by Tim Richards
My footsteps down the passage sounded like head-punches. I was so angry, I didn’t know what to do. Though one part of me wanted to throttle Selma Roy for not telling the whole truth, I’d already guessed that this was her strategy. I would only care about Michael and his fate – would only differentiate between this behaviour and the oddness I knew – if I saw it first-hand. She had to win a convert to her cause.
With a storm gathering, the afternoon was sumo-heavy. I could make calls about the dog from home. As I flew back to Melbourne on a half-full plane, I was as desolate for my brother as I was for Yvette Mitchell.
Though we’re not wealthy, we do well enough. If my framing business collapsed, we’d be stretched, but I was ready to spend months in a Brisbane court if that was the best thing I could do for my brother. It was important to be sure that financial considerations weren’t tilting my sense of right and wrong.
Though Dane took some convincing, I said we had to do all we could to stop Michael’s case going to trial, even if that meant flying to Queensland to speak to the court’s psychiatrists.
I was about to share these thoughts with Selma when I received an email from Amanda Jackman, manager of the genealogical research firm I’d approached in the UK.
16 January, 2007
Dear Helen,
We’ve had some luck with Yvette Mitchell, but we need to know if you still wish to proceed with a search for surviving family members.
Camden-born Yvette Rosalie Mitchell’s details and birth-date coincide with the 21/11/1940 you supplied. However, it should be noted that both Yvette and her mother Rosalie Anne (nee Bannock), born Guildford 17/6/1918, perished in the V2 attack that hit New Cross High Street on 25 November, 1944. Yvette’s father, Raymond Keith Mitchell (born 3/3/1917), had died in June that year, while prisoner of the Japanese in Burma.
We will delay further investigation until you indicate how you wish to proceed.
Yours faithfully,
Amanda Jackman
How did I wish to proceed? There was no clear answer to that.
I’d read about the V2s. They were the whispering death. You never heard them coming till it was too late.
Weeks earlier, I had asked Michael’s landlady to care for his dog while the legal matters were being resolved. I now told her that I’d arrange to have Lucy sent to Melbourne as soon as possible. Dane and I had never spoken about having a dog, let alone one that had bonded with Michael and taken his quirks as a matter of course. But all that was before the missile hit, when the future was still best placed to take care of itself.
CLUB SELECTION
Even the sight of Norichi’s name beside his on the roster sends Hizu’s pulse racing, and now, with Nori at his elbow, and the transit coach pulling into the loading bay, Hizu finds himself searching for the correct phrase. ‘Welcome’ comes to mind, but it sounds too formal. Though his tutor says that Australians aren’t fussed about the odd word out of place, Hizu is fussed. He needs to be more Australian.
The door opens with a hydraulic vroosh, and the first guests greet him with outstretched hands.
‘Nice place,’ one says.
Seizing this hand and shaking it vigorously, Hizu opts for the all-purpose, ‘No worries.’
‘Didn’t think there would be, mate,’ a huge man in baggy shorts replies. ‘Not after what it cost to get here.’
When another stupendously obese man emerges, Hizu, now more sure of himself, grasps his hand. ‘No worries, mate.’
Only after greeting twenty men and women does he see Nori squatting beside the driver, regarding him with rising disdain. Still six months away from qualifying to become a supervisor, Norichi is determined to behave like one.
‘Just say “G’day”, dickhead. Save “no worries” for when they ask to sleep with your missus.’
‘I’m not married,’ Hizu says.
‘Mate, you don’t know shit. You’ll never pass.’
Several weeks earlier, Hizu would have apologised, but now he tells Nori to ‘put a fuckin’ sock in it’.
He keeps meticulous notebooks. Most entries rehash instruction Missy has given at Language and Culture classes, but more recently, they have been dominated by his thoughts about what guests have told him, and what he’s seen at the resort. Often they take the form of personal reminders.
Eliminate all sense of superiority, pity, or judgement. Your personality must adapt to each individual guest.
Nothing troubles Hizu more than piss-taking, and the expectation that one should respond to a piss-take in kind. Australian culture is subtle, and reading nuance and irony doesn’t come easily to him. Hizu flicks back to an early note, one of Missy’s favourite jokes.
Never confuse taking the piss with taking a shit. Rarely is the latter so pleasurable as the former.
Below this, he has yellow-highlighted Missy’s observation that Australians love the illusion of social equality: first names, casual dress, jokes and unexpected intimacies. Only recently has he begun to understand the tension between this illusion and the complex underlying realities. After reflection, he makes a new note.
As one becomes more Australian, it is possible that one might like Australians less. Why not set myself the task of becoming a better Australian than those I meet?
As he lugs Ray’s bag down Newton’s third fairway, the old man tells Hizu that he’s visited the resort three times a year since it opened. Before The Shark withdrew his endorsement, it was known as Shark Resort.
Keen to avoid these ancient disputes, Hizu tells Ray that MacArthur Pleasure Resort is a better name, the General having done so much to bring their nations together.
‘Australia’s not worth shit,’ Ray says. ‘This resort is the best patch of Australia we have left. Did you hear what the terrorists did to Royal Melbourne? It’s not safe to play in Australia these days.’
‘No worries about safety here. And the greens have never looked better.’
Ray’s not so easy to distract. He’s different from most guests, who usually love to put the bad stuff behind them.
‘Golfers are an easy target, Hizzy. You want to blame someone for Australia going to shit, blame us. Or blame the pioneers who only tried to make something from a useless patch of dirt and scrub. The courses they’re tearing up are a symbol of everything we achieved.’
‘It’s a beautiful day, Ray. Not so windy as yesterday.’
‘Yeah, one out of the box.’
Seeing the old man cheering up, Hizu gives him a play-punch to the bicep.
‘Days like these, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.’
With the shower running cold, Hizu drapes a towel around his waist and knocks on his neighbour’s door, hoping Tom knows whether the problem is common to all apartments in the annex. When there is no answer, he phones the superintendent.
‘It’ll be back on this arvo. Had to replace the tank,’ Jet says.
‘Seen Tom or Miuki about?’ Hizu asks, momentarily forgetting his distaste for Jet’s gossip.
‘Admin gave them the flick.’
‘Bullshit!’
‘Too many complaints. The boss’d had a gutful.’
‘They’re good people,’ Hizu says, remembering how Miuki comforted him in the first weeks. It was she who’d said that a young man could have no greater ambition than to become a good Australian.
‘Sure, they’re good guys, but they forgot themselves.’
That was the one thing always said of the staff told to leave: they’d forgotten themselves.
‘They were more Australian than anyone here,’ Hizu says, which is close as he’d come to issuing a protest.
‘Might’ve been the problem. You can be too Australian.’
Some things aren’t meant to be fathomed. Reiko dies, and that death sends you into the path of a woman who might have been her twin. Miuki knew me from somewhere outside time. For her, it was no accident that fate brought me here. I was like Tom, whose dad worked with my dad at the old reactor before these fairways were dredged from th
e sea, when men and women made the two-hour commute from Hoshi six days a week. She said we were here in search of our dreaming.
When Miuki delivered her second dead child, the obstetrician from Fukuoka told Tom that the resort’s water was contaminated. Neither man dared raise it with the bosses. ‘Time to get bolshie,’ Miuki said. ‘That’s what an Australian woman would do. There’s no one more daring than an Australian woman.’
She was certain I’d make it, that fate had been astute when it sent me here. So why has fate chosen to treat her and Tom like shit? Despite everything that’s happened in Australia, they intended to live there as soon as they’d saved enough to retire. ‘Guests have their reasons for escaping to a place like this, but we think we can give something back.’
Born in Stockholm to Australian parents, Missy looks the part, a statuesque blonde with an accent that could slice raw steak. Her great gift is making all her students think they’re her favourite. For this session she’s asked Hizu to instigate a role-play.
In an unspoken nod to his friend Miuki, Hizu casts Shingo as the worker who requests three days’ leave to visit a dying parent in Perth. As the boss, Kobe will choose this moment to question Shingo’s dedication. When Kobe refuses the request, Shingo is nonplussed.
‘That was excellent,’ Missy tells them, ‘but you left out the most important part. Should the boss have the last word?’
The class mulls this over for a moment before Hizu suggests that Shingo would give his boss the bird.
‘Absolutely! When the boss turns his back, the worker makes a one-fingered salute … You try that, Shingo.’
Shingo jolts his index finger upwards.
‘It might be more expressive to use the middle finger.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to do it to the boss’s face?’ Kobe asks.
‘Possibly.’
Missy then turns to Nobuko, who always has an answer, along with a deep, relaxed laugh that any Australian woman would kill for. ‘Why wouldn’t Shingo make his gesture to the boss’s face?’
‘That would be unAustralian.’
After class, Nobuko seeks Hizu out to ask why he never attends the Sunday evening staff parties.
‘It’s a good turn,’ she tells him with a gleam in her eye. ‘Cheap grog. Drink till you chuck … With norgs like yours, you could win the wet T-shirt comp.’
Nobuko is slim and pretty, and Hizu knows that his only hope of meeting a woman and making a family is to pair off with a staff member, as Tom and Miuki had, but grog’s the one thing he can’t get on top of. All his worst errors have followed a night on the piss.
He tells her that after caddying fifty-four holes he’s knack-ered most Sunday nights. Truth is, he’d prefer to study and write.
Nobuko doesn’t conceal her disappointment.
‘Maybe you’d like me if my tits were big as Missy’s?’
‘Maybe,’ Hizu tells her, and feels the wind of her raised finger the moment he turns his back.
For the first three months, his mother wrote twice-weekly; now he’s lucky to hear from her once a fortnight. Her attitude has changed. To begin with, she was proud that her son had a job where he earned the same as a top surgeon. After losing Reiko, it was important to make a fresh start. Now, she says he’s rejected her and her culture. He’s so tainted he can’t see how offensive his thinking’s become.
She misses her son, as he knew she would. It was too much to expect her to understand the dedication this work would involve when he hadn’t fully understood it himself until recently. You only see the point of no return after it’s passed.
‘Your father never would have let this happen.’
That might be true. He can’t say. He has few memories of his father. The most prominent has his father being summoned to school to approve their chosen punishment after Hizu, a gifted mimic, entered the principal’s office and delivered a bogus speech over the public address system, complete with trademark tics and slurs.
‘Do you want to go on the stage, is that it?’ his father shrieked, his complexion already hinting at the cancer that would take him the next year. ‘Your friends will be lawyers and you’ll have no arse in your pants.’
An Australian dad would have asked him to repeat the routine, and praised the accuracy of his impression. In the final analysis, it wasn’t about what his own father thought, but about the kind of dad a decent Australian could choose to be.
While setting himself to blast out of the greenside bunker on Crampton’s fifteenth, Craig asks his caddy if it’s true that the cancer rate among resort staff is ten times the national average.
‘That’s bullshit,’ Norichi tells him. ‘Wouldn’t be enough money to pay a bloke if that was true.’
Fifteen metres away on the green, Craig’s playing partner, Ben, has overheard this exchange and looks Hizu in the eye.
‘Sure, that’s the company line. Let me ask you something, man to man. It’ll go no further than us four here. There’s a story doing the rounds in Melbourne. Two big blokes came up here, one of them a top investment banker. After drinking a skinful, they decided to have a swimming race on the ornamental lake. Two thirds of the way across, the banker’s mate had a massive coronary. The banker notices, pulls him to shore, does CPR, and saves his life. Two days later, both men are dead. The doctor signed off on meningitis, though he knew it was radiation poisoning. I’ve heard that story from three sources. Is it true?’
Hizu doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t been asked in the way that a wealthy man asks a servant, but in the way an Australian asks his mate. He could tell Ben that his story’s untrue with an easy conscience. He’d been there. It was Hizu who’d given CPR to the banker’s big mate. Last time he’d seen the two men, they were alive. What happened after that was rumour. If he said that, Nori, listening nearby, could have no reason to complain to their supervisor. But this situation was entirely new. It was a question of honour.
‘It’s bullshit,’ Hizu tells Ben.
‘Didn’t happen?’
‘Nah, they both drowned.’
‘Then why would the doctor lie?’
‘The bar staff had seen them getting legless and did nothing to stop them.’
Ben and Craig were impressed. ‘Fuck, that’s great arse-covering. This place couldn’t be more Australian if it tried.’
Later, having shared two beers with their new mates, Norichi was furious. ‘If I told admin what you said, you’d be out of this place in an hour.’
‘What choice did I have? They wanted a story with a credible ending.’
‘That man could be a private eye or ASIS … You’d threaten everything to give someone a yarn to tell his mates.’
‘Better that than the truth.’
‘Truth’s got nothing to do with it. If truth mattered, this place would still be wasteland.’
‘Nori, if you’ve got a problem, put it on paper and shove it up your clacker … You think you wouldn’t go down with me? Do you really think your willingness to lie would count for anything?’
While studying for his final exam and the Permanency interview, Hizu begins to question some of Missy’s balder assertions.
Even if a guest asks about your family, or where you went to school, don’t imagine that they’re doing anything more than satisfying their desire to seem friendly. As likely as not, the facts won’t interest them. They’ll be just as happy with bullshit that sounds like bullshit.
Whenever he told tall stories about his childhood – the kamikaze grandfather, and the aunt who was kidnapped by the North Koreans – the guests had a good laugh, and responded with yarns of their own, but the genuine types were really touched by his tales of a mother who struggled to give him a chance after his father died. When he’s told guests that staff are only free to leave the resort for six weeks every three years, and that admin encourages them to take pay in lieu, they’ve been shocked speechless.
No one understands what it is to be Australian until they fully grasp the terms of Au
stralian friendliness. For Australians, friendliness is a superstition; a way of defraying the fear of being considered selfish or mean-spirited. To refuse friendliness is much worse than refusing a gift, since refusal is likely to activate the tensions implicit in ‘the friendliness paradox’. The more you try to be sincere, the further you are from true sincerity. If inscrutability is the cliché one attaches to Asians, one ought to approach Australians with an appreciation of their paradoxicality.
Hizu chooses to see this paradoxicality as a quality worth nurturing. What better than to be someone whose candour generates a sense of mystery?
He is in the canteen, reading Recollections of Ludowyck B., when seized by an appealing fragrance. A hand descends to clasp his own. While her fine hair caresses his cheek, Nobuko whispers into his ear.
‘I worked late-shift at the casino with Nori last night. What did you do? He’s after your balls.’
‘He thinks you can stay Japanese and wear Australianness like a mask. And he says that’s what admin expects from us.’
‘He might be right.’
‘In terms of head office, I’m sure he is. But only a cretin would be in this for show. One day, he’ll triple guess himself.’
Gently squeezing his arm, Nobuko warns Hizu to watch his back.
Probationary staff are attending their final culture class when the General Manager arrives to ask them to help search for two female singers who’ve managed to leave the entertainer’s annex and enter the casino. Hizu finds himself paired off with Missy, who treats the matter as a grave emergency.
‘Entertainers don’t always maintain a good-faith relationship with the resort and its clientele. Some of them have history with our guests.’
‘They just want to rub shoulders with celebrities in the gaming room,’ Hizu suggests, trying to sound laconic as possible.
‘Well, the guests pay top dollar to make sure their shoulders are only rubbed on request … One bad incident, and all this could vanish like it never happened.’