Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Jamie Marina Lau

  I like watching videos online of middle-aged ladies unpacking their make-up shopping hauls and doing makeup demonstrations. I say. This isn’t absolute truth, I’d only done it once before. But everyone laughs anyway.

  Yuya comes in with Tre and they’re holding hands and Yuya’s lip gloss is smudged above her upper lip. Everyone makes low coos with flared nostrils. The mother looks over. Yuya has this muddy grin on her face.

  Everybody back on their phone screens over dinner. They all yell, thanks Ma! Ma as an idea. I imagine being a ma. I look at Yuya imagining herself as a ma.

  Some way through the night I look through the window and see downstairs is lit by a small white light. A rubbish man rolling a huge bin around in circles. There are few people smoking, standing in distances, little spaces where words go. A pizza man rolling up on a bike.

  Inside we are shrouded by cigarette smoke. Yuya goes into the bathroom. I follow her. She looks at me in the mirror. Opens the cabinet, and pulls out a bottle of mouth-wash, gargles it in her mouth. Her face is patchy with pink. I tell her that Honey wouldn’t like her smoking. She agrees and shrugs, probably not. She’s still got this muddy grin on her face. I ask her why she can’t just respect her mother’s wishes. I try to lean casually against the shower screen. Yuya’s face has screwed up like paper and asks what I mean by that? I say that Honey’s her ma, and so she’s gotta respect her. Yuya leaves the bathroom, and I put the bottle of mouthwash away and get the floss out and use it for all my teeth. I sprinkle strings of floss into the toilet. A white worm pool party.

  Outside the bathroom a guy calls out, hey you taking a shit or something?

  When I sit down with everyone again, Yuya moves closer into Tre and rests her head between his chin and shoulder. Tre kisses her hair, smells her hair, rubs his thumb across her jaw line.

  Later on, Zig’s ma in the kitchen pours box cake mix into a pan and puts it in the oven, but takes it out too early. She gives it to us and the batter is still wet and before I eat it, I look up and see that everybody’s still eating it, watching the videos on the TV. The batter slops in my mouth. I push it away and ask if anybody else wants it. A guy grabs it from me and Zig’s ma is looking at me. She comes over and asks if it was cooked okay and everybody agrees together in loud swallows and Zig says yeah yeah yeah, and tells his ma to stop asking for compliments.

  I ask Yuya when she’s planning to ditch this party and she says she’ll leave whenever she wants. I ask her if she’ll catch the train home with me and she says probably not, that Tre’s dad’s going to pick them up in his truck.

  Fire escape stairs all by myself and the sounds of a couple fighting. I peek over the banister and see a girl pushing a boy against the wall, tears in her eyes. The boy’s scrunched against the bricks with his arms close to his body. He’s crying too. They see me and I say sorry and run down the rest of the stairs without stopping.

  A pit bull is going for a walk with its owner, both frothing.

  BLUES

  Make or Break City flashing across the train’s window. Everybody in here is a faulty battery; black coat slumps.

  The sky is a purple haze of lights from buildings, and white birds circle public soccer grounds. The train goes underground and my reflection is a madam in her late twenties with a cat to keep her company. These dark spots under my eyes.

  A young family stand right up close to the carriage doors, and in their hands are cliché milkshake cups with red straws, vibrating and quivering between their fingers, and they look at each other and smile. The child rolls its head into his mother’s stomach.

  On the street, somebody’s playing a Miles Davis and John Coltrane collaboration on saxophone. I buy a tub of pickled seaweed a few blocks before home and go to the restaurant to buy another custard bun from the old man who gave me two last time. When I get there and ask the middle-aged waitress about him, about the old man with the Reebok cap, she tells me he hasn’t worked here for a long time; she doesn’t know too much about him except that he lives in a retirement village. I told her that I only saw him the other week and she frowns.

  She says: Aya, leave if you’re not going to eat.

  Even if you own a restaurant you still end up in a retirement village and also even emperors die.

  Dad and Santa Coy are sitting silently in front of Santa Coy’s new computer, looking at a graph. Dad’s old-fashioned calculator on the table.

  Dad gets up and opens all the cupboards just to slam them shut again. He says: they’re getting bored of us, goddamn, they’re getting bored of us.

  Something cooking in the kitchen to distract from the money-drought.

  A Davis-Coltrane collaboration to fall asleep.

  SAMBA COOKBOOK

  This will tantalise a fashionable audience. With the money that Santa Coy’s mother makes as a surgeon they hire an art space on the north side and dress the walls up in the same scribble print. Lined up on plastic fold-up chairs are whisky-and-cola cans filled to their rims with tap water.

  They invite everybody from Santa Coy’s contacts and Dad’s contacts from the university and more than seventy people show up. They say they will turn water into wine.

  This exhibition will stay open for a month. Then people will get bored and talk about something else.

  When my sister comes to see the show with me, she says the thing that screwed Dad over was that he assumed he could always be the central figure in someone else’s attention. She tells me: whatever sort of relationship you’re in, never try to be what makes the other person constantly happy, because all you really are is just someone to make things less bad.

  I think about her polo T-shirt husband and I ask where he is. She tells me he’s gone on a tip with his best friend from childhood. They’ve gone to see a Chinese opera in another city. He told her that he’s trying to embrace her culture. My sister told him she’s never seen a Chinese opera before either.

  They’re staying there for the weekend, she tells me. I ask her will she miss him? She makes a noise with her lips like: yeah, of course.

  MEDIUM TESTAMENT

  The whole truth is that as an artist you must go through the process. You make something, be happy, see it as a form of shit, be sad, make something new, and so on. Dad is crying while sitting on the toilet. Me and Santa Coy pretend not to hear it, listening to Bingo Miki and his Inner Galaxy Orchestra. I say that he needs to open his mind again, that it always becomes closed off with success.

  EARLY DINNER OUT

  Dad has asked Aunty Linda to take me out to yum cha down the road because it’s going to smell bad in the apartment today. When Aunty Linda asks why it’ll smell, Dad is a raging brown couch and barks at her that she isn’t their ma, so stop judging him, that she is a sad piece of shit.

  Aunty Linda holds my hand down the street. She hums, gwaai loi.

  We eat. Sweet floppy egg custard tarts, a shumai and cha siu bao fantasia. Creamy mango pudding topped with milk cream on a plate and arranged as a circle of little lumps, like a flower, nearly. With fan guo, a fluffy cake for the cloud tasters. Siu mai, haam sui gau. Prawn dumpling with a juicy surprise. Tofu with sticky syrup, delectable. Jin deui. Chicken feet. Suck the toes off. Stir-fried radish cake called lo baak gou. A deep-fried pumpkin and egg yolk ball. Ham sui gok—a greasy football.

  A cloth white table and stains from little pork ribs make blotches. Some people at the next table have bottles of beer. Undrunk tea, even though yum cha means ‘drink tea’. It’s loud in here, but the loudness of people is coming from nowhere because when I look around, it looks like nobody’s mouths are open at all.

  A woman in a tuxedo keeps probing us to try these delicious deep-fried fish worms.

  Aunty Linda asks me how school is going. I tell her I’m in a band. She asks me what I play, and I say, did you know that the voice is a wind instrument? She raises her eyebrows and says, you’re a singer? She starts to sing a church hymn in a Chinese opera voice. Nobody looks at her and I don’t say anything, just dig my t
eeth into a lotus seed bun. This is a whatever-space and we order everything from the trolleys until the bill is more than a hundred dollars and our stomachs are colour collages. Yum cha like buffets: for tuxedo-dressed Jie Jies and Old Chens picking teeth-leftovers and swallowing.

  In the afternoon the greyness of the sky and the sun sours the weather and me and Aunty Linda go to the shopping mall. She buys herself some turnips on sale. She buys a new pack of pastels and tells me that she’s fulfilling her dream of becoming a textiles designer—that she’s going to quit her job at the IT place. She tells me about her friend that’s asking her to design something for her to sew. Aunty Linda buys the expensive pack, quality always sells.

  DANCE SHOW

  When I come home there are new canvases stacked in the doorway. There is a big smell of deodorant and on the kitchen bench is a coil tower of cent coins. The cupboards are all closed and a pan is in the sink. There are crushed pills, and bowls of egg whites, and pink gravel in plastic bags.

  Dad’s washing the dishes.

  Santa Coy’s packing his bag up.

  Aunty Linda is at the door with her arms crossed. Good day? she asks.

  My dad makes a grunting noise and Aunty Linda clicks her tongue and hugs me and leaves down the hall again.

  He looks at me and nods. I come right up close to him and ask him what he’s been doing all day. He blinks and then looks at Dad. Santa Coy’s eyes are a long buzz. Dad looks at Santa Coy then looks at me quickly. Neither of them say anything.

  When they talk they only talk to each other: empty threats to kill men whose names I don’t recognise. Dad calls them narcotic bourgeois.

  They’re both asleep on the brown couches by seven. Uncoiled tin foil scattered along the kitchen bench, covered in burn marks, some black, some purple. This is an electric cowboy exhibition. Like we’re in a space shuttle from 1976. Deadbeats. Back to their old ways. I fall asleep without goodnight. Wake up without looking.

  POT OF ALMONDS

  Almonds that taste like nothing in a peculiar room at school. A lunch break without Yuya—she’s kissing Tre behind the basketball court and Santa Coy’s been offline for hours.

  PARLOUR

  Honey’s healing parlour is only one steet away from Chinatown. Closing in half an hour to the ballad of a depressed sitar. This is an Eastern heatwave.

  Hello? says the receptionist. I tell him my name is Monk and that Honey is expecting me. The receptionist says I don’t have an appointment and so I just walk straight through and knock on Honey’s door. The receptionist on little tiptoes following me through. Excuse me, excuse me, he says. He’s wearing a gypsy cloth. Honey opens the door and she’s wearing an oversized red silk kimono. Monk, she says. There is a general mood of absolute physical combustion.

  I am Wu Zetian, but also an undercover spy. I am the emperor of a white envelope in the back pocket of my jeans and I’m not allowed to look inside or talk about it. Getting Honey’s powers back in exchange for some voodoo. Soon Santa Coy and Dad will be swept up in a voodoo they don’t understand and they won’t know what hit them. I’ll tell them, you’re not the kings of the world, you know?

  FIVE

  ISLAND MANIAC

  In this apartment it’s a factory.

  Dad and Santa Coy are painting globs of black, brown, red and electric blue over coloured boards. Scrawling words with black felt-tip markers. New shiny space tubes of oil paints and chubby stacks of cash as prizes on the TV set. Sloshing paint over prints in their shiny suits before they go to this art show tonight. This time Santa Coy’s asked me to come. As your date? I ask.

  In the cab, it’s a tight squeeze.

  We are in a big white space like an angel’s hot tub. Santa Coy’s got one picture in the show, hanging on its own wall. He wears his sand dome beanie inside, with his dark blue suit. I go to hold on to his hand and he pretends to scratch his elbow. Something I read once in a pocket-size magazine: if a boy is mean to you or refuses your affection, they probably have a crush on you. If they jump at the chance of your affection, they’re too desperate—leave. This is something I take into serious consideration. I cross my arms, and walk away.

  When he’s finished his drink, Dad asks me what I’m even doing here. I cross my arms tighter and tell him: Santa Coy’s only working with you to get to me. I ask him, what if he kissed me? Maybe this is a solve-itself sudoku—no need for Honey’s voodoo quest. Dad looks at me and blinks and says, is that right? Walks away with one hand in his pocket. He is wearing sunglasses inside. He straightens his shirt.

  Deadbeats in suits, a sporting arena with champagne flutes. Fatalities in a big white room. Everybody dead in here but me. But this is me: wearing a silly tight top with loose jeans for scum and hair that’s been half brushed. Just standing in the middle of an orgy of paints and other people’s false brains.

  Pressing close, I hear some conversations about Santa Coy becoming a star. The glamour puss of underworld art scenes.

  It’s only eight o’clock when I leave the cannibal festival. Outside it’s a pool of headlights and girls in tall boots. One looks at me and whispers something to her friend. She shouts at me, asks if I’m supposed to be ’round here, I ask her where she got her boots from. She says that her boss gave them to her. I tell her that her boss has good taste. She says he needs to.

  By this time all the girls in tall boots are laughing at me. One of them puts her cigarette out and comes over. She asks if I need a cab or something, and steps off the curb and waves one in. She opens the door for me and this cab driver is a loose unit. He says hello to her, not me. She starts to cackle and slams the door once I’m in.

  My head heavy on the fuzzy grey seat.

  Where to? asks the cab driver. His eyes on mine in the mirror.

  This is a movie about shopping sprees in New York. I tell him: the shopping mall.

  The doors to the mall are all locked and security’s standing out the front. I disappear into the red bistro next door. Contorted lips of eaters, all wondering about the specials. The waitress asks me what I want and I ask her for the cheapest form of food. She says, how about this, how much money you got? I tell her, like five dollars. She tells me that’ll get me plenty, and she’ll even give me more because I look too skinny.

  A business-day stakeout. A campfire for robots.

  After I eat I’m in a subway tunnel where a man is playing a kick drum with his foot and singing. Then a pavement street, down an alleyway of lobbies. A woman and a man think they’re holidaying a coastline, kissing and rubbing against brick walls.

  My clothes are too loud.

  I’m at the reverend’s apartment lobby. The buzzer is hot. A man in a suit sitting on the couch has a small child tugging on his brown belt. He smacks him across the face.

  One of Honey’s? says the voice in the machine—a drone fuzz. Yep, I say. The voice asks me my name and I say, M.

  There’s a heavy claustrophobia in the doorway of the apartment. At the door is Reverend Bugsy. He is a buzz cut wearing a dressing gown, a book about the life cycle of moths under his arm and holding a cylinder tin of chocolate malt. He asks me if I am Monk and I tell him yes. I ask him if he is really a reverend, he tells me yes.

  Say, he says. You’re oriental.

  He puts his hand along his jaw. Honey sent me a concubine?

  A what?

  He says, a hooker. He asks me if I am a hooker. I tell him very vehemently that I am not.

  Honey has stuff for you, it’s in my pocket, hold on.

  I show him, shiny white prize, nearly crumpled.

  He sighs and lets me in.

  His apartment is like petrol station and coconut butter. He has a chandelier hanging in the middle of the room that’s dim like wasted butter.

  Every shelf is full of little ceramic statues of mice. Some with tuxedos on or ball gowns, some naked and eating foam cheese. Reverend Bugsy doesn’t say anything about them.

  What’s it like being a reverend? I ask him.

  H
e says: I want to keep this brief.

  He finishes mixing a malt drink for himself and puts the cup in the microwave. He asks what Honey has for him.

  I pass him the envelope. He reads the words on it and hums to himself. Peels the sticky from the edges of the envelope carefully, pulls out a small ripped piece of paper. Reads it aloud. I remember what I know. He laughs a little and shakes his head. He fondles a mouse’s head on the shelf of his counter. The microwave bleeper goes off.

  I ask him if he likes mice. He says he does.

  He pulls from the envelope a little something with plastic shine. It’s a folded Ziploc bag. I ask him what it is. He asks me what Honey said it was. I tell him that she said she’ll give him powers for powers. He says that I just answered my own question.

  When he speaks it’s so soft that I can barely hear him.

  What church do you reverend?

  I used to reverend at the Baptist.

  I thought there was more than one.

  He says: there probably are.

  My Aunty Linda goes to one, I tell him. Do you know her, aren’t reverends supposed to know their flock?

  Yes I do, he says.

  You do? You mean you know your flock or you know Aunty Linda?

  He says, sure.

  Reverend Bugsy is turned to the counter so I can’t see what’s inside his envelope. His hands are cusped like crab. His malt drink is waiting inside the microwave for him. The bleeps go off again.

  I ask him: were they the powers you wanted?

  He says he thinks so.

  This is a pungent squeeze. The television is playing Survivor. On top of it there’s a little ceramic couch seating a nice group of young mice with overflowing popcorn. They’re pink. Pink ceramic mounds. The bleeps go off again and I pick up a mouse.