FATHER—
This was too compassionate a country, he thought. They were swept from the camps onto planes, and this meant that the lee-and-lah loiterers had also been swept on board. They became the gangsters, the drug addicts and the troublemakers. One evening, after he and his eldest daughter had locked up the shop and walked to the car park at the back, they saw a man sprawled on the gravel, face down. His daughter took out her mobile phone. Its backlit screen made her face the same shade of blue as the lights in the public loos that made veins invisible, made it impossible for men like the one lying there to shoot up.
‘What are you doing? Get in the car!’
Only after they had driven for three minutes did he let her call 000. She had not the faintest idea about the dangers of the world. Did she think that she could just stand there over that body and call the ambulance and wait with the man until they came? Sometimes he didn’t know what to do with his kids.
Children Down Under were a different breed. Some of them were like pets that would roll over waiting to be tickled, not realising that to lie squirming happily like that was to expose the softest part of your underbelly to the boot. ‘Tickled pink’ – that was an Australian expression. It meant you were extremely pleased. But they baffled him too, sometimes, with their jokes that didn’t make any sense.
‘Dad, do you want to hear a joke?’ his son had asked as a very young boy.
‘Okay.’
‘How do you know if your house has been robbed by a Vietnamese?’
‘How?’
‘Your dog’s gone and your homework’s done.’
He knew that his son had most likely been parroting something he heard in the schoolyard, but it was bizarre what his kids could joke about.
‘Funny, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t it funny?’
Stealing, eating dogs, making fun of the people who liberated him from the Black Bandits.
‘I really don’t find that funny,’ he said.
‘That’s because you don’t get it, Dad.’
*
When they were still living in Braybrook, in their house behind the Invicta carpet factory, his wife had started to feed the stray cats that sometimes meandered into their backyard. As with humans, if you fed a stray, it always came back. Soon more cats came, until there were three or four at once, rubbing against their legs as they hung out the washing, or running towards the back door when they heard it opening.
The original cat had black and brown stripes and flecked green eyes. She was heavily pregnant when she arrived.
One afternoon she gave birth to her babies beneath the house. His children were enthralled by the kittens when the mother cat took them out to clean them. But she quickly smuggled them beneath the floorboards again, where they could not be reached.
The cats were given leftovers, and on the day there were no leftovers, the mother cat crossed the road. Such was life and the law of the suburban jungle. Glass on the floor, and blood on her paws.
For days the kittens mewed beneath the house. He’d never heard of the RSPCA, didn’t know that people existed to protect animals, and not just rare animals but domestics too. A few days later his daughter opened the door and found tiny skeletal parts – little legs extending to tiny claws, the connected bones of a tail. Skeletons of dead kittens that had been cannibalised by the older cats, their aunties and uncle.
‘They ate their babies!’ squeaked his small son. His daughter didn’t say anything, but she would not come out of the house for days on end.
Later, one of the cannibals had mated with its brother, and the kittens were weak things that lay on their sides in the grass. The only thing that moved were their stomachs rising up and down. For days they remained like that, and then one day his daughter came to look at them and they were not even moving.
‘What happens now?’ she asked. ‘What do we do?’
‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘They’re dead.’
The first time each of his children saw death, their faces were smudged with surprise, and then, without fail, they would cry. Alina, the youngest, even cried over the death of a fish at a Chinese restaurant, one that she was watching moments before with squeals of delight.
He and Kien were doing their best to give the children a happy childhood, but he realised that with the cats they had replicated life as they knew it to be – filled with knuckle-cracking cruelties that were inevitable. His wife bought live crabs and prepared them. She would stab them in the centre of their chests with a chopstick. She would buy special duck eggs with the dead foetuses curled inside and boil them. She would cook live fish, smash them across the head with the side of her cleaver.
But those starving cannibal cats, they walked so soundlessly.