Cal shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t know.’
‘You haven’t read his work?’
‘A little bit. His paper isn’t online and it’s not like his reports are syndicated or anything. You know, when I started planning for this trip, I decided I should study up, get some up-to-date info. I tried reading this book on modern-day Vietnam, but it was like a fucking economics textbook so I gave up. Then I set up a Google news alert, so I’d at least keep up with the big news stories out of here. But most days all the stories are about the US, not about Vietnam at all. “Iraq is not another Vietnam”, “Vietnam Vets protest pension cuts”. So I gave up on that, too. So here I am and I have no idea what’s going on.’
‘Oh, no one has any idea what’s going on here. It’s one of the attractions of the place.’
‘Oi!’ Kerry’s voice leapt out of the background hum of chatter and motorbikes and electricity. ‘Mischa! Come and back me up here. Henry’s talking absolute shit about visa extensions again.’
‘Duty calls,’ I said and Cal hooked his arm into mine and led me back to the table like it was his own.
Later, after I’d drunk far more than I’d intended, I found myself resting my head on Matthew’s shoulder as we shared the last cigarette in his pack. I was dizzy from the unfamiliar rush of nicotine, from the gin and beer, from Matthew’s unexpected fingertips on my lips as he held the cigarette there for me.
Across from us, Cal put down the plastic umbrella he’d been twirling and waved a finger from his father to me. ‘What’s this about? Something you need to tell me, Dad?’
‘What?’ Matthew smoothed my hair, bent and sloppily kissed my eyebrow. ‘Didn’t I mention that Mish is the love of my life?’
I blew smoke in his face. ‘Cal, it’s really quite remarkable the effect you have on your father. He’s like a new man. A new, fun, likeable man. I may fall in love with him after all.’
‘What do you mean may? You’ve loved me since you set eyes on me. Cal, did I tell you, the first time Mischa saw me she literally swooned? You’ve never seen a woman so delirious with desire.’
‘Oh!’ I sat up, knocking Matthew’s chin with the top of my head. ‘That’s right. The day we met . . .’ I slumped against him again. I had remembered something Matthew said on that day and I almost repeated it now, stopping myself when I saw that Cal was watching me.
‘That was a crazy day,’ I said and Matthew laughed and kissed my forehead again. ‘God, you really are marvellous tonight, Papa Matty.’
Cal made retching noises, then asked if he could order more food.
On my first day in Hanoi six years ago, jet-lagged, hungry and numb with shock, I’d wandered away from my hotel and got mindlessly lost in the ancient, winding, cacophonous streets of the Old Quarter. In a street lined with men carving tombstones I found myself breathing into a wall. I don’t know how long I stood like that, my forehead and palms against the cool, rough brick, with the chiselling of stone and the roar of motorcycles and chatter of language swirling around me. It couldn’t have been long – as I quickly learnt, a tall white woman with dark red hair is never left alone for long in Hanoi – but it felt like hours. Even my memory of it is protracted; I feel I leant into that wall for at least as long as I had spent on all of the planes I had caught in the week leading up to it, from LA to Perth to Sydney to Bangkok to here.
Someone took my arm and led me into nearby cool dimness. Blur and noise and then I was sitting down and something cold and wet was pressed onto my face and then my neck and then my forehead. There was a drink in my hands and the chilled, sticky sweetness revived me enough that I had a moment of worry over the cleanliness of the ice clinking in the glass.
‘Thank you,’ I said to the girl blinking over me. She said something in Vietnamese and I was saved from not responding by the man I only then noticed sitting across from me. He was as pale as I was, although several days of stubble darkened the lower half of his face. He answered the girl in what sounded to me like fluent Vietnamese and she giggled and scurried off.
‘Always making people laugh,’ he said in an Australian accent. ‘Even when I’m just asking for a bottle of water. How’re you feeling?’
‘Better,’ I said and drank some more liquid sugar. ‘Not used to the heat.’
‘How long you been in Vietnam?’
I couldn’t make sense of it. I knew I hadn’t spent a night in the hotel where I’d left my bags, hadn’t even eaten a meal. I knew the sun was as bright outside as it had been when I’d climbed into the Bài airport cab. ‘Not long,’ I said finally. ‘A few hours.’
‘Ah. It can be overwhelming at first.’ He took the water bottle from the giggling waitress and passed it to me. ‘Hell, I’ve been here five years and I still get overwhelmed sometimes. How long you staying?’
I gave him the answer I’d given my sisters in Sydney. ‘I don’t know. It depends. If I like it I may never leave.’
‘Really?’
I shrugged as though it made no difference to me. ‘Do they have food here?’ I asked.
‘They do, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I was actually on my way to lunch when I saw you lurching about out there. If you’re right to walk, there’s a terrific stand around the corner.’
I went with him and didn’t feel too bad when he and the old woman behind the stove laughed at my clumsy attempts to scoop and slurp like a local. He told me his name was Matthew, that he was a journalist with the local English-language newspaper, that he lived in an apartment near the Hanoi Opera House and that he would never leave Vietnam at all if it wasn’t for his son back in Australia.
‘His mother won’t let him visit me. She’s worried I’ll keep him here, I think. I visit him two or three times a year. Every time he seems to have grown half a foot. He’s twelve now and almost as tall as me. Lovely boy, though I’d never say that to him. He’s at that age, you know, wants to be a lot of things but lovely isn’t one of them.’
I’d never been interested in children, not even my nieces and nephews. I certainly couldn’t have interest in the unseen, unnamed child of a man I’d just met. Yet I remember Matthew speaking about him, remember the exact look in his dark, watery eyes. It’s not significant, I know that. It’s because it was my first day in Hanoi, because I’d swooned in the street and been revived by sugar water and beef noodle soup and now everything was sharp and vivid and searing. I remember the nostril-stinging steam from the pot of broth on the stove, the twinge in my lower back and ache in my thighs as I perched on the child-sized plastic stool, the extraordinarily constant tooting of horns. I remember Matthew’s khaki lizard-print shirt and tan linen trousers, the way the wiry, black hairs on his forearms glistened with sweat. I remember the barefoot toddler chasing a gecko across the concrete floor and his mother, fanning herself in the furthest corner of the room and smiling every time his body crashed into our plastic table. And I remember that Matthew told me he had a son who was twelve and lovely.
After lunch, Matthew had walked me to my hotel, which was, incredibly, one street back from where we’d eaten. ‘Everything’s close here, as long as you know where you’re going. Two blocks that way,’ he said, pointing, ‘is Hoàn Lake. Nice place to sit when it all feels a bit too much.’
‘Thank you.’
His sweat dripped in two almost straight lines from each temple, but he seemed not to notice. ‘If you’re up to it, a bunch of us are going to the bar at the Metropole tomorrow night. It’s the priciest bar in the city and full of wankers, but it’s, uh, it’s my birthday actually, so . . . Well, we’ll be there pretending to be rich and oblivious. You might enjoy it.’
‘Okay,’ I said, having no idea what or where the Metropole was and no real intention of finding out by tomorrow night.
‘Tell you what,’ Matthew said, retrieving a set of keys from his pocket and jiggling them. ‘Since you’ll still be finding your way around, I’ll come by and pick you up. Seven-thirty?’
‘Okay,’ I said again and Matthew smiled an
d turned and seemed to melt into the crowd. I nodded to the smiling man at the desk and climbed the four flights of stairs to my room where I stripped off my sweat-soaked clothing and laid myself out to dry under the slow ceiling fan. I wondered what Glen was doing, who he was taking his rage out on now.
The following night, Matthew picked me up on his motorcycle which he drove like a local, weaving in and out of the traffic, ignoring lights and lines, missing other vehicles and pedestrians by millimetres. By the time we arrived at the Metropole I was shaking.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said. ‘It looks crazy but it’s actually very safe. Everybody’s paying close attention, not relying on other people obeying rules.’
Later I’d discover that thousands of people die on these roads every year. Later I’d see a woman flip over the handlebars at an intersection and have her head smash open like a watermelon. But that evening I clung to Matthew’s assurances and to the casualness with which everybody I met there talked about driving through the city. It can’t be that bad, I thought, if all of these clever, sensible people are okay with it.
Of course, most of them weren’t clever and none of them was sensible, but it took me a while to figure that out. Everybody I spoke to that night had a convincing explanation for what they were doing there and I left thinking that I had stumbled upon a community of laid-back, self-deprecating saints. Genuine doers-of-good who still enjoyed a drink and a laugh. I assumed they were all so welcoming to the frazzled, explanation-less stranger out of pity and kindness. To be fair, there was a bit of that. But mostly they were so warm because they recognised me as one of them: a damaged fuck-up unable to thrive in her own land.
I’m not saying all the foreigners in Vietnam are like that. Some of them are genuine and kind and altruistic. Some of them have a deep love for the Vietnamese culture and language and landscape. Some of them are kick-arse corporate whizzes doing their multi-national expansionist thing before jetting off to the next new boom-town. But the people at Matthew’s birthday party, the people who would become my social world, were in Hanoi because it was the only place they’d found where they could get away with being who they were. The only such place with five-star hotel bars, anyway.
Six years later, the KOTO get-together ended like so many others before it. The restaurant closed and we all bundled onto or into taxis, and waving and shouting we went our separate ways. The night sticks in my mind, though, not because it was the first time I met Cal, but because it was the first time I’d known Matthew to be happy. Not that I’d thought of him as unhappy before then. Happiness is relative, surely, and for those first years of my friendship with Matthew I had nothing to compare his to. He could say the same about me, which must make it worse for him.
That gathering sticks in my mind – in my conscience – because I laid my head on Matthew’s shoulder and felt him revivified by Cal’s presence. I wonder if he looks back and remembers a similar change in me not long afterwards. I wonder if he remembers me coming to life and now that he knows why he wishes I had stayed dead.
ver those six years in Hanoi, I had five addresses not counting the hotel I stayed in when I arrived. My last house, tucked down the back of a courtyard at the end of an alleyway behind the cathedral, had hot water and air-conditioning but neither could be guaranteed on any given day. The kitchen was a sink and stove-top in one corner of the living area. The fridge hummed loudly next to my TV. There was a rosy-tiled bathroom with a temperamental shower and an upright toilet which needed unblocking every month or so.
And there was the reason I loved it enough to put up with everything else: a bedroom that covered the entire second floor, with windows as tall as me on two sides. They were double-glazed but could not silence the bells of St Joseph and the constant rumble of the traffic. I often spent whole weekends in bed, eating honeyed cashews out of a cellophane bag and reading paperbacks from the English-language book exchange.
When I was married I fantasised about this kind of aloneness. I spent a lot of time physically alone back then, but I was accountable for that time and could get away with only a very small amount of reading or TV watching. An entire day spent in bed would have been unforgivably self-indulgent. Even when Glen was on one of his trips, I would need to report my activities hour by hour. For a long time it didn’t occur to me to lie, and then when it did, I quickly discovered what the consequences for being caught in a lie were, and so reserved my deceit for covering up essentials like phone calls from my sisters.
In my Hanoi bedroom, with the ever-present background hum of three million people and the knowledge that my landlady, all of my neighbours, the local Communist Party rep and probably the police were keeping track of my every move, I felt truly alone. Free and safe from judgement.
It didn’t last. I suppose I began to take the benign interest for granted and flaunted my freedom, inviting suspicion and scrutiny. I never discovered exactly what my neighbours knew or how they knew it, only that they had turned against me. Scorn and disgust are among those emotions easily expressed without language.
Three days after Cal arrived in Hanoi, Matthew organised a picnic lunch in Tù Giám Park. It was a Saturday and, by the time we arrived, all the gazebos had been claimed. We managed to score a patch of grass on one side of a banyan, so we had some shade at least.
Henry had brought along a workmate, a New Zealander in his early forties who wore a white linen suit and introduced himself as Collins.
‘Colin, is it?’ said Kerry, sliding her sunglasses down her nose.
‘Collins,’ he said, emphasising the s.
‘Collins just arrived from Kuala Lumpur last week,’ said Henry.
‘Promoted to Hanoi,’ Collins said. ‘How’s that for an oxymoronic phrase?’
‘How’s that for a moronic suit,’ Cal, who was sitting to my left, reading a yellowing paperback, murmured.
‘Promoted from what to what?’ Matthew asked, unloading a basket of mini-baguettes from his Foster’s beer cooler.
‘Head of IT in a small, modern, professional office to Head of IT in a wastefully large, colonial office staffed by people who think networking has something to do with fish.’
‘Sounds like they’re lucky to have you,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Oh, they are,’ Henry said. ‘We all are. That department’s useless. I could get better tech support from my housekeeper.’
‘Ah, but your housekeeper is the amazing Giang and there’s nothing she can’t do,’ said Kerry.
‘You have an actual housekeeper?’ Cal asked.
‘So do we, kiddo. Who do you think has been cleaning the place and stocking the kitchen before you get out of bed each morn— each midday?’
Cal blinked. ‘You?’
‘He’s only been here a few days,’ Henry explained to Collins.
Collins squeezed into the space between Cal and Kerry, put a pink hand on Cal’s shoulder. ‘Something you learn quickly in Asia. The value of a good housekeeper.’
Cal turned to his father. ‘So everyone here has a housekeeper?’
‘Pretty much,’ Matthew said.
Cal nodded towards an old man swinging his arms and legs in tai chi motion. ‘So he’d have one?’ He pointed to a woman dressed in a green canvas apron, picking up rubbish with black-gloved hands. ‘And her?’
‘Well, no, but you know I didn’t mean that.’
‘You said everyone.’
Matthew sighed. ‘Yes, I did. I meant all of us here. We foreigners.’
‘I was determined not to, at first,’ Kerry said. ‘My posting before this was in Malawi and I managed to do everything for myself there. But here it really is very difficult. Buying food at the markets, organising repairs or deliveries, even garbage pick-ups – if you’ve got white skin and not much Vietnamese it’s tricky and expensive. Having a housekeeper, if you find a good one, is like having a personal assistant. Not so much about cleaning as about day-to-day life stuff. I can scrub my own toilet, but hell
if I can figure out how to get my air-conditioner re-gassed.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Collins. ‘For me, the best part about these postings is not having to clean anything except my own body.’
‘Oh, I can recommend a service to do that for you too,’ Henry said and he and Collins clicked together their empty plastic glasses.
While Kerry mixed up a jug of iced lemon tea and Henry, Matthew and Collins discussed the Euro-zone crisis, I cut open the baguettes and filled them with the slivers of pork I’d roasted and sliced that morning and handfuls of shredded coriander and basil from Matthew’s roof garden. Cal squatted beside me, watching.
‘Your servant got the day off?’
‘Of course not. She’s back home polishing the silver and hand-washing my underwear.’
He smiled. ‘What’s this then – bánh mì?’
‘Ah, well, it’s inspired by bánh mì, but since I wouldn’t want to give bánh mì a bad name, I call it what it is, which is pork and herbs on a bread roll.’
‘Fancy.’
‘No. But very delicious. Here.’ I handed him a roll and he bit into it. Flakes of golden breadcrust fluttered to his lap. In four bites it was gone and his mouth was slicked with grease. He gave me a thumbs-up and licked his lips.
‘It’s a shame Amanda couldn’t make it today. She’s a fab cook. You’ll have to ask her to make you one of her pies or her choc-chip cookies. Tastes just like home, as they say.’
‘Not my home. That tastes like two-minute noodles with grated cheese on top.’
The others had gathered around and I began to hand out the rolls. Collins quizzed me on the origins of the ingredients, sniffed at the meat and crushed some basil between his fingers which he also sniffed. Finally he took a bite, chewed loudly and declared it would be better with a little shrimp paste.
‘I’ll have to try that next time,’ I said.
‘Not for me,’ Cal said. ‘I like it exactly like this.’