My Candlelight Novel Read Free

cauliflower. The woman had a squint, and deep lines running from the edge of her nose to the corners of her mouth, giving her an air of severe disappointment. Both of them had a physiognomy that told of another place and century – Victorian England perhaps; or a place where everyone was wounded or scarred in some way.
    I served them and went back to the kitchen to feed Hetty her egg, feeling ineffably sad for people. How lonely, how flawed, how doomed everyone was. I thought how Hetty, in all her fresh perfection, would some day bear sorrow of some kind, while I, who am scarred inside where you cannot see, look ripe and ready for plucking.
    I sat a plate onto the tray of Hetty’s chair, and spooned egg into her little bird mouth (how willingly and trustingly she opened it for me!). A fresh surge of love for her overcame me. Her plump hands, the rings of fat round her neck, the way she flexed her toes as she ate!
    â€˜You’re nice. You’re very nice, did you know that?’ I told her, firmly. Hetty put her head on one side, and smiled.
    I thought about the poetry of kitchens. There seemed to be very little of it written, but there was so much to be captured, and a kitchen is the heart of the house, a place of pleasure and work. Not all of it is beautiful, but why should poetry only speak of beauty?
    There’s the begrimed stove-top, the splatters that tell of the pleasures of eating and the accompanying dreariness of cleaning up. I would like to see a poem on the not-so-secret squalor of under-the-sink, a poem about the moist shimmer of fat that accumulates under the griller after lamb chops have been cooked, and the astonished twinkle of a clean stainless steel sink. I love the smooth, cool body of the refrigerator against which I lay my cheek in hot weather, and the dance of the trembling, collapsible ironing board, the toasty smell of its warm cover. There are the worn rungs of chair legs, paint rubbed away by restless feet. If you’re after beauty, there is the amber stream of hot tea coming from the pot.
    And there, up in the corner of the coloured glass window, a little spider sits protecting her egg sac, the most hidden and domestic scene of all.
    â€˜Kitchen is a green word,’ I told Hetty that morning. Kitchens always remind me of green, perhaps because these walls are green. And I love the word kitchen . Sometimes I think it’s my favourite word. ‘Kitchen, kitchen, kitchen.’
    Hetty blew egg at me and smiled. See how already my baby loved words, even though she couldn’t speak them yet?
    After we’d eaten our breakfast, I took her to Lil’s room. Pulling back the curtains from the window, I pictured myself as some nineteenth-century housemaid rousing her mistress. Light flooded in, and I could see that Lil was already awake. She had been lying there in the darkened room, not moving. She shielded her eyes and exclaimed, ‘The light! Oh, the light!’
    And for kindness I frisked the curtains back over the window a little.
    Kate had gone away to university at the beginning of the year, and since then Lil had taken to lying-in in the mornings and leaving the breakfasts to me. At various moments of the day she was prone to wondering what ‘my Katie’ was doing now, and I had taken to doing the same. ( It’s nine a.m. Wednesday. Kate, who has stayed up almost all night writing an essay on the Romantic poets, stumbles out to the shared kitchen to find that one of the people who also have a room in the house has breakfasted on squid. Again. She throws open the window to let in fresh – or other-than-squid – air and stands for a moment contemplating a back lane filled with garbage and stray cats. )
    Perching on the sill with Hetty on my knee, I peered between the curtains to the laneway that ran beside our house. ( We are two sisters, seven hundred kilometres apart, both currently contemplating insalubrious laneways .) It had started to