Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

  Sonny grew out of this nightmare eventually, but it would recur twice more during his life. The first occasion was when his hero Chet Baker mysteriously tumbled to his death from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988. Sonny grieved as though he’d lost both best friend and father. The second time was a decade after that, when his mother jumped from the eighteenth floor of an apartment block in Singapore. Each time, he woke up and crawled out of bed, groping in the dark for his trumpet. He ran his fingers over the metal stops and hugged it to himself for comfort.

  Sonny wanted nothing more than to be Chet, pouring poetry from the spit-tarnished brass bowl of his trumpet. The weekends of his adolescence were spent burrowed away in the rat’s nest of his bedroom, holland blinds drawn down to keep out the glaring afternoon light, the desk lamp throwing his distorted silhouette against the beige walls. He nursed the trumpet like a baby, but in turn he suckled at the mouthpiece; breathed fragile, fluty notes like iridescent bubbles towards the moulded plaster flowers on the ceiling. One bony bare foot rubbing absently on the synthetic pile of the carpet, white Hanes T-shirt drooping baggily over his Levis, stiff black Asian hair brushed and Brylcreemed back into a 1950s pompadour. He perched on the edge of his unmade bed and adopted Chet’s brooding, sulky pose from those William Claxton photographs.

  But Claxton would never have pinned Sonny down in black and white. Not with those straight, thick black brows, the flat flub of a nose and the awkward angles of his lanky body. Back when he still believed in romance, ‘My Funny Valentine’ often sighed out of his trumpet, accompanied by the scratchy LP of Chet with the Gerry Mulligan quartet. But perhaps his eyes might have arrested Claxton’s attention: benignly cow-like, long-lashed and almond-shaped with the epicanthus fold that Chinese long to possess, they peered disconcertingly at the world, hungry and expectant yet afraid to ask for more because we had always been told as kids that we already had so much. As children we were fed with fear and succoured with guilt.

  All the things he wasn’t supposed to wish for, all the desires that would have been interpreted as ingratitude by our parents—what thanks for this trauma and sacrifice of immigration to Australia!—were spun out into the four corners of the ceiling. Sonny didn’t merely play the trumpet; he prayed with it. Eventually, prayers changed to paeans of adolescent disillusion: snatches of simple-note melodies and murmured jazz phrases that congealed the clichéd but heartfelt sentiments of alienation and misunderstanding adolescents believe unique to themselves.

  Absorbed in the effort of exhaling music, head bowed hopelessly over his trumpet, he started with a yelp of surprise as Mum exploded like a Star Wars Stormtrooper through the door, snapping off the lamp and yanking up the blinds.

  ‘Do you have any white clothes?’ she demanded. Colour segregation was religiously observed where her laundry was concerned. Whites would have nothing to do with blacks or other colours. ‘I’m doing a load of white laundry now.’

  Her nose twitched and she sniff, sniff, sniffed the air like a hound. ‘Your room stinks. You forgot to change the odour eaters in your school shoes, didn’t you? Hah!’

  She pounced on two shrivelled grey socks poking out from scuffed black shoes the size of small boats. ‘You’re such a dirty boy, Sonny. Why didn’t you put these socks in the laundry?’

  A cursory glance around the room revealed dog-eared manila folders stuffed with notes for history, a rain-wrinkled book of Bruce Dawe poems which had lost its cover, and the smudged and scribbled hieroglyphics of trigonometry. Crammed into his bookcases, where his textbooks should have been, were boxes of Arnott’s Shapes biscuits, Smiths salt and vinegar crisps and plastic wrappers of mini Mars Bars. Over his desk and strewn across his bed were NBA T-shirts, shorts, a sports towel and the school uniform he’d forgotten to put in the laundry. Old, smelly underwear hid like criminals under his bed.

  All this she absorbed with a single X-ray glance. Sonny cringed as her right hand snaked out automatically towards his head, thumb and index finger assuming mechanical pincer motions as they gripped his left ear and twisted hard. The cartilage of his ears cracked as they were yanked out of shape. Sonny always maintained mournfully that his ears resembled Prince Charles’s because of this favourite punitive act of our mother’s.

  On her rampage through the minefield of his room she tripped over a camouflaged barbell. Pain detonated instantly.

  ‘Ssssss!’ she inhaled in a hiss of agony. ‘Your room’s a disgrace. You’d better clean it up before your father sees it.’

  (It was always ‘your father’, never ‘my husband’.)

  But Sonny was never in time to avoid the furious telling-off, the roars and bellows that thundered through the two-storeyed house and that made me scurry to my room, desperately cramming clothes and books into my own cupboards.

  ‘You kids don’t appreciate anything. When I was growing up I never had a bedroom of my own. We didn’t even have beds of our own until I was eight. We slept three to a bed and had to put up with each other’s smells and kicks. You’d better learn to appreciate how fortunate you are and clean up your room. I didn’t sacrifice a great career and migrate here to live in a messy house.’

  The door slammed and angry footsteps thumped through the silent rooms. For the next few hours anger and outrage seeped through the house and permeated its cracks and corners. Mum would be sorry that she had got Sonny into trouble. Yet again. She spent the rest of the afternoon cooking his favourite dish for dinner, only to be unspeakably hurt when he refused seconds.

  ‘Eat some more,’ she urged as she piled globs of mild beef rendang and choy sum stir-fried in garlic and brandy onto his cooled rice.

  ‘Don’t want any more.’

  ‘Stop sulking and eat it,’ the Patriarch ordered. ‘In my day most people only had meat once a week unless they were very rich. And then it was mostly gristle and tendon.’

  Sonny hung his head and did his best to eat it, spooning rendang into his mouth until it not only looked like shit, it tasted like it too. Where she’d got the idea that he liked beef rendang was completely beyond him. He had never liked spicy food and at that age, his idea of a good meal was an all-you-can-eat buffet at some American-style steakhouse.

  Rebellion was an art at which we were particularly untalented, though we gave it our best shot. But how could we compete against the furnace roar and the searing gusts of the Patriarch’s anger? Or the guilt induced by our mother’s sorrowful sigh: ‘If I’d known this was going to happen we wouldn’t have migrated.’ Immigration is an act of sacrifice on the part of your parents that you can never atone for. So we sought refuge in resentful silence and built stony walls of unspoken hate. We brooded, we sulked. Sonny avoided everyone’s eyes all night, especially Mum’s, and she grew more frantic and agitated as her tentative overtures of friendliness went unseen, unheard and unreturned.

  ‘What fruit do you want?’ she demanded after dinner, bringing to the table a plastic tray of custard apples, bananas, Californian Sunkist oranges, Batlow apples, Japanese nashi pears, flushed persimmons and waxy sultanas. The variety of fruit available in Sydney never ceased to thrill her. How often had she told us that when she was growing up in Singapore after the war, she’d had to share one apple with all her siblings. She never got over the marvel of having a whole piece of fruit to herself. The vegetable crispers in the fridge were constantly overburdened with new and exotic fruits that she had just discovered in the local Italian fruit market. (‘Mr Iacono showed me how to choose juicy watermelons today,’ she would say proudly. ‘Next week he’s keeping a box of first-grade Bowen mangoes for me. Top quality!’) Much of the fruit rotted away before anyone ever got to it, and the reproachful headlamps of her gaze would light upon her family then.

  ‘I’m too full for any fruit,’ Sonny muttered. Casting a sidelong glance at the Patriarch falling asleep on the peach leather lounge in front of the ‘7.30 Report’, he picked up his plate and shuffled to the sink to rinse away the remains of uneaten rendang into the insinkerator
. Mum trailed after him with her tray of peace offerings, bleating unhappily.

  ‘Too full for any fruit?’ she repeated, a look of dazed incomprehension glazing her eyes. ‘What about roughage? Don’t forget your bowel movements, Sonny.’

  ‘We had choy sum tonight.’

  ‘Still, you don’t want to get constipation. Very painful, you know.’

  ‘Don’t have it.’

  ‘Your father and I do,’ she reminded him, as if constipation were hereditary. Sonny didn’t answer, determined not to take any interest in his parents’ internal plumbing. She tried again. ‘Take some grapes at least. Are you shitting properly anyway?’

  For her, love was expressed through the provision of clean clothes and fresh fruit, and the supervision of regular bowel movements.

  Sonny shot her a look of disgust and turned away. At the doorway, between the kitchen and the living room where the Patriarch snored in his white singlet and tracksuit pants on the couch, toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, Sonny paused and looked from one parent to the other. He shook his head.

  ‘I hate being Chinese. Chinese are so gross,’ he said as he walked away to lock himself in his room, brooding to the sound of Chet Baker.

  I tried to get Mum’s attention.

  ‘My bowel movements are fine,’ I said as I grabbed a banana, snapped off the black top and peeled it. ‘Traffic on the Harbour Bridge is regular as clockwork with no delays at the tollbooths.’

  But she hardly heard me. She was busy cutting a Batlow apple into six precise pieces and arranging them on a brown glass plate.

  ‘Take these out to your father.’

  Later that night, after she had done the dishes, she retreated to her domain at the back of the house to do the laundry. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears and the soft lines around her mouth curved slackly downwards as she turned shirts inside out and spritzed pre-wash on the collars.

  Hoping for some attention at last, I perched on a bamboo stool in the laundry and read out my school essay to her. But her ear was not attuned to Gavrilo Princip or Germany’s Blank Cheque to Austria–Hungary. She craved Sonny’s forgiveness and friendship, but it wouldn’t be forthcoming for the next few days. Not until the Patriarch’s

  Black Mood had evaporated and Sonny was no longer the recipient of those contemptuous glances and bludgeoning remarks. Only then would he deign to talk to her.

  When he was much younger, Sonny had graciously allowed Mum to lavish attention on him. And if he was feeling generous he doled some out to me, so that a peculiar friendship sprang up between us. On the weekends he’d allow me to enter the sanctuary of his room and riffle through his LP and cassette collection. As he struggled with his maths, I sat in a patch of sunshine and squinted at Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, Charlie Parker, Bob Barnard, James Morrison and Vince Jones. Trumpet tunes and snatches of Gershwin melodies formed the soundtrack to my childhood.

  But as the years went by those patches of forgiveness and friendship became few and far between. Pique and misunderstanding became a matter of habit; we knitted our separate resentments together strand by strand, and wrapped them like blankets around our shoulders, gripping them tightly so that they would not fall away and leave us exposed to love, hurt and the whole damn pain of living.

  As a family, we were doomed to the humiliation of begging pathetically for love and attention from the one member who refused it to us. Mum wanted Sonny’s, Sonny wanted the Patriarch’s, the Patriarch wanted his wife’s, and I wanted my mother’s. All my life we rode that merry-go-round, chasing love in front of us and never catching up, never looking behind to see who might be offering it until it was too late.

  THE SPITE OF LIFE

  Madam Tay was coming to visit us. She had been threatening to do so for years and now she was actually going to come—for a long visit, too. She hadn’t seen her son for five years so she applied for a three-month visa. She arrived on my birthday, at the start of the summer holidays. The Patriarch ordered Mum to make sure that we were neatly dressed and ready to go to the airport by seven-thirty on that Sunday morning. She jerked us out of bed at six-thirty.

  ‘Happy birthday, Grace. Nah.’ She thrust a small unwrapped box into my hand. I already knew what was inside: the gold watch with the Roman numeral face and brown leather strap that she had bought for me two weeks before from one of the cheap jewellery stores in the local shopping centre. ‘Hurry up and get ready or Daddy will get angry.’

  Sleepy and sulky, we waited at the airport for an hour and a half. The flight was due to land at seven-fifty but it was late. It arrived at eight-fifteen and we waited for another three-quarters of an hour before Madam Tay toddled out of the arrival gate, a fat old woman with grey frizzy hair like steel wool and huge pink glasses tilting on her flat snub of a nose, dressed in a bilious green samfoo and a white cardigan with pearl buttons.

  ‘Ai-yah,’ she groaned as the Patriarch hurried forward to kiss her cheek and take her trolley. She gripped his arm and leant heavily on him before turning to inspect us. She started speaking but we couldn’t understand what she was saying because she spoke in her Hokkien dialect. Then she tottered forward and wrapped her flabby arms around Sonny. There was a strong whiff of Tiger Balm and mothballs. An old Chinese lady smell. A Madam Tay smell.

  ‘Ah Sonny, ah,’ she said, stroking his face and arms. ‘Good, good.’

  It didn’t take us long to realise that her English vocabulary was restricted to ‘good’, ‘coffee’ (or ‘kopi’, as she pronounced it) and ‘TV’.

  Hanging on to Sonny’s arm and pawing him all the while, she turned her head and said something to the Patriarch, then we began to move off to the car park. Madam Tay walked between the Patriarch and Sonny, chubby fingers pinching their arms in a lover’s deadly grip. Mum and I walked behind and sat silently in the back of the car as we drove home.

  Changes were made immediately. She didn’t like the guest room at the back of the house so she moved into my room, which was next to the master bedroom at the front end of the house. I dragged my clothes from the closet and hauled them downstairs to the guest room next to the laundry, emptied my desk drawers and stacked the contents on the floor. Sonny and Dad would move the desk down later.

  ‘Can’t I take my bed as well?’ I asked Mum. ‘Or at least my mattress. It’ll smell forever if she sleeps on it for three months. I’ll need a new mattress.’

  ‘Shh,’ Mum cautioned in a whisper, looking furtively towards the living room where Madam Tay sat with the Patriarch, still clutching his hand tightly and speaking in a breathy whine. ‘Sonny,’ we heard her bleat. ‘Sonny, ah.’ Mum nudged him and, rolling his eyes at me, he shuffled into the living room and allowed her to paw him again.

  Mum cooked rice porridge for lunch and I helped her to make the meatballs, rolling together a gooey paste of minced pork, garlic, ginger, shallots and chopped bits of Shiitake mushrooms. We set the table and Mum called them in for lunch.

  ‘Don’t forget what I taught you,’ she hissed at me in an undertone. ‘Call your grandmother to eat.’

  Madam Tay waddled in and sat next to the Patriarch. She patted the seat next to her. ‘Sonny, good, good.’

  Sonny came in and I saw that he was now wearing a thick gold necklace with a rectangular gold pendant like a dog tag. She’d brought over lots of gold jewellery and some money for him. She was determined to love him because he was the only son of her eldest son.

  ‘Amah, chiak,’ I said obediently.

  With her index finger she pushed her slipping glasses up her nose and stared at me as if seeing me for the first time. A slow, wide grin spread across her face, splitting it like a slice of melon. She flashed pink gums at me. She began to speak in Hokkien, the guttural words tumbling forth as she spooned hot porridge into her mouth, making clucking noises and spitting it back into her bowl when she found it too hot. Finally, she stopped and looked at me expectantly. I tried to remember what Mum had told me to reply.

&nb
sp; ‘Wah bay heow tiah,’ I said with my Aussie accent. I don’t understand.

  She was outraged. She looked at my mother and began scolding. In silence we sat and ate our porridge, letting the incomprehensible stream of words eddy around us. The tone was plain enough. Despite the fact that Mum spoke a different dialect and didn’t know much Hokkien, Madam Tay blamed Mum for not teaching us her language. She accused our mother of trying to drive a wedge between us and herself. Finally, she turned her attention back to me.

  ‘No good,’ she said. ‘No good.’

  She got up from the table and left her lunch cooling in the thick porcelain bowl. She tugged Sonny up from his seat and made him help her to her room so that she could lie down. Even tucked out of sight, her displeasure resonated through the muted house. We didn’t see her again until dinner that night. Mum had made roast chicken with potatoes, pumpkin and green beans because it was my favourite meal then. Madam Tay came in and stared incredulously at her meal, adjusting her spectacles fussily in order to see better.

  ‘No good,’ she said. ‘No good.’

  The Patriarch tried to explain to her that it was my birthday so Mum had cooked me a special birthday meal. Grumbling, she lowered herself to her seat and we were then allowed to sit down. She looked around her.

  ‘Sonny?’ she demanded.

  ‘Hi-yah. Where’s that boy?’ the Patriarch said, exasperated. ‘Never on time, one lah. Sonny, where are you?’

  The answer came hooting through the door. Sonny had brought down his trumpet and he now started to play the opening bars of ‘Happy Birthday’.

  ‘Sonny, how nice,’ Mum said. She started singing along with the trumpet: ‘Happy birthday dear Gra-ace, happy birthday to you.’

  It was a solo effort. Nobody else sang; Sonny because he was trumpeting, Madam Tay because she didn’t know how to; the Patriarch just squirmed uncomfortably in his seat.