‘It was okay. I gave out my number to a few potentials and,’ Mum’s voice changed up a notch, ‘one was really handsome, which was nice.’
My grandmother asked if his house was big.
‘I didn’t go back to his house,’ Mum said.
Yiayia shrugged. ‘Eh, kai to thiskolo then ine kalo,’ she said. It translated directly to, ‘Eh, and the difficult isn’t good.’
There’s an icebreaker and then there’s your grandmother chastising your mum for not putting out. I couldn’t not laugh at it, and when I did, it was with my whole body. Soon, breathing was a challenge. My sides split and my eyes watered. I looked to Mum who was collapsed in her seat, gripping her stomach and wheezing.
And for a moment, we weren’t in a hospital waiting room.
The blissful ignorance lasted around forty seconds.
Yiayia smacked her lips together and closed her eyes. ‘Po-po-po,’ she muttered.
‘Just breathe, Ma.’
Yiayia nodded.
Mum placed a hand on my thigh. ‘Thanks for bringing her,’ she said eventually.
‘Well, I was thinking of just leaving her . . .’
Mum shook her head. ‘Don’t.’
‘Right.’
I smiled. She did too. Then she made a face like she was extremely uncomfortable, reached into her bra and removed her chicken fillets.
Mum’s return to the dating world had been a sudden one. For years, she’d been the sole parent, deftly juggling work and her motherly duties. Dating appeared to be the furthest thing from her mind, until one night, over veal parmigiana, she announced that it was time she started looking for someone.
And ‘looking for someone’ meant makeup and chicken fillets, expensive dresses and salon haircuts.
‘Ugh, that’s better,’ she said.
She went to put them in her clutch, then realised she couldn’t stuff two breast enhancers in there. One, maybe, but not two. She glanced around and her eyes fell on my jacket.
‘Can I?’
She put one in each of my pockets. We went quiet. There weren’t many places a conversation could go after the removal of chicken fillets, but I felt like I needed to fill the silence with something that let her know I supported her romantic pursuits. Something light though, because there was a fine line between supportive and creepy.
‘So tonight wasn’t a complete bust, then?’
‘It was all right,’ Mum said.
I didn’t think she got the joke, so I tried explaining –
‘No, I got it.’ Mum swept her hair up and looked over at reception.
There was a nurse scowling down at a piece of paper. She wore the look of someone confronted with too many vowels and no idea how to string them all together.
‘Filyo Ioannidou,’ she said. Or at least that was what she was trying to say – I have no idea how to spell what she actually pronounced.
Mum waved the nurse over, although there was no need, Yiayia was clearly the only Filyo Ioannidou in the room. The nurse approached and introduced herself, then explained that Yiayia was going to be taken to a treatment room to be put on a morphine drip and have blood samples taken.
Mum took control of the wheelchair. ‘I’ve got it from here,’ she told me. ‘Get some rest.’
‘I –’
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ she said. ‘One of us might as well sleep tonight.’
‘You go,’ Yiayia said, gripping my hand. ‘Christos anesti.’ It meant, ‘Christ has risen.’
I replied automatically, ‘Alithos anesti.’ Indeed, He had.
She released my hand as Mum wheeled her on through and they disappeared behind the swinging double doors.
As soon as I stepped out of the hospital, the night air bit at my exposed skin. I tucked my chin down and started walking.
When I arrived home just before three, I couldn’t recall any part of the journey, or explain why it had taken twenty minutes longer than it should have, but I could describe any moment of the date at Gazette in excruciating detail, and relay how gut-wrenching it had been to learn Yiayia had to rely on some random Nikko to catch her when she collapsed. I had spent the entire trip replaying my night on loop, remaking every poor choice and piling guilt on top of guilt on top of guilt on top of . . .
I sat myself down on the lounge chair in Mum’s room. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep and I wanted to be there when she got home.
The whir of the blender upstairs woke me.
Sunlight slipped between the venetian blinds and painted stripes across Mum’s bed. It was made – she hadn’t come home.
The blender stopped. My younger brother was up. I considered racing back to my room, getting changed and then disappearing, but Yiayia was in hospital. Someone had to tell Peter, and if Mum already had, I owed him an explanation.
Our house had been designed upside-down – the five bedrooms were downstairs, and upstairs was an open living area with a kitchen in one corner, couches in the other and a dining table floating in between. It had been a warehouse before my parents bought it, but you could only really tell on the second storey. Its ceiling was supported by steel beams and the brick walls were exposed.
Peter was standing in his boxers, skolling straight from the blender.
‘Hey.’ It was the first thing I’d said since waking, so I sounded like a pack-a-day smoker.
There was something about trying to interact with Peter that made me instantly nervous. The way he could take our entire sixteen-year history and casually dismiss it was just unnerving.
He replaced the lid of the blender, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and walked the remainder of his protein shake over to the fridge. All without acknowledging that I was standing a metre away from him, looking at him, talking to him.
Not that I was surprised. Something had made him not want me, Mum or Simon in his life anymore. He just wouldn’t tell us what.
‘Yiayia’s in hospital,’ I tried again, thinking something dramatic would get him to engage.
It worked. ‘I know. Mum texted.’ He spoke in a deep monotone.
I checked my phone. She had texted. I read the message.
‘Okay, we’re having lunch at the hospital,’ I said, looking up.
‘I know.’
‘Yiayia’s already cooked so I’ll go to her place to pick the food up.’
Peter blinked. ‘And?’ The kid was ice-cold.
‘I thought maybe you could help me carry some.’
‘No, I’m good.’
He smiled. It was one of those insincere smiles people gave you to fill the time between saying something pithy and leaving the room.
I found my older brother in Yiayia’s kitchen. He was stuffing her away-from-home necessities into a plastic bag.
‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Heyo.’ He was struggling to get the second half of her robe into the bag.
‘How was your flight?’
‘The usual,’ Simon said. ‘Then I get off the plane and check my messages and it’s like, “Surprise! Easter drama! Yiayia’s in hospital! Bring slippers!”’
‘I only got the food text.’
‘Yeah, I got that one too.’
He had already laid out the contents of the fridge on the table. There was more food than I expected.
‘We’re taking all that?’ I asked.
‘Apparently.’
I doubted our ability to carry it all.
‘Welcome home,’ I said.
I had understood Simon wanting to move out of home. Leaving the nest to forge his own identity, I got all that. But Brisbane, I didn’t get. It was so far away, and the heat . . . Simon was the only one of us not to inherit olive skin and he burnt at the first hint of sunlight.
I always imagined we’d live close, even after we got our own places. We had a pretty decent relationship growing up. It wasn’t perfect, but it was elastic. No matter how hard we’d pull, and no matter how much we’d get on each other’s nerves, it would alwa
ys snap back. But then, he moved, and almost overnight, it snapped apart. He became an occasional brother, one that flew in for Christmas and Easter and texted on birthdays. We went from having mutual interests to talking about flights and the weather ‘up there’.
We didn’t do details anymore and I got the sense that he didn’t want us to.
‘Who cooks an entire barbecue a day early?’ he asked.
‘Luck favours the prepared, I guess.’
‘It’s gross.’ He started stacking containers of food. ‘If we’re smart about the way we pack these, we should be able to get them into five bags.’
‘And what are we going to do when we get there, have a picnic in the middle of the hospital room?’
That was exactly what we did – there was too much food, a fight broke out over a dolma, then everybody left and it was just me, Yiayia and the family across the room.
There was a girl sitting by the window, freckles splashed across her face and blonde streaks through her brown hair. Her parents wore matching cardigans. Her father held the Sunday paper, and her mother held a toddler.
But my eyes were drawn back to the girl’s. Staring into them, they were as wide and blue as the sky. And it didn’t feel corny thinking that, only absolutely and completely true.
‘Hello,’ Yiayia said, finally addressing the Anglo-Saxon elephants in the room. ‘You hungry?’
The freckled girl snorted a laugh. She cupped her mouth, but the sound had already escaped.
‘We have lamb and we have dolmades, moussaka,’ Yiayia continued, name-dropping the food that hadn’t jumped overboard.
The girl looked down at her lap. I could tell she was trying her hardest to stifle a second bout of giggles.
‘We’re all right, thank you,’ her mother said curtly, pulling the partition across with her free hand.
I stared at the spot past the curtain where the freckled girl had been. I’d fallen as deep in love as I could in ten seconds.
Yiayia must’ve seen it written on my face. ‘She pretty.’
The girl started laughing on the other side of the curtain. Apparently, Yiayia thought the partition was soundproof.
My cheeks burned. Yiayia was unfazed, but the people on the other side of the curtain weren’t – they were saying their goodbyes and getting ready to leave.
I sunk into an embarrassed heap on the floor and concentrated on sweeping the mess into a centralised pile as they walked past. I didn’t want them to see me. I knew I’d gone tomato-red.
When they were gone, I raised my eyes from the floor.
Had the girl been laughing at us or had she been laughing with me?
‘Psst.’
I looked to Yiayia, who seemed unconcerned by their rapid exit. She beckoned me closer and I pulled myself up.
Mum had delivered us the prognosis when we’d arrived for lunch. It hadn’t been like it was on TV. She’d used lots of technical terms like ‘stuff’ and ‘yeah’.
‘A massive kidney stone and a few little ones,’ she’d explained. ‘The larger one is blocking stuff and causing an infection.’
Roughly an eighth of Yiayia’s kidney had stopped working. The doctors needed to wait for the infection to clear before they could operate to remove the stone and the dead part of the kidney.
‘And she was calling it “trapped air”,’ I’d told Mum.
‘One more week of that, she would have been . . . yeah.’ The actual word had given her too much trouble.
‘Dead?’ Simon had asked.
Mum hadn’t responded.
As heavy as it all was, standing over my grandmother now, it didn’t seem like she’d just cheated death.
‘You love me?’ Yiayia asked.
I was picking food off her quilt cover. ‘Yes, Yiayia.’
‘My bag.’
It took me a second to realise she was asking me to pick her handbag up off the floor and not just announcing the fact that she owned one. I put it on her lap.
‘I need you to visit someone,’ she continued, unzipping the bag and struggling with its contents. ‘Very important.’ She removed a crumpled sliver of paper and handed it over. ‘You go there.’
It was an address written in Yiayia’s handwriting. Her scrawl was unmistakable. It was like she’d written it on a bus. During an earthquake.
‘Malvern?’ I looked up at her. ‘Where’s Malvern?’
‘Melvourni,’ Yiayia said.
Melbourne. She wanted me to get on a plane and go to a city I’d never been to before.
‘You go tomorrow,’ she added. ‘And you no tell your mummy.’
So it was a hush-hush, non-negotiable trip to a city I’d never been to before? Who or what could warrant the secrecy and effort?
I asked her.
‘Not important now,’ she said.
‘But what would I do?’
She ignored the question. ‘You go. For me?’
‘I –’
‘You love me, yes?’ Yiayia Filyo, the master of the guilt trip.
‘Um.’
‘You go tomorrow?’
‘I can’t just . . . Plane trips cost money.’
She grimaced. ‘You no have job?’
No, I didn’t. And besides, even if I hadn’t left the glamorous world of office supplies, I didn’t exactly rake in fly-to-Melbourne-on-a-whim money.
‘I quit,’ I said.
‘Bah.’
She fumbled with her handbag’s inner zipper. Her face creased like a sun-dried tomato. She pulled, it broke, she swore. Agitated, she tore the fabric and ripped out a short stack of fifty-dollar notes. She relaxed her face and passed the money to me. It was the most I’d ever held in my life. At least four hundred.
‘I can’t take this, it’s so much –’
‘You take.’
‘It’s a lot of –’
‘You take and you go.’
I couldn’t just take the money and go, I told myself. Who would agree to a hush-hush, non-negotiable trip to a city they’d never been to before to visit someone for some unknown reason? It was farcical.
But Yiayia was looking at me like I’d just turned down a second helping. And she was in hospital with a massive kidney stone that was causing an infection that, if she’d ignored much longer, would have killed her.
She had been spurred on by a near-death experience to get me to do this.
Whoever she wanted me to visit, it was serious. I mean, she’d gone all ghetto and ripped her handbag apart to find cash.
It was farcical. But it felt important.
‘All right,’ I said.
BillyTsiolkas
Doing absolutely nothing today.
3 minutes ago
Sticks94
i will also put up a really subtle public status about doing nothing today.
Just now
‘Great,’ I said, ‘now my status looks suss.’
Sticks was staring at his phone. ‘It looked suss before.’
An announcement over the aeroplane PA system asked all passengers to switch off their electronic devices. Sticks obliged.
I’d needed to keep Mum from knowing about the trip. If she were to, say, ‘accidentally’ open a letter addressed to me from the bank and ‘inadvertently’ pore over my statement, a return plane trip would be difficult to explain, so Sticks had lent me his debit card and invited himself along.
The whole scenario had piqued his interest. What was the reason behind the mystery trip? Was there someone we had to meet? Who? An illegitimate child? A former lover? Or was there something we had to retrieve? Was it part of a larger scavenger hunt, and if so, what was it leading us to?
Whatever I was travelling to Melbourne for, Sticks wanted to be there when I found out.
I didn’t argue against it. Company would be nice, and he’d been to Melbourne before. The pros outweighed the cons.
‘So, tell me, how did it go with Miss Maria Cheng?’
And there was the big con. I’d been dodging the question,
but there wasn’t much I could do on a plane flight to keep from answering.
‘I kissed her.’
‘Yeah, you did.’ Sticks held up his hand for a high-five, then looked at me, confused, when I didn’t tap his palm. ‘You’ve got to pay that.’
‘I kissed her and then she asked me how old I was.’
He left his hand hanging in the air above us. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘As in, the kiss was so bad that she realised I hadn’t kissed many girls.’
‘Oh.’ He lowered his hand.
‘And then she ran away.’
‘Yeah, that’s never good.’
‘It’s really not.’
As the plane departed the gate, it was tempting to wallow in my unique brand of terrible-kisser misery. I probably would have if I’d been alone. But Sticks was having none of it.
‘Well, stuff her, we’re going to Malvern,’ he said. ‘Malvern . . . It sounds like something out of The Lord of the Rings.’
‘Not really.’
‘And so it was,’ Sticks began in an ethereal English accent, ‘that Sticks the Scoundrel and Billiam the . . . Describing-Word-That-Starts-With-B set off on their perilous journey to Malvern.’
‘I don’t like the idea of being in another city while Yiayia’s in hospital,’ I said.
‘She’ll be fine, Bill, trust me.’ He buckled his seatbelt. ‘Easter’s all about amazing comebacks.’
We caught the express bus to the city. I followed Sticks out of the coach terminal and Spencer Street immediately smacked us with its Melbourneness. A busker in aqua-blue chinos and a bowler cap set free-verse poetry to an acoustic guitar riff while two ageing green tramcars trundled past, one travelling in each direction.
‘Can we catch one?’ I asked.
‘Not from here,’ Sticks said. ‘We’ll head towards Flinders, buy lunch and get a tram to Malvern from there.’
I was more than happy to relinquish control to the expert.
Compared to the sprawling chaos of Sydney, everything about Melbourne felt so regimented. The city was built on a grid. The streets that ran in the same direction were parallel, and those that intersected did so at right angles. Back home, you got the impression that they just built the roads to connect important places, but not in Melbourne. There, someone had the foresight to build the roads first and the places second.
The First Third Page 4