New Australian Stories 2 (41 page)

I just stand there looking up and down the street. The fireman turns and goes splashing down my path. He sets off for my next door neighbour's place. He won't find anyone home there – they're in Brisbane for a wedding - but I don't bother calling out. My head's pounding. The rain's clattering out of the sky, and I can't understand how the world could have become so wet. Everyone's packing their cars and driving out of the street. I'm sick of Elvis, I'm sick of the rain, I'm sick of the cops, sick of all this. I have always protected my son through thick and thin. There's nothing I wouldn't do. Nothing is stronger than love. But who'll look after this clumsy boy when I'm gone?

I pack all my photos and some clothes in a suitcase. Then I sit down on the sofa. The street becomes quiet. Everyone's gone except the cops, me and my boy. None of us are giving up.

I make a plan.

I carry the suitcase out to my carport and get into the car. I shut the door loudly so the cops notice. In my glovebox is an isolation switch for the ignition. My son had his mate install it for me. Cars are always being stolen. When you press the isolation switch, the car won't start even if you hotwire the ignition. The engine will turn over but it won't start.

There's a trick to everything.

I push a fifty-dollar note and the spare car key into the glovebox and make sure the isolation switch is on. I turn the engine over a few times. Don't flatten the battery.

Out I get, slam the door, squelch over to the cop car. I'm going to ask if they know anything about Datsun Bluebirds. I rehearse as I go. Excuse me, I've got a problem. Car won't start. A lift, officer? Thank you so much. Trying to evacuate, cutting it fine. You're a lifesaver. That's what I'll say.

That's my plan. I'll start to get in the cop car, then I'll say, oh, but I need to let my cockatoo go. Let him take his chances, I'll say. I don't want him trapped in the cage if the river comes rolling down the street. Then I'll run back. I'll unlatch the cage and get Squizzy on my arm. They won't be able to see the cage door because it's around the other side, the house side. I'll pretend I'm talking to Squizzy but I'll be telling my son to wait until he hears the cop car drive away. I'll be telling him to take the Datsun, key's in the glovebox, don't forget the switch, go to your uncle Paul in Inverell. That's my plan. I realise it might not work but I don't have anything else.

Watch out, I'll say. Keep your eyes open. Make sure you always know what's happening around you.

My legs are like jelly by the time I reach the cop car, and I'm thinking it's not such a good plan at all. It's strange that the cop car has tinted windows. I tap on the glass. Nothing. When I go to the passenger side I see the window's broken. I try the door and it's unlocked. There are wires hanging from under the dashboard, and someone's left crushed-up potato chips all over the seat.

It's eight forty-five in the morning. I lean against the car, this abandoned car, and close my eyes. I don't know if I'm glad or monumentally shitted off. What I need now is a new plan.

Blackbirds Singing

KAREN HITCHCOCK

A man's cuffs should graze his heel. You button a jacket from the top down and stop one button from the end. A Windsor knot will always mark a man as well groomed. We do our best to help, but the moment a customer's wife says he looks good, then he looks fabulous. We aren't responsible if they've ignored our advice. We aren't responsible once they wear the stuff downstairs, outside, at home, out for tea, away from our golden lights. Since when do we live up to our own expectations anyway?

Sixth floor, men's collections. It was a move up for many. It was not exactly what I'd imagined for myself, folding jumpers and chit-chat chit-chat. But it wasn't manning the reception at Frank's garage. In men's collections, no man wolfed Chiko rolls for lunch, there weren't those bloated shiny tits plastered on every vertical surface, the toilet was not a piss-splattered steel vessel with neither seat nor paper. The sixth floor smelled good. There was no grease. I just had to breeze in, look neat, and never ever point: I directed customers with my fragrant, moisturised palm.

Men's collections shimmered with mirrors. My reflection had a reflection of its reflection. We knew how we looked from vistas supernatural. And if now and then I was oblivious to myself and the soaring expectations, the other girls would let me know: sweeping gazes, harsh as steel brooms. And then I'd be bent over the Country Road rollneck display table, breathing fast and hard, my palm buried in navy blue lambswool, wondering what the hell I'd been thinking, leaving the house dressed
like this
. Then I'd be dreaming of my apron and my cakes and a quiet place where I could work with jam smeared along a cheek and flour in my hair and no one would give a damn.

But I rode the elevator each day and stood folding and hemming, hanging and fetching — stabbing the floorboards with my stilettos — as I waited in that infinity of mirrors, smiling like my teeth would suffocate if I accidentally closed my lips.

I didn't want to be a front-girl in a department store. I wanted to hide away in the back of a boutique bakery that specialised in cupcakes displayed on gilded plates and old-fashioned lace. I'd even bought the parchment cards on which I'd write their names in black ink. Like:

Interpretation Of Dreams

I had no one else to cook for so I carted the cakes to work. Set them out on the tearoom laminex table every Friday morning to see if they passed the test.

Tonight's composition was a study in tart mashed berries and chocolate ooze I'd named
Manhattan Murder Mystery
. I slid butter and cream from the fridge and frozen blackberries and cherries from the freezer. The bittersweet chocolate was in my handbag. The sweet vermouth under the sink.

Friday morning, 9.36 a.m. and in waddled Claire. She always could smell a cupcake at three hundred miles. She was my most dedicated fan despite her ‘diabetic diet' but she'd never meet my eye: she'd talk to me, and her eyes would roll around their sockets and then flee up behind her forehead, leaving me staring at the membranous whites. So, in rollicked Claire and she started swallowing cupcakes, throwing them down onto god knows what else she already had in there, while she flicked through an old
Women's Weekly
. I stood and watched, feeling a strange mix of satisfaction and despair.

‘
Manhattan Murder Mystery
,' I said when she looked up from the mag.

She showed me the whites of her eyes, slick as boiled eggs. ‘What?'

‘It's the name of the cakes.'

‘Oh … they're divine,' she said in a distracted kind of way, as if what she really wanted to say was:
Cakes? What cakes?
And who the heck are you?

The real test was whether or not I could get the other girls to eat them, ascetic congregation that they were. It was like tempting a pack of monks: bit of cleavage, bit of ankle, stroke their forearm gently and maybe they'll start imagining, maybe they'll take a lick.

One cake for morning tea once — that's all it took — and they hurled austerity out the window permanently. The first cakes I ever got them to eat were a batch of
Breakfast
at Tiffany's
: savoury semolina cupcakes flecked with spinach, corn and ricotta. I sold it to them as a high-protein, low-carb breakfast, and for once Claire didn't get to take home a plate full of her own leftovers.

‘Oh god,' they'd usually say, ‘my hips, my gut, my bum.' But then they'd say ‘Oooo!' and ‘Cindy!' and take a cake straight to their tongue.

The successes:
Strawberry Fields Forever
(fresh strawberries and cream-cheese folded through vanilla cake),
Nuts about
You
(caramel cake with pecan butter praline) and
Don't Blame
It on the Sunshine
(pineapple and passionfruit upside-down cupcakes). If they were gone by morning tea, I knew they'd been a success; any left by four, Claire took them home ‘for her demented mother', and I'd scrap the recipe. Notable failures:
Your Place or Mine
(it was the jaw-shattering chopped dates),
Grandma Takes a Trip
(a cupcake filled with rainbow-coloured whipped cream that leached out into unappealing puddles of food dye and grease).

There were three other full-timers besides Claire and me: Sue, Tara and Ange. Sue had been on the cover of a magazine for
Losing Half Her Weight AND Her Husband!
For that headline they gave her five thousand. For three years she drank black coffee and only ate her fingernails. She'd remarried and now supplemented the coffee and nails with three protein bars a week and a Friday carb-loading cupcake: ‘I have to keep up my strength,' she explained.

Tara was tall and skinny and loud. She'd had a bit of lipo here and there, and two boob jobs (A to C, then C to E) and she'd let us feel them. For a few years now she'd followed the only-one-type-of-food-a-day diet. It was usually apples or chicken breast or low-cal soft serve, and on Fridays it was a cupcake. ‘Being a skinny bitch is no walk in the park,' she'd say, laughing, then slip off to solicit husbands in the change rooms.

I mostly spoke with Ange. We'd hide from our reflections in the dim-lit clothes reserve, lying on piles of soft jumpers. When Ange spoke she'd look at the bone of her wrist and take licks of her lip gloss between words. Ange was different, Ange ate anything, Ange ate everything. But then she'd go and spew.

The week after
Manhattan Murder Mystery
I invented
Cloud Nine One One
. It was a complicated cupcake that I knew would be difficult and expensive to produce commercially. The lemon-scented cake was filled with raspberry puree, then coated in meringue and baked until crunchy. A shard of toffee pierced the meringue, allowing dribbles of escaping raspberry to slip down the side. They looked like little bleeding clouds. And they were a triumph at morning tea.

‘Ohmygod,' said Tara, dissolving meringue on her tongue. ‘You should totally go on
Masterchef
.'

‘What's
Masterchef
?' I asked, and everyone turned to me with mouths agape, as if I'd just declared that white carbs make you thin.

‘
Where
have you
been
?' said Tara. ‘It's only like the most popular show in the world or something.'

Sue nodded, eyes wide.

‘It's not that good,' said Ange.

Sue looked at Ange like she was a bag of sick, then looked back at me and said, ‘You audition, you get on the show, and if you can cook really good stuff then you win! You should see what they make … Unbelievable stuff … Stuff just like that.' She pointed at the
Cloud Nine One Ones
.

So I watched the show online in one huge binge, the first episode to the last, and it made me so excited that my lips went numb from the hyperventilation. If I could get onto
Masterchef
then
everyone
would see my beautiful cakes, then I'd open my own kitchen and I'd get my recipe book published and — the relief of it — I would get the fuck out of men's collections.

I didn't sleep for a week; I lay awake dreaming up new recipes and cooking them for massive black cameras and awe-struck, salivating studio audiences. Thursday night I assembled the ingredients for
Bitter Almonds and Sweet Revenge
: an almond-meal cupcake with chips of marzipan and Turkish delight swirled through the batter, and with the palest pink, rose-flavoured frosting. I considered
Bitter Almonds and Sweet
Revenge
a masterpiece, but they didn't fly in the tearoom. Tara refused to ‘eat flowers' and everyone — even Claire — claimed that marzipan made them gag.

‘How about plain chocolate next week?' Sue said, with big gaps between each word, as if I was three years old, or retarded.

Tara gasped. ‘Or even better!
White
chocolate!'

‘Yes!' squealed Sue. ‘I
love
white chocolate! I had white-chocolate mud cake for my wedding!'

‘That's what I want too!' said Tara.

Meanwhile, my little dream-cakes sat in lonely sophistication, and my heart sank like an amateur soufflé. If I couldn't entice a tearoom of half-starved shop-Sharons then I had zero chance of getting on TV.

Sue said, ‘Hey, Ange, isn't it your birthday next week?
You
should pick the type of cake!'

Claire put her hands on her massive hips. ‘I'll make your birthday cake, Ange. Name the cake. I've cooked a few good 'uns in my time and I should practise.'

‘Practise?' I asked. ‘Practise for what?'

Claire hit me with her rolling eggwhites. ‘Oh, didn't I mention?' Her voice had gone all singsong. ‘I sent in my entry for the
Masterchef
auditions yesterday.'

This snap-froze my thorax.

‘Wow!' said Tara. ‘That's awesome!'

Claire examined her fingernails with feigned nonchalance.

‘Blueberry cheesecake,' whispered Ange.

Claire and I both turned to Ange and said, ‘Okay!'

‘Oh, don't worry, Claire, I'm more than happy to make it,' I said.

‘Oh no, it's too much bother. You concentrate on your fancy cupcakes,
I'll
do a normal old birthday cheesecake classic.'