Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Jamie Marina Lau

  Pork bun triad in a bamboo steamer.

  I say: my Aunty Linda told me that my dad’s body is 60 per cent alcohol and 30 per cent dead brain cells. They’ve taken him to a centre.

  When Santa Coy hears this, he’s halfway through a charsiu bao.

  He says, give your dad a break.

  I say, you don’t understand him.

  Stained red in the corner of his mouth.

  He says: what do you even know about all this?

  He takes a second one, looks at me sharply before putting it between his teeth and ripping it open. Red pork dripping into his lap.

  I tell him: I think I might’ve done something.

  As he finishes off the second bun, I take the last one and the bite is a gush of sweet and salty.

  We pay the bill and I talk of Honey’s deal: exchanging voodoo for voodoo, unfix someone to fix someone else—that’s how she put it. Santa Coy purses his lips.

  A truck driving past releases a sort of acid smell.

  It’s humid out here near the heating and cooling machines and Santa Coy and I sit on the curb to let our stomachs become peaceful again.

  I tell him about Reverend Bugsy, how he took Honey’s powers away because he was envious of her ability to connect with the Holy Spirit. The restoration of powers and how it triggered my dad’s beating.

  And Santa Coy continues to shake his head over and over again. He’s whispering my name. I ask him: what. He tells me: man, you’ve been scammed. I say: I obviously haven’t. He asks me why obviously not, and I say because I got what I wanted. He asks what it was I wanted. I tell him: you without my dad. My dad without you. When I say this, a car exhaust explodes. My face is a giant peach flushed in the fumes. Santa Coy lights a cigarette and doesn’t look at me. He murmurs my name again. This is sweet, this is working.

  MEMORY LANE

  Something guilty about the way his eyes muddle. Something reassuring about how he can’t balance on his feet.

  PARAPHERNALIA

  You’re my space princess, I’ve got to have you. This song plays while I’m buying a packet of cigarettes from the Korean grocery store and sharing them with Tre and Yuya and Zig at the bus stop. The tobacco reminds me of feuds, of rubbing my teeth the wrong way. Doesn’t feel right, but it looks cool. Across the road a man is waiting for his dog to finish pissing. He doesn’t look at us before walking along.

  This was band practice with me screaming the way Honey does at the television. A sort of siren song blowing up with red squelches. I do this into the microphone and the theatre teacher comes in again and puts a straight finger to his lips. When he closes the door Yuya puts a pan flute effect on the keyboard and we play a little bit of Lonnie Liston Smith.

  I tell Santa Coy to meet us here before it gets dark, that I’m not allowed to be alone when it gets dark, to come quick. He arrives with his hands in his pockets and a long beige coat, like he’s just been gallomping all the way here. Camel. There’s something about the way he smells. When we’re chewing gum at the bus stop, Tre and Yuya are making out and Zig’s on the concrete playing his guitar unplugged. Santa Coy is quiet and staring.

  I say: so you won’t help me?

  He says: help you what?

  Don’t play a fool.

  Don’t play a fool, Santa Coy spits.

  Zig and Yuya and Tre get on the next bus and Santa Coy and I walk along a spilling curb.

  I have to go to a woman’s house whose name is Sadie, I tell Santa Coy. To do some things—but I’m not allowed to talk about it. This is what I’ve got to do if I want Dad to be okay. Santa Coy asks if Sadie’s the one who beat my dad up. I tell him I don’t think so. He asks: so who is Sadie? I shrug and tell him I don’t know. He sniffs, fixes his beanie, crosses his arms. I tell him that she is similar to Honey, but not as well-established. He asks me what she does then. I say that she runs a counselling service. And plays mahjong. And listens to Toni Braxton.

  So what, are you just playing messenger or delivery boy or what?

  I’m a girl.

  Whatever.

  We stop outside a fish shop. He looks in the window. Thinking about Grandpa maybe. I ask him if his grandpa went with him to the Bahamas. Santa Coy nods, he did, it might be his last holiday. I ask him what makes him say that. He says his grandpa has been coughing a lot. Coughing up blood. That they just watched TV the whole time, on the couch and everything. Him and Grandpa. Dinner out occasionally, ate a lot of lobster. I ask him what it was like, on a little island and stuff. He says that there was a lot of space, a lot of trees. Endless deserts of sand. Just what you’d expect. He’s quiet for a second. Then he goes into the store and comes back with a bottle of wine. We drink it from a paper bag, sitting in the park opposite Chinatown. This is a formless place; a dark emerald grove syringes a sort of new feeling into us and the wine does little.

  This is like dry land after red sea. Swept away and safe on the park bench. Even just for a second, we sit.

  A bare-chested homeless man asks for a sip. Santa Coy pours a quarter of it into the man’s plastic water bottle and then the man moves on.

  Was it lonely being on the island?

  He says: in ways.

  It was the kind of place you feel like you’re owed the moment you’re born. But I come back, and I’m still me, he says. He says: I’m sitting there watching cable TV with my grandpa, and there’s a maid standing behind the couch. She pauses for a second, just to watch TV a little, and then gets back to it. Lays out fresh fruit every morning. A kind of gesture you’d feel bad for the whole time you’re there, but you come home and you crave it again. My grandpa fell asleep a lot and it just made me sad. We weren’t even doing anything, just channel surfing. We’d sit outside on the terrace for breakfast. None of us would talk. And then my grandpa would say something about the weather, and my dad would ignore him and ask if anyone wanted to get in the pool. But Dad would always end up in the pool alone, swimming laps back and forth. Get out, take a shower. Form a routine in the Bahamas.

  Santa Coy hands me the rest of the wine and I drink it up in huge gasping gulps.

  When I take the bottle away from my lips and look at him, he’s got his mouth hung open a little. A little part of his face is smiling. He says: truuuue, and he laughs, takes the bottle from me gently and puts it down.

  I tried a pawpaw for the first time, though, he says. He rubs his hands together.

  I say: you’d never tried a pawpaw? They’re all over Chinatown.

  He looks around at nothing, sucks in and breathes out.

  Sharp rocks used to carve hieroglyphics into the trunk of a tree. The bottle of wine smashed, carved into the pavement.

  We spend the rest of the afternoon carving, buzzing on ten-dollar wine.

  SOLOMON’S SINK

  An allowance is not the same as approval. When I was nine, my dad handed me five dollars every beginning of the week and then got mad at me at the other end of the week for spending it. This happened for four years until he quit his job at the university.

  Nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun. Nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun. Nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun, nothing was gained under the sun. A beggar in front of the 7-Eleven repeats this, sitting on a cardboard mat.

  Santa Coy gives me five dollars to buy some kind of drink for the party he’s taking us to later. In this shop, I buy a red sealed bottle. We’ve become princes and kings.

  We take the train uptown to Santa Coy’s home and inside it’s unpigmented; smells like cotton or silk shirts. Air conditioner convention centre, black Rover Defender double garage, bedroom with ivy white walls. We don’t enter his bedroom, we go to his parents’. Big Pollock painting.

  His parents’ wardrobe is ideal foot-space. He passes me his mother’s fur coat.

  I’m looking at the blood stained on her surgeon’s uniform. Santa Coy w
atching me watch it.

  It’s hard to get blood out, says Santa Coy.

  Santa Coy opens a drawer, asks me to choose a lipstick colour.

  I pick 466 Carmen of the Coco collection.

  Behind it is black tang. Santa Coy watching me watch it.

  He says this is a Glock 17 Gen 2. He pulls it out from behind the lipstick drawer. My parents get paranoid. He grins. He holds it unlike cowboys do in movies, he doesn’t touch the trigger. He puts it back quickly.

  We sit on his parents’ bed, he does my make-up. I’m becoming a canvas but I want to be the body painted on top of it.

  Do you know why your dad was beaten up for real? he asks.

  I shake my head and tell him that I didn’t really question it for too long, that it’s not too far from making sense. Santa Coy screws his face up and says, that’s hurtful. I shrug. He draws thicker eyebrows for me.

  He faked, Santa Coy murmurs.

  What’d he fake?

  Santa Coy concentrates on my eyebrows—he’s squinting, jelly for eyes.

  I ask him again: what’d he fake?

  He says: you know. The stuff we sell. He clears his throat.

  I frown with new stiff eyebrows that are drying to the breath from Santa Coy’s lips.

  I say: art?

  Santa Coy sniffs and says: sure.

  He traces my eyebrows, puts his black lint coat on.

  He brings out beaten-up high-top 95s from a big cabinet of shiny fresh foot accessories, puts them on, wears a sport bag and we leave.

  A red-lit home on the south side, near the docks. Where the houses are close together with green island trees outside. Apartments: building themselves to block the paradise views.

  When we walk in, everything gets hotter. Everything is getting hotter, and people are cooling down.

  A girl in a red one-piece swimsuit paints the walls red with a wide brush. Later she’s painting a man in coat and tails all red. Sharp rock sculptures around, which people view up close and from metres away, gathering around the artwork in snarky little clumps. An open viewing ceremony.

  Around the room there are people naked and others in big coats. They are pink under the big coats and they carry paper bags of sexy bottles and glasses of champagne. Somebody’s filming this whole thing from the next floor up.

  Santa Coy’s got a thousand concubines. Some of them young women, some of them young men, some of them old women, a small portion of them old men. They flood to him and he stands in the centre like a dome, and he’s got this grin on his face. He pulls me in so that I’m standing right up next to him. An archipelago. I drink my wine in four gulps and feel nothing. Then I’m in the bathroom and it slowly breaks my brain in half. It’s a slow sawing, friction strategy.

  A man has turned up with a bunch of videotapes and puts one into a television in the upstairs section. There are people crowding around to see it and Santa Coy leans over to me. He whispers into my ear that this guy owns the house, that he’s known to do this every time people come over: brings out his old home videos and cries to them while everybody else stands around. And some people say that when he first started doing this he owned more furniture, but slowly got rid of it all so more people could stand inside and watch. That instead of furniture he installed all these rock sculptures, tall and thin and unable to break. That this is why it’s so hot in here: because this man spends all his electric billing on heating, so people will stay. I stare at the home video playing: it’s a video of a little boy watching television and his mother trying to get his attention. Then the scene changes to a family filming themselves singing happy birthday to some kind of grandmother. I ask Santa Coy why this man wants heaps of people watching his personal home videos. Santa Coy thinks for a bit. Somebody shrieks outside. The shrieking continues in spiky intervals. Santa Coy says: I guess it’s some kind of validation or something. That this man needs people to see that he exists, or existed, or some sad shit like that.

  I ask Santa Coy: isn’t that exactly what you do? Isn’t your shit the same sad shit?

  Santa Coy says, I never said it wasn’t.

  ECCLESIASTES

  Outside, a woman is crying into the palms of an old man and Santa Coy and I watch for a little bit. Then Santa Coy’s kissing with another boy in the corner. Then he goes to the sink and empties his cup of wine and fills it to the rim with water, sculls it. Then he flirts with a girl who has one long braid down to the floor. She’s a model, you can tell by the way she has her shoulders. They go away for a little while and the next time I see him he’s lying on the couch being painted by the girl in the red swimsuit. She slathers paint on him in violent turns.

  A middle-aged man standing next to me weeping with mascara running down his face. He’s standing with no one.

  I ask him, what is it?

  He yells out: meaningless. That we should live while we are dying. He yells this while crying through his mascara and eyeliner which is dribbling like black jungle juice, washing his cheeks. The corners of his mouth are pulled down hard. He moans: the light is pleasant, it is good for eyes to see the sun. That the sun is gold like honey, that the men on this earth are afraid of a high place and the dangers on the street. He starts to chant to a hidden drum beat and says that the dust will return to the earth as it was, that the spirit will return to God who gave it. And that the dust will return to the earth as it was and the spirit will return to God who gave it. He finishes and then people who are all standing around us all begin to clap. He nods, keeps his head down and his eyes closed for a second and then he walks straight forward and in between the people, rubbing his nose around with his palm. Somebody clutches onto him and whispers: thank you, thank you, thank you.

  In crossed legs in front of the home videos, watching the man cry about them, and Santa Coy coming to sit next to me, I ask if he prefers the men or the women. He says he doesn’t know, everyone’s so different to each other. That the only thing everybody has in common is that they’re something. He asks me which I prefer and I tell him that I’ve never preferred anybody except him. My cheeks are inflating and about to burst and Santa Coy starts to kiss me on my lips, thumb circling my jaw. A thick tongue like a fat fish against mine. And it’s a paradise kiss but I’m just imagining the saliva of the boy and the saliva of braids girl swirling in my mouth and I pull away. On the TV there’s a grandpa who slips while playing a dance game on Xbox. The man who owns the videos moans into his palm watching it. I pat him on the back while Santa Coy’s just staring at me.

  When I get home there’s a religious program on the television and Aunty Linda, half-watching, half-doing a sudoku, says to me that if you think about it, the Bible is just a book of the mortal world’s lapsing missteps. I say okay and I shrug and slam my bedroom door.

  No more weird thuds from upstairs. I hear her singing a bossa nova from the CD I threw out to be run over. How she knows the song I’m not sure and I yell from my bed for her to stop driving me crazy. She stops singing.

  SEVEN

  BETHLEHEM

  We’re entering this world where everybody wants to be a messiah.

  We all want to be somebody’s messiah, I tell Yuya. A dream come true. She looks at me. We’re sitting under the bathroom sink at school and it’s cold under the basin tin roof and water runs through the pipes. Above this ceiling the drama group is rehearsing Apocalypse Now: The Musical. This school is ten stories high.

  Yuya purses her face.

  She’s exasperated, tells me that there’s no need to get all philosophical about it. She tells me: me and Tre were just arguing over the last chicken-salted cheese puff. Really low-key situation.

  We usually talk about nothing much unless Yuya needs to be angry. For me, it’s a juicy treat hearing about the toil in her relationship. I know Tre is only fifteen. But Santa Coy is nineteen. I cross my arms. I chew the gum in my mouth. It’s a smooth tasteless tack, smacking between my saliva and teeth. I tell Yuya maybe she should just date someone more mature.

  On
the other side of the school fence I watch somebody spray-painting giant words in shiny black. When they’re done it says FREAK TO THE BEAT TONIGHT AT ZAGAME’S. I turn to Zig and Yuya and Tre sitting on the metal tables behind me. Zig and Yuya are looking through some old catalogues with Supreme in them. The man outside the school fence is spraying a motion logo.

  He sees me watching and shouts: hey sexy, you like this? This music tonight.

  I turn around and Zig has this kind of grin on his face. He repeats the word: sexy.