Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  For many years during our childhood, we lined up before the Patriarch every night and obediently opened our mouths for his inspection. He bent, he peered, he pushed our chins up to the light and flashed an orange Everyready torch at our uvulas. Pass, he said, and we were then allowed to go to bed. Imagine his consternation and outrage, then, when he discovered that the drill parade had been in vain, that his wife had undermined and betrayed the practice of good dental hygiene he had so carefully inculcated in us all these years, simply by bringing me a cup of Horlicks after I had cleaned my teeth.

  My childhood nights were subsequently spent tossing and turning, gazing at the ceiling in the dark, listening to night trains grinding along the track to Burwood Station, watching through the window the occasional blue flash of sparks along the electricity cable overhead. Concentrate, I told myself. If only I could concentrate hard enough on the soothing monotony of the train, I would be able to tune out the ominous crescendo of my parents arguing downstairs. I wouldn’t hear the shock of the sharp slap or imagine the burning sting of her cheek. I would be able to turn off the guilt that dripped steadily all night long and stopped me from sleeping.

  Their happy reunion had long ago deteriorated into the sullen resentment and flaring irritation they’d felt towards each other in Malaysia. Migration had only exacerbated it. The Patriarch found it difficult to establish his dental practice and make ends meet, so he blamed his wife for forcing him to migrate. She wanted to get a job to help with the family’s finances, but this he would not allow. He could support the family, he claimed angrily. She should just do her part and be a good and obedient wife and look after her unruly kids. (We were her children by then, not his.) Little things about her began to annoy him and in his unrelenting quest to make her into the kind of wife that he wanted, he forgot the woman with whom he had actually fallen in love. Even now I can rattle off a list of all the reasons why he hated her, but it’s hard to remember why he ever fell in love with her.

  Their grudges bubbled like magma just beneath the surface of their lives and it took little friction to cause an eruption. Alone in the inky blackness of my room, with only a crack of light creeping in under the door, I twisted the bedclothes in one fist and swiped the tears from my face with the other. I imagined myself taking dramatic action: throwing myself between them and receiving the blow of his fist on my body, perhaps. Clasping his knees with my arms and imploring him to stop. Snatching up her long-bladed sewing scissors and skewering them into his back. Instead I cried in the dark and did nothing to help her. I was frightened of falling asleep in case, in my sleep, the unthinkable and unmentionable should happen to her and I wouldn’t know until it was too late. So I stayed awake and listened. And when I slept, I was terrified of that too, because my body released its anxieties and soaked the bed.

  Each morning Sonny shook me awake and I flung off his insistent hand grumpily. As the fog of sleep faded, I sat bolt upright in bed, remembering. Then I scrambled away, pulling the covers with me to check whether I had wet the bed. ‘Safe,’ Sonny would say, relieved. Or, if I had wet the bed, he’d help me to drag off the bedclothes quickly, furtively, before the Patriarch could discover what I had done. Eventually, I slept on top of a plastic garbage bag so that the sheets would not get wet. The plastic irritated my skin and caused red rashes to appear. When I scratched myself to relieve the itchiness, the skin would break and flake and I’d watch in fascination as tiny beads of blood oozed out like latex from a rubber tree.

  Then one night I accidentally discovered the soporific effects of masturbation and a good hard come. I woke up in the morning in a dry bed. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific . . . silent, upon a peak in Darien. It was such a relief. Masturbation replaced Horlicks in my nightly ritual for falling asleep and was far more effective anyway. It blanked the mind and exhausted the body, tuning out the tumult of the arguments downstairs and making me forget for a moment that I was beginning to hate myself and my family.

  ELASTICS

  You’re a dirty little girl, aren’t you?’

  The nurse spread a green garbage bag over the foam mattress in the sick bay. I looked down and didn’t answer, because she was right. I was a dirty little girl. I couldn’t control the boundaries of my body. My anxiety and desperate need to belong leaked and spilled and made a mess.

  ‘Didn’t your mum toilet train you? Fancy a big girl like you wetting her pants. Really.’ She made me climb onto the mattress and lie down although there was nothing wrong with me. ‘Now stay still and behave yourself until the bell goes. Do you want a book to read? No? All right. Call me if you feel sick or need anything.’

  She went out of the room and I was left alone.

  I’d been playing elastics when it happened.

  England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Inside, outside, inside, scales . . .

  How odd to have been rehearsing in a sunny Sydney schoolyard the names of countries of the United Kingdom thousands of miles away. The girls were playing elastics and I could only watch because Niree had said I wasn’t good enough yet. I had to wait until they all got out before I could have my turn. I’d tried hard. I had been practising every night. When the Patriarch was having his shower upstairs, I snuck down to the rumpus room and dragged two chairs away from the scarred wooden desks where Sonny and I did our homework. I borrowed two pairs of Mum’s pantyhose and knotted them together. I asked her to buy some elastic and sew the ends together so that I could practise like the other girls, but she thought it was a waste of money. So I had to make do, looping the flapping flags of the control pantyhose waistbands around the legs of the chairs. Ankle height first, then knee height. I hopped and thudded heavily over the tan-coloured skeins of stocking. My tongue lolled out like a dog’s when I jumped, Sonny used to tease me. I ignored him and concentrated on scissoring my legs through the bend and give and twanging snap of the hose.

  Inside, outside, crisscross, inside, out.

  I slid the pantyhose to thigh level, but in a fatalistic kind of way. I knew I couldn’t do this because I couldn’t jump high enough. When I panted out ‘scales!’ and my feet thumped down onto the nylon cords, the chairs overbalanced and came toppling down. Once again, I had stretched the pantyhose too tautly over the backs of the chairs and there was not enough ‘give’ when the loop was at thigh level. The noise of tumbling chairs was muffled by the thick beige shag pile of the carpet, but I still hastily disassembled the pantyhose and put away the chairs neatly in case the Patriarch had heard and was on his way down to investigate the cause of the ruckus.

  Each night, after I finished my homework, my spelling lists and my subtractions, I practised elastics doggedly although I hated the game. When you’re an eight-year-old girl and you’ve just moved to Sydney, you simply had to be able to play elastics or there was nothing to do and no-one to play with at lunch.

  England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Inside, outside, inside, scales . . .

  The playground was cracked bitumen with the faded yellow outline of a netball court baked onto it. Around the edges eucalypts and wattle trees sagged over the neat aluminium benches where children sat to eat their lunch. Twigs, cracked gum-nut shells, dirt, birds’ droppings and the gold dust of fallen wattle flowers spotted the dull machined metal. However, these benches were still cleaner than the old flaking wooden ones with their curved backs striped red, green and white. Columns of ants crawled along the aluminium grooves and heaved away the bread I’d crumbled. It was rather like looking down at traffic on Parramatta Road. I sat on one of these benches with my lunch on my lap: a bulging brown paper bag with the hieroglyphics of my mother’s writing in black texta:

  Grace Tay

  Class 3C

  1 ham sandwich

  1 frozen orange Sunny Boy

  1 banana

  When we had arrived in Sydney and I had started school, for the first three weeks she made ham sandwiches f
or me. She got up early each day, set out the sandwich board and unclipped the blue and white striped plastic bag of sliced bread. She lined up the tub of margarine, then unwrapped and forked apart slices of leg ham. Sometimes she shredded iceberg lettuce and constructed neat sandwiches, triumphantly cutting them into isosceles triangles and wrapping them in plastic film. After a while she just ordered us ham sandwiches from the tuckshop, although I was sick to death of them by then. I took unenthusiastic bites out of my sandwich and it tasted dry and stale. There wasn’t enough butter. I pushed a mouthful against my palate. My tongue rubbed against the thin slivers of ham, testing for taste. It was just salty, and perhaps a little off.

  When Sonny and I went to school in Malaysia we always came home in time for lunch. One of the servants would cook us egg noodles with a fried egg and slices of sweet barbecued pork. We’d had to start school at seven in the morning, though, and we had to learn Malay. Ini Ali, ini Siti, ini ayam. This is Ali, this is Siti, and this is the chicken. They were all there in the picture books Sonny kept on his shelf, next to our Ladybird and Enid Blyton books. My mother taught me how to read with Ladybird storybooks about Peter and Jane. This is Peter, this is Jane, and this is Pat the Dog. Daddy and Mummy, Peter, Jane, and Pat the Dog go on a picnic. They probably eat ham sandwiches. I simply hated ham.

  I slid a glance at my neighbour’s lunch. This was Andrew Reynolds. He was the class captain and he had blue eyes—the first blue eyes I’d ever seen—and a head of curly blond hair that reminded me of Little Lord Fauntleroy. I didn’t know why he was sitting next to me because he never sat next to girls. Andrew Reynolds usually played with the other boys at the wooden fort or the monkey bars.

  He pulled a white buttered bread roll out of his brown paper bag. He ripped open a packet of chicken-flavoured Arnott’s chips and scooped out a handful, shovelling them into his mouth. Munching hard, he clenched more chips in his fist and, prising open the bread roll like a clam, he squashed the chips in between the greasy, buttered halves. He jammed the top of the roll down and we both grinned at the satisfying crunch of squashed chips. He glanced at me and did a double take, as though noticing for the first time that I was looking at his lunch.

  ‘I’m on a seafood diet,’ he said. Then he shoved his index and middle fingers into the corners of his mouth and stretched them. His jaw yawned wide open, revealing a mangled mess of chewed chips and blots of bread that clung to the crevices and hung from his palate like stalactites. He started to laugh and bits of munched-up lunch spewed out and sprayed my uniform.

  ‘See food, get it?’ he said, killing himself laughing.

  I looked away from him quickly and fumbled in my pockets for a tissue (my mother didn’t believe in hankies; tissues were more hygienic because you used them once and threw them away). Carefully, I wiped away the debris of his lunch, but I wasn’t too grossed out by this because I really liked Andrew a lot. In fact, I was half in love with him. He was the first person to speak to me at my new school, and each morning he would prance over to me, unbutton the top two buttons of his grey school shirt, tuck his left palm under his right armpit, and flap his right arm vigorously, making farting noises at me and laughing.

  Each Friday afternoon when our class lined up on the bitumen court for square dancing, I tried to manoeuvre it so that I was his partner for a bit, but he would never let me touch his hands or fingers. It wasn’t because I was Chinese, I knew that. It was because I was a girl and I had polluting girl germs. In the syrupy heat of a Sydney summer, Andrew Reynolds and some of the other boys would wear their navy school jumpers over their grey school shirts so that they could pull the sleeves right down over their fisted hands, and the girls would then clutch the dangling sleeve ends when we had to clasp each other’s hands for the dance. That way we didn’t get infected by boy germs either. It’s almost chivalrous, really, the thought of all those boys suffering in the baking heat so that we could grasp the ends of their jumpers.

  Later on, the teachers put a stop to this silliness and the boys had to take off their jumpers. Then we had to write on the backs of our hands: ‘SFAG’. Safe From All Germs. The girls took it a step further and prefixed the charm with an extra ‘S’: Super Safe From All Germs. The boys retaliated with ‘SSFAGEGG’: Super Safe From All Germs Especially Girl Germs. Then we ran out of space on the backs of our hands, but we were safe when clammy flesh clasped, gripped and slipped with sweat.

  Anyway, there I sat, ignoring Andrew Reynolds after he’d splattered my uniform like birds’ droppings. I wouldn’t look at him anymore so he got bored. He crammed the rest of his bread roll and chips into his mouth, got up and made one last horrible face at me, his mouth a chasm of churned-up food. Then he ran off to play with the other boys on the wooden fort. I looked after him enviously and wished that I could scrape up the courage to play on the fort too, with its cut-out windows and swaying bridge—but that was clearly the boys’ domain. The girls were playing elastics and I could do nothing else but sit there and wait my turn.

  I finished my lunch, screwed up the paper bag and got up to put it in the bin.

  ‘Hey, Poo! Come and take my place.’ It was Niree speaking. She was the class captain and the prettiest girl in our class. Her hair fascinated me; I always wanted to touch it because it had so many different shades from blonde to dark brown. Her fringe was carefully flicked back with a heat wand each morning and her mother tied her hair up with blue ribbons in two bunches over her ears. On Thursdays she always wore a smart Brownie uniform with a yellow tie. I wanted to join the Brownies too, but I wasn’t allowed because the Patriarch said I had to do my homework and practise the piano. Niree was my best friend and I wanted, ached, to be hers too. She knew it, and my neediness made her cruel to me.

  ‘My name isn’t Poo. It’s Grace,’ I said sulkily. On the first day of school, my mother had told the teacher that my name was Pui Fun Tay. Nobody could pronounce it so she said that they could call me Grace. But the boys started chanting ‘Poo Fun! Poo Fun! Poo Fun!’ They made me hate my Chinese name.

  ‘It’s Poo if I say it’s Poo. Otherwise I won’t be your friend,’ she threatened. Then, just as abruptly, her mood shifted and she smiled. ‘Come on, don’t you want to play?’

  Many of the other girls were now ‘out’ and had lost interest in the game. There were not enough players now.

  ‘You can hold up the elastics,’ she said. ‘I want my turn now. You can have a go after me.’

  I loved her when she smiled at me as though I was her best friend, even though I knew I wasn’t. I walked over and changed places with her so that she didn’t have to hold up the elastic anymore. I shifted the elastic band until it was at my ankles, the line biting into my white cotton socks. Niree started jumping and skipping and hopping, and I was again filled with envious amazement. How she danced over those lines, dashing her ankles between them, twirling around in a complicated choreography. There was no-one better at elastics and that was why she liked it so much. She was never going to get out and I wouldn’t get my turn that lunch time. I hardly knew whether to be disappointed or relieved. The elastic band moved from ankles to calves to knees. At the end of lunch, I would have red welts striping my bare legs.

  I shouldn’t have drunk so much water at the bubblers, I thought. I could feel the bend and snap of the elastic around my knees and somehow it added pressure to my bladder. I swallowed hard and frowned. I wanted to cross my legs and press my thighs together.

  ‘Further apart,’ Niree said tersely. ‘It’s too narrow.’

  She had big feet shod in brown Bata school shoes. She’d gotten a poster of a young blonde girl standing next to a horse when her mother bought those shoes. I wanted those Bata school shoes and the horse poster too, but I got black, square-toed Clarks shoes instead.

  ‘Niree, I have to go,’ I said.

  ‘Wait, I’m almost finished. Then you can have your turn.’ She was panting hard now. The blue-checked skirt of her uniform flapped and her small-flowered underwear fl
ashed as she scissored her legs skilfully over the thigh-high white lines. The boys had stopped playing at the fort and had come to watch, catcalling and wolf-whistling.

  ‘I see England, I see France. I see Niree’s underpants!’ they called out.

  I flushed with shame for her, but she just smiled and kept on skipping, tangling the lines expertly and slipping out of them easily.

  ‘Niree, please,’ I said again. And then I stopped. It was too late. I could feel the wetness snaking down my bare right leg.

  ‘Shit!’

  I had interrupted her concentration and she missed a jump, so she was ‘out’.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, Poo?’ she said angrily. Then she looked down at my legs. The floodgates had opened. The trickle had become a torrent and the pool around my black school shoes was spreading darkly over the hot bitumen. The girls looked away, embarrassed, and the boys started to laugh.

  ‘Poo’s done a piss!’ they hollered. ‘Poo’s done a piss.’

  To my surprise, Niree turned on them angrily. ‘Shut up!’ she said. She looked at me helplessly, unsure of what to do.

  ‘You’d better go to the loo,’ she ordered. ‘Kylie or someone will hold the elastic. Go on.’

  ‘No, I’m okay now,’ I said. I couldn’t bear to stay, couldn’t bear to leave. Didn’t want to give them a chance to say something behind my back. Wished I was dead.

  ‘Go on, Grace,’ Niree said gently. She came over and put her arm around me gingerly. Taking care not to brush my damp skirt, she gave me a quick hug. ‘It’s okay. You can go.’ It was a dismissal. I changed places with Kylie. We didn’t catch each other’s eyes. She sniffed involuntarily and I could see her wondering whether the elastic—her elastic—was now urine soaked. They moved away from the black puddle. I stood there for a moment, not knowing what to do. The girls had started playing elastics again, chanting determinedly as if nothing had happened.