Cake Flat - by Marion May Campbell
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Cake Flat. The finality of the spondee – stressed syllable plus stressed syllable. Flat-footed, no pretence. With her low salary and her boy to support she heads for Cake Flat, the dormitory suburb on the coastal plain where she, as they say, can get a foot in the door, a state-subsidised mortgage deposit. Then the interest rates shoot up. Real cake is spongey moist succour and chocolate-dark. Not Cake Flat. She prepares a cradle of rich potting mix for each seedling, but the roots sizzle on first encounter with the grey sand and, after days and days of forty degrees Celsius, stems and leaves vaporise without trace. Yet still the sand is jumping with fleas that give the young black Labrador a raging back rash. Flat is an abstraction about topography and altitude, she tells herself. I’ll contour this native patch so that it unfolds as you go down the winding path. Tough platypus gums, melaleuca, weeping peppermint, grevillea and banksia multiply. Inside, she strives to do comforting domestic things.
Like now she’s making chocolate cake.
It’s a frisbee-hard disc she takes smoking from the oven – flat as the disbelief she flings her boy the day he swings past the ATM with his mates. He wants to see if his faraway father has sent his birthday gift. The ATM tells him balance unavailable. So he tests the gods, asking for bigger and bigger withdrawals. He jackpots newly minted plastic notes from the Rural & Industries Bank. He takes his mates to Hungry Jacks and then to the Fremantle skate shop.
Now the Applecross Branch Manager is at her door, in his green-striped short-sleeved Terylene shirt. His tie glints silvery in the glare. I could put your son behind bars right now unless you replay the $400 on the spot, the pink mouth drawls from the oblong of shaven beige flesh. There is no nonsense in the precision of his side parting. It’s more than I earn in a week, she says, opening the fly-wire screen. His eyes are on her dirty fingernails. We’ll come to some arrangement then, for you to pay it off. You bring him into the bank this afternoon after school and I’ll show him what’s what.
She swings by the high school as the siren sounds. Minutes pump through her heart. Now speeds the blur, her boy the skater with the devil’s fire in his feet. Alongside him, another blur resolves into his handsome mate who always carries a knife. That boy’s mother, a Lindy Chamberlain double, has told her, you’re bound for bad luck in that blue car of yours. The boys have just missed the final rollcall.
The mother drives in silent fury to the Melville branch of the bank because the petrol gauge of the blue Passat shows they won’t make it to Applecross. There’s $19 in her account; you can only withdraw multiples of twenty. Back in the car, her boy is jabbing at the radio buttons – bursts of Public Enemy, of The Eurythmics. He settles on Nirvana. We’re goners, she says. We can’t even make it to Applecross. So what do you actually do, when you do bother to attend class, she asks him, as he fiddles with the bass. I just veg out, don’t I, he says, flatly.
Flat cake. Is that all I’ve ever served, she wonders, her voice gone, as the ignition key turns nothing over. ▼
Image: Eric McLean
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