I go to the fridge and take out a Tiger beer. I stand in the middle of the kitchen and take a few long swigs then walk back across the room, pick up the phone and dial her number in one fluid sequence. My heart feels like it’s going to pop out of my chest. I still hold out some hope she won’t answer.
On the fourth ring: ‘Hello.’
‘Hi!’ I say, breathlessly. ‘It’s me.’
‘Ella! Are you all right? I’ve been so worried!’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m sorry I didn’t call … I’ve been busy and …’
‘I’ve been worried.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. What’s been happening? What have you been up to?’ I’m perched on the arm of the chair, as if for a brief, friendly chat.
‘I went to a film last night with Janet. The sewer pipe burst. I was worried about you.’ I think I hear her take a drink. ‘How is your life there anyway?’ She sounds wounded.
‘Good. Everything’s fine. Just, you know, teaching. I might stay another six months, I’m not sure. I want to get Vietnamese lessons and learn to ride a motorbike.’ Really?
‘I see.’
I can’t do it, I think, desperately. It’s too hard to say the words. ‘How’s work?’ I ask.
‘Much the same. Nothing much changes here.’
I nod in agreement, though she can’t see me. ‘Well, I really just wanted to call and say hi.’
‘Thank you. You know when you don’t return my calls I think something has happened to you. You’re so far away.’
I look down at Suze’s note. ‘How’s Nan?’ I buy some more time.
‘She gets by. Her health is fine but it’s not much of a life.’ Her delivery is just a little theatrical; maybe she’s further on in her afternoon than I realised.
‘Mum … there was something else I wanted to talk to you about.’ I’m still ready to resort to my tax return – anything – but she doesn’t respond. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes. I’m here.’ I hear her swallow.
We’re both silent for a while and something in me starts to slowly turn. ‘It’s been hard here sometimes,’ I say. ‘I’ve been lonely.’
‘That breaks my heart,’ she says, ‘to hear you say that.’
‘I’m not saying it to make you sad. I just wanted to talk to you.’
‘Why don’t you come home if you’re lonely? Why on earth do you stay?’
‘Being here isn’t the problem.’
‘Is it that Tim?’
‘No, it’s not that Tim, it’s …’ I light another cigarette with trembling hands. ‘I’ve been wondering about my father again. I just, I don’t know, maybe it’s being here. Stuff has come up and …’ She is silent. I can’t even hear her breathe. ‘I guess I wanted to talk about it with you.’
‘Can’t this wait until you come back?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because neither of us has mentioned him in almost eight years.’
Silence. Then: ‘What is it you want to talk about?’
‘I just – I don’t know … I just want to know what happened —’
‘This is the wrong way to have this conversation,’ she cuts in.
‘Then when are we going to have it?’
‘When we’re face to face.’
‘Maybe this is easier,’ I say. ‘Maybe I needed to be here so I could talk to you about this.’
‘I thought you were at peace.’
‘Mum, you always think I’m at peace.’
I hear her take another drink, I gulp my beer; her at her end and me at mine, a thousand miles between us. Where are you now, Jack Lord, on your big surfboard?
‘There are things I thought best to keep from you when you were young,’ she says slowly, ‘because I wanted to protect you.’
‘Okay, but now I’m grown up. And I need to know what happened – I need to know.’
‘Not a day goes by, darling, when I don’t wish you’d just come home. I can hardly believe you’re in that terrible place.’
‘I didn’t come here to punish you,’ I say, impatiently, but even as I say it, I wonder if that’s true.
‘Your father was very hurt in that war, Ella – his spirit. Something inside him was damaged. He came home a different man. There are things I’ll tell you one day – but not like this.’
I feel the conversation slipping away. ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why did he leave us? Why didn’t he ever call?’ My voice is strangled and small, a little girl’s voice.
‘Ella, he didn’t want to leave you. Your father loved you. The only time I saw a glimpse of the old Pete was when he was with you. But I had to ask him to go. I had no choice.’
‘You asked him to go?’
‘Oh, Ella, it was impossible. He was destroying himself. He told me I didn’t understand what he’d been through. He hid in the laundry behind the washing machine. He cried all night. There was an incident with a mine. He had to nurse one of his friends as he died. He couldn’t get over it. He refused my help. The government abandoned them, Ella. Everyone abandoned them. But you were a child, and I had to protect you.’
‘Then what happened? He just disappeared? What about the job up north?’ I drink more beer, and my voice is curiously normal, but I’m staring at a blank wall and the world is tipping wildly from side to side.
I hear her whimper. I wait. ‘You were too young to understand. I had to tell you something. He went to live with his parents. Every month or so he called and he’d want to see you but it wasn’t the right thing. You have to trust me.’
‘He called? He wanted to see me? When was the last time you heard from him?’
‘I haven’t heard anything in twelve years. I have no idea where he is any more. He was living in Queensland for a while but he came back. I don’t know where he is … You know, when you were small he’d go to your school and sit outside and watch you in the playground. But you have to understand, he wasn’t capable of being a father.’
‘Could you hold on a second?’ I hold the phone away as I crumple.
Maybe sometimes, when I thought I saw him watching me, maybe he was really there. Maybe I didn’t just imagine it all.
I come back to the phone. ‘Do you know I believed for all these years that he just walked out and never looked back? You never told me he called! Why? You told me he broke your heart!’
She starts to cry. ‘He did, he did break my heart. He used to look at people and see them dead, in the supermarket, on the street, he saw the life pouring out of them, wherever he went. He felt guilty for going there and then guilty for being alive. He didn’t want to be alive. I didn’t want you to know that. I tried very hard to do the right thing. I had to protect you.’
You have never protected me! I think, feverishly. I have spent my life protecting you. But suddenly it’s like I’m looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope – she is small and faraway, shrunken, and I start to cry too.
‘I never meant to hurt you,’ she weeps. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know, Mum. I’m sorry too.’
For an eternity we sit and cry into the phone.
My father didn’t leave me.
‘Mum, if I wanted to try to find him, would you help?’
‘I don’t know what you would find, baby. But if it’s what you want to do … I did love him, you know. That was always true.’
TWENTY-FOUR
In the days after the call I drift about like a shipwreck survivor, dazed and parched, wide-eyed. I feel vulnerable and strange, yet often I find I am smiling. I was not abandoned! I am just like you, and you, and you. My father loved me too.
Suze and I go for a swim and afterwards find a sinh to stand. We sit on the pavement and drink our fresh watermelon juice out of plastic bags. I tell her everything about the conversation, how she was right, my father did kind of go MIA. I tell her about Operation Hammersley and the ‘jumping jack’ mines – they were mostly Australian mines lifted and r
epositioned by the VC. Apparently half of all Australian casualties between 1968 and 1970 were from their very own mines; the Eighth Battalion was one of the hardest hit.
Suze offers – if I want to – to organise a permit via her boss for me to visit the old site of Nui Dat. She doubts we could get into the Long Hais but at least I could see the barracks. Six months ago I would have recoiled but now I agree. I ask her if she’ll come. She says she’ll try to set it up for the coming weekend.
I make it to all my classes and catch up with Hugh for a coffee but I also spend many hours alone, wandering aimlessly, as I did in those early lost months, through the streets I have grown to love. My father seems to have miraculously gained substance, like one of those kits where you just add water to grow-your-own crystal palace overnight. He has come alive to me again. I take out my favourite old memories and they seem to have lost their bitter edge. And I see him – really see him – sitting outside my primary school on the wooden bench under the elm tree, watching me perform sporting miracles and other amazing feats of childhood. He is softly smiling. But also I picture him cowering in the laundry. It was horrible, that laundry, small and dark and mouldy, with no windows. I imagine him crying in his bed and I remember him crying too, and how it would scare me. I walk the streets of Saigon and I remember my father.
By the end of the week I have made two decisions. I will write to my father’s parents, the Mortons, and ask if they know where he is. Mum said she would hunt down their address. She remembered that they live in Boronia. I picture some quiet, tree-lined street, a solid red-brick house. Apparently they stopped speaking to Mum when she asked my father to leave and after a couple of awkward visits they gave up on me too. I don’t even remember them – there was just Nan and Pop. I will write even though I have no idea what will happen next: I could find out he is dead. More than half the number again of Aussies killed in action in Vietnam have suicided since their return. Or he might tell me to piss off. Or I might not find him at all. Or I might find I hate him, or that he has a whole new family with no room in it for me. Also, there is the possibility, just the slimmest, that I will find him and we will make friends, and that some long way down the track, in some city or other, on a warm day or cold, he could finally come wandering back, through some doorway, or maybe across a park. And perhaps, and it could take years, there might even be an embrace: the feel of him, the smell, the warmth.
I take my second decision to Miss Jenny after class on Friday afternoon. I ask if she can extend my visa for another six months and if I could take the extra classes she mentioned. She flashes me her demonic smile, shakes my hand, vigorously, and says she will organise the visa immediately. She can increase my workload in a month.
I have no interest in social work. I think I want to be a teacher.
On Saturday night I am invited to Hien’s for dinner. It feels auspicious somehow and I spend an hour and a half wandering around Ben Thanh market choosing gifts. I end up buying her a bottle of perfumed lotion and sweets and plastic toys for the kids then I ride to Ham Nghi to buy Chivas Regal for Chau. In the bottle shop – a stall at the side of the road – I notice Vietnamese rum for US$1. I buy one of those too, stuff everything into my day pack then get back on my bike, cycle hard.
By the time I reach Ariel’s street my heart is pounding. I stop outside the gates to his compound and peer awkwardly through the hand-hole. I can’t see his Vespa so I let myself in, in broad daylight; ready, at any point, to turn and ride away.
There is no one around. The little dog scampers around my legs; I pat it. I stand for a minute or two on Ariel’s doorstep then put the rum down and retreat.
Hien escorts me to her home in Phu Nhuan district Saigon-style – her on her Honda and me on my bicycle, gripping her shoulder. It’s a twenty-minute ride along busy main roads until we turn off abruptly into a tiny gap between two shops. We enter a labyrinth of crisscrossing lanes, too narrow for cars, more like open-air corridors. It’s like discovering a whole other world. There are corner stores, children playing hopscotch, nhay lo co, a tiny market in a house block–sized square, cooking smells drifting out from homes with doors wide open. It’s not like anywhere else I’ve been in Saigon. I love it.
Hien’s is the middle level of a dangerously slender, apricot, three-storey building – a ‘tube’ house; other families live above and below. We go up an external staircase and a couple of neighbours poke their heads out to stare. Chau is waiting for us at the door; he ushers us inside. I give them my small gifts and Chau flashes his custard-yellow smile. He remembers I like beer and it is ready on a tray with a glass.
I take a seat in the tiny living room on the edge of a double bed that has a patterned polyester sheet thrown over it. There are two silk paintings on the wall with the plastic covering still on, maybe to protect them from dust. A table is piled high with books and papers, an electric fan, a tin of Ovaltine, a gaudy statue of Buddha. No sign yet of the children.
Hien announces she has to prepare dinner; Chau sits across from me on a hard-backed chair and smiles nervously. ‘I do not speak English very well.’
‘I don’t speak Vietnamese very well.’
We both smile and proceed to speak a mixture of both. He tells me about his work as manager of a construction company. There is much confusion. We laugh a lot.
Finally Hien reappears in the doorway with Mai and Long. Chau says something in a gruff tone and they walk over and stand before me like little soldiers on parade. I smile, trying to appear harmless. Their father verbally prods them again and they say ‘hello’ and ‘how are you’ in their best English.
‘They are very happy to meet you,’ Chau says, beaming. ‘And now – Long will play for you.’
It’s only then I notice the electric keyboard on a bench in the corner, concealed by more books, a rain poncho, and a large, flowery urn. Chau clears everything off and Long reluctantly approaches. He is just the right height, at standing, for his elbows to be level with the keys. He begins to play something corny I recognise but can’t name, not ‘Greensleeves’ but something similar. He plays well, his small fingers dancing over the keys as if disconnected from his frowning face. We’re all watching and listening so intently it’s almost unbearable, but then when the tune ends, and we all applaud, he smiles, a shy, pleased smile.
Mai and Long scurry out of the room and I chat a bit more with Chau, then Hien serves up a feast she must have started preparing last night. It’s all on the table when we’re summoned to the wee alcove by the kitchen: homemade cha gio, steamed rice, sour soup with tomatoes and prawns and coriander, bean sprouts and pork, spicy fried whole fish.
We sit down and as we’re eating the children relax and talk – mainly to their parents but it’s enough that they will speak in front of me. I eat three bowls of rice and Chau and I drink beer. It’s warm and bright and noisy – a proper family.
When Hien and I have cleared the dishes, the children start their homework at the table, but then there is an unexpected treat. Chau approaches the keyboard and, it turns out, he is a master! He plays Chopin on the electric keyboard and we all sit mesmerised. I can see how Hien fell in love. When he is finished, we clap and cheer; I demand an encore. He plays some more then insists on opening the whisky and we toast, chuc suc khoe, to your health and happiness. Soon I am promising to come back next week to start tutoring Long and Mai in English. Hien proposes a weekly lesson followed by dinner and Chau assures me I am welcome in their house ‘every time’. We shake hands on it. I feel so lucky to be included, so privileged to be here.
After several farewells, Chau escorts me to the main road and I start the long ride back to the city centre, tired and elated. It’s not late but the streets are dark and peaceful. At one point I get disorientated and have to ask directions from a xich lo driver who is sitting in his vehicle at the side of the road, eating a bowl of pho. I end up chatting with him for twenty minutes talking pidgin Vietnamese. Everything that comes out of my mouth makes him chuckle.
Suze knocks at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning. I am all ready: day pack zipped, teeth brushed, watching Bones pursue a tiny moth across the ceiling. We walk down the five flights of stairs and out to a shiny silver car with tinted windows. Apparently Suze’s boss insisted we take a driver and a guide – Nui Dat is a politically sensitive site and Suze will be expected to write a nice piece on the Australian soldier’s daughter, here to redeem the sins of her father. In some ways, maybe it’s not so far from the truth.
I am nervous and excited on the two-hour drive, as if I were off to a final exam with freedom in shimmering view on the other side. Really, I don’t know how to feel. Hien gave me a bag of coffee-flavoured sweets for the journey so we eat these and play word games and chat with the guide, Phuong. She is from Hanoi and her father was NVA. She was married last year and her husband exports lacquerware. She hopes to have one son and one daughter.
I rifle a bit through the blue folder, reading up on the Australian base of operations where my father lived for twelve life-changing months: Nui Dat – small hill.
Rice paddies fly by; small villages and larger towns; water buffalo, stilted huts, school children, loaded buses and trucks. A roadside stop comprising a tea stand and a hundred hammocks swinging beneath a striped canvas canopy. The odd billboard advertising new Western treats.
We get into ‘Vungers’ just after nine. Phuong announces we will stop here for breakfast and she has just the place – a restaurant beside the sea where the owner welcomes her like an older brother and brings out a thermos of tea and four bowls of steaming chao ca, rice and fish soup. It is delicious.
We get back in the car. This is it. We are off to the ’Dat.
I mutter to Suze in the back seat. ‘It’s a lovely day. The sun is shining. I can’t take it seriously.’
She smiles. ‘You don’t have to, honey. You’re just taking a look.’
We go through the villages of Ba Ria and Dat Do. Phuong points out a cashew plantation and a kindergarten. But as we draw closer to our destination she embarks on what is clearly a well-rehearsed monologue. She talks about the Long Phuoc tunnels and the amazing bravery and ingenuity of the VC tunnel rats. She points out the Long Hai mountains: the base of Battalion D445 and the heart of the ‘liberators’ operations in what was once Phuoc Tuy province, now Ba Ria-Vung Tau province. I squint at the infamous Long Hais where the ‘liberators’ – or the ‘enemy’ – hid out in caves but all I see is a benign brown ripple of mountains in the distance, clouds perched gently on top. We pass Horseshoe Hill, a limestone formation used by the Aussies during ops as a fire support base. And then we are entering the rubber plantation and – now – passing through the ‘pearly gates’ of Nui Dat, still standing on either side of the road like old brick sentinels.
The Rainy Season Page 24