All Dressed Up (42 page)

Then came the
fire, and I have unanswered questions about that, too. What was I
really seeing when I scrabbled frantically amongst the charred
remains? Something I could have prevented? Predicted? Something I
should applaud?

The final
crime, yes, I should definitely have predicted. A sin, really, not
a crime. A crime against my heart. Oh, but they were all crimes
against my heart, Karen, all three of them. Please read this, and
tell me what you think.

I’m in the
kitchen at ten o’clock at night, trying to re-discover cheese -
failing - when Jody walks in, eyes dry and hands cramped from
driving. He’s unfamiliar. It’ll take my desire a little time to
kick in. Ten minutes? An hour? A day? We haven’t seen each other
since early July.

It’s raining
hard, colder than it has been for most of the winter. Neil and
Nonie, who own the house (but are not of particular significance in
my life), have just gone to bed. The ski season has been terrible
and Jody has had long stretches with minimal work. He turned in his
ski school jacket this afternoon, I discover. He packed up his gear
and drove without a break from Jindabyne to Sydney in four and a
half hours.

He hugs me,
and the familiarity begins to stir inside me like a small animal
waking from long sleep.

“You didn’t
tell me you were coming.” It’s not really an accusation.

It is.

It is! When I
phoned him seven weeks ago, broke the news about Karen’s accident
and told him he didn’t need to come down, he said, “Okay, if that’s
what you want,” and he didn’t come.

It wasn’t what
I wanted. I wanted insistence. “Of course I’ll come.”

Now, half a
lifetime later, he’s here.

“Yeah,” he
says vaguely. “I wasn’t thinking.” He’s talking about today, not
seven weeks ago. “I meant to text you…”

He kisses me
short but deep, and despite the other animal stirring inside me -
the angry, accusing one - it feels right, a prelude to more. We hug
again. Tight. Warm. “You’ve lost weight,” he says.

I answer, into
the shirt fabric on his shoulder, “I haven’t been enjoying food
much lately.”

He stills, and
on snaps the light in his bright mind. “God!” He pulls back a
little, and examines my face, shocked on my behalf. He’s the first
person to understand, the way he so often is. “That’s not
good.”

“No,” is all I
can say.

You can divide
the world into two kinds of people - the ones who eat too much when
they’re stressed, and the ones who can hardly eat at all. Put me in
the second group.

“And it’s not
as if you had a lot to lose,” he says. “Bit, maybe.” His usual
blunt approach. “Three or four kilos. But you’ve lost more than
that. You’re thin, now.”

We talk about
it for a few minutes. I show him the cheese tasting experiment,
which isn’t working. I got home from cooking at the restaurant at
nine-thirty. We only did fourteen covers. Typical for a wet Monday.
Julie only makes any money at all on a night like this because her
overheads are so low. The crab cakes went down well. But I didn’t
do the blue cheese souffles, and I should have.

This was what
started me on the cheese experiment. The menu tonight was thin.
Julie shrugs about things like this and forgives me more readily
than my own mother would, and more readily than I forgive myself.
It’s not guilt, so much. As Jody has recognised so fast, it’s
fear.

Will I still
have a cooking career by the time Karen is better?

“Is there
anything that pleasures you?” he asks. He trains his blue eyes upon
me, computing a solution to my problem. “Chocolate? Soup?”

“I’m living on
coffee.”

“Try coffee,
then. Taste it like wine. Explore it. See if that brings back the
joy. I brought some of mine.”

Striding to
where he’s dumped his things in the lounge-room (floorboards creak
under the old carpet) he unpacks the coffee from his boxes of
left-over food. There’s his French Breakfast Blend, his Mocha Java,
his Sumatra Dark, each in its own packet, neatly crimped at the
top.

He offers to
make me a cup but my face folds into a
blah
look and I say
no. Not sleeping well enough as it is. Don’t need caffeine at this
hour. And his idea doesn’t feel quite right, anyhow. I don’t want
to explore coffee like wine. If I’m going to explore coffee, it’ll
be in a different way.

“I’m hungry,”
he says, so we put away the King Island Camembert and the Stilton
but keep out the sharp Tasmanian cheddar, with which he makes
himself piles of cheese on toast.

While the last
slices of it are still bubbling under the heat, he tells me what
he’s been thinking about in the car, what made him forget to text
me, and by the time we’re lying on the carpet in front of the
two-bar radiant heater, the words are pouring out of him.

He has decided
to run a workshop.

Ta-da!

“It’s
brilliant,” he tells me.

This isn’t the
mood I’d have chosen to find him in upon his unexpected return.
Sometimes he’s softer. Sometimes I’m the full and total beneficiary
of his focus, as I was just for those few minutes when he noticed
I’d lost weight and understood how scary that was.

He tells me
the whole workshop plan as far as he’s taken it at this point,
after hours of driving on auto-pilot down the freeway and the M5,
brain clicking away. I spread my hands over his back as I listen.
His shirt is dry and hot against my palms. He hasn’t mentioned
Karen yet. We’ve talked about her a lot on the phone, of course,
but right now that doesn’t feel as if it counts.

“You see, I’ve
got to have at least another $20,000. Net. In hand. By
December.”

He crunches
beguiling numbers. Twelve participants. $2,500 each. $30,000. Minus
a few insignificant costs. Couple of weeks work, a month at most.
Brilliant.

“You’ve got to
be in it, Susie. I know it’ll reduce the income to $27,500, but I’m
going to need you.”

“What about
the restaurant?”

“We’ll work it
out.”

“And
Karen.”

You. My
sister. The reason I’ve been coasting at the restaurant, just
lately. The reason for my lost weight, the food problem, the
coffee.

“How is she?”
he asks at last.

“Getting
there.”

I wait for
more, toy with my anger a bit, wonder whether to tell him that he
let me down.

But I said
I’d come down and you told me not to
.

I have no
appetite for that dry logic tonight.

“Actually, the
other way to do it...” He pauses. His mouth is full. The oil that
has sweated from the melted cheese seams his lips. “...would be to
spread it over several weekends. I’d been thinking of a total
immersion for six days, but spreading it out would be better. I
could charge more. $2,800? You could get Julie to bring in one of
those guest chef friends of hers to cook for you, couldn’t you?
Just four Saturdays between now and December?”

“Why do you
want me in it, Jody?” He’s still detailing the wrong things.

“For support.
Obviously you won’t say that we live together, or even that we know
each other. You’ll just pretend to be a person off the street. My
shill, yeah?”

“Your
shill...”

He hauls
himself up. He’s full of energy for this, as he’s full of energy
for everything, and he believes everything he says. “You’ll have to
sell it, talk it up. What amazing insights you’re getting, how much
you’re growing and changing, so that the others - the real
participants - the marks - know they’re getting their money’s
worth.”

“The
marks
?”

“The people
I’m - not fleecing, not scamming.”

“Not?”

“Not really.
Not from their perspective. They’re going to think it’s
incredible.”

He goes
looking for paper and a pen to write down ideas. He has notebooks
full of ideas. Concepts for short films about extreme sports. A
house he’s going to build one day, with his own hands, in Wales or
Maine or Byron Bay. Articles to write and sell to airline
magazines. Last year, he wrote three, and sold two of them. Not to
mention sculpture, embroidery, quilts. He goes through periods when
he can’t bear for his fingers to be idle. He scrounges left-over
fabric scraps, ribbons and threads from everyone he knows who’s
ever sewed. We have one of his quilts on our bed.

Occasionally,
he even writes essays.

He craves more
time. Doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t have ideas like this.
“It’s not like I try.” They just wander into his head. Sometimes
they sit benignly for years, to be returned to occasionally and
mulled over. Sometimes they burn and eat at him until he follows
them through. He is genuinely bemused by the fact that other people
are not like this.

I’m sometimes
like this.

I was.

I think.

But only about
food.

I have a brown
cardboard expanding file of recipes upstairs in the office at the
restaurant, things I’ve been collecting and tinkering with for
eight years, but I haven’t added to it since July. Haven’t looked
at it. Somewhere in this house, or possibly thrown away, is the
last scribbled idea I wrote down the night of Karen’s accident,
minutes before Dad called.

Something
involving artichokes? I can’t even remember.

Jody comes
back with the message book and felt-tip pen from beside the phone,
which Neil and Nonie will hate. The book and pen are only to be
used for messages.

“I couldn’t
find a decent pen.”

He scribbles
madly and I watch, the skin on my face going tight from the radiant
heat of those glowing orange bars. I turn over and heat my back
instead. A strand of hair drops into my mouth and I suck on it
nervously. It tastes no worse than the cheese.

Oh, great, I’m
thinking. A workshop, now. A scam-that-they-won’t-think-is-a-scam.
Do I need this complication in his darting, charismatic
ambitions?

It’s no good
telling him I think it’s immoral. He’ll have arguments that are
better than mine, to prove I’m wrong. The emotional centre of the
argument will shift from the question of the workshop to the fact
that I always get tongue-tied and he has no patience, talks me
down. As if it’s a competition he’s determined to win, instead of
an attempt to communicate constructively about our differences.

But I tell him
anyway.

“I think it’s
immoral.”

“Why? I knew
you’d say that.” He’s energised by the fact of being right.

“Because
you’re ripping people off.”

“How? It’s not
as if I’m going to take their money and then not do the
workshop.”

We digress
into a whole argument about Ferran Adria’s Michelin three-star
restaurant,
El Bulli
, in Spain, which some food people rave
about and others think is the palate equivalent of the emperor
without his clothes. Since I’ve only heard about it and haven’t
eaten there, I’m not taking sides, but Jody (who also hasn’t eaten
there) draws out a ruthless analogy and runs with it.

“If you think
you’re eating great food, then you are. Having great sex. Learning
great truths. Substitute any words you like.”

“But you don’t
believe in it. Feng Shui, and Reiki and past life therapy.” I’m
floundering, as usual.

“But
they’ll
believe in it. That’s why it’ll work. Know what I
mean? What’s belief, anyway? Maybe it’s belief that creates
reality. It’s all relative.”

Jody claims to
have a degree in Philosophy from Cambridge University, and mostly I
believe him, despite the lack of concrete evidence. There’s this
idea in Philosophy, apparently, that the laws of gravity didn’t
exist until Newton discovered them. Or something. It has been a
surprise to me, since knowing Jody, how applicable this concept is
to many of the events of everyday life. Tonight’s subject of
discussion is obviously one of them.

“What are you
going to do in it, though?” I ask, thinking that maybe the
practical details will provide a stumbling block.

No such
luck.

“Tons of
stuff. Massage, relaxation, trust work, games. Probably, yeah, past
life therapy.” He scribbles something. “I’ll research it on the
Net. Awakening your dragons. Crystal energy, maybe.”

“You see? What
do you really know about it? When have you done massage?”

“When I was in
Mooncalf.” This is another of the previous careers he lays claim to
- struggling actor in an experimental London theatre collective.
Before we met.

There’s a
silence, then he changes the subject. “What time are you going to
the hospital?”

“Nine-ish.”

“That
early?”

“I always go
for about three hours after I’ve been to the markets and set up at
the restaurant.”

“Your parents
aren’t up this week?”

“No, week
after next.”

It is a bland
exchange, like so much of the dialogue between established couples,
but there’s a lot beneath the surface. I can’t believe it has been
nearly two months since Karen’s accident. Jody thinks I shouldn’t
spend so much time with her and that my parents should spend a lot
more. I agree with him on that last one, but I’m still waiting for
something else, something better.

Something I
can bite into.

Reassurance,
or a reason to attack.

It doesn’t
come.

And I’m tired
so I go upstairs, leaving Jody to clean up. Turns out he doesn’t.
In the morning, there’s still one slice of cheese on toast sitting
there, cold and brittle on the crumb-encrusted plate, and the phone
message book beside it, minus twelve pages and the pen.

The coffee
experiment

If today is a
cup of coffee, it has to be a big, piping hot
café au lait
,
served in a bowl the way they often do in France. I drink it with
my hands curved around the bowl for warmth - and for safety - but
if I’m not careful, the corner of my mouth snags on the chip in the
rim. A couple of days later, I get a cold sore, crusty and
stinging, and I wonder if the chip in the rim has caused it.