CHAPTER 11
‘Why are you walking so fast?’ I say, wrinkling my nose, my backpack jabbing me painfully in one hip. ‘What’s going on, Mum?’
As we crossed the pedestrian bridge in front of Henry’s house to reach our own side of the neighbourhood, Mum explained that the takeaway bag she just gave Mr Xiao contained a big serving of rice (‘Enough for two days at least!’) and a serving of silken tofu with chicken, shallots and salted fish, together with a container of slow-braised beef and vegetables. My mouth is still watering as we head away from the bridge towards the local shops, Mum practically running in her ugly tan wedge shoes.
Outside Mrs Xenakis’s pharmacy, Mum stops and reaches inside the blue, red and white grocery bag on her shoulder and pulls out the house keys. She holds them out to me, and I take them for the second time in my life, my mouth open in surprise.
‘Now you go home and start your homework, Wen. Put the rice on to boil if I’m not home by five-thirty so that we can eat at six-fifteen. There are a few things I need to get from the grocer before I get back.’
I think of Dad, brooding in his bedroom behind a closed door. What will we say to each other if he comes out? Will it be shouty Dad today, or silent Dad? And how do I explain why Mum’s not home? I’m not feeling at all creative today. He’ll be able to work out that she’s most definitely not in the toilet.
‘Where are you going to be?’ I exclaim. I close my fingers over the heavy set of keys in my palm. ‘Did Mrs Wu collapse inside the pharmacy again?’
Mum laughs. ‘Mrs Wu is not collapsed inside, although she did stop in to buy some lip gloss and collect a prescription for antibiotic cream for Mr Wu, who has a bad cut on his leg. A gardening accident, she said.’
‘How do you know all this?’ I say, and then zing, I get it. My insides feel like jelly.
If I’m right, this is big. This is huge.
‘Are you … working here now? Did you accept that job Mrs Xenakis offered you?’
I feel like squealing and jumping up and down.
Mum nods vigorously, and her face seems a little bit lit up from the inside.
‘Mrs Xenakis,’ Mum stumbles, like she usually does over the Greek surname, ‘Nina, said I could start right away, when I explained about …’ Her gaze goes unfocused for a moment before settling on me again. ‘She won’t need me every day, but she promised that on days that I am working I can still walk you to and from school. Go home to get dinner prepared, if I need to. She’s already paid me for today and tomorrow. She needs me to come back on Monday, to interpret for a family from Shenzhen.’
Mum grasps my hands where they are cupped around the keys, tilts her head up slightly and looks straight into my eyes. ‘You don’t have to explain anything to him,’ she says in Chinese. ‘You tell him to wait until I get home. I’m the adult, remember? I will explain.’
When I let myself into the house, it’s still silent and my parents’ bedroom door is still closed. Dad’s still in bed, brooding. I practise my violin in the kitchen with the sliding door shut because it’s the furthest point from their bedroom, so if Dad’s asleep it won’t be loud enough to wake him up.
At 5.30 pm, Mum’s still not home, so I move the washed rice waiting in a claypot on the kitchen bench onto a burner to cook.
I almost leap out of my skin at 5.42 when Dad slides the door open. ‘Where is your mother?’ he demands.
His face is creased from sleeping all day. He’s wearing a terrible old dark-blue tracksuit that’s sagging at the hem and at the collar.
‘She’s at the pharmacy,’ I reply, hearing the little tremor in my voice.
‘What about dinner?’ Dad growls.
I point at the stove. ‘It’s already cooking.’
He looks across at the covered bowls of chopped vegetables sitting on the kitchen bench, makes a sound in the back of his throat, then walks away down the hall and shuts himself inside his bedroom again.
At six on the dot, Mum flings herself through the door with her stripy shopping bag, now bulging. She unloads its contents into the fridge before strapping on her black apron, pulling out the wok and taking other small bowls of sliced meat and tofu from the fridge.
In minutes, dinner is ready – but there are only three dishes on the table.
‘Uh,’ I say, as I set the table with glasses, bowls and chopsticks.
Mum cuts me off with a steely look. ‘Any number but seven is fine. Go and call your father to eat.’
I knock on the closed bedroom door.
I say, ‘Dinner?’ like a question, as if I’m asking him for dinner, instead of telling him that it’s ready.
As Mum and I are sitting down at the table to eat, Dad appears again in his rumpled sleep suit, with his rumpled face, his usually severe, neatly combed hair still standing up on end from all the tossing and turning he’s done.
His voice is very quiet. ‘Where have you been all day?’ ‘At the pharmacy,’ Mum replies, a little shakily. She is unable to quite meet his eyes as she places a serving of meat and vegetables on top of his bowl of rice. ‘Doing what I can … to help the family.’
Dad still hasn’t sat down. He just stands there looming over the two of us, his face twisted into a shadow of its usual sneer. ‘You can’t speak English properly,’ he mutters. ‘You’re not even educated. You would be an embarrassment to any workplace.’
Mum and I exchange glances and I pray that she doesn’t answer the way that I would: What? The same way that you were?
But the silence just hangs there uncomfortably after Dad’s words.
The kitchen is still hot and airless from all the flash-frying and steaming Mum’s done. I don’t know if I should start eating, or instead, run and snatch up the back door key that’s hanging on a small hook inside the pantry and let myself out into the night. I know what I want to do.
I don’t want to be here. I can’t stand it anymore.
When I grow up, I don’t want to be like her, or like him. I’m going to answer to me.
I half rise out of my seat to maybe run again, and Mum’s voice, quiet but stern, stops me. ‘Wen?’ she says. ‘Sit.’
Dad circles the table. ‘There’s not enough food,’ he snarls.
‘It’s not Tuesday,’ Mum says softly, picking up her chopsticks and putting a slice of meat into her mouth. She doesn’t remind him that tomorrow is Friday. The day he was supposed to get paid and give her money to buy groceries with.
Dad stops prowling and I find that my fists are clenched on the tabletop, ready to defend myself from a random clip across the ears, or maybe a porcelain bowl full of food thrown in my face.
If the air could crackle any more with this unspoken something, I think I’d be able to hear it.
It’s like a scene from a dream as Mum helps herself to a cube of tofu and another slice of meat, placing them on top of her rice then placing them carefully in her mouth, chewing then swallowing.
‘You’re a very good doctor, Jin,’ she murmurs in Chinese, looking up finally. ‘I told you that you were wasted in that pretentious yum cha joint, that it would end badly, and it has. Do what you were born to do – make sick people better. Whatever way that you can.’ Mum looks up at Dad and I can see that her chopstick hand is shaking, but her voice isn’t. ‘There’s no shame in that – in helping people.’
Dad makes a sound like a roaring scream that rises and rises in scale and volume. He turns and storms back into his bedroom, slamming the door. My fists are still so tightly clenched that they hurt as I listen to him upending things in there, pounding on the walls, the doors, kicking and smashing things around. Working things out in the only way he knows how.
Across the table, Mum continues, calmly, to eat, although the hand cradling her bowl of rice is shaking. When she speaks again, her voice is thick and strange.
‘I am sick of living as if I am seated on a carpet of needles. If I’d known what he was like, before I married him, I’m not sure any of this would have been worth it – except for you. But this is the choice I made, no one else, and I have to live with it.’
There’s a tiny tear on Mum’s cheek as she says this, and my throat is tight and very sore as Mum adds, ‘Eat, Wen. You have an important exam on Saturday.’
Friday is a blur of nerves and uneasiness. Dad doesn’t come out of his bedroom at all before Mum and I leave for school. It’s as if the fact that Mum has a job now, and I’ve got an important exam tomorrow, is something that he can look away from. That maybe if he doesn’t come out of his room, none of it will be true.
‘There’s food in the fridge,’ Mum says tersely as we pick up Henry’s last batch of homework from his doorstep on the way to school. ‘I’ve left your father a note again. And if he doesn’t like what I’ve prepared for him, he is welcome to cook something else for himself. He is not going to starve.’
There’s bitterness in that word, starve.
I look at Mum with incredulity. I’ve never even seen Dad turn on the stove. He can barely work the microwave. One of us is always handing him a hot drink, or a bowl of nuts, or plate of cut-up fruit, when he’s home. He doesn’t have to lift a finger.
Time seems to run faster all day, faster than usual. Everyone except Billy Raum wishes me luck and people keep giving me helpful advice like, Read the questions and Make sure you wear a watch and Don’t eat too much for breakfast, you’ll get gas.
Michaela, Fatima and Nikki force me to sit in the sun with them instead of doing any more last-minute studying in the library.
‘You’ve done enough,’ Fatima says firmly, taking out her lunchbox and starting to eat, her long-lashed dark eyes not leaving mine for a second.
‘More than,’ Michaela adds, re-touching the banged-up orange nail polish on her right thumb before studying the paint job critically with narrowed eyes.
‘Homework with lashings of extra homework on top? Ugh,’ Nikki says, slipping me a book of poetry from our local secondhand book store. I recognise the stamp inside, underneath which she’s written You will smash it, girl.
I give her a hug and she hugs me back, hard.
‘I’m afraid,’ I mumble into her hair.
Of change, of leaving.
Of no change, of not leaving.
‘You’re allowed to feel and do anything you want,’ Nikki says fiercely, pushing back from me and staring into my face.
‘Except kill someone,’ Michaela drawls, capping her nail polish bottle.
‘Or set fire to school property,’ Fatima adds, snapping her lunchbox shut.
‘Except maybe that,’ Nikki grins.
And it occurs to me, as the bell goes and the sick feeling in my chest that’s been there all day returns, that they made me forget it for a little while.
Dad doesn’t come out of his bedroom when I get back from school. He doesn’t come out when Mum returns home from work, and he doesn’t come out for dinner.
Later, when I’m in bed, unable to sleep because tomorrow is the day I’ll be exposed as the fraud that Billy Raum has told everyone that I am, I hear them talking in low voices on the other side of the wall between our rooms. I pretend I’m asleep as Dad moves down the hall slowly toward the kitchen. As I hear the sound of the microwave door popping open, I’m still pretending so hard that I’m asleep that I am asleep, even before the cycle of warming food finishes with a beep.
At precisely 7.15 on Saturday morning, Henry’s dad’s battered vegetable truck pulls into our driveway, the mashed leaves of vegetables and the remains of old fruit stuck to the sides of the deep metal tray at the back. Maybe the front curtain of our house twitches a little when Mum walks me and my cartoon-character-covered exam pencil case out to the cab of the truck. But that’s all.
Mr Xiao leaps out of the driver’s seat to open the door for me. ‘Henry!’ he says sharply. ‘Come down and thank Mrs Zhou properly.’
Through the windscreen, Henry’s small face looks very pale, and I can’t see his eyes behind his glasses because the morning sun is flaring in them.
Henry climbs slowly down out of the truck clutching his own flat tin pencil case with all his exam stationery no doubt neatly arrayed inside in size and colour order. He’s wearing one of the new jumpers and a pair of the trousers that Nikki’s and Fatima’s families collected for him, but he’s still got his terrible white runners on – the ones with the rips and holes all along the sides of the toes that let you see what colour socks he’s wearing.
Today, he’s wearing one yellow sock and one red sock. They’re awful. But the colours are lucky and bright and maybe that’s why he chose them. Red for fortune, yellow for power.
I grin. Lucky socks.
I’ve got lucky socks on too. And lucky underwear. And a lucky jade necklace with a pendant on it in the shape of a heart. I’m not usually superstitious, but today is different. Maybe Henry – all scientific and logical and precise – is a little bit superstitious too.
Henry stops in front of Mum and just bows deeply, from the waist, without saying a word.
It’s the kind of bow you’d do at a wedding, or at a funeral.
‘Henry,’ his dad whispers beseechingly. ‘Please say something.’
But Mum stops Mr Xiao with a raised hand. ‘It was my great pleasure, Henry,’ she addresses him, in formal Chinese as if Henry has just spoken politely to thank Mum for all the hasty meals, all the hasty care that we could manage and arrange under the circumstances. ‘Now you and Wen go and make your parents very, very proud.’
On the way to the school by the sea, we listen to crackly news radio and don’t speak.
Mr Xiao gets lost at one point and we have to turn into a side street so that he can puzzle over his cracked old phone and reorientate himself. I bet this wide street full of huge, leafy trees and graceful old houses with high fences has never had a big, dirty vegetable truck parked in it before, ever.
When we reach the school with a good half hour to spare, Mr Xiao tells us that he will be right here, waiting outside when we’re done.
‘You read everything carefully, son,’ he says in Chinese. ‘You answer every question until there is no space left to write things in. You hear me?’
Henry, staring down into the footwell of the truck, nods and nods as his dad speaks. I wonder if Henry has spoken to him at all since he found his mum in the apple tree.
As we climb out of the vegetable truck, Mr Xiao gives us a little toot on the horn.
All the kids and parents filing into the school reception area look around at us and I glare back at them, my anger rising. Everyone has to eat. And everyone’s vegetables have to come from somewhere, you snobby old so-and-sos.
There’s a sharp tug on my sleeve and I turn, surprised.
‘Just remember the remainder,’ Henry says in English, beside me. His voice still sounds rusty and unused, hesitant; the Rs all optional, as usual.
For a second, I’m completely puzzled by Henry’s advice. The rule is now burned into my memory as if it’s somehow carved there. I don’t think I will ever forget the remainder again, or how to do long division, until the day I die.
‘I did all that on purpose, you know,’ I reply in English. ‘Just to annoy you.’
Henry laughs in surprise, and his laughter sounds rusty too. ‘Just don’t annoy them the way you annoyed me, and you’re going to do fine.’
It occurs to me that Henry’s still speaking in English. I’m not having to remind him to practise. He’s doing it all by himself, and I know that he’s on. He’s in the zone. He’s back, with his thinking cap on and game face ready.
‘You’re going to be finer than fine,’ I tell him. ‘It’s in the bag. But good luck anyway.’
‘What is this “bag” of which you speak?’ Henry replies airily, with a grin. ‘Anyway, don’t need it. See you in a couple of hours.’
As soon as the exam finishes, I can’t remember anything about it, any of the questions or what I thought or wrote after seeing them. I just feel really hungry as I look around for Henry.
He’s sitting in the second row, right under the clock – probably so that he wouldn’t miss, or waste, a second of available writing time. I bet he smashed it.
In the vegetable truck, driving home, all I can think about is what there might be to eat in the fridge but that I’m not sure I want to go home to eat it.
‘Did you answer A or D to the question with the graph in it?’ Henry says suddenly over the sound of the news radio. ‘That one is still bugging me.’
I grin. When Henry uses slang, it sounds really wrong.
‘I honestly don’t remember,’ I say, puzzled. ‘Was there even a graph question?’
Henry looks at me incredulously and I laugh. ‘All I can think about is a roast pork bāo, to be honest. Three, actually. I could inhale at least three.’
‘I’m thinking about a huge plate of gān chăo níu hé.’ Henry grins back at me and I sigh out loud at the thought. Dry flash-fried beef rice noodles is one of my favourite dishes too.
‘Good choice,’ I say approvingly as my stomach rumbles. ‘With extra onions, please.’
But Henry’s face suddenly falls and I say hastily, ‘When you win that place, we’ll go out and order exactly that. At least half a dozen roast pork buns dripping with honey glaze, and a huge plate of fried rice noodles loaded with beef and onions for us to share.’
‘Yeah,’ Henry says flatly, and his Dad gives him a sharp sideways glance. ‘Let’s do that. When we win.’
When we reach home, Mum shoots out of the front door as if she has springs in her legs and feet.
‘So?’ she enquires eagerly. ‘It went well?’
‘I think it went … okay?’ I say, because I still really can’t remember a single thing I did after they told us to start writing.
Frustrated at the lack of detail, Mum turns to Henry.
‘Easy?’ she says in Chinese.
Henry shrugs. ‘I was prepared,’ he replies quietly in the same language. ‘I was not surprised by anything.’
His voice is still so flat and expressionless that he sounds like a robot, and Mum and I exchange anxious glances. It will be very hard to shock Henry Xiao ever again, I’m imagining.
‘Come on, Henry,’ his dad says gently. ‘Let’s go home now. You need to rest. It’s been a busy few days.’
It’s a typically Chinese-style understatement, because it’s probably been the biggest two weeks of Henry’s life. You would never wish for bigger. Not even for your worst enemy.
Our screen door slams loudly and we all look up as my dad comes towards us in his disreputable sleep suit and indoor slippers, his hair hastily smoothed down with water but his face unshaven and lined. He looks old and careworn. Used up.
Like Pavlov’s poor dog, I step back at the sight of him.
In the harsh sun, as he approaches, for the first time I feel shame at the way he is. I think about the pressed business shirts and trousers he used to wear, the pairs of leather business shoes that were so shiny you could see your face in them, and I wonder where that dad has gone. Was that dad better than this one? The too neat, tightly wound up dad who knew everything and was always roaring at me to Do things properly! versus this sloppy, speechless and sullen dad?
Dad reaches Mum, putting a heavy hand on her shoulder from behind as he studies Henry and his dad in silence.
‘Mr Zhou,’ Henry’s dad says, ducking his head respectfully. ‘I must thank you …’
There’s some kind of struggle going on behind Dad’s rumpled face; I’m having trouble watching it. Mr Xiao’s words falter to a stop as he tries to read my dad’s shifting expression.
‘Uh, Bà,’ Henry says to his dad hastily in Chinese. ‘We should get going. We’ve bothered Mr Zhou and Mrs Zhou quite long enough …’
The silence is drawn out and awkward as Dad continues to stand there, studying all of us as if he’s never seen any of us before, not even me.
When he speaks, I feel as if I’m dropping down into my body from a great and whooshing height, and I realise that I’ve been holding my breath for so long that I’ve grown dizzy. The ground seems to ripple under my shoes.
‘Mr Xiao,’ Dad says formally in Chinese. ‘I am deeply sorry for your loss. Please come inside and share a cup of tea with us before you go. Mei will prepare some food for us, a small snack, if you’d care to share that too?’
‘She is a very fine cook,’ Mr Xiao says gratefully, with a touch of surprise.
‘Yes, she is,’ Dad agrees readily. ‘I’m very … lucky.’
Mr Xiao stiffens at the words, unsure of their exact meaning or intention, but he follows Dad up onto the front porch anyway.
Henry and I trail behind the adults, open-mouthed and goggling at each other, as we all enter my house.
Later that night, Henry and I sit out on the front porch, our feet and legs hanging down the steps, moths and gnats dive-bombing the light above our heads.
It has transpired, on this day of surprises, that the Zhou and Xiao families not only shared a soup noodle lunch that Mum hastily threw together, but also shared an evening meal of six dishes over rice, which was the lucky number Mum managed to eke out of her last round of food shopping. All of us crowded around our cramped kitchen table, sitting on mismatched chairs.
Between the two meals, our dads sat in the lounge room all afternoon and talked and talked over endless cups of cooling tea. Mum had put a finger to her lips and shooed us out each time we tried to go in to raid the pantry for anything resembling snack food. Something that will hopefully change now that Mum is working at the pharmacy with its copious display racks of jellybeans, raspberry drops and licorice allsorts that threaten to go out of date all the time, and must be eaten.
Mum told us to leave the dads to it.
‘I have you, Wen,’ Mum said quietly as she looked down at Henry and me playing cards on my bedroom floor: endless games of Spit and Speed, gin rummy and Old Maid. ‘And Mrs Xenakis, Doctor Gupta, all the old people. And you two have school, and your friends – and your big dreams. Let them talk in peace and find a new shape for their lives – the way we are all doing.’
‘Nikki is having a birthday party on Sunday, at the scout hall,’ I tell Henry now as he brushes an inquisitive moth away from his face. ‘I’m sure she’d love you to go.’
Henry makes a huffing noise. ‘What would I do at a party?’
‘Feel joy,’ I say simply. ‘Or boredom. Normal things. At least you wouldn’t be hungry, or alone.’
‘It’s been the worst two weeks of my life,’ Henry murmurs suddenly. ‘I can’t even cry. It just sits in here.’
He puts a closed fist against the front of his shirt, lets it drop.
I wait for him to say more but he blinks behind his smudged glasses and looks down at his new trousers, picking at a loose thread that isn’t even there.
‘They were pretty bad for me, too,’ I say truthfully. ‘But nowhere near as bad as yours. I’m surprised they have so much to talk about, to be honest. Our dads are very different people.’
‘I’m surprised, too. We’re common people,’ Henry murmurs. ‘Not like your dad, with all his degrees.’
‘There’s nothing more common than a waiter in a restaurant,’ I say grimly. ‘There’s nothing special about us. If Dad was special once, he’s chosen to be common. It’s on him. He’s no better than your dad, for all his training and education. He turned his back on it. Why? Because his feelings were hurt. Because he couldn’t compromise.’
Henry turns to me now, frowning, the light bouncing off his spectacles and making his eyes unreadable again.
‘What if we can’t ever be anything more, or different, than what we are now?’ he asks worriedly. ‘What if the exam, the idea of winning anything, is an illusion? How can we bear it, if it is?’
I take a deep breath, thinking quickly, knowing that what Henry is really talking about is his mum and why she chose not being here anymore, over being with him.
I think what he’s really asking is: Is there a point to the struggle? Or are we just like these moths and gnats, bashing away at the bright lights and all the hard, fixed things, all the obstacles, until we are burnt out, and then we die anyway?
‘All of it is the point,’ I tell Henry urgently. ‘What you get out of it is the point. It’s not about …’ I think hard, ‘reaching some kind of once-off pinnacle of luck or excellence or power – everything changes, all the time. It’s like those waves I almost drowned in at Cape Schanck, you remember?’
Henry nods. He was one of the first ones in the water, forming a human chain to get me and the student teacher out of the pounding surf. ‘It’s aiming for the peaks,’ I tell him, ‘and swimming through the troughs so that there are moments where you can just float under the sun and see how far you’ve come. Until you get pounded again. And then you have to start over.’
‘It’s about never giving up, even if there’s no point?’ Henry says, brow furrowed.
Trust Henry to get to the heart of the problem and summarise it so succinctly.
‘Yes,’ I agree softly. ‘The point is how you get to the point.’
Henry’s face clears, then he laughs.
From inside the house, I hear a bustle of movement, of voices raised in farewell. Henry’s dad putting his faded old work boots on by the door, my dad telling him to give him a call next week because I have contacts who can help you.
Dad helping someone else, again? I crinkle my nose in wonder. Day of wonders, indeed.
Henry stands as someone unlocks the front door behind us.
‘Thank you,’ he says to me simply, in Chinese, looking down at me through a halo of moths and gnats. ‘I will never forget, not even when I am old, what you have done for me.’
‘The point is how you get to the point,’ I remind him lightly, in English, although I feel like crying. I raise my fist in the same victory salute Henry gave me Wednesday night, as he and his dad walk away down the footpath.
‘This is why I will never get an A in English,’ Henry mock-grumbles over his shoulder.
I’m still seated on the top step as Henry and his dad drive away in their rattling truck. Behind me, Mum and Dad are silent for a long time. For once, it doesn’t feel like a bad silence. It’s not fraught with anything.
‘Time for bed, Wen,’ Dad says finally as Mum puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘It seems that we have a birthday party to attend tomorrow.’
As I turn and look up at them in delight, Dad smiles for the first time in days.