Clean by Rowan Heath
Clean
Lucas washes the rice three times in a measuring jug, tipping the grey water onto his hand. He sweeps plastic wrappers and empty jars to one side of the bench to make room for the rice cooker and tests the water level with his finger. The lid of the cooker is still cloudy from the last time he used it. He considers washing it, but what’s another smear in the kitchen? What’s another crumb on the countertop? As he shifts to the other end of the room, a round, theatrical voice chimes.
‘What’s he doing now? He’s going to the fridge.’
Another voice coos in response, crisp but a little far away, as though Lucas hears it from behind two sets of hands cupped over his ears. ‘You know, he’s getting the – what do you call it – he’s getting the other things, fish, vegetables… ’
The rounder, deeper voice cuts in: ‘He’s reaching for the butter.’
The other person laughs. They have a feminine voice, startled and tinny. ‘Huh? What’s he going to do with butter? My nephew, you know, he tried making a curry the other day, and he started with butter.’
The audience chitters. Polite, restrained. Not too near, maybe half a block away. Lucas imagines the lights in the studio. The set in startling colours within a dead-black shed. The film crew in beanies and headsets, making silent gestures to each other as they steer the world’s attention from the hosts to him, to the audience and back to him. His face and hands in technicolour on a wide rectangle screen.
He puts the butter on the bench and stands in front of the fridge for a moment, listening to the rice cooker tick. He scans the contents: greying beef skewers, two rotting kiwi fruit, a mayonnaise jar with the lid unscrewed, week-old pizza. A black speck escapes from the open door and zips past his head. He’s forgotten what he came here for.
‘Ah, see, he’s gone back to the table. He’s getting – he’s got a banana.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘He’s got three bananas now.’
He retrieves a metal bowl and a knife. The bananas are soft and flushed with dirty brown spots. As he peels them, their smell blooms like petrol pouring in through the window, thick and sweet and sickening. He cuts them into bite sized pieces, puts them in the bowl and mashes them with a spatula.
‘I don’t trust this guy,’ says the host with the deep voice. ‘It’s like watching a toddler cook for himself.’
‘You know, my nephew could do that when he was two.’
‘We’ll bring your nephew on next time.’ More laughter, wary and hushed. Did anybody wince at that? ‘Look, he’s still got the rice on.’
Mashed into a paste, the banana looks a lot like sick. Lucas tries not to think about the last time he threw up and does anyway. Two months ago at a friend’s birthday party. Jaime held his hair back while he watered the lawn with the contents of his stomach. Once more on the way home. They didn’t have a bucket, so Jaime pulled over and Lucas crouched on the edge of the freeway, long-haulers screaming by. Acrid taste in his gums, turbulence whipping his hair across the back of his neck. ‘It’s 3 o’clock,’ wailed Jaime. ‘Are you fucking done?’
Lucas rests his gaze out the window and tries to remember what comes next.
‘Now he’s cubing the butter,’ the deep voice says. ‘How much butter is that?’
‘It’s a lot.’
‘I’d like you to guess. First pop-quiz question of the night: how much butter is our home cook cubing?’
A cheerful tune starts up at the nape of Lucas’s neck, like the jaunty chords spat out by slot machines for minor prizes. A cube of butter gets stuck to the side of his knife and he slides it off, leaving a thin greasy film on his finger.
‘Fifty grams, seventy-five grams, one-hundred grams. What does our audience think?’
He wipes his hands on his pants and melts the butter in the microwave. Another tune starts up, an enthusiastic cascading of trumpets designed to count time. It lasts for about a minute while the votes are tallied. Maybe the audience have little whiteboards, flashcards or a digital voting system. The hosts start up again as the music stops and the microwave beeps.
‘Audience majority says seventy five grams. And what did you have, my dear?’
‘Well,’ the other host says coyly, ‘I wrote down seventy five, too.’
‘That’s right.’ A bell rings. The audience performs some lukewarm cheers, invested enough to sound genuine, but not so enthusiastic that they sound insane. They find the right combination of gusto and embarrassment.
‘And now it’s time for a commercial break. See you soon.’ A new tune pipes up, ascends and bottoms out as though it has suddenly lost the will to keep playing. In stifling silence, Lucas mixes the butter into the mashed banana. He considers eating the mixture as is but thinks better of it. He’ll add sugar soon, so it’s worth waiting until then. Plus, there are only two clean spoons in the kitchen. Can’t cook with only one clean spoon, can’t run the washer with only one dirty. He could wash it by hand, but what’s the point of that? Not worth the effort washing it without soap, not worth changing the dirty dish towel to dry it, not worth the effort doing any of it.
‘What are you making?’
‘Jesusfuck.’ Lucas drops the spatula. Buttery spray hits his pyjama pants. He stares down as his feet, feeling the presence at the edge of the room, stunned by how badly he doesn’t want to look up. But he does look up eventually.
Jaime leans into the kitchen from the hall, his curls just grazing the top of the doorway. His arms are crossed and the skin of his chest is glossy.
‘Scared the shit out of me,’ says Lucas, working through each word like a knot.
Muffled shouts and gunshots come from the headset around Jaime’s neck. On one side of the headset, level with Lucas’s eyes, an LED the size of a fingernail blinks red.
‘Bit late to be cooking, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s only-’ Lucas checks the microwave for the time. Christ, it’s past midnight. When did he start cooking? ‘It’s midday somewhere.’
Jaime navigates the catastrophe of the kitchen – kicks past the cardboard, steps on the plastic with bare feet – to look into the bowl of mashed banana. Lucas considers how quickly his view of someone can change. Jaime doesn’t leer – has never leered – yet here he is, looking into a bowl of smashed banana like he secretly wants to spit in it. His face is a familiar place seen in the dark for the first time. Had he always looked like this?
‘What is that?’
‘Banana.’ Through the window, Lucas can just hear the sounds of crickets calling out to each other. The kitchen feels crowded. Lucas adds, ‘Are you going to bed soon?’
‘I think I’ll stay up and sleep in tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’
Jaime looks at Lucas for a long moment, his mouth a funny, wiggly line. In other moments like this, Jaime has reached for him. Kissed him, pinched him, ruffled his hair. This time he’s asking for something else, something new, and Lucas refuses to give it to him. He lets the energy drain from his face so that his expression is serene and unreadable.
‘Have fun with your game.’
Jaime’s wiggly line of a mouth straightens out. ‘Sure will. See you in the morning.’ He leaves without touching Lucas, having barely stepped into his space, just as another cheery tune signals the end of the commercial break. Applause seeps into hearing as the audience’s attention returns, presumably, to Lucas. He turns to the cupboard and pulls out flour, baking soda, sugar.
‘Quite the performance,’ says the host with the deep, bulging voice. ‘What did you think?’
‘His face was a little tight.’ The other host talks as if they’re apologising for something. ‘I wasn’t totally convinced.’
‘Given the circumstances, though.’
‘Oh, yes, he did very well.’
‘It’s not every day you find out your partner is fucking somebody else.’
Laughter from the audience, polite and restrained. One person at the rear of the crowd chortles, finding this particularly funny or relatable.
‘And what did our audience think? Are we convinced?’
It takes a minute to tally the votes. The trumpets sound and die. Lucas adds the dry ingredients to the wet ones. A pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking soda, one cup of sugar.
‘Green – green – green – the audience majority is convinced.’
Lucas shuts his eyes for a moment, focusing on the dry, empty pressure behind his eyelids. He listens to the set rustling all around him: the purr of the aircons, the whispers of interns, a distant, dry cough, a gentle, mechanical whirring dwindling almost out of earshot. Someone clears their throat – insistent, mildly panicked – so he opens his eyes and starts folding in two cups of plain flour, a half cup at a time.
‘I think I know what’s happening here,’ says the host with the tinny voice.
‘Go on,’ the other says, their tone insolent.
‘He’s cooking two things at once.’
‘Ah, you’re right. He’s multitasking. There’s rice, and the banana is for something else.’
‘I think so.’
The bubbling from the rice cooker grows urgent. The lever snaps from ‘Cook’ to ‘Keep Warm’. Lucas uses the spatula to push the batter into a stout baking tray and abandons the tray on the bench. He turns off the rice cooker, wraps his hands in a filthy tea towel and moves the metal rice pot to the edge of the sink. Then he takes the baking tray to the oven, but doesn’t load it in. A hushed ripple moves through the audience. The hosts confer in stage whispers.
‘What’s this?’
‘He’s stopped.’
‘Why did he stop?’
‘Something wrong with the oven?’
‘Oh, he’s crying now. Look, he’s crying right into the batter.’
‘He didn’t preheat the oven.’
‘Ah, I’ve been there. My nephew has certainly been there.’
Lucas puts the tray aside and turns the oven on to preheat. The last time he made banana bread, he had the oven on too low and it took an extra half hour. Was that before he met Jaime, or after? He can’t remember. At this rate, he’ll be up until sunrise. But what’s another sleepless night? What’s another failed distraction?
‘Ah, he’s gone back to the cupboard. What’s he got now?’
He opens a can of tuna and drains the water into the sink. As he crushes the tuna into a paste with a fork and adds mayonnaise, salt and pepper, he reflects on how lucky it is that he took a diploma in Japanese. Otherwise, he wouldn’t know what these hosts were saying. He flunked out in the last semester, sure, but he covered the important stuff: hobbies, asking for directions, cooking. He has enough Japanese to enjoy a game show without subtitles.
‘I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to ask tonight’s special home cook a few questions.’
‘Oh, I’m itching to speak to him. Let’s go.’
A chime sounds somewhere in the roof as Lucas puts together the rice seasoning. He feels the hosts step in closer, at about the edge of the room, like two kids approaching a caged animal they’ve never seen up close before. Their voices are clear and hollow like glass cups.
‘What are you making there?’
‘Onirigi,’ he says. He doesn’t shout, yet the volume of his voice is startling and obscene, and everyone goes quiet. Not a breath from the audience, not even the squeak of bodies shifting in chairs. Their attention is on Lucas like a classroom circling a fish bowl. There’s flour on his arms and shirt, butter under his fingernails, batter on his pants. Crumbs on the lino, white smears on the window, bright pink grime in the sink. Dirt in every room, on every surface, in every corner of this house. He feels so unclean.
‘Who taught you the recipe?’
He should be funny. He tries to think of something funny. ‘Google taught me.’
The audience laughs. The hosts humour him with chuckles. He feels them smiling at each other.
‘And what else are you making?’
‘Banana bread.’
The audience ‘Ooohs’ in good-natured approval.
‘How much rice did you cook? I don’t think that’ll be enough.’
Lucas assesses the rice in the pot. He used half a cup. It’s not enough.
‘I’m just cooking for myself.’
‘Sure,’ says the host with the deeper voice. ‘Sure. We will leave you to it and check in later. We’re all excited to see how it goes.’
The chime sounds again, the last note shrinking away as the hosts return to their chairs. Another commercial break starts up, and in the quiet Lucas listens to himself breathe. A crazed fruit fly dives from the windowsill into the sink.
He forces his hands to move and mix the seasoning into the rice. His forearms feel both light and heavy at once, as though someone is holding them tightly to stop them from floating away. He sweeps the junk on the bench to one side, creating a small, clear space, and spreads out a square of plastic wrap. The commercial ends just as he starts scooping the rice onto the plastic.
‘The oven should be pre-heated by now,’ says one host, their smooth voice cutting through a fading applause. ‘Let’s get that banana bread in.’
‘Oh, I can’t wait to see how it turns out. I might have to make it with my nephew.’
Lucas takes the cue and abandons the rice for the moment. He tries to put the baking tray into the oven, but the rack is sitting too high. With his free hand he reaches in and moves the rack down a level, struggling to slide it into place. He loads the baking tray and closes the oven door. The audience mutters, and one of the hosts performs an exaggerated gasp.
‘That’s gotta hurt,’ says the other one, their tone somehow serious and comic all at once. A dull pain manifests in Lucas’s left hand. Red lines have appeared on his fingers and palm.
‘Oh, he’s crying again,’ the host with the high voice coos. ‘Poor thing, he’s in a lot of pain.’
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘I think I love him.’
Cue laughter. Polite, restrained. Someone in the back row wails, finding this particularly funny or upsetting.
‘You would, wouldn’t you?’
‘He’s just so pathetic.’
Lucas thinks of Jaime sitting at his desk and wonders if he should call out to him. But he can do this alone, too. He wades through the kitchen to the sink, turns on the tap and holds his palm open under the cold water.
