The Borrowed Kitchen Read online

  Finally the gas came on and the removalists, a team of several muscled, but slightly vacant-eyed lads, had all of Mitch and Sally’s possessions stowed away. Her first meal was something I’d never have cooked in a million years. If I had had hairs, and a neck upon which to grow them, they’d have been standing on end when I saw her bring in a bag of black mussels, fresh from the fishmonger.

  Sally seemed a little unsatisfied that she hadn’t the time to make it from scratch when she set a pot of salted water to boil for spaghetti. This’ll do, she thought in a resigned tone. Shrugging it off, she turned up the volume on her iPod and began work on the black molluscs.

  With Andre Bocelli singing away so beautifully in the background, she scrubbed the mussels under cool water and removed their beards, tossing aside a few that didn’t close as she cleaned them. Next, in a heavy blue-enamelled pot, she began frying up four (Can you believe it? Four!) cloves of garlic with two tomatoes and a chopped up red chilli, seeds and all in extra-virgin olive oil. When the tomatoes were just beginning to soften, she tossed in the mussels and a goblet of white wine, gave it a quick stir with a big wooden spoon and closed the lid.

  When the pasta was ready and drained, she then drained most of the juice from the mussels then mixed them, the remaining juice and the spaghetti together, tossing in an enormous bunch of fresh basil at the last minute. She then spread out the pasta onto a huge ceramic platter she’d warmed in my oven and called for Mitch.

  His helping contribution was to grate the Parmesan cheese and open another bottle of wine. I’m no expert, but I’d always thought one didn’t serve Parmesan cheese with shellfish, but then what do I know? I’m dead.

  Sally carried the platter out into the adjacent dining room while Mitch trailed along behind her, pausing only long enough to turn up the volume on the iPod dock. I may not have been able to taste the meal, but I sure enjoyed the music. The playlist was just a collection of Bocelli’s albums, and I couldn’t really tell one from the other. Not that it mattered. That blind tenor’s beautiful voice took me out into the stars. He could have been singing text from Mein Kampf for all I knew and I wouldn’t have cared a whit. When he sang Con Te Partiro, the moon could have crashed into the earth and I’d not have noticed a thing.

  When the song ended, I did notice the lights had gone out. For one terrible moment, I thought my house was on fire, which would mean soon I would be on fire. Nope. It was candlelight. Phew. They both made short quick trips into me at various stages that night. At first I’d expected them to just get plastered, but again, they surprised me. Both thought they had eaten less than they could have, being conscious of their waistlines and the sedative effects of too much booze and pasta. Each had erotic plans for the other later in the evening. I guess they carried out those plans because the dishes didn’t make it into me until two hours after dawn the next day.

  Chapter Two.

  A couple of weeks later, Mitch and Sally were out in the front yard when I saw young Kelly ride up to the gate on her bike. The girl stopped and stared out at them, nervousness written all over her face. After a few moments, she sucked up her courage, climbed the gate and walked up the driveway. I couldn’t touch their minds, since they weren’t in me, but I could hear the conversation.

  ‘I’ve been mowing the grass,’ she told them earnestly. She waved at the shed. ‘The people that built this place taught me to use their ride-on. Been doing it every month since they died.’

  ‘Did you know them, Kelly?’ Sally asked, her face a picture of sincerity.

  Kelly nodded. ‘When they were building it, they paid me to help. Then—’ Her voice trailed off and she glanced towards me, sadness in her pretty blue eyes.

  Mitch nodded and changed the subject slightly. ‘So you mowed the lawn, yeah? Did someone pay you for that? I hope so.’

  Kelly nodded. ‘Yeah. Jim, the real-estate guy paid me. Thirty bucks plus extra if I bought petrol for the ride-on.’

  Sally looked up at Mitch. I didn’t need her to be in me to know what she was thinking then. Mitch nodded back to her then turned back to Kelly.

  ‘How long does it take to mow the yard?’

  I could have told him that. It took Kelly on average, three hours and twelve minutes to mow my yard and tidy it up. I began to rile a bit at the rate she’d been paid. Less than ten dollars an hour isn’t much these days.

  Mitch shook his head disapprovingly, obviously thinking the same thing, the dear boy.

  ‘Tell you what. If it’s okay with your parents—’

  ‘Oh, it’s okay,’ she all but burst out eagerly.

  Sally turned and hid a smile at the girl’s almost desperate enthusiasm.

  ‘How about once a fortnight, you come around and put in four or five hours. We’ll do it properly too. Got a tax file number?’

  Kelly nodded. ‘Yeah, I had to have one. Dad got me one for my bank account. Something about interest.’

  ‘Fine. I don’t know what the award rate is, but we’ll find out and round it up from there to the nearest five or ten.’

  Kelly blinked, not understanding.

  Sally beamed at Mitch then turned to the girl with a patient smile.

  ‘He means, if the award rate is say, thirteen dollars and eight cents or something ridiculous like that, we’ll round it up to fifteen. If it’s sixteen-fifty, we’ll take it up to twenty.’

  Kelly beamed at them and stumbled over her words in her effort to thank them so profusely. I felt a happy glow too. She’d always seemed a little sad, sometimes in a frightened way, sometimes an angry one, but rarely happy until she began mowing. I guess rolling along with the ear-muffs on, she could escape into her own little world and daydream of worlds far away from her teenage troubles, whatever they may have been. And so began what for me was the true beginning of Mitch and Sally’s settling in.

  I got to know Mitch quite well over the next few months. There were times when he felt contented and relaxed, relishing his new life. His writing was progressing well. The newspaper kept paying him, syndicating his weekly column across the globe, while his next book was coming along very nicely. It was odd to sink myself into his mind when he was concentrating on the characters in his books. I’d never have dreamed writing could be so hard.

  Sometimes he’d scribble notes on a bit of paper. Other times he’d dictate ideas into an app on his iPhone. Now that was a clever idea. Wish I’d had something like that when I’d been alive. Of course Mitch used it better than I would have anyway. I’d have just turned it into a shopping list, even though I’m sure there are apps for that too. He’d rattle off instructions to himself to make this character say that, or adjust a scene to a different time of the day. Were anyone not privy to Mitch’s mind to hear them, these comments would have sounded random and mad, but when I aligned them with his thoughts about the exact location in the text, they made perfect sense.

  To see him obsess over a single paragraph for hours was really something. He didn’t just want to string words together. He wanted every line to be as poetic as he could write it. Simple, straightforward narrative was not to be tolerated. His mind was a wonderful thesaurus, constantly throwing up beautiful alternatives for the mundane. Verbs, nouns and adjectives were his raw ingredients, mixing together to make descriptive analogies and powerful imagery the paints on his literary pallet. No wonder his previous books had done so well. The one that had been made into a movie was in its third reprint and still in the top one thousand ebooks on Amazon.

  He worked hard on the garden too, and seemed to love every minute of it. Every time he came in for a cold drink, or when Sally actually fetched one for him, I got nothing but contented vibes from them both. The pictures in their minds of the new herb garden they’d planted in the poly-tunnel, as well as the small orchard of fruit trees they’d planted in the back yard seemed nice. Not exactly the way I’d have done it, but then each to their own. Of course, Mitch just did as he was told. His little general was the architect of both the front and back yard
s.

  Sally also hired some local fencers to cordon off some forty acres of the cleared land. Come spring, she planned to put in a small herd of goats to keep the grass down. Her study had something to do with the hunting range of wolf spiders on grazed grass, compared to virgin bush. I tried following her thoughts on the matter, but it was too much for me. I hate spiders.

  Mitch seemed to be of the same mind. She can have that, he thought one day. Then he began thinking of her with her reading glasses on. Reading glasses and her hair tied up in a pony-tail... He raced out towards the shower. Exactly five minutes later, he came back into the kitchen and accosted Sally right there and then. She squealed with mock protest as he grabbed her and hoisted her over his shoulder, carrying her away to the bedroom. I was kind of happy they took their business out of me. The pair of them were worse than rabbits. They did it wherever and whenever the urge took them, so long as Kelly wasn’t around. I’d heard them in the lounge and the hall, even on the front porch once.

  That’s not to say their romantic life was confined to carnal pursuits in the house. They made an effort to explore nearly all of the local restaurants. Gembrook had a Thai place and a reasonable bistro at the pub. Yarra Junction had more to choose from. One of their favourites was an Italian place called Il-Mondo, although I frequently noticed Sally thinking she could out-cook them any day of the week. Another was a local draw-card called Monroe’s which did fantastic spit lamb and chicken along with lots of other Middle Eastern dishes. Monroe’s kept funny hours though, so they rarely went there. I’d been there once and had eaten far too much and burped so much garlic the next day that I’d been reluctant to return.

  Other times, Mitch felt trapped, stifled somehow. Back in the city, he’d been used to riding his bicycle into work every day, writing his column there at the newspaper office, then riding home. He’d had some away time. Now he was in the house with Sally so much more. Sure, every fortnight she drove into Monash University in Clayton for the day, but that wasn’t much at all.

  Sally saw it too. ‘Go for a ride,’ she ordered him one Friday morning after breakfast. It was one of those lovely clear, sunny days early autumn. The easter influx of chocolate had begun and the two were being extra-conscious of getting enough exercise.

  She handed him a cut lunch in a paper bag. ‘You’re not doing that keyboard any good by cooping yourself up in here with me all day. If you go past the shops and they have any iTunes cards on special, get some. We need some new music.’

  Mitch was surprised. He didn’t say a word, but Sally guessed what he was thinking, just as I knew what he was thinking. He loved her. He really, really loved her.

  Sally and I watched out the window as he rode out and down the dusty road with the lunch she’d made for him securely tucked way in the carry sack on the back of his bike. Of course, while he wasn’t in me, I had no idea what Mitch was thinking, but Sally? Well that little minx watched him cycle away with love certainly, but also with a fierce pride.

  And he’s all mine, girls, she thought. Perve at those thighs and those arms all you like, but he’s mine.

  With Mitch out of the house for the next few hours, Sally kept herself busy. She did laundry, vacuumed and mopped then disappeared into one of the other rooms. While she was out of my range of vision and hearing, I watched out my windows for Mitch to return. Lost in my own thoughts, I didn’t even notice Mason until he spoke.

  ‘Do you know what that lass is doing in there?’ the ghost asked me, aghast.

  Startled, I tore my attention away from the window.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She… She’s masturbating! Lewd woman!’

  ‘You should see what they do to each other.’ By now I’d become used to their supercharged sex-lives. Mason wasn’t so blasé. He was quite a bit older than me after all.

  ‘Wanton behaviour!’ Mason drifted about to my fridge and stuck his head straight through the door to peer inside.

  ‘Oh calm down, Mason. You can’t tell me you never did the same thing to yourself.’

  Mason withdrew his head from the fridge and glared about.

  ‘Madam! I’ll have you know—’

  I didn’t let him finish. Rather than argue about the differences between the morals of the “young people of today” and those from his era, I changed the subject.

  ‘So what’s new? Any gossip?’

  Mason grinned. He made a show of unbuckling his waistcoat and lounging on one of the bar stools along my bench. Silly really. It’s not like he could actually feel the furniture or move it.

  ‘There’s a new ghost in Gembrook,’ he told me with a conspiratorial wink.

  I groaned inwardly. Mason could never just come out with anything.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘A youngster.’

  While Mason’s eyes were bright with the intrigue of his news, I felt saddened. It always made me sad to hear of a young life cut short.

  ‘He’s spending a lot of time in the constabulary.’

  Mason always used that word for the police station.

  ‘And now I’m supposed to ask you why?’

  Mason made a face. ‘You needn’t take all the enjoyment out of it, Eugenie.’

  ‘Just tell me, you crazy old coot.’

  ‘Humph! Impossible woman!’ When it was clear I wasn’t going to play his game, he continued. ‘Remember that case a few years ago? When the Riley youngster went missing?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied quietly. That poor family. Around the turn of the century, pubs and clubs were allowed to run poker machines. Jeff Riley had become hooked on them straight away. The man was already a chronic gambler. Those machines were like bait to a rat. They ruined his career and all but ruined his family.

  Then the lad disappeared on the weekend a few days before Ashleigh had died. He was eleven years old. Like most boys in the neighbourhood, he ran pretty feral. His parents couldn’t put a definite time or place to his movements, other than that he’d probably been with his mates. Failing that, he might have been riding his bike along any number of trails through the bush in either Kurth Kiln Regional Park, or the larger Bunyip State Forest that joined it. The police and local scout groups searched all over the place for weeks, hoping he’d be found hungry but alive. Sadly, their efforts had found no trace of him. Their conclusion? He’d been abducted.

  The boy’s mother Claire was still out there campaigning and urging the police to keep looking for her son. The father Jeff’s gambling had become worse as had his drinking. In the investigation, all that came out and Claire had kicked him to the curb. Their divorce was quick. She got the house, the car and their investment property. He moved into a single bedroom flat where he could walk to the petrol station which was the only employer who would have him.

  I’m really quite surprised that I knew all this, considering I didn’t speak much to people during those two short months. But then, it’s a small town and I wasn’t really the one doing the talking. The check-out chicks and general retail staff in the supermarket and hardware store were always gossipping. Maybe they were trying to draw me out of my silence, feeling sorry for the uptight Christian widow out there all on her own. Maybe they just couldn’t shut up.

  ‘Alec Riley, his name is,’ Mason went on.

  Honestly, the old ghost seemed to think everyone around him was completely ignorant. I sighed.

  ‘I’d wondered what had happened to that boy. Have you talked to him? Does he know what happened to him?’

  Mason shook his head. ‘Won’t talk to me.’ His head snapped up and he faced the window. ‘Looks like your bonnie brown-eyed boy is back.’ Then he whooshed up through my ceiling and vanished.

  He was right. Mitch rode his bicycle up the driveway and into the garage. A few moments later, I heard Sally come to meet him.

  ‘You’re home early, sweaty man! Did you eat your lunch?’

  Mitch’s reply was muffled then I heard the water in the pipes running so I knew he was taking a shower. Mitch was careful
about his showers. Never took more than four minutes. I couldn’t help feeling smug as I watched Sally rush into me with two sex toys and give them a very quick clean in the sink.

  Dunno why I should be embarrassed, she thought to herself. Her mental tone was both self-mocking and slightly bitter. He’s the one who got me to like anal.

  She examined each vibrator. The large one, she wasn’t so worried about, but she paid more attention to the smaller one. No poop. Good, she thought.

  As much as I thought I was used to Sally and Mitch’s proclivities, the idea of anal sex still rubbed me the wrong way. It just seemed wrong. Immoral. I was still certain Sally must really be fooling herself because it was sure to be painful. How could anyone actually enjoy that?