brandy barter

I must have lived in Berlin too long because it’s screeching hot on a Sunday afternoon, I am exhausted, and somehow the idea has crept into my head that I would like to drink a martini. It won’t dislodge. Opening my parents’ liquor cabinet is a dispiriting experience. It is a small, oval, glass-panelled thing on turned legs and inside, it resembles a brown mouth half-filled with decayed molars. An uneven semi-circle of discoloured flasks: these are the bottles of something your old workmates gave you for Christmas and that no one enjoys enough to actually drink. Plus a bottle of cheap brandy from which I made the pudding butter five days ago. Outside, Brisbane sprawls on all sides, as far as the sea and the hills, suburban and stupefied by shimmering heat. I cannot accept that there isn’t some strange punk bar or pirate bar within a block’s walk, opening late and staying open even later, candles on the tables, dogs under them, where a charmingly incompetent twenty-five-year-old bartender will make me a martini that begins with him holding up a Cinzano bottle that is actually labelled ‘Martini’ and showing me, “It’s empty.” After that I will explain that you don’t need a bottle marked ‘Martini,’ you need gin. I wish I could buy a vile martini for three euros, or a sublime martini for four, and have the bartender bring his black leather wallet to my table afterwards and have to remember that when you pay, it is customary to tip, but advisable not to say “Danke” when you hand over a twenty-euro note: this means, in the German sense, “Nein, danke,” which means “keep the change,” and it took me almost all of an eighteen-month stint there to learn this.

On Christmas Day I met for the first time in three years my uncle, with whom I had been having a feud. He lives across the road and is stubborn, a unhelpful family trait shared by us all. Our feud arose because three years ago I was staying with my folks a few months before moving to Melbourne. During that time I had set up a writing room in their dining room and pinned out the manuscript for my poetry book along the tongue and groove walls. It was a quiet, dim, and sacred space. The first song in my album was recorded there, on a single microphone propped by the couch. But for now it was just me in there every day, working, working. The walls were lined with shelves and high up above the rows of books lay three ugly old clocks, stained wood, with various pieces missing. I made a joke, apparently: we should sell these on Ebay. My uncle, who spent his childhood immersed in the story of these clocks, one of which had belonged to a great-uncle who died in the Great War, took me seriously. It had not occurred to me that such hideous objects might be of value to anyone. I was at my desk one afternoon when the door opened without a knock and my uncle strode in. He is a train driver. He was wearing hubcap shorts and a huge pair of dusty boots. Without a word he climbed onto my desk and started reaching down the clocks. I was milling at his feet, wringing my hands, saying Please get off my desk! Don’t stand on my stuff! That’s my work! If you want the clocks I will get them for you! My uncle took all three clocks in his arms and climbed down, grunting. He set off down the hall with the clocks anchored under his chin and me beside him being flicked aside like a fly. He confiscated the clocks and later told Mum it was in order to protect family heirlooms from being sold online. The idea that I could live in my parents’ house whilst secretly selling family treasures online was disgusting to me. I marched over to his house to demand he apologize. I could not accept that anyone could know me all my life and believe me capable of such selfishness. We had been mates since I was three or four – how could he not know that hey, she’s a royal pain but at least she is painfully, irritatingly honest? The feud simmered slowly for all the years I was away. No one had been sure whether to invite this lonely uncle to Christmas lunch or whether to leave well enough alone. Christmas morning everybody cooked. My sister-out-law made a magnificent salmon and wrapped it in foil, my brother cut up foothills of potatoes, we worked out that we had almost one whole joint of meat or fish for every adult at the table. I made a pavlova and a Christmas pudding and followed the most labour-intensive recipe for custard I had ever seen. It required the milk to be slowly heated to a simmer and then allowed to cool. Halfway through it said, “Now transfer custard to a clean saucepan.” I made the brandy butter. Then I went to the phone. I rang my uncle. “It’s Cathoel. Are you coming over soon? Because I have a problem and I need your help.

“My problem is that I made the brandy butter and it’s got so much brandy in it that it literally won’t absorb any more. There’s actually a puddle of brandy sitting in the top of the butter. Everyone’s telling me I’ve wrecked it and I need you because you are the only person in the world who can come over and tell me ‘this needs more brandy.'” My uncle said, “You need back-up.” “Exactly,” I said. “I’ll need to make myself beautiful,” he said. “I’ll need to have a bath.” I said, “Don’t get too beautiful. The rest of us have settled for only moderately attractive, so don’t be too long.” When he came in the door half an hour later he handed me a drinking straw. “Is this for slurping up the excess brandy off the top?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Then he took a spoonful of my brandy butter and said, wonderfully, “It’s perfect.”