‘You do look a wreck, Mish,’ said Kerry. ‘There’s some hair-smoothing serum stuff in the bathroom if you like. And blot your forehead while you’re in there.’
‘What a lovely welcome. I’m so pleased I came.’
‘Oh, don’t have a sulk, darling. Just pop off down the hall and fix yourself up and I’ll have a lovely glass of champers waiting for you.’
Matthew came and kissed my cheek. ‘The pom is all over Amanda who I happen to know has her sights on the busty German girl, who is apparently schtupping the goateed fellow. Meanwhile, Kerry has already necked three glasses of chardy in the last ten minutes,’ he whispered.
‘Do you think anyone will notice if I go now?’
‘Don’t you dare leave me alone with all these UN twits. You know how they get when there’s a gang of them.’
‘Ugh. Okay. I’ll be back in a sec.’
Kerry’s bathroom was at the end of a blissfully cool and quiet but claustrophobically narrow corridor. As I reached for the door it swung open.
Cal blinked, then grinned. ‘Hello.’
‘I was just . . .’ I touched my hair. ‘Got a bit mussed on the way over.’
‘It looks hot. You should always wear it like that.’
I was fairly certain he was teasing me but felt myself growing warm all the same. ‘Are you finished in there?’
‘Yeah. Um.’ He stepped back into the room so I could enter. He was wearing low-slung, skin-tight jeans and a fitted green shirt. His feet were bare and I had a pang of longing to feel the cold white tiles against my own skin. Cal stepped around me and out into the hallway, where his shoulders almost touched the walls and his brown feet looked pale against the dark-stained timber boards.
When I re-emerged with my untangled, serum-smoothed hair and powder-dry skin, Kerry was ordering everybody into place around the table. I was second from the end, beside Cal and across from Kerry, who was flanked by Christopher and the man from the UN. Amanda had been shoved down the far end with the UN women, Henry and Matthew. I wondered if Kerry did not see me as a sexual competitor because I was her friend, or because she thought me unattractive. It can’t have been that she knew Christopher wasn’t my type, because I hadn’t been with enough men to have established one.
‘How are you enjoying Hanoi?’ I asked Christopher.
‘What an interesting choice of words.’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘How am I enjoying. Enjoying. Begs the question wouldn’t you say?’ He looked me in the eye. ‘I am not, is the answer. If you want to know how I am finding Hanoi then the answer is, er, unenjoyable. It must be one of the nastiest places I’ve been.’
Under the table, Cal hooked his ankle over mine.
‘Oh’, I think I said.
Kerry cackled and squeezed Christopher’s arm. ‘He’s joking.’
‘I am not. It’s miserably humid and loud, you can’t walk twenty feet without being accosted by scam artists and beggars. And everything smells like piss and fish.’
‘Everything does? Even here?’ Kerry waved her arms. Balinese bangles jangled from her wrists to her elbows.
He sniffed. ‘No. Here it smells of chicken and piss.’
‘Your reaction is typical,’ said the UN man, in an affected mid-Atlantic drawl. He stroked the strip of brown fuzz on his chin and I remembered my previous conversation with him. He’d been on a spiritual retreat up near the Chinese border and felt moved to share every moment of revelation he’d experienced.
‘The thing about Vietnam,’ he went on, leaning across Kerry in an attempt to make eye contact with Christopher, ‘is that you need to give it time. It doesn’t work straight away. You need to stick around long enough that the noise and heat become background. Then the magic begins.’
‘The magic?’ Christopher asked, with undisguised scorn.
‘Yeah, for real. You talk to people who’ve been in country a long time and I promise, the longer they’ve been here, the more whole they are, the more authentic, you know? This place just does something to you. But you have to let it.’
‘Wow,’ said Cal. ‘The Vietnamese must be the most whole and authentic people on earth then.’
‘Ah, well, that’s a different thing. For the Vietnamese, the earth is soaked in blood. Ghosts haunt the jungles and rivers. It’s a belief of theirs, you know, that the dead whose bones are not gathered up and reburied are prevented entry to heaven. Imagine all the dead from the wars, scattered all over. Millions of lost, wandering ghosts. Of course people who believe that are going to have a different relationship to the land than we do.’
‘We?’
‘He means westerners, Cal,’ Kerry said.
‘Ah, but I’m a mongrel. I wonder,’ he said in a tone I could only describe as aggressively innocent, ‘if I stay here a long time, will my white half become whole and authentic or will my Vietnamese half become haunted by ghosts?’
Christopher snorted.
‘Well, that’s an interesting thought.’ The UN man leant forward, stroking his fuzz. ‘What’s your feeling, being here? Do you feel, if I can put it this way, more connected? More real?’
‘Are you serious?’ Cal laughed.
I pressed my ankle hard into his. He pressed back.
‘I don’t know what it’s like in the countryside or jungle,’ Christopher said, ‘but I can’t imagine what kind of person could possibly feel connected to this place. I spent ten minutes on the street outside Kerry’s office this afternoon and saw half a dozen people wander out to the footpath – if you can call it that – and fling plastic bags of garbage into the gutter!’
‘Oh, silly,’ Kerry poked his arm. ‘That’s just how you get your garbage collected. The bags aren’t going to stay out there.’
‘Seriously, Cal,’ the UN man said. ‘I’m interested in your experience as a member of the diaspora. What is it like to be among your people?’
‘The only one of my people here is that pasty bloke down the end of the table.’
He squinted down at Matthew, then gave Cal a look I interpreted as pity. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s people, I meant.’
‘They’re not my mother’s people, either. Her people had to hide under piles of rotting fish for a month to escape from the people here.’
Christopher chortled and the UN man scowled at him before leaning so far across the table toward Cal he was almost prone. ‘Do you feel no kinship with the people here? Or with the land?’
Cal shook his head at the ceiling. Beneath the table, his ankle moved up and down my shin.
I decided speaking would be a normal thing to do at this point. ‘We published a piece in the magazine recently about members of the diaspora who’ve returned to Vietnam. It was fascinating. They came from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of situations, but almost all of them spoke about a sense of completeness when they returned home.’
‘Bullshit,’ Cal said and I might have been stung by his tone if his foot wasn’t trailing up the inside of my calf. ‘I bet they weren’t from all kinds of backgrounds. I bet they were all marketing-savvy, English-speaking with businesses to promote. I bet they all said exactly what the reporter wanted to hear and when the interview was over they went back to bitching about the corruption or undrinkable water or traffic.’
‘Oh, bravo!’ Christopher said. ‘This kid knows what’s what.’
‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’
‘It’s a relief to hear someone speaking the truth about this bloody place.’
‘Here we go.’ The UN man threw his hands up. ‘Someone who’s been here a couple of days praising as true the opinion of someone who’s been here a couple of weeks.’
‘There’s a saying,’ Kerry said, too loudly, ‘that if you want to write a book about Vietnam you should only stay a week. Any longer and you’ll realise you know nothing.’
‘I’m not writing a bloody book. Having been asked, I’m giving my impression of the damn place. Or is there a minimum time one must be “in country” b
efore one is allowed to have an opinion at all, let alone express one?’
‘You can give your impression, mate, but don’t go assuming I’m with you just because I call bullshit on one crap article. I’ll tell you one thing, since I’ve been here I’ve heard more white people talk more crap than I have in a lifetime of living surrounded by white people talking crap.’
Kerry threw me a desperate look. The pressure from Cal’s foot intensified along with his pitch and I was feeling rather desperate myself.
‘The chicken is so good, Kez. I can’t remember the last time I had a proper roast.’
Kerry grinned maniacally. ‘Yes, I personally taught Hai how to do it homestyle, none of this boiled in a pot then crisped for ten minutes crap. I taught her to bake the veg, too. She enjoyed it, I think. Using an oven is a bit of a novelty for a Vietnamese.’
‘Thanks for changing the subject, Mischa,’ Cal said. ‘We were almost having a real conversation. So relieved you brought it back to trivial bullshit.’
‘Oh, Cal.’ Kerry’s cheerfully scolding tone was contradicted by the murder in her eyes.
‘Hope you’re behaving yourself up there!’ Matthew called down the table.
‘You’re very welcome,’ I said to Cal and kicked his foot away. I tucked my feet under my chair and asked the UN man his views on the street vendor crackdown.
While Hai cleared the table and prepared dessert, Kerry led me to the balcony to tell me that Christopher had turned into a total prat in the years since she’d seen him, but that he was only staying five nights and she wanted to keep him onside so she could at least enjoy herself while he was here.
It was at least ten degrees hotter out than in, and I was damp all over before Kerry drew breath.
‘Don’t whinge to me,’ I said, moving to the far edge in an attempt to catch the non-existent breeze. ‘I was the one keeping things nice.’
‘I know, darling, thank you. Keep on doing that, okay? I have to go back in. Amanda may not like fucking men but she sure as hell enjoys making them think she does.’
As I turned to follow her, Cal came out and draped his arms over the rail, staring intently at the streaky grey wall of the neighbouring building.
‘Great view,’ he said.
‘Having fun?’
‘Time of my life.’
‘I can tell, by how charming you’re being.’
He turned his head and gave me the briefest smile. ‘I’m a teenager. I’m supposed to be surly.’
‘I’ll leave you to it then.’
He sprang towards me, held my arm, dropped it. ‘I just can’t believe how much shit they were talking in there. Even you, Mischa. I didn’t think you were like that.’
‘Like what?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘That crap about the feeling complete, chatting up that soul-patch douche. Not to mention the lovely-fucking-chicken hose-down.’
‘Being polite, making conversation, complimenting the hostess. You didn’t think I was like that?’
‘Yeah. I thought you were the kind of person to call bullshit, to make a scene, you know?’
‘Oh, no. Definitely not. You’re thinking of someone else.’
He squinted at me in the dim light, his hands crammed into his pockets, his sharp hip bones jutting at me through his jeans. His feet were still bare. When he went inside he would tramp the black Hanoi dust into Kerry’s carpet.
‘No, I’m thinking of you,’ he said. ‘You think I don’t know you, but I do.’
My chest heaved as though I’d come to a sudden stop after running for miles, and he curled his hand over his heart and didn’t smile.
Inside, Kerry had rearranged the seating. ‘So everyone can meet each other,’ she said. I was stuck between Amanda and Henry. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ we each said loudly and then slumped in our seats and mumbled nastily about the others. Cal was swallowed by the UN women at the other end of the table. They were closer to his age than I was and, from his frequent blasts of laughter, I guess they were more entertaining, too.
I wasn’t jealous; I was relieved. I couldn’t look at him. I stayed up my end of the table and pretended to drink much more than I actually did. I felt volatile enough without getting drunk. I had no idea what I might do.
At home that night, I emailed my sisters.
M & M,
Guess what? I’ve met a boy, the loveliest looking creature you’d ever see & smart & kind to boot, and he seems to have a crush on me! Weird, I know. It’s possible that I’m imagining things, like the giddy, ageing divorcee I am, but . . . I don’t think so.
Well, sisters, you always say I never tell you anything, so there: I’ve told you something.
Kisses,
M
For years my body was a mirror for Glen’s mood. Clear and smooth, glowing pink with sex, splattered purple and tan with rage. An angry night would leave me hobbling and squinting like a crone. A blissful night and I would float through the day like a teenager in the first rush of love. I was beautiful or repulsive when he said so, and the rest of the time my appearance was a marker of order. A jiggly body or flyaway hair was, like unvacuumed floors and undusted shelves, a sign of laziness and disorder.
Glen and his friends would speak contemptuously of women who ‘let themselves go’ after they were married. I always thought it sounded wonderful, though I wondered how these other women dared to do it, to stop holding everything inside, to let go.
In Vietnam, I’d done just that. It would have been pointless to do otherwise; fitting in physically was impossible and, in any case, no one except me would notice or care. I dressed for the heat and the grime and the climbing on and off of motorbikes. I ate whatever smelt delicious whenever I felt hungry. Children sometimes laughed at my hair or clamoured to stroke my pale skin. Shop girls fretted over finding pants that would fit me and seamstresses hollered my measurements across the floor or alleyway, excited by the challenge of sewing clothing of such size. Men looked at me, but never made passes. I had become used to being viewed as interesting but sexless.
So of course I wondered – then and many times since – why Cal was interested in me. When he looked at me, I didn’t feel admired so much as recognised. It was like he saw me as his partner in some enterprise so secret that even he didn’t know about it yet.
Both my sisters responded to the email within hours. Mel was thrilled at the notion and hoped I would send a photo of the lovely lad. Margi was tickled too, in her cautious, motherly way: Well, enjoy the attention, Mish. You deserve some happiness.
It’s an odd idea, that some people deserve happiness. As though the universe should compensate us for bad luck and sadness. As though happiness was something one could earn through suffering. If that were true, then I’d be in a stupefyingly long line of sad souls waiting for their payout.
But I’m being too literal. All Margi meant was that she loved me.
did not act. For several weeks I lived in a deliberate fog. I didn’t think through any scenarios, but I did begin noticing what seemed to me a new breed of Viet boys. Tall and well-muscled, with white teeth and an air of entitlement. But why shouldn’t they feel entitled, I asked myself? They were not the trespassers here.
At work, some bureaucratic situation I had no hope of understanding had occurred and, as a result, every translator on the department’s books needed to work fifty-hour weeks until the end of the month. We had double the staff necessary for the magazine which meant the translations for Mrs Lam’s book began to ping into my editing folder at the rate of one or two a day.
My new favourite was the story of . In 1950, at the age of sixteen, she lobbed a grenade into a French battalion, killing an official and injuring twenty soldiers. She was held in a tiger cage in island prison for two years before becoming the first Vietnamese woman to be executed by the French administration.
‘They don’t make ’em like they used to,’ Julian said, after he’d proof-read my rewritten version of her story. ‘Sixteen year olds these days a
re total twits.’
‘Nah, it’s a put-on,’ Mario said. ‘That whole bullshit coy, giggly virgin thing.’
‘God, yeah, the giggling. Every fucking Vietnamese girl you speak to.’ He put his palm over his mouth and gave a good impersonation of a giggling child. ‘Watched too many of those Korean soaps. Give me one of those 1950s girls. The kind who’d hurl a grenade without cracking a sweat. That’d be just the thing.’
‘Nah, nah, mate, you don’t get it. They’re all like that. Every last one of them would firebomb your house while you slept if they thought they’d get a few thousand dong out of it. These girls, they do what works and, because the rich tâys are such soft-cocks, what works is that shy giggly crap. They’re all hard-arse grenade-throwers underneath.’
I took back my story, silently vowing to never ask Julian to proof-read another entry.
‘What’s extraordinary,’ I said, ‘is that you guys actually think you’re being insightful.’
‘Come on, Mish, you’ve been here long enough. You can’t think the local girls are as sweet and innocent as they pretend?’
‘That’s not the point. There’s no war on. None of us is walking around with grenades in our pockets and murder in our hearts. Doesn’t mean we’re not capable of it.’
Mario held up his palms. ‘Speak for yourself.’
‘Yeah, see, a Viet woman would never talk that way.’
A wave of exhaustion washed over me. I slipped my headphones on and turned the volume to nine.
The first storm of the typhoon season hit as suddenly and violently as always. One moment I was walking along Tràng , slick with sweat, and the next I was dashing for the cover of an awning, which, within minutes, was creaking under the weight of water. On the road in front of me, motos swarmed to the kerb, drivers leapt off their seats and flipped them up to pull out their brightly coloured rain ponchos. There was a flutter of blue, pink, yellow and orange and then the bikes were flashing past again, the drivers seeming to swell and shrink as their ponchos puffed out with the wind, then flattened with rain.