Hellsite – by Jane O’Sullivan
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
‘That’s how you know twitter’s over,’ she says, pointing the knife at me. A tiny cube of carrot falls off the blade and bounces across the tiles. ‘It’s that nostalgia crap.’
‘I sent you the cat thing because it was funny,’ I say, as she scrapes the carrot off the chopping board and into another bowl. There are already little bowls of cubed celery and arborio, and the stock is bubbling on the stove. Eva is making risotto because she is getting me back onto carbs. She is also breaking up with me. We’ve been here before. I sit on the small, uncomfortable stool in her small, uncomfortable kitchenette and steep myself in the white wine she opened for the recipe. ‘You kick Miette?’ I say in a bad French accent. ‘You kick her body like the football?’
Eva rolls her eyes. She’s heard me quote the cat meme before. She’s still in her leggings from pilates and the skin tone makes her look half naked. Caramel, I think they call that colour now, but if I tried it they’d have to call it Scallop or Salmon Run or something. Smaragdine. No, wait, that’s emerald. I can already feel the wine in my cheeks.
‘You know what I’m saying, Louise.’ She always goes stern when she cooks. ‘All those best moments of twitter posts. No one talks like that if they’re still having a good time. No one.’
I pout. ‘Jail for mother. Jail for mother for One Thousand Years!’
‘And all those movie posts from the eighties! That sinking horse in the swamp? Jesus.’
Not fair. She knows how much I cried in that one, how I made my mother carry me out of the cinema so I could howl in the foyer. The greatest death scene in cinema history, a whole generation scarred! But she wasn’t even born when it came out.
Eva fusses with the burner and when it doesn’t ignite, she gets the lighter and rasps it hard. The flames go up with a whoosh. Orange and blue. What colour is that, I wonder? Smauglust, maybe. Glimmertod. She sets down the frypan and I think the conversation must be over because she just stands there with her hand over the pan, feeling it warming up. ‘It’s like your brother,’ she says, and now, now, she looks me in the eye. ‘Always talking about seeing Pearl Jam at Flinders Park.’
‘But he’s a critic,’ I say, helpless, because he is. Or was, back when they still paid critics. When there was still music press. But even with the whole death-of-media thing, she knows how jealous I am.
‘Or that line-up at Good Vibes, how there’s never been anything like it.’
‘What’s wrong with having’ – and I say this like he does – ‘experience? A body of knowledge?’
‘Your brother hasn’t enjoyed a single thing since two thousand and two.’
I can’t really argue with that. She knows my family calls him Eeyore. I told her that on our first almost-date, when we went to the Kylie Kwong food truck at the festival and sat there with our paper plates on our knees, confessing all sorts of shit to each other, how our mothers gave us food trauma, how weird it was to be dating again, how we never wanted kids, how free that felt. ‘Remember when we hunted down that Kylie Kwong food truck,’ I say, because I need her to understand that I’m not my brother and I can, well, enjoy new things. Some things. ‘Remember those duck pancakes.’
Finally, the oil goes in. Then the little bowls, one by one. Eva is slow and precise as she stirs, stopping only to take another sip of the expensive yellow wine. Tangerurine, I think, stretching out the syllables like a sick little prayer. But maybe it’ll be okay after all because Eva is finally beginning to relax. She leans against the counter and tips in the rice. The kitchenette gets that nutty smell and I think, I will have to eat this. All of it. But then she shakes her head, just the once.
‘I’m not like you,’ she says. ‘I can’t do it, Lou. Always living in the past.’
I’m hurt then but I can’t let her see it. That’s not how we do things. ‘I’m deleting twitter,’ I say, picking up my phone. ‘I’m doing it right now.’
She turns on me then, jabbing the bamboo spatula in my face. ‘Artax!’ she hisses. And I’m so surprised that she remembers – that she was even listening when I told her about the stupid horse in the mud and my mother buying me a choc-top that one time, the only time – that my thumb hovers over the uninstall icon. Waiting. Even though I know which way this is going now; how she just needs to yank the reins one last time before she lets me sink.
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Image: Darya Sannikova - Pexels
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