My Word
by Karenlee Thompson
D
eanna was the best neighbour. Watered my plants when I was away, brought me a casserole when my stove blew up, gave me a plate of her homemade Anzac biscuits every year. She also told the best stories from her decades of travelling the world. Like the time she stared down an obese moose on the outskirts of an Alaskan town, even mimicking the strange departing grunt of the moose. She once went on Jeopardy! in the US and left TV host Alex Trebek speechless after mistakenly replacing the word “organisms” with “orgasms”. Deanna had a key to my place and I never hesitated to call her to check if I had left the iron on or the garage door open. She’d be in there in a flash and often left me little gifts to brighten my day – a heart-shaped chocolate or a flower from her garden. So, I was not overly surprised to find a gorgeous loofah hanging on the shower head when I came home after a quick trip to Hobart. The flight had landed at some ungodly hour and I was desperate for a shower, so grabbed the loofah and gave it a bit of a splash around. It was kind of weird, a little bit squishy and it didn’t seem to work well as far as scrubbing my skin. The next morning, I received a call from Deanna. She had taken ill while I was away and had undergone an emergency appendectomy, but was recovering well. “Can you put my rubbish out? I’ll be in here for a couple more days and there’s a heap of food scraps in there that will go rack.” I knew she meant “rank”, but I was so used to her mispronunciations and malapropisms that I rarely corrected her. It was the only time I could recall her asking for my help and I was pleased to oblige. Her normally immaculate kitchen was in some disarray, so I washed the few dishes, removed a bit of coagulated mixture from one of the hotplates and gathered up some craft scraps from the table. As I pulled the bag of rubbish from the bin, I couldn’t help but notice fragments of fabric and fancy string. I realised that Deanna must have made my loofah gift herself. I wasn’t particularly surprised, given her penchant for all things crafty. She was always knitting or crocheting, she had done a scrapbooking class and even made soap once. I arrived at her hospital bed with a bunch of yellow roses – her favourite – and a basket of nibbles from the
corner health food shop. She was in high spirits, despite the most recent news from the doctor. “I’ll be incinerated in here for another week!” She meant “incarcerated”. As I was taking my leave, I remembered the loofah. “Thank you for the gift. So thoughtful.” “Oh! I forgot about that,” she said. “I only put it in there to keep it dry while you were away. It’s not finished yet.” I was embarrassed and didn’t want to let on that I’d already used it, so I just nodded and agreed to hang it from her kitchen railing when I went home. Christmas Eve – the last one we were to share together, as it happened – she arrived with a beautiful big basket of homemade goodies. Fruit mince in a fancy jar with checked gingham covering the lid, bespoke Christmas bonbons, a decorative bottle filled with grapefruit and ginger lemonade, shortbread and peppermint creams. And there, nestled in the bottom of the basket was what looked suspiciously like the loofah I had sluiced my body with a month before but which was now – clearly – a miniature Christmas pudding, with a quaint little holly tie. “You’ll recognise that then,” she said, killing my last fragment of hope that it was all a bizarre coincidence. “Almost spoiled my surprise, you did.” We drank eggnog and she went home tipsy. The next morning, I could hear her sitting at her back patio, talking with family on the other side of the world. I headed off to join my own group, much closer. I lied – of course – when next we met. The pudding was a delight. Shared it with the family. Lip-smacking good. “It wasn’t the same one that was hanging in your shower,” she said and my guilt at having hidden a perfectly good pudding in a box in the wardrobe brought a flush to my cheeks. “It didn’t age as well, that one.” With every word she uttered, I felt a growing unease. “Sometimes the moisture gets to them and they turn. I ate that one myself.” I stammered and stuttered, mortification making me almost mute and then she roared. “Of course I didn’t eat it,” she said. “I smelled the soap on it and put two and three together.” For the next six months until Deanna moved home to Canada, we couldn’t meet without cackling like deranged hyenas. I imagine I have become one of her many stories and I still have a chuckle every time I see one of those cute little puddings hanging by a fancy thread. Karenlee Thompson is an Australian short story writer, world traveller and author of Flame Tip. She occasionally blogs at karenleethompson.wordpress.com.
09
Karenlee Thompson plumbs the depths of her friendship with her Canadian neighbour – and gets her just des(s)erts.
11 DEC 2020
A Loofah Minute