Meg pulled the Camry into Jock and Bertha’s driveway and braked hard. A carton of Peroni, two bottles of Charles Melton Nine Popes, and three long thin parched baguettes lay across the back seat. The curry sat up straight in the boot, jammed against the spare tyre. We were late for Christmas lunch.
Popping the boot set off an urging within me. I lifted the lid of the Tibetan clay pot, fished out a single snub-nosed morsel of lamb, and gently lowered it onto my tongue. There it sat, quivering and contemplating its fate. It smelt ripe, sweet, pungent, muddy, glorious. My jaw slowly chewed. After a slip of doubt, I swallowed. I felt as if I’d licked a seeping wound.
As I lifted the curry out of the boot, a stomach cramp came on strong. I groaned and dropped to my haunches.
‘Are you okay, Sunshine?’ Meg said.
‘Hunger pains.’
‘You tried some, didn’t you?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Ollie?’
‘One piece. One tiny piece.’
Jock leaned in the doorway. He had that I-still-can’t-believe-my-bright-eyed-and-prodigiously-intelligent-and-mostly-sensible-daughter-chose-this-imbecile look on his face: one bushy eyebrow raised and the other perpendicular, nose crinkled, cheeks puffed, and lips pursed as if he was playing the oboe.
It had taken Meg years to convince me that this was Jock’s way of showing love. But she was right: Jock just needed translating. His creased brow was a smile, but only if you knew. He showed sympathy by patting people’s cheeks – bang bang – with an open palm. In times of crisis, he waited until he believed no one else was listening before he offered solace. One day in the late-1990s, I overheard him whisper ‘I’m thinking of you’ to Felicity, Meg’s younger sister, after she ruptured her cruciate ligament in her right knee for the third time, ending a netball career that had shown real promise years earlier. Like a living, breathing greeting card, ‘I’m thinking of you’ was all Jock had to say, after which he shoved himself back in his envelope.
Bertha, who missed nursing desperately, pushed past Jock. She squatted beside me and grabbed my wrist.
‘Deep and even breaths, dear. In, out, in, out. Oh, dear: I’m not getting a pulse.’
‘That’s it,’ Meg said. ‘He’s finally poisoned himself. It was only a matter of time.’

‘There: it’s faint. Erratic.’
They bundled me up the stairs and into the bathroom. I slammed the door, nearly severing a couple of Bertha’s fingers.
‘Sorry,’ I called through clenched teeth.
‘That’s okay, dear. You need your space, I’m sure. I’m not at all offended. Really, I’m not.’
I knew I should let her Mother Teresa me. Wipe my brow. Hold my hand. Take the credit by not taking any credit, because, just like Mother Teresa, Bertha’s brand of help mostly benefitted the helpers.
‘Come on, Mum. Why don’t you help me warm up Ollie’s curry,’ Meg said.
‘What if he passes out? Somebody needs to listen for the sound of his head hitting the floor.’
‘You’ll be doing more good than you’ll ever know if you just let him sort himself out. And he’ll feel better quicker knowing that the curry is in good hands.’
‘Don’t let it boil,’ I yelled as I undid my belt buckle. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘We hear you,’ Meg said. ‘The whole suburb hears you.’
‘Nine level tablespoons of garam masala, once it’s warm. Measure them. Don’t guess.’ I’d made the number up, but it felt therapeutic to be giving orders.
I dropped my chinos, fell onto the toilet seat, and wedged the bucket between my knees. I piled breaths one upon the other. The pain eased. But then a new wave of cramps felt as if somebody had thrust their hand right inside me and jammed down, down, down with a flat palm, forcing my stomach into my intestines and my intestines into my crotch.
For the longest of seconds, I had no idea whether I would vomit or shit or explode. Then my chest heaved. A wave of frothy bile splayed from my mouth and my bowel let forth a spray of ripe air. The final convulsions lasted seconds. And then instantly, I felt released. Fulfilled. And ravenous. I squeezed SensiBright Freshme toothpaste into my mouth and brushed my teeth with a finger. The toothpaste’s burst of genuine peppermint flavour, and its gritty foam, left a subtle, energising aftertaste that made me even hungrier.
I inspected the vomit. It was clearer than I’d expected, like watered-down ink. Oddly, the lamb had stayed inside me.
I poured the vomit into the toilet and used a full flush, despite the water restrictions. I gave the room an extended spray of air freshener, an all-natural blend of lavender and talcum powder.
I found Meg, Bertha and Felicity in the kitchen, poking and prodding the curry with the wrong end of a wooden spoon.
‘There you are. How are you, dear?’ Bertha said. ‘Here, sit down. Do you want a cool flannel? Or an electrolytes ice block?’
‘I’m perfectly fine,’ I said. ‘Fully restored.’
To prove my point, I slugged Felicity’s wine, sloshing it around my cheeks to cleanse my palate of SensiBright.
‘Yuck,’ Felicity said. She dumped the remainder of the contents of the glass down the kitchen sink. For a moment, I thought she would throw the glass in the bin.
‘Happy holidays, Flea,’ I said. ‘But you should have poured the wine into the curry.’
‘Yes, we were just admiring your, um, creation,’ Bertha said. ‘You should be very proud of the … the … the …’
‘The smell?’ Meg said.
‘That’s it. That’s it exactly. You certainly suffer for your art. That’s something to admire, I suppose.’
‘We all suffer for it,’ Felicity said.
On the patio, the word spread that I was cured. A chant of ‘Ollie Ollie Ollie’ started up. Felicity began wailing – ‘Why are we waiting?’ and everybody joined in. Uncle Fred’s voice soared above the chorus. If he’d stuck with the Pavarotti business as a young bloke, he could have gone all the way: frilly shirts, tights, bulging testicles, the Trevi Fountain tattooed on his belly, the whole bit. But he had a lazy voice box, which, according to Aunt Bess, was an actual medical condition.
Meg’s rellies formed a guard of honour that ran the length of the patio, arms interlinked above their heads. A cloud of deodorant, aftershave, perfume and BO embraced me. I froze before the trestle table, one leg off the ground.
‘It’s time,’ I called.
‘It’s time,’ they chanted back.
With a flourish, I lifted the lid from the curry pot. It was as if I’d squeezed the whole carcass of a sheep in there: meat, bones, organs, wool and tongue. Litres of blood absorbed into the clay pot’s curves. And, finally, the spices came, great rolling pungent floodwaters that ran in and out of every nose.
In that triumphant moment, I believed that after nearly four decades on earth I’d finally, decisively, triumphantly captured the essence of Christmas. My curry was better than tinsel, better than ‘Away in a Manger’, even Bob Dylan’s version, better than ‘Does anyone remember what street the church is on?’, better than green and red-wrapped presents that nobody wanted to buy or receive, better than a hothouse pine tree shoved into a split bucket and propped up against the far corner of the lounge room, the dribble of water in the bucket implying, wrongly, that life beats death.
Long experience told me not to make a direct assault on Christmas. I’d tried for years to make my family see the truth. In response, they’d abandoned me, to London, to California, to Tweed Heads. So, I knew now that there was no point trying to tell Meg’s family that they were wandering naked, aimless, deluded. Them and the whole city: 1.2 million emperors without clothes. ‘Let us forget’ is the essence of Christmas. Let us forget the starving children in Africa. Hell, let us forget Africa altogether. Let us forget bombs ripping through Baghdad. Let us forget the old war criminals we once propped up, the new ones we cuddle. Let us forget the good blokes who assault their nearest and dearest. Let us forget the slightly tired food we throw in the bin, day in and day out, year in and year out. Let us forget the net worth of the global wrinkle cream industry.
I had come to understand, finally, that I should not speak the truth aloud. Instead, I gifted Meg’s family a miracle of a curry and in return they indulged me like I was a five-year-old performing a card trick. Somebody shoved a red paper crown on my head and a plastic whistle in my mouth. ‘Toot toot toot,’ I blew as I placed the curry in the space left in the very middle of the trestle full of food, adjacent to a sign that said DANGER in calligraphied red letters.
‘Three cheers for Ollie’s casserole,’ Jock called.
‘It’s not a bloody casserole,’ I said.
‘Family and friends,’ Jock called. He raised his arms in an appeal for quiet, but Uncle Fred started up: ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’. His voice soared. A few others joined in.
‘Don’t encourage him,’ Aunt Bess yelled. ‘He’ll be taking requests next.’
‘Amazing grace, how sweeeeet the sound, that saved a wretch liiiii —’

‘Family and friends. … And Fred. … Please. Please. … family and friends,’ Jock said.
I looked around for anybody who wasn’t family.
‘Refugees at 8 o’clock,’ Uncle Callum muttered, nodding his head at a couple who stood just off the patio in the direct sun. The woman had a round belly.
‘Pregnant, you reckon?’ Uncle Callum asked. ‘Well, let’s hope so.’
‘There’s every chance she can hear you,’ I said.
‘How pregnant, would you say? It would really make a mess of my lunch if the kid popped out now.’
‘Are you kidding? Bertha would love it.’
‘Where’s she from, Asia? The Caribbean?’
‘There’s no such place as Asia,’ I said. ‘It’s like saying, “Let’s eat Asian tonight.” It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘It does. It means lemon chicken. But, look, fine, she could be an Eskimo for all I know.’
‘The bloke she’s with is Taiwanese.’
‘How do you know?’ Uncle Callum asked, clearly impressed.
‘Because it says so on his shirt.’
Uncle Callum squinted over his glasses at the man’s T-shirt, which read ‘Made in Taiwan ...’.
‘What the hell does that dot dot dot mean?’ he said. ‘Hey, mate? What does the dot dot dot on your shirt mean?’
Mr Taiwan turned around. The back of his T-shirt read ‘… by God’.
Uncle Callum and I groaned in unison.
‘Could I ask you all to be quiet for a moment,’ Jock yelled. ‘Will you all please SHUT UP, especially you, Callum. Thank you. Thank you. Family and friends: Bertha and I welcome you into our home for another year. Our home is your home.’

‘And it’s a seller’s market,’ Uncle Callum called.
‘As soon as one Christmas lunch finishes, we start looking forward to the next one. Some days I think it’s the only thing that keeps us together, heh heh heh. … No, no, Dear, don’t look at me like that. You know full well that I count every day I have with you as a blessing. I only hope that I die first, because I don’t believe I could carry on without you. But let’s not, today, of all days, have any talk of death. I— ’
‘Save that for Easter,’ I yelled.
‘All right then. Are we ready? … Please, everybody, enjoy the food and drink. Thank you all for your contributions. Even yours, Ollie. Remember, it’s going to be a stinker today. Make sure you take full advantage of our new air con. Ducted into every room. Keep your fluids up. It’s true that we have a nurse among us, but we don’t want to use her.’
‘Because she trained in the eighteenth century.’
‘Yes, thank you Callum.’ Jock said. ‘Keep hydrated, everybody, I beg you, and I’m not just saying that because the less booze you drink today, the more will be left over for me for the rest of the year. Although that’s also true.’
‘We offer our thoughts and prayers to the people of southern Pakistan,’ I muttered, ‘who will spend Christmas Day scanning the sky for drones.’
‘It’s all right,’ Callum said: ‘those people don’t even celebrate Chrissie.’
‘Today is our best spread ever, I venture to say,’ Jock said, ‘for which we say thanks be to God and —’
‘Oh, for Chrissakes,’ Uncle Callum yelled. ‘Haven’t we had quite enough religion this week.’
‘Yes, all right, you’re quite right: Amen, amen, amen.’
‘Amen,’ the crowd called, even the lapsed and the non-believers. Even me.
The heat and Uncle Callum’s God heckling had already hit Mr Taiwan hard. Breathing heavily, clutching his left shoulder, he swayed back and forth on the perimeter of the pergola, passing from light to shade and back again. Freya, Meg’s cousin, caught him as he fell. Bertha hurried inside for the first aid kit.
‘Sorry sorry sorry,’ Freya said to Mr Taiwan. ‘Just another one of my dad’s awful jokes.’
‘It’s not that …. I’m dizzy … the sun … I, I, I forgive him.’
‘Thanks be to God.’
‘There’s no getting around it,’ Uncle Callum muttered to me. ‘My baby girl has turned into a God-botherer.’
‘How did you get it so wrong?’
‘I blame her mother.’
Anyone not ministering to Mr Taiwan rushed to the food table to fight over Aunt Frannie’s curried egg mornay. I left them to it, because Frannie had already put a double serve aside for me for my Boxing Day breakfast. I started instead with Aunt Bess’s coleslaw: spears of carrot and hard white cabbage — truly, she sharpened the points — floating in a pale white lake. The magic was in the mayonnaise. One year I nearly weaselled the recipe out of Bess by telling her that she’d lost weight. She had, too: a tapeworm in the gut. In the end she refused — ‘I can’t play favourites, even for you’ — so I experimented in the kitchen until I got it nearly right: (1) take one tin of condensed milk (2) fold in three eggs (3) add white vinegar until the consistency is slightly thicker than water (4) add too much salt (5) pour over raw vegetables.
A thin but authoritative voice came from behind me. ‘Ollie? … Ollie, where are you boy? Where is he? He should be helping me.’
I dropped my plate and moved across to the prawn cocktails, the thick pink dressing shimmering in its released-from-the-jar freedom. I grabbed three bowls and carried them to Grandma Jean, who sat in a wheelchair, a rug over her legs. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d forgotten all about me.’
‘Don’t you know that we’re in the middle of a heat wave?’ I said, tugging at the rug.
‘My knees are cold. My feet. What can I do?’
‘Here, I brought you your prawns.’
‘What, no bread?’
‘Hold your horses. I’m going back for it.’
‘Plain sandwich white, Love. Nothing dark. No seeds. No —’
‘I know.’
‘Lots of butter, and salt and pepper. ’
‘I know.’
‘Good boy. And bring me your mornay. Just for a look.’
‘It’s a curry.’
‘You call it whatever you want, dear. Let me see it.’
‘There’s nothing really to see. You smell it. The smell’s the thing.’
‘I can’t smell a blessed thing. Haven’t been able to for years.’ She squinted across the yard at Mr and Mrs Taiwanese. ‘I don’t mind them coming here if they must,’ she shout-whispered, ‘but do they really have to come to Christmas.’
I lay the bread flat on her plate. Grandma Jean picked the tiny prawns out of the bowl with gnarled fingers and arranged them like a jigsaw puzzle, where they sank into a soft bed of butter. Once she’d covered one slice full of prawns, I added a couple of pinches of ground pepper and an avalanche of salt. She popped the second slice of bread on top, squeezed down and began to eat.
‘You want a bite, I suppose, Dear?’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
‘For somebody who claims to hate Christmas — ’
‘It’s a lot of hocus pocus. You think so too.’
The prawns were rubbery. The cocktail sauce stuck to the roof of my mouth and started slow-releasing its toxicity. The plain white bread was so light it barely existed. But it provided a surface for the butter, which was hands down the best part of the dish. It needed more pepper. And a chopped birdseye chilli or at least a splash or two of Tabasco Sauce. But most of all, it needed fresh prawns.
A queue formed of people wanting to pay their respects to Grandma Jean and to whisper ‘This could be her last Christmas’ to each other. I patted her bony shoulder and returned to the food table. There I found Mrs Taiwan hovering over my curry, looking worried. I upended a prawn cocktail onto a plate, added some pork crackling, a couple of barbequed pineapple rings, and a piece of ham, shiny from the brine pumped into it.
‘The curry is not for eating,’ I told Mrs Taiwan.
‘Do. You. Speak. English? Unglais? Yes? Yes?’ Uncle Callum hollered in her ear. ‘You no eat. Ok? Danger! Poison! Bad! Yuk yuk yuk yuk!’
‘It’s decorative,’ I said. ‘It’s political. It’s educational.’
‘It’s a symbol,’ Felicity said. ‘A lot like Christmas, eh, Ollie?’
Mrs Taiwan’s face faded to a blank mask, resembling her empty plate, as Aunt Sylvia forced forward her grandchildren, Jennifer and Phillip, to paw at her belly.
‘The miracle of life, children,’ Aunt Sylvia said.
‘Although probably not if you eat that,’ I said, inclining my head towards the curry. ‘My name’s Ollie,’ I said.
‘Hello. I’m Marguerite,’ she replied.
‘What?’ Aunt Sylvia said. ‘Marguerite, did she say? Marguerite? But … What’s her real name? What’s your real name, sweetheart? You can tell us, we’re very broadminded. We’ve had Aboriginals in the house, at least twice. And Jennifer is learning Indonesian at school. Aren’t you, dear.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, what?’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
‘No no no. Say it in Indonesian.’
‘Ya nenek.’
‘How about that. How. About. That.’ Aunt Sylvia grabbed Marguerite’s arm and held it up. ‘Look at that wrist. So thin.’
Marguerite gazed calmly across the lawn, where, exposed to God’s blistering sun, Mr Taiwan and Freya had dropped to their knees so that Freya could recite a grace that went on for so long — ‘thank you, Lord, for providing us with this food, and thank you Lord for the crops that sustain us, thank you Lord for all of the world’s animals, including sea creatures, especially whales, as well as majestic dolphins and lowly sea slugs, thank you Lord for …’ — that their food had gone cold and ants had invaded their plates and started carrying the curried egg mornay away. God’s creatures at work, fucking things up for the faithful. Freya seemed very taken with Mr Taiwan, who looked like he might never rise from his kneeling position.
I sat under the jacaranda tree to eat in peace. Aunt Jess’s pasta salad was a revelation: the penne was firm but giving. Through it, she had folded blunt feta, peas, rock-hard pepitas, something white (perhaps cauliflower, perhaps Lego), crumbled Jatz cracker biscuits, and a medley of processed meat: cubes of fritz, shards of deep-fried bacon fat, and salami. It was an inexplicable triumph.
Then I started on Grandma Eve’s meatballs. Grandma Eve — Jock’s mum — had been dead for going on 13 years but was immortal for her meatball recipe: ‘bind beef mince with breadcrumbs (the cheaper the better because bread is bread) using an egg or two or three (depending on how big they are, how old they are, how brown the shells are). Add onion salt and dried parsley to taste (and be sure not to skimp on the onion salt). Shape into balls bigger than a golf ball but smaller than a cricket ball. Arrange in a greased shallow dish, pour over a sauce made of four cups of barbeque sauce (whichever of Heinz or Rosella is on special) and three cups of Berenberg apricot jam. Cook on a moderate heat for 40-45 minutes. Serve immediately.’ I ate six of them, one after another. They entered my mouth whole, allowing me to suck the sauce off the surface before beginning to chew.
By now, a yellow stain had formed around the base of the clay pot that held my curry. The glorious pastiche odour had passed, leaving old dead flesh to assert itself. I jammed the lid down on the pot and carried it to the side of the house, where I opened the yellow-lidded wheelie bin and lifted out a rubbish bag. I opened the bag and upended the pot into it. Nothing happened. I shook the pot. Still nothing. The curry was stuck fast to the pot’s inner walls. I plunged my arm into the pot, stirred the contents, and tried again. I pulled my shirt off, made my hand a ladle and shovelled the curry into the garbage bag. My hands and wrists tingled, my nose streamed. I lifted my arms above my head, fingers splayed triumphantly. Curry juice ran off my fingers, spread through my hair, dripped into my eyes. I stood in the stinging juice-rain under a cloudless sky in the middle of a drought.
Ecstasy passed. Christmas Day resumed. Behind me, a champagne cork popped; decades-old sibling rivalries droned on; Freya attempted to impress Mr Taiwan with talk of the prophet Ezekiel while Mr Taiwan waited for Mrs Taiwan to finish eating her bread and butter so they could say a polite goodbye and he could go home and take an ice bath; Felicity threatened to turn the television on, purely to irritate Bertha; Uncle Fred started singing Elton John, surprisingly well; leftover food prepared itself for landfill; an old woman closer to death than the rest of us dozed in a chair, one eye open protecting her last prawn; and the star on the Christmas Tree stood proud and erect, but only for those of us who’d had one glass too many.