‘I have to sting you extra for this delivery,’ she said.
‘All factored into the price,’ I told her. ‘By Jason, with whom you should not play poker any time soon. The Castle, eh. Do I know the house?’
‘It’s on Studley Park,’ she told me. ‘Near where I live. One of the big houses that are set back from the road. Been empty for ages. There was some huge argument about it — heritage against developers, as usual — and the owners got pissed off and let it lie empty. Hoping it would fall down on its own, I suppose. I did hear that someone had settled there. They aren’t allowed to alter it and it must be pretty spooky by now.’
‘Well, just hand in the bread and refuse all invitations to look at their etchings,’ I advised. ‘They’re some kind of religious brotherhood. And if they eat this bread for preference, they aren’t into fun of any kind.’
‘Too true,’ she said, and gunned her engine.
The luncheon rush came and went. The loaves were all dispatched, the coffee was poured, and I grabbed the last chocolate muffin and ate it myself. It was, as usual, wonderful. Kylie minded the shop while Jason went to get his butternut pumpkins and I considered whether we ought to have bought slightly sturdier cups. A good pumpkin soup is a solid thing. And when the customers got sick of pumpkin we would have Scotch broth. And pea and ham, my favourite. All good, solid, stick-to-the-ribs cold weather soups. Which would freeze beautifully so could be made in advance. Not that one needs much skill to make soup. They mainly require assembly and a lot of chopping, and I had a Jason for that.
Life was good. I leaned back in my chair and sipped. Heckle fell asleep on my foot. I closed my eyes. Just for a moment.
Daniel woke me with a kiss, always a nice way to be woken, and I dislodged Heckle as I got to my feet. Heckle is an ex-alley cat. He gave a broken snore and fell asleep again. Jason was back with more pumpkins and the baker’s day was getting on for over.
‘Butternut,’ Jason declared, thumping them onto the big table.
‘Great,’ I responded. ‘Start cutting. You can use a knife on these ones. Get the big pot and scour it clean, Jason, and put the sour cream in the fridge.’
‘Yes, Master,’ he said blithely. Jason is only cheeky when he’s happy.
I loaded the sack for the soup van. Kylie was cashing up and the shutters had already been pulled down over the shop window. I remembered that, other than a chocolate muffin, I had had nothing to eat since the BLT at seven, and here it was nearly three. I had, of course, had two hours’ extra slumber, which is not to be sneezed at in these sleep-deprived times. What with George W. Bush and the Federal Government, or Heartless Australian Hegemony, it doesn’t seem safe to sleep. Unless you like really bad news on waking … I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. Daniel, I judged, also looked hungry.
‘Did you lunch?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing a little investigating and I didn’t have time.’
‘Then let’s have a late lunch or early dinner of unusual extravagance,’ I suggested. Daniel smiled quizzically.
‘What are you suggesting?’ he asked. ‘Tea at the Windsor?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘At Southbank. All of those restaurants are good, and we can have the best ice cream, sorbet or gelati in the world by way of dessert.’
‘Where?’
‘Limonello,’ I replied. Surely he had heard of it? Even Goss and Kylie went down to Limonello for their non-fat peach ice cream.
‘Need to clean up and get changed,’ he said. ‘And so, forgive me …’ ‘… do I,’ I agreed. ‘Right. Jason, put the soup on to simmer and I’ll take care of it when I get home. And here is a small bonus for your good idea, against which I fought until you defeated me.’ I gave him fifty dollars and folded his fingers over it.
We had just got Jason a bank account by dint of obtaining a birth certificate and all the other things he needed, like a Medicare card. This had been hard because we couldn’t contact his family, Jason absolutely forbade it. But Sister Mary knew a social worker who understood such things and we slid it in through the cracks in the system. The same ones that Jason himself had fallen through in his drug-addicted, desperate past. I no longer feared that giving him money would send him back onto the gear again. Every useful productive bread-making day put Jason further and further from heroin.
He grinned. ‘Ace,’ he exclaimed. ‘I c’n get that CD, and go down to the Games Room and play Nude Twister tonight.’
Of course, everyone to their own …
The tram clanked along the new road, which I still hadn’t really got my head around. I had known Melbourne so well for so long that when the river end of it started evolving, my mental map dissolved. I was as lost as a tourist in Sydney trying to work out which side of the Harbour Bridge they were on. I mourned the loss of that wonderful red-brick wall which had shut Victoria Dock off from the world, but I had to admire the palm trees. We descended from the tram.
A small sprint, avoiding Jaguars, through the car park and we were out onto the edge of the river. A fine cool wind was blowing. I had worn my trench coat and was glad of it. The prospect across and along a city river is always fascinating. This one still had cargo sheds on the other side, and boats, and ferries, and people in small craft. And at the foot of all those tall buildings were restaurants selling every cuisine, except possibly Martian. Delicious scents wafted out from them as we walked along.
‘What’s your pleasure, madame?’ asked Daniel. ‘Chinese? Indian? Italian?’
‘Can’t decide,’ I said, mouth watering. ‘What do you fancy?’
‘This is one of those problems which arise in relationships,’ he said seriously. ‘Do you really mean, decide for me, or do you mean, pick something and I’ll see what I think, or do you mean, have you a serious preference which I’ll go along with because I love you even though that’s not what I want?’
‘Hmm,’ I said, sorting through the possibilities. ‘All right. When I was with James and he said, you choose, he meant, let’s see how little you know about food so I can spend a few hours criticising you later. So when I say “what do you fancy?” I mean, state a preference and I’ll see how I feel about it. I won’t go along with it if I don’t like it. Only teenage girls do that and it always breeds bitterness.’
He smiled his beautiful smile. ‘You are very wise. Agreed. I will mean the same. If I have an absolute yearning for one or another I will say so. As it happens, I don’t have a serious desire, but I do have a leaning towards steak.’
‘One of my carnivorous days as well,’ I said. ‘Steak it is.’
The Italian restaurant Renzo’s did a wonderful rare steak with mixed vegetables. We drank red wine with it. The waiter lingered, brushing off crumbs, picking up unnecessary cutlery and removing glasses. He was a plump young man, very attractive, with curly black hair and soulful eyes like a cow. Round his right wrist he had a yellow rubber band which he kept snapping at every unoccupied moment. Some kind of new fashion, apparently. I recalled that the Raskols in New Guinea used to wear rubber bands made from car tyres — who told me that? That’s the trouble with arcane information. Bits of it stick in the mind like burrs in a sock, memorable beyond any use they might have had.
We finished the meal and the young man cleared away. But I could have sworn that, as soon as he was out of sight of the door and the kitchen, in the little alcove where the side wall abutted, I saw him grab a handful of leftover bread, stuff the trimmings from the steak inside it and swallow it whole. It was a furtive, frantic bolting movement, more like a stray dog’s than a man’s. It jolted me, but it was over before I could draw Daniel’s attention to it. And it wasn’t as though it was important.
Time for a heavenly gelato from Naevio, the gelati master. There were so many ice creams to choose from and they all looked so gorgeous that Limonello ought to provide a discreet gutter for their patrons to drool into. Cherry Ripple. Caramel and Honeycomb. Chocolate. Pistachio. I finally chose lemon and orange, and Daniel chose coconut and coffee. We licked them comfortably, strolling down the riverside, admiring the strange sculptures and wondering at how many people were loose on a working day. And why all those children weren’t at school. Not that I cared. They weren’t my children.
It was still early when we came sailing back to Hebe, full and a little soporific.
Therese Webb immediately rang the bell. She must have been watching for us to come in. I was not pleased to see her. But I opened the door. At least she wasn’t my mother.
‘Tea, coffee or a glass of wine?’ I asked.
‘A glass of wine,’ she said, sitting down heavily next to Horatio.
I poured her a glass of chateau collapseau and had one for myself. Daniel sat behind me on the sofa and I leaned back into his embrace.
‘How do you know my mother?’ I asked. I don’t for a moment believe that curiosity slew any felines.
‘I knew her at school, where she was very nice to me,’ said Therese. She shrugged her tweed cloak off her shoulders. A lot of it fell on Horatio. He clawed his way to the surface, unnoticed by the weaver, and then stretched out on the fabric luxuriously. ‘We went to a very tough girls’ school, and I was bullied badly. You know?’
I nodded. I knew. I still couldn’t contemplate an upright locker with equanimity, due to having been repeatedly stuffed into one by Julie, our resident bully.
‘No one bullied Jacqui!’ mused Therese proudly. ‘She told them where to get off! And she took me under her wing, for some reason. I’ve never known why. But she was always kind.’
Not my experience of her. ‘So you kept in contact after she left school?’ I said.
‘Oh yes. She went to Nimbin, of course, met your father — they were so sweet together, like Babes in the Wood — and then they came back here to start a collective. Very strict. I couldn’t go and visit her there, my health wouldn’t permit me to sleep on the ground, but she sometimes came to visit me. I was always pleased to help her out with a little money or a place to sleep. Then I inherited quite a lot of money and decided that I’d leave my shop to be run by a manager and take some rest. My heart isn’t very reliable. I don’t know how long I’ll live. So I bought Arachne in this delightful building. I still weave, of course, but I really just wanted a rest.’
‘And then you got Jacqui back on your hands,’ I said ruefully.
Therese twinkled. ‘Well, actually, dear, I’ve always been busy. I’ve worked every day all my life. I was getting very bored and fancying myself sick when Jacqui turned up, and now I feel fine. I need to have something to do, that’s clear.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And you don’t mind the way she abuses you?’
‘She’s heartbroken about your father,’ said Therese gently. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’ She sipped her wine. ‘Anyway, I came down to ask if you’ve had any success.’
‘He was at the YMCA,’ I told her. ‘But he was banished for trying to pick up a Californian girl.’
‘He went to the backpackers’ hostel across the road,’ said Daniel. ‘He stayed there for a week. Then he was expelled by the management for peeking into the ladies’ bathroom. He paid cash. He didn’t go to another backpackers’ anywhere near there. I’ve canvassed that end of town. I’ll ask more questions late tonight, when the night people emerge from the shadows. They might have seen him.’
‘Oh well, at least he isn’t dead,’ said Therese. ‘That nice policewoman searched the unknown bodies and he wasn’t there, or in the hospitals.’
‘Which nice policewoman?’
‘Oh, didn’t I mention it? I persuaded Jacqui to report her husband missing. They say there isn’t much they can do, but they at least checked that he wasn’t dead. Here’s the young woman’s card. You could call her if you like.’
‘I will,’ said Daniel, and wrote down the details. Therese took her leave.
‘And I have to go and do the Nerds Inc accounts,’ I sighed.
‘Right now?’ he asked, pained.
‘I promised,’ I said.
The problem with favours is that they are often more onerous than anything for which one would be paid, and this particularly applied to the accounts of Nerds Inc. I was checking their Business Activity Statement, or BAS for short, as a return favour for them setting up and disentangling my internet connection and talking to the nice boy on the help line. They speak fluent techno, while I barely get by with a few words. The main one of which is ‘help!’. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the best accounting software and the most up-to-date spreadsheets. This doesn’t help, as I had told them in exasperation, if you don’t enter all the data. They shuffled uncomfortably. Like most extreme nerds, they don’t get out much in daylight and they don’t meet a lot of mundanes. I was a definitive, even extreme, mundane.
Nerds Inc consists of Taz, who is tall and has scrubby blondish hair and a face that hasn’t seen sunlight in years. Rat, named for his long rat tail of hair at the back of his neck, had otherwise close cropped dark hair and is shorter than the other two. And Gully, who is the most presentable and articulate, now sports a reasonable hair cut and, I believe, he actually owns a suit. All had the rolls of fat round the waist which indicated a total lack of exercise and a diet of Twisties, tacos, nachos and their preferred drink, Arctic Death, a vodka and lemon concoction which probably sterilises newts. They are dressed alike in jeans and t-shirts. Someone’s mum, I was willing to wager, appeared every week and took home a huge load of washing, returning them nice clean t-shirts on which they could spill more chili sauce. They run a fairly good business, or did. This time I was not getting good news from the figures I could estimate.
‘No other way to do this,’ I said, ‘than that someone sits down and reads out all the receipts, and then someone else reads out all the bills and outgoings. Which will take hours. So someone else will have to make me coffee and give me a bottle of spring water.’
Their shoe box method of record keeping did have this to say for it: all the receipts were there and could be arranged by date. I set Rat to do this while Gully worked on the outgoings and Taz made the coffee.
I was sitting in their office, which was a mess. I had cleared some space for my chair and my feet amongst the piles of games, printouts, old t-shirts and pizza boxes. Though definitely squalid, it wasn’t actually fetid, because they have a cleaner who comes in once a week to wash the old coffee cups and remove the uneaten food. She must be a woman of iron nerve and grim purpose. I stirred the mess with one foot and turned up a photograph. There were my three nerds, all dressed up in costume from a variety of sources: from
Babylon 5
, Gully as a Centauri in a bald wig; from
Star Wars
a storm trooper, Rat, grinning; from
Doctor Who
’s Meglos, Taz in a cactus mask. A genuine sci-fi conference experience. I smiled.