Scission

‘Married long, dears?’ the old woman asked as they made to leave.

  ‘Two days,’ Ann said, drinking the last of her lemonade with some effort.

  ‘Well, if you could have some of our forty years, you’d be a happy couple, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Halfway along the cliffs where the radio wires drooped like laden clotheslines, Philip laughed suddenly and swung the bag of cockles up high.

  ‘The old bastard didn’t even give us the sauterne.’

  There was a coldness in the hut that night. The delicacies remained untouched, the cockles went rank on the bench, the wind blew and the lamp hissed. They ate bread and honey and put their elbows up on the deal table, unable to say much. They found it difficult to even allow their eyes to meet. In bed, Philip thought of his friend, the one whose illness had shocked him so. As she tried to read the opening of Under the Volcano, Ann thought of the old woman’s words: ‘You’ll have one like it, someday’ with a turning in her belly.

  Ann whimpered in her sleep. Philip was awake. Surf cracked down on the beach. The wires kept up their mournful sound.

  Towards noon the next day Ann and Philip sat in the sun on the broad beach, and sketched and took photographs.

  ‘What are you drawing?’ he asked.

  ‘The cliffs. What are you taking pictures of?’

  ‘You drawing the cliffs.’

  ‘Here come our mates,’ she said.

  Philip turned the zoom down along the beach, focussed and groaned. ‘And they’re bringing a bag. He’s gonna get some cockles, I’ll bet. Not to be outdone.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have put them in his hat.’

  ‘He wanted them. Hang on . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hang on . . .’ Philip got to his feet. ‘Something’s wrong. The old man’s down.’

  ‘But what’s wrong?’

  Philip saw the woman moving frantically about the prostrate figure. ‘Oh, God, we better help.’

  They ran, folio flapping, camera chest-beating, and the sand broke their gait and made them stumble. The old woman was now flailing the air with her hands, hat fallen to the sand beside the head of her husband. She began to shout, then scream.

  As he leant over the old man, the swinging lens of the camera caught Philip on the nose and he was blinded. Ann put her head to the man’s chest and heard respiration. The woman cried: ‘His heart, his old heart!’

  They hoisted him onto Philip’s back and tied his wrists together with his belt and threw his arms over Philip’s head. For a few moments Philip felt the old man’s breath in his ear. He could barely see. His nose bled. Fifty yards away, the path up the cliff began. Words, talking noise, plans, advice, regrets, they were all mashed in his ear with the sound of his own exertion. Near the top, where the footing was firmer and the noise of the wind in the wires could be heard, Philip felt a hot wet flush down the small of his back, in the waistband of his jeans and down the back of his legs.

  Ann did not drive as fast as she could have. No one had conceded the old man’s death yet, even though his body, sprawled across the back seat, head in the old woman’s lap, was quite lifeless. She saw Philip’s white face with its congealed blood smears. He looked out at the road. It was an hour before a word was spoken. The town limits were visible. Then the old woman spoke.

  ‘Jim loved his cockles,’ she said composedly. ‘Loved them.’

  Ann, watching in the rear view mirror asked: ‘Did you know his heart was bad?’

  ‘Oh yes, dear, only I didn’t know how bad. He didn’t enjoy teaching those boys, I’m sure. No, his heart was bad. I should have guessed it was giving him funny turns the other night when he went for a walk before dark and came back without his shoes. He was all confused, said he didn’t know where they were. He went straight to bed. I heard him crying in the night – it must have been the pain, poor love. Well, we had a good life, dears.’ She began to weep.

  Philip’s mouth was open slightly. Ann had noticed it was the way he slept. She seemed to be driving faster, the curves seemed more centrifugal. Ann cleared her throat. The sound made Philip flinch. Their eyes met. It was only a moment. Then they were inside the town.

  The Oppressed

  for Loi Hong Quan

  They are like children sitting in the market place and calling to one another,

  ‘We piped to you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not weep.’   Luke 7:32

  1

  WE ARE hugging. Our arms and faces and palms touch. Skins brush contrasts across one another. Their eyes glitter in their tall, pale bodies. They are Australian. I am still Chinese. We laugh exultantly. It has been months since we met. They used to visit me at the migrant hostel. But I have not come alone: by my side, Hoa is silent, half afraid of the strange boisterousness of Mary and Simon. They tug me and punch me on the back, though they become subdued when they notice Hoa and her stillness.

  ‘You’re back, mate,’ says Simon who is a shaggy-haired youth. He is younger than me, friendly, and impatient, it seems, to be friendlier. ‘Quoi, you’re back!’

  Mary slips an arm around his waist as she often does, with her weight on one foot. She is sensitive, I feel; she wants to know things, to feel things. These are young people, and I, so little their senior, feel like an old man with them. And yet, what do I know that I would have them experience? Her narrow, pleasant face beaming, Mary asks many questions at once, almost in a single breath. There is a smell of roses in this park with its crusty statues of horses and men poised, rising and rushing forwards, clamouring silent. And browning roses.

  ‘Yes. I am back.’

  Their faces smile until they seem they may split like mangoes.

  ‘It’s great,’ Mary says. I call them ‘mate’ and they laugh as we stroll in the sweet space between rosebeds. We are quiet for a moment; even the traffic is subdued. Mary smiles at Hoa, uncertain, but friendly. Hoa is unused to their ways and remains silent. She feels like an intruder, I am sure, but my relationship with these people is difficult to explain. They invited me into their home. They helped me. How can I explain such a thing? She folds her hands neatly over her cheap cotton dress. Her figure is minutely fine compared with the motherly thighs and hips of Mary. Their bodies seem to have thickened during these months, whilst mine has strengthened and hardened. They tell me so, and seem ashamed of their softness.

  ‘Who’s your friend, Quoi?’ Mary asks.

  I introduce Hoa, embarrassed at my neglect. They say hello in unison and Hoa nods politely. They are noticing her silence and I can feel them wondering. Silence worries them.

  Those long reeking, wallowing nights we learned silence, huddling on the aft deck of the stolen boat watching lights pass us spectrally on the water, that water which yields more than fish and weed, throwing bloating things upon the beaches, that water which knocked fists of wavelets against the boat’s hull, beckoning, taunting us with the men and women it still withheld . . .

  As we walk down William Street towards the art gallery, I tell them of Broome and the other towns they have yet to see. It is very like home, I say, explaining the climate and the palms and the tides, and describing the humid, sultry nights drinking beer with the noisy Aboriginals who frighten us, but smile often and whitely in the dark. Some Europeans drink with us, call us Charlie, speak rudely to the Aboriginals. Beautiful, lonely nights sipping draughts of prickly-cold beer with froth boiling over the lip of the glass. Saigon beer, I say, has not been so good for years. Simon says he thought we drink rice wine. He is joking, I am sure. Both he and Mary seem disturbed when I say Russian beer is no match for American beer. I feel sure Simon wishes to reply, but he refrains from comment.

  ‘Where did you meet Hoa?’ Mary asks, avoiding more talk on beer.

  Dismissed from my job as a deckhand without warning, I sat by the post office watching the waves bracing the rugged piles of the jetty as a new boat berthed, off-loading tired men who came up to collect their mail. In my hands I clutched two l
etters, one from my company who regretted this and that, and the other from Simon and Mary who joked about a string of illegal pearls I should bring back to use as checkers to renovate the battered set we idylled over by the river on summer evenings when we ate freshly netted prawns. It was hot and I clenched the paper between my fingers, for the first time without a reservoir of resolve, only apprehension. People speaking in the post office . . .

  I begin to tell Simon and Mary the parts that are not so tedious to tell.

  The people at the post office were asking me did I want a job. I walked down to the jetty with them, four Eastern European men with difficult accents. A deckhand died at sea, they said, and they seemed dazed. Perhaps they too knew death, but not at sea as I did. It was nothing new to me. I noticed these men were speaking to me as though I was stupid. This would be a hard job, I was sure. A girl’s face appeared for a moment near a hatch. She was also Chinese. My spirits rose. She did not smile . . .

  ‘Many Vietnamese working up there?’ Simon asks. He forgets what I have told them of our origin. Does he do this on purpose? I tell him of the Chinese, Filipinos, Malaysians and others. No one else could allow themselves to be treated so poorly, except the Aboriginals who no longer seem to bother. Few need money as badly as us. Fewer know what Australian money is worth in our country.

  I speak of the advantages of the black market and how I send money home through its revaluing channels to my parents and family in Saigon. Simon and Mary speak in gently disapproving tones. I cannot explain. There is too much for them to know.

  As I mounted the gangplank, the girl’s head appeared once more and I stared and lost my footing. My belongings bobbing sulkily about, I swam to the jetty, with the crew laughing down at me . . .

  Hoa’s shoulder brushes against me. Is she glad that these people are my friends? More than once have I thought they would make formidable enemies, so irrepressible is their idealism and goodwill. Hoa is frightened. She does not know how they will react. Her mouth is tight.

  ‘Rough seas?’ asks Simon, perhaps he is testing me.

  ‘Nothing is too rough when there is somewhere to go,’ I say with a smile. Simon nods soberly. They react this way when I mention the refugee boat. I feel they mention it to remind themselves. Sometimes they are angry and tearful about it, but more often sober and quiet.

  We go into a dirty café which smells of bacon and coarse antiseptic, the sort of place Americans eat in. I am confused. Simon and Mary cannot afford to buy food. This is why we are going to the gallery which costs nothing. We sit at a slippery Laminex table with a chromed napkin-dispenser and a cracked glass sugar bowl. Simon puts the dispenser against the wall to make it like Australian toilet paper. We laugh, not really embarrassed. My brother, who designs American bathrooms would laugh loud if he were with us.

  Four egg and bacon burgers come, the sort we ate in the American places in Saigon. It was fashionable for students then. Hoa is gripping my hand. This will be hard for her. Mary and Simon seem not to notice as she spills lettuce and tomato into her lap, eyes down, humiliated. She has not yet learned to eat without her front teeth. I am embarrassed for them. People are staring, some nudging and making unquiet fun. I am embarrassed for Hoa. And perhaps myself. And my people.

  She only ever told me once, late at night when most of the crew were resting and in Chinese in case they weren’t. How the Thais dragged her across the deck by her legs and tied them apart with all the other people sobbing and looking away. How she had heard them beating the young men, tearing the instruments from the boat, smashing, urinating, threatening, leering as she waited mutely, too frightened to speak until she saw things which made her cry out, and she tasted the brass end of the rifle butt in her mouth, the oily, bloody taste, and the fragments and singing nerves she could not spit out. I could not know it as she did, but I had things of my own.

  Some I have told to these, my innocent friends. I say nothing of Hoa’s boat. They have guessed and Mary is crying.

  The night I spoke of the Gulf of Thailand, Simon, too, cried; ashamed, he said. Even the Thais will not fish there, now. Their nets are invariably snagged on sunken vessels and often break under the strain of the bodies dredged up. Was Simon ashamed of mankind, or ashamed of crying?

  2

  Massive as walls, the paintings lean down upon us, clotted oils glistening as if still wet. I watch the ‘cybernetic structure’ whose photocells react to my presence, my shadow, my height. It beeps and blurts sounds, audibly reacting to me. Can it tell what I am thinking? It is a marvellous thing.

  Mary and Simon steer us down long rows of pictures to a small collection of watercolours. There, says Simon. The watercolours are of men and women – peasants – working in rice paddies. They form a progression. Dread plummeting through me, I realize that these are of the war. Helicopters, candy-bars, the rickety skeleton of a live child, huts aflame. Old miseries. Hoa and I walk away, leaving Simon and Mary peering carefully at each frame, murmuring to each other in serious, indignant tones.

  Puzzled, they join us at the display model of the new Congress Hall the government is building, ‘Parliament House’. The model is beautiful, so pure, precise in its engineering. I feel the formulae in my mind, the slide rule hingeing against the heel of my palm, and for a moment I am resentful of such things as dirty pearling boats. The symmetry and wholeness of the structure are not apparent to Simon and Mary who pass sarcastic comments.

  ‘Such technology,’ I say. ‘Marvellous.’

  ‘Bloody marvellous,’ says Simon, straining to be polite.

  ‘You have made great advances. Like the Americans.’

  They nod, and I am uncertain about the cause of their sudden ill-feeling.

  ‘Bloody America,’ Mary whispers.

  On the boat with the crew sleeping around me, my hands sore from the shells and the salty cuts, I thought, not about the starless nights huddled on the deck of the other boat, but felt the old formulae in my head reeling outwards, ready to unfold themselves on paper, to do my work for me. I longed to write them into the stiff brief postcards to Mary and Simon, but they would not understand. In any case, the formulae are different here, they told me at the Institute of Technology. Not even Hoa would understand the formulae. She has had little education. It is easier, sometimes, without.

  3

  Christmas Eve. On the way to a party in Mary’s old car, we speak of small things, avoiding the subject of the watercolours we saw yesterday. The exhibition was called ‘The Oppressed’. Mary and Simon want to discuss it with me.

  ‘Hoa is at the dentist,’ I say. I miss her tonight.

  ‘On Christmas Eve?’

  ‘He is Chinese. A favour.’

  We become quiet.

  ‘Those pictures,’ Simon says. ‘Yesterday, those pictures – I thought you’d like them, Quoi.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘But it’s about cruelty, destruction, oppression.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ve been there,’ says Mary.

  ‘And do not wish to return. Such things are for those who have not been there.’

  These people are concerned about politics, but only of a sort. They think in fiery, innocent terms – in principles. But politics – it is how much food and who will die. We have grown up without time to wield these principles, only a numbness.

  I had never lived in a bamboo hut and worn no shoes until the Area Camp. My father, a taxi driver, saved for our education over many years, before the Americans, even. Saigon had no rice paddies where we lived . . .

  Simon is trying to distract my attention from a slogan on a bus shelter which almost glows in the dark. I wish they would not worry.

  ‘Bastards,’ says Mary, driving faster.

  On the back lawn we sit drinking good beer, eating the grapes, watermelon, cheese, apricots and biscuits that Mary’s friends bring around. I have read nothing on Christmas, and it has not been explained to me. No one mentions it. The beer is good and for a while we
talk quietly between ourselves, joking about the seeds Simon is spitting into the garden. They are trying to protect me.

  ‘Have you ever had food like this before?’ a wriggling curly-haired girl asks, holding a stick of English cheese under my nose. I answer politely, telling her I have. She calls to a friend. Simon and Mary are ill-at-ease.

  ‘Hey, come and meet this Vietnamese bloke!’

  ‘He’s Chinese,’ Simon says with a measure of authority. I cannot help but smile.

  The drinking is heavy, many people are dancing to music I cannot understand. American music. Some serious young people are talking around me.

  ‘Who were the worst?’ asks one. ‘The Yanks or the French?’

  Before I can answer another speaks over me.

  ‘Was the corruption in Saigon —’

  ‘Ho Chi Minh City,’ interrupts the other.

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘What do you do?’

  I tell them my qualifications and those of my eldest brother. I tell them my father drives a taxi and how he bribed an official to ignore my absence temporarily.

  ‘Poor bastard’s a victim.’

  ‘American product.’

  They speak about me as if I am not present.

  ‘Shut up!’ Simon is shouting. ‘Go bite your watermelons or something.’

  ‘Geez, Sime,’ someone calls, ‘the proletariat cries out.’

  They all laugh. Simon and Mary gather their things and we leave, climbing over the bodies in the garden and the asbestos fence. They are apologizing for their friends as we get into the car.

  ‘Bloody idiots,’ hisses Mary, looking helplessly at Simon.

  ‘We’re sorry, Quoi,’ he says.

  Both are confused and embarrassed.

  ‘It was good tucker,’ I say, a word from the lugger. It catches them by surprise and they smile, and Mary leans over and kisses me on the forehead.

  ‘They wish me to be a peasant,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Simon. ‘I suppose it would be easier for us, too.’