High tea

‘She started to get a bit funny in the head for a while there. She had central locking, but she still went around and checked every door, and the boot. Every time she left the car,’ says my cousin. I think she's talking about her best friend.

We’re having high tea in Collingwood for Nan’s 83rd birthday. Three tiers of West Heidelberg-bred women with three tiers of sugar at lunch on Friday, a time that makes it hard for the blokes to come too. 

‘If she couldn’t remember checking the car she’d go out and do it again no matter where she was. She only realised it was a problem when she got together with Ben and he was like, what’s that about? I think her grandparents were dying or something, there was a bit of stress anyway. A lot of stress.’ 

My cousin emphasises the lot of stress. Her mum directs a quiet Nanny dearest, toward the other end of the table, have another scone. Do you want more tea? She wants a say in what’s happening, wants to take the heat off the grandparents-dying part of the story. The tea’s a bit cold, says Nan. I’ll try a coffee instead when the girl comes back. She usually drinks six cups of Liptons before dawn: I thought she’d lose her tiny mind over high tea, but it's not scalding enough for her.

‘Anyway then she woke up at Ben's in the middle of the night and she didn’t have a zit stick beside her bed. You know a zit stick, for pimples. She usually always had one beside her bed but she woke up and it wasn’t there. And instead of going oh well and going back to sleep she got up and checked the car, then went to the supermarket and bought a new zit stick. They medicated her after that.'

‘I count while I’m walking,’ my auntie says. ‘It started out after the operation and it was hard to walk around the block. Now I just do it in the background while I’m talking to Lee on our walks. In in time with my steps.’ 

‘I make pie charts in my head before I go to bed,’ says my cousin. ‘If I’ve got four things to do in the morning I make a pie chart breaking down the time it’ll take to do each thing.’  

'I'm too forgetful to be obsessive, that's the only thing that saves me,' says my other auntie, the one who speaks so soft you must lean in to hear what she says. 

‘Pa had the spot where he’d sit in the kitchen and nobody else sat there,’ I say, bringing him into the room. It's uncomfortable for a second, but then he's there with us.

‘I look at number plates and try to match them to the driver,’ says Mum. 

Numbers don't give me any peace, but I locked down over food for a while there. Does that count?

brushtail

sunglasses in flight

what the family needed

‘Every once in a while, Ruth felt the necessary pull of destiny. When she’d eloped, when she finally took the kids and left, when she’d switched to night duty, when she’d bought this apartment. In each case, she couldn’t have done otherwise. Her decisions had been inevitable.’
– What the Family Needed, Steven Amsterdam, page 137

For me, a big decision feels more like the moment after Wile E Coyote runs into the air over the canyon, just before he realises he’s about to fall. It feels like the intake of breath as I put my head underwater in the early summer ocean. Or the flattening out that happens before orgasm.

Pete and I talk in the kitchen about friends who are deciding whether to hold onto a relationship or let it go. 

‘They’re at the pointy bit,’ I say, making my hands into an apex. 

‘They’re at the bit that goes like that,’ says Pete, pointing his hand to the floor with his fingers fanning out in five directions. 

Occasionally Mum mentions a chap she dated in high school who moved up north to be a prawn farmer. She could have married him, the story half goes. Her eyes get humid when she takes herself there: a maybe-rich fishwife living in a house on stilts, raising burly blond children who run to their father as he comes through the laundry door with the evening breeze, smelling of crustaceans. Would he be kind to them? Would she be happy, with her ankles swollen in the heat?

It’s hard to see. Steven Amsterdam’s character gets off lightly, with destiny dragging her in one direction.

secret dinner party

autumnal

amanda out

when it comes to winter fruit, nature is a virgo. she breaks the task into small segments and makes it so you can eat the packaging as well.

apostrophe

even the apostrophe is in the right place.

trippy taco

in pieces

How’s that story coming along?

Oh, it’s in pieces on the living room floor, like the car engine my friend once took apart to see how it worked. I’m pretty sure I can get it back together again but it might be a different vehicle altogether when I'm done.

mother's day

If they're going to give you donuts, at least make them Spanish.

patience

panic bolt

train crash

‘Good luck with your wife and your girlfriend,’ Lolli said to Pete on the way home last night.

And here we are: Pete, his not-quite ex-wife and her parents, their kids and me, standing around the outdoor chairs at his wife’s new place. Shuffling plates of grain waves and watermelon to make way for sadness and sandwiches.

‘What’s going on in the garden?’ I ask the five year old, hoping that someone will sit down in those chairs while we’re rummaging through scorched basil, pumpkins and bees. Pete’s wife comes out with a bug zapper made to kill small things. ‘It’s sort of fun,’ she says.

The three year old has his helmet on. He takes his new bike up and down the driveway on a birthday walk of glory, then lets it clunk against the side of the house. Back to the table full of sugar, his hand in a bowl full of snakes. I give him an hour before he crashes.

I follow Pete’s wife into the kitchen for a glass of water and her mother follows shortly after, to fuss over the symmetry of the train cake she has baked. ‘Do you read The Age?’ the older asks, standing too close. Sizing me up, diverting attention.

I know that you know that he thinks I’m fucked, Pete’s wife says with her eyes as she hands me a tumbler. Please don’t think I’m fucked.

In the middle of this kitchen, my face is up against the glass at the end of someone else’s marriage. And there’s a three-carriage, four-colour train-shaped cake between us.

lismore veggo

us: what's good to eat here?
bartender: all of it.
barfly: the fish is beauuuuutiful.
us: how's the lamb shank?
bartender: i dunno, i'm a vegetarian.
pete: but you said it was all good!
bartender: yeah, well we don't get any complaints about the meat from them (waves her arm at the front bar, where blokes are standing belly to belly with beers at their chests). i eat the chicken and fish ones, they're good.
barfly: you're makin' me hungry (drinks white wine from pot glass).
me: fish for me.
pete (later): i have a 50kms rule when it comes to seafood, and we're within that range, but that barramundi is far, far from home.

lismore hotel, hamilton hwy