DAUGHTER—
These were some of the sights she and her sister Alison saw in Cambodia: a leper with white on her face like talcum powder. A woman who sold them some books, her face melted by a long-ago acid attack. Landmine amputees. Children who squatted in the streets, brown and grotty. One tiny girl followed them all the way to their car and stood outside, tapping on the window. She had a baby on her hip, held there by a krama scarf. Tap, tap, tap. Little beggar children with no one to pull them away from oncoming traffic. A man who was so crippled he could only crawl on his stomach, lying on a flat board with wheels on the bottom.
Her family in Cambodia tried to shelter them from all this, in the same way Siddhartha was sheltered. ‘You will never see land this green,’ her father told them proudly. ‘This is the tropics.’ They were driven in a Mercedes to the holiday resort Cousin Hue managed in Sihanoukville. They had dinners of fresh seafood by the sea. The chauffeurs remained respectfully silent, and the bodyguards never spoke a word to them. But they were always there. When she swam at Sihanoukville Beach with her sister they watched from the shade of a tree, and when she ate dinner at a restaurant they stood outside. Her uncle kept sending them, three or four at a time. He was afraid his family would be kidnapped and ransomed off. A finger might be cut off, an ear. Acid on the face if there was no payment.
It wasn’t just the money and the hotels. Her relatives called every day, and often accompanied them on their trips. This is what it means to be a Pung, they seemed to be saying. You take care of your family.
She was taken to see the royal palace with its Bodhi tree at the front and its floor of silver tiles, its stupas commemorating the life of kings. She saw the Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, and the floating village on the Tonle Sap Lake. But not the genocide museum with its bloodstained floor and its racks in the corridors, not the killing fields of skulls and broken teeth.
Never get too close to cripples lest their cripple rub off onto you, was the way her parents saw their existence, even in Australia. The sense of helplessness on leaving those behind – those on the stretchers with their IV drips warming like cordial in the sun. Crying crying waiting for them to die, wanting them to shut up.
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Perhaps this was why her mother and father couldn’t save the cats beneath the house. The mother cat was left on the side of the road, eyeballs out of their sockets, mouth open in one final noiseless roar, for the children to see. Her father didn’t think to shield their eyes from it while he walked them to school. They did nothing – just waited for the council to clear away the death. Months later the bloodstains were still on the side of the road, the claw scratches on the curb.
‘Give this dish of milk to the kittens,’ her mother told her when the mewing became too much. ‘Put it under the house.’ But by the time she stepped out into the drizzle, on the front doorstep, the four older ravenous feral felines were there. There was no way to get beneath the house; the narrow wooden slits at its base would only admit small crawling creatures.
Those kittens mewed for three nights straight. They were beneath her room. She couldn’t sleep. For three days and three nights she was at home in the room she shared with Alexander. There was nowhere else to go during the school holidays. No such thing as taking a walk down the street. For three days and three nights it rained outside and they heard the kittens above the rain.
Human life, like the cats’ lives, was nasty, brutish and short. That was what she had been brought up with. It was not like on a farm, where the trajectory of life and death was laid out in matter-of-fact detail as part of the natural world. Her parents were working to give them better lives, but in those early years of arrival they worked until the curtains fell down, until the grouting on the tiles turned black, until the grass grew tall outside, and yet they could not see these things in their quest for an unblemished future. Work meant existence. In their minds, crippled soldiers: taken away and shot. Sick workers: taken away. Yet they could still work, and if you could work you could strive for something better, something cleaner. You had a future.
But the kittens were dying beneath the floorboards and there was nothing she could do. She could beg and beg and beg for their lives and yet her parents would say nothing could be done. She listened for three nights as the mewing became more faint, till the mews became hoarse. Till it was no longer a collective mew, till they dropped off one by one. She listened until the final whimper, until the end of noise.
Later, other cats came. She fed them scraps from the kitchen, but she would not pat them.