Where’s the sun in a Sunday? Yuya’s in church right now, and I’m wondering if she learns about locusts there.
The sun in a Sunday inside a microwave. Rising and bubbling.
The sun in a Sunday is right there before the day. Will there be sunsets in days of the plague?
The television turns off. He gets up to clean the black spill off the floor.
A little after sunset we drive in the car to my sister’s house. When she cooks, she cooks what Dad and her husband like. Clams again. Little spores on a big shiny white plate. Dad and her husband don’t talk at all. I’m not sure they ever have.
My sister and I make another cake and this time we don’t burn it. Like perfection.
I’m learning French. Glacé the cake.
From stools in the kitchen, Dad and my sister’s husband watch reruns of Seinfeld while cake smell shoots up all our noses. This cake is not burnt, but Dad says it’s too sweet and nobody breathes because he looks like he’s about to explode.
Our drive home is AM radio.
XANAX
My dad texts me: If it gets too dark then don’t take the train home, just ask me to pick you up.
After our school play rehearsal, where I’ve been playing Singing Beggar No. 7, I am standing still on the street and across the road a man in a suit is pissing on the bus stop pole.
Yuya, who plays a Singing Tomato, comes from behind me.
I ask her, is it too dark?
She says she doesn’t know what too dark means and so we stand there for a while and wait for the bus to take us to the train station to take us to the next station to take us home. In some parts of the city this bus’ll never come, especially if there’s an accident. This city has no room for detours.
A hey. Fabio who plays the lead role of Town’s Genie taps Yuya on the shoulder.
I’ve got something for the two of you lucky ladies, he says. This grin spreads on Yuya’s face. She grabs two invitations, decorated in pictures of David Bowie. It’s my Sweet Sixteen, says Fabio. We stand there in silence for a bit and then me and Yuya look at each other and decide to walk to the train subway. When we turn around Fabio is watching us walk away. The man in the suit pissing all over the bus stop is following behind us. When he turns off into a double-story townhouse the whole universe exhales.
In the fat tender corridors of our apartment building there are weird thuds from upstairs and pink soft bursts happen in my brain and when I open the door I’m in tears and Dad looks at me. He is drinking, a brown bottle in his hand, and on television is the animal program. It’s an old friend: the panther. Dad’s on a slow ride, a semi-liquid grin on his face, a remote control dangling between his fingers.
It’s a Xanax fantasy in this home. The vacuum of a panic attack. Dad passes me the assortment. My arms are crossed as a sort of garland over my chest.
He points the remote at me and tells me, stop crying, and that there are children with nothing to eat or drink, to get myself a glass of water. I get myself some water. This white little hunk is soft on my tongue.
If I slide my fingers between the blinds our flat is a galaxy house, bursting inside with blueness. And downstairs is an hour behind us. There’s a tiny man thumping the inside of my skull. I turn around to look at Dad asleep on the brown couch. I press my finger into his cheek. Years ago I did this and he tried to bite the finger off—remember not to go sticking your business in anybody else’s. I kiss on the cheek.
Yuya calls me on the phone. Asks if I have an email yet, tells me hers is [email protected].
I go through the internet browser of the boy’s old computer and some of the websites become legs and mounds of skin and sexy and baby and local area.
His email address is on my clipboard: [email protected]. I send him a smiley face saying: Hi, want to chat? He replies within seconds. I reply within seconds. This is now becoming a chat.
This is sweet, this is working.
Outside like a microwave hum. Through my window are blue lights and high heels. People going in to play on the machines. Dad is on an alprazolam ride. Me on a cyber trip. A bloating orchestra and a timid man’s voice from the television in the living room.
CHAT ROOM
Hi, want to chat?
Hello
How’s your night?
Good
What did you do today?
Drawing, I tried to draw with rulers, but I found out I can’t
Neither. I had play practice
Cool
Yeah it’s so hot on the stage
Why?
Because the lights heat up your face
Ohhhh
Yeah, do you want to see the play?
Maybe
I’m playing a beggar. It’s not a big role but I’m in the front row
Oh cool. Ok I gotta go
Ok cya later
NO PLACE
In my bed it’s a melting pot.
Emails are a stupid idea. ‘Santa Coy’s Hot Sauce’ probably means something I don’t understand. There is a power in not knowing: something my Aunty Linda said during a dinner once.
I sit on the other brown couch and cross my arms.
You weren’t hungry were you? Dad asks, waking up. I say to him definitely not.
He opens all the cupboards, showing me that there’s nothing in there and that it’s not his fault. When he closes each one he slams it, looks at me right in the eye. It’s a gradual drumbeat growing fatter. He comes back to sit on his grumpy brown couch and changes the channel.
UNPLUG
I pack my computer, my Xanax.
My bus outside the outdoor shopping mall. Retail stores and French fry distributors.
Coins in my jacket pocket for chocolate milk.
I’m wearing my school dress and it’s itchy on my thighs.
The milk makes my stomach move.
Santa Coy with a green dot: Hello. I’m at the shopping mall.
Cool, buying anything?
No, just got some chocolate milk.
I like orange juice better.
After a while he texts again: What’d you have at school today?
I didn’t go.
I meet Santa Coy under a plastic palm tree. He has sneakers and jeans on.
He asks me why I didn’t go to school today.
I tell him no.
He says, no, I mean why didn’t you go to school today?
I shrug and tell him: I woke up and thought the apocalypse was going to happen. His mouth is sealed.
That’s weird, he says.
I nod. I ask him: if the world ended today would you stay home?
Santa Coy and me with a carton of milk and a plasic bottle of orange juice under a palm tree. He tells me he likes to paint the fish that his grandpa catches. It’s how they bond, he says.
He tells me about the time one summer his family rented this oasis home in the middle of nowhere and his grandfather and him stayed inside the whole time under high ceiling fans watching Larry King and eating vegetable pasta. His mother in the swimming pool swimming backwards breaststroke. This sounds like paradise but he calls it the worst summer of his life.
Santa Coy speaks in this nasal voice. And short, rounded slang.
Do you like the sounds of it? he asks. The shopping mall, he means.
I tell him: yes I like to have a lot of people around me.
Me too, he says. So I guess that answers your question—if the world was ending, I wouldn’t stay home.
MILLIPEDE
There is a millipede infestation in our home this afternoon. One giant void of shiny black squirms. Standing next to me is Santa Coy.
What are we going to do in here? I ask to a grumpy brown couch. He gets up.
Says: Christ when did this happen?
Santa Coy grins: you sleep through this?
Like hell I did, my dad says. He doesn’t look at Santa Coy.
What are the millipedes thinking? Like do they think: there is not enough of us here, let
’s keep coming in. This is something I say to Santa Coy. Santa Coy is just laughing.
Dad isn’t laughing because he’ll eventually have to get up and spray pesticide over broken shrubs of carpet. Still for now he’s on the brown couch, counting with his eyes each black squiggle. Get the pesticide, he tells Santa Coy. Santa Coy strikes up like a match and asks, me?
Dad says: I’m not asking you to kill someone, Christ.
Santa Coy asks: where do you keep the pesticide?
Dad tells him: top cupboard, left. We look and there’s no pesticide, only cooking oil spray. Santa Coy grabs it anyway and we take it in turns spraying the millipedes with cooking oil.
CEREMONY
A funeral for the millipedes.
They are all little coils—this is how you know they feel scared.
My dad doesn’t say anything while we massacre them, oiled-down arthropods.
When millipedes hatch they have three pairs of legs. Millipedes for seven years. First to live on dry land. God maybe made them first so that they could remind us to be careful where we step.
When they curl up like that does it mean they’re dead? Dad asks this in a grunt.
He’s still on the brown couch, doesn’t see that it’s just cooking oil we’ve sprayed. He’s changed the channel from soap operas to a game show. Outside, the blue light from the Chinese takeaway store has turned on. My dad doesn’t yell the answers to the game show while Santa Coy’s here. Some kind of intimacy gone. I purse my lips. Our blinds are film noir.
Yes, says Santa Coy. It means they’re dead.
He looks at me in the corner of my eye.
DINNER TABLE
Sitting in an almost-square around a crowded table. Dad doesn’t like the lights on, so the room is wholly lit by second-hand neon from downstairs. Santa Coy is my big new caretaker, or a husband Dad will actually talk to. He’s the one to get us dinner from the Japanese takeaway.
Cheap wood chopsticks stuck with gobs of Kewpie and diced spring onion. Dad puts fish sauce and Tabasco on anything. A secret recipe involving exactly only two ingredients.
The millipedes’ spirits in our white takeaway boxes. Santa Coy has his new computer out and is showing Dad videos on the internet of people falling over in the middle of the street. Only this blue light on our faces.
Santa Coy leaves and Dad says: I like him, you should bring him ’round again.
TEMPORARY CAR PARK
Outside the school gates Dad is dropping me off for play rehearsal. The play will premiere in the school gymnasium in about three weeks. My stage make-up and thrift store rags and dancing shoes are a bundle in my hands; stuffing into my sack.
My dad pulls up to the curb.
Hurry up, he says. It’s no standing here.
He throws himself across the passenger seat and opens the door for me. It dents into the pavement. It’s stuck I tell him, looping the sack around my body. Then get it out! It’s no standing here. It’s a tug of war between the pavement and my underarms. The door making scraping noises. He warns me: don’t break the car. I pull in smaller tugs. He tells me: hurry up, this is no standing. I tell him: maybe drive forward a little. Not with half your body and legs hanging out of the car, I won’t. Pull your legs in, hurry up, this is no standing. I hold my sack tight. This is like a constable’s arrest. The bottom of the door snaps off like a biscuit.
AUNTY LINDA
Dad has sent me two blocks over to live with his younger sister, who decorates the rooms of her chubby fifteenth-storey flat like they’re dolls. Mostly orange, sometimes pink. This is a 2001 disco party.
My duffel bag in her spare bedroom. This room is pink. One big pink mound which makes my brain swell until it pops. Curtains made from fabric dresses, collection of Bee Gees on ceramic plates, and movie posters of French New Wave.
Dad says to her that he won’t be able to do anything ’til the car is fixed: drive me to school or to rehearsals. This is what his excuse is, but the same thing happened a few months ago too, and I know it’s just to stop himself from being angry with me.
From Aunty Linda’s telephone on the wall I call Yuya, who asks me not to call her anymore because we both have computers now and it’s much quieter and quicker if we do things that way. I hang up the phone and speak to her online about the rehearsal I missed. She tells me the beggar and vegetable ensemble didn’t even have to stay around too long anyway ’cause they wanted to work with the main actors. Yuya is a Singing Tomato that still wants to go swimming and wear short-sleeve dresses.
For dinner Aunty Linda has made me sausages and baked beans on a big yellow plate.
The plates are a nice colour, I tell her.
She says thank you, they were made in Quebec somewhere. I make a feeding line with my baked beans, and the sausage is a thick round gate. Line up to be eaten, everything says.
After dinner is healthy hot chocolate that tastes like bitter malt. At the bottom of the cup I can see the reflection of my face and it is strained.
In the shiny brown wooden bed, it’s a sweatbox. I turn the computer on and its light is a sneaky explosion. Santa Coy is online. This is match point.
I’m at Aunty Linda’s
Who’s that
It’s my aunty
Cool. What’s it like?
It’s pretty boring here
Why aren’t you home?
Dad’s angry
So you ran away or something?
No, he dropped me off in a taxi
Ok
Do you wanna hang out?
Yeah I guess I’m not doing anything much
Soon this room becomes swollen and we are sitting like Ls, our backs against the bed and our asses on the carpet.
When Santa Coy came through Aunty Linda’s front door at ten, nobody questioned it.
We are reading a story that Santa Coy wrote and published on his own blog. Also he shows me his digital drawings which are mostly just scribbles. He tells me they take him about half an hour each.
On his head is a beige fisherman beanie. It’s a sand dome.
Aunty Linda is snoring.
This is ten o’clock at night: watching videos of digitised acid trips on the internet. Eyes bulging in dark blue and pinks. The music is a huffing orchestra with woozies speeding around on white holographic bicycles. The videos come one after another and don’t stop, a never-ending film strip.
Santa Coy taps his foot to the beat of patterned noise.
It’s a dark blue hum in here. The synthesiser music is a buzz underneath.
I ask him: what are you going to do with your drawings?
He’s fat with digital whirs. He murmurs that he’ll probably print them off and hang them up in the streets so people can see them. He says he doesn’t know why people trap their work inside books or art galleries, nobody sees them that way. I tell him that if he puts them in the street then he is forcing people to see them. He says, exactly. I ask if that makes it propaganda. He says, not really. I say that he would be forcing people to feel his emotions. He says that he wouldn’t be forcing them to feel what he’s feeling. They can look away if they want to.
Naughty carpet is scratching my leg. I sit up on the bed.
I ask him, would you look away if somebody was forcing you to look at their emotions?
He says, I’m here now aren’t I?
ELEVATOR MUSIC
At the music store I ask for elevator music.
They ask what I mean by elevator music.
I explain: you know what they play in elevators? I hum a little.
They tell me: people play all kinds of things in elevators, are you an idiot?
Meanwhile Santa Coy is looking at something else. It’s a Horace Silver record. He picks it up. A man with open arms. A dome. The sort of softness and little maracas. Little maracas. A guitar stepping on hot stones.
The store clerk directs me to the section with a sign that says Bossa Nova. I buy three CDs using the money Aunty Linda gave me to buy lunch. I take them ba
ck to her apartment. Play them on a little stereo in the living room. It’s dark and steamy in here. It’s not an elevator, but a silo for elastic sexiness and beach sides in Europe and tossing cherry tomatoes in a big stone bowl and late nights next to tiny flame candles in a black silk dress and a pier made of cobble and tar and tripping over because of the shiny red wine inside the purring throat and a purple sky and holding hands with each finger interrupted and late night espressos in tiny cups at the hotly lamped booth couches while the barista sweeps between circle tables and should we go so that they can close up? But the music is still swelling so maybe they don’t mind and a simmering breeze outside the door but it’s summer so the heat weaves between our arms and torsos and in the curves between our necks and we wonder if the night’s finished, but there are still wine glasses tinkering upstairs. Inside blurred windows apricots from the sensor light let people know they’ll be coming back to sell them suits and handkerchiefs and the little felt hats in the morning. The river is black goo. It’s Astrud Gilberto, Stan Getz, a Paul Desmond collaboration.
In the kitchen SBS news is on and Aunty Linda chops yams at the bench. She asks me what I’ve been doing lately. I tell her it’s none of her business.
BITING FINGERNAILS
Between me and Aunty Linda is a yam massacre.
What’s the difference between a turnip and a yam? I ask her.
Philosophically?
Physically.
She says, can’t you tell by tasting it? She gives me a force-fed smile.
The physical difference between a turnip and yam is: turnips are lively and yams are brooding.
I say: I wonder what their philosophical differences are then.
Aunty Linda forks into a yam. She takes three minutes to answer. And then we discuss the philosophical difference between yams and turnips for the rest of dinner until she washes up and asks me to help dry.
Pink Mountain on Locust Island Page 2