DAUGHTER—
‘I can’t believe you’d want to move out of home to live in this creepy ghost house.’ Her mother had packed a plastic washtub with cleaning supplies and was wiping down every surface with a cloth and a bottle of detergent.
It was four years before the China trip, and she was twenty-three. Her parents were helping her move into her new flat, but there was not much to move. She had packed only a few boxes with some clothes and some books so they wouldn’t feel anxious that she was gone. She brought along with her the leftover incense that was burned at her grandmother’s funeral in case the flat still smelt of new paint. She had also dragged along her easel and sewing machine. It would seem to them like a camp, temporary accommodation. Workers’ barracks.
Her new flat was in Janet Clarke Hall, a residential college of the University of Melbourne. At the interview she had worn her mother’s old black cardigan with the frayed sleeves, and a brown skirt that fell far below her knees. She needed to look older because she didn’t want the principal to see her as someone applying to be a residential tutor just for the parties and something to write on her resume. She wanted the job so badly that she was prepared to spend her mid-twenties in dowdiness if it meant she could have a place of her own.
She was offered the job straight after the interview. When the vice-principal showed her the apartment, it was being painted by two men in beige overalls. Newspapers covered the floor, and there were no blinds on the windows. Sunlight shone in like a beacon, to the real fireplace in the corner. ‘This would be your flat,’ said the vice-principal. It was the most beautiful place she had ever seen in her life, and it was enough to turn her white-knuckled with want.
Although she’d never lived in a college before, she cajoled her father with a repertoire of reassurances. She told him that the security was good. It was only a twenty-minute drive from home. She had been going to the university behind the college for six years. She was used to allaying her parents’ fears, and knew that any hint of faltering uncertainty would elicit a clear no.
It wasn’t the sharing. She didn’t mind sharing her room or her bed with her little sister. In fact, she liked the warmth of another person next to her at night. She just wanted to do things, normal things that normal people approaching their mid-twenties did, without feeling guilty all the time.
That whole week before her father said yes or no to her moving out of home, she felt as though she had insects teeming inside, so that she might soar off at any given second. She couldn’t sit still or sleep.
*
This was the first time her parents had seen the place. Inside the college, they went all quiet. Then: ‘Wah! Look at all these rooms, they are completely empty,’ exclaimed her mother as they walked down the hallway.
‘The students don’t arrive until a few weeks before university begins,’ she said quickly.
‘Wah! It looks so unsafe. Why don’t you come home tonight? Wait until all the students arrive before you move in,’ suggested her father.
She thought the place was perfect in its quality of solitude.
Yet when she unlocked the door to her flat, she could see the panic rise in their faces. Since her last visit, the rooms had been filled with furniture. ‘Don’t worry, the place will look better once I cover the table with a tablecloth,’ she said. She knew that this was standard-issue university furniture: the dark-brown wooden table with the metal legs, the foamy chair with orange, brown and beige stripes. The single bed with its brand-new mattress protector. The light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Even the curtains that looked like the remnants of the roll of fabric used to make Greg Brady’s flares. The items had been carefully, even lovingly, placed there by the maintenance staff of the college, and she knew that they were clean and useful and hardy. But her parents had filled their new house with granite and marble, porcelain sinks and gilded spas, and could not imagine why one of their children would want to move out to this.
The flat had already been meticulously cleaned by the maintenance staff, but there was no stopping her mother. People went about their day-to-day business of living, but no one ever stopped to question why these migrant women were scrubbing at dirt that was no longer there, why they loved to wrap all furniture in plastic, or why their houses had to have white walls and tiled floors. These were the sorts of things that migrant-support settlement groups never talked about. Beyond the practical discussions about groceries and doctors and English classes, there was no other dialogue.
She imagined support groups of a different kind. A roomful of women of different generations and languages – Armenians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Chinese – sitting in an AA sort of circle, going on about the things that mattered.
‘How many years have you been clean?’ they would ask each other if they could speak the same language. This would be the most important question. ‘How many years have your kids been clean?’ They would not be talking about drugs. Free from scabies, free from lice, free from musty, mildewy concrete houses and the dirt. Their deities were Mr Sheen, White King and Toilet Duck. This was what it meant to be clean.
She worked alongside her parents, who had rolled up the sleeves of their blue Retravision salesperson uniforms. When they felt that her flat was clean, her parents bid her a hasty, no-nonsense farewell. ‘Call home if you get scared at night,’ directed her mother.
‘I won’t get scared,’ she said, as she handed her mother back the tub of cleaning supplies.
‘Keep it, you will need it for a laundry basket.’ Now why hadn’t she thought of that? Her mother had even remembered to pack three rolls of toilet paper.
‘Call and come home any time,’ her father told her, ‘and I will come and pick you up. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep at home tonight? Just for tonight?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘We have a tutors’ meeting.’ Even so soon out of home, the lies had started. But what could she tell them – that she wanted to spend the night alone roaming the halls? There were too many attachments in this world, she realised, and sometimes love bound too tightly.
That first night she slept in her first single bed. She didn’t care that the mattress had probably been slept on by a decade of randy students. She didn’t care. This was a room of her own.
The next day, she walked down the corridor and asked a taller tutor, the new physics tutor, to take down the curtains for her. Suddenly, light blinked into the room, a little at a time, until it was like an awakening. And there it was – her flat as she had first seen it – light entering every porous surface, including her skin. It was beautiful again.