Earthly Delights (2 page)

I remember delivering a tray of this bread to some healthy function and catching myself muttering, ‘Eat sawdust and die, yuppie scum.’ I probably didn’t really mean it. Right, Health Loaf mixed and into tins and into the oven. Baking powder is a chemical reaction and starts as soon as the liquid is added. Speed is essential. I stacked the tins onto a slide, into the oven, timer on.

Now for the French sticks while the sawdust bricks are cooking. Pasta douro yeast, white flour, a little oil, warm water. Go, yeast. Muffins go in as soon as the sawdust comes out, another chemical reaction. I felt like apple today. Haul out the tin of apple pie filling (yes, yes, I know, but do you know how much peeling I have to do for the potato bread tomorrow?) and reach for the tin opener.

No tin opener. My hand falls confidently onto its place on the shelf and comes back empty.

Damn. I must have taken it up to my own kitchen. I clatter up the stairs in my Doc Martens (good solid shoes are essential if you are on your feet all day, and at least they never come with a kitten heel), find the bloody thing, clatter down again, remove top layer of tracksuit, open tin.

It’s really getting hot now. The ovens are into their stride. Time to open the door and greet the new dawn.

The Mouse Police rush outside with cries of relief, as though they had been trapped for days in a lift with Philip Ruddock talking about border protection. A gust of cold air rushes in. I turn off one mixer and set the rye bread on ‘rise’. I prepare the muffin mix, except the milk, and pause to look out at the dawn and stretch my back.

Then Heckle leaps inside as though he had been stung. Something is stuck in his foot, he is shaking his paw frantically and mewing loudly. I grab him and extract a syringe from his paw.

Heckle immediately settles down to allow Jekyll to lick his injury and I stalk out, shaking with fury.

Junkies! Irresponsible bloody junkies. Never mind finding a sharps bin, just drop the syringe in the alley, a waiting trap for an innocent cat. I kick at the wall with a furious foot, a waste of effort, for when they built this building they built it to survive anything short of an exploding volcano. I swear into the chill grey pre-dawn light. Then I see a figure slumped on my ventilation grate. No wonder it got so hot in the kitchen with some vagrant lying on my grate! I stomp over, reach out and grab for the offending shoulder, meaning to give it a good shake and send it on its way.

It collapses bonelessly out of my grasp and falls, flat on its back. A girl, with long matted hair shifting away from her blue face. Not just a delicate azure either, but dark blue like my slate floor.

Not breathing. I run back inside, grab the mobile and call 000, get a bored voice which promises instant attention and instructs me to start CPR. Oh, Jesus Mary and Joseph. My skin tries to crawl off me and find a more compassionate human. This girl is probably riddled with diseases, AIDS, hepatitis A to Z. And she’s just wounded one of my cats with her careless syringe. What a bitch life is. It’s a punishment for stepping on Horatio’s tail.

I still have plastic gloves on and I can use cling wrap on her mouth. I’m shuddering with revulsion as I lay her out on the cold cobbles. I punch a hole in my cling wrap, clear the airway and puff breath into her mouth. I can feel no heartbeat but
I don’t know where to check. I learned this at school, come on, Corinna, it’s push here and then breathe, count, then push again, breathe again. There are soft lips under the plastic. She feels like a child, all bones, high rib cage, stinks like a sewer. Breathe, count, push, breathe again.

I’m dizzy. I don’t know how long I can do this or whether it’s working. Breathe, thump, breathe, thump. Both cats are watching me from the doorstep. Horatio joins them, looking quizzical. I see his point. I don’t know why I’m doing this either. She’s dead. There’s not the faintest response to all my shoving and I’m using bruising force.

I can smell singeing. If I don’t get those Health Loaves out of the oven in five minutes they’ll catch fire. But somehow I can’t leave this filthy, childlike corpse, because what would I do if I stopped? Go inside and shut the door?

Hands are on my shoulders. Someone is lifting me to my feet. I stagger up and see, blessings upon them, a pair of ambulance officers who look like they know just what they are doing.

So I drag in a deep breath—I get to keep this one—go inside and haul the loaves out of the oven. They are slightly more crisp than usual but I’m sure the taste-challenged won’t notice. I find my cold coffee and drink it and the red mist recedes from my eyes. At school no one told me that CPR required Olympic levels of fitness.

Then I go outside to see what has happened. I don’t want to. I just do.

The paramedics have attached an oxygen mask to the girl’s face and are injecting her with something. I ask what.

‘Narcan,’ says one. ‘You did a good job, but it might be too late. The respiratory system shuts down, see, and starves the brain of oxygen. We get a lot of brain damage. But narcan
cancels out the effect of opiates. Works fast. Right. Back away, lady. They usually wake up cross. Here we go, Jules.’

Julie, his mate, had the girl by both arms, a constabulary come-along-o’-me grip which immobilises quite well. She needed it. The girl came up from her deathly trance screaming and bucking like a frightened beast. It was astounding. One minute she had been utterly still, pulseless and breathless, and the next she was struggling like a fish on a hook. Colour flushed her face. Pink, for a girl, not blue, for a corpse.

‘Cunts!’ she shrieked in an accent which I’d always heard associated with the best schools. ‘You narcanned me! I only had one hit! Gimme back my hit!’

‘Could have been your last hit,’ said Julie, holding her tightly. ‘You took too much. Take a breath, now.’

‘They’re always like that,’ observed the ambulance man, who must have seen how shocked I was. ‘You did good there. M’names Thommo. Nice to meet yer.’ We shook plastic gloves. He lit a cigarette. I suppose we all have our drug of choice. I took one of his smokes, though I stopped smoking three years ago. It tasted divine. Thommo continued my education. ‘Druggies mostly react like this. Don’t let it worry yer. From her point of view, we robbed her. Now she’s got to go and hustle for another hit. Lucky we’re not in the job for the gratitude,’ he added. ‘You want to come into casualty,’ he advised the girl. ‘Get a doctor to look at you.’

‘Yes, come on,’ urged Julie. ‘You were pretty close to the edge, you know. Can you tell me your name?’

‘Fuck off, cunt,’ said the patient.

‘Come on,’ said Thommo. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

‘No!’ screamed the girl, struggling so hard that she broke Julie’s grip. She staggered to her feet, unbalanced on one broken stiletto.

‘Working girl,’ said Julie. ‘They don’t want to miss out on a paying client by going to hospital.’

‘I’m not,’ shrieked the patient, hands out, fingers curved into claws.

‘Hey, Suze,’ said a deep, rich voice, as casually as if he had met her in the street at lunch hour, instead of confronting a screaming hysterical dervish in a back alley at five in the morning. ‘What’s happening?’

A man had strolled into Calico Alley, walking over the hard damp cobbles without making a sound. He was tall, with close-cropped dark hair, a scar across his forehead, and the most penetrating, bright and beautiful eyes I had ever seen. He was dressed in jeans, boots and a leather jacket lined with fleece.

‘These cunts want to send me to hospital!’ Suze replied, moderating her tone. I wondered how many of my exceptionally respectable neighbours were even now listening fascinated from their bedroom windows above. Usually the only noise in Calico Alley at that hour was the muted hum of my machines and the occasional squeak as the Mouse Police made another arrest.

‘Chill,’ advised the man. ‘These kind people saved your life, and even if you don’t, I think it’s worth saving. Now say thank you nicely and come on. The bus stops at Flagstaff tonight, remember?’

To my amazement, Suze turned to us and said, ‘Thank you,’ in the carefully enunciated voice of a well-behaved little girl who has taken elocution lessons, and followed the tall man out of Calico Alley.

‘Who was that masked man?’ I gasped, leaning back against the jamb and fanning myself.

‘That’s Daniel,’ said Julie, similarly affected. ‘He’s the
heavy on the Soup Run. You’re a baker, aren’t you? Then he’ll be back.’

‘Oh, good,’ I said faintly. ‘Why?’

‘’Cos he’s on the Soup Run,’ said Thommo, nettled. ‘Gotta go,’ he added, listening to his radio. ‘Fry-up on the ring road. Come on, Jules.’

Julie stuffed her equipment into her bag and prepared to follow her partner.

‘What’s a fry-up?’ I asked as she walked away.

‘A burning car,’ she said. ‘Nice work. You saved that girl’s life. ’Bye,’ she said.

I went into the bakery, made my muffins and my French bread, threw in a few twists with the leftover dough, all the time trying not to think. The terrible colour of the girl’s face. The feel of her bones under my hands. And the cruel ungrateful strength of her reaction, which had not surprised the ambulance officers at all.

It was only when I observed Horatio examining Heckle’s foot that I was recalled to my own duty of care to my dependants.

Heckle, uncharacteristically, allowed me to feel over the injured foot. I could see a small puncture in the hard pad of his weathered paw. It had been bleeding freely, which, in view of what might have been in the syringe, was good. I bagged the syringe and put it in my drawer, meaning to take it with Heckle to the vet. Could cats catch AIDS? There was a feline version called … what was it called? God, I was so tired, and so cold …

Heckle, who is basically an old softie, was purring rustily under my absent-minded caresses when there was a knock at the open door and the rich voice asked, ‘Can I come in?’

‘Why not?’ I asked, feeling weak.

He drew the door closed behind him. Horatio, contrary to his usual practice, walked towards him, tail straight as a taper, uttering a polite greeting. Daniel of the Soup Run dropped to one knee, holding out a hand. Horatio was graciously pleased to allow his ears to be stroked and his whiskers smoothed.

‘What’s your name, ketschele?’ he asked.

I found my voice. ‘He’s Horatio. This is Jekyll and this is Heckle, and I’m Corinna.’

‘Delighted,’ he said to all of us. ‘I came to thank you,’ he added, taking the other chair. Jekyll planted herself firmly on his foot. She is a cat who makes her intentions plain.

‘It was nothing,’ I murmured. ‘It bloody nearly was nothing, too. If those ambulance people hadn’t turned up … she was as blue as this floor …’

I hadn’t realised how upset I was. Daniel dislodged Jekyll gently, took off his coat, wrapped it around me, and ferreted around in the stockroom. He came back bearing a bottle of brandy which I used for making fruit loaves, poured me half a glass and put it in my hands.

‘Nothing like that ever happened to you before, did it?’ he asked quietly. ‘Do you want water in your brandy? It’s all right. You’re shocked. You’ll get used to it.’

‘I hope not,’ I said, sipping. I don’t drink a lot of neat spirits and I choked a little. Daniel patted me on the back. He was so blatantly, physically attractive that even without the shock I doubted if my knees would have held me up. He had the same lithe, graceful movements as Horatio. No wonder they approved of each other. His jacket bore his scent, a clean male smell with a hint of sweet spice; cinnamon, maybe. He also had eyes one could happily drown in. And that wreck of a girl had been transformed into a good child under his influence. A magician. Meroe, the witch next door, would say
he had great mana. He seemed to be considering my answer, which didn’t deserve any great consideration.

‘True. One should never get used to human suffering. But it is inevitable if you do this kind of work.’

‘What kind of work?’

‘I’m on the Soup Run,’ he said simply, as though this explained everything.

‘What’s the Soup Run?’

His eyes widened into trout pools. I had amazed him.

‘But you live in the city. You must have seen us. The pink and green bus? We stop at four locations in the city. I’m on the late shift, ten pm until four am. I’ve just finished.’

‘Of course. You’re a social worker.’ I had certainly seen the bus, and remembered the shrieks of outrage from Keep Melbourne Clean when they used to stop outside a McDonald’s near the station. The pink and green bus attracted the homeless and the junkies like bees to Solomon Islands honey. I found it hard to imagine this cat-like spunk as a social worker. He saw what I was thinking and smiled.

‘Not really. I’m not trained in social work. The Soup Run has to deal with the wounded ones, the ones like Suze, as well as the hungry and the cold and the lost. Sometimes the clients can be physically threatening. We’ve got a nurse on board, you know, and they always think she’s got drugs. So the Soup Run always has one heavy, to deal with any physical trouble.’

‘And that’s you,’ I said lamely.

‘That’s me. Daniel Cohen, at your service. Being on the Soup Run is a mitzvah, a blessing,’ he said. ‘And grandfather always said that the reward for a mitzvah is another mitzvah.’

He grinned. I was warm enough now to give him back his coat and drag on my discarded tracksuit top. Brandy danced in my veins. My tired brain finally made the connection
between my profession and the Soup Run. What goes with soup? What always goes with soup?

‘Tell me, Daniel,’ I said, ‘does your Soup Run need some bread?’

I rang the vet, who assured me that no human disease was likely to be spread by a needle to as tough an old campaigner as Heckle. My vet is Irish. There is something extra reassuring about being reassured in that buttery God-love-you accent. I got dressed in respectable shop clothes, a pair of trousers, a shirt and a vest. Ten o’clock and I was still thinking about Daniel. This was more amusing than thinking about the shop and definitely more amusing than worrying about how I could possibly engineer another meeting with him. He would come for the bread, he said, or send someone, and I didn’t want him to send someone. I wanted him to come himself, and if that sounds like a Freudian slip, it isn’t.