Songs from the Violet Cafe by Fiona Kidman

up to down there, but Hester closed up on her. What people did at the Violet Café was their own business. Ruth considered asking Freda about the café, as if with a passing professional interest, for often on the radio, which she kept switched on in the shop to the local station, she heard Freda talking in an animated way about the café, its charming ambience, the quality of its unusual menu, and the warm welcome patrons (oh what had happened to customers, Ruth wondered) would receive from its increasingly famous owner, Violet Trench. In the end, she always ended up deciding against it. She knew from Hester that Evelyn had a job at the café, filling in until she started at university.
    â€˜I don’t like to mention this,’ Freda said, ‘but the new shop is putting up a special display of guns and deer heads in the window.’
    Ruth shuddered. ‘Good luck to him, I say. The customers will get a nice bite to eat when they come here.’
    â€˜They’re something of a novelty, these book signing sessions,’ Freda observed.
    â€˜Oh, people have book parties in the cities all the time, these days,’ said Ruth airily, ‘One has to move with the times.’ Privately, she thought how tired Freda was looking.
F REDA AND E VELYN, AND, IN HIS ABSENCE, L OU
    Freda Messenger sat in front of the microphone, her finger poised on the button, waiting for her voice level to be taken. The studio was like a small cell. No natural light intruded. Between her and the technician stood a soundproof pane of glass. In these moments before the broadcast began, she was aware that intangible airwaves were her only connection with the world beyond, and this was when things always seemed as though they might slip out of her grasp. It was not that she didn’t enjoy her work as a shopping reporter. If she was asked she would say what a great privilege it was to be part of the working lives of so many people in the town, and that in return she made a valuable contribution to their businesses. But she always felt fearful just before she started, as if some secret act, more private than love or sex, was about to be performed in public. Some would call it stage fright. In preparation, she repeated a ritual that worked for her week in and week out, breathing deeply through her nose, expelling air with a slight aaaahhh, in and out, until her terror abated.
    Only today she couldn’t breathe at all. Her in breaths emerged as choking gasps. Her nose was blocked and her eyes so swollen she had kept her dark glasses on. Any moment now, she would have to take them off because under the fluorescent light tube it was impossible to read her script.
    A red light on the panel alerted her.
    â€˜Try a level now,’ said David Finke, the technician. He was a spiky-haired youth with a white face and red-rimmed eyes. He boarded in town and slept between shifts. That was all he did, he told her. Never went out, just slept. What else was there to do in this hellhole of a town, this pit of a place, reeking of hydrogen sulphide? Where would he go? If he went out he was just as likely to fall down a vent hole and be boiled in a pot like puha, or get eaten by the Maori who lived at the waterfront. He’d done science and a little music at school, before he came here, but neither of them well enough to take up a career. On his way home to his boarding house his only distraction was to check, with a long, thin laboratory thermometer, the temperature levels of the hot pools that dotted the park. Sooner or later he would get away from this place, go back to Hamilton where he grew up. This whole town was just waiting to explode. This apocalyptic view was the main topic of conversation he ever engaged in with Freda.
    She steadied herself, took a grip on the edge of the table. ‘Testing, one, two, three,’ she said and was surprised that her voice sounded normal in her ears.
    â€˜Stand by,’ said