I took a bus that trundled through the mist, pulling up hard every so often, the bleary lights of the cars glowing like the eyes of animals in the fog. Every now and then there would be a cacophony of horns before the vehicle lurched forward once more, and eventually the looming shadows of high-rise buildings gave way to more modest abodes. Above these, the late afternoon sun had cast the drifting vapours of mist in a strange, sallow haze. I got out and had to ask a few stall owners for directions before finding the road I was looking for. It was less of a road, more of a gravel alleyway, thin and uneven, with dwellings on either side. The houses here were single-storey shacks with thin concrete walls unadorned by paint. Some had bars on the windows. The roofs were made from strips of corrugated iron, and scattered across the narrow walkway was a series of old scooters and bicycles, propped up like drunks against the guttering.
At first I thought I had got it wrong. Macaw couldn’t live somewhere like this. And it wasn’t just the squalid poverty of the place, though the area clearly had no small share of that. It was the drabness, the mud-smeared gravel, the tawny walls and the dull grey of the roofs. It was hard to imagine Anna – someone whose personality was so full of colour – languishing here. I had the urge to turn back, to get the next bus out of there, for it was as though I was seeing something I shouldn’t. But there are times when rational thought gives way to deeper impulses and currents, and I found myself raising my hand and knocking on the hard wooden door nevertheless.
She opened it. Even without makeup she still looked beautiful, only tired, her skin a little more faded, her hair pulled back haphazardly, and she wore a frayed kimono with a faded image of a dragon. She regarded me coldly.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I … I … you dropped this. And I thought it might be important to you.’
I handed her the wallet.
She took it without saying a word.
‘I like your kimono. Very snazzy!’
I caught the ghost of an amused smile.
‘I guess this is the point where I invite you in,’ she said, and for the first time there was a dullness in the luminescent depths of her eyes.
I followed her inside.
There was not a great deal of space. A small hallway. A poky kitchen that opened into a living room at the back. It was disorderly but not dirty, and the appliances looked old-fashioned but well kept, although, in the fading light of the afternoon, the cupboards and surfaces were lightly covered in a grainy dust. The air had a smokiness to it.
‘So what do you think?’ Macaw asked, regarding me with cold amusement.
‘It’s … very nice. It’s … quaint.’
At once I regretted those platitudes.
‘Yeah, it’s the perfect dream home,’ she said sarcastically.
‘You know, Anna, I’m hardly from money myself.’
She nodded her head a fraction.
‘I should introduce you to my father. It’s his house. It’s only right.’
In the living room there was a large moth-eaten chair and the diminutive frame of a man sunk into it, so small that I hadn’t noticed him at first. He was watching TV, a miniature black-and-white device with a fuzzy picture that buzzed and crackled. Around the chair was a collection of empty beer cans. Perched on one of its arms was an ashtray, with a cigar stub cold and mouldy against a carpet of ash. As I got closer I could see his face. He had large eyes, and thin salt-and-pepper hair that straggled down the sides of his head. There was a little of Macaw in him – the same straight, sloping nose, the same fine jaw – but his expression was softer, almost flabby, in terms of its gentle unrecognition. He blinked and smiled spontaneously, the way a baby might.
‘Father, this is my friend Lai. Lai, this is my father, Tang Daiwei.’
There was a large window behind him. The mist had thinned. In the small porch outside stood the skeleton of a barbecue which looked as though it hadn’t been used for years.
He reached out and cupped his hand in my own.
‘I am very pleased to meet you. I don’t meet many of Anna’s friends.’
I smiled at Anna’s father.
‘It is an honour to meet you, sir!’
His hand felt like a little bird in mine.
‘I would offer to make you some tea and serve you some cookies, but unfortunately a migraine has kicked in.’
‘That’s quite okay, sir. I completely understand.’
We retreated to Anna’s room.
It was different again. Whereas the small area outside had allowed in some light, her room was softly shadowed, the walls shrouded with dark silk sheets. She hit a switch and the darkness was interrupted by a series of blue and emerald lights, threading through the dark silks in winking, glittering gleams. Photos had been pinned to the material, and I couldn’t disguise my fascination. There were pictures of Macaw as a child, pressed into a tight gaggle of girls in a photo booth, all smiling out. But the majority of the pictures were of Macaw as a young adolescent, tucked into an oversized and tattered black gown with golden moons and stars emblazoned on it. She was nearly always standing on some makeshift stage or mini-podium, but her head was only a little higher than the audience. Sometimes she was standing before a table, sometimes pointing a long silver feathery wand, but in all these pictures she was smiling at the camera without artifice or care.
I looked at her.
‘I never knew you did magic.’
She smiled ruefully.
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘Show me a trick.’
She looked at me poker-faced.
‘Oh come on, I am sure you were great!’ I cajoled gently.
‘Well, since you ask …’
She reached into a basket underneath her bed and produced a stout, wide-bottomed bottle of peach liquor.
‘I am going to show you … how to make this disappear!’ she declared with a theatrical flourish.
She popped the top off, took a swig and handed the bottle to me. I was always quite finicky about drinking from other people’s vessels; my grandmother would sometimes tease me for being a prude. But that day, in the velvet darkness of her room, and with tendrils of mist swirling outside, I took a swig and it felt as if we were teenagers once again making some kind of girlhood pact – drinking illicitly – and we started to giggle. The drink was sweet and warm, forming a glow at my core, but as I looked at her the smile on her face faded. She seemed almost hesitant.
‘You haven’t asked me about my father. Why he is as he is.’
‘I didn’t … I mean, I didn’t think it my place to ask …’ I stuttered.
‘It’s okay,’ she said softly. ‘Some part of me would like to talk about him. As you can tell, he is old before his time. But he wasn’t always that way. Before … it was different. Then everything changed.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was years ago now. When my father was still a veterinarian. He loved animals, loved tending to them. As a small girl, I sometimes fretted that he loved animals more than he loved me! He would often work late, see. And that’s when it happened.’
‘When what happened?’
Macaw tensed up visibly. She gestured for the bottle. I handed it over. She took a longer drink this time. Coughed slightly. Pushed her way forward through the words.
‘Sometimes they would tend to more … exotic animals. Zoo animals. Nothing too dangerous or too large, like tigers or bears. But smaller creatures, lizards, snakes and the like. At that point, they had been looking after a Komodo dragon. Have you ever seen one of those?’
I nodded mutely.
‘My father was thrilled. It was a real win for his business, to be asked to nurse such a rare specimen back to health. It had a damaged limb or something, I don’t remember too well now. What I do know is that one of the staff must have left its cage open …’
I edged closer on the bed. She took a full, mournful breath.
‘Anyway, you can imagine what happened. My father, always working late. He didn’t notice the giant lizard until it was on him. Komodos are big and strong by lizard standards, and they have a poisonous bite. He managed to pull it off him, get out of his office, close the door, trapping the beast inside. But by that point he was in a bad way. If the lizard had been at full capacity, well …’
She shuddered, as though someone had walked over her grave. She handed me the bottle. I drank – this time without even thinking, so focused was I on the gravity and horror of her account.
‘His arm had been torn. He was bleeding. He tried to walk along a dirt road to a nearby hospital. But unfortunately … he didn’t get there!’
‘Why not?’ I whispered.
She looked me in the eye, her expression cold.
‘His clinic was on the outskirts, where the edge of the city meets the land. They often had problems with wild dogs. Pests and vermin, they wouldn’t normally attack human beings. But it was late evening. And my father was wounded. Perhaps they smelt the blood. In any event, a group of them started trailing him.’
I was dumbstruck.
‘They came closer and closer, until suddenly they were on him. With his good arm he picked up a rock, pushed it in their faces, somehow he managed to make it to the door of a nearby house. The dogs were chased away. And the owners called an ambulance.’
‘Thank god,’ I murmured, ‘the poor man.’
Macaw looked at me again. She reached over and took the bottle, her movement slow and weary. She took another sip.
‘Think again. I sometimes think that fate does not favour the meek or the kind.’
I looked at her in astonishment.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The elderly couple in the house were good people. They chased the dogs off with a stick, and once they had set my father down in the living room, they went to call the ambulance. Unfortunately …’
‘Unfortunately?’
‘Unfortunately, they were collectors of cats!’
‘Cats?’
‘The very same. Perhaps because my father was lacquered with dog drool, the cats in the house at once sensed in him their natural and eternal enemy. As he was lying there, all seven of them … They … set on him tooth and claw and they …’
At this point her voice broke with the weight of her emotion, and she cupped her hand to her mouth, turning her head away. She was trembling violently. I was shocked and astonished, and I reached out to her.
And then I realised she was laughing.
‘You bastard!’ I exclaimed.
‘I can’t believe you bought into that, Funny Bunny. You really are the last of life’s innocents!’
I snatched the bottle back from her.
‘I had a feeling it wasn’t true. When the cats attacked him as well, I knew you were pulling my leg!’
She laughed with savage delight.
I found myself smiling too. She was like that. One of those people who had an edge of cruelty, but could somehow tease a smile from you all the same.
We drank some more. The small beads of the threaded lights glinted and gleamed in the soft shadow. She spoke in a quieter voice now, with a kind of thoughtful resignation.
‘No, Funny Bunny. The truth is much duller. My father was never a vet. And for the last few years he has spent his days wasting away in front of the TV because my mother left him. Some time back, he had a mild stroke that took away some of the movement in his left leg. It wasn’t too bad – and he was encouraged to exercise, to get better. But he just gave up. People choose to do that sometimes … to abandon the rest of the world in favour of a single room and a television!’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Especially if they know someone else has been left behind and can look after them,’ she added, the bitterness in her voice palpable.
I handed her the bottle once more.
‘Do you ever see your mum, Anna?’
‘No, she left when I was eleven. Not seen her since.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘I guess I probably should. But I don’t care all that much now.’
She took another swig. And then she broke into a smile.
‘They were funny though, the two of them. My mother was more like me, dramatic. She wrote poetry in her spare time. She did some performance art too. Maybe that’s where I get it from. My father was a wet sock, even back in those days. As you can tell, the walls in this house are thin. I’d hear them arguing in the night sometimes, after I had gone to bed. Well, it was more her screaming, and him desperately trying to calm her down. Afterwards I’d hear them make love as well. It kinda grossed me out at the time, every kid hates to think of their parents in that way. But it was nice too.’
‘Howdya mean?’
‘Well, just that they were both there. Present. At that age, your parents are very much your world. And even if you are angry with them, when you go to bed at night and you hear their voices, raised or lowered, you feel secure somehow. Life seems as it should be!’
She took another drink. I was feeling the effects of the alcohol now.
‘I don’t blame her, though,’ Anna continued philosophically. ‘See, what you have to understand is that man out there. Sometimes it feels like he can drain any hope from the room just by his presence. He stays there staring at that TV, and sitting with him in those long silences feels like drowning. He saps your energy. All of it. He knows there is always someone there. To cook. To clean. And he just … accepts that. He takes it for granted. As though the world is obliged to provide someone to cater to his needs. That’s the most incredible thing of all. So I get why my mother left me to it. Sometimes I think I actually hate him!’
She said this last part almost to herself, as though she were mildly surprised by the realisation.
‘How do you manage if he doesn’t work?’ I asked softly.
She smiled wryly and took another drink from the bottle. One of the things about her was her strong masculine streak. I don’t mean in appearance. She appeared strikingly feminine. But there was something in her behaviour, the way she related to the world – a certain hungry confidence, a voraciousness almost. She would drink from the bottle without giving it a second thought, and she could drink a great deal; rarely did alcohol overwhelm or subdue her. When she liked a guy she would approach him in the same way a cat might stalk a mouse. And she seldom failed to secure her prey. She was competitive too – she loved to play games and win; the world to her was something whose vitality was to be sucked and savoured like a luscious piece of fruit. It was something she could impose herself on.
Perhaps that is why she could play-act being a man so effectively, slip into his clothes so easily, into his guise – because a masculine sense of confidence was immanent in all that she did, the way she moved through the world, the way she was. Perhaps, too, that is why her relationship with her father was so galling to her: it was the only aspect of her life where the size of her personality and the sheer force of her will had no impact on her powerlessness, her inability to change the situation.
‘You know those quilts that old women make? The patchwork ones where they weave lots of different squares into the one blanket?’
I blinked.
‘Of course.’
‘Well, it’s a bit like that. I get by doing that. Threading together little squares. Since my father had his stroke, the government pays him a small stipend. That’s one square. I do some shifts at the local grocery shop. Another square. And then there’s the Marvellous Marauders. Sometimes we do performances at bars, and we receive a little in tips. Another square. And so on. And so I get by. I think that’s how most people get by. And … and I manage to continue my studies. There’s a small victory in that, I think!’
She smiled, and for the first time there was a trace of uncertainty in her expression.
‘There really is,’ I told her sincerely.
That peach alcohol was perfuming across my brain now, leaving a fuzzy haze in its wake.
‘I think I should get going. Before I pass out.’
‘I’ll see you out. And … thanks for coming.’
I stood waiting by the door as she gathered a couple of things. I looked back through the small, squat dwelling. She was standing in front of her father, and he was looking up at her, listening to what she was saying. Anna’s face was shadowed, indistinct, but I could see she was frowning. The man in the chair seemed diminutive and shrunken as he looked up at her.
And then, just like that, she passed her hand across the side of his face, stroking his cheek, the gesture tender and impossibly brief.
When I stepped out, the brightness of the late-afternoon sky met the grogginess of my alcohol-clouded mind. The mist had all but abated, some lingering strands outlined momentarily in the cool of the air. I felt the warmth of the sun on my face; the winter giving way before the first signs of spring. I walked through the neighbourhood, retracing my steps towards the main road. I thought of Macaw and her balloons, and I found myself grinning involuntarily, and then I thought of Anna and her father, and of my own father and a whole generation of men who had retreated into the quiet of their studies or their living rooms; then I thought of the latest outbreak of student protests in the university, and a new generation – my own – and while the sunlight tingled against my cheek, inside me bloomed a sense of hope.