Raw Blue (2 page)

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Café Parisienne, Manly, Friday night. Orders come in waves. After ten o’clock there is a lull and I start making the Café Parisienne version of hollandaise sauce, reducing some vinegar with peppercorns and a bay leaf, and setting up the food processor on the bench. I wash my hands for a ten-Mississippi count with soap and warm water before I crack eggs into my palms, letting the whites sag through my fingers into a bowl and throwing the yolks into the Moulinex. After I add the reduction to the yolks, I turn the food processor on and watch its twin blades spin a yellow tornado.

Adam comes in while I’m drizzling melted butter through the hole in the lid. He slams his plastic box full of plates, cups and food scraps onto the bench near the washer.

‘I hate bussing,’ he shouts. ‘Bloody Emilio’s always got me bussing.’

It’s the only way he can stop you eating the contents of the cool room, Adam, I could say, but I don’t. I nod and smile and don’t take my eyes off the yellow string of butter. Adam likes to talk because when Adam talks he doesn’t work. My back’s aching and tired from surfing and it hurts my neck to look sideways. I don’t want to talk.

‘
Urgh
. I hate it. I hate it, my precious.’ He pulls up the top half of the dishwasher so that steam billows into the room and slides the tray of finished plates over onto the bench to his left. While he’s waiting for them to cool off, he throws another rack on top of the sink and starts stacking up. Halfway through he loses interest and wanders over to me.

‘Yucky poo.’ He sticks his finger into the drizzling butter and licks it.

‘Adam.’

Adam has some kind of skin condition, which means open sores on his hands, arms, legs and face – all the bits of him that you can see, including the sticky little fingers he likes to touch everything with. He’s told me that it’s Golden Staph; there was some long, involved story about how he went to hospital to get his wisdom teeth out in his first year at uni. I didn’t take it all in. And I don’t believe he’s got Golden Staph. Adam says a lot of things.

‘I’m so bored.
So
bored.’

His glasses are misted up and he looks like a mole. He considers the Moulinex again and I wonder when he last washed his hair.

‘Why don’t you just slop it in?’ he asks. ‘The butter.’

‘You’re the one doing a science degree. You tell me.’

He sniffs. Then he reaches for the plastic sauce bottle of old hollandaise on the shelf to his right. He squeezes some into his palm and licks it up. My stomach clenches.

‘If I put it in too quickly it’ll separate. The sauce will curdle,’ I say in a tight voice.

‘
Ooh … Rrrr-ight …’
Adam likes drawing words out. When he’s not around, the other staff pronounce his name ‘Ad-
dom
’, so it sounds ridiculous, like ‘condom’ or ‘aplomb’.

He leaves the sauce bottle on the bench. I reach across him to put it back on the shelf. We leave the hollandaise out all the time. The kitchen is always warm and keeps it at the right consistency. The thought of that worries me sick. I think of the bacteria multiplying in the hollandaise, the protein in those raw egg yolks loving the kitchen warmth (between 5°C and 60°C, ideal conditions for bacterial breeding). On my first day I questioned Emilio about it. In a testy voice he said,
If you’ve got time to make up four batches a day, go for it
. I try to make a fresh batch every shift so no one dies from food poisoning, at least not on my watch.
Clostridium perfringens, Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus
– in my mind the words look like long numbers comprised of 8s. I see them increasing and increasing and increasing.

888888888888888888888888888888888 …

8 is just an infinity symbol the right way up.

I switch the Moulinex off, pull the plug out of the socket for safety’s sake, then rinse the blades in hot water at my sink. I’m paranoid about putting them in with the normal wash. Too sharp. What if someone grabs them without looking? While I’m doing this Adam sticks his fingers into the jug and scoops up a handful of hollandaise. I almost gag. I look at the sores on his hands and my mind is so crammed with 8s I can hardly think.

‘Come on, come on, give me some room,’ I say, and I jostle Adam in a good-natured way. You’ve got to jolly Adam or else he sulks and gets vicious.

He retreats back to his stacking, slamming plates into the tray, spraying them vigorously.

‘So are you like one of those high school drop-outs?’ he shouts.

I mouth like a fish, suddenly winded. ‘I started a degree in business communications.’

‘Oh?’ He says it in doubt. ‘But you don’t go to uni now, do you?’

How does he know? How can he tell? ‘No. I stopped.’

‘Why’d you defer?’

I don’t correct him. I don’t tell him I dropped out, not deferred. Don’t tell him how I got in my car to hand in an assignment, eyes grainy from cramming all night, and I just couldn’t bring myself to start the motor. I sat there for thirty minutes, maybe more, frozen. Then before I knew it I was heading for home, driving up the F3 in a car packed with gear from the place I was sharing in Surry Hills. I hated Surry Hills. Even the leaves on the trees were dirty. In the beginning I was okay with my flatmates, Karen and Matt the pothead, but over time I could hardly talk to them. Sometimes I’d go into the kitchen and the two of them would shut up and I’d know they’d been talking about me. And I hated being away from the ocean. Without it, I felt like I was shrivelling up.

‘I just wanted to think,’ I say.

I finish funnelling the hollandaise into a plastic bottle. Then I rip off some masking tape and stick it on the front of the bottle and write:
Carly, 05/11
. I can feel Adam’s scorn.

Later, I open the door of the cool room and startle Adam in there. He’s standing in front of the cooked-meat shelf with one of the containers open. I can see the masking-tape label fixed to the front of it:
Thai curry, Kylie, 03/11
. He’s been scooping it into his mouth, using his hand like a spoon. My stomach turns over.

‘Shouldn’t you be out front, Adam? Bussing?’

I flatten against the cool-room door but his bulk still brushes me on his way past. He’s left the lid off the container and I shut it thinking that if I’ve got time I’ll tip the curry out and make a fresh batch, free from 8s. But I probably won’t get time. There are fifteen boxes of pre-made pastry and bread dough in the freezer room that need to be emptied.

I use a box of frozen croissants to wedge open the freezer door. I get the heebie-jeebies when I’m in there with it closed, a horror of being locked in somehow. The freezer is nested inside the cool room so it’s not like you get much of a break from the cold with the door open – the cool room’s temperature is 4°C. If someone blocks the door to the cool room I’m still screwed, but I will get a slower death.

Whoever took delivery of the frozen stuff was supposed to unpack it. Instead, they’ve stacked the boxes up inside the freezer doorway, completely blocking access to the shelves. I look up at that tower of boxes and I start to cry, big wet snotty sobs. I don’t know what I’m doing. I should have stayed at uni like a normal person, like everybody else. Then I’d be nice and clean and safe, doing nice, clean, safe things. What I can’t get over is how quickly it happened, me falling out of my own life.

I close the kitchen at eleven-thirty. I’ve just finished putting the chopping boards and fryer baskets through the wash when Georgina’s perky face appears in the window.

She dings the bell even though she knows I’ve seen her.

‘Nachos, wedges and a steak sandwich, lovey. Ta.’

I open my mouth to tell her that the kitchen is closed but she’s disappeared already. Deep male voices reverberate through the window from the front and I can hear her giggle. I ding the bell back and wait.

‘The kitchen’s closed,’ I tell her.

Her blue eyes look incredulous and I wonder why she cannot seem to see the clean, wiped spaces and the cover that’s been placed over the deep fryer.

‘Can you do it for these guys? I know them from school.’

‘I turned the grill and fryer off half an hour ago. I told you, remember? The oil’s cold. It’ll take ages to heat up again. And my shift’s finished. I’m off now.’

She tilts her head at me, tweaking her short black hair as though she’d like to say something more. Georgina makes me feel uncomfortable. Early on she toted me up and decided I was short of whatever it is that she thinks is important. She’s studying marketing or something.

I’m trying to bristle up so I don’t apologise. The kitchen shift always finishes at twelve. The fryer is always turned off about half an hour before. Same as it ever was. I shouldn’t have to tell her the news.

She disappears from view. A moment later I hear her low muttering and one of the male voices saying, ‘Well, tell her to turn it back on.’

I scuff out to the office. The roster is open on Emilio’s desk. Emilio himself is long gone, he slunk out at ten. He had no reason to slink, he’d been in here since seven in the morning. But he’s a bit of a martyr, old Emilio.

I take off my apron and cap, pull the elastic out of my ponytail and scrabble my fingers through my hair. It’s lank and oily from the cap and my scalp feels tight and sore. Then I hunt around on the desk for a pen to sign off with, spotting the yellow sticky note that Emilio’s pressed to the roster.

Carly,

Can you do the lunch shift front of house Sunday?

Thanks,

E.

I give the note the finger. Sunday and Monday are my days off and even if they weren’t there is no way I’d do front of house. I’m not going to stand behind that register, meeting and greeting people, talking cheery shit with them. I hate people. I can only just deal with the other staff, and that’s because if they want to speak to me they have to ring a bell and look through a little window.

Emilio knows this. I told him when I first got the job that I only wanted to do kitchen stuff
and
I could only work the night shift. I said I was happy to work here so long as he understood that, which sounds high and mighty, but I said it in a nice grovelling way. And he nodded like he’d heard me. But now he keeps pushing for more, all the time. I hate that about people. Why can’t they just respect what you want, instead of always suiting themselves?

All the time now Emilio says,
Great job with the kitchen, Carly. Things seem a lot smoother since you’ve stepped in. We’re going to have to get you out front soon. Give you a turn on coffee
.

As if coffee-making is the pinnacle of achievement. When he says those things, I get a cold panic. I feel like I’m being bulldozed slowly.

I sit down in Emilio’s chair and rub my face, feeling the grease and salt on my forehead. There’s just no way I’ll do front of house. I pat around for the sticky notes and write Emilio a message:
Regretfully E., as I told you when I started,
I’m unable to do day shifts. Apologies for not being able to help you out on this one. C
. A business communication. I started a degree in it, don’t you know?

He’s never asked me why I won’t do day shifts, but I’ve got an answer figured out in case he does. I’ll tell him I’ve got another job as a carer. I look after an old sick lady, just up the road from me.

He wouldn’t accept the truth:
I won’t work days because that’s when I surf, Emilio. That’s the only reason I’m doing this job and that’s why I won’t work an hour longer than it takes to cover rent and petrol. I will do whatever it takes to surf every day. I love it that much. It is my only good thing
.

Front of house – like hell.

Between Emilio, Adam and Georgina, I’ve had a really great night. Bees are loose in my head, buzzing and stinging.

I decide to go the long way home, Wakehurst Parkway. I just want to drive. I want to smoke too, but that’ll have to wait. I’m no good at smoking and driving at the same time, the ash always comes back in the window at me and, besides, I like to take my time over a cigarette, make it an event.

Once through Seaforth and on the open road, I speed up to ninety, winding down my window. I push through to a hundred and ten, and the lights from the cars coming the other way blind me. I feel like I’m being sucked towards them, like you can be sucked over the edge of a cliff. I focus on the white line on my side of the road. The urge to let go of the wheel and just see what happens is compelling. If I live, I’ll wake to find myself in hospital. I won’t have to do anything, deal with anybody, talk, be scared anymore, because I will have become somebody else’s responsibility. And if I die, well then everything’s solved. No more being angry like this.

It’s so tempting. I frighten myself when I cross the bridge near the back of the lakes at a hundred and twenty. The bitumen is raised there and when I hit it at that speed, for a moment I think I’ve lost control and the car’s going to hit the side rail. But then I’m over the bridge and I brake sharply. I squeeze the steering wheel tight, leaning forward like Mr Magoo, really trying to concentrate on what I’m doing. I pass Garden Street, which is where I’d usually turn to get to Powderworks Road and home, and turn off at the smash repairer’s, making my way through the back streets to the break.

I pull into the top car park and sit there in my car, smoking out the window, listening to the surf. It’s too dark to go down to the beach, just being near it is enough.

If I close my eyes I can imagine crashing. I see it in slow motion, like a crash-test dummy reconstruction where I’m the dummy. The Laser swerving across the road to hit a brick wall – the one near the sports grounds at the back of Seaforth – yellow bonnet crumpling, metal screeching, indicator lights exploding and spraying orange glass. My neck whiplashes forward, the windscreen shatters and the car presses in around me like a cocoon. Tight, tight, tighter, the warmest hug in the world.