When the Night Comes (22 page)

Rob looks down at his last bite of cake.

“I will try to remember that,” he says.

“More cake?” I ask, but he puts his hand up.

Erik walks in. “That was a good movie,” he says.

Rob stands up. “Thanks for the cake,” he says. He looks better, not so green.

“Anytime,” I say.

I take the plates and his cup and put them in the dishwasher. I stand there and look out of the porthole. I think about the times my father would call from ports, from Melbourne, from Norway, from Hull. He would tell me about the albatross and about the whales, about life on the ship and what the crew would get up to.

Amazing stories, and I loved them. But the time would run out and he'd have to go. “Be good for your grandmother,” he'd say, and the phone would go dead.

I would hold the receiver in my hand, hold it right up against my ear for a long time.

“Papa?” I would say, “Papa?” because I always had so much to tell him. I always had so much I wanted to say.

There was never enough time.

I
don't like cooking much,” I said.

Bo looked up at me but he said nothing. His hands kept on cutting the carrots and celery in perfect time.

“I'm not very good at it.” I twisted the tea towel in my hands over and over, until it was long and thin and tight.

Bo finished chopping. He stood tall, hands on his hips.

“I started to cook when I was very young,” he said, “maybe even before school, I don't know. I had my grandmother there to help me. To teach me. My grandmother taught me how to cook.”

I thought about my grandma. My grandparents' second-floor flat was steamy with the salty smell of butter. Sunday lunch. In the small kitchen, my large grandmother stirred the thick soup, and I could hear it bubbling.

Bread dumplings in the metal steam pan ready to be cooked, the dark pieces of crusts checkered the white doughy bodies.

Our job was to set the table. My brother and I would get the plates and knives and forks and glasses and we'd carefully lay them out on the dining-room table.

It was a green wooden table covered with a lace crocheted tablecloth that came from a country far away, a place I had never been to, but that was alive and real in that flat. The walls were lined with tapestries of the
old city of Prague. The bridge, the castle and the cobblestone streets. Dark, quiet. Standing forever.

My grandmother's old-fashioned dresses, her beehive hairstyle and her kind, soft accent. She was from a place far away, a place lost in time.

Bread dumplings and
svíčková
—a thick vegetable soup, sometimes with a cut of meat cooked whole in the soup and sliced later.

The soup was poured over the bread dumplings, and they absorbed it like sponges.

Food for winter.

Food for snow.

Food to put fat on your bones.

“What do you make?” Bo asked.

I put the tea towel down on the counter and got out the
Women's Weekly Cookbook
from the cupboard. I picked through the pages.

“I can make this one.” I showed him
Savory Mince. “
And this one.”
Russian Potato Salad with Egg.

He took the book from my hands, studied the pages—the pictures. His face was blank but slowly he began to smile.

“Seems like you don't like feta,” he said.

There were notes written in pen next to the recipes that I had made so that Mum could get the right ingredients. Under the Greek salad I had crossed out
feta
and written
NO!
 
in capital letters.

“Greek salad is very interesting with no feta!” Bo said.

He turned the page.
Winter Casserole.
I had crossed this one out altogether. I had gone over it with pen in lines and lines so that you couldn't read the ingredients or anything or even see the picture. I had blacked it out.

“Try to eat some, love,” Mum said.

Big fat chunks of beef sat on my plate—glistening with fat, chunks of carrot, chunks of potato. Mum's casserole. I ate the potato and then I made myself eat the carrot.

I put a piece of beef on my fork and ran it round and round the rim of my plate to get the gravy off so I could see the fat. Three times round, rings of orange-brown gravy like a racing track around my plate. I held the piece of beef up in the air. I could smell it.

I looked up and Mum was staring at me with that vacant look.

“Please,” she said.

I closed my eyes and put the piece of beef in my mouth, tried to chew, but I gagged and the beef came out of my mouth still pretty much in a solid cube. My brother looked at me. He hadn't eaten anything at all.

Mum was standing on the other side of the counter, her hands by her sides.

“Try,” she said again softly.

But then the door opened and Dad was home. He put his briefcase down and took his jacket off and then he came and sat down next to us at the counter. Mum got his plate out of the oven, full of brown casserole—it looked a little bit dry. He looked at it but he didn't pick up his fork or knife, he just picked it up and hurled it across the room. The plate flew past my mum's head. Some of the casserole spun off onto the floor, but most of it splattered on the cream wall and the plate smashed into a million tiny pieces. Bits of beef and carrot and potato slid on the wall and slopped down.

“I'm sick of this,” Dad said as he got up and put his jacket on, picked up his briefcase and slammed the front door behind him.

Mum started to cry and my brother and I sat there until the food was
really cold, the beef congealed in the brown sauce, and we kept on sitting there until one of our dogs came over and started to lick the floor. Mum said, “No, no, sweetie,” and got the dustpan and a cloth from under the sink and started to clean up the shards of white plate and the globs of brown gravy.

“I think this needs to go in the rubbish bin,” Bo said, and dropped the book in the white swing-top bin. My eyes must have opened wide, because then he said, “Well, we won't tell anyone we did that. It will just be lost.”

He put his hands on his cheeks, pulled a face.

“Oh, where could it be? Where could that wonderful cookbook with such exciting food be? We are lost without it!”

I looked at the bin. I was worried about how I was going to manage to cook without the recipes.

“Food comes from here,” Bo said, and he put his hand on his chest. “Good food you know how to cook from . . .” and he looked up to the ceiling, maybe searching for the words in English. “By heart,” he said.

He picked up a pen and the message notepad that was next to the phone and handed them to me.

“You write. My English, not brilliant for writing,” he said. Then he said, “Your mum is doing her best. I know that.”

I looked down at the pad. I drew small circles on the paper, all in a line. I heard the words he said.

“What about meatballs with pasta? Or a simple omelet with cheese and spinach and bacon. Pan-fried chicken with herbs. That's easy.”

My brother came in and wanted to add hot dogs to the list. Bo laughed at that. He told my brother that it was
very
important to know how to make Danish hot dogs.

“You never know when you will be needing them!” he said.

Bo also put the ingredients for pancakes on the list.

That afternoon Bo taught me how to make a simple pancake batter, one that was foolproof and good, and I didn't worry at all while I was making it. I didn't worry about how it would turn out or if I'd done it wrong. I just stayed there in the kitchen with Bo, while he finished off his vegetable soup.

He told me that when he is cooking, he is a
happy little bear
.

I made the pancakes and my brother said they were good. Not as good as at the café but good all the same.

I
n the middle of physics, Mr. Wilkins started to cry.

No one spoke or moved. There was just the sound of Bunsen burners, the hot hissing of them as we all sat there in our white lab coats.

I tried not to look at Mr. Wilkins, but I was looking at him.

“I'm leaving,” he said quietly. “I'm going to become a doctor.” He looked down at the floor, his brown hair flopped over his forehead. He wiped his eyes with his hands.

“I'm going back to university in New South Wales and I won't be a teacher anymore.”

When he looked up his face was pale.

The Bunsen burners turned off one by one and then the hissing sound was gone. Then there was no sound, not even one squeak on the linoleum floor as Mr. Wilkins told us about the accident. About how he had seen it all from the overpass. About how he had been the first one there.

He told us that the car had hit the boy so slowly that he would have been fine, he would have just had a sore head and some bruises, but somehow, by some kind of crazy, sick chance, the front bumper bar nicked the skin on the boy's neck and sliced through his carotid artery.

Mr. Wilkins started to cry again then. He just stood there by the blackboard crying with his hands covering his face.