The Best Australian Yarn winner: Vanilla... then Cinnamon by Anson Cameron

She told me her name was Ha, which I took to be Vietnamese. She was spiced that way: lemongrass and ginger and mint and broth and lotus. Her scent created a beautiful Vietnamese woman in my mind. But, then, the yearning mind doesn’t invent frumps. It was, perhaps, my fourth year on my back in coma. Hard to tell. There are no seasons in a climate-controlled hospital room. Christmases in coma are heard off-stage, distant bells, faint carols, laughter at the Nurses Station — soon forgotten. “Hello, Thom. My name is Ha. I’m here to take a few readings and give you a bath and a massage. And to talk. I’m a talker. And I love a listener, so we’ll get on.” That was her little joke. I was a virtual cadaver, unable to speak. The medical people didn’t know if I retained any skerrick of cognisance or was just gone, baby, gone. As she sponged my body she told me about herself. Her grandparents were boat people from Saigon in the seventies. Her parents were both estate agents with their own agency in Peppermint Grove. She was doing a couple of years nursing here in Sapphire Creek, saving money before completing her medical degree. Romantically involved with a funds manager named Neil who couldn’t go to her cousin Florey’s wedding with her on Saturday because he had a Match Play comp at Royal Perth that was pretty crucial to his yearly points total. It’s always this way with Neil, I soon learn; Match Play, a mate’s barbecue, some gig at the casino exclusively for bankers . . . She confided in me in a way she couldn’t with any living soul, prone to tittle tattle and conceit as they are. I was a spirit to whom she could offload grievance and doubt. A saint to whom she could come to confess and contemplate her troubles. She would roll me on my side to prevent bedsores and begin to massage my atrophying limbs. “There’s this chick, Lilly, that Neil drinks with on Friday after work. He says it’s work drinks, anyway . . .” I wanted to tell her, “He’s using you, Ha. You’re Neil’s posting to the Far East, an adventure to boast about to his mates. He’ll dump you and go back to Dalkeith when some St Cath’s girl calls him to heel.” I came to hate Neil. *** She took me into her world, narrated her life for me as if I were a lifelong confidant. Perhaps because she thought I didn’t comprehend anything she said. Like talking to an imaginary friend, or a dog. Me lying there with machines running numbers, trying to figure out whether I was alive, what I was. Her ministrations were the gentlest of any I felt in my long incarceration inside coma. More than rote nursing. Not just another stop on the daily round of enfeebled and bedridden patients. The bathing and massage was gradual, designed to please a cognisant being. It was tenderness. Wasn’t it? I’ve long been prone to misinterpret life’s little graces as miracles. *** She would come for five days, and then be gone for ten, while I waited for her return. My heart leapt at the sound of her voice. “Morning, Thom. It’s Ha.” I would sob, if I could, at hearing her voice. She sometimes leant over me scented with jasmine tea and chanted a sotto voce prayer from a religion unknown to me. I like to think she’d become fond of me, and I took the prayer as proof. But is it possible she was fond of me? Can you become fond of a totally non-responsive dependant? At best I could be just a suspicion of consciousness to her. Though, perhaps after a few months she had imagined a fully reasoning personality for me . . . in there somewhere behind my sallow visage. Perhaps she had imagined me a beautiful soul. A prince locked in a tower. But of course this was foolishness. It would have been an act of faith, a novelistic feat of imagination, to believe I had a questing mind behind my eyelids and my irreversible atrophy. I felt her closeness, her skin tantalisingly adjacent to mine. Just beyond touch but near enough for yearning to flare into a low ache of desire. Every move was hers to make. I couldn’t reach her. I had to let her come to me. I longed to touch her while waiting and wondering where she might touch me. I lay there, a Romeo of marble. Was she Juliet . . . or a nurse on her rounds? *** I didn’t eat in those years. Tubes ran into me with prescribed nutrition. How did the horror of my sensory deprivation occur to her? How had she got the idea that I would be missing flavour? It was a rare perception. It takes the soul of an artist to look at a world and see what is lacking. “Let’s say Thom really is alive in there . . . Wouldn’t he be missing taste? Chocolate? Anchovy? Pear? Honey?” No one else had considered my sensory poverty. Ha brought flavour to my flavourless life. She was transgressing, I am sure. The doctors couldn’t have known she was smuggling gifts into my room. Any of her carefully chosen comestibles could’ve infected me. My mouth was supposed to be washed daily and kept clean of all foreign matter. But the mouth is so often where pleasure enters the body. That first day she widened my lips with her thumb and forefinger and wet the desert of my tongue with a drop of water, before placing a chip of vanilla brittle on it. The first thing I had tasted in three, perhaps four, years. Sweetness spread across my palate like a carpet of wildflowers blooming after rain. Wondrous jaw-aching taste. Vanilla, sugar . . . reincarnating receptors that had lain dead for years in a morgue that flickered halitosis and Listerine. From there the physical stimulation morphed into a psychic joy. Blue sky after long night. The world opened up, colour rolled across the plains of my consciousness and music played. It made me unaccountably happy. Ha brought me bliss many times after that with a changing menu of smuggled delicacies. It was art. A drop of lemon on the waiting canvas of my tongue. Another day a tiny hillock of cinnamon. A dab of fish sauce. A smear of ginger. I am in groves. I am in Ceylon. I am at sea. I am listening to jazz. A pinch of cocoa on my tongue might as well be a tab of acid the way it skews the universe for a few unutterably gorgeous moments. *** Ha. And a snippet of merriment. The first stroke of the happy engine of laughter. Ha ha ha . . . etcetera. She stopped coming after a year. Stopped without warning. She hadn’t told me she was going away, that our fates were diverging. Perhaps when she knew she was moving on she gave up the charade that I was a living, thinking man who needed things explained. Perhaps my cognisance was a conceit she felt silly about when she finally knew she was going. Put away the imaginary friend, Ha. It’s time to grow up, move on. I mourned her, this mouthwateringly scented woman incanting Eastern prayer and dabbing my tongue with sorbet. I missed her a great deal. That year with Ha. That year of taste reborn; of umami, bitter, salty, sour and sweet. A golden age between the years before and after, when my taste buds endured two vast blanks like the two eternities that parenthesise life itself. Was she promoted? Fired? Did she find a new, more rewarding, job? Did she graduate and become a doctor? Wouldn’t she have shared that good news with me? Did she have a baby and become a hands-on mum who remembers me when she dabs banana rice on her infant’s tongue and is rewarded with a smile? I would have given anything to reward her with a smile. She moved on. Everyone moves on when you’re incarcerated in a prison of pajamas and sheets. I lay a long time after Ha without tasting anything. And I missed her scent, her presence, immeasurably more than the covert smorgasbord she once brought to me. *** Eavesdropping became a main entertainment in coma. Mostly it was the nurses as they talked in the corridor outside my room. Like wooden ships sailing east and west, passing on the high sea and exchanging their worlds briefly. Nurses at speed with their shorthand tittle-tattle. Nurses’ have you heards? A hungover Friday nurse declaring — “I just couldn’t be arsed today — patients will die”. A nurse frustrated with me, asking another, “What’s the point of this guy? Like, s..., is this a responsible use of resources?” The answer being, “I think he’s an experiment.” Then the eavesdropped snippet that ran a voltage of sour electricity through my marrow and woke me. Two nurses, Sophie and Jenni: “You hear Ha’s getting married? Here in Sapphire Creek, at All Saints. To the invisible boyfriend. The banker.” “Yeah, I know. I’m going to the wedding. Are you going?” “No. She left pretty soon after I got here.” “Oh, she’s super nice. She’s a doctor now.” Hearing of her engagement galvanised whatever eccentric morsel of manliness lived in me. It acted as my alarm clock — it alarmed me. *** I woke in a curtained enclave filled with doctors adorned with silver apparatus. A frisson of expectation was making them shift their weight foot-to-foot, and they were drawing measured breaths, like a pilgrimage of astronomers come to see the transit of Venus, a ruck of dockhands come to ogle a famous stripper. In the preceding days I’d made sounds approximating words and I’d twitched and flexed sufficiently to indicate I was rising, rising up through myriad layers of unconsciousness toward them. They have tracked me like a whale surfacing from great depths toward the ice-sheet, and they have gathered to witness my historic breakthrough. *** There was a lackluster fanfare in our little town upon my resurrection. The redheaded Irish surfer/chef who had embraced Sapphire Creek with a refugee’s glee and been found on the Point Black rocks with his head gashed and his lungs marinated in brine and kept alive in deathly state ever since — was back from that mysterious realm. Hallelujah. They extolled my bravery in headlines: “Miracle Chef Back In The Kitchen.” I wasn’t back in any kitchen. My restaurant had become a Mexican takeaway run by Greeks. The town held a Welcome Home party for me at the football club where a Pogues tribute band from Kojonup played. A Chinese Whisper of the Pogues in truth, careful in their musicality and in their lyrics — and sober. I wasn’t in great spirits anyway, what with both my parents having died while I was under and people telling me just now. I was grieving. The good news is you’re alive . . . the bad news is everyone you love no longer is. My world’s a looted gallery. There once were masterpieces here, gone now, and me come back to witness the want of them. *** A little wooden beauty it is, All Saints. White ribbons bordering her path today and mighty bluegums sparking sun above and the sea below a serene green. Such a day as lends itself to love. You’d almost snatch a thin stranger off the street and say, “Let’s . . .” I work my walking sticks and wheeze and swelter until I finally plonk myself mid-church with a grunt. I am in among Ha’s people, the Vietnamese to the dexter side of the chancel. I have taken refuge here because I will be making accusations against the Caucasians, their boy, and I don’t want to be piled on and denounced and perhaps beaten. The vicar resembles a teepee filled with lard and when she asks us if anyone present knows of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony to speak now or forever hold our peace I ratatatat my walking stick on the pew in front of me causing a tiny woman with chopsticks skewering her black beehive to clutch her throat and blurt F...Christ. As I rise from my pew the vicar scowls. The congregation is watching agog, secretly thrilled I’m sure, because, I mean, you never hear anyone speak now. They always forever hold their peace. For a thousand years the honest heart of every wedding congregation has had the urge to shout, “Barry’s a creep”, or “Sheila’s a cheat”, at this “speak now” provocation offered up by the vicar. But each is more cowardly than honest and forever holds its peace. But I’ve been silent many years and there’s no holding my tongue now. Everyone wonders who this sallow cuckoo is among all the sun-coppered family on the bride’s side of the church. This emaciated Celt stepped from among the Vietnamese and seemingly about to speak now and not forever hold his peace as one must. I step sideways into the aisle as the happy couple turn to me. Ha stares at me, her face locked into the kind of artificial happiness that turns into a headache and is, anyway, a dead giveaway for screaming doubt. Her faux joy melts away and reforms as wonder when she realises who I am. I must look like a desiccated saint risen from a crypt to her. An old confidant back from the grave. The keeper of all her private fears has sculled a jeroboam of truth serum and is ready to rock. F... me, she must be thinking, I have told all my secrets to a medically certified mute and the bastard has found voice. Neil is a hulking nonentity in a morning suit. “Puddinface” my gran would have called him, as she did all those girthy young men who’d never hacked at Germans with bayonets. But what, really, can you say as the incense smolders and the jaws of the congregation hang aghast? How can you talk a woman down from committing the folly she is fated to commit while the family breathes and fidgets collaboration? I hadn’t planned my denunciation of Neil. I was going to ad lib, fly by the seat of my pants and, in precis, call him a f...er without peer. Any spurned beau could shout the same thing at any wedding. But I see by her face that my being here is already the retelling of Neil’s crimes. My being back from the dead has loosed the truths she told me into the fragrant All Saints air. I need to tell her the other thing. I need to tell her how I lay with her unendingly, and what chords she played for me in that long night. My voice is dry and would be faint if it weren’t filling a hush deeper than silence. “Vanilla,” I say into the small church. “Then cinnamon.”

The Best Australian Yarn winner: Vanilla... then Cinnamon by Anson Cameron

The No. 1 source of news for every West Australian

Subscribe

Subscribe