As the woman ushers them into the impeccably tidy living room, Antonio’s eyes discreetly scan the place. Something’s not right. There are photographs on the wall of her and a man. The husband, maybe. The department file said he passed away a while back. Three or four years, maybe.
“Your husband?” Antonio asks, smiling casually toward the framed vacation snapshots.
“Yes.”
She seems rattled, a bit defensive even.
“I suppose I’ll get around to taking those down, one of these days. Would you like coffee, or tea?” She gestures for him and Sunni to sit on the long leather couch.
“Thanks, that would be great. Tea, please. Black, one sugar.” Antonio’s eyes move to the carved wooden cross hanging above the mantelpiece. On the ledge below is a photograph of the husband overlaid on an American flag, with the words September 11, 2001. Never forgotten. God Bless America.
Sweet Jesus. The deceased husband. That’s how he died. Antonio’s eyes widen.
Antonio can feel Sunni’s leg trembling against his as the boy moves closer to him on the couch, can hear the kid’s shallow breathing right next to his ear. He wonders if Sunni’s noticed the memorial plaque as well.
* * *
Mirabel leaves the Child Protection worker sitting on the couch and moves into the kitchen. She fixes two cups of tea, and an orange juice. He’s eight, they said, the boy. He’s chubby, but he still looks small for his age. Perhaps it’s just that he’s leaning up against the tall man like that. Almost as though he’s afraid of her. Mirabel hasn’t even really looked at his face. She’ll go back out there and talk to him properly. She hadn’t wanted to be too pushy in those first few minutes, but in the process of trying to give him space, she realizes now that she’s kind of ignored him. Mirabel puts the drinks on a wooden serving tray with a plate of Oreos and walks carefully back to the living room. She sets the tray down on the table.
“Sunni.” She looks directly at him now. His eyes are still staring at the floor. “I’m so glad to have you here. I have a room all ready for you. We can go and have a look at it now, if you like.”
The boy slowly raises his dark-brown eyes to meet hers, and she sees him. The chubby brown arms, furrowed black eyebrows. The oversized cap still pulled down tightly over his ears. And something . . . she can see something—what is it?—beneath the cap. Something covering his head. Mirabel tears her eyes away from the kid and looks over at the man from the department.
The man clears his throat and stares steadily back at her. “Sunni, you should probably take off your hat indoors, little man,” he says.
The kid’s bottom lip is quivering. He raises his hand to the front rim of the faded blue Knicks cap, slowly removes it from his head, and rests it in his lap. His face is cherubic: cheeks rounder than Mirabel’s ever seen on a child his age. Wound tightly over his head is a piece of black, stretchy material. The material conceals the boy’s hair and twists around at the top to form a kind of covered-up bun.
Mirabel takes a sharp breath in, fear rising in her throat.
* * *
Sunni stares at the lady. She’s not smiling anymore. She’s screwing up her face in that way people do. Screwing up her face in that way he thinks might have made his maa go crazy in the Walmart, in that way that made it so that now his maa has to stay in custody, and he has to stay here. Sunni wrenches his eyes away from the lady and looks down at the tray of Oreos. He reaches a hand out: grabs two, three, four of them. He starts cramming the cookies into his mouth as fast as he can, grinding the crunchy sugar crispness of them down with his teeth.
There’s a small crack in the glass coffee table where the plate of cookies is sitting. The crack in the glass makes Sunni think about when all of this started: about when his maa first started to go crazy, when the trouble first came.
They were okay. They were okay, his maa and him. Sunni’s pita took off when Sunni was very little—before he was one year old, even. Sunni can’t remember what his dad even looks like. Whenever he asks, his maa says she’s burned all the photos. The kids at temple always teased Sunni; whispered that his pita had run off with an American woman; a white woman. But Sunni had paid them no mind—he and his maa got by okay.
Old Bill and Susie, who live in the apartment next door to Sunni and his maa, had looked after him when his maa was nursing a night shift. He would play on their living-room floor and sleep in their spare room. Sunni could feel that Bill and Susie loved him, in the sure, quiet way they’d let him become part of their everyday lives. His maa said the old couple had no kids themselves, so no grandkids either; that they were very lonely. Sunni hadn’t minded hanging out at their place. Old Bill and Susie had looked at him like he was special, like he belonged to them. Not like this rich white lady is looking at him now.
But everything changed. Everything changed on that one day when Sunni was about five, when the bad men flew planes into those towers in New York. Sunni’s maa had let the TV run all morning, and Sunni saw the baddies crash the planes over and over and over again: watched the buildings smoke and crumble. It was like a video game where you had to swerve the plane away at the last minute, and the kid playing the game got distracted and went to the park to play, but the game kept looping and looping.
That same afternoon, while Sunni was playing cars in his bedroom, there’d been a shattering sound. On the street outside their apartment, a car had quickly screeched away. Sunni had paused for a moment, petrified, then run into the living room to see his mother cleaning up broken window glass and the shards of a stray roof tile that had been hurled into their home.
“They think we’re Muslim,” his maa had said, wrapping the jagged pieces of glass with newspaper. “It will pass.”
Sunni hadn’t understood. He hadn’t understood, and his maa had been wrong—it hadn’t passed at all. Sunni used to climb over from their apartment’s balcony to the balcony of Bill and Susie’s place. It was a cheeky thing he did: surprising them with a visit, sneaking in through the sliding balcony door to leave a drawing he’d done of them, or some cookies he and his maa had baked. After the bad men in planes, Bill and Susie had stopped looking after him, stopped looking at him with kindness in their old-person eyes. All of a sudden, they said they were getting too old to help out looking after him anymore. They’d said it through the crack in their door, peering above the silver security chain.
The next week, old Bill and Susie had put plants up against the concrete divide where their balconies joined Sunni’s place. Sunni pointed the beautiful pink flowers out to his mother.
“You can’t climb over and visit anymore,” she’d said, her voice shaking. “They’re poisonous flowers. That’s oleander.”
The look on his maa’s face then had been the same terrified look as the one on this lady’s face as she crouches by the coffee table, staring at him. Sunni quickly swallows the mouthful of cookie.
* * *
Antonio watches the lady closely. “Are you all right, Mrs. Adams?”
“Mirabel,” she says weakly. “Call me Mirabel . . .”
Her face is drained of color. Antonio bites back his disappointment. Sunni’s watching. For fuck’s sake, the kid’s right in front of her. Antonio reaches over and hands Sunni the glass of orange juice, helps the woman up, and escorts her into the kitchen. He pulls out a wooden stool for her, folds up a clean dish towel, and wets it at the sink.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting—” She dabs at her face with the wet cloth. “I probably upset him. He looks scared. I just wasn’t expecting . . .”
“He is scared, Mrs. Adams.” Antonio scratches at the back of his newly razored Afro, looks out the kitchen window at the clumsy black dog chasing its tale in a patch of sunlight. “We have you down for emergency care. For any child. Did Jillian at the office not explain?”
“Yes. Any child. I did say that. But I never considered . . . Jillian said his name was Sunni.”
“It is.” Antonio tries his best to sound understandin
g. “His name is Sundeep—Sunni for short. He’s a good kid. He really is. You’re lucky. I don’t think he’ll be any trouble at all. It’s emergency care, Mrs. Adams. Just for the weekend. Then we’ll find somewhere a bit more permanent.”
* * *
What would Michael think? Mirabel takes a deep breath, swallows past the lump that’s formed in her throat. “Is he— I mean . . . What . . . ?”
They’re standing in the haberdashery store down near Union Square. Michael is reaching around Mirabel’s sides, both of his hands on her swelling stomach. His chin is resting on her shoulder, his blond stubble prickling her cheek.
The man from the department is glaring at her, judgment in his eyes. Mirabel can see he’s doing his best to be calm, but she can sense the annoyance in his voice.
“His family’s Sikh. If that matters to you.”
The memory of her husband aches in the muscles just below her abdomen. Sikh. Mirabel doesn’t even know what that means. She glances out the window. Big Ted is running around now, chasing his tail, tornado-ing around the back lawn.
Michael, with the wind rustling through his sandy-colored hair as man and dog tumble over each other, wrestling.
It’s golden outside. A brilliant yellow light bathes the whole of Oakland. The breeze drifting in through the open windows is all cut grass and neighbors barbecuing, and freshly laid asphalt.
This child. This tubby little brown boy. This knock at the door. Rappata, rappata, rappata. A frantic urgency. Mirabel looks back through the kitchen doorway to where the little boy is sitting, shoulders curved over, backpack still on.
“Where will he go?” she asks softly. “If I can’t take him?”
The man from Child Protection sighs. “Honestly? I don’t know. He’s a good kid, Mrs. Adams. He’s just a little kid.”
Mirabel closes her eyes. Plane seats are laid out in straight rows on either side of her. She is walking, slowly toward the cockpit. She puts a hand on the wall to keep herself steady. The hallway is spinning. She’s right inside the nose of the beast now, can see over the pilot’s shoulder. There are men yelling things in a language she can’t understand. The plane is suspended in time, hovering wasplike. The man from Child Protection is talking, but he sounds very far away.
The Sukiyaki Book Club
AVERY IS hanging upside down on the monkey bars. Her blue-and-white-checked uniform is bunched around her waist. Her black bloomers are tight around her chubby thighs. The elastic waistband digs into her stomach. Every afternoon when she takes the sports undies off after school, they leave a stinging pink ring around her middle that looks as if somebody has tried to saw her in two with a blunt knife.
Avery’s told her dad that she needs some more bloomers, but when they went to the shopping center last month and finally found Target, her father froze outside the entrance, peered in at all the families on their Saturday afternoon shopping trips and made a small, strangled sound at the back of his throat.
“Here’s thirty dollars, love. I’ll sit out here on the bench. You ask one of the ladies to help you out, eh? You’re a big girl now. You’ll be okay in there by yourself. I’ll be right here waiting.”
But Avery isn’t a big girl. She’s only seven. She can tie her own shoelaces, climb to the very top of the acorn tree in her backyard and almost ride her bike without the training wheels, but she is definitely too little to buy sports knickers on her own from a crowded department store.
She had taken the money and scrunched it down into her pocket, walked into the store and hid just around the corner behind a tall stack of electric fans. After several minutes she’d come out again, told her dad they’d run out of sports knickers. He’d forgotten to ask for the money back, so every lunchtime for three weeks she’d bought a doughnut with yellow icing and blue sprinkles from the school cafeteria. Her dad wouldn’t have minded even if he knew, so it wasn’t really stealing.
Avery’s head feels heavy and swollen. The sweaty backs of her knees are sore where they’re hooked around the shiny yellow rung of the monkey bars. The shredded bark on the floor of the infant school playground is playing tricks on her eyes, forming and re-forming into different shapes: a fire-breathing dragon, a princess in a pointy hat, the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, a garden spade. It’s like cloud-watching, only wrong way up. And the bark isn’t moving; it’s her that’s swaying back and forth.
Avery’s arms feel loose in their sockets. They pull downward, as if they want to detach at the shoulder and tumble to the ground. There’s a spot on her back, right between her shoulder blades, that is itching like buggery. That’s what her dad says whenever anything’s going on with his body he’s not so keen on. Itches like buggery. Tired as all buggery. Hungry as buggery. Drunk as buggery. Avery wriggles, trying to shake the itch away. The backs of her knees are really stinging now, burning. Her head feels dizzy. Avery does not know how to get down from the monkey bars. She is stuck as buggery.
* * *
Down the short corridor from my bedroom the Bananas in Pyjamas are talking to each other with their trademark speech affectation—repeating themselves unnecessarily, slapping each other’s names onto the end of every sentence.
“Have you seen my shoes, B1?”
“No. I haven’t seen your shoes. Maybe we should look for them together, B2?”
“Great idea. Let’s look for my lost shoes together, B1.”
“Where do you think we should start looking for your lost shoes, B2?”
It’s enough to drive even a toddler crazy, but there’s no other sound coming from the tiny lounge room—both kids are miraculously quiet. I move over toward my bed, climb onto the thin patchwork quilt cover, peer out the window and down toward the station. From four stories up, we can see right through to the Melbourne skyline. Every night before bed the kids climb up and search for the tallest lights, the Eureka Tower.
“When we move into the next house,” Maryam said last week, “can we take the window with us?” At three years old, she has already known four homes. It is always the same story: landlords refusing to fix hot water heaters, home invasions even pest controllers cannot fix, extortionate rent increases.
Down below, Irving Street is crawling with evening commuters. They chat on mobiles and clutch folded newspapers under their arms as they hurry out the station gates, then dash across the road to Footscray Fruit Market to gather extra grocery items for dinner. I shift to the left a little, peer past the rusty corrugated-iron roof of the Dancing Dog Café.
The queue in front of the Peter’s Doughnuts van, just outside the station exit, is about ten people deep. Not bad for piping hot sweets on a ninety-five-degree evening. The old Greek man and his wife will be trying to hurry themselves and failing miserably, but nobody in the queue will bat an eyelid. Rosetta will be wearing the same starched white nurse’s uniform she wears every workday, her wiry salt-and-pepper hair pulled tightly back into a netted bun. She will be slowly mixing the batter for the doughnut machine, flicking the switch at various intervals to drop glugs of it into the honey-colored cooking oil. The conveyor belt will be straining, sliding round balls of just-cooked doughnut into the shallow dish filled with fine white sugar.
Her old man will be taking change, mostly coins, with weathered olive hands, asking about jam and sugar, rescuing doughnuts from the conveyor belt before they hit the sugar pile. He will be nodding through the tiny window of the rusty white food van, ramming doughnuts onto the metal jam syringe and growing them plump with bright red strawberry syrup, sliding them into white paper bags.
Bananas in Pyjamas is finishing now. The familiar theme song’s blaring from the lounge room. The apartment is so small that even with the television turned down low, the program echoes in every other room. The kids are still eerily quiet. It is entirely possible they’ve managed to simultaneously dispose of each other.
Across the road from the station entrance, the evening busker is setting up: an elderly Vietnamese man who wears a long khaki jacket and pale
denim jeans, no matter the weather. He stands on the footpath, between the Vietnamese bakery and the Ethiopian coffeehouse, next to a wire rack of prepackaged coconut buns. The old man’s violin is clutched lovingly beneath his chin. His bow hovers an inch above the strings. He closes his eyes a moment. He bows then retracts into straight-backed poise, as if taking a breath with all his being.
I slide the window open a crack, listen for the mournful wail. The glass is warm beneath my fingertips, still holds the day’s heat. The music is different this time—not the usual slow, regal, pentatonic pull, not those several yet somehow cohesive harmonies. I listen, squeeze my eyes shut, search for the tune. It is not a Vietnamese song at all this evening. It is Japanese. “Ue o Muite Arukou”: “I Shall Walk Looking Up.” A song about sadness lurking in the shadows, sadness lurking behind the stars and moon. A song about ignoring the tears welling in your eyes, raising your head high and walking on.
Markie’s prep class performed the song for their school assembly item last year. The teacher taught them to sing it jovially, with an upbeat tempo, swaying with joy. “Sukiyaki,” his teacher had called it, the easier name the song was given when it reached Western shores. Even after we did the research on the history of the song and Markie presented it for Tuesday Show and Tell, the teacher still insisted on having the kids smile through it, as if they were singing “Happy Birthday”: a song about a man overwhelmed with despair.
* * *
Avery does not know how to get down from the monkey bars. She is hanging upside down, stuck like buggery. She tries to take her mind off her headache by scanning the empty playground. She draws a treasure map in her head, marking herself as the X, dotting a red line directly to where she hangs so somebody will come out of the school and find her.
On the map she is making in her head, Avery includes the two hopscotch grids that are stencil-painted onto the dark gray asphalt of the infants area, and the white plastic skipping rope with bright yellow handles that hangs from a gum tree near the kindergarten seats. She also adds the five lunchboxes that have been left on the wooden benches, colluding in a brightly colored cluster, as if having a tea party.
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