House of Kwa

by Mimi Kwa

  For three weeks, I cannot speak properly. I have spasms, my mouth opening wide, my tongue connipting, my face contorting. None of it is within my control, nothing ever has been, but all of this is my doing. I’m terrified I will be permanently disabled, but luckily the only permanent damage is memory loss – unfortunately not the memories I’d like to lose, just things like what I had for breakfast.

  My suicide attempt meant Granddad got to use his first-aid skills again. Daughter and granddaughter, lucky him.

  BEGGAR AND PRINCE

  HOWEVER OVERAMBITIOUS FRANCIS’S HOTEL IDEAS ARE, HE succeeds at making Mandarin Gardens an international budget destination of choice: the number one choice in Australia. Travellers, backpackers, sports teams, rock bands, performers, adventure seekers, couples and families of every kind are our guests. But there are also drug dealers, thieves and lowlifes.

  What I love most is that everyone has a story. They wear them on their faces and their clothes, and very often sit down and tell me their whole tale. I’m a good listener, so this is a perfect storm for a lonely, curious girl.

  With amazing things from far-off lands to ponder, and constant dramas to deal with and conundrums to solve, I become worldly in my own backyard. Fire dancers and Olympic athletes parade across my days, and I sit on our lawn watching them rehearse and train. I meet people from every walk of life, and it inspires me – to do what, I don’t know yet.

  In summer especially, Mandarin Gardens is a hive of activity. Youthful travellers are everywhere, tanned, fit and up for a good time. Surf, beach, lying by the pool – who doesn’t want a holiday like that? But beneath this wholesome picture is an underbelly of older men, attracted to the life of the young, who also stay at Mandarin Gardens. They’re free of the responsibilities and rigours of work and family, and I sense something not quite right. To me, these guys are ancient, probably forty, maybe fifty, overtly preying on youth as their anti-aging elixir. I listen to them use their wiles under pretence of wisdom to talk twenty-somethings into bed. Perverts, I think, when they make eyes at me and my teenage friends. As the owner’s daughter I’m off limits, but not immune to their leers and comments.

  Fortunately, almost all our guests are nice to me. It helps that I hold the key to rent-deadline extensions and dorm-room allocations. Mandarin Gardens is my giant dollhouse to rearrange with new characters every day.

  The entrance to the compound is flanked with white rendered walls, one side emblazoned with the name in brass lettering. Apart from our monstrous backpacker accommodation, our street is suburban, populated by duplexes and units. On the other side of the swamp, next door to us, is a video shop, and next to that is a YMCA. Then a Chinese restaurant, pawnshop, hairdresser, pizza bar, fish and chippery, and – my favourite – the corner shop.

  I regularly push Dad’s wheelbarrow full of one-litre glass soft-drink bottles down to the corner shop, and they pay me ten cents a bottle. Backpackers go through a lot of Fanta, Coke, Sprite and Red Creaming Soda, so I do a good trade.

  At Mandarin Gardens, Dad has welded together a designated bottle recycling shelf. My job is to take the bottles to the corner shop and collect the pay, the deal being that Dad and I split the profit eighty–twenty. He’s the eighty, and I usually spend my twenty, on the spot, on one- and two-cent lollies – as many as I can fit into a small white paper bag.

  The change I take home for Dad always goes in his coin jar, and he reaches into this jar when a beggar comes to call one day. She’s in her fifties, grey haired and dishevelled, wearing a faded purple skirt with an elastic waist and a pale-brown cotton blouse, the kind that has two collar strings with tassels.

  She stands at the top of our red-brick driveway for a moment, surveying Mandarin Gardens, before she commences an elaborate performance. The bell sleeves of her blouse billow, her dramatic sweeping motions and pleas for help attracting a curious audience. ‘Ooohhhh, come to save me. Save me and my baby. My baybeee neeeds milk. I cannot feed her. Please give me money. Please heeeelp me. Pleeease don’t let a baaaby starve.’

  Backpackers reach into their pockets and toss her a few coins. Dad hears the commotion and comes downstairs. He’s wearing a white singlet coupled with a brown Balinese batik sarong tied round his waist and brought up through his legs to be tied again – like a nappy. ‘Oh, oh, oh, I’ll be back,’ he says excitedly, dashing upstairs to grab coins from his money jar.

  The beggar smiles in anticipation as Dad emerges, rattling the coins in his hands as though he’s about to roll dice. ‘So you come to my kingdom to beg for money, is it?’ he asks, facing the woman.

  Her eyes widen. ‘Is this your place?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, and you are trespassing, but that is okay. Ahahahahhhhah.’

  The woman begins her theatrical routine again. ‘Ooohhhh, come to save me.’

  ‘How old are you, old woman? You are grey and cannot have a baby, isn’t it?’

  She’s startled; clearly no one has ever pulled her up on her story before.

  ‘If you need milk, I buy you milk. Let’s walk to the corner store together.’ A cold expression falls over her face. She wasn’t prepared for Francis Kwa.

  As if reading her mind, he says with a smile and a gleam in his eye, ‘How much money have you begged today with your impossible story?’ He looks pleased with the gathering crowd. ‘I will tell you my story. I am a poor old Chinaman. My child needs medicine. See, I only have one leg.’ He pulls his foot up behind his backside and holds it there to look like an amputee. ‘Give me money, give me money. Ahhahahah.’

  Her eyes bore into him, and I can see her anger grow as his performance continues.

  ‘How much money have you got? Let’s see who’s richer.’ Dad squats down in front of the woman and begins counting out his coins. There’s scattered applause from the small assembly of backpackers.

  The woman can’t take it anymore and reaches into her pocket, throwing a handful of coins at Dad’s feet. Ten- and twenty-cent pieces roll into cracks between the red driveway bricks. ‘You are cursed,’ she screams at him. ‘I cuuuurse you.’ She does an elaborate witchy movement with her arms, which ends with her gazing towards the sky, a grave look on her face. ‘You are cursed!’ she shrieks and storms off.

  ‘Ahahahahah.’ Dad picks up the coins. ‘Look at me! I got money from the beggar. I turn three dollars into ten.’ He laughs again and shows the group of backpackers the coins, doing a triumphant little jig.

  I shake my head, but our guests are smiling broadly. Mandarin Gardens is entertaining, I must admit. Dad could add ‘in-house drama’ to our list of amenities, with a side of financial advice and investment coaching.

  Perhaps Dad likes being surrounded by lots of people because he grew up in a big family. He also loves having servants just like in the old days: people fussing around him and over him, working for him even when they’re out of sight. He is deeply satisfied by his place at the top of this hierarchy, referring to himself as ‘God’ and ‘the King’. He laughs and jokes and does a little jig. ‘I am the King, I am the King,’ he sings. He always gets a laugh. ‘Everyone thinks I’m great.’ He can be entertaining and endearing. ‘They like me, they like me. I am the King.’

  So when a real-life prince comes to stay at our 4.5-star backpacker accommodation, Dad recognises an opportunity.

  An African prince on a worldwide adventure happens upon a sign at Perth airport. It boasts that Mandarin Gardens has a 25-metre pool plus a long list of other appealing offerings. The accommodation has a 5-star rating with a disclaimer in fine print: restaurant application pending. It’s near the beach, and there’s a free airport shuttle.

  ‘Take me to this place known as Mandarin Gardens,’ says the prince. The shuttle-bus driver today is Dad himself, and by the time they reach Mandarin Gardens, the prince has agreed to ‘help out’ in his office. The prince says he has studied commerce law.

  What a catch, thinks Dad.

  When a few days later Dad discovers the prince is a prince, he c
annot believe his luck. ‘I really am king now,’ he says. ‘I have a prince working for me.’ The prince laughs because he finds it funny, doesn’t understand or is being polite. When my father introduces the prince to people as his ‘houseboy’, the prince doesn’t say anything.

  At the same time the prince is staying at Mandarin Gardens, two of the local ducks – after landing on the next-door swamp for years – begin to land on our pool. Dad considers adding ‘Australian wildlife’ to the list of attractions. But when the ducks do their business in the pool, he decides they’re not to be encouraged.

  He waits until the pool is deserted and observes, from a balcony, the ducks paddling contentedly in the over-chlorinated water. That’s another thing, he thinks. They’re costing me money because I have to sanitise their mess. He raises his shotgun, rests it on the balustrade, angles it skyward and fires. The birds get the fright of their lives and fly off. But the very next day they are back. Francis brings out his shotgun again.

  Police knock at our door, which I open. ‘Yes?’ I say calmly. I have a lot of experience with saying that Dad isn’t home when police or people serving court summonses come to call. I’ve also had practice with tax investigators and health inspectors. ‘Sorry, Dad isn’t at home,’ I say if I don’t know them.

  ‘We have reports of gunshots in the area,’ one policeman says. ‘Is your father home?’

  Dad is watching through a keyhole inside our inner front door – he believes it’s necessary to have two front doors for occasions such as this. Surprisingly, he opens the door and pushes past me. ‘Hello, officers, how can I help?’ He smiles.

  ‘Mr Kwa, we’ve had reports of gunshots on your property. Do you know anything about this?’

  Dad looks them straight in the eye. ‘No, no, no. I never heard it. Actually, yes, yes, yes – I think I heard some car backfiring lately. I think that is what it must be. The car backfiring.’

  The officers don’t look like they buy it, but they have only telephone complaints to go on. ‘You do understand, Mr Kwa, that with so many people staying on your property at any one time, it would be an extreme public safety risk to keep a gun here.’ The officer looks at me, and I look down.

  ‘No gun here, no gun here,’ Dad says. ‘Mimi, go inside. This is grown-up business.’ A minute later, he comes inside. ‘Buddy cops. Buddy ducks.’

  The prince has been making himself useful to Dad, filing and carrying out general admin in return for free rent. Not that the prince needs free rent, mind you – I expect it’s all part of his adventure.

  The next day, Dad strikes up a conversation with him about ‘back in Africa’ and ‘back at home’. ‘Back in your palace you must go hunting. Hunting. You know hunting? Bang, bang, gun.’ The prince nods. ‘So let’s have duck for dinner. Hahahaha.’

  That afternoon, the prince takes aim and shoots one of the ducks dead, first go. The other one flaps its wings violently and escapes before a second shot can be fired. Dad instructs the prince to pluck the dead duck, then eats it for dinner. ‘Good idea, good idea,’ Francis congratulates himself.

  We never see the other duck again.

  ‘Steve Jobs – see, that’s me, that’s me. And Bill Gates, I’m Bill Gates.’ Dad enjoys using his electrical engineering skills to tinker with voltage. He has wired up an in-house video channel that sends a signal from his upstairs study to each of the apartments and bunkhouses. Anyone can watch Video One on Channel Five and Video Two on Channel Six. It’s two dollars to rent a video, and whoever pays is basically paying for all the other guests to watch the movie as well, because the signal goes to everyone.

  Dad has rigged up two VHS recorders to copy movies from one to the other. He sends me to the video shop on our street, where I rent videos using one of the lifetime’s worth of free vouchers Dad has accumulated. The vouchers don’t have an expiry date – a major oversight but a plus for us. I borrow movies like Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Stand by Me and the Nightmare on Elm Street. Mandarin Gardens copies all the classics.

  All I have to do is insert a movie into VCR One and press a sequence of buttons to record it onto a blank videotape in VCR Two. If a guest happens to be flicking through TV channels when I’m pirating movies, they get to watch that one for free. Two dollars is a lot in 1987, and definitely a lot for a backpacker who’s already paying ten dollars per night for their accommodation. (Although if they pay for six nights up front, they get the seventh free in a year-round promotion.)

  It’s my job to keep the movie list updated. I’ve saved it on a floppy disk so I can make additions between printing it out for new guests to take away with them at check-in. There are animated arguments between backpackers over what movie to watch. With two channels to share between a hundred guests, it’s a case of first in, best dressed. I am the booking agent, often staying up late to put on a new video. Sometimes I fall asleep, and we get complaints the next day. And sometimes the video doesn’t play right through to the end or reception is bad or the VCR eats the tape and I have to gently tug to untangle it, using a toothbrush handle to wind it back into place.

  Dad teaches me to apologise profusely and say it has never happened before, even though it has. He tells me that’s good business. But there are an awful lot of complaints about our video service, so he puts up a sign: ‘NO REFUNDS on in-house movies.’

  We build up quite a collection of films, a big investment of my time. Dad manufactures two large trundle drawers to hide the hundreds of tapes under his and Angela’s bed. They are concealed by the fabric skirting along the bed base. When authorities knock on our front door, asking me if I know anything about pirated videos on the premises, I say, ‘No, I don’t.’ When they ask if they can speak to an adult, I say, of course, ‘Sorry, Dad isn’t here.’

  During the summer months we’re so overbooked some weeks that we pitch tents on the expanse of lumpy dry lawn. An enormous pine tree between the main apartment block and the bunkhouses drops pine needles all over the grass. Dad calls them ‘monkey tails’, and raking them up is often on my list of jobs to do.

  One weekend, Dad and Angela leave me in charge for a day. I ‘man’ the front desk, where a revolving door of people check in and out, make enquiries about this and that, and file their complaints. I field them all.

  Dad has bought a bigger bus so he can take backpackers on sightseeing tours. When he got his bus licence he added this to our list of amenities. Unfortunately it doesn’t increase our 4.5-star rating, but it sounds impressive, and a full bus of thirty passengers at thirty dollars per ticket is a $900 day.

  ‘It is a hotel, I own a hotel,’ Dad says. His passengers laugh at his jokes, and they drive off merrily to discover Western Australia. Today he’s taking them to one of the state’s premier destinations: thousands of weathered limestone pillars in Nambung National Park, two hours north of Perth, called the Pinnacles.

  For me, the day should be fairly standard: collect rent, change sheets, and empty cash from our public telephone box, washing machine and dryer, then count it. So I can get through Angela’s list and simultaneously take care of guest enquiries, I carry a cordless phone with a retractable metal aerial whenever I leave the front office, pasting an apologetic sign with our phone number on the sliding door. When the phone rings, it vibrates because the ringer has been set permanently at its loudest volume so I never miss important calls.

  I’m raking up monkey tails when the cordless phone has its usual conniption – it’s Dad calling me from a pay phone. He tells me his bus has broken down after he reversed into a Pinnacle. The Pinnacles are a protected national treasure, between twenty-five and thirty thousand years old, and you are not allowed to climb on them, let alone drive into them.

  ‘Buddy hell! Just do as told.’ Dad wants his Royal Automobile Club card number, not my questions. He is angry that his day hasn’t gone to plan. To make it worse, he’s lost two backpackers. Dad says they went off into the 17,500-hectare park to find a quiet place to shag, and haven’t returned.

 
; With Dad and Angela joining the search party and waiting for the RAC, my stint in the office will now be overnight. We’re in between managers at the moment, so it’s just me in a small desk alcove in front of a tiny black-and-white TV. It’s mid-afternoon, Dad and thirty backpackers are two hundred kilometres away, and I don’t know how long the RAC will take to fix the bus or if the ancient rock Dad crashed into will ever be the same.

  Kevin, a blond British backpacker, slides open the office door. He’s in his early twenties – an age I approve of for a backpacker. He’s wearing sunglasses on top of his head and torn-off denim shorts. Three other backpackers step in behind him: two boys and a girl. They all speak at once, and it’s a while before I work out what’s going on.

  ‘We’ve caught him red-handed, we found him, we know who it is,’ Kevin says proudly.

  ‘But now he’s locked himself in,’ the girl in a red striped bikini adds. ‘He’s going mental. He’s not coming out.’

  Over the past week, personal belongings have gone missing: first a Walkman, then two Walkmans, then a passport, then two – a steady stream of ‘lost’ property reports at a much higher rate than usual. Speculation that there’s a thief among us, finger pointing and mistrust have all added to the usual undercurrent of drama at the hostel. There are no secure lockers at Mandarin Gardens, so it’s the responsibility of each backpacker to arrange to store valuables in our office safe, but as there’s a small fee for this, most don’t bother. Besides, travellers need passports almost daily for trip bookings, checking in and out, admission to pubs and clubs, opening bank accounts, and applying for jobs. It’s a hassle to leave valuables in our safe, so our lost property list has become a stolen property one.

  The thief is an older guy, about forty – an inappropriate age for a ‘backpacker’, in my opinion. We find out later he is a career kleptomaniac. He hotel hops and travels the world with stolen money, passports, and . . . ladies’ stockings.