Pink Mountain on Locust Island

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Pink Mountain on Locust Island Page 8

by Jamie Marina Lau


  I ride in the ambulance with him. In the emergency department it hits me in my throat and I just stare for hours.

  SIX

  FABIO’S PARTY

  A big townhouse attached to other townhouses and out the front is a long, red piece of felt trying to be The Red Carpet. I ask Yuya at the front door: do they use the same red carpet every time? She says yes. Fabio’s ma comes to the door with big curly hair and raindrop earrings and leather pants. She’s got a belly growing over her waist and she asks our names. We tell her. She calls us beautiful. Her voice is a soft egg whisk.

  She lets us in and tells us: don’t bother removing your shoes. We go straight in and walk along the red felt and it curdles a little. I bend over and straighten it up again.

  Inside are star-shaped cookies and mini sausages and red punch in plastic cocktail glasses with ribbons tied at the bottom. A deep bass pounding but no one is listening. A fruit bowl that I can tell is for looking at only. I ask Fabio’s ma if I can have some fruit. She looks at the arrangement with bent eyes and looks worried about it. She stutters and says sure and takes a small apple from the bottom.

  Fabio is the king among a crowd of small stubby tuxedos on the deck while Fabio’s dad is on the barbeque. There’s only about ten other people here and they’re playing pin the sunglasses on David Bowie. A strong sausage smoke. Yuya and me sit on the table and wait for them to be cooked. We put our own sunglasses on so that we look like we’re from one of her nineties runway magazines. Yuya is not allowed to wear tight clothes so she’s wearing very long and flowy jeans and a disco vest. We’re mostly bored. Fabio comes over in jest and says hi and that he didn’t see us come in. Yuya looks at me and pushes her lips out like a sad cartoon duck.

  I ask Fabio: are you enjoying your groovy party? He laughs with one hand on his penguin belly and says yes.

  While eating a lamb shank straight from the hot stove I tell Yuya: Dad was punched and kicked a lot, that’s what the hospital said. By a bunch of white thugs.

  She asks: how you know they were white?

  I nibble the tender parts and tell Yuya: I found him on the floor in front of the television and he had a buzz coming from his throat but he didn’t respond when I tried to wake him up. So I had to call the ambulance.

  Is he still in hospital?

  I say yes.

  She asks: do you know why he got beat up?

  My sister picks me up in her car and we drive back into the city, to her home, where my pyjamas and toothbrush are. I’ve been sleeping on her couch.

  BIRTH OF COOL

  The air tastes like mustard. After she’s gone to sleep, my sister’s husband is hunched over a computer screen and when I look, it’s a video chat room. He has the sound turned to zero. Every night it’s a different person on the other end. Sometimes they both just sit there and stare. Neither of them typing.

  Tonight it’s a middle-aged woman with fuzzy hair. She gets up at one point and brings her chihuahua over. She shows my sister’s husband and he nods at the screen. Then she gets up again, brings back a feather boa and wraps the chihuahua up in it. My sister’s husband nods again. I see him about to click the ‘End Chat’ button, then he stops, and leans back into his chair. The middle-aged woman keeps grabbing things and putting them on the chihuahua. The chihuahua starts barking but you can’t hear it from here.

  The next person in a video chat room with him is a man with big glasses on that reflect his computer screen light. He appears, zips his pants up, reaches forward, and he’s gone.

  My sister’s husband slightly bangs on the table. He sighs. He leans back into his chair and my sister comes out. My eyes look shut. She comes and kisses him on the head. She asks him quietly how he is going, what he is doing still up? Her arm is around his neck, his cheek in the space of her elbow. He doesn’t really answer her and eventually she goes back to bed.

  The next video chat is with a little Chinese boy in front of a meal. He’s carefully eating pickled vegetables with wooden chopsticks. My sister’s husband stands up and gets a slice of plain bread and comes back and they eat together in silence.

  BREAKFAST

  Cash money slipped under the place mat. I ask my sister what the point of place mats are if the dining table’s so dirty anyway and she looks at me and just chews her sugary cereal.

  This cereal rubs my teeth the wrong way but it feels good going down my throat. Her husband is watching the morning news and it’s a heavy ring in my left ear.

  When he leaves, me and my sister look at a recipe book for dinner ideas. I ask her what her favourite kind of meat is and she tells me she likes beef and I say is that because your husband is like a slab of beef? She bursts out laughing and then I sit on the couch and change the channel.

  My sister goes to work. It’s a general mood of physical combustion the whole day.

  I try not to think about my dad with a buzzing throat and I do this by watching a housewives television program while doing one hundred sit-ups every hour. My stomach recoils.

  BREAKING AND ENTERING

  It’s five in the afternoon and neither of them are home yet and I have been eating their chicken-flavoured, glutenfree corn things. A taste on my tongue that’s a frenzied salt buzzing.

  When they get home I’m watching television on the couch and my sister opens the cabinet and notices straight away that all the corn tubes are gone, her husband standing next to her.

  She says to him: jeez honey how many packets of corn tubes did you buy on Sunday?

  She takes a muesli bar out and finishes it in four bites.

  She says: jeez they’re all gone. My sister’s husband puts his backpack down and looks closer in the cabinet. He doesn’t touch her. He tells her: six packets.

  She says: there’s none left. I was looking forward to them all day.

  Were you really looking forward to them all day? And they’re not corn tubes, they’re corn fingers, he says.

  My sister’s husband is always a correction pen. He always corrects her because my sister looks like she can’t speak English. He is the kind of person to think that he is the Western ranger who saved my sister, a Chinese doll.

  She uses her finger to jiggle the oats from out of her back teeth.

  She says, yes, I really was looking forward to them all day.

  He says, well I’m sorry that you’ve been looking forward to them all day.

  He looks into the cabinet.

  My sister looks at me.

  How was your day Monk? she asks. She doesn’t wait for me to answer, instead turns to her husband and asks: so you really ate all six packets? You realise it’s only Thursday? He says excuse me, I haven’t even eaten one.

  My big sister puffs her lips. She is deflated, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  We sit around the dinner table to eat and then she stands up, takes her plate to the couch and turns on the television. Me and her husband watch her for a second, and then he takes his plate and goes into the bathroom.

  When I tell her I ate the corn tubes, she says that she knows; she’s not stupid.

  ANTI-MATTER

  Their half-lit apartment, after work again, a thickness.

  My sister smoking a cigarette by the window, playing a kind of gasping Parisian lullaby. She’s wearing a white suit. Her body looks clean but she’s got the cigarette and looks as though she could be in a kind of Nouvelle Vague but her eyes are too red. A woman cries alone: there’s nothing more beautiful than it.

  She is a form of modern woman. And all the apartments are starting to look the same around here, and my sister cries and then finishes and then dabs her face with a wetted cloth before her husband comes home.

  She asks him to order Thai food and he spends some time scrolling on the computer and she comes up next to him. They fall into their moulds, her hand clasping his neck and his head in the cavity of her elbow. A soupy bide. A Southern noir meets a Beat. She says in his ear that there are only so many. He makes a ridiculous face, a sort of fur
iousness. Her shoes rub against the carpet.

  The sadness in here has taken shape in the form of my sister packing her things into her gym bag, a toothbrush and everything, and my sister’s husband is standing with crossed arms in the far corner of the room and he keeps asking where she is going over and over and she just says that she’s just going out for a drink, just going to get some air, just going to get some dinner. That she’ll be back, that she’ll be back. And she’s packed a lot of clothes, and she leaves out the door and then there’s no more air in here, it’s all been sucked up.

  I ask him if she is coming back tonight. I ask him if she does this often. Boxes arrive: the only thing we can do is eat. He tells me she’s done it once before. That she came back. Jazz channel until 10:45 when it starts getting experimental. Disappointment in an unproductive game. The word piddle. He asks hey you wanna play Scrabble? I tell him that I guess I can’t stay here anymore. I tell him: people who are sad play Scrabble, I don’t necessarily mean you, but I mean, just people who don’t have anything left to piece together except irrelevant words play Scrabble.

  No words are irrelevant, he says.

  PUBLIC NUISANCE

  Santa Coy’s Hot Sauce has been offline this entire time. As soon as I’m back in Dad’s apartment he calls our phone number.

  A wildlife special: a coral-based archipelago. A flamingo props one leg and a national fish, called marlin, stabs other fish with his nose. A flag that is the landscape and a name that means shallow water.

  Santa Coy’s left twenty-nine messages already.

  I can tell he doesn’t know why he’s speaking to me. I’m one of those islands that you go to just to get to another.

  CHERRY SAUCE

  After some silence on the phone Santa Coy asks me: if you could drown in any substance, what would it be?

  A Russian ballet is on the television and I’m eating a packet of sultanas that’s been here since I was twelve. I tell him: Dad went to hospital, he’s still there because the thugs disconnected his jaw. And broke his arm. Santa Coy swears a few times. I wonder if he’s so angry that he’ll want to kiss me when he gets back. This makes me smile and turn the Russian ballet up to the highest volume. I ask Santa Coy if he can hear it. I tell him: that’s a Russian ballet.

  In this apartment it’s a spasm of nightmare violins and I am waving my legs in the air like windshield wipers. I wonder if anybody’s ever died from a woman’s leg.

  A weird nap.

  When I wake up Aunty Linda is cooking a fried egg on the stove. I never noticed her come in. She tells me: child services called me, I hopes it’s okay with you that I stay here, I’ve just put my stuff in his room.

  A dark yellow yolk means the hen was eating a lot of vegetables. Hens that eat grass have medium-yellow yolks. It spoils this ceramic plate.

  Aunty Linda is eating her food on Dad’s brown couch. She murmurs: there weren’t very many ingredients here. The Russian ballet is still going. My egg whites are a tutu.

  I ask her when my dad’s coming home. She says that he’s going in for some tests after the operation. I ask her what kind of tests. She says for his whole body, not just the broken parts. I ask her if they’re testing his brain. She says yes.

  UNLIMITED COOKING OPTIONS

  Tonight is a supermarket experience like no other.

  BED

  After Aunty Linda calls the hospital, she tells me they’re not going to let me speak with him.

  As I lie in bed that night I hear weird thuds.

  In the morning, Santa Coy is taking canvases and Ziploc bags away from our living room. He says hi to me and that’s all. He’s wearing a holiday shirt.

  UNMERRY

  This train is elastic if you see it from the inside. I’m riding it to Yuya’s apartment building in the centre of the city.

  Across the carriage is a woman with a patch over one eye and she keeps repeating the same thing: why you looking at me, why you looking at me, why you looking at me? I get off a station early and wait for the next train to come.

  Yuya’s not home and Honey is slamming her head against the kitchen counter tops again.

  I sit myself at the round table and wait.

  Honey stops and opens her rice cooker, scoops it into little bowls. Sets one in front of me.

  I tell her that Dad got beat up by a bunch of white thugs. She asks me if I would like mustard. I say: mustard with rice? She says it diminishes evil. I shrug an okay. She gives the bottle three fanatical squeezes and says: who was beaten? I tell her, my dad.

  She asks, physically?

  For a long time Honey watches me cry and scoops up spoons of mustardy rice to my lips.

  SENSEI

  I ask her if it’s something I did. For a long time Honey has her eyes slit. Her brain is bulging out of her forehead.

  I ask her if the dark spirits got to him because of my errand with Reverend Bugsy. Honey’s eyes beam like yellow stars. She says that that must be it. She barely draws her lips apart when she speaks.

  I ask her how I can fix it.

  She tells me that I go to a woman called Sadie’s house, that I have tea with her, and that when she’s not looking I set her curtains on fire, and then her living room couch. She says that I should use her cooking oil in the top-right cupboard next to the stove.

  When I ask Honey why I should do this, she screams.

  SENSEI’S SHOPPING LIST

  Sadie. Forty-three years old. Lives in the city area, likes the bay. East African. Goes to the beach every summer. Interested in buying a custom-made book cabinet, where can she get one? Public forum for pit bull owners. A space for mothers who like crafts. The restaurant on the north side. To eat a well-cooked steak, and a place with exceptionally crunchy-on-the-outside-but-soft-on-the-inside chips. Dog obsession. Absolutely too obsessed! Former school guidance counsellor. Alcoholics Anonymous arranger. A Toni Braxton fan page, the hair salon somewhere in the eastern suburbs that also does Brazilian waxes. A folder online reserved for nice dining rooms, a folder online reserved for Toni Braxton. We Love Toni. Twitter account with two posts. Seeking two more women for R’n’B cover band? Smiley-face mania. This was four years ago—nothing since then. A folder reserved for handmade cabinets. A folder for Maltese-cross-Shih Tzu. Videos of dogs cuddling their owners. A folder reserved for ‘Zen’ and also ‘Meditation tips’. A folder reserved for herbal healing, pictures of gunk green and dirty balls. A type of green tea? A ‘Toni Braxton In Concert!’ forum, are tickets completely sold out yet? Contact at [email protected] or personally message her! McDonald’s, just for a cheeky bite with little baby. Divorced and hella happy. A dog’s catwalk. A photo in Disneyland. A photo next to a fountain in some kind of Hawaii. Narcoticlovers.com. How can you tell real molly from fake molly? Unemployed for a few years. Mahjong forum. Soul searching and job searching simultaneously is one hard job! Hit me up. How much should I be making per gram? Wine-lovers forum page. A bar on the north side for a casual drink, why not treat yourself after a long day?

  SENSEI CREDIBILITY

  Honey’s idea of burning a house down, probably a different idea than those of the worldly state. Probably a symbol of replenishment. In what kind of religion?

  My Aunty Linda told me: yes Jesus loves you, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do as long as you try to do things the way you’d do things if you had compassion.

  She tells me there is something wonderful about the grace. It makes me fuzzy inside thinking about it. I wonder if Aunty Linda is compassionate when she over-boils the yams. I wonder if it’s compassionate when you over-boil a house.

  PARANOID IDEA

  In this timber apartment everything is hot. Imagine cooking a sunny-side-up on one of these timber walls—I say this to Aunty Linda on the other couch. She tells me that I got home late tonight. I try to find some Russian ballet again but it’s not playing on any of the channels, just commercials.

  Lying in bed, there are weird thuds from upstairs.

&
nbsp; Aunty Linda won’t sleep in Dad’s room so she sleeps on the brown couch as curled up as a millipede. I ask her if she can sleep okay and she doesn’t wake up—she snores.

  The next morning she tells me she can’t sleep in his room because it smells and the mattress is stained. Stained with what I ask her. Aunty Linda stabs a fork into her yolk dome. We stare at it and conclude together that this hen has been eating a whole lot of alfalfa.

  Today I am preparing to retract a sort of voodoo. Thinking about where to get a lighter or a flame.

  I am leaning on a wall about to meet Santa Coy for the first time in a while.

  There’s oil in the gutters and everything is plastic if you look at it with sunglasses on. These are rectangle shades from Fabio’s ‘Pop Star’ party. The city’s eyes have sunken into its face. The lights left on from the night before are making tingling noises.

  Santa Coy also with shades on in front of the manga shop. I ask him why he is wearing shades, tell him that there’s no sun. I tell him that he’s not a celebrity, that nobody knows him. He lights a cigarette.

  I tell him that I think eating in a restaurant is a very disgusting thing to do. He offers me a cigarette. When I say no, he asks me why I think eating in a restaurant is a very disgusting thing to do.

  I ask him, don’t you think that it’s like a mix between group animal sacrifices and exhibitions of wealth?

  Santa Coy retracts his chin into his neck.

  The same corner shop yum cha. One basket of chicken feet. Suck the toes off, slurp the webs. Stir fried radish cake called lo baak gou, also known as turnip cake. A deep-fried pumpkin-and-egg-yolk ball. Shumai congee. A variety of steam buns. You like the chicken feet don’t you. Don’t forget about the mini egg tarts or a steamed sponge cake with coconut milk to moisten. Deep-fried taro turnover, char siu sou, cheong fan, pan-fried bitter melon, beef dumpling. A pudding of black sesame in soft ball. Deep-fried bean curd skin roll—comes in threes. Rice noodle roll with deep-fried crab claw. Later I promise we’ll get the mango pudding topped with creamy coconut milk. A soft ball with deep-fried bean curd skin rolls—rolled inside of a rice noodle roll. Traditional steamed glutinous rice with zhu hao sauce, crispy yam puff, crispy dragon roll, honey-dew puree with sago. Butter cream, hot raw fish slices, porridge. Sautéed string beans, beef shank, pork-spiced salt-baked octopus. Deep-fried seaweed roll, barbecue pork puff, pan-fried pork dumpling. Potsticker, water chestnut cake, bitter melon, beef dumplings, turnip cake, leek dumplings, deep-fried taro turnover. Mini egg tarts, steamed sponge cake, tofu with syrup. Jin deui. Chicken feet. Dan, omelette with ham slices like Grandma used to make. This one with turnip. Potstickers, stir-fried radish cake. Turnip cake, leek dumplings, deep-fried taro turnover, cha siu sou. Cheong fan, pan-fried bitter melon, beef dumpling. Honeydew puree with sago, deep-fried garlicky fish ball, chee cheong fun with barbecued pork, steamed radish cake, steamed bun with premium lotus paste, cabbage roll. Spliced salt-baked octopus. Fung zao, ngao yuk kau, pai gwut, ma lai go, do fu fa. Cabbage roll, paekuat, quail egg, shumai, pancit canton guisado, fookien-style.

 

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