House of Kwa

by Mimi Kwa

  A few days later, temperatures are soaring. Although our time is spent in air conditioning or the pool, the thick humid envelope of air in between is bearable for a few minutes at most. When the generator at Aunty’s condo breaks down, we feel it instantly. Royston cries, his little pink face flushed; it must be forty-five degrees in here.

  Brigit’s sister has come up from their village home to stay for a while and help out, and maybe find a city boyfriend. She’s beautiful and like an elk crouching by Royston’s cot, fanning him with a magazine, singing to him in her T-shirt and jeans. How on earth can she be wearing jeans?

  ‘They are used to it.’ Aunty reads my mind, standing beside me in the doorway to Royston’s room. All the power is out now, and Aunty is carrying a flashlight; I’ve been using the one on my mobile phone. John is downstairs in the bath-warm pool when Aunty says, ‘I’ve sent Brigit to tell your husband to get ready. Grab your overnight bag. We are leaving.’

  We walk into the Shangri-La Hotel foyer looking like drowned rats, and Royston stops crying the minute the air con hits us. Aunty pays for three rooms: one for John and me, an adjoining one for Royston, and one for herself. ‘Live it up.’ She winks at me.

  Once I’ve settled Royston into a blissful sleep and John’s nodded off, I slip out into the corridor wearing my hotel robe and slippers and tap lightly on Aunty’s door.

  ‘Alligatorrrr,’ I hear. To Aunty, ‘See you later, alligator’ can be abbreviated to ‘alligator’ as shorthand for ‘see you later’ and ‘hello’ and ‘welcome’. ‘Alligator. Alligator.’ She is so happy. ‘Now, what would you like? I get you something. Thirsty? Hungry?’ She’s wearing her hotel robe too and leans back in an armchair, perusing a menu before swinging her legs up to sit cross-legged and dial room service. ‘Why not.’ She smiles broadly and winks. Champagne and club sandwiches soon arrive, and Aunty watches my delight. ‘Eat, eat,’ she commands. ‘Hmm, this is good.’ Her mouth is full, so it sounds more like ‘HMM-rthmisoud’, but I can understand her. I always have.

  I wipe crumbs from my chin. ‘You’ve worked so hard, Aunty Theresa.’ I replace the starched white linen napkin on the tray.

  ‘No, not really.’ She folds her own napkin and lies my glass flute down too, as one might expect of cabin crew when they collect your empty plate. ‘I am very lazy.’

  Laughing, she picks up the tray and carries it across the room to leave outside the door. She comes back and sits down, cross-legged again, her expression now serious. ‘I have had a good life, Mimi.’ For a moment she looks reflective, as though she has sailed off somewhere far away. ‘Really, Mimi, I am so very lucky.’

  COFFIN AND WOLF

  ‘MIMI, I WAS SO EMBARRASSED WHEN THE DELIVERY BOY brought the flowers up the path. That big 80 on the balloon was bobbing up and down for all the neighbours to see!’ Paw Paw is laughing; she’s tickled pink with the flowers.

  I wish I was there for her birthday. It’s the same day as Dad’s, which is strange – for two Geminis, they couldn’t be more different. Except for my sixth birthday party, Dad never celebrates them. ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter,’ he says. He did give me a half-eaten packet of biscuits wrapped in Christmas paper for my eleventh birthday, and for my twelfth he gave me golf balls knowing I didn’t play golf. As a child, I was so upset by his attempts at birthday celebrations, he gave up in subsequent years.

  Paw Paw, on the other hand, is a birthday and Christmas professional. On Boxing Day she follows a tradition of leaving money in a box for the milkman, postman and newspaper boy, and in the lead-up to Christmas she wraps dozens and dozens of presents from every family member including the dog, guinea pigs and two budgerigars to every other family member – including the dog, guinea pigs and two budgerigars.

  ‘Oh, Mimi.’ I’m in Melbourne but I feel her warmth emanate all the way from Perth. ‘Mimi, I just love the flowers. I wish I could give you a big hug.’

  I try not to cry. ‘I do too, Paw Paw. I do too.’

  I haven’t seen Paw Paw since she came to Melbourne a couple of months ago. We toured around, went to the theatre and had a lovely time together.

  I had a few work shifts in between, but not for Channel Nine anymore. I spent five years there chasing ‘bad guys’ for a nightly current affairs program, where my boss was fond of telling me how I would never amount to anything, whenever I was eligible for a pay review. I covered news stories and diet stories, and interviewed celebrities like Serena Williams, Russell Crowe (we reconciled after my appalling ambush), Pierce Brosnan and Kylie Minogue. Then there were the weekly helicopter rides; the series of stories with Chopper Read; an investigation into psychics and another into police brutality; the girl who didn’t know she was pregnant when she gave birth at full term; and the boy, Chris, who aged at ten times the normal rate and died at nineteen soon after I’d spent weeks filming with him. I never knew what story I’d be thrown on next. It was exciting and fun, confronting and sad, but after having Royston, the idea of going back to long hours and spontaneous trips away – sometimes for days at no notice – didn’t make sense, so instead I return to my dream job at the ABC: anchoring news. No more last-minute chartered flights, screaming bosses or chequebook journalism – sitting behind a news desk is exactly where I want to be.

  ‘John,’ I call out, after hanging up the phone, ‘I’m worried about Paw Paw. She says she’s too old to travel overseas anymore. She lives to travel.’

  John walks down the hall to the kitchen. We live in a single-fronted cottage on a pretty street in the Melbourne suburb of Prahran. ‘Well, let’s visit again soon, before this one comes along.’ He pats the curve of my belly where our second child grows while Royston masters walking.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, grateful for John’s unwavering support, ‘that would be good.’

  A few days later I receive a frantic phone call.

  ‘Mimi, Mimi,’ my mum cries, ‘I’m taking Paw Paw to the hospital. She’s having a heart attack.’

  The world goes into slow motion, like when my mum flew down a corridor and threw herself in front of a car.

  ‘Let me speak to her,’ I say.

  For the first time in my life, I hear Paw Paw swear. ‘Shit,’ she says, ‘I can’t get my seatbelt on.’

  Mum hangs up. I don’t call back straight away; I don’t want to delay them getting to the hospital. I’m numb for a moment. Then, all of a sudden, I have questions. Why haven’t they called an ambulance? Why even worry about the seatbelt?

  I never get to ask. When Mum calls me from Paw Paw’s bedside, she holds the phone to Paw Paw’s ear for me to say goodbye, but all I hear is the rushing of oxygen through tubes, the beeping of machines, and a voice that says, ‘Clear,’ and again, ‘Clear!’

  Mum drops the phone and I hyperventilate, feeling I might lose the baby. I can hardly breathe, and if he can feel my sorrow I am sorry, but I can’t help convulsing with grief. I hold my stomach, and the baby gives a little kick. In my mind I hear Paw Paw’s words, The show must go on, so I breathe to bring the oxygen back into my bloodstream for the baby, to stop the panic attack. I breathe.

  Mum and I sit crouched against a wall at the funeral parlour. Paw Paw is in the open coffin in front of us. We have cried all we can cry today. I flew in on the soonest flight and haven’t had dry eyes since touching down.

  Aunty Zora sings a song from her musical theatre days, ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’, and dances around the coffin, the trill of her voice filling the empty hall. Mum and I giggle, breaking the tension for a moment; there will be plenty of time for being serious.

  It’s hard to know what to do now our matriarch is gone. Paw Paw was mother to us all.

  The day of the funeral comes, and as Paw Paw is lowered into her grave, shared with Granddad, we play Vivaldi. I have to stop from flinging myself into the hole with her, just like I had to at Granddad’s service ten years ago.

  There is no one to brush Mum’s ‘condition’ under the carpet anymore, and before my eyes she deter
iorates rapidly at the thought she will now be alone.

  ‘John,’ I say over the phone to him at home in Melbourne, where he stayed to look after Royston, ‘I can’t leave my mum here.’

  ‘Ms Bryce, we are doctors. If you open the door we can help you. We are not going to hurt you.’

  Mum, who lives with us in Prahran now, has barricaded herself in her room.

  ‘She just wants my money,’ Mum screams at the CATT team. ‘She wants me locked up so she can take my money.’

  I’m pressed against the wall between large pieces of antique furniture from Bicton, so heavily pregnant now that I can barely get past Mum’s things in the hallway. We brought truck loads over from Western Australia when she moved into a small cottage, identical to ours, next door. The supposedly God-fearing landlord, who is well known in the community, demanded six months’ rent in advance, and I was so desperate that I agreed.

  ‘Ms Bryce. Mela. We have assessed you as a threat to your own safety. You can come with us voluntarily, or we will use force.’ A medic puts on white latex gloves and prepares a syringe.

  ‘Mum,’ I say, ‘please come out.’

  ‘Shut up. Go away. Leave me alone.’

  The CATT team are about to force the door when it opens. Mum steps out, shaky and frightened. Then she spits, ‘It’s her! She just wants to see the back of me.’

  I hold my belly, and the team squeeze past me with Mum, two leading the way, two walking behind. There are police on the footpath too, as not everyone could fit inside with Mum’s hoard of belongings.

  I ride in the front of the ambulance, listening to my mum scream about me and at me. I breathe deeply and rub my round belly reassuringly. ‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.’

  Lately the episodes have been overwhelming, and I’ve got no idea how Paw Paw and Granddad managed it for so many decades, how on earth they coped. I couldn’t go on, so I approached a family friend, Professor Allan Fels. He’s from Western Australia too, and there’s always a Perth connection, but this one is surprisingly close – he took John’s mum to a debutante ball, and I’ve interviewed him on TV a few times.

  After I called him about my mother, the professor met up with me at Fawkner Park during one of my darkest hours. We sat on a bench, the Alfred hospital looming behind us. The professor is on the board of directors there, and his daughter’s battle with mental illness is publicly known.

  ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ I said.

  The professor took my hand. ‘Don’t worry, Mimi. I will help you.’

  With his support it came to pass, and now Mum is being led from the ambulance into the Alfred psychiatric unit. I feel sick to be doing this to her, but I just couldn’t have my children growing up the way I did. This time it would be me and John wrestling with Mum in the night, dragging her home from shouting at neighbours, tending her wounds when it got too much, or finding her dead.

  Stepping into Paw Paw and Granddad’s shoes is incomprehensible – I can’t do it. I promised them I would always look after Mum and I meant it, but I didn’t mean hiding her from the world and pretending there’s nothing wrong. I have to look after her my way.

  Days turn into six weeks; solitary isolation, ‘for her own safety’, evolves into art therapy classes on the main ward. I visit Mum every day. Usually she displays some distrust when she sees me, but sometimes she’s pleased, which gives me hope. Sometimes, though, she refuses to see me at all.

  When Mum turns a corner, she asks that I bring in the photo essay I made for her in the days before the CATT team arrived to take her away. It was my last-ditch attempt to persuade her to see a psychiatrist. On each page there were photos of Mum with me, Royston and John. Under each picture I wrote how much we love her, and that she can have a happy life with us, along with a meaningful role in our family, and she doesn’t have to hear ‘the voices’ anymore. I was letting her know she could be well, but she ripped it up and screamed at me.

  Now she wants me to bring it in to show her doctors. I have to tape the pages back together, but her willingness to read it and the fact she mentioned it to them are great signs.

  Then Mum is ready to come home. She has been diagnosed with chronic and acute schizophrenia and treated accordingly. ‘Mela has responded well to the medication. Not all patients maintain their dosage. How will you handle that?’

  ‘She never ever lies,’ I said. ‘So if she’s promised to take her medication, she will.’

  By the expressions on the doctors’ faces, I don’t think they’ve ever heard such conviction and optimism about maintaining dosages at home. But I know I can rely on Mum to take the pills. She will do it because now she’s able to enjoy a day without the voices, and she appreciates what she has to lose if she slips up with her tablets.

  I finally read the torrent of historical personal and legal letters sent back and forth between Mum’s camp and Dad’s. Doctors’ assessments. Character references and assassinations. Pages and pages of desperation – over me. Folders of medical reports and lawyer fees reopen vast wounds – in me. I keep most of them; I might need them some day. But there is one file I can never bear to share.

  Because of all the blame my grandparents dished out on my dad for the accident, it has taken me decades to shed the resentment I harbour towards him over it – maybe I still haven’t finished. Then someone asks me, ‘Are you sure the brakes failed?’ And I realise something: Mum might have put the car in the path of that truck deliberately. The ‘voices’ were at their most persuasive back then.

  I take a copper wastepaper bin, which used to belong at Bicton, into my Melbourne garden. It’s strangely satisfying to strike a match and watch as the forty-year-old medical and legal files containing my mother’s confessions of deeply disturbing thoughts wrestle with the heat, twist and contort, curl, burn, blacken and succumb. The glow of the flames flickers across my face as John and the children sleep. Mum’s living-room light is on, and classical music drifts over to me from her radio.

  Someone close said to me once, ‘You’re doing the right thing, Mimi, looking after your mother,’ and I thought, But isn’t it the only thing?

  ’‘Mimmmiiii Kwaaaaaaa!’ my tall friend Foxy waves me over to a check-in counter. I’m a mother of two now. My own mum has made steady improvements and John has given me a leave pass for a girls’ getaway in Hong Kong. On board, we find we’re seated apart, so I reshuffle strangers’ seats. Two crew members stop and stare as I make a health announcement to the entire cabin in my best television voice. ‘My friend is highly allergic to peanuts.’ Foxy turns bright scarlet and hides under an aeroplane blanket.

  When we arrive, I spot a walking stick furiously waving in the air. A bejewelled hand is on the end of it. It points to me and a male flight attendant pushes a wheelchair hastily over.

  ‘Aunteeeee!’ I throw my arms around her neck and beam at my friends. I couldn’t be more proud to have these two worlds collide at last.

  ‘Welcome to Hong Kong.’ Aunty pulls herself to her feet and shoos the steward playfully away. ‘Let’s have some fun!’

  We enjoy dumplings, dinner and drinks each day. ‘More people. More dishes.’

  Aunty leaves nothing to waste. ‘Waiter please wrap up this duck carcass. I take away for my cook to make broth.’ She smiles and lowers her spectacles to look at a menu. ‘So much food to eat. Four day, you here not long enough. Not long enough for all this food.’

  ‘Jiao ao zhi yuan,’ she says when I’m alone with her. ‘You make Aunty proud. You have nice friends and you have good husband. A beautiful family. Good career. You are veeeeery lucky. You can still become a diplomat, you know. Never too late. Never too late.’

  At our hotel, Aunty lays out a silk suit bag on a bed in our room for three, and I undo the zip. My girlfriends and I gasp. ‘Ohhh, wow!’

  I run my hands over a blanket of long soft fur. It’s stunning.

  ‘It’s a wolf.’ Aunty says matter of factly. ‘I wore it in Europe. But Asia? Too hot. Much too hot. I
give your cousin Jojo my mink. You remember I selected the live mink individually at the farm.’ The gift is a rite of passage. Aunty is of another time.

  To her great satisfaction I admire myself in the dresser mirror like a 1950s movie star, hugging the fur collar close to my face, pouting. It’s entirely glamorous, but at the same time, of course, entirely wrong by today’s standards and I will never be able to wear it.

  ‘Perfect for Melbourne weather.’ Aunty adjusts the fur to sit squarely on my shoulders. ‘You put red lipstick and you look just like Joan Crawford.’ She opens one side of the coat revealing a striped silk lining and a monogrammed pocket which reads TWC KWA then, taking an Elizabeth Arden lipstick from her black quilted Chanel handbag with gold chain strap, she slips it into the wolf’s pocket.

  On the flight home to Melbourne, a Chinese woman sits next to me and I find out she’s about to become an internet bride. She is keen on a visa to live in Australia, but not so keen on marrying.

  ‘I need a housekeeper if you would like to stay with me,’ I offer.

  So, I ‘bring home a stray’, as my friends put it. We are out of earshot of my new housekeeper as we wait for our luggage and Foxy and George peel with laughter. ‘Mimi Kwa, you cannot get on an aeroplane without recruiting staff! You’re just like Aunty.’ Or like my dad. I smile – either way it’s a very Kwa thing to do.

  As John and the children run up the driveway to greet me, a petite Chinese woman follows a few steps behind. Given we’ve had Columbian, South Korean and Taiwanese students, as well as German, Swiss and Canadian au pairs living with us over the years, John isn’t the least bit surprised. He understands you can take the girl out of Mandarin Gardens, but you can’t take Mandarin Gardens out of the girl.

  CARAVAN AND SAINT

  YOU REALLY CAN’T TAKE MANDARIN GARDENS OUT OF THE man. Relics of the Kwa compound still litter Dad’s house. His panorama of the hostel is more yellow than last time I visited, faded and peeling, hanging by twisted, rusted wire on rusted nails embedded in the doorframe.