Free The Point by Marion Halligan

because of the ephemeral nature of the product, the brevity of the moment before it is mussed about on a plate and consumed, or maybe not consumed, just mussed and destroyed and thrown away. Or thrown away hardly touched, in all its heartbreaking perfection. And the fact that you have charged a great deal of money for the dish won’t help: it is its closeness to perfection that is your only reward. You’ll need courage and skill and stamina and strength, and your return will be first and finally the satisfaction of the job properly done. You’ll be paid, but not a lot at the beginning. You may earn a reputation and a following and make a great career, but all of this will only come from the job well done. A job that is slog and craft and technique and skill and occasionally art, and maybe once in a lifetime genius.
    But these admonitions were not for Joe. His job was washing dishes. The kind of job that kids applied for so they could stay on the dole; they behaved outrageously so they would get fired and go back on the dole again. Part of a bureaucratic rigmarole, which they played like a game.
    On the other hand, even the apprentices chosen for their litheness and leanness, their speed of hand and foot and eye, their capacity for close attention, even they didn’t always make it. It’s a matter of will, she said to them, whether you have the will to make yourself a good cook. The desire and the will, and both in your gut like a worm gnawing, craving the best. Zola writes about a tapeworm. It lives in a woman’s stomach and twists it up unless she feeds it the finest delicacies. It likes a nice bit of chicken. A terrible expense for a poor woman, her whole life is feeding the worm. Make what you will of that.
    By the way they gaped at her they made little of it. They were commis chefs, not students of literature.
    I recommend Zola to you, she said. L’Assommoir , that particular novel is, with the tapeworm in it. The name means something like the grog shop, serving the kind of crude spirits that knock you out. It’s a novel about food, in a very strange way. It uses eating as an image of evil, and a sexual one at that. You can’t read too widely when you want to be a good cook.
    Joe waited behind, after the others had gone. He looked at her a little slyly. You can cure the tapeworm, you know. You swallow a grilled mouse and that poisons it.
    Flora looked at him, astonished. You’ve read L’Assommoir ?
    Joe grinned. I can’t pronounce it. My grandfather had books. Not a lot, he’d read them one by one and when he’d finished he’d start with the first one again. A good book just gets better, my mum said he used to say. We took them with us, it was something to do, out there, reading. I dunno that I always understood them, but still.
    Are you sure you want to be a dishwasher, Flora asks.
    It’s a start, says Joe. I don’t have to stay a dishwasher forever.

7

    The man who sometimes sleeps on the ferry wharf, now sitting on a seat by one of the lake’s sandy beaches where boats can be pulled up, he has walked right round to the other side, sees two pelicans come in to land. Directly facing him. Their round bodies hanging below their outspread wings make him think of Catalina flying-boats. They are followed by two black swans. Together they come in, together settle on the water, together sail away. He watches them until they are small black smudges on the pewter-coloured lake, sailing up and down it seems for the simple pleasure of it. Because that is what swans do. In their companionship they are an image of fidelity, of serene couplehood. There’s a poem, he remembers, about swans and marriage. He can only think of one line. Sweet day, so calm, so fair, so bright … it’s as though the Antipodes has turned all those things upside down. It’s a sunless day, the sky is full of purplish clouds with only occasionally a hint of sun like polished metal between them. The trees are full of winter, the rows of