Free Grace's Table by Sally Piper Page A

live off china flowers were a complaint? They were jokes, Mum. He wasn’t really asking for more but you always gave it to him. And given the state of his heart – his diabetes – it would’ve done him good to see a bit more of his plate, not less. It was a dangerous habit you got him into.’
    â€˜Dangerous habit I got him into? Don’t blame me. Your father was responsible for his own eating habits.’
    Between them, in the sudden quiet, peas popped into the bowl.
    Des had always been a dangerous eater. The closeness to animal fat all his working life – fat that kept his hands soft, clothes stained and hair slick – never deterred him from liking his food cooked in it. If asked about his favourite meal, Grace knew, he’d say it was a breakfast fry-up: The working man’s heart-starter , he called it. But Grace thought his eating habits marked him as a weak man. It was a weakness that would eventually strangle him by the coronary arteries at the age of fifty-four.
    â€˜You’re a damn fine cook when you put your mind to it,’ Des said to Grace, long after her triumph at the butcher’s had served its purpose.
    Des appraised his plate. Two thick sausages, their ends turned up like old boots; two long rashers of streaky bacon, the fat brown and crispy as he liked it; two fried eggs, sitting like perfect breasts, bathed in oil and out sunning themselves; and potato cubes fried with onion.
    â€˜Tomato?’ Grace asked.
    â€˜No. That’d spoil it.’ Des pinched a generous amount of salt between thumb and forefinger from a small bowl beside his plate, a bowl Grace made sure was always full, and sprinkled it over his food. ‘You not eating?’
    Grace shook her head. ‘I’ll have something later.’
    â€˜You should be having something like this.’ Des pointed to his plate with his knife. ‘You’re looking scrawny.’
    Grace sat down and sipped her tea. She watched as he trawled a square of toast through a ruptured yolk and lifted it to his greasy-cornered mouth. The sound of cutting and scraping across a china plate filled the otherwise quiet kitchen. In the distance Grace could hear the rhythmic squeak of a child’s swing toing and froing and the busy attempts of a fly trying to find its way out of the flyscreen at the kitchen window.
    â€˜Get us another bit of toast, would you.’
    Grace got up, cut a slice from the loaf and put it in the toaster. She waited at the bench while it cooked.
    â€˜Another hot one,’ Des said, looking out the kitchen window.
    Though it was still early, Grace could feel the weight of that heat pressing against the stillness in the room. ‘I miss the cold,’ she said, almost to herself, as she watched the heat shimmer above the toaster.
    â€˜Miss the what?’
    â€˜The cold. From Harvest. When I was a girl.’
    â€˜You can have your cold. Give me the heat any day.’
    â€˜But it’s all the same. If we’re lucky it gets cool at best. But usually it’s just one day as warm or warmer than another. When you feel really cold – hard frosts, a bit of snow on the hills, that sort of thing – you have to make adjustments and it’s those adjustments that let you know you’re still alive. Otherwise how can you tell the difference from one day to the next?’
    â€˜By the six o’clock news. That toast ready yet?’
    Grace hooked a nail under the metal edge of the drop-sided toaster. The Bakelite handle had broken off long ago. She passed the hot toast from hand to hand and onto a small plate she’d taken from the cupboard. She embedded a butter knife into the dripping tin beside the stove and dragged it across the bench toward her. From inside she dug out a generous measure of the fat and spread it right to the edges of the toast.
    She handed Des the plate. He slid the toast onto his and set about cutting it into symmetrical squares,