Fava Beans For Breakfast Page 3

  Tom laughed. ‘Never could stand it myself. I went to boarding school in Sydney, when I was just a boy.’ He ran his hand over the top of his head. His knuckles were like ball-bearings.

  It was hard to imagine Tom ever being a boy. ‘Boarding school? What is this?’

  ‘Boarding school is a type of school where you don’t come home until the holidays. You sleep, eat, fight, go to class, everything … at the school.’

  ‘Your parents, they send you away from the home?’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ he laughed, his handsome actor lips receding for a moment. ‘It was a very expensive school. It had views over Sydney Harbour.’ He stared absently at a currawong that was boldly perched on the verandah railing. ‘Me and my brother—we both boarded at school, then we boarded at uni. But he stayed on afterwards. Met his missus at uni. He never looked back, I guess.’

  ‘Only one brother?’

  ‘Yup. You got brothers or sisters?’

  ‘Me, I have four brothers.’

  ‘Do you write to them much?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Same. Parents?’

  ‘No.’ Her tongue went thick. ‘They are dead. Both.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Mine are too. Dead. Both of them.’

  A loud crunch from the densely grown garden made Nayeema turn abruptly.

  Tom smiled and faced her directly for the first time. ‘When the garden is this dry, even a lizard can make as much noise as a scrub turkey.’

  ‘Who tells you about Fawzy buying pharmacy?’ Nayeema’s voice was pinched.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I must have got my wires crossed.’

  She frowned and nodded. They sat in silence as the final fingers of peach waned to dusty terracotta, and Tom’s shallow breathing lengthened out, and the last streaks of colour on the waxy sky drained to grey.

  * * *

  In the centre of Tom Grieves’ grand dining room was an ornate chandelier. Below the table stood a mahogany dining table, very wow, with intricately carved legs. Tom had draped a cream and white embroidered tablecloth over the imposing table, which could seat up to twelve people, maybe more, thought Nayeema. This was where she and Fawzy had spent every night so far in Burraboo: with their landlord, in a clamour of conversation, garlic and chilli; the three of them at one end of the long table.

  Large dishes and small were clustered between them: kofta, rice, potatoes, fried eggplant, fattoush salad, pickles, tahini, olives and swathes of mint all within arm’s reach. This was the convenient, self-service style of eating that Nayeema preferred but for a moment, she felt a pang of self-consciousness. Her spicy, bold food looked strange sitting atop the delicate pastoral motifs of Tom’s Wedgewood plates. El professeur must be cringing, she thought.

  ‘By jolly,’ said Fawzy, pressing his lips together to evoke his dimples. ‘Pat Morris runs a busy pharmacy. A busy pharmacy, indeed.’ He nodded enthusiastically to Tom and gingerly placed his knife and fork down. ‘It is a most impressive operation. Do you know Pat well?’

  ‘Well enough. Burraboo is a cosy town. You’ll figure that out pretty quick. He’s a good bloke, but he’s getting on. Not far from retirement now. It’s a good little business to hand over to the right buyer.’

  Nayeema casually loaded her plate with pink, beetroot-tinted pickled turnips while closely watching Fawzy.

  ‘It’s always a pleasure to work with outstanding individuals,’ said Fawzy with a broad smile, giving nothing away. El professeur was as relaxed and charming as the day they had left Sydney. His head was craned back awkwardly as he looked up at Tom. Even seated, there was a comical size differential between them. Fawzy was not a short man, but next to his landlord he appeared diminutive and so much younger than his twenty-four years. In a blink so fast that she wondered if she had seen it at all, Fawzy flashed Tom a look of caution.

  Tom cleared his throat. ‘Reckon there are folks going to the pharmacy just to check you out, Fred … er, you know, say hello and all that. We’re a nosy lot. The novelty factor of the new guy. Wouldn’t be surprised if a few people have come in with some phantom headaches?’ Tom winked.

  Fawzy nodded amiably. ‘I’ve been impressed by the ingenuity of ailments. Still, it is a delightful place to work, indeed. I cannot complain. Pat is a splendid chap and I admire what he has done very much. But … still,’ he hesitated, ‘I think there are areas that could be improved in the pharmacy, there are new systems and processes, modern approaches that I can bring,’ said Fawzy, his cheeks flushed with pleasure. ‘Fortunately, Pat is willing to entrust me with these changes. Small steps, of course.’

  ‘Yeah? Like what?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Starting from tomorrow I will be moving around the shelving, repositioning where things are stocked on the shelves. The dispensary section is poorly positioned, that will have to move. After that, I will order new merchandise. Merchandising is a big thing in Sydney.’

  ‘Sounds like big steps,’ said Nayeema.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Tom, and smirked. ‘Bev won’t like that.’

  Nayeema recalled Pat’s daughter from their brief introduction at the pharmacy a few days ago. She had a loud and musical whistle, and the reddest ear tragus Nayeema had ever seen. Nayeema could see Fawzy resented her confident authority on all matters related to the pharmacy. She was brazen. She looked unwashed. Above all, she was no scientist.

  ‘Beverly is quite displeased with me,’ sniffed Fawzy. ‘She laughs at my suggestions to improve the business … but, well … one must always remember, one can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’

  Tom raised his eyebrows and speared a kofta into his mouth.

  ‘It was a favourite expression of my friend, Edward Campbell. He often said to me, “Lad, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”’ Fawzy paused. ‘Have you heard of the famous scientist Edward Campbell?’

  ‘Can’t say so. Should I?’

  ‘He was quite influential in academic circles before the war.’

  Nayeema sucked in her breath. Oh no. Here we go again. Edward bey drifted like a sulphuric stench into every anecdote Fawzy told. She loaded the honorific, bey, with a quiet sarcasm that she rarely kept to herself.

  ‘Be careful with Bev,’ said Nayeema, keen to shift the conversation away from Edward bey. Then in Arabic, she said, ‘If you have to drag a dog to the hunt, then neither he nor his hunting is very good.’

  Fawzy’s body stiffened. He hated her speaking in Arabic, and especially in front of Australians. He noiselessly placed his knife and fork down on his plate in perfect parallel unison. ‘Nina,’ he said, softly.

  ‘Hah? Nina?’

  ‘Nayeema,’ said Fawzy, curtly.

  ‘I forget to speak in English sometimes,’ she said to Tom. ‘Fawzy gets upset.’

  ‘Never mind … about Beverley,’ said Fawzy stiffly. ‘She has no expertise whatsoever in the science of the body or pharmaceuticals. She is a cashier.’ Fawzy popped a large pickled turnip in his mouth and started to chew it in that fastidious, exaggerated way that Nayeema instantly understood he was counting each chew. He would reach twenty chews. Then he would swallow.

  ‘Well, I gotta tell you, Fred, people are real impressed with you, mate. I’m hearing this all around town today. You’ve been a real surprise.’

  ‘Oh. What were people expecting?’ asked Fawzy, far too quickly. The regard of others was like bread to him.

  Her poor little Professeur. She noticed his fingers gripped around his knife and fork; saw the calluses and tears and cuts still etched in his hands that marked the indignity of his physical labour. The construction sites across Sydney that he had worked on were not yet a distant memory. She pinched the fleshy part of her thumb hard for ridiculing his twenty chews. He deserved to be happy.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, all the folk around here are used to Pat. The old codger has been the face of that pharmacy for fifty odd years. People don’t like change, especially around here. Believe me.’
Tom grimaced. ‘They don’t always like newcomers.’

  ‘You mean people like us, the New Australians, the wogs, the ethnics … we know what people say. We hear it, we see it, like the butcher’s son.’ Nayeema shovelled fattoush onto her plate and let the serving spoon fall back onto the platter with an indelicate clank.

  Fawzy frowned. ‘I am an accredited and registered pharmacist. I studied at Sydney University. Before that, Alexandria University, where I read Science and English and discussed Goethe and Descartes with Edward Campbell.’

  Fawzy was just warming up. Here it comes, those crisp consonants, those perfectly executed BBC vowels, the circle returning to that son of a shoe, Edward bey.

  ‘Well, maybe … that isn’t what I meant,’ Tom said, shifting in his seat, ‘what I mean is that Burraboo isn’t known for being progressive or dynamic or whatnot. I should bloody know.’ Tom half-laughed in disappointment. ‘But I reckon, Fred, you’ll be getting on just fine here. Burraboo could do with more people like you, agitating for change, wanting things to be better. This old town has seen better days, that’s for bloody sure, back when I was a half-pint whippersnapper.’

  ‘Snapper? Like fish?’ She frowned. This new language was impossible.

  Tom laughed, his handsome actor lips shining. ‘When I was a boy.’

  ‘I’ve seen your posters about the Horizon at Serpentine Heights. By jolly, a very big project indeed. There is a town meeting, I believe?’ Fawzy asked, nodding enthusiastically.

  ‘Yup. This will be Burraboo’s first development in years.’

  ‘Our landlord is quite the business man, Nayeema, his shoulders carry a tremendous undertaking.’

  ‘Big man of business?’

  Tom snorted. ‘Nah, my old man will be cussing in his grave at that. Big Jack Grieves was the big man of business. At least he thought so.’

  ‘Which old man, you say?’ said Nayeema.

  ‘My old man … my father. He owned a lot of businesses in this area. I inherited most of them. Well, my brother and I did. Before we sold most of them.’ He reached for his water glass.

  Nayeema watched the dancing bump on his throat as he drank. ‘Tell us about your father.’

  ‘Wouldn’t want to ruin the night. Another time, maybe.’

  ‘Tell me then, why you choose the little Burraboo to do your big business when you can pick Sydney?’

  ‘Sunsets aren’t as good in Sydney.’ He placed another two pieces of kofta on his plate. ‘Seriously, if you play your cards right, there are plenty of advantages to building a business here.’

  At these words it was impossible for Nayeema to ignore Fawzy’s radiant cheeks, the zeal in his eyes. He was a jackal with his ears pointed up to the sky, he was the very picture of attention. Her breath stayed in her throat. She could no longer have one ear blocked by mud and the other blocked by dough. For the first time since they had started eating, she felt the familiar stab of pain through her birthmark like hot skewers through her chest.

  The front door shuddered and the dining room windows rattled as the wind outside gathered pace. Dogs started to whine. She thought of the gritty Khamaseen desert winds that flooded Alexandria at the start of spring. The Khamaseen, the fifty, were so named because they charged for fifty days through North Africa like a murky torrent of desiccated orange peel. When she was still small enough to sit comfortably on her father’s knee, Hassan would explain that the Khamaseen was a ferocious gale that simmered all year in the dry furnace of the Sahara Desert before it tore north across Africa, over Egypt, and into the Mediterranean. Hassan would hiss with his eyes wide and wild as he told how the winds churned the earth and lifted coarse sand and dust for hundreds of kilometres, drenching Alexandria with desert soot and illness. The Khamaseen could shred your lungs like a sickle. Men went mad during the time of the Khamaseen winds, only to recover their senses when the foul scourge blew out of the city. Babies howled, sleepwalkers ruled the night, chickens forgot to lay their eggs and goats barked like dogs. ‘Little bird, life will always blow the right way if you know where the winds are coming from,’ Hassan would tell her.

  She put down her fork and looked at Fawzy then Tom, heard a bucket skid across Tom’s back verandah and the groan of an awning as the wind blustered and bucked outside. Her heart screamed and her eyeballs pounded and her birthmark prickled as she realised she had no idea what way the wind was blowing.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bloody country roads. Full of road kill. The bloody and the damned, the innocent and the fey, the hunters, the defenders, the settlers, the nomads, the wallabies, ’roos, rodents, lizards, foxes, possums, the arrogant, the drunken, the meek, the beauties, the douches, the drongos, they were all here on these roadsides, covering the sods and clods. Cripes almighty, they filled the earth with their eyes and marrow and bone.

  You could hold your breath and before you needed to exhale you’d see another furry, torn carcass or fragments of shattered glass or pieces of destroyed tyre. Tom Grieves hated this section of the road. It always made him morose. The road wound up the steep headland, at first gently, and then into hairpin bends. There was another road to the headland but you had to go inland first and then take the highway. Cripes, you couldn’t build a world-class entertainment complex and not provide a decent road to get there. He’d already started to argue his case, bypassing the local municipal Mayor, Bruce Gavin, who was nothing if not a pork chop, with a few phone calls to the Minister himself. It was the only way to get things done and the Grieves name was still known in the State government. A few of the fat cats used to be mates of his dad’s. Everyone’s wheel would get greased, he’d make sure of it.

  His portable cassette player was on the passenger seat, blasting ‘Long Train Running’ from its speakers—the Dooby Brothers and Steely Dan had been on a solid rotation in his car for months. He’d lost Pink Floyd to his car’s cassette player, which had chewed up The Dark Side of the Moon on the first play of the album. He’d get around to fixing the damned cassette player. With the amount of money he’d spent on the Dodge Charger, the idea of forking out a cent on fixing anything just yet annoyed the hell out of him.

  Halfway up the headland Tom turned up the volume and stroked the steering wheel. The Dodge was perfect for long stretches of country road where he could let this beauty soar close to its maximum speed—an incredible 150 miles per hour. Not that he did that often. Bloody country roads. On his regular trips to Sydney, though, that was different. He loved the way the Dodge started up with a plug-plug-plug before settling into a roar, how the hairs on his arms separated and stood upright like conifers as he commanded revs. This was a car that could move from a standstill to 60 miles per hour in 7.4 seconds. The Dodge was submission and power all at once, a symbol of what could be achieved.

  But a Dodge Charger wasn’t for everyone. First of all, it was an American car. The cost of importing it to Australia was sickening. You could expect to pay an amount equal to the price of the car itself, through a suite of import tariffs, taxes and government whatnot. Then there was the modification cost of converting it to a right-hand drive. There were the optional extras—which you’d be a drongo to decline—of a built-in radio and cassette player, though later, he felt like a drongo for having gouged his wallet on a faulty cassette player. Once in possession of this magnificent piece of automotive wonder there were other factors to consider, including your ability to ignore the taunts of teenage boys aping for a race, and your acceptance that the rumble of the V8 engine would make it impossible to fashion a discreet arrival or departure, anywhere.

  Breaking in his new car had been pure pleasure. Learning how the steering responded to corners, how it yielded to his demands, took him out of his body to a place of limitless potential, where there were no edges, no borders, where every line was blurred, and all possibilities were accessible to him.

  It was the only fancy thing Tom had ever bought for himself, rather than inherited. He wasn’t obsessed with cars like his dad had been. At an
y one time, Big Jack owned four cars. He’d created kilometres of sealed road so that he could drive his Bentley in and out of Burraboo. Everyone knew about Big Jack’s Bentley. Then, of course, there was the Jaguar. His old man’s 1955 Jaguar XK140 Roadster was the talk of the town from the day that he’d first driven it brazenly down Main Road. Even in death, with the car wrapped around a tree and his father’s body a mangled mess, Jack Grieves and the Jaguar coveted the attention, while Tom’s splintered and bloody legs beside him were a secondary consideration.

  Tom wasn’t as flashy as his old man, but cripes, was he enthusiastic about driving his very own ’72 Dodge. He’d ordered it in Lucerne Blue. Took ten months to arrive from America. Once he’d sold the last of his old man’s business interests, he bought the car. This was a celebration car. He was stepping out on his own terms and the car was a celebration of the future. His dad would have disapproved of the Dodge. ‘Yanks don’t know how to make cars,’ he’d say.

  Tom rubbed his chest. That dinner Neema had cooked up last night was something else but it was so rich in flavour and fat and spice that he hadn’t felt hungry enough for breakfast. Didn’t matter, he liked discovering the foreign food Neema dished up. He liked coming home to a hot meal. He liked the way Fred and Neema chatted loudly and clanged his grandmother’s silver against his mother’s bone china dinner plates. The formal dining room was grossly decadent, but it was too late now to suggest eating at the breakfast table. He probably should have gotten rid of his mother’s show-off furniture years ago. Most of the time, the house didn’t really feel like it belonged to him. Truth was, he’d never really cared for his parents’ stuff, but he’d never really cared enough to change it, either.