The Pause

by John Larkin

  I was raised a Christian because of Dad, but a questioning one thanks to Mum. It was the nutjobs who turned me agnostic. The righteous, the zealots, the egocentrics, the narcissists, the extremists – they destroy it for the rest of us.

  The arrogance of people who believe that God has an individual tailored plan mapped out for them is the very height of narcissism, I reckon. Do they ever stop to think about that photo of that little girl in Ethiopia? The one where she is squatting down in exhaustion on the way to a UN food station when an enormous vulture lands next to her? Was it God’s plan for the vulture to eat that little girl?

  I heard a story about a man who emerged from a bus crash in Egypt, where the bus had rolled down a mountain, killing everyone but him. He claimed in an interview that Allah was looking out for him. Does that mean Allah was ignoring the rest of the passengers? Was Allah displeased with them? Were they unworthy, or was the guy just lucky?

  It’s when people enter into a private dialogue with God and gain strength from such conversations that the true beauty of faith emerges. But unlike Maaaate, I don’t think for one second that God is going to stop me from jumping into the path of an oncoming train. He’s not going to stop Lisa’s skin being whacked raw by The Kraken. He’s not going to pluck one guy out of a bus crash in Egypt to prove that he exists, just as he’s not going to make your football team win, your Lotto numbers come up, or help you with your parallel parking. For that is the price we pay for free will. And if God does in fact exist, then apart from life itself, that is the greatest gift he could give us.

  I insist we get to the yum cha restaurant early. It’s Saturday morning, the day after I’ve been released into the wild, and from what I remember from my last visit here with Lisa, it can get quite crowded. Too much longer and all the tables will be taken and we’ll have to wait around for about an hour or maybe more.

  Kate nudges me in the ribs as we walk in. ‘Look, douche,’ she says excitedly. ‘Is that for real? Is it allowed?’

  I turn around to Mum. ‘Have you cut back her Ritalin again?’

  ‘Declan,’ says Mum. ‘You know she doesn’t take it anymore.’

  ‘Seriously!’ says Kate, practically leaping out of her skin as she points at the sign above the door. ‘Fuck me.’

  ‘Kate!’ snaps Mum.

  But Kate’s wound up like a caffeine-affected chihuahua. ‘It’s called “Fuck Me”, Mum.’

  ‘“Fuck Me, Mum”?’ I say.

  ‘No,’ says Kate still looking at the sign. ‘Not “Fuck Me, Mum”. That’d be silly. Just “Fuck Me”.’

  ‘Kate!’ snarls Mum. ‘Stop it, before we’re escorted away by security.’

  I sigh and look at Kate. She has absolutely no filter. She doesn’t care who hears her or who she offends. In fact, I don’t even think it would occur to her that she might be offending anyone. Meanwhile, I’m attempting to display the sophisticated air of someone who has been to yum cha more times than he can remember. Well, okay, six: three times with Lisa, twice with Chris and Maaaate, and once with Mum.

  ‘It’s “Fook Mei”,’ I say, though my Cantonese seems destined to remain at kindergarten level. I try to make the ‘Fook’ rhyme with ‘puke’, which is probably not great now that I think about it.

  But Kate’s so hypo by this point I don’t think she can hear me, so I decide to toy with her for a bit. ‘That’s actually its shortened name.’

  ‘Declan, don’t,’ says Mum from behind as the balding man in beige – otherwise known as Dad – leads his clan towards the ‘Wait to be Seated’ sign.

  ‘The full name,’ I continue, ‘is “Fook Mei Sideways”.’

  I can hear Mum’s intake of breath as if she’s about to tell me off, but she snorts with supressed laughter instead.

  ‘“Fook Me Sideways”?’ says Kate.

  ‘Yeah,’ I continue, because playing with Kate’s gullibility is a bit of a hobby of mine. ‘Before the renovations you could only access the restaurant through the alley, which was so narrow that you had to turn sideways to get down it, so they named the place …’

  ‘“Fook Me Sideways”,’ says Kate again and Mum is snorting so much now she sounds like an asthmatic warthog.

  ‘Stop it, Declan,’ she says, but it’s hard for her to speak and for me to take her seriously when she’s biting her lip. ‘Don’t listen to him, Kate. He’s having you on.’

  ‘It makes sense though,’ says Kate. ‘I mean, if you could only get in sideways.’

  If I look at Mum at this point I know we’ll both end up rolling about on the floor kicking and screaming.

  Captain Embarrassment decides to draw attention to himself, as if his beige pants and battery-operated Hawaiian shirt weren’t bad enough. ‘Lei ho ma-rrrr,’ says Dad, ratcheting up the cringe factor which, on wardrobe choice alone, is already running pretty close to DEFCON 1.

  ‘Morning,’ says the bored waiter, who is about as Chinese as me.

  ‘We’d like a table for four, please,’ says Dad.

  Not one to waste words, the waiter hands Dad a ticket and gestures towards the stairs.

  ‘You’re not allowed to ask for a knife and fork,’ I say to Dad as he leads us up the stairs.

  ‘Oh,’ he sulks. ‘You know I’m next to useless with chopsticks.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I say. ‘Either use your hands, go hungry, or sharpen one of your chopsticks and use it as a spear.’ I turn to Kate. ‘Same for you.’

  ‘You’re not the boss of me,’ says Kate, lapsing into tween cliché.

  But I’m adamant. ‘No knives and forks. Got it?’

  ‘It looks like the floor will be eating well today,’ says Mum.

  A waitress greets us at the top of the stairs with a warm smile. She’s wearing a blue, figure-hugging traditional Chinese cheongsam. ‘Table for four?’ she says.

  Dad nods and hands her the ticket. We follow the waitress to our table, which is right at the back of the restaurant.

  ‘Drinks?’ asks the waitress when we’re seated.

  ‘Mm goi bei cha ngoh?’ I say.

  The waitress looks at me as if I’ve just asked to inspect her bra. ‘Ha? Lei sik gong joong mun?’

  ‘Ngoh jeng hai sik giu cha,’ I reply.

  I can feel Mum, Dad and Kate all staring at me with their mouths hanging open.

  The waitress gives me a stunning smile. ‘Dung yut dung, ngoh lor bei lei.’

  I nod. ‘Mm goi.’

  ‘Well,’ says Dad after the waitress has taken everyone’s drink orders and gone. ‘As you know, it takes a lot to impress me, but son, you just impressed the shite out of me.’ Dad, like a lot of Irish people, thinks saying shit with an ‘e’ tacked on the end makes it less offensive.

  ‘What did you say to her?’ asks Mum, equally taken aback by my bilingualism. If there is such a word as ‘bilingualism’.

  ‘For all I know, I just ordered a deep-fried hedgehog and two sautéed badger balls on a stick. But I think I asked her for some Chinese tea. Lisa taught me.’

  Mum reaches across the table and pats the back of my hand. I don’t pull away.

  ‘Well, fook mei sideways,’ says Kate and the four of us practically explode.

  ‘Douche, look at that,’ says Kate, pointing at the far wall. I look over at the lobster tank as the unfortunate invertebrate (or whatever they are) try to clamber over each other with their spindly legs to get at something that appeals to their pea-size brains. If I were a lobster and I saw the waiter heading my way with his scoop, I’d try to make myself look really thin (not easy, I suppose, with an exoskeleton) or else use my spidery legs to point at the big fat one skulking in the corner. Or maybe I’d teach myself how to tap-dance. No one is going to throw a tap-dancing lobster into a boiling pot, surely. It’d just be too cute.

  ‘Do you reckon they’re bred in captivity?’ asks Kate, interrupting my thoughts on tap-dancing lobsters. ‘Or are they wild?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘These are free-range lobsters. It’s the law now. They’re
bred on a farm outside Dubbo where they can come and go as they please and get into territorial disputes with the crabs on the neighbouring ranch.’

  ‘Really?’

  In deference to Dad’s meat-and-potato palate, we opt mostly for gweilo food. I bite into the nuclear-hot spring roll, relishing the sound of the crispy deep-fried pastry shattering between my teeth, and the explosion of flavour of what’s inside. My favourite dish is siu mai (pork dumplings). I’m a bit of a greenie at heart and rapidly heading towards vegetarianism, but I’m forced to suspend my principles when the waitress lifts the lid of the bamboo basket and reveals its mouth-watering contents. This is Lisa’s favourite, too, so I insist on two servings and gobble Lisa’s share as well, without telling anyone why I have momentarily turned into Homer Simpson.

  A little while later, the waitress reveals her chicken feet to us (the chicken’s – not hers), which is a Chinese delicacy. Kate is intrigued. She doesn’t want to eat them, she wants to know what happened to the rest of the chicken, or if these chicken feet are in fact grown in a lab or something, kind of like mould or a pancreas.

  Not being one to let an opportunity pass, I inform her that they only use free-range chickens, which are bred on a farm near the lobsters, and when they have removed the chickens’ legs for market, the chickens are given little off-road wheelchairs in which they can manoeuvre about the farm and team up with the lobsters to drive off the warmongering crabs.

  Kate looks at me and then over to Mum, who is biting her lip so much that she’s practically drawing blood. ‘You’re such an idiot!’ Free-range lobsters she buys, but wheelchair-bound chickens is apparently a step too far. Still, I suppose it’s what you might expect from someone who names her pet guinea pig Pooey McFartpants.

  ‘Okay,’ says Dad when he’s devoured several spring rolls and a couple of char sil bau. ‘Down to business.’

  I look at Dad, wondering if he’s about to announce that he and mum are splitting up, which I reckon has been coming for a while – they’ve been arguing more and more, recently and, rather than making up afterwards, the tension seems to linger. So maybe they are getting a divorce. Or worse, maybe they’ve taken up line dancing.

  ‘We’re going on holidays after Christmas,’ says Dad.

  ‘We always go on holidays after Christmas,’ says Kate.

  ‘Ah,’ says Mum, ‘but this year’s different. Your father and I have –’

  ‘You mean you have,’ interjects Dad.

  ‘– have decided,’ continues Mum, ‘that we all get an equal vote about where we go this time.’

  I look at Mum and smile. I know what she’s getting at. In an effort to stave off his boredom and introduce it to us, Dad generally drags us off to some godforsaken corner of the globe to look at some fossilised dinosaur crap. We actually spent last summer on a four-day trek through northern India, wading through waist-deep mud and being eaten alive by mosquitoes the size of helicopters, just to see a hut that some supposed guru or other had once stopped to take a dump in. And as if to add a certain poetic symmetry to things, poor Mum ended up in hospital with a severe bout of dysentery when all she’d wanted to do was sit by a pool with a good book and a glass that contained a tiny umbrella and copious amounts of pina colada. So this year, when Dad announced that he was keen for us to venture into the Amazon Basin to see for himself if there was any evidence of a certain breed of fish that was thought to have been extinct for thousands of years, Mum told him where he could stick his fish and cancelled our subscription to National Geographic. Obviously the vote thing was a sort of compromise.

  ‘So,’ says Mum, ‘where do we want to go?’ Mum looks at me and nods. She’s obviously counting on my vote and I won’t let her down. Well, I won’t be voting for the extinct fish thing anyway.

  Ever the accountant, Dad takes out a pen and paper ready to take notes and tally up the count. ‘Okay, Katie Bear,’ he says, ‘you’re up.’

  Kate thinks for a moment. Then her eyes go manic. ‘I want to go to Disneyland.’

  I look at her and shake my head. ‘You go nuts staring at a lobster tank and a painting of some fish on a psycho hospital wall. How could you possibly cope with all the stimulation offered up by enormous mice, waistcoat-wearing bears and talking ducks? You’ll be having nightmares for years.’

  ‘I wanna go to Disneyland, I wanna go to Disney land,’ says Kate in her cutesy singsong voice that makes me want to throttle her with her Frozen scarf.

  ‘So that’s one gorgeous girl for Disneyland,’ says Dad.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy,’ says Kate, and I think even Mum has to hold back a puke.

  ‘Declan?’ says Dad.

  ‘Ladies first,’ I say.

  ‘Nope,’ says Dad. ‘Youngest to oldest.’ Dad gives me a look that lets me know that he’s well aware of what I’m up to. Mum could say she wanted to spend the holidays having her bikini line waxed on a herbal-tea plantation just outside Kandahar and I would go with that too, just to avoid the Amazon fish thing or the agonising possibility of having to search for a tree in some remote corner of Asia that Buddha or Gandhi had once taken a leak behind.

  I try to second-guess Mum. Where would she want to go? She likes shopping and art and sitting by the pool. Mmm, tricky. ‘Okay. I vote Paris.’

  Dad writes Paris on his list. ‘Not what I would have expected, but good choice.’ Meanwhile, Mum gives me a weird look. She’s gritting her teeth and making her eyes bulge. Not having a clue what she’s on about, I shrug.

  Kate obviously sees Mum’s facial gymnastics. ‘Hey. That’s not fair. They’re cheating.’

  ‘How can we cheat?’ I say.

  ‘Gabriella?’ says Dad.

  ‘Well, as you all know I love shopping and five-star hotels, so I’m going for somewhere in Asia.’

  ‘Oh, not the guru poohouse again,’ says Kate, and Mum and I burst out laughing. Kate looks over at Dad. ‘Sorry, Daddy.’

  ‘“Sorry, Daddy”,’ I mock.

  ‘That’s okay, darling,’ says Dad.

  ‘Thank you, Daddy.’

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’ says Dad before the vomit starts to fly.

  ‘I was thinking Hong Kong.’ Mum gives me her best exasperated look and I pretty much want to beat myself over the head with a rice-bucket stand. What an idiot. Kate’s right. I’m a complete douchebag.

  ‘But you go there all the time with work, Mummy,’ says Kate.

  ‘That’s right, darling. Work. But I never get to see it properly. It’s just hotels and boardrooms. I thought it would be nice to go as a tourist.’ Luckily neither Dad nor Kate has made the Lisa connection. ‘There’s a Disneyland there too, Katie,’ continues Mum.

  ‘Really?’ says Kate.

  ‘It’s not as good as the real one,’ interjects Dad, trying to take Kate’s mind off changing her vote to Mum’s. ‘Mickey Mouse looks more like a rat.’

  I try to find my Zen centre through breathing, which isn’t easy when my Zen centre wants to pour my Chinese tea over Dad’s balding head.

  ‘Which leaves me,’ continues Dad. ‘And this year I’m opting for the stromatolites.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ sighs Mum. ‘Please tell me that’s not some type of petrified dog turd in the middle of the Simpson Desert.’

  Kate bursts out laughing. ‘Mummy said “turd”.’

  I cast Kate a look that only a sibling can.

  ‘No,’ says Dad. ‘The stromatolites are not petrified dog turds in the middle of the Simpson Desert.’

  ‘The Mojave Desert?’ I offer.

  ‘They’re in Western Australia,’ says Dad.

  ‘So they are dog turds?’ I say.

  Dad ignores me. ‘Shark Bay to be accurate. About nine hours’ drive north of Perth.’

  ‘And just what,’ says Mum with a world-weary sigh, ‘are stromatolites supposed to be?’

  ‘Well, they’re kind of like living rocks that sort of sit in the water,’ says Dad, warming to the subject and perhaps hoping, in his own deluded way, tha
t he’ll be able to convince us to change our vote because we’ll be positively aching to see a bunch of rocks with him.

  ‘Rocks?’ says Mum. ‘You want us to fly across the country and then drive nine hours to look at some rocks?’

  ‘Ah, but they’re not just rocks,’ continues Dad. ‘They’re three thousand years old, the first known ecosystems, and they’re similar to life forms that are about three-and-a-half billion years old! It is thought the original ones started the oxygenation of the atmosphere and so they’re kind of responsible for all life on earth. They’re sort of like our earliest ancestors.’

  ‘It’s always difficult when you drop in on relatives you haven’t seen for three billion years,’ says Mum. ‘I mean, you never know what to bring. Somehow, a bottle of wine and a tin of shortbread doesn’t seem enough.’

  Hawaiian shirt and beige pants aside, I want to respect Dad as much as I can. But, unfortunately, when Mum does sarcasm I can’t stop myself from laughing.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to mock,’ says Dad.

  ‘No,’ says Mum. ‘Let’s hear the rest of it. So do these rocks actually do anything?’

  ‘Yes, well, occasionally they’ll walk up the beach and play volleyball against each other.’

  ‘Really?’ says Kate.

  ‘Oh, come on, Katie Bear,’ says Dad. ‘Even you must have seen that I was pulling your leg with that one.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Mum. ‘Back to these … rocks of yours.’

  Dad scratches his head. Surely he must realise that Mum and I would rather drive a sharpened chopstick into our ears while watching the shopping channel than visit a bunch of rocks with him, living or dead. ‘If you watch the water closely, you might get to see some oxygen they’ve released bubbling to the surface.’