Despite their proximity, Kim hadn’t met Owen until college though he’d ordered food many times from the Great Wall, he’d told her. The No. 24, he’d said, Chow Mein. With chips, he’d added sheepishly. Typical, she thought, remembering her time serving behind the counter as a schoolgirl and taking orders on the phone. It was chips with everything.
He’d been right about the waiting, though. For two whole days, they hadn’t ventured out of their cool, tiled room. The heavy double doors remained closed to the world, the eyelids of the slatted window shutters turned demurely down. They made love hungrily, repeatedly. The sheets were musky with the days-old scent of their sex. Exhausted, they drowsed deeply, lethargic with ravishment and the clenched release of orgasm. They did not shower or wash; they bathed instead in the pungent secretions of lust. They barely ate – they snacked on nuts and chocolate from the minibar. They slurped beer and spilt spumes of it over one another and watched as it seethed in ferment on their heated skin. In the afternoons they coupled on the marble floor and slept afterwards resplendently naked, waking in twilight, gathering the sheets from the tiles to swathe around them as they journeyed to the bed and started again. They emerged on the third day to barbed sunshine and a sky fat with dark cloud. She could sense rain in the air. The clouds spoke to her. It was what she looked at when the others were defecating so as not to shame them.
* * *
Owen was itching to get started though Kim had lounged in bed late, lazily reluctant to quit their pungent nest. It was an indolence that alarmed him. He watched her body curled like a cat in the crushed sheets at noon. Stink and sweat of daytime, bone-cold nights. Seventeen bodies huddled together to sleep, fetid clothes, salt larded in the creases.
‘Come on, Murph,’ he’d said, fingering her silky hair which fell in a fan on her back-turned shoulder. He ran his hand over her delicate haunch, marvelling at its perfection and his own unworthiness. She seemed to him in that moment the most perfect creature he had ever seen. That was when he remembered Quinny. Out of nowhere the memory of her kneeling as if in adoration in front of the oven, her head to one side, her hair falling about her shoulders.
‘Come back to bed, Doctor,’ Kim purred and gripped him blindly. He pulled his hand away sharply. Suddenly the foul airlessness of the room, the rank sheets, Kim’s sour unwashed smell revolted him and he wanted out.
Once out, she had seemed happy to walk across the pigeon-scattered expanse of San Marco or to follow him along the narrow alleyways of the Giudecca which plunged into darkness or unexpectedly led back to a shy piece of waterway. There was water all afternoon, glimpsed between stone and arch and pooled between flagstones in sad, unexpected corners, wet pockets of secrecy. Late in the day, a misty rain began to fall. Owen had brought a transparent plastic rain cloak, one he used for cycling to college, and they shared it, wandering until twilight when the air, moist with intermittent drizzle, cooled to a lavender chill. Perhaps it was the weather, or the unpeopled melancholy of off-season Venice, but by dusk he felt invaded by a bleak sense of bereavement. He blamed it on the intrusive memory of Quinny. She hadn’t crossed his mind in years. She was a maid who’d looked after him when he was a child, to whom he’d been very attached, or so his mother told him. He remembered her hair mostly; auburn, unruly, so long she could sit on it. You were her pet, his mother would say, with an odd emphasis. His treasured pink bunny had come from Quinny. There was a postcard of the beach in Courtown where they used to go on holidays, in which Quinny had featured, straw-hatted and solitary, minding his baby brother Fergal, and shielded from the sea by a striped windbreak. He’d kept the card for years, a childish treasure, until it, like Quinny, had vanished. All he is left with are these fragments of memory as if all of it had happened to someone else.
Just like now. The ordinary tramping about was so at odds with their first days of erotic intimacy that it rendered them strangers, and strange to one another in the glare of the world. Or was it the ghostly impersonators who were out here on the street? The watery movement of Venice made him doubt everything. He could see now that he had been afraid of their wantonness, afraid he would never be able to satisfy her. What kind of a fool was he to trade sexual pleasuring for this ridiculous sightseeing? Which was why he’d struck on the idea of the gondola to take them swiftly back to the scene of their delicious crimes.
‘I mean, it, Kim,’ Owen threatened.
No more matey Murph. He must really be angry now. She’d never really seen him angry. Not her mild-mannered Owen who had wooed her so tactfully, who had, right from the start, bided his time. For several years he had been Dr Devoy from Art History who came into the Campus Café to order the lunch special and an Americano; he seemed to survive on a diet of spag bol and caffeine. She made a beeline for him because he always left silver under the saucer. And he always talked to her in a way which suggested that she wasn’t just the little immigrant waitress, or a refugee from the sciences. (She was studying Pharmacy.) He’d asked her her name – always a trick question. Nobody in Ireland could get their tongue around Phuong; she’d wanted to be Margaret or Elizabeth but her mother had decreed otherwise. We must, she said, hold on to as much as possible.
‘Kim,’ she’d said. ‘Kim Nguyen.’
‘Noo-en,’ Owen tried it out. ‘Noo-en. Sounds strange.’
‘It’s a very common name,’ she’d said, ‘like …’
‘Murphy?’ he prompted.
That’s where his nickname for her had come from. She liked it; it made her feel neutral.
On graduation day just as the group photograph was being taken on the steps of the Aula Maxima, Kim peering from under her mortar board, trying to pick out her mother in the crowd, saw Dr Devoy make his way across the quad and step into the picture. In that moment he was transformed into her tousled, slightly shambling Owen. She called him doctor now only to poke fun at him and draw attention to the eight years between them.
He had been so keen to avoid cultural faux pas that he ended up drawing attention to insults she’d missed.
‘Murph, have you seen my address book? You know, the little red book. Oh God, I didn’t mean that!’
Don’t mention the war.
It was just this deference that had won her over, so used was she to chronic, low-grade cruelty and casually intended slights. (At school she had been the Yellow Pack, the Flied Lice, her family lumped together as Boat People.) But Owen would never knowingly hurt her and she clung to that knowledge.
‘Would it not be more suitable if you did not marry out,’ her mother had said when, after their short and utterly proper courtship, Owen had proposed.
‘But it was you who wanted us to assimilate,’ she countered, bristling.
Wasn’t that what all the education was for? she wanted to say. What her mother had slaved over deep-fat fryers for all these years? To marry well?
‘Still, you should not marry before your sister,’ her mother replied.
‘That,’ Kim had said, ‘is the old way.’
Her sister Mai, brow knitted, looked up from the jigsaw she was doing with Lu. He had spread out the thousand pieces that made up the mythical scene – Sinbad the Sailor on the High Seas – on the dining-room table. Perplexed at the air of disapproval, he shifted his gaze from one face to another; he was seven and a lone boy among women. Mai was still wearing her paper hat and the blue nylon housecoat with the Great Wall logo on the breast pocket. Kim fought off the familiar undertow of guilt at being the younger sister. While she shared a flat with three girls from the lab, Mai still lived at home.
‘I’m twenty-three, practically an old maid,’ Kim went on, sensing the resistance. ‘You wouldn’t want to scupper my chances, would you, Mai?’
Mai said nothing.
‘Look,’ Lu cried, holding up a jagged piece, ‘here is the lady’s face from Sinbad’s ship!’
The boy stood as a rebuke between them.
‘The figurehead,’ Mai said to him, ‘it’s called the figurehead.’
/> ‘Would you, Mai?’ Kim persisted.
‘It is not a question of personal wishes, Kim,’ her mother said. ‘It is a matter of form.’
‘No,’ Kim told Owen decisively, ‘let’s walk back.’
Smell of diesel – until the engine broke down. She gets that whiff passing a petrol station forecourt and she has to cover her mouth to stem her rising gorge. Then the sickening tilt as they drifted. She wakes up sometimes in a cold sweat imagining the bed is the junk and the room is the sea, refusing to settle. Her stomach remembers the hunger pangs. Nothing would stay down.
‘Ah, Murph, we’ve been walking for ever,’ he complained, though he prided himself on his tourist stoicism.
She shrugged.
‘Look, I’m not even sure I could find my way back.’ This was a lie; he knew exactly where he was. Unlike her, he’d been here before.
‘Anyway, it’ll cost too much,’ she said. ‘They’re a tourist trap, you said so yourself.’
She remembered everything.
Thirst – in the midst of all that water – a terrible thirst.
Everything he said, banal, throwaway remarks, his most pompous assertions.
‘Oh, come on,’ he wheedled. ‘It’ll be romantic.’
She looked away, arms across the breasts he had so recently fondled, her neck taut, something in her temple throbbing.
‘You go, then,’ she almost spat.
She was wearing that cute little denim jacket over a polka-dot sundress. Like a Saigon streetwalker, he thought savagely.
This was meant to be a treat. He wanted them to drift into the sunset – muted, though it was, by the rain – steeped in the rose-water light. She would lounge on the red velvet cushions as the gondolier plashed lazily. His bride. He was secretly proud of the possessive. But she would never be all his. Just this morning she had been on the phone to her mother. In the middle of their honeymoon! Over something he’d said, no doubt. He’d eavesdropped on the nasal tones which always sounded peeved to him. He knew the intonation was crucial. A tiny inflection could transform mood and meaning. But he’d never learned her language – even the college language lab didn’t run to Vietnamese – so he didn’t understand those shifts; he only knew when they had happened.
Wake of the big ships, mountains of swell. Huge tankers, their armoured flanks like impenetrable fortresses would loom up in the night and bear down on them. She would arch her neck back, her gaze clambering up the sheer slopes of those vast riveted surfaces and see no end to them. When the ships passed that close, they were transfixed with terror and delight. Could they be seen? Would they be swallowed up? Or picked up? But by whom?
‘I’m not getting into that thing.’
‘But why?’
‘I don’t want to,’ she said.
Simply that: I don’t want to. Well, my girl, we can’t always do what we want.
‘Please yourself.’ He marched over to talk terms with the gondolier. He was the one with the Italian, he thought victoriously. Kim, reluctantly bilingual, did not want to learn another language.
‘It makes you …’ She always wrinkled her nose when trying to explain.
‘Bifurcated?’ he ventured. He liked to finish her sentences.
Two choices, Father said. Drowning or drought. He wasted away; some old weakness of his chest. He spent days gasping for air, cracked lips turned beseechingly to a glistering sun. He saw things in the sky, in the shadows of the sea. The sun seemed to drive him mad. Too late, too late, he kept on saying, over and over again. What did he mean? That they were all doomed, or that they should have left sooner, as her mother had pleaded. But Father was a professor, he knew better …
Owen knew she would follow; he was the navigator, she was lost. They had to sit close; that was the nature of the gondola, but he could sense her anger in the tense way she held herself, taking trouble not to allow the thin stuff of her dress to rub against his bare knee. The gondolier poled away silently. Thank God, Owen thought, he’s not one of those singing ones. They passed illuminated facades of palazzos, windows fat with umber light, the gay barbershop poles on the dark skeletons of the jetties, and against the skyline the dusty pink outlines of spires and cupolas. He noticed how she clutched her knees with her hands, the knuckles showing white. Her jaw was similarly clamped and her eyes were shut precisely so she wouldn’t see what he had wanted to show her.
They buried him at sea. It sounded regal, but it wasn’t. They had nothing to wrap him in; the captain and his son picked him up and slung him overboard like a bag of meal. He barely made a splash. She saved his glasses; he had lost everything else. He had lost her already. The captain’s son used to stick his penis into her from the back …
How adolescent, Owen thought.
She’d told him, she’d told him all of it. How could he not remember? It wasn’t even 24 hours ago. Haltingly … after they had made love. She thought of them as cigarette words. He had reached over her and fished out a cigarette and lit up. Was it because they were lying down together? Was it the incense of the smoke? But the words after love were like the love itself, a safe harbour. She’d hesitated but he’d said tell me, tell me all about it, I want to understand.
‘Jesus, Murph,’ he breathed when she had picked her way through the story. It was the first time she had told anyone. ‘It’s like The Raft of the Medusa.’
‘The what?’
‘Painting,’ he said. ‘By Géricault. Terrible thing – a hundred and fifty people piled on to a raft that drifted for twelve days. The occupants turned on one another, well, they were desperate. Even resorted to cannibalism. Géricault painted it all, the degradation, the despair …’
Kim felt a tide of fury. She had squandered this intimacy on him. He couldn’t understand, how could he? Or he could only understand like this, in brushstrokes, impasto, the oiled representation of life on canvas.
‘ … but also the hope,’ Owen went on, ‘the hope of rescue. On the horizon you can see the tiny little silhouette of the Argus that picked up the few who survived.’
She turned away from him and lay on her back. Owen had been her hope of rescue. When she looked up at the ceiling, it was a map of shadows.
At Camp Three in Galang, there was privacy, at least, somewhere to hide even if it was only the dank corner of a tent and the emblazoned protection of the Red Cross, though Mai had fallen pregnant there. One of the Thai clerks. Afterwards Mai told her she thought it might help their application. They all expect it, she said. It didn’t help; by the time their Irish papers came through, Lu was nearly two. Their little brother, her mother decreed, so that Mai’s honour could be kept intact.
‘We were saved, too,’ Kim said, ‘if you could call it that.’
As soon as they docked in front of the railway station she clambered out on to the quay like a fugitive. She stood there for a moment with a look of what Owen took to be sheer spite, turned on her heel and stormed towards the hotel, her damp, ill-chosen sundress sticking to the back of her legs. He is left to pay off the gondolier – a scandalous amount, which he’s glad Kim doesn’t witness him handing over. Two things soften him as he follows her: the memory of their first days in Venice which makes him secretly blush, and the dim realisation that maybe she’s seasick. The canals can be rough and when the vaporettos pass they leave a swell which has made even Owen’s cast-iron innards lurch a little. I’ve been an insensitive boor, he thinks, as he hurries down the quilted corridors of the hotel. By the time he opens the bedroom door, he is not only ready to conciliate, he is quickened by desire and the memory of it sewn into the fabric of the room, full now with the spilt gold of artificial light. But she is on the phone again. His goodwill evaporates.
What has passed between them is not irrevocable. Heedlessly Owen will trample on the sensitivities of his oriental wife many times. (It’s how his mother with her bourgeois candour describes her daughter-in-law at the golf club, as if she were some exotic brand of tea or spice.) Despite the fact that to Kim she’d s
aid, ‘Call me Irene, we don’t want any of that old mother-in-law business.’ But Owen knows Kim’s formality will not allow that. You can be the daughter my mother never had, he tells her, and then wonders if that’s what Quinny, the maid, was. Perhaps that’s what his mother has always wanted? Instead of the four sons she got?
After the honeymoon Owen stops thinking of Kim as his bride, his anything. He comes to regard her, as his mother does, as someone just beyond the radar of understanding. And Kim, as she did the first time, will seal her lips and say nothing. She keeps her silence on principle because once should be enough to talk of these things. Owen will persist in his misapprehension because she has talked of it only once; in his mind it is tied up with lust and desire and the tender aftermath of love.
In time, for Kim, the journey and the feelings of shame and repulsion associated with it recede, return to secrecy. It becomes like a deception, something she has withheld. As if Owen had never known. And in a strange way that pleases her.
LOVE CHILD
‘Misfortune?’
The desk clerk smirked. Julia sighed; her name was a joke every stranger thought he was the first to get. But as the clerk scrawled her name on the registration card, Julia realised this would be the last time the joke would be on her. The clerk was a paunchy man with oily black hair and a neat moustache. He peered over a pair of half-glasses. Despite his spotless white shirt, dicky-bow and braces he had a vaguely dissolute air, like the MC of a Weimar cabaret. Or perhaps it was because Valentin – for such his name badge declared him as – was the sole representative of manhood on the premises; the Hotel Nathaniel (formerly the Alhambra) was a women-only hotel. As he riffled through her passport, seeking out the title page, Julia had a chance to take in the foyer.
It was a dim ill-lit cavernous place with a gallery visible in the higher reaches. There were mosaic panels set into the walls and tiles in the risers of the stairwell that turned a corner sharply out of sight to the left of reception. The Eastern echoes of its former existence were repeated in the crazy-paving floor and the fountain which played idly in the centre of the lobby. A battered-looking leather sofa and scarred coffee table were set against the wall opposite the elevators. Stranded in the vast distance of the place they looked like museum pieces or priceless objets to be marvelled at but not used.
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