Love and Vertigo

by Hsu-Ming Teo

Finally he said, ‘Happy birthday, Grace. Come, let’s eat.’

  ‘Amah, chiak,’ I tried again. This time she ignored me. She waited for my mother to carve the chicken and place the food on her plate, then we ate in tense silence.

  Whenever I think about Madam Tay, a clear image of her dentures flashes into my mind. I woke up every morning and stumbled into the bathroom to be greeted by the wide grin of her acrylic dentures floating in a glass. During the day her ill-fitting dentures clicked when she talked, occasionally troubling her. She took them out and left them lying on tables, benchtops and windowsills. Sometimes she would fall asleep in front of the TV. Her mouth dropped open, saliva dribbled down the groove of her cheek, and once her upper denture fell out and reposed on her left shoulder like a general’s epaulette. Her whole face changed its shape when she didn’t have her dentures artificially propping up her mouth and giving her a semblance of bone structure. Her upper lip collapsed and her thick cheeks sagged like a bulldog’s, beginning the cascade of liver-spotted flesh that continued with her dewlap and disappeared into the neckline of her samfoo top.

  Sonny later lost her favour and all the cash and jewellery she’d brought with her from Malaysia when she caught him shambling around the house, smacking his lips loosely and pretending that he’d lost his dentures. He had an elaborate Marcel Marceau routine in which he groped the surfaces of coffee tables and benchtops blindly, sighing a long drawn-out ‘Aieee-yah’. Then he’d pretend to find the dentures and polish them in the hollow of his armpit. He grimaced hideously, contorting his mouth into weird shapes that resembled Munch’s Scream as he carefully inserted the invisible dentures and mumbled them into place. He often did this behind Madam Tay’s back, especially when she’d been scolding Mum for being extravagant, lazy, a bad wife or a hopeless daughter-in-law. Impotence fed our petty acts of spite.

  ‘Sonny, you’re so naughty,’ Mum would say, but she couldn’t help laughing. Perhaps she was even gratified that her son took her side and stood up for her when her own husband would not. ‘You shouldn’t show such disrespect to your grandmother, you know.’

  Madam Tay caught him mimicking her one day.

  ‘Ai-yah, pi-see!’ she exclaimed. That was one of the few Hokkien words we learned from her. Naughty. We were the pi-see kids. She waddled off furiously to tell the Patriarch. She burst into tears and screamed that she was cutting Sonny out of her will and, furthermore, she wanted him to return the gold necklace and pendant she’d given him.

  ‘Fine,’ Sonny said as he took off the necklace and gave it to her. ‘Now I don’t look like an extra from Saturday Night Fever.’

  ‘Come on, lah! What do you think you’re doing?’ the Patriarch raged. ‘Do you think I sacrificed everything and came here to Australia to put up with this kind of behaviour from my kids? I’m fed up with you all. You deserve two tight slaps.’

  And that’s what Sonny got, and I got the same as well because I’d laughed at Sonny’s performance. Then Sonny was grounded for two weeks and he had his pocket money suspended for that period. It only fuelled his resentment against the Patriarch and his hatred of Madam Tay.

  From the start Madam Tay was in a vicious contest with Mum, Sonny and me for control in the house. At first it looked as if she would win hands down. The Patriarch was on her side and she fawned on him. After his wife’s blank passivity and his children’s sullen and fearful avoidance, it must have been gratifying to receive undivided attention from his mother once again. Meal times were changed because of her. The rice my mother cooked each night was now waterlogged and swollen because, Madam Tay claimed, it was easier for those dentures, although nothing stopped her from tearing into the biggest pieces of roast duck or braised pork. We could no longer watch TV even when she wasn’t watching anything because she told the Patriarch that television rotted our brains and we ought to be studying anyway. One day we came home to find that she had gone into the garden and brutally hacked away all the jasmine and wisteria because they were decorative and useless. In their place she’d planted tomato seedlings. My old bedroom stank of the urine which she collected in two-litre plastic ice-cream buckets to fertilise her tomato plants. More likely kill them, Sonny said.

  ‘If she ever goes I’ll need my room fumigated and sterilised,’ I grumbled. The Patriarch overheard me and cuffed my ear.

  But slowly, insidiously, the tables were turned. It began with the silent treatment we dealt her. Whenever she came into the room, Mum, Sonny and I got up and left immediately. If we were cooking in the kitchen and couldn’t leave, we pointedly ignored her. If Mum wasn’t around and Madam Tay started complaining to us, Sonny deliberately turned up his stereo so that Jimmy Barnes screeched deafeningly that all the flame trees went by the weary driver, drowning out her scolding until she was forced to walk away because she couldn’t stand the sound of Cold Chisel.

  Patriarch-meted punishments flew fast and thick. Undeterred, we engaged in acts of retribution. If she grumbled to the Patriarch about us, then suddenly, mysteriously, her dentures disappeared and were found hours later half-ground into the dirt of the tomato patch. We captured huntsman spiders and released them into her room. The hot water system in our house was unreliable so when she took a shower, we ran into the kitchen and laundry and turned on the hot water taps at full blast so that she would suddenly be flooded with cold water. She complained to the Patriarch about all these things but she couldn’t prove that we had actually done anything, and even he began to think that she might be a bit paranoid. She stopped picking on us but continued trying to bully Mum, as she had all those years ago in her house in Singapore.

  Our malevolent spite was becoming a knee-jerk reaction to Madam Tay, and it infected Pandora. Gradually she realised that the power relationship had changed. In Sydney, she was on her home turf and Madam Tay was the alien. All the advantage was on her side. She silently condoned and encouraged our campaign against Madam Tay. After a telling-off by Jonah one night, she decided that she’d had enough. On the following day, after Jonah had left for work, she bundled Madam Tay into the car under the pretence of going to Westfield shopping centre. Instead of the three-minute drive down Shaftesbury Avenue, however, she took a long, circuitous, disorientating route through Strathfield, Homebush, Flemington, past Rookwood Cemetery, through Chullora and back towards Burwood. Half an hour later, she left the car at the far side of Burwood Park and dragged Madam Tay through it. When they reached the middle, Pandora turned around and jogged away. She ran back to the car and drove away, leaving Madam Tay stranded.

  Pandora drove across to Westfield, parked inside the carpark, and slowly walked back towards the park. She sat in a cafe opposite the arched entrance and watched the old woman wandering around in terrified confusion, unable to ask for directions or help because she couldn’t speak any English. When Madam Tay crossed the street and drifted into the shopping centre, Pandora slipped behind her and followed her at a distance. She felt a sour pleasure as she saw the domineering, fault-finding old woman lost and helpless. She reached out for passing arms, babbling in Hokkien. Young kids shrugged her off impatiently and laughed at her. Older women stopped and tried to help.

  ‘Sorry, love. Can’t understand you. You’d better go see security or someone. Go into Grace Bros. They’ll point you to the right people.’

  ‘No good,’ bleated Madam Tay. ‘No good.’

  Eventually two security guards came and escorted Madam Tay away. Pandora was now in a quandary. She didn’t feel she was ready to rescue her mother-in-law yet, but she also needed to keep an eye on the old woman to make sure she was all right. She stood browsing in a shop, frowning and debating what to do. Then, to her relief, she saw police officers entering the centre management office. A few moments later they brought Madam Tay out. She was crying and pleading with them in Hokkien, but they just kept shaking their heads uncomprehendingly.

  No good,’ she said. ‘Pi-see. No good.’

  Pandora went to the supermarket and bought vegetables and a tray
of chicken thighs for dinner that night. She drove home and put everything away in the fridge. Only then did she pick up the phone and ring Burwood Police Station to report that her mother-in-law had wandered out of the house that morning and was now missing. An hour later, Madam Tay was returned to the house by a female police officer. Pandora thanked her effusively, gave her a freshly baked green Pandan cake to take back to the station, and shut the door. She turned and looked at the exhausted, weepy old woman. Where was her power now? Her scornful taunts and spiteful belittlements?

  ‘If you tell Jonah what happened today,’ Pandora told her in broken Hokkien, ‘I shall take you somewhere even further and leave you there next time. Or I shall have you arrested by the police again. They will throw you in jail and nobody will rescue you because nobody will understand you. Do you understand me?’

  Why could we not be content with disarming Madam Tay? All three of us knew what it was like to be victimised, but we couldn’t stem the sadistic pleasure of humiliating her. Our vindictive campaign against her did not end after that day, although she had been abruptly silenced. Sonny openly mimicked her, and I joined his vicious, childish taunts. Even Pandora participated. She knew that Madam Tay didn’t know how to lock the toilet door. She waited until Madam Tay was on the toilet, then she crept upstairs and wrenched open the door while the old woman was squatting on the dunny.

  ‘God, you don’t even know how to use a commode properly,’ Pandora exclaimed in disgust. Later, after Madam Tay left, Pandora would be aghast at her own capacity for cruelty. For now, however, she enjoyed the heady pleasure of power and revenge.

  Between us, we broke her. She was afraid to leave the house and terrified of staying in it. She didn’t dare to tell Jonah that she wanted to cut short her visit and return to Malaysia, for he would ask her why and she didn’t dare to dob us in. So absorbed were we in our victory over her that we didn’t really notice until the end of her stay how much the old woman had deteriorated. She habitually stayed in her room, with the curtains drawn and the door shut. Out in the garden, the tomatoes ripened and dropped to the earth with fat splats, and the patch became overgrown with weeds. When she ventured out of her room to go to the toilet or to come downstairs for a meal, she often forgot her dentures, and she wandered around the house with the buttons of her blouse undone. We shrieked ‘yuck!’, ‘gross!’ at the sight of the flabby flaps of her wrinkled breasts. She just stared at us blankly and moaned, ‘Ai-yah.’

  When she flew out of Sydney, I opened the windows of my old room, vacuumed and shampooed the carpet, and scrubbed down the walls with antiseptic detergent. I persuaded Mum to throw out the old mattress and buy me a new one. I aired the closet until the reek of Tiger Balm and mothballs had disappeared, then I transferred my clothes back into it.

  The phone rang late one night and the Patriarch learned that Madam Tay had died of a heart attack shortly after returning to Malaysia. Neither Mum, Sonny nor I doubted that we had killed her. The holidays were over and we slunk back to school quietly. In my English class we read through and acted out the bush ballads of Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. Niree and I were given ‘The Man from Ironbark’. I was astonished at the guilt and grief that rose like a flash flood inside me. We stood at the front of the classroom reciting the ballad, and my voice began to quaver and my eyes watered.

  And all the while his throat he held to save his vital spark,

  And ‘Murder! Bloody Murder!’ yelled the man from Ironbark

  I could tamp it down no longer; I burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably as Niree cast an uncertain look at me and doggedly continued reciting.

  And when at last the barber spoke, and said ‘’Twas all in fun—

  ’Twas just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone.’

  ‘A joke!’ he cried, ‘By George, that’s fine; a lively sort of lark;

  I’d like to catch that murdering swine some night in Ironbark.

  ‘It’s only a poem, Grace,’ Mrs Dillon said impatiently as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

  Jonah flew back for Madam Tay’s funeral. Pandora refused to go, saying that someone needed to stay home to look after us and to drive us to our various school and extracurricular activities. Guilt and self-pity flooded her and she spent days crying for herself and her bewilderment at who she was, how she had reached this point in life. Once upon a time she had wanted to escape the vulgar meanness of the Lim family. Now she looked in the mirror each morning and saw her brother Winston staring back at her.

  GLOSSOLALIA

  All my life I’ve had to compete against men for my mother’s attention. First it was the Patriarch and, of course, Sonny, whom I really liked so I didn’t mind that much. But then I had to compete against God, and that really topped it. I was fourteen when Mum discovered God and started speaking in tongues.

  After Madam Tay’s death Mum took to wandering down to Burwood Park every morning. There she sat, alone in the sunshine, entertaining dark thoughts. She returned from the park one afternoon with a lurid-covered Good News Bible and excitedly announced that she had found God and was Born Again. God had forgiven her her secret sin of murdering Madam Tay. Suddenly, her bad days were a thing of the past. She spent her time singing Christian choruses and humming hymns as she did the laundry and gradually took over the cooking again. The phone was constantly ringing and she was talking to people whose voices and names I grew to recognise but whose faces I had never seen. She was actually happy.

  She tried to force us all to go along to church with her. I refused at first. Sunday mornings were for sleeping in and watching Bill Collins present a Shirley Temple or Andy Hardy film festival on midday television. How many people of my age, I wondered, had actually seen Mickey Rooney in A Yank in Eton, and was that perhaps something to be deeply embarrassed about? Sonny went along with her instead.

  They both got sucked in to the whole church thing. Sonny played the trumpet for the band. I don’t know whether he did it for religious reasons, or whether he just wanted a band to play in. Whatever their motives, they left me alone with the Patriarch on Sunday mornings. We sat at the breakfast table with toast, tea and the two Sunday newspapers between us. We pretended to be absorbed in the news. Occasionally we might reach for the same piece of toast or catch each other’s glance, and then we’d quickly look away, both feeling awkward. Eventually, tense and unnerved at having breakfast with his daughter, the Patriarch would get up abruptly.

  ‘I’m going to do some gardening,’ he informed me. ‘You should do some laundry if you’ve got time.’

  I did the laundry, then cooked noodles for lunch. They nestled in a large porcelain dish on the table, waiting for Mum and Sonny to come home.

  ‘Where’s your mother and your brother?’ the Patriarch demanded irritably. ‘Give them the opportunity and they gallivant all over the place, running wild.’

  Together, we ate lunch in silence. Waves of disapproval radiated from the Patriarch and hummed in the air, alerting Mum and Sonny to the Bad Mood when they came in.

  ‘Ai-yah, sorry lah!’ Mum said. ‘The service went overtime and then we all went out to lunch.’

  ‘Come on, lah. Can’t you even show some consideration and call home? Grace went to all the trouble to make lunch for you and now you tell me you’ve eaten.’

  ‘Oh dear. Grace, so sorry lah. Maybe you better not make lunch next time. Sonny and I can always eat some toast or something.’

  The Patriarch understood that she didn’t want to be tied down to coming home at a regular time after church on Sundays. He bristled at the idea of his wife socialising with strangers. ‘Who are these people you had lunch with?’ ‘Oh, just friends from church,’ she said evasively. ‘You don’t know them anyway.’

  The Patriarch scowled. He could see his wife entering an entirely different sphere of life. He hadn’t said anything at first because she was happy for once, and she didn’t slip into depression as easily these days. But he hated the fact that she was developing a s
ocial circle that he was not a part of. The faceless strangers who absorbed her attention provoked his curiosity and his jealousy.

  ‘Maybe Grace and I will go to your church with you next week,’ he said.

  ‘Dad,’ I protested. ‘You go if you want to.’

  ‘Jonah, are you sure? You might not like it.’

  ‘We’ll both go,’ he said.

  Sometimes she was just so easy to read. On the one hand, she had been nagging us to come along to her church since she started going. She was on a mission to save her family and convert them to Christ. She would be an evangelist for the Lord in the mission field of her own home. On the other hand, she visibly enjoyed the freedom from home and husband that church gave her. She loved having her own friends; a time and space where she had no need to pander to his moods and whims.

  ‘Great,’ she said. She pasted a bright, cheery, Christian smile onto her lips. ‘I’m sure you’ll really love it.’

  And that was how I came to be sitting in a plastic chair in a converted warehouse building in Surry Hills on a Sunday morning, stifling yawns while clean, bright, Omowhite people stood and sang and clapped and chanted happily. They were actually white; my mother, so afraid and intimidated by the ang mohs all her life, was actually mixing with white people. I could hardly believe it. Who would have thought she’d find her place in Sydney in a mostly white Pentecostal church?

  This was like no church I’d ever been to in my life. Where were the wooden pews, the altar, the stained glass windows, the organ, the hymns, the hushed awe, the dignity, for Christ’s sake? Instead, the band played, coloured lights dazzled like a disco, backup singers bellowed, guitars wailed and drums thundered while Christian choruses flashed up on an overhead screen. There was a temporary lull.

  ‘Why don’t you take some time to turn to your neighbour and greet them with Christ’s love,’ the chorus leader suggested.

  Suddenly, alarmingly, a hug-fest broke out. Complete strangers turned around and started hugging and kissing the Patriarch and me. Poor Chinaman Patriarch, he suffered even more than me. I could see him visibly shrinking inside his skin at such sudden and unexpected physical contact with people. There were so many scents: talcum powder, Brut 33, Old Spice, Yardley floral perfumes, Australis, Chanel, sweat. I was pressed into fleshy shoulders and armpits as friendly Christ-loving Christians grabbed me and hugged me tightly as if I was their long-lost relative.