I wasn’t planning to ruin my mother’s fridge space ratio, but it suddenly feels blindingly obvious that eating meat is strange and disgusting. This will be the only proper meal Miriam will eat this week, though, so leftovers will definitely be a problem. She hardly ever eats, which is why she is a beautiful skeleton. One that is nicely preserved in alcohol.
She forks lamb onto her plate and pushes a bowl of carrots with spiky green ends towards me. They are the colour of beetroot and have bits scattered over them. ‘What’s this?’ A weird-looking bit lands on top of my potato. It appears to be bacon with fat attached.
‘Roasted root vegetables. I combined two of Yotam’s recipes. The lardons aren’t from him, but I thought they’d go well with the carrots.’
She is waiting for my praise, and I can see she has gone to a lot of trouble. She had an Ottolenghi cookbook on the bench when I came in, so I’d know who to thank for today’s Sunday spread. She calls him Yotam, as if she’s a Knightsbridge local who’s just popped down to the Harrods Food Hall for a ten-pound Bavarian yak milk latte and run into him in the organic vegetable market for a chat.
‘Right. Yum,’ I murmur.
I move the lardon to the side of my plate and take a huge sip of wine, even though I rarely drink. There are plenty of tricks to getting through Sunday lunch with Miriam, but wine is the fail-safe. My phone buzzes and I make the mistake of checking it. A text from Lila to my ex-boyfriend Hugo and me.
Hi you guys! Coming to Sydney next week. Can we do dinner at Lou’s in Bondi? Can’t wait to catch up on your news. Xx
I put the phone down. Miriam’s glare does nothing to improve my mood.
‘It’s Lila,’ I explain. ‘She’s coming to Sydney.’
‘Who’s Lila?’
‘Hugo’s cousin from Hobart. You’ve met her. She came down to that charity book sale Phyllida helped organise last year.’
‘Why are you still talking to Hugo’s cousin?’
‘Because she’s my friend! Just because I’m not with Hugo anymore doesn’t mean I have to ditch my whole life.’
Miriam raises a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Does she know you broke up?’
I feel myself redden. My mother knows I am avoidant in most things. The breakup is hard to talk about because nobody who knew Hugo and I as a couple can believe I have blown the whole thing up.
Miriam swipes the air as she puts her wine glass back onto the table. ‘Hugo needed a decent haircut and a proper job. You made the right decision.’
‘He’s a barista. That’s a proper job.’
‘Rubbish. You need to find a new man. It will spice things up for you.’
I sigh. ‘There are no single men in this town. They left because they are not all idiots like me.’
‘Plenty of married ones, though.’
Internally, I am flinching, but there are carrots, turnips and potatoes still taking up half my plate and Miriam is only on to her second glass of wine. I decide to humour her by participating in the conversation, because that is another top tip for surviving Sunday lunch with my mother. ‘Is it ever okay to sleep with a married man, do you think?’
‘It depends,’ she says.
Sweat runs down my back and I look through the open French door, out onto Miriam’s beautiful garden in search of a breeze. Despite the fact that it is more than thirty degrees and the middle of the Australian summer, we are having a hotSunday lunch because David (my father) apparently thought it was a nice tradition, and Miriam clings to David’s words as tightly as she would to a surviving package of Botox in the ruins of her cosmetic clinic after a bomb explosion.
I plough on: ‘Like, if he really didn’t want to hurt his wife, but he was in a marriage that was never right for him in the first place and you were his real soulmate?’ I peer across the top of my vegetables, interested in her view. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’d instigated affairs.
Miriam gives a little head shake. ‘Of course it’s fine. Think logically, Charlotte. He’d be the one cheating, not you. He’s the one who has to examine his motives. Although’—Miriam grimaces and begins to shrug one shoulder repeatedly, as if a pain has set in—‘I don’t really see you having the courage to seduce a married man. You’ve always been such a rule follower. Not sure where I went wrong there.’
This is a familiar dance from my childhood. A memory comes:Miriam placing a bunch of grapes into the trolley then blithely popping them into her mouth as we shop, and enthusiastically encouraging me to eat them too, even though I have pointed out to her that she is stealing because we won’t be able to weigh them; then Miriam laughing to the checkout operator, pointing to the naked grape stem and shaking her head. ‘Would you look at that? Little scallywag’s eaten the lot!’ Me, burning with shame.
‘What’s wrong with rules?’ I say, pushing the memory away. ‘If there were no rules, I could just’—I think for a moment—‘tip my wine onto the carpet. No consequences.’ I hold up my glass and Miriam ignores me.
I sigh and put down the glass. ‘Most parents are happy that their children don’t drink-drive or hold up banks.’
‘Well, I’m not most parents, am I? And who holds up banks anymore? There’s no cash to be had. You are so unimaginative, Charlotte.’
‘That’s not true. I have an excellent imagination. I just choose not to reveal my imaginative thoughts to you.’ I think about my recent imaginings: about finding long-lost family members and discovering they are not all self-obsessed, attention-seeking egomaniacs like my mother. ‘I wonder if my DNA test will show I have Nordic heritage.’ I sent the test away six weeks ago and am impatiently awaiting the results. I never met David—the man who was in Miriam’s life for only a few months and left her pregnant with me—but I am dying to find out any family connections he might have. I have him to thank for my excellent grandmother, Phyllida. She’s been a rock my whole life. Although, I haven’t mentioned the DNA test to Phyllida because I have a feeling she might not want me digging around. She’s always been vague about David’s father. She’s never talked about being married or ever having a partner, so it’s a bit of an unspoken family mystery.
