She looks at me appraisingly. ‘Em dep lam! Very young, very beautiful. Where you from?’
‘Australia.’
She nods. ‘Many Australia people come here.’
‘Yes.’ I nod too, thinking instantly of the early scene on the plane in The Odd Angry Shot, where John Jarratt says to Graham Kennedy, beer in hand, This is the way to go to war, hey, Harry!
We stand there together until the bloated fish are done with the bread.
I walk haltingly to the end of Pham Ngu Lao and turn left into Nguyen Trai. Now that I’ve missed the bus, I have no destination, no place to be. A young woman follows me for a while trying to sell me a conical hat. I tell her, no thank you. She says it will protect my white skin, she strokes my cheek. I try not to look at her imploring eyes. She thrusts the hat onto my head so I pay her and keep walking.
I pass a stall selling potted cumquat trees, and another row of stalls selling firecrackers, paper money and porcelain dogs. It will be Tet, Vietnamese New Year, in a week. According to the itinerary, we’re to spend it on the beach in Nha Trang, watching the tide come in. Tim even knew we’d be welcoming in the Year of the Dog and that the astrological dog is known for his loyalty, honesty and sense of fairness. He notes these things on the itinerary: loyalty, honesty, fairness.
As I get further from the backpacker strip, fewer people approach. Two teenage boys pass holding hands. A woman drives her scooter up onto the footpath. She’s wearing clear goggles, a blue pillbox hat with a net over her face and elbow-length pink gloves. She takes her shopping basket from the back of the scooter and two hens poke their squawking heads out.
Then I hear a strange wailing. It sounds like someone is in terrible pain, is crying for help. I speed up, moving sideways through a clutch of schoolgirls, until I find myself trailing an old man who is wheeling a bicycle weighted down with bulging sacks. Everyone else on the street seems oblivious to the tortured sounds he is making.
I follow him for two blocks. Sometimes he pauses and the wailing gets louder. I get out my camera and take a pointless shot of his back. Then a girl sticks her head out of a shop and beckons to him. He stops, the wailing stops, and something is exchanged before he starts slowly off again.
I catch up. I desperately want to know what is in the sacks. I am right alongside, only a metre or so between us, when he swivels his head and fixes me with watery black eyes. His face is so old it looks like it has imploded around the hole that is his crying mouth. And then he is wailing right at me, right into me. I see reproach in his eyes. Hatred.
I stop walking. My heart is beating fast.
I turn and head back to Pham Ngu Lao.
Chanh frowns when I walk in to the Smiling Café. ‘We wait long time for Miss Ella.’
I wince. ‘I’m so sorry, Chanh. I didn’t wake up.’
He tuts, shakes his head.
‘Hey!’ It’s Mick with the dreadlocks. He’s sitting at a table full of people. ‘Come and join us.’
I feel a flood of relief. I sit down next to him. They’re all drinking beer, though it must still be late morning, and there are plates of half-eaten fried noodles and spring rolls in the middle of the table.
Mick offers me the bottle.
‘No, thanks, I should eat.’
The girl to my left says, in what I think is a German accent, ‘You can eat while you drink.’
I smile. ‘That’s true.’
Mick pours me a beer.
‘We’re toasting the end of the embargo,’ he says. ‘History in the fucking making! I can’t believe we were here for it. No one could have planned that.’ He raises his glass to the table. ‘To the lifting of the embargo,’ he intones. ‘To a free and prosperous Vietnam!’
We all clink. The beer is lukewarm but tastes surprisingly good. The German girl pushes the spring rolls over and I eat a few, just to have something in my stomach.
An English couple at the table have just arrived in Ho Chi Minh City after cycling down Highway One from Hanoi. They glisten with good health. They tell us about seeing Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body, how they had to suppress their giggles as they passed the glass casket flanked by sombre guards. We listen to their advice. Names of cafés and pagodas are scrawled onto napkins and Lonely Planets. More beer arrives, and why not?, and I start to feel pleasantly dazed; relaxed, for the first time since I arrived. I hear my voice, disembodied, joining in the conversation. We are all laughing, careless and half drunk. I glance out at the street and it looks just like a backdrop, a film set, not menacing at all.
I notice Allan walk in. He’s taller than I thought he was. He comes past the table and our eyes meet. ‘I didn’t make it to Cu Chi,’ I offer. I don’t know why.
He pauses. ‘So I guess you won’t get to crawl through the very same dirt tunnels where men, women and children lived and died like animals.’ He grins broadly and heads to a corner table.
‘Whoa,’ says Mick. ‘Who the fuck was he?’
I shrug and turn back to the table but the good feeling has gone. Just like that.
I drink more beer. The English guy recounts a story about a pig and a monk and a crowded bus. The German girl and her friend take off. Mick and Marcus argue about how they’ll get to the Mekong Delta, local bus or motorbike. I go to the toilet. I notice I am unsteady on my feet. The concrete around the hole in the floor is wet and reeks of piss. I almost unbalance squatting down over it and have to hold the walls to right myself.
When I come back out Mick refills my glass. I drink. The British couple leave on their bicycles. I notice a girl at the next table drinking juice from a big green coconut. I suggest fresh coconut juice would go well with rum so we order three coconuts and three glasses of Vietnamese rum. I desperately want the good feeling back. We pour the rum into the coconuts and drink through white, wax-paper straws. Then we order another round, with double rum. And then another.
Things start to unravel, to become disconnected. Marcus is talking about the War Crimes Exhibition and a foetus in a jar of formaldehyde. Mick has his arm around me. I look around for Allan, the GI; Allan, man of war. He is gone. I am smoking cigarettes, for the first time in five years. They taste bloody fantastic. Then Chanh is sitting down. He’s talking about his lover, Alec, who promised to take him to Paris then left without saying goodbye. I am holding his hand. It’s late afternoon. Someone else is at the table – a Vietnamese guy with a briefcase – an older man. Mick and Marcus have disappeared. I am talking to the man with the briefcase about the MIAs, asking if he thinks there could be any still alive. Could there? Do you think? There is a bowl of soup in front of me. The man is telling me to eat. I am calling for more rum.
For three days after Tim left I couldn’t move. I ate tuna from a tin and Vegemite sandwiches. I lay sprawled on the couch in a state of near-paralysis but with a constantly racing heart, waiting and waiting to hear his van, to hear the key in the lock, his flat-footed thump down the corridor; to hear him coming back to me.
Then Mum turned up. She arrived with a watermelon in the late afternoon of another hot sticky day. Apparently he’d rung her and told her what had happened, said he was worried about me. We stood in the middle of the living room with the blinds drawn. Tears were streaming down my face, like I was turning to water.
Why don’t you come home for a while? Mum said. You could have the spare room – or the back shed, if you want more privacy.
She put the watermelon down on the couch and pulled me to her, pressed my face against her breast. The chemical vapours of last night’s riesling seeped from her skin, her mouth, her armpits; and, as I held my breath, all the years just concertinaed away.
There I was, eight years old again, trapped in that sludgy grey house with rain pouring down outside, Janis Joplin on the stereo and the aching, terrible loneliness within. There, the trail of cigarette ash leading up the corridor to her bedroom where she would disappear, door closed firmly behind her. After the record spun out, I could hear every wee sound in that house, every cr
eak and whistle and hum, sometimes her muffled weeping. I didn’t have words then for the bottomless, eerie feeling I had when she moved out of reach like that and I was all alone, like the whole world was swinging wildly loose on its axis. I would lie curled up in a ball in front of the heater watching TV or huddle in my room to read and draw. I would try to suspend myself in time, like a moth in its cocoon, until she came back.
Sometimes she was gone from me for days, even weeks, and I would have to take care of us both. After, she would always say she loved me and she was sorry for being sad. I knew she meant it; I know she always did. Sometimes she could look me right in the eye and I would feel connected – to her, to myself, to the possibility of happiness. But I thought all mothers drank wine from a squat jam jar and wished their lives had turned out differently.
I pulled back from her stale embrace and wiped my eyes. I told her I was leaving in a week and I had to get traveller’s cheques, a new camera. You can’t still go! she said. It would be madness! And then, Why are you doing this? Why?
I picked up the watermelon, held it in front of me like a shield. It’s only three weeks, I told her. It’ll be fine.
Knocking; the room filled with morning light. I roll onto my back. My head is pounding and I’m scared that if I move I’ll be sick. I don’t remember getting back here but the mosquito net is down around me and the fan is spinning.
The knocking continues, gentle but persistent. A few taps then a rest then another few taps.
I pull myself up and out of the net, which is yellowing and has several gaping holes. An enormous black cockroach scuttles across the floor. I am still in yesterday’s clothes – jeans and a Clash T-shirt I’ve had since I was fifteen. I scratch the bites on my arms and drink from a half-full bottle of tepid water before opening the door.
‘Ella … I’m sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’
It takes me a few long seconds to place him: the guy with the briefcase, from the café. I step back. What is he doing here? I’d thought he was Vietnamese but now that I’m sober I see his eyes are a startling green against his olive skin and short black hair, and his accent is American. Then I have a flash of him helping me up the stairs. Shit! He must have brought me back here – brought me back because I couldn’t make it on my own.
‘I’m fine,’ I say at last. I grimace. ‘Thanks for checking up on me.’
‘Good. I just wanted to make sure.’ He turns to go, then stops and looks back. ‘So you’re sure you’re okay?’
I take a quivery breath. ‘Well, obviously not in great shape.’
He pauses. ‘Would you like to join me for breakfast?’
‘I don’t think I could eat.’
He nods, hesitates again. His face is worried and kind. ‘How about lunch tomorrow?’
‘Yeah. Okay. That’d be nice.’
‘I’ll come by at midday.’ He turns to go again.
‘Wait,’ I say, blushing. ‘I’m really sorry – I’ve forgotten your name.’
‘Hugh.’
‘Right. Thanks, Hugh!’
We both laugh a little shrilly then he waves and heads off down the stairs. I undress and go back to bed.
At midday I venture down to the noodle soup stand outside the hotel. I sit down tentatively on one of the tiny stools and when the woman with the ladle nods at me I nod back. It works. She brings me a bowl of steaming broth with rice noodles and lumps of yellow, goose-pimpled chicken, a saucer of herbs, lime and fresh chilli. There is an array of sauces in a basket on the table.
I haven’t even reached for a spoon before one of the men at a neighbouring table approaches, greeting me in stilted English. He proceeds to tear herbs into my soup, squeeze lime and brown sauce. Then he slips a business card from his wallet: Mr Thanh Ngoc, Import-Export. When he gets back to his table, he and his friends all look over and smile encouragingly, so I make a show of trying the soup and nodding appreciatively. I get through half the salty, pungent broth and noodles; I don’t even try the chicken.
I take out the itinerary. Day 3: War Crimes Exhibition. Hotel Caravelle (where Australian Embassy housed during war). After paying the woman 500 dong for the soup I head off on foot. It takes thirty minutes of hot, hard walking. It feels like a penance for the rum. But even as I stop outside the museum, I know that I am not going in. I think I have known all along.
Sweat drips down my face. I dab at it with my T-shirt.
There’s a queue of tourists at the entrance and an empty bus parked on the other side of the street. The group sounds Dutch, voices like square shortbread. I stand in the shade of a tree and watch them lining up, cameras swinging from their necks. I think of Allan’s sneering face. I think of Pop once telling me after a few glasses of port that American soldiers are noisy and slow, not suited to jungle warfare, not like our diggers. I think of the old lady from our milkbar who cautioned me, only last week, Be careful, love. Isn’t there a war on there? And I think of Tim saying, in the months leading up to the trip, It’ll be good for you to see it, El. Make it real. Together, he assured me, we were going to bring it to life, away from the page and the screen, this country my father disappeared into for the first year of my life, this black hole that my mother always stepped so carefully around but which kept drawing me furtively back.
But now Tim isn’t here and I can’t go in there alone to study the atrocities America and her allies inflicted upon this land and these people. What purpose would it serve? Tim wanted to make it real but maybe it is too real – maybe that is the problem.
When the last of the group has gone in, I turn and start the searing walk back to the hotel, pausing to buy a pack of folk art postcards from one girl and a Tiger Beer key ring from another. I pass billboards for National Panasonic, Toshiba and Seiko, juxtaposed against grainy Communist murals in khaki, yellow and red.
On the footpath at the bottom of my street is a trolley with fruit piled up like a picture behind polished glass. The old man motions to an electric blender. I nod and he makes a mixed juice with watermelon, pineapple, strawberries and mango. It comes in a small, clear plastic bag, a straw attached with a rubber band. I pay him and gulp it straight down.
Hien has her back to the door watching television when I come in; I hadn’t noticed the small set on a bracket behind her desk. I sit down on the brown couch and stare, uncomprehending, at the screen. It looks like Vietnamese current affairs.
As she watches, Hien peels and dissects something similar to a grapefruit but with a layer of pith as thick as my little finger, which she strips from each segment before dipping the fruit into a saucer of salt and dried chilli.
I sit there for over an hour and apart from sharing her fruit, which is sweet and dry and hard to swallow, Hien ignores me. It is strangely comforting. Eventually I go up to my room where I shower again and collapse under the rattling fan in falling light.
I gaze at the photos of my father on the bedside table: the close-up black and white shot of him at nineteen, fresh out of his chef’s apprenticeship, scowling, with his long black hair, pale skin and drop-dead, bullet-hole eyes. And the second one, the post-war family portrait that used to sit on the mantelpiece in the Brunswick living room. In this one, Mum is to the left; she is smiling at the camera, beautiful and melancholy, her long mousy brown hair draped ’70s-style around her small face. My father is facing her, hair cropped army-short now. He is holding a can of Melbourne Bitter. I am the fat toddler planted firmly on the grass between them, like a toadstool. When I left home I took the photo with me. Mum never commented but for months afterwards I could still see the shape of it in the dust on her mantelpiece. Always an absence, my father – a shadow, an outline, an echo.
I remember the first time I showed Tim these photos. We’d been together six months. We’d come home from Sunday dinner at his parents and were lying in bed in the dark. His arms were around me and everything felt warm and full and safe, and like this feeling could last forever. I started to whisper to him about
my father, right into his ear, and once I had started, and it was okay, I couldn’t stop. I talked on and on, words spewing out of me. He kissed and stroked me. I was almost dizzy with relief. I remember he went to the kitchen and made us cups of tea – it must have been one or two in the morning – and, by lamplight, I got the drawstring bag out from under the bed.
I showed him the remnants I had collected: the toothbrush, the wooden spoon, as well as the very first inventory I compiled of facts about my father; a paltry list on a single lined page from an exercise book, written in my earnest ten-year-old hand.
My dad has ebony hair.
My dad’s birthday is in July the same as me but his date is the 4th whilst mine is the 22nd.
My dad likes beer and his favourite is Melbourne Biter wich is made in Carlton by United Breweries. (This is actually quite near to our house.)
His hole name is Peter Francis Morton. (This should go first.)
He is a chef and his specialty is steak.
Me and my dad look alike. (Mum says.)
I remember Tim, in the lamp light, half smiling. He said something like, There isn’t much, is there, and I cried, because he seemed to understand. I remember him reaching for me; whispering, hoarsely, that he would never ever leave.
I dream I’m at Mum’s, in the brick veneer in Brunswick where I grew up, packing for the trip. I’m kneeling on the floor and she’s somewhere behind me. She’s drunk and she’s telling me to hurry but I can’t fit everything into this big plastic bag. I have to pull it all out and start again. A clock is ticking loudly, absurdly, like the one in Nan and Pop’s vestibule. I take out a toothbrush, and a pair of big black boots. Then, from the bottom of the pack, a single business card. It has someone’s name on it that I don’t recognise and I’m wondering how it got there when I turn it over and see the words Daddy Extraordinaire! printed in swirling, cursive script. It sends shockwaves through me. Is he back? My father? In the house?
FOUR
The Rainy Season Page 3