Free Dark Roots by Cate Kennedy Page A

later, storming through the kitchen swing doors like Wyatt Earp into a saloon, only in a short white towelling dressing gown decorated with his initials.
    â€˜Something wrong?’ I said.
    â€˜Bloody oath there’s something wrong. I got a nasty surprise tonight, Monica, a very nasty surprise.’ I looked enquiring. The parking ticket in the glove box? But no.
    â€˜When a bloke can’t trust his own wife, Monica, there’s gotta be something seriously wrong.’
    â€˜I’m sorry?’
    â€˜First Macca tells me while we’re having a game of pool, then blow me if Chooka doesn’t have the same thing to say while we’re putting a few dollars through the poker machines.’
    I made my face go blank. ‘Tell you what?’
    His eyes flashed. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know. About you. You propositioning them.’
    â€˜What?’ I made the mistake of letting an incredulous laugh escape me, and sat up on the couch. ‘Listen to me, Barry. Your mates were the ones that came on to me, and did it with all their Neanderthal allure, let me tell you. And now that I’ve been nice about it and haven’t embarrassed them …’
    â€˜Are you trying to tell me my best mates propositioned you?’ There was a high note of disbelief in his tone.
    â€˜Barry, use your brain for a moment and tell me which seems more likely to you. I mean really. Think about it.’
    I could hear his teeth grinding. And his brain. ‘When, then?’
    â€˜Friday and last Saturday.’
    â€˜Then why didn’t you tell me?’
    I laughed again, bitterly, slumping back helplessly on the scatter cushions. ‘Because it just seemed so ridiculous. And I thought you’d be embarrassed, too.’ I threw a cushion at him. ‘And because I made the mistake of thinking they’d maybe want to forget all about it, if you want the truth. But I should have known better, I guess.’
    Good old Barry. There he stood, the man who wore a ring that matched mine, who slept next to me every night, who was at this very minute weighing up my word against that of his two drinking buddies. It was me against the testosterone club. But Barry, I told myself, Barry was the man I was married to. Surely Barry couldn’t be that dumb.
    â€˜Don’t bullshit me , Monica,’ said my husband.
    Snap and colour. Barry was as insistent about it as he was about them being no bigger than that. Pickled cucumbers made at home can occasionally go greyish and flabby. You will have noticed how well commercial pickles take lurid food dyes — Barry wasn’t having any of that. After three days of stony, wounded silence, he brought home a box of chocolates and a much larger one of very small vegetables, led me to the chapter in The Home Preserver about old-fashioned ways to keep snap and colour, and left me to it. I could sense this was my test, my chance for redemption. I bowed my head and read it humbly.
    Basically, you add a preserving agent in powder form. My grandmother used to keep some of the powders listed to retain snap and colour in her laundry cupboard. I recognised one she used to put on her hydrangeas, one she applied in a pinch to mouth ulcers, even one, I think, that she used to make her own mothballs. This alarmed me. Surely you shouldn’t eat tincture of iodine sulphate?
    I went to the library, in the interests of the perfect cucumber pickle, and asked for a reference book on chemical compounds — can you believe how conscientious I was? — and waited while they dithered around getting one with fragile, rice-papery pages from out of the archives. I dragged this book over to a window seat and looked up the effects of the chemical agent, ‘available at any reputable chemist or apothecary’, which the cookbook had recommended for pickling.
    I sat back, surprised. Then read it again. I looked at the date of the reference book —1879.
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