Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Jamie Marina Lau

  STYLISH CONDO

  When we get to the resort it’s a wasteland surrounding a shiny oasis. A strange watering hole. There are Hawaiian-shirted parvenus and piña colada kings. By the pool a little girl is crying and her father is reading a newspaper with his toes dipped in the shallow end. The little girl’s mother is swimming slow freestyle laps around the pool.

  Here is my new temple for the week.

  In our room, pink and blue tropical flowers on both sides of the bed, imported from Fiji. The clock is too loud. I put my bag down and take the clock off the wall and empty the batteries and put it back up again and it’ll be 4:37pm for the rest of our time in this burnt sienna condo.

  I ask Santa Coy what would happen if I put batteries in the fridge and he shrugs. He pulls down his hot mom jeans and puts on his swimming trunks.

  Late at night, Dad and Santa Coy are drunk, watching the video of the woman from the truck stop. We’re all sitting around the pool except technically I’m on a lawn chair that’s far away from the bar and they’re on lawn chairs close to the bar. I’m on my computer, drinking fizzy orange soda and batteries do nothing if you put them in the refrigerator.

  BUFFET

  For breakfast we eat potatoes drenched in oil and finished with butter. They call them potato waffles and there are 315 calories in three. This is the sort of paradise where you don’t have to care.

  This is the sort of paradise where everybody is a rotund Hawaiian-shirt Don or pink-polo Debbie and nobody can stop getting seconds.

  I have found a way to fit everything in my stomach without bursting it: if you eat at non-stop stride, but at a medium-level speed and alternate between savoury and sweet, you can manage to try everything.

  Here, the soft-serve machine is on during breakfast hours. Santa Coy and Dad get creative and eject their sundaes on top of potato waffles, making sandwiches. Inside these potato waffles is bacon, bits of crushed toffee, chocolate chip hot-cakes, and half-puréed strawberries. They eat three different versions of these and then we sit in silence for a bit and Dad makes fun of the family sitting on the other side of the room who are just tucking into their sixth round from the buffet.

  Santa Coy and me are sitting at the table across from each other, waiting for Dad, who’s gone to the bathroom. We stare at each other and Santa Coy smiles a little.

  You go on holidays much? he asks.

  I tell him: not since I was about eight.

  Where’d you go?

  I tell him: here.

  Same place?

  Yes. Exactly. It’s the only place my dad knows how to go to. I ask Santa Coy if he goes on holidays much. He tells me he was in Monaco about six months ago for his cousin’s birthday.

  I ask him what it was like.

  He says: good, there was this Olympic-sized swimming pool at the hotel. That the harbour’s nice, that the weather’s perfect. The arcades: fantastic.

  No, I say. What’s it like to be somewhere?

  He says it makes him depressed.

  I ask why and he says it’s because everybody thinks you become someone different when you’re someplace different, but it’s not true, you come back and you turn the same again.

  I ask him: how can somebody become something else then? My dad has been the same person forever.

  He says: well, your dad’s been different since I’ve been around, hasn’t he?

  Dad comes back from the bathroom looking a little happier, and we go back to the poolside. When we get there a drunk man walks around talking to himself and Dad and Santa Coy video him. He’s saying this: nothing’s working, I wants to go to Francis’s house and throw a frying pan at that goddamn ceramic dog statue, I wants all the lights to shut off and for me to be the pinnacle of the world, I will pray but I don’t know how and I’ve forgotten how to close my eyes. He says all this like he’s explaining a business deal. He stops, tries to throw a cocktail glass at Santa Coy and Dad when he sees them filming.

  We sit in the hotel room watching cable for an hour before getting in the car.

  MAGAZINE

  Out beyond the resort is nothing.

  We sit on top of the Commodore and pretend the heatwaves are different types of canine growls.

  Santa Coy is painting an angel on cardboard. Dad is counting cash.

  There are plans being made in quiet talk. They’re mainly discussing profit. I remind Santa Coy about how he wanted to put his art on public walls so that it wouldn’t be trapped inside rooms or books the way he hated. He looks at me and says, oh yeah, yeah yeah.

  They give me a bottle of beer, and then another. When I drink them my face glows up.

  Santa Coy drives us back to the resort, and I stare at the outback dunes and they’ve become Rottweilers.

  RECREATION ROOM

  I’M DRUNK BUT MY HAIR’S NOT OILY AT LEAST.

  My dad’s just told us all the stories he knows about serial killers while we eat steaks in the resort restaurant and somebody sings a hard-boiled country ballad. Nine serial killer stories learnt by heart.

  Dad and Santa Coy have so much money that they go to the gaming room and spend it all on some hope. I go to the recreation room and in here is just a boy who looks a bit younger than Santa Coy, playing Crash Team Racing.

  I’m drunk, I tell him.

  I’m barefoot in the door.

  Everyone’s drunk here, you’re not special. He says.

  I probably have a crush on this boy because of his hair. I sit next to him and take the other controller but he won’t put it on multiplayer mode. When I ask him why he won’t he tells me because his screen will be too small then.

  If I could tell him all the things I want to do with him, I’d tell him:

  • Go to a cheap Vietnamese restaurant and buy soup noodles with his money

  • Take him to buy a cap that isn’t fluoro orange

  • Swim in the pool here past eleven o’clock

  • Not be drunk

  • Not care about multiplayer mode screen being too small

  • Sit upstairs in the car park here and stare at the tops of all the resort buildings and talk about what they’re doing in them

  • Do magazine surveys or the question-and-answer sections while sitting on a hill

  • Go on a movie date without any irony involved.

  I’M A FOOL TO WANT YOU

  I fall asleep in the recreation room and when I wake up it’s midnight and all the controllers are put neatly under the TV set and the lamp’s still on but the monitor’s off and the door’s been shut.

  In the buffet room are white plump mugs with five-cent tea bags in them. People talk in quiet muffles. After a big day like this, it’s not good to just go to sleep. I want to talk about nothing with someone. I listen to a conversation like this:

  – When I get back, I don’t want to regret that I got no writing done.

  – Holidays are not for work.

  – Then tell me what they’re for?

  – They’re to make you feel guilty.

  – For what?

  – For being alive and well.

  – Make you want to scream. Make you feel this pressure to suffer.

  – And then you get home and you’re sad it’s all gone. And it’s all better.

  – And then I can write again?

  – And then you can write again.

  2003 EDITION

  I’m lying on the bed in a leotard swimsuit and I start to write a novel about a cowboy who’s delusional about ‘a cowboy’ being a real job. In my story he rides a horse called Yamamoto, like the jazz musician. Instead of a Western space opera, it’ll be a Western space jazz standard, improvising on F sharp.

  When Santa Coy flops onto the bed next to me I ask him where Dad is. He tells me he’s in the bathroom having a long, hot shower because he’s pissed off about losing money to casino games.

  Santa Coy kisses me on my head.

  Enjoying the computer?

  I tell him yes. He takes his beanie off, stretches
his arms out. Think nothing of these warm lamps. Or the double beds or the cleaning services. Honeymoon comfort; don’t think about it. He tells me that someone once made a book of photographs of people asleep in the Chateau Marmont.

  We order soup through room service and when it comes it’s cold. We call the phone again and they take it and heat it up and come back and the soup is hot. Like magic, Santa Coy says. We share a spoon. I ask him if he’s ever shared a spoon with my dad.

  He says, why you would ask that?

  I say, because sharing a spoon is a very intimate thing.

  He asks, would you be pissed off if I’d shared a spoon with your dad?

  I tell him: probably not, it’d be good for you to get along with my parents.

  I rub my hands through the bristles on his head. He takes his shirt off and kisses my lips.

  Dad is glowing red when he comes out of the bathroom with just a towel on. Santa Coy rolls onto his back. Dad tells him that there’s a stripper scheduled for now in the south bar by the pool. He wants them to make a painting of her. Santa, without looking at me, grabs a canvas and two bottles of paint. The top of my leotard has been tugged down so that I’m popped out on one side and I lie on my stomach until they’ve both gone out the door.

  STRIPPER

  The woman in the bar is a middle-aged swimsuit. I see her as Santa Coy’s painting. He’s painted her as a red curled smudge but I can tell it’s her, the way you tell handwriting.

  The next day I watch her swimming laps in the pool. She breaststrokes, and then gets out to sit on the edge. She starts to smile and slowly she starts to laugh and the pool lights drag across her cheeks and she keeps laughing just by herself and it sounds bizarre, and it sounds romantic.

  INFERNO

  This hotel lobby is made for ballooned brains and late-night sitcoms.

  It’s late at night without a room card and waiting for a show to finish. They don’t have clocks inside these places.

  Here, an old couple holds hands and I want to ask them if they think they’re very glamorous.

  At half past one a man in a golf shirt pisses on the plastic plants and then lights a cigarette and holds it against a plastic leaf so that it coils. He brings his lighter to the tulle curtains and for a while nobody’s able to put the flames out.

  The residents have been evacuated even though the flames were put out five minutes ago. Outside, it’s a kind of protest. When I look up, the hotel’s a hot palace but it has this ancient goldness about it. People have their arms crossed, looking at their phones, asking the staff when they can go in again. I sit on the valet curb and wait and Santa Coy comes to sit beside me. I ask where my dad is. He shrugs: last time I saw him he was shedding money. We stare at the dampened hotel without saying anything.

  TOWN GOSSIP

  At the chain drive-thru a girlfriend and boyfriend share a bowl of hot chips and divide it in half, completely equally. When the girlfriend goes to the bathroom the boyfriend takes a backpack from behind the booth couch. The girlfriend comes back and they leave out the automatic doors with chips still split on the table. The guy who owns the backpack follows a few metres behind them. He hurries when they hurry. A backpack-obsessed conga line. The three of them walk off along the highway.

  We’re eating double beef burgers again and this time nobody’s speaking to each other. Santa Coy’s on his phone watching a William Strobeck video.

  In the bathroom a woman is doing her make-up from scratch with speakers plugged into her phone, playing something from Badu. Everything seems beautiful for her. Her lips are cherry red.

  FOREVER CAR PARK

  Santa Coy pulls a clarinet out of his suitcase and starts to play it, leaning against the Commodore. Dad holds Santa’s phone with long, outstretched arms trying to video him in non-shaky mode. He squints and flares his nostrils at the image. He starts to laugh in bellows. I’ve never seen my dad so awake before; wind prickles his beard up.

  We stand here forever and people’ve stopped to watch Santa Coy until they realise he’s just playing the same Bach melody over and over again.

  PRECIOUS CHINESE TAKEAWAY 2

  Just me and Dad back in our apartment, eating mee goreng. He says: the trip was fun, wasn’t it? I grin and tell him yes, I loved it so much. I thank him. He nods and finishes his bowl and goes back to the couch. He says goodnight to me before sleeping. I am a national flag.

  FOUR

  MICHAEL JACKSON

  Dirty Diana is no medium-rub fantasy. She’s Tre’s ex-girlfriend from the tenth grade. They broke up when she walked around the school completely nude and was expelled. Her explanation was that she was entirely depressed by how the world was going. Now everybody’s seen her naked and Tre doesn’t feel so particular anymore.

  Tre’s looking for a new girlfriend who’s not going to walk around nude and talk about empowerment. It’s going to be Yuya unless she walks around nude soon.

  A visit to the convenience store after our band practice. I’m the lead singer of a new fusion noise band that Tre and Yuya started as an excuse to see each other. Yuya had said: Mama always makes sure I have a co-curricular activity every night after school. And I’m tired of playing Singing Tomatoes.

  I scat while Yuya plays keyboard and Tre plays drums. A blonde boy wearing a hood plays guitar. The four of us playing a fusion of Coltrane and Prince and Bingo Miki. Tre plays bongo drums with his eyes closed.

  The microphones add a freaky fur between my voice and the speaker. I test one two and three and hear static that could be a form of psychedelia.

  This makes me not care about anybody else that’s not here in this room.

  The noises we make are tigers in a bath house. Sweeping through soft rolls of water using flat paws. Palm leaves sweating and drooping into the sea.

  Shivering my voice up and down, vibrato into some kind of geisha sprawl.

  Gold wine casket, a pot of almonds. A pan flute effect on the keyboard, and my voice is a timid screech. I hold it for ages, the fur between my voice and the sound a bottomless well. Yuya stops and then Tre stops and the guitar stops and they all look at me.

  What are you doing?

  I tell them, art.

  Everybody’s faces are screwed up, but I’m the Troupeau Bleu. This voice I’m doing is an ancient valley. We start playing again and it feels like the room’s about to give birth until a teacher comes in and mimes for us to turn it down a bit please. He looks embarrassed for us. When he leaves, Tre slams his brush-stick against the wall and kicks the snare drum over.

  After band rehearsal we’re sitting outside in the courtyard and Tre has his arm around Yuya. When the guitar boy tries to put his arm around me too I frown and he takes it away.

  I imagine we’re sitting at a dock and picture the asphalt as scum water that my feet can’t touch.

  Yuya and Tre are making out behind the corner and his hand is rubbing all up her thigh. Yuya’s got a crunched back when she kisses him. Chewing on her small lips.

  Me and the guitar guy stare for a little while but then he says he’s gonna go. I ask him for his name, he tells me Zig. He doesn’t ask me for my name, he calls me Ling Ling. And he asks, do I want to go to his party, tells me Yuya and Tre are gonna be there. This weekend, be there or be square. It will involve teenage alcoholism and dark house lights.

  TEEN ALCOHOLISM

  Yuya’s at the bottom of the fire escape stairs smoking a joint with Tre when I get there. A bag of chips brought to share but I’ve been eating them since the train station.

  Yuya’s speaking too loudly when she explains that Zig didn’t want anything to stink up his house. Tre doesn’t say anything to me. He’s wearing skinny speed-dealers and heavy jeans. Yuya clutches his hand. They say they’ll see me up there and pretend I’m gone when I’m still there.

  The fire escape stairs, and there’s a girl a few steps behind me. She’s wearing a big fur coat.

  Cold today, she says.

  Her voice thrums the brick walls. I agre
e with her, my voice a big puff instead. She asks why I’m not wearing more clothes then. I say it’s because I’m not cold. She asks why I agreed with her then.

  Zig opens the door and inside is an oversized T-shirt mania. Thick physiques, tobacco simmer, VHS tapes of skaters and amateur bands on a small television screen, and a mother in a kitchen cooking frozen food in the oven.

  You ever had a fad? Zig asks everyone.

  What’s a fad?

  Zig says: it’s like something you’re insanely into for a little bit.

  Someone calls out, like most girls, and they all snigger and drag. I’m a spill of sweat. Zig raises his voice a little, nah but for real, has anyone really had a fad?

  The one with fat cheeks and cherry lips and a whole paper-bag bottle for himself says, yeah I got a fad. I got a fad for like, homemade low-budget skate tutorials, the ones just with like kids in their backyards or something. And sometimes they trip over or something.

  Hell yeah my man, says Zig.

  Zig grabs the plate his mother leaves on the kitchen bench and brings it over to the middle of all of us. I take a little sausage roll. Ziggy says, you know I got a fad for like jumping over shit.

  Man that’s lame, someone yells.

  No way, Ziggy says. It’s exhilarating, real thrill. He looks at me, you got a fad Ling Ling?

  I tell him, my name isn’t Ling Ling.

  The room is perspired.

  He grins, calm down, he says. He grabs his guitar and starts playing the same riffs he was playing the other day. His mother from the kitchen looks at me for a second, then goes back to the oven. She turns the television down and then Zig turns it back up again.