Frites

In the secret room where my mom and I meet to talk, we hear each other best in the silence after bad news.

Trigger warning: gun violence.

Dispatches from home are rarely uplifting. Seeing my family online is oxygen to the system but after 20 years of faraway updates, I’ve learned to appreciate the good and expect the devastatingly bad when my mom calls. WhatsApp, our secret room, is suspended in time and space. When we meet there, it hasn’t been four years since we last hugged each other. Now that I live in Melbourne I’m usually cooking dinner while she’s getting ready to face the day with me on speaker.

This evening I was making Steak Frites. I could sense from the way my mom greeted me that something troubling was waiting in the wings. It’s in the way we say hello.

Mom: Hello! (I’m so happy to hear your voice)

Mom: Oh, hello… (You’ll never believe what’s happening here)

Me: Mom? (It’s not going well, mom)

Me: Hi mom. (You’ll never believe what’s happening here)

She tells me shots were fired at a funeral yesterday. With her heavy breathing in my AirPods, I look down at the potatoes browning in the skillet. Tiny bubbles form around each wedge and I gently nudge the ones in the centre so they don’t stick. I use a slow-fry Frites recipe. Slow heating the oil and potatoes together creates smaller holes on the surface of the vegetable, which means less fat in the flesh and a crispier outcome. French fries have become my signature dish. I even judge restaurants by how good (or bad) their French fries are. To cook potatoes in oil beautifully you must know when to nudge and when to stand back and watch. You must believe in perfection at scale. You must pull yourself away from everything else that’s cooking.

Shots were fired at a funeral yesterday. I can see my aunts, cousins, and aunts who aren’t aunts exactly sitting on plastic chairs under the amber street lights outside the four-roomed house where Khul’ Z died fed up and ready to rest. I don’t see my uncles but I can hear them. My mom details the uncanny of daily violence while I fry potatoes. So, she went to the shop and they were sitting right there when they shot at his car, but luckily the kid had been taken to the grandmother’s house so nobody was hurt, but she could have lost two sons in one week. I want to remember the exact feeling of Durban winter but I’m here by the stove in southeastern Australia. I remember sitting in the big bedroom of that same house years ago at a different funeral. It was the third death I’d seen pass through Khul’ Z’s living room. I was weeks away from flying off to Oxford and disappearing for good. My cousins asked me why I was going back to school but still didn’t have a car. In the big bedroom, we exchanged phones and compared photographs. I took J’s phone and swiped through her selfies. J had dreadlocks and a silver tooth. I idolised her and keep her frozen in my mind, gasping and giggling between sips of cider at a funeral. When the lights came on in the houses around Khul’ Z’s, the barrier separating the house from the street quickly hardened. No more walking around. My handsome cousin and I snuck to a dark corner at the back of the house and exchanged taunts and whisky.

She tells me shots were fired at a funeral yesterday. I tell her that the women bury the bodies and carry the burden like she isn’t a woman. She tells me she’s glad her kids “don’t have to be around all this” like I’m not her child. When we leave the secret room I go back to my skillet of potatoes. They’re golden brown now and swollen from the heat. I want to tell someone that I’m into Riesling these days and have started adding a drop of caper brine to my go-to dressing. It’s hardly a dressing. I salt the greens, add a generous squeeze of lemon, and coat the lot in oil and caper brine before tossing. There’s choreography in Steak Frites and a side salad. I love the way the capers kiss the potatoes. And how the lemon and brine tingle around the marbled parts of the meat. I want everyone to know I don’t have a car but I can make batches and batches of French fries. I want to bring them all in from the street before it gets too dark so we can pass around a platter and talk over each other while we’re all still here.

What song takes you back home? Right now, this Melbourne band is keeping me grounded.