Your Friend and Mine Extract

Allen & Unwin
Jun 24
10 min read

Updated: Jun 25

Read an extract from Your Friend and Mine by Jessica Dettmann.

When Margot saw the email from Tess, she was so surprised that for a moment she forgave her friend for having been dead for the past twenty years.

It took her brain a few seconds to register that Tess Bramley was the subject of the email, not the sender. The realisation that Tess was, as dead people usually are, still dead, and had not come back to life to contact her, left Margot with a kind of hope whiplash. She looked away from laptop screen, staring instead at her inverted reflection in a shiny metal spoon on the starched white tablecloth.

Around her continued the familiar sounds of the restaurant gearing up for evening service— a whisk against a metal bowl, whipping air into egg whites; the rhythmic chopping of a vegetable (probably fennel, judging by the sound and pace); a bus passing in the street. An almost overpowering smell of shellfish told her the prawn stock had reduced sufficiently. Her tiny, baffled, upside-down face looked back at her from the bowl of the spoon: the face of a woman with a still-dead best friend.

‘Did you find it?’

Johnny’s deep voice came from behind and his hands gripped the muscles at the base of her neck and gave a gentle squeeze, reminding her that the reason she’d stopped polishing spoons and clicked into her junk mail folder was to confirm that she had in fact remembered to order the new kitchen clogs he needed. She thought she’d done it a few weeks back, but they hadn’t been delivered and there was no confirmation email in her regular inbox.

How long had it been since she’d looked in her junk mail folder? How long, potentially, had this email with the subject ‘Tess Bramley’ been sitting there? She checked the date: it had arrived a week ago. The sender was someone called Harold Castafiore— the name meant nothing to her.

‘Johnny, look at this.’ She pointed at the email and clicked it open.

‘What is it?’ He leaned down to see better, resting his chin on her head. He smelled like fresh bread dough. ‘Who’s Harold Castafiore? Who’s Tess Bramley?’

‘Tess,’ she told him emphatically. ‘My Tess.’ Johnny had always been better with faces than names.

‘Oh.’ He sounded confused. ‘So who’s . . .?’

‘Just let me read it.’ She skimmed the single paragraph— the email wasn’t long. Harold Castafiore was, or claimed to be, a solicitor. He wrote that he was acting under instructions left in Tess’s will, and that he had something for Margot. He asked her to call him and provided a London phone number.

‘It’s something about a bequest,’ she said. ‘Is it a scam?’

Johnny had read the email now too. ‘Pretty much everything online’s a scam, but I don’t know— it could be legit. How long is it since she died? Like, fifteen years or something?’

‘Twenty,’ Margot said. ‘It was twenty years a couple of weeks ago.’ She’d marked the date by drinking a single glass of wine alone at the Acorn Hotel in a back street of Balmain, where she and Tess had met in the first month of the century. The anniversary of her death fell on a Friday, so Margot had to slip out between the lunch and dinner services, while Johnny was asleep on the sofa in the back office. She was only gone an hour. It had been a paltry way to commemorate two decades of life without Tess. Shameful, Tess would have said. Tess didn’t believe wine should even be sold by the glass, let alone consumed as such.

‘Twenty years is a bit long to still be sorting out a will,’ said Johnny. ‘I mean, our paperwork can be a bit out of control, but twenty years? Even we’re not that slack.’

Margot bristled silently. Our paperwork. We’re not that slack. Johnny hadn’t dealt with a single bill or payslip in the twenty-one years since they’d opened Manger. She did all of that, and she did it well. He was only trying to be funny, but still.

He straightened. ‘So, no new clogs?’

She glanced up and he looked down at her with the dark chocolate puppy-dog eyes that had got her into this whole restaurant-owning, chef ’s-clog-ordering life in the first place. He was fifty-two now, and still only getting more handsome, having started quite far ahead of the pack to begin with. Perhaps selfishness had anti-ageing properties.

‘I’ll check properly later. The order confirmation will there somewhere.’ All she wanted to do was forensically examine that email, google the solicitor, check the phone number was real, but she had so much work to get through before they opened at six. She didn’t actually have time to hunt for the shoe email, let alone deal with this bizarre intrusion from the past. Back in your grave, Tess, thought Margot.

‘How are we looking for tonight?’ Johnny had moved on.

‘Fully booked,’ she told him, pleased. It was no longer always the case, but tonight they would be serving sixty covers over two sittings, and they were good bookings, too. Many of the names she recognised as having dined at Manger before. At least six she considered genuine regulars, showing up once a week for two or three courses of Johnny’s classical fine dining and several heavily marked-up bottles of wine. They loved the people who lived in the neighbourhood and could drink as much as they wanted without worrying about RBT.

When they first opened, their food was known as Innovative Modern Australian, but that label, with its connotations of fusion cuisine, had gone out of fashion, along with Turkish bread and anything involving sun-dried or semi-dried tomatoes. Now the marketing buzzwords on their simple, one-font website were ‘traditional’, ‘local’ and ‘sustainable’. Whether ‘sustainable’ referred to the provenance of the ingredients or to their cost being low enough that Margot and Johnny could afford to keep the restaurant open, well, that was a grey area. People could read into it what they would.

‘Innovative’ was definitely gone from their blurb. Going out to eat was now so absurdly expensive that for people to come back time after time to a restaurant like Manger they had to know things weren’t going to be mucked about with. Diners craved stability, comfort and quality, which was what Johnny delivered with a menu of mostly Franco-Italian inspired dishes, with a side order of English gastropub fare. People had to be able to order half a roast chicken on some sort of pale puree with a concentrated jus. They needed the option of freshly shucked Merimbula rock oysters, house-made chicken liver pâté with brioche, one or two handmade pastas, various iterations of beef, lamb and fish. These days they always offered two vegetarian mains, neither of which was served in a stack or drizzled with pesto. Johnny specialised in cooking dishes you thought you could probably make at home, though you mostly wouldn’t bother because he did it one million times better.

‘Fully booked? Excellent,’ he said, and gave Margot’s shoulders one last squeeze before heading back into the kitchen.

She looked back at the screen, re-reading the words from Mr Castafiore. Who knew if the email and its mysterious promise of a bequest was real or not? But she felt a flicker of hope and chose not to extinguish it immediately with a puff of common sense. It couldn’t hurt to nurse that hope through the evening’s service. The email was the most interesting thing that had happened to Margot since they replaced the restaurant’s tired old plain white plates with fresh new plain white plates.

Normally Margot was very focused at work. Their success was equal parts Johnny’s cooking and her . . . everything else. She knew who was at each table, what they’d ordered and what they were drinking. She ran the floor, overseeing two other waitstaff, answering the phone, keeping glasses topped up with wine or water, clearing plates and delivering dishes. She mixed cocktails and kept the candles burning, replacing the tapers when they looked in danger of guttering, replacing the paper table runners between customers, checking that the linen tablecloths beneath hadn’t been so soiled that they need changing. She charmed people, Johnny said. But tonight, while she did all that, Margot thought only of Tess.

•

They’d met the summer after Margot finished school. Her exam results hadn’t come yet, but she didn’t much care what they were, because there wasn’t a university course specifically tailored to what she wanted to do with her life, which was become Nigella Lawson. In her last term of year twelve, instead of learning what Thucydides had to say about the Battle of Amphipolis, which would arguably have been more useful in her Ancient History exam, she read How To Eat, cover to cover, twice, and decided the only way she wanted to make a living was by writing about food and cookery in a disarmingly convivial tone.

Her parents wanted her to go to university, and that’s what most of her friends were planning, so she applied for a few arts degrees, listing them in order of how beautiful the university campus looked in the prospectus. If she did go to uni, it wouldn’t be until she’d had a gap year. Her plan was to get a job in one of the many pubs near their house in Balmain (so she could avoid paying rent), save up and head to London and Europe as soon as she could afford it.

The Acorn was down a back street, jammed in between little workers’ cottages and two-storey terraces. It had one bar, a small room full of poker machines, a little beer garden and quite a smart dining room. She walked in one weekday afternoon in December 1999, clutching a single-page résumé that tried to suggest that some babysitting, her bronze medallion lifesaving qualification and a week’s work experience at her aunt’s florist in year ten added up to a person eminently qualified to be a waitress. She was a little surprised when they gave her a trial shift.

But the shift went well, and after Margot agreed to stop filling wineglasses all the way to the brim, they hired her. The pub quickly became her life. She worked lunch and dinner shifts six or seven days a week, stopped seeing her friends from school almost entirely, and only saw her family if they were home between when she woke at eleven and headed back to work at a quarter to twelve. At 10 p.m., when the dining room closed, she went with the other waitstaff out to the beer garden, where they drank pints until well after closing. She was the youngest, but not by a lot, and the others were mostly backpackers. The chef was a shaven-headed Irishman called Brendan, and all the staff except Margot seemed to know him from home, or know his cousin from home, or know his cousin’s cousin from home.

One night, there was Tess behind the bar. Margot caught sight of her as she was seating tables of diners, handing out menus and bringing them carafes of water. Tess was new, but she seemed utterly at ease. It was clear she had more than CPR and changing the water in buckets of tulips on her résumé. She laughed and chatted with other bartender, Kieran, reaching assuredly for bottles of wine while she let the head of a three-quarter-poured pint of Guinness settle before spinning back around to top it off without spilling a drop.

Her hair was dark blonde, she was taller than Margot by about a head, and her body was strong and lithe. Later, Margot would learn that Tess hated how she looked, and called herself a huge great fat giraffe, but Margot couldn’t take her eyes off her. Given her looks and her confidence, Margot decided she was probably a bitch. One of those girls who was mates with all the boys and had no time for other girls.

She took a drink order from the dining room over to the hatch in the back of the bar and waited for Kieran or Tess to come fill it. Tess rang off an order on the till and whirled around to face Margot.

‘Hi!’ she said and gestured to the docket in Margot’s hand. ‘What’ve you got?’

‘Two chardies, a sav blanc and a schooner of New.’

‘Gotcha.’ Her accent was English and sounded slightly posh. She didn’t sound like she was one of Brendan’s third cousins twice removed.

When she had the order complete, she placed it all on a tray and slid it towards Margot. ‘There.’ She smiled. ‘All yours’— she glanced down at Margot’s name tag— ‘Margot.’ Australians gave the first syllable of her name a bleating sheep tone, but Tess rolled the ‘r’ in the back of her throat like she was speaking French. ‘Great name, by the way. Have you seen the movie?’

‘Which movie?’

‘La Reine Margot? Amazing French film about a hot young queen. With Isabelle Adjani? It’s super sexy.’

Margot had seen it on the foreign shelf at the video shop, her eye drawn not only by her own name but also by the blood-soaked beauty on the cover. She felt stupid for not ever having rented it. She wished she had been named after a hot young French queen and not after her dad’s great aunt from Leeton (a champion fruitcake maker despite having lost one arm from the elbow down in a tractor accident).

After her shift, Tess joined the dining room staff out the back for a drink. She was on vodka tonics and Margot’s fruity white wine felt childish. They didn’t talk to each other much that night, but Margot listened as Tess explained that she was twenty-one, had finished her acting degree and was seeing the world for a while. She did actually know one of Brendan’s cousins— they’d worked together at the box office of a West End theatre the year before.

Tess was the centre of attention in that beer garden. She laughed generously at people’s jokes, listened wide-eyed to their stories, and she had the knack some people have for casual touch. Somehow Tess could lean her head on someone’s shoulder, bump them playfully with her elbow or rest her hand on their forearm without it looking like a come-on. It just felt like she was spreading magic. Margot felt her envy soften, and by the time Tess linked arms with her, and they stumbled out onto the street, reminding each other loudly that they had to be quiet so as not to piss off the easily-pissed-off neighbours, she’d revised her initial assumption that Tess was a bitch. Tess was the coolest person she’d ever met, and she wanted to be her friend forever.

Extract from Your Friend and Mine by Jessica Dettmann