by Michele Lee
‘Oh Michele,’ says Blia politely, seeing me materialise before her in her tiled family room. Because we’re not close, my appearances in Canberra are always unannounced. ‘How long are you in Canberra for?’
‘Ah. Not too long. Just went to Sydney yesterday to see Pob Lou.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘So I’m going home tonight.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Got to work tomorrow. You know.’
‘Yeah. Okay.’
Blia wanders away, calling out to Beanpole and Elf to get ready for lunch.
Feeling awkward, I make a quick exit to Beanpole’s bedroom. She gives me a tour of her room from the doorway, gesturing to the objects of significance.
‘Wow, this is very nice,’ I say.
‘Yeah, it’s nice.’
‘It’s really neat.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you decorate it yourself?’
‘Well, like, yeah. But it’s annoying. ´Cause, well, you know my dad? He said he was going to paint that wall purple, all those walls, he said he would paint them the yellow colour. Then that one is the feature wall. But then he got it mixed up and he painted it yellow.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Yeah, it’s okay actually. We can just paint it another time.’
Bloody dads. You ask them for one simple thing – a purple feature wall – and they muck it up. On the accidentally yellow feature wall, she has attached things that are important to her. Like the letters of the word ‘T-W-I-L-I-G-H-T’ printed out on individual pieces of coloured A4 paper. I notice too that she wears a T-shirt that says ‘I Love Edward’ and she has all the books in the Twilight saga on her bookshelf. I’m torn between wanting to trill, ‘Ooh who’s your fave? Rob Pattinson or Taylor Lautner?’ and admonishing her for being a groupie.
‘Hey Elf,’ I say to my nephew as I come back out into the family room. Elf is sitting almost face-to-face with the TV screen, intensely playing a computer game. ‘Want to show me your room?’
It must be an annoying question because he is obviously busy. He spends lots of time playing computer games – after school and late into the night, on weekends – and Blia might tsk at it but neither she nor Ee stop Elf. Elf is mildly autistic and the games are his main interest, and as he doesn’t ask for much, he’s allowed this.
Elf gets up.
‘Yeah. Okay. Sure, Pol Xi.’
Surprisingly, he doesn’t make a big deal about being interrupted from his game. He walks me the short distance to his room, the one opposite Beanpole’s. It’s smaller and a lot messier, and whereas Beanpole has her venetian blinds drawn open, his room is dark and his strewn belongings shadowy and indistinct. He does have one deliberate touch on the door, a sign that declares ‘No girls allowed. And Mum’. I guess he mustn’t regard me to be in either category because I’m allowed in.
Back in the family room, Blia says to Elf, ‘Now don’t you be naughty, okay? Be good with Uncle Xang and Pol Xi.’
He tries not to meet her eyes. ‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.’
He sounds Americanised, as if imitating a cartoon character in one of his video games, the friendlier ones where he’s not shooting lifelike people point blank in the face.
Blia’s father has wandered into the room. He sometimes stays in Canberra to work with Ee in Ee’s house-painting business. Blia’s dad acknowledges me and he says, ‘You’ve come.’
And I say, ‘Yes, I have come.’
And we leave it at that.
APK Pizza is okay but the pizza in Melbourne is better. I should ask Beanpole what she thinks given we’ve eaten pizza together before. I suspect she doesn’t do that annoying Melbourne thing of judging food like this by its Italian-ness. Tsong, Ka and Ka’s boyfriend join us for lunch. We order another three extra large pizzas because my family are self-declared pigs.
Later, back at Duggan Circuit, Mum and I are in Tsong and Ka’s old bedroom, which has now become one of those storage slash everything rooms that Hmong people like to have. Mum shows me a suitcase she bought on sale at Kmart; it has wheels and an adjustable handle, and Mum shows me how sturdy the zip is by doing and undoing the zip several times. Over the sounds of zipping, she tells me that I can take this suitcase to Laos with me. I might need extra luggage for my four months away, and while I agree that my backpack won’t be enough, I’m hesitant.
‘I don’t know if I can take it back tonight as part of my carry-on,’ I say, appraising the suitcase as if it might suddenly inflate into a surfboard or a bike. I had only paid for carry-on luggage this weekend.
‘No, you’ll be fine,’ says Tsong, who is in the room, wedged in between extraneous furniture that Mum doesn’t have a use for but doesn’t want to throw away. ‘I take that size with me all the time.’
Her workplace organises conferences in different cities and she goes along to help run the event. She says she loves her job. She says she loves Canberra too. She’s even considered working in the public service. Dad will be happy.
‘Are you sure about this?’ I ask Tsong, still eyeing the suitcase.
‘Yes!’
She rolls her eyes at me, stupid Michele. I take the things out of my mini backpack and fill the suitcase with them. I decide I will take it with me.
Ka and Beanpole are also in the room, in the crooks between other bits of furniture. We’ve decided to seek refuge in this cluttered room because the male Hmong adults are in the living room and the female Hmong adults in the kitchen. Mum goes out to join them. The ambassador and his wife are here to eat Mum’s chicken soup: she makes the noodles from scratch using only rice flour and water, and the broth from scratch from boiler chickens.
‘Hey Beanpole,’ we say to our niece, fixing our greedy eyes on her and expecting gossip.
She grins sweetly. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘You have a boyfriend, don’t you?’
‘Maybe. Yes.’
‘Is he blonde?’
‘Maybe.’
‘How’d you meet him?’
‘School.’
We giggle. Ka and Tsong already know about him but another interrogation of our niece is always pleasurable. Beanpole doesn’t mind being questioned.
‘How long have you guys been going out for?’
‘A month.’
We chortle at the thought of Beanpole, only eleven, having already dated someone, and we imagine what sweet nonsense their MSN conversations consist of. She smiles, going along with it, soaking it all in, the attention of all the adults revolving around her.
Tsong drops me off at Canberra Airport.
‘Bye worst sister ever,’ she says.
‘Bye Chauffeur.’
‘Don’t die in Laos.’
‘I hope I do. Then I don’t have to keep coming back here to visit.’
‘Stupid Michele!’
I check in at the Virgin counter with my new suitcase – and it does indeed qualify for carry-on luggage – and then I wait in a corridor of Canberra Airport’s sole terminal by my allotted departure gate. I think about my family, and about the Hmong in Sydney, and the many degrees of middle class that change a migrant community. It might not be death or lunacy that undoes us: my generation and my generation’s children will wipe out those counters with sunny side up eggs. There will be McDonald’s, and APK Pizza.
I check my phone. No texts. Nothing from Mr Mercedes. Nothing characteristically filthy from him about us having sex tonight, which is what we’d promised by text message on Friday night. He must be tired, maybe he’s gone out for a weekend ride.
There’s nothing from Jackie Winchester.
Nothing from the Cub. I’m not sure what he was doing this weekend. Dreaming of his escape to Europe perhaps.
Nothing from Husband either. He’s with the Naturopath.
At Tullamarine, I make the city-bound SkyBus without having to wait. At this time of night there can be a long interval in between buses so I have a sense of victory in making it on time.
; Awesome Aunt. Tired Aunt.
In the city at the butt-end of Spencer Street.
And onto the number 96.
When I get home to Albert Street, I’m a bit tired so I just go to bed.
Monday morning. I have two more Mondays to go before I’m off to Laos, and I have one unfinished cake before me on the kitchen table.
I’d made a cake for Sleek Surf to congratulate her on her new job doing merchandising at Witchery, which she starts today. I was aware she had a farewell party at her other workplace on the Friday so I’d left this gift for her to take and share with people she was saying goodbye to. But she didn’t take the cake and on Monday, here it is after a weekend at home, barely touched.
‘It was really nice though,’ she says. She’d sliced a corner off to try.
‘Thanks.’
‘I took those cupcakes to my party.’
She dips in and out of the kitchen as she gets ready for her first day at her new job. Shrewdly, I note that she must have left my ceramic serving tray at the party she’d been to on Friday with said cupcakes. I can’t find the tray respectfully cleaned and stacked in the cupboards. I don’t think she’s going to try to get the tray back.
I wait for her to read my mind, she may or may not, and if she does, she says nothing. Except she says bye, and she’s out the back door, and I hear her car start.
I eat toast and I eat a toast-thick slice of ageing cake, and head off to work as well. I’m actually riled, and it’s not just this morning’s failed mind-reading session that’s pissing me off, it’s many previous Mondays in Albert Street where I’ve sat stoic in my share-house fuming about the lack of house etiquette and fuming at myself for giving a shit. That I give a shit about something being borrowed and having it returned. It’s a tray. I won’t need a tray when I’m in Laos. But I’m riled. I’m sitting on the number 96 so riled that I’m not thinking about Jackie Winchester and his absence from my inbox. I’m thinking of my share-house. I used to suggest things at the house meetings I organised – if we each use the bathroom, wouldn’t it be a good idea to each take turns cleaning the bathroom; if we each use dishes, we wash the dishes we dirtied; we use utilities, pay for it. Oh, and the garden outside – yes it’s concrete but the weeds still grow and the many trees still need trimming, and there’s a lawn out the front. Simple ideas, right. And yet ceramic plates went unreturned, I knocked on bedroom doors to remind housemates to pay their portion of an overdue electricity bill. The toilet bowl went brown.
Ah. Share-houses.
Ah. Albert Street. Two more Monday mornings.
Four Track hunted for months for a share-house when he arrived in Melbourne.
He was a big guy and when he was quiet, as he could be in front of strangers at a house interview, he came across as a threatening hulk, untoward in his monosyllabic largeness. He was actually very talkative and quick-witted when he warmed up. Eventually someone offered him a dank room with an unused fireplace and damp carpet. He lived near the Northcote train station and from his room you could hear the trains rumble past. We were not yet broken up, but rapidly inching towards it, and in our final months together I visited from Canberra. It may have been the uncertainty of our relationship overshadowing the trip but I was intimidated by Melbourne and found it foreign and unappealing. I definitely wasn’t thinking about going overseas to places like Laos, I didn’t even want to be in Melbourne. All I wanted was for Four Track to hold onto me, to hold my hand, and to stay with me another year even if he was living in this alien city. When he had things to do, an NMIT guitar class to attend, I walked nervously up High Street, Northcote. When I’d strayed too far and felt too alone, I escaped onto a tram because a tram would take me into the refuge of the city where the crowds of locals and out-of-towners seemed more evenly balanced.
I saw the beginning of Four Track’s time in his Northcote share-house and then the end of it. Our breakup happened in between and we weren’t speaking so regularly. In that lost time, it turned out that two of his housemates had started sleeping together. One of them was a girl with a Cleopatra-esque bob and dark eyebrows, and a skinny body clothed in black. She reminded me of an Egyptian-themed rock eisteddfod dancer. The guy was handsome and wore a tan leather jacket, the kind you’d find in the racks of a nineties vintage shop. It made me think of someone with a Nick Cave CD collection. There was a fourth housemate and he might have actually been a Bad Seed. His heroin chic made him broody and alluring. But he brooded because he was a cunt, as Four Track put it, and he wasn’t sleeping with Cleopatra but tried to and she moved out. It was a sour house to remain in, and by the time I had moved to Melbourne, Four Track was on his way out too and into a place in Thornbury.
I can’t remember what we did together when I had visited as his girlfriend. He never caught the tram with me, I remember that. He regarded the city as being too far away. He likes High Street but he only goes to a handful of places, like the Northcote Social Club.
‘I’m like a country guy in the city, girl. I have my locals. I stick with them.’
After work, I meet Four Track for dinner at the Wesley Anne on High Street. The Wesley Anne does two-for-one meals on Monday nights and Four Track and I both like a bargain, having grown up in poor families. I like to think that being from a similar economic background innately stoked our attraction; we could sniff out the years spent in similarly under-resourced public schools. He likes to make fun of my politics, of that time I was in that socialist party. Even though we’re essentially politically identical, where he has the option to agree with me or make fun of me, he likes to do the latter. I don’t mind, I think it’s funny. I do it to him too. In our cutting way, we put each other at ease by putting each other down.
Like my sisters, Four Track does not like my hair.
‘You want to order something for your mullet too?’ he says.
I get the sausages, which Four Track wanted. But because he has a rule that people eating out together cannot order the same dish, he gets the pot pie. I give him half a pork and fennel sausage anyway.
I tell him about Jackie Winchester, about the Cub. I tell him about someone else called Spoon, a guy I had sex with a few times last winter, who wrote me an email today.
‘Who?’
‘A theatre person. We had sex.’
‘Spare me the details, girl.’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to go into details.’
‘He was your boyfriend?’
‘No, no. We only had sex a few times – kinky times, actually.’
‘Fucking hell, girl, I said spare me the details.’
‘So we had sex. I wrote about him. I sent it to him, back in March and he read it and was he was utterly incensed. And I can see why, I get that. So here I was accepting that he’d hate me forever but then he emailed me today. He said that although it was just casual sex between us last year, I’d written about him as if he were doing things to me, not that it was ‘two lonely, slightly fucked up people’ keeping each other company.’
I’d never thought of myself as being fucked up, like a Bad Seed. I never got to know Spoon well enough to judge his levels of fucked up-ness. Given he was a member of Theatre Land, I assumed that he was in some way, and so it was probably correct of him to say I was too.
‘So I guess if you leave someone alone for long enough,’ I continue, ‘they might work through what they are feeling. They might tell you. They might not, but they might.’
‘Girl, why the hell did you think he was going to like what you’d written? Do you think people like reading about themselves?’
‘I know. And it does seem retarded now.’
‘Well, you are pretty fucking stupid most of the time.’
‘Yes. I know. But at the time I thought he’d be okay with reading my writing. I read his writing about me; he wrote about me by the way. He’s an artist. I thought he’d get it.’
‘Fucking theatre people. All as fucking retarded as each other.’
‘You’re a musician.
You plagiarise life too.’
‘Don’t put me into your autobiography.’
‘Don’t worry. You wouldn’t appear until the end anyway.’
‘Yeah, that’d be right.’
Four Track asks about my crazy dad. I tell him my crazy dad’s still crazy but he’s not that bad. I ask about Four Track’s crazy dad. He tells me his crazy dad’s still crazy but he’s not that bad. Four Track’s mum is in town. I don’t think she’s crazy but Four Track might disagree, she still likes me after all.
‘When are you free? She wants to have dinner.’
‘Wednesday or Thursday.’
‘Wednesday would be good. We could have dinner before Jersey Boys. She’s trying to get tickets for her and me to see Jersey Boys. God. I don’t want to go with her. I really don’t.’
‘Are you paying?’
‘Fuck no. You’re invited.’
‘Am I?’
‘No you idiot. But don’t tell her we’ve broken up.’ This is an ongoing joke of ours. ‘The old bitch still thinks we’re going to pump out kids.’
‘Aren’t we?’
‘You idiot. Come on. Let’s go.’
‘I suppose an hour has passed.’
‘We’re not going to sit here and talk, are we? I have to see you and your mullet again on Wednesday so let’s not use up all our conversation topics tonight.’
‘It’s a rat’s tail.’
‘Come on. I’ll drive you home, you thankless bitch.’
‘Why are you being so romantic tonight?’
Four Track laughs, a deep unforced laugh. He once told me I’m one of the top three funniest people he knows. It was his mistake to start complimenting me after so long. I held that over him and he even blushed.
Four Track helped me move into Albert Street, almost six years ago, when I arrived in Melbourne. In fact, he’s helped me move into every house I’ve lived in.
In Canberra, after I’d graduated from uni, he helped me move my things out of Duggan Circuit and into my first share-house, an open-plan apartment in Kaleen. I was working four days a week with a not-for-profit in Deakin but my new housemates were still students. They no longer wanted to live in raucous residential accommodation, however, and only made an exception for raucousness on Thursday nights when they went to the Uni of Canberra student bar, the place one could visit to simultaneously get stonkered and meet the future faces of corporate Australia.