FATHER—
Damn it, his daughters were so foreign. They shook hands with all the bank staff, and smiled at the wrong people. ‘There’s no need to thank the drivers or shake hands with employees. You’re in a different country now, with different rules to follow.’ But they didn’t understand hierarchy, he realised, and this was due to their soft upbringing in Australia. They’d also seen too much of the good stuff in life, so much so that they weren’t even particularly impressed by Kiv’s mansions and hotels. Or if they were, it was a fleeting, token interest. They seemed more interested in seeing old crumbling things, the museums and relics, the stupas and temples.
And they had even refused to take money! The thought of being instant millionaires did not move them. In fact, they had seemed aghast, and at the earliest opportunity had wanted to give the notes away in the street. What was wrong with these girls, he wondered. On the second day they sat around the air-conditioned house in the afternoon complaining of boredom.
‘Dad, there’s nothing to do. We can’t even step out the front door without the bodyguards.’
‘You can go for a swim in the pool out the back. You can watch the flat screen television in the lounge room.’
But they didn’t want to swim in the backyard. They didn’t want to watch the television. They wanted to go outside.
Didn’t they feel safe? Didn’t they feel lucky? These kids didn’t know anything. He remembered one evening when his son was in Cambodia a few years back. Kiv had called him up in Australia to laughingly relate the day’s events: ‘Your son and his cousin tried to run away in Angkor Wat. My bodyguard called me in a panic and told me he had lost them in Siem Reap. Luckily, twenty minutes later he found them sitting in a coffee shop snickering away.’ Kuan had been horrified. What idiots would do such a thing? Anything could have happened to them. And he could just imagine the panic of the poor man whose foreign charges had disappeared.
When their driver drove him to his old street, he could barely remember it. ‘This street used to be so clean and beautiful,’ he told his daughters. ‘People would sweep out front of their shops every morning, and in the evenings pull up chairs and sit outside to chat.’ They thought that it was just their father being nostalgic about his former home, which looked like four squares stacked one on top of the other, but he knew that he was not mis-remembering.
‘Imagine! We even brought along the bunch of keys from the factory with us when the Black Bandits came!’
He did not recognise the house on stilts where his brother claimed that he had lived during the time of Year Zero, or the river.
‘Why is the water so dirty in the stream?’ he asked his sister-in-law.
‘It was always that colour.’
‘I remember it was clear. We used to collect it for boiling and drinking. It was clear.’
But Kiv told him he was mis-remembering.
Oh, it was so good to be around Kiv again, Kiv who always knew what to do, Kiv who could make the hard decisions, and Kiv who could laugh about things too. Kiv was the innovator, the inventor, the let’s-take-action man. It was Kiv who got them to Vietnam, Kiv who hid the gold in the handlebars of his bike, Kiv who came back to Cambodia much to the chagrin of his fearful loved ones. In Kiv’s presence he felt like a kid again, under the protection of his older brother. It was so comforting that he didn’t care what his daughters thought.
Perhaps there were two decades when he was not so fearful – in his thirties and forties, when life seemed to spread out in a vast expanse of possibility. Anything could happen in Australia, it seemed, but only good things, and he was young and ready to make them happen, working seven-day weeks, ten-hour days. But then, compared to Kiv’s success here, his own seemed small.
So what if they worked until they stopped noticing that their homes were falling into disrepair, if it led up to this? Success of such dizzying magnitude, security to such an extent that it took your breath away? If Kiv wanted to build a medical clinic, it would be done. The same with roads and temples and schools. Everyone treated Kiv with such respect and fear, while back in his shop in Footscray he still sometimes got crazy customers who would scream at him. Once, one even threw a telephone at him. He was still quelling the apoplectic rages of people who brought in twenty-dollar hairdryers six months out of warranty, still selling toasters to pensioners who pulled coin purses out of their vinyl handbags.
‘Why didn’t you go back to Cambodia too?’ his eldest daughter had asked him out of the blue one day when she caught him gazing at Kiv’s calendar. The calendar featured a picture of one of Kiv’s buildings on each month’s page. He knew his daughter scoffed at his ambitions, his love of franchises, his admiration of Colonel Sanders who had started Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was in his seventies, and his awe at Sir Richard Branson.
‘You kids were still too young, and there were four of you,’ he replied.