I visit the Military Museum, the Museum of Revolutionary History, the Ho Chi Minh Museum and Hoa Lo Prison. They are not like the museums we visited at school in Sydney. The displays are often gruesome and there is little explanatory text. What there is, I can barely understand. I overhear an English tourist complaining that the information in Hoa Lo is ‘commie propaganda’. Her friend says it isn’t, it happened, she read about it in college. I wish I had the confidence to join their conversation, to ask them to argue it out for me. I wish that my dad was around to help me figure out what is real and to explain why Thanh is wrong, why it still matters.
I go to sleep thinking about babies born with fused limbs and inward facing eyes; I have nightmares about napalm attacks and twice I dream of my father crushing an old woman’s skull under his heel. I imagine how Thanh would laugh if I told him this. How he would tell his cousin and they would laugh together at my horror. Oh, bad dreams! Poor girl, you.
Each morning I go to the breakfast room in the hopes that Thanh will be there, but it is always Mrs Nguyen. I work up the courage to ask her about the war and she pulls up a chair and talks for twenty minutes. She hardly mentions the Americans or Australians or even Ho Chi Minh. What she remembers most about those years, and many of the ones that came after, is hunger. She talks about hunger the way my mum and aunties used to talk about Vietnam. It is a disease that makes people meaner, crazier versions of themselves. It is behind the most unspeakable humiliations and cruelties. It is the worst punishment she can imagine and is the reason so many Vietnamese ghosts are so angry. They died hungry and will suffer the pain of that forever.
* * *
Dad calls and tells me Patty’s threatened him with divorce if he doesn’t come home immediately. She said she doesn’t care if he feels he’s becoming a better person because he’s being an awful husband and a bloody terrible father.
‘But I can’t do it, mate,’ he tells me. ‘I love her, but I need to stay here for now. I need to keep healing. You understand, right? I know you do. But Pat… She doesn’t get it.’
I feel like crushing the phone in my fist, like kicking holes in the wall. I lean out the window and take a deep breath of ash and incense and though my nostrils and throat sting I feel better.
I don’t know what wakes me at dawn or what paralyses me in the night. I don’t know why I need this hunger or why when I consider letting it go I am gripped with grief. I don’t know what makes my father scream at nothing and grind three wives and a child beneath his ever-moving heels. I don’t know and I don’t care. We can pay tribute to our ghosts without knowing their names. We can inhale the ash and then walk away.
‘Dad,’ I say, ‘I think you should come back to Hanoi. I think you should hang with me here for a few days and then we’ll go home together.’
His pause is long, but I know from the first second that it is false. He wants me to think he’s considering my words. ‘Nah,’ he says at last. ‘I can’t, mate, sorry. You go on home, hey? I’ll come see you when I’m done here.’
* * *
My last morning in Hanoi, I head out for a final walk. The air is wet and grey and thick. Its particles stick to my nostrils and inside my ears. My nose and eyes stream. I come to a French-style cafe and throw myself inside; the glass doors vibrate for long, mortifying seconds after I close them with too much force. I order a coffee and only when the waiter slinks away do I realise that the air in here is thicker still than that outside. Old men in berets and army coats crowd around most of the tables and they all seem to have a cigarette in each hand and a spare burning in the ashtray.
These men are old and every one of them seems to be suffering a wet, hacking cough. Their coats are, perhaps, original issue. Images from the museums flash through my mind and I feel the old panic rising in me. I turn from them and watch the street through the nicotine-tinted glass. I am leaving this afternoon and nothing is fixed. My dad and I are fear and panic and hunger. We are paralysed.
I watch the street and inhale damp smoke and, after a while, I begin to feel better. They’re all okay, aren’t they? These old men and the people out there. So much must be wrong because it always has been, not just here but everywhere, really, everywhere—but still people are mostly okay. They’re scaling fish and buying puffy jackets and sucking on cigarettes. They’re balancing on high heels and over-revving their motorbikes and linking arms and eating ice-cream. They’re going to school and work and having babies and painting walls. So what if panic grips their bellies in the night or ghosts scream them awake in the morning? Because here they are, we are, day after day. Alive and moving and okay.
Unspeakably Blue
Krissy Kneen
It was easier for him with the blanket on. The coarse wool was a substitute for fur. Jesse realised this but there was nothing to be done about it. Without the blanket the thing was an inanimate object, or worse, an inert version of the women he worked with, Jill next door, his sister. Without the blanket he would lose his erection, which was only vaguely hard as it was. He pushed the doll over, moulding it with the weight of his own naked body. The blanket was tied on with kitchen twine, but wherever it gaped he could see pale flesh-coloured rubber, the look and feel of skin, fake pores, a fine soft down of sparse hair. The manufacturer was particularly proud of the lifelike skin. It retained heat. When he held the thing for any length of time it became warm. This was supposed to make it seem more like the skin of a real girl. He was revolted by it. He tugged the blanket across and pressed his face into it, thinking about nothing but the sensation of wool on his skin.
His cock grew harder. He had lubricated the vagina. He did this in the way he prepared chicken, slightly revolted by the scent of death and the idea that this skin was plucked of its feathers. When he slipped his cock into the orifice it was as he would eat the cooked chicken, trying to forget the process of preparation, concentrating only on the juicy breast, the oily spill of spices.
It was hard work but he managed for a while not to focus on any one particular beast. He thought only of the idea of fur, the soft silken slip of it between his fingers. Wool was not fur, but there was still an earthy scent to it that might have been the scent of a dog. Dog. Too late. The idea of ‘dog’ ambushed him and suddenly the images were not just fur and breath and claws, but dog. Still, he thrust into what now was a dog for him and if he concentrated only on the image of a tail lifting and his penis slipping into the wet pink passage, then it could be any generic dog. His cock was so hard and large now it seemed to take up his entire sense of self. His resolve softened. He clutched at the creature’s woolly body. He bent over, forcing it into a dog-like crouch, thrusting his hips harder, the sleeve of rubber gripped him in a way he imagined a bitch might grip him with her powerful muscles.
He might of course be a disappointment to her. His own cock was at its maximum capacity. When he came he would easily be able to slip it out from her cunt. Jesse remembered crouching at the edge of the bitumen. The sun was too hot. He had gulped an orange juice too quickly and there was a sharp pain in his skull, thudding there, a dizzy feeling, a nausea. He thought for a moment he might throw up, but the other kids might see him and he was already a target for having a red backpack when every other boy had a blue one or a black one or at the very least a brown and green army print version. He was crouching half in the shadow of a line of bushes, half in the full heat of the afternoon. The dogs came into sharp relief so suddenly that Jesse felt as if he had been looking at a magic eye picture and his brain had finally adjusted to the visual conundrum. Once he had spotted them it was impossible not to see them. They were rutting. He knew the word for it and he knew also that there were other words for it but he couldn’t remember what they were. He was struggling to think of the dirty word that Peter Ryan had told him at recess. Rutting seemed too tame a word for what was happening. The male dog, strong and powerful, his thigh muscles twitching with effort, had mounted the female. It was a gorgeous dance, his front paws tapping on the shoulders
of his mate, his back legs hopping then stopping as he thrust with his hips once more.
Jesse’s sickness was cured in an instant, replaced by a sense of awe and a hot rush of blood to his loins. His little unfinished penis darting up in his shorts, an accusatory finger pointing out this illicit coupling from the secret of his lap. Two things happened and he remembers them now as his own hips pick up their rhythm, thrusting harder and faster into the body in front of him. The male dog scrambled forward, his hips thumping against the rump of the female, his tail trembling, a sound escaping his throat, half whine, half bark. Then in a sudden movement, the male leaped off his mate and stumbled a few steps to the side, dragging the bitch, still joined to him by the length of his cock. The little sideways shuffle of the both of them, impossible for him to understand what was happening, knowing only that the sight of it excited him.
Even now the memory urged him onward. In his imagination the dogs separated and he took over, knowing that his own penis would not be as thick and swollen as the dog’s. He had read about the knot in a dog’s penis. The knot that swells and makes it difficult for the bitch to pull away. He had Google searched, immediately deleting his search history. He trawled through these images now. Dogs mounting each other, the excitement in their staring eyes. He thrust into the doll and let himself remember these moments of passion but as his pace increased the dog beneath him transformed. It always came round to Blue.
Blue was a terrible name for her. She was an elegant beast and deserved a name more delicate. Blue was the right name for a working dog, a Heeler or a Shepherd. But Blue was a tall, doe-eyed Dane, silky black, long legged. She walked with a dainty shimmy of her hips but he had seen her run and there was a clumsiness to her loping gait that was endearing. Her hips were narrow, but when she lifted her tail to wag it, as she always did, furiously, when she caught sight of him on the street, he could see that her vagina was almost always swollen, red, damp. She seemed always in a state of excitement, at least whenever she saw him walk by. It would be a simple thing to lift the latch on the gate, to let her jump at him, so tall that her paws would clutch at his shoulders, her nails hard little points bruising his skin. She would turn and her thick rope of a tail would whip at his legs. Her vagina hidden, seen, hidden, seen. Her pleasure obscuring his pleasurable view in an excited rhythm. When he was inside her, that tail would tap out her joy against his hip like Morse code, urging him on.
It was too much for him. He wrapped his arms around her waist and thrust as deep as he was able. For a moment, but only this moment, it was Blue, his Blue. He grunted her name into the woollen blanket and this moment was a moment of bliss. He felt his cock throbbing, his sperm flooding into Blue. He had a sudden urge to bite down on her neck, a little nip of love. The last shuddering thrusts pushed them forward. Her breasts were pressed down onto the blanket. He knew her nipples would be resting there, an image that would be pleasurable for any other man, but for Jesse it was the moment that broke the spell, the ideas of her swollen rubber breasts, those pink aureoles, those always-erect nipples. He scrambled away from the Real Doll, and for once he was thankful that his own penis was not blessed with the thick excited knot that would link a male dog to his mate. He wanted to be well away from the thing. He was filled with a bitter regret, self-loathing. His cock was deflating but it was still slick with a coating of lube and his own sperm. He would have to wash the doll out. Again the idea of chicken, washing the limp carcass, letting the water fill its cloaca, pouring the juice and blood down the sink. Jesse hid his head in the palms of his hands. He didn’t want to cry. He pressed until the urge to do so passed. He tried to calm his breathing. Deep breaths. Deep forgiving breaths. He glanced at the Real Doll, the woollen blanket falling away and beneath this the pale pink skin, the wet vagina, anatomically correct and gaping, a snail trail of his own sperm leaking slowly from its red interior.
* * *
She timed her turn perfectly, the tray of cupcakes resting on the flat palm of her hand, the waft of that fresh baked smell, the scent of coffee. She was flirting with him, of course. It was impossible for him not to notice. She was wearing a top with a plunging neckline and she was usually so careful about covering her chest. She had put some thought into the choice of her bra.
She turned and he would see her flushed with the heat from the oven, the soft skin of her chest pillowy, mirroring the softly iced swells of the little cakes.
‘Cupcakes.’ She grinned at him.
He was tall, broad-shouldered but thin with it. His body tapered away as if he were being eroded from the ground up. Kevin was broad all over, a block of a man, muscular all the way to his calves. His feet pummelled the coffee table whenever he hefted them up onto it. Jesse had small feet, feet like a girl. This was the first thing she had noted about him. Somehow it made her feel tender towards him.
‘I thought you might be hungry.’
‘For your baking? Always.’
She could feel the heat of blood in her cheeks. A blush. She glanced down at the plate in her hands. Pink icing. She probably should have picked a more masculine colour.
His fingers on her cheek made her flinch. He rubbed the icing sugar between thumb and forefinger.
‘Angel kiss.’ he said and at that moment she would have thrown herself at his feet if he had asked her to.
She put the plate of cupcakes down on the coffee table. She wanted him to sit on the couch and not the chair and so she put the cakes closest to the couch, training him with food. He sat where she expected he would sit and she had to stop herself from patting him on the head and telling him that he had done well. Perhaps she just needed a pet, or, of course, a child. Kevin would be ecstatic if she had a child, a boy child, but in truth she couldn’t bear the thought of being bullied from above and below.
She brought the coffee pot and some cups and curled up on the couch beside him. Mostly they chatted at the kitchen bench, but today was different.
‘You okay today?’
He pointed to her thigh and she pulled her skirt down over the line of livid green bruises there.
‘Good.’ she handed him a cupcake on a plate, the one with blue cornflowers, the last of a set her mother had given her. ‘Thanks.’
‘No, don’t.’ he was about to elaborate but he bit his lip instead, looked down at the plate, the pink icing, the blue flowers. ‘Have you been baking all day?’
She shrugged, ‘Belinda Jeffery eat your heart out.’
He took a bite of his cake, pink icing on the tip of his nose which he wiped off with the back of his hand. When he had chewed and swallowed and wiped the crumbs from his lips he stared at her as if he had suddenly discovered that angel with the icing sugar fingers here on the couch beside him. ‘Oh. My. God.’
She was blushing again, but brazenly refused to avert her eyes.
‘I seriously never ever…’
Her kiss surprised them both. She felt him flinch, but she held fast to his shoulders. His lips were full and softer than she expected, softer than Kevin’s lips, like the lips of a girl. She tasted the sugar and vanilla, she licked at it. Sweet. He struggled for a moment and then she felt him relax. A soft surrendering of those thick shoulders. She held fast to them with her fingers. When he pulled away it was to catch breath. She did not feel any rejection.
‘Jill.’
Her name sounded so nice when he said it like that, softly and with the l sound trailing away.
Jill kissed her name off his lips. Vanilla. She parted them with her tongue and there were crumbs and it was true. They were good cakes, the best she had ever baked. He let her kiss him and, reluctantly it seemed, he touched her tongue with his.
There was music. She had put it on at five when he would only just be leaving work. It was on a loop and had been playing, unnoticed for an hour. It was the right music. Everything planned out to the tiniest detail.
He pulled away from her then and took a deep breath.
‘Jill, I’ve never, I’m, I just, you should
know…’
And then she did know. It was suddenly clear to her, his nervousness, his gentleness, his shyness. Of course she knew.
‘It’s ok,’ she told him. ‘Close your eyes.’
‘Kevin…’
‘Is away. Won’t be back till tomorrow.’
‘Oh God…’
She grinned up at him, leaning into his lap, his jeans already unbuttoned by her deft fingers. There was a scrap of icing on her hand and she licked it, extended her tongue just a fraction and heard him gasp again. The little flaccid curl of his penis, hiding like a frightened animal, trembling in the palm of her hand. She licked it. She didn’t like licking Kevin’s penis. Sometimes he held her head down there the way he liked it and she struggled through her terror of choking, lurching for each breath, her scalp aching where he held her hair in his fist. Down here in Jesse’s lap there was room to breathe. There was the sweet, doughy smell of his genitals, an unbaked bread smell. The shyness of his penis was a provocation. She lapped at it, wet little kisses. becoming more bold with each lick.
A tiny stirring, a little twitch in the flesh. She licked faster, curling her tongue around the penis. She wanted to call it a cock. She felt suddenly bold enough for sex words, whore words as her mother used to call them. His shyness brought out the predatory aspect of her personality. She licked the soft protrusion of flesh into her mouth and sucked on it like a calf might suck on its mother’s teat. A thickening: not much, but it was something. Underneath her flower-print frock her white cotton knickers were soaked through. She was wanton. She wanted him to feel how wet she was and took hold of his hand and placed his unresisting fingers under the cotton and elastic. She slipped them into herself and rocked her hips back and forth in time to her sucking.
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 3, Issue 2 Page 3