and apple pancakes; organic muesli with vanilla seeded yoghurt and cinnamon poached pears. Out the front in pride of place by the coffee machine lies a still-warm tray of Hilary’s famously huge buttermilk and berry muffins – all made to cherish and nourish the world.
Hilary works like a dog, Siena thinks, but her generosity attracts, and the financial returns do show positive. Not great, but good enough. As long as they can keep the greedy landlords of Coogee at bay. Every rent increase an attack on the social contract. Bookshops gone, bakeries gone. The local hardware shop just a memory. Still, we can always eat our cake. And muffins.
Yet even in sociable Coogee, not every café succeeds. There are occasional mystery patches, the half empty cafes in between the crowded houses. As if the populace has all agreed, made a pact, let’s not go in there. But why? Siena and Hilary are intensely interested in the failures. If not the rent, what makes a café go under? What makes the great intuitive, or is it unconscious, public turn away from one door and enter another? The person who cracks the mathematical code, the algorithm of retail, will surely become a millionaire. Maybe already has.
The Pirate brushed past her with a deep bowl of quinoa and black rice porridge. He likes to serve customers himself every now and then, to relate just a little. Hilary lets her cook do what he likes. She is so grateful to him for his loyalty. He held the fort when Vianney suddenly left the cafe business. Five years ago now, and they all survived. Thank god. No thanks to Vianney of course.
The Pirate’s real name is Nigel but they are not to speak it. Early in his life he faced down the challenge of a huge front tooth gap by sporting a large silver earring in one ear and a bandanna on his head or around his neck. It makes him handsome, dashing in a Daniel Day-Lewis kind of way. A plain man who can act handsome.
At this early stage of the day, customers are sitting in what Siena considers to be her own table at the back of the Planet, where she often marks undergraduate history papers. If she isn’t working on her own unending doctoral thesis. But that is usually in the afternoon. In return for the table, Siena will help Hilary out with drying the cutlery or wiping tables down. She enjoys the work. She always likes hanging out with Hils. Hilary is the sister Siena never had, the one she longed for in that bleak childhood of troubled boys and men. Hilary didn’t have a sister either, so the feeling is mutual. Or should be, but isn’t quite. Siena knows Hilary wasn’t looking for a sister. She was looking for Vianney.
Except Hilary isn’t here this morning. And the Pirate is looking stressed. Like he’s not doing this front of house service for fun after all.
‘What’s up?’ Siena asks the Pirate as he reappears with more food.
‘Nothing’s up,’ he says, pretending. ‘Hilary just asked me to mind the front of shop while she went home to check up on Vianney.’
‘What’s wrong with Vianney?’
The Pirate gives her a sharp appraising look. Before she can say I am his sister, he gives in. ‘Not so well,’ he mumbles as he moves on with the pancakes. ‘The black dog.’
‘Oh shit.’ Siena sighs. Not again.
***
Vianney looks at the patterns on the white embossed wallpaper in their bedroom. He’s still not sure if they're abstract designs or meant to be flowers. He follows the lines of one of the bulging bulb-like flourishes with silent intensity. His eye roves determinedly around every blemish and stain and bulge of the once bright wallpaper. Hilary’s choice. Like her hopes, once so shiny.
She’d wanted children for a while. They hadn’t always used contraception but she’d never got pregnant. He thought she’d agreed with him, to not go on and have all the tests, not to wear themselves out with the nonsense of IVF. Not to be like Lolly and Claudia, who had been like ravenous hunters seeking their second child. Just to accept the fates. Parenthood was hard anyway. Their own parents had failed at it, they told each other.
Sometimes it feels like he has spent his whole life gazing at wallpaper from a sickbed, starting with the blue carnations of the farmhouse bedroom. He had not known then that blue carnations were a fantasy. In his childhood illnesses those carnations had brought him comfort, along with the erratic attentions of Bran, his father’s dog, who would occasionally burst into his bedroom to check up on him. Bran and he would rub noses together and then the great brown creature would turn and spin out, unkempt toenails skittering on the old flagged kitchen floor, his mother calling out threats. She did not like the dog, any animal, to be inside.
Their father was far less strict. On the rare occasions Kate was out - up at a St Vincent de Paul meeting, or a Catholic women’s thing – Sean always let the big dog in, encouraged him, even let him onto the couch. All the boys, giggling, would be sworn to secrecy.
Later, the blue carnations of the farmhouse bedroom were replaced by the dark orange paisley wallpaper of the cramped Lithgow house. And no Bran. That zany wallpaper had made Vianney feel faintly nauseous, yet in a pleasurable way. His adolescent gaze would drill into it, seeking to penetrate, unlock its arcane meanings. There had to be some there.
Now, in Coogee, in another cramped over-expensive flat, he is back gazing at wallpaper, not so much exploring as hanging on to it for dear life. Inside him the dark river threatens to flood. It has been building depth and strength over the last few weeks. His attempts to struggle against it, to swim to some non-existent shore, to drown it with work and alcohol have only weakened him, not it. They do say nowadays, let go, let it come through. Yet to let the dark waters flow over his head – to cut off all air and light – that is a horror Vianney cannot allow. He gasps for breath, trying to bring oxygen and feeling back into his fingers and toes. If he can hang onto the wallpaper, he may not be carried away by the flood.
His father had suffered from bouts of depression too. There was no doubt a genetic factor. Funny thing is, that’s what they said Sean had suffered from, but in all of Vianney’s memories, except the very last, his father was boisterous, energetic, crackling with life. Full of jokes and songs, plans and stories. He was a treasure house of stories.
He was the one who told them about Michael Davitt their ancestor, one of the bravest men Ireland had ever produced. And that was saying something, Sean said proudly, because courage to the point of recklessness is a thoroughly Irish trait.
Michael Davitt had faced down the greatest Empire in the world, Sean had told them. As father of the Irish Land League, he had organised collective resistance to the landlords and their harsh rents, and saved a new generation from a second terrible Famine. What’s more, he had organised the Irish people all around the world into a unity of resistance and courage, and had stopped the kow-towing, the bowing and curtseying to their so-called betters. He had told them to be proud, to be rid of their shame as a defeated beggared people. He had told them to wake up to their true manly selves.
When Michael Davitt had died, Sean said, the train bearing his body home to Mayo had gone slowly through the fields and country towns of Ireland. And the people had come to the train stations to stand with their caps off as the train went through. And the ones who couldn’t get to the station had stopped working in the fields and had bowed their heads and prayed. One of their greatest protectors and defenders had gone from them. There was another decade to wait before the Easter Rising.
One of the paintings on the walls of the Ryan’s farmhouse in those days had been Millet’s The Angelus, a popular sentimental Catholic image, where a man and a woman stand amidst the fields, their heads bowed in prayer at dusk, a basket of potatoes at their feet and a church steeple in the luminous distance. A dream picture of French rural devotion. But for years the young Vianney
