by Cate Kennedy
‘I’ll be forty in a fortnight,’ you say.
Impossible to gauge his real, unadorned reaction to that news. You’ll have to turn the light on for that.
Angel
‘You don’t say much, do ya?’ said the lady in the shop on the ground floor of the flats when I first came here. I shook my head and smiled. The tone in her voice was one I had grown to recognise. In Vietnamese, a slight inflection can change the meaning of a word entirely, in English this can apply to a whole phrase. As she scooped up my change her voice maintained that it was just being friendly, but there was an inflection in there meant only for me. In Australia many people take silence for rudeness, for not enough gratitude. If I were really grateful for being here, I would talk endlessly. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. That is what the feeling is, in the flats and in English class: an expressionless resentment at my failure to play my part.
‘Talk about your new country,’ my tutor would say, reading that suggestion out of a book on how to teach people like us.
‘I like the trees,’ the students would say, flat and careful. ‘I like the sea.’
I don’t like the sea, I would think to myself. I spent two months on the sea, waiting for my turn to sip the water, knowing as people vomited that they would be the ones to die.
‘Let’s hear from Mai,’ the tutor would say, and everyone would turn, ready to watch my difficulties. Wanting to get the language themselves, this barely comprehensible thing that would allow them their driving licences and jobs in the T-shirt factory in Smith Street or Champion Dimsims in Ascot Vale.
‘I like the sea, too,’ I would say, the obedient student. My father used to say I was the best student at the school in my town, the family scholar. I learned by keeping quiet, but this is not the way you learned in Australia. When I passed very well in my English class, my tutor looked at me with the same expression as the lady in the shop.
‘You don’t say much, but you take it all in, don’t you?’ she said, an accusing finger on my diploma. Why is silence so worthy of suspicion? You can choose to talk or choose to not talk. But take it all in: yes, that part is true. I take everything in, and in bed at night I lie rocking on a tide of it, whole scenes and conversations, faces I will not forget, even if I wanted to. After the boat, there was a child I went on caring for at the camp who didn’t speak for a whole five months. I worried that the authorities would think she was a slow learner. That was not the problem. The problem was she was a fast learner; she took it all in. When we got into the harbour we were news, not because of our plight so much as something unusual that had occurred on our boat.
‘They want to ask you about the shark attack,’ said the interpreter, nervous, and the people with the camera equipment had made a movement, a hopeful, craning movement, towards this child. Whether she spoke or not, I could tell she would be the one they made the story about.
She hadn’t spoken since this thing happened, and she didn’t speak now. She didn’t say a word till three months later, when other authorities came to the camp and news spread around, a whispered, desperate rumour, that they were going to give preference to all the children under six. This child, who was eight, was with me and she suddenly wrenched away and rushed to the table where the men were sitting with their papers and slapped her hand down. She spoke to them in perfect English, the first two words she’d uttered for five months.
‘I’m five,’ she said.
I, too, broke my silence that day with a lie.
‘I am her mother,’ I said.
She is a chatterbox now, my daughter. My father, if he were alive, would be proudly calling her the family scholar now. But at night-time when I go into her room, I find myself looking at her small head and thinking: Inside there is the boat and the shark and the slipping over the side of bodies, the watching for pirates and chewing on bleeding teeth. And I think: That is enough to take in.
Scenes, conversations, faces. Sometimes just a picture — the stillness of my father’s shoulders as he got up from the table to be taken away, waiting while they turned over everything in the house. I went to speak and he shook his head just once at me. His hands waiting, still, on the table. A chicken came in watchfully in the quiet and pecked very carefully at some grain the soldiers had tipped out.
I saw one of those soldiers again, only two or three months ago. I was at the Footscray market and I saw him crossing the street in a big crowd of people. He looked just the same except he had a leather jacket on now.
‘There is so much evil in the world.’ That is what the lady downstairs says. I go to a different market now, with her and some other ladies on the Community Centre bus. She invites me down to her flat to drink coffee and talks very fast about her relatives in her country, too fast for me. She gets out photograph albums, shows me pictures, gets her two noisy daughters to dress up in their national clothes to show me. ‘English,’ says Gabriella, ‘who can understand it? In Spanish, the language has rules, and they are sensible, every tense matches every verb, every letter is pronounced correctly. The war,’ she tells me, ‘has given Central American Spanish a new verb: to disappear.’
‘I am sorry,’ I say. ‘I am confused.’
Gabriella explains. ‘To disappear somebody,’ she says. ‘An active verb. People there are disappeared. Do you understand?’
Then she plays a video. The pictures are blurry; there are people running along the street, police, pictures of bodies and women crying outside the hospital, holding up photos. More pictures of bodies and soldiers training. Gabriella watches and cries, passes me a photo over the coffee cups of a sister at her fifteenth birthday. ‘Not even political,’ says Gabriella, rocking back and forth on her little boat of grief, ‘a student, nothing more.’ I have no more room to take anything else in. I have no national dresses, no photos to show in return. There is no point in saying anything.
From my window I cannot watch my daughter playing in the playground. My flat faces the wrong direction, towards the new freeway. She tells me I worry too much, that she does not like her friends to see me sitting on the bench down there keeping my eye on them all. That is what she says: keeping my eye on them. It is a strange expression; it makes me think of an angel. I have a blind over the window now. One day I was looking out, not expecting anything and not really seeing, when something went past — a flutter of clothing, fast as blinking. I did not go downstairs.
Gabriella came up. She expected that I would know the girl because she was Vietnamese, and said that she had jumped with an empty purse in her hand. She paused after she told me this, expecting me to say something. I shook my head, looking at Gabriella’s own hands, clutching tissues and her own throat, wringing themselves with all the evil in the world.
There is no angel there to keep an eye on my daughter. Vietnamese children are often approached because it is their reflex to be polite to adults. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her from the balcony outside the lifts, and see her small shining head with all that it contains going back and forth on the swing and the monkey bars. One day last week she stopped playing there. She stayed in the flat, colouring in her schoolwork, not talking. A silence rose between us, waiting for me to form the question, and in that silence I heard the shuffle of a soldier’s boot, the quick hard tap as the chicken struck in the stillness.
‘Why aren’t you at the adventure playground?’ I asked.
Her hand coloured and coloured with her new textas. It was the sea around Australia, light blue for shallow water, dark blue for deep. The paper was softly tearing. I put my hand over her hand, the hand that had slapped the table, so strong was its owner’s will. Now it stopped colouring, and was still.
‘A man came,’ she said.
There have been five days between her telling me this and now, this moment. She stopped talking then, but she showed me what he had done and led me down to the little storeroom fo
r bins behind the laundry. Showed me with a tiny gesture who it was, as we crossed the road to the school. Two friends walked ahead with their mothers and she looked at me and pointed again.
‘Mai knows more than she says; she takes it all in.’ That is what Gabriella and the others are saying about me. They think I know more about the body than I let on, because I still don’t say anything. Silence instils suspicion, so they are anxious to talk to the police, smothering their fear of uniforms and trying to hear the layers between what is said and what is not said. They tell the police everything they can think of, and the second time the police come to see me they joke that my neighbours all think I am the mystery woman. I am not a mystery, I want to say to them, I am my daughter’s angel. They try very hard to make me talk; they say they need a statement. The lady in the shop, they say, believes it was me she saw and is making a statement. They now wish to search through the flat. Their voices are as careful as the students’ in English class, slow and deliberate, stumbling over long difficult words and without inflection. In the silence before I speak there is the creak of a boot, hands lying flat on the table.
‘There is so much evil in the world,’ I say. How different this is to the other day, when my father stood his last minutes in the kitchen, collecting himself. There everybody knew a disappearance was to occur, no statement was required. Here everyone seems to talk at once, to all try repeating the questions using different words, as if language, not silence, is the code. A bag of clothes is overturned in the bedroom. I hear the plastic bag being shaken, and think of that soldier’s face as he waited for my father to rise, as empty as when he stepped across the pedestrian crossing in Barkly Street holding his mobile phone. Now they are whispering to each other in the kitchen and talking loudly into my face, telling me they have found the knife.
Now they are telling me I have the right to remain silent.
Seizure
If it hadn’t been Helen’s turn to collect the coffees she wouldn’t have seen it. She was carrying the tray back to work when a man in front of her — an ordinary-looking man in a grey suit, a little overweight, hurrying — suddenly sprawled to the ground. His keys and briefcase and a mobile phone went skidding from his outstretched hand and across the concrete.
About ten people stopped. Helen, heart thudding with uselessness, put the tray of coffees on the ground and picked up the man’s belongings, thinking, he’s not getting up, and feeling the day lurch out of ordinariness. She stood up self-consciously, wondering if her hesitation was losing him vital moments and the oxygen was ebbing from his brain because she didn’t know how to do CPR. When she turned back, though, another man had detached himself from the milling crowd and was turning the injured man’s grazed head to the side, loosening his collar. He glanced up at Helen.
‘He’s fitting,’ he said. ‘Epilepsy.’ Then he turned back to the unconscious man on the pavement. ‘You’re okay. Take it easy now.’
She watched the way he took a pen from a pocket and worked it carefully and patiently between the prone man’s teeth. One of the passers-by had something to say to their companion about that, as if they were watching a documentary.
‘So he doesn’t swallow his tongue,’ they said. ‘Choke on it.’
‘Epileptic fit,’ Helen heard muttered from the onlookers. She crouched and tucked the keys and mobile phone back into the unconscious man’s suit pocket, stood his briefcase next to him. She studied his face, red and sweaty with a swelling lump where he’d smacked the pavement, resting close to the other man’s knees. She imagined him five minutes before, finishing a cigarette and talking on his mobile, alert and purposeful, striding back to work with dignity intact. Now this.
‘You’re all right,’ said the crouching man soothingly, and Helen watched, surrendering any responsibility with relief, as he reached over and smoothed the man’s hair out of his eyes. Suddenly the unconscious man’s mouth laboured and he vomited. The onlookers moved on at that, with distaste. But Helen was still drawn to those hands, lifting his head, shifting the pen, grabbing a handkerchief and wiping, never hesitating.
‘You’re right. Everything’s okay.’
Helen felt her face flush with someone else’s humiliation, and something else. That another stranger, passing randomly on the street, could be the agent of such unconditional compassion. She tore her eyes away from those ministering hands, and said: ‘Is he going to be OK, or shall I call an ambulance?’
‘I think we’ll be right — I’ll take care of it. It’s just a kind of seizure. He’ll be fine in a few minutes.’ He glanced up at her as he spoke, smiled and added, ‘Thanks for stopping, though.’
He was not a man who commanded attention. Later Helen could hardly remember what his face looked like; mild, freckled, unremarkable — like someone who fixed your phone, someone who sold you a stereo unit or whitegoods, some blurry identikit picture with features you wouldn’t look at twice. All she saw was his sandy hair, his thin narrow shoulders in an old checked shirt and the pink sunburnt line across his nose. He knelt there patiently, one knee in pooling vomit, not moving, and she thought that if she was lying in the road after an accident, he’d be the person she’d want to stay with her. The unconscious man’s hand twitched, opened and closed. His head would be splitting when he woke up, thought Helen.
She picked up the tray of coffees and experienced the strange sensation of not wanting to leave. She pictured herself back at the office, relating what had happened, and could envision the same milling interest of the crowd that had stopped, expressions of disgust when she mentioned vomiting, the women grimacing with polite sympathy and Alan, the office know-all, regaling them all with details of epilepsy.
She wanted to stay here, of all places, and … what? Just rest. Witness more of that kindness. She made herself walk away, but her feet dragged, as if something lay there she had neglected to notice. She felt thrown by a sudden, dull fatigue. As she walked, she tore her own coffee out of the tray and had a mouthful. It had upset her, that was all — that poor man, confident and unsuspecting and suddenly felled. She turned back and saw the sandy-haired guy take the unconscious man’s briefcase and with all the tenderness in the world slide it gently under his head, and go on waiting. Her heart ached. She wouldn’t say a word to anyone at the office.
Helen had lived with Steve for seven years. When her friends talked about their relationships to Helen it often seemed they were avidly describing characters in a TV show or movie, each with their own motivations and reasons, their flaws and failings. The conversations and arguments they related seemed pointed and polished, like scripts.
When her girlfriends talked about Steve they said he was dynamic and charismatic, and Helen would find herself filing away those character traits, trying to step back to get an overview of the plot. The way she related the storyline, Steve was the perennial enthusiast and she was the reluctant one, lagging behind.
‘It’s never dull,’ she would concede with a smile, feeling how Steve’s plans pulled her along like an undertow. This weekend, for example, he’d talked her into going bushwalking again and when she got home that night he had a map spread out. Ah, yes — the gorge, she thought as she put her keys on the kitchen bench.
‘Hi,’ said Steve, absorbed in mapping. ‘Good day?’
‘Um … yeah.’
She watched him lean over the table with a highlighter pen hovering.
‘Do you want to get some Thai takeaway?’ she said.
‘No, no, I’m making puttanesca. Just give me a sec with this and I’ll get started.’
He came over and gave her an absent-minded kiss. Steve was big and broad-shouldered and for a second she was enveloped in one of his distracted one-armed hugs, the elbow clamped briefly around her neck, before he moved back to the table.
‘Okay. But can you please make it not too hot?’
‘Sure. Just mild,’ he said,
his eyes back on the map. ‘Just a mere shaving of hot salami.’
She could have written that part of the script in her sleep. She was about to nag, to tell him that he always said that and it was always too hot, but stopped herself. She waited for him to look up at her again, leaning against the bench there in silence. What she wanted, now she thought about it, was for him to look more carefully at her and ask her if anything was wrong, sense her mood from across the room and tune into it, maybe even ask her if she still felt like doing an eight-kilometre hike the next day. But he was focused on his pen, curving neatly down the page in luminous yellow, and then refolding the map carefully leaving the relevant sections open. She could wait all she wanted; he wasn’t going to look up.
In their bedroom, both their daypacks rested on top of the week’s washing she’d folded that morning. Helen unzipped hers and smelt the familiar, unwelcome odour of apples and sunscreen, took out some brochure she’d picked up from somewhere about a winery and tossed it in the bin. Outside, the TV and the news waited, and her special glass in the cupboard for her first red out of the cask, but instead of going back out there she sat on the bed and paged through a Country Life magazine for a long time. When she finished she felt listless and sated, slightly nauseated by the perfumy smell of the gloss pages. Steve was right, they were a stupid thing to buy; he stacked them up beside the toilet for a joke when they had guests. Helen leaned back on the pillow and lay there pondering, feeling something — energy, probably — slackly spooling out of her, like fishing line following a lead sinker from an open reel. The pillowcase itched. Her waistband felt too tight. She anticipated the following day like a visit to the dentist. She recognised that familiar, unwilling lassitude, and summoned what she needed to fight it off.