Her landlady had begun to lock up the house and close all the blinds on the windows. There were times when strangers would ring the doorbell, which was left unanswered. And so the visitors would try to come down the side of the house, shout their demands for money and bang on the doors until they had spent their anger.
Now, when she came home from cleaning houses and motels, she kept her coat on and silently watched the brittleness of Đào’s steps or the old woman’s endless chewing. She would eat her bowls of rice quickly, and then head back to her half of the studio or leave the house. Sinh’s walks became longer and more frequent as troubles seemed to mount at the house.
The local area included a large expanse of bushland inside the golf course situated in this industrial suburb. She found a walking path that connected her bus stop with the golf course, and then returned to her landlady’s house. From behind the high hurricane fence, Sinh marvelled at the well-dressed men and women swinging their long metal sticks, or the caretaker riding his mower around.
Along a secluded part of the course, Sinh followed a line in the ground down to where a golf ball had rolled into the middle of a dried puddle. Over time, it had partially sunk into the earth. Her fingers carefully lifted the half-revealed find out from the soil, and she dusted it off to reveal its bright orange colour.
It was perfectly dimpled and almost brand new – as far as she could tell. Sinh pondered the life of a golf ball. Its world of civilised ritual and intermittent aerial views over beautiful parklands and areas left to grow wild in a golf course. Although, it can also become lost, abandoned or abducted by children, and left in the garage for years.
Whoever had hit it over the fence had no way of retrieving it, as there were no gates on this side of the golf course. No one was around to claim it, so the girl dropped it into her plastic bag.
When Sinh returned home, the house was still gloomy. Đào was wearing her old jumper, which meant that she had not been outside all day, again. She moved around the kitchen tentatively as if the floor shifted beneath her, and her breathing was more difficult than before. Đào was engrossed in tying up a slow leaking tap stem with clean strips of fabric, and wiping up the film of water on the benchtops.
Sinh knew that her landlady liked it very much when she brought home found things – toilet paper for use in public toilets, flimsy umbrellas, takeaway containers, lost hats and scarves. But none of these was as strangely impossible as the immaculate golf ball she’d picked up that day.
“Cô ơi, I’m back. Look what I found!” she exclaimed to Đào’s dark back.
Her landlady froze, and in the silence, Đào’s neck lifted from the depths of her grief.
“Here, turn around and you’ll see how marvellous it is!”
It was then Sinh realised her grave mistake. Đào spun around hungrily and her skinny fingers grasped for the object in Sinh’s open palm. Then Đào’s fingers recognised its round and mottled shape. Her posture dropped instantly and she snarled, “Why are you showing me this useless thing!”
Đào
In the evening, the women ate in silence. Đào sat in the pool of darkness in the corner of the kitchen. A noise came from the bathroom-outside. The three women looked at each other.
“It might be the new tenant,” Sinh said.
“Would he return here?” Đào said.
“Maybe he’s forgotten something.”
“Please, Ancestors. Let me recover everyone’s factory-earned money.” Đào got up.
“Wait!” Bác said, listening. Her old ears keener than her eyes.
“Sao? I’m going to find out where the money is.”
“It might not be him.”
Sinh looked up from the table at her landlady. “Let’s call the police.”
“They don’t want to hear from silly women afraid of the trees and empty houses; idiot migrants with their tongues full of foreign troubles. I will go check.” She pushed her jade and gold bracelet up into the flesh of her forearm.
“I’ll come with you,” Sinh said.
“No!” Đào looked back at Sinh in horror. “No,” she repeated softly. She would not involve this innocent. Đào took the meat cleaver from her kitchen drawer. “I am old and ugly enough to scare the monster away.” She stepped out in the backyard and told them, “Lock the door after me.”
Đào passed the studio, and slowly patrolled the backyard. No sign of movement. She looked across to the garage window; it was dark inside and out. The concrete felt rougher than usual beneath her feet, the side fence was a profusion of malevolent splinters as she walked by, and from beyond the back fence an eeriness seemed to reach out to her with its velvety substance.
“Anguli?” Đào called out. No answer. She gripped the meat cleaver tightly, and dragged her heavy feet towards the bathroom-outside.
“Ai đó?” but heard no reply.
She pushed the door open slightly, and caught a glimpse of a dark shoe behind the door. Đào stared as the shoe shifted slightly. Then she heard a movement of air from the bathroom – a fart.
Without thinking, Đào used all her strength to pull back on the door handle, closing the door tightly. To trap the monster inside the bathroom. Đào’s forehead was warm with sweat. She felt her hands moisten and the meat cleaver began to get heavy. Inside, the toilet flushed. Water flowed, for what seemed a long time. A river of waiting.
With a violent force, the intruder yanked the door open, dragging Đào’s arms and body into the bathroom. He punched her head with a square fist. A burning pain rang in Đào’s cheek and nose; she dropped the meat cleaver. His smell emanated from the toilet.
“I knocked on your door earlier,” the intruder told her.
He was broad across the chest and head and had thick black hair. His ears were swollen and shrivelled up like dried fungus. So this is thằng Cowboy that she had been warned about.
“…I was out all day,” Đào backed away from him, both her arms covering her face and head. He shoved her off balance and she fell onto the concrete.
“Where’s the money?”
“I don’t know where it is. It was taken – ”
He lifted his foot and got her just below the rib cage. He kicked her in the liver. Her eyes turned glassy with pain. Đào tried to scream, but she couldn’t even breathe.
“Think harder, or this will really hurt.”
“I’m not…I’m not hiding…I swear.” Her bracelet scraped on the concrete as she tried to crawl. Her voice sounded like a collection of other people’s voices all talking at once, fluctuating up and down.
She tried to stand but her legs were shaky.
The back door flung open. “Cô,” Sinh’s voice called, and light from the kitchen was thrown over a corner of the backyard. “Cô Đào!” Sinh ran out with a torch, shining it straight into the intruder’s face.
He had an unusually large forehead, and his eyes were focused somewhere in front of it, like a dog following the scent of meat. He stood and stared at the girl’s long black hair swaying in the cold darkness.
Sinh let out a scream, “I’ll remember you – thằng vồ! I’ll describe you exactly. You’re as tall as that door.”
“They sent me; no one will find me. Everyone will help conceal us,” he spat and then bolted over the back fence, disappearing into the shadows of the disused factory.
The meat cleaver lay, edge dented, on the tiles of the toilet floor. Đào clutched her side, as Sinh helped her back to the kitchen.
“Was it Anguli Ma?” the old woman asked.
“No, it was a bad-luck number with a big forehead,” Đào said. She looked at Sinh, and felt a pang of regret.
“How do you say it in Vietnamese?”
Đào said it the usual way.
“Are you Vietnamese?”
“Not Chinese?”
“Yes,” Đào agreed.
“Chinese?”
“No. Vietnamese.”
“How do I say your name?”
Ahh, now she had to think for a moment, being unused to having to describe something she did not usually have to think about.
“Đào.”
“Dow?”
“No, Đào. There is a falling…sound.”
“Da-ow”
It’s as close as she’ll ever get, Đào thought, and smiled politely.
“I got it?”
“Yes,” Đào said, “Yes,” and nodded.
“We can take down your description – but from what you’ve told us, he could be any number of persons.”
The Brown Man
When he wakes, he realises he has been sweating out impurities during his sleep, from his meditation earlier that day.
He is clean from washing himself in the river, upstream from the murky scum. He is fed, from discarded food and some weeds and berries foraged in the park; he is quenched from the drinking fountain. Where the river splits in two to form a small island is where he sits. Seventeen moons come and go; the plants change in their colour and thickness. Few walkers come to this side of the park, and so no one crosses the river to reach him. He makes a thin raft to cross from one bank to the other.
Inside the cave, the man is sheltered from the extremes of the weather, and his meditation becomes longer and deeper. He sits through the hot seasons and the cold and wet seasons. Even when the howling winds blow through the cave, the man is able to sit with increasing equanimity. He experiences the difference between physical pain and mental pain; he comes to realise that without the latter, almost all physical pain is tolerable. He sits with extreme pain, riding its peaks and troughs, and afterwards at the next sitting finds that his focus is profoundly deepened for having persevered with the pain. His mind wanders to the icy fingers that touch his shoulder in the middle of the night. He can no longer tell whether this is a dream, a hallucination, or that he has been awakened by her; her body, so beautiful, except the bloody stumps where the fingers had been. The man feels the weight of it, the sacrificial garland, the flesh and nails of it. Icy fingers touching him in the night.
The man tells the monk of the vividness of his visions and memories and dreams. The monk advises him that these are the impurities of the mind, which arise from deep meditation.
“Do not place attachment to them at this moment. Try to return to the present. So much has happened to each of us.”
Beyond that, the monk remains silent, because the truly sacred things one does not talk about until the listener is ready. They watch the tea-coloured water glide past under the slender trees, as the brown man rests his sore legs and back.
Bác
The old woman locked the door to the studio; the girl had a key so she could get in later. Or if she had forgotten her key, she could knock and Bác would get out of bed to unlock the door for her.
Bác pulled the woollen blanket over herself and rubbed her legs together to get warm. The studio seemed bigger without Sinh on the other side. The old woman’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and she scanned the partition, made up of cardboard boxes filled with fabric and household items the charities had donated to Đào when she first arrived. A large cardboard still life of fresh fruit covered another part of the partition, and then a curtain.
Bác slept, and dreamt that her son was calling her from the bottom of the ocean’s body. And no matter how much she tried to bucket the salty water away to reach him, more would rush into the very spot. Her clothes were soaked, and clung heavily to her old thin body.
When she awoke, she saw that she was in the studio. The light was still on. The old woman didn’t know what time it was. She switched off the light, and then realised as she stood in the dark that the reason the light was still on was because Sinh had not come home.
With all the troubles their landlady had had, and Đào’s heart drying up like a piece of beef jerky, Sinh had made herself scarce from the house recently. Still, it was unusual for the girl to be out this late, especially on a cold night. Bác eventually fell asleep.
Her ears brought her attention back to the studio. She heard a female voice speaking methodically and comfortingly. “She is just outside,” the old woman’s hope rose; “It is Sinh, standing outside, trying to be quiet so she won’t wake the landlady up,” the old woman thought.
“I’m coming, I’ll open the door in one second.” Bác began to rise dully from her bed. She managed to sit up, and had one foot out of bed, when she realised that the female voice had continued talking, over her response.
“Sinh?”
The old woman’s mind became attuned to the cadence of the female voice. It was in English, and there were no pauses in her speech. Not a conversation, not a live person standing outside their door, the old woman began to dread.
Where was Sinh at this time of the night? Who could she be with right now? The Cowboy or someone else? Her alarm pricked her. Bác realised that it was the voice of a radio announcer, floating across from the neighbour’s house. The old man was drinking beer alone with his radio on, in the peaceful night.
Đào
She offered more fruit to the Buddha and Ancestors. Buddha’s eyes were serenely downcast, while her dead parents looked out from the photograph as though stunned by the flash from the camera. Đào pressed the thin stems of incense between her palms, and raised them three times to her forehead.
“Phật ơi, Nam mô a di đà Phật, Buddha please keep me sane. Nam mô a di đà Phật, Buddha keep me sane. Nam mô a di đà Phật, please keep me sane.”
The smoke was sliced with each gesture by the incense sticks, and dissipated into thin haze. She had tried to calm the old woman down, and perhaps she did do a good job, but now Đào found her hands trembling as she planted the incense sticks in the urn. She stood there, lost. This was the terror of emptiness, of finding herself utterly severed from her ancestral land. Đào looked over to the crucifix, very high up above the door. Jesus’ head drooped heavily to one side, and Đào could not see whether His eyes were closed. Đào did not know whether He was the Son of God or not, as the tall church-people had told her, but maybe He had some influence in this peaceful, rich land, and could pass on her prayers for a future of peace and prosperity.
Đào planned to keep her own ears and eyes open. She tried to tell her son about it when he came over that weekend with Tuyết. There was an unusual silence between them, as Đào tried to tell Trung her fears, that the girl was missing; that Thảo and others from the hụi group had enlisted the Society-Black after she had lost their money.
“Where is the girl today?” her son unthinkingly asked, somehow tuning into his mother’s fears.
“I don’t know where she is…” Đào was about to continue, but then stopped. She tried to pull the words up from her stomach, to throw them from her mouth into the wide world. The pain still lingered. She felt a sickness in her liver that she could not get rid of. If grief was a colour, it was certainly a dirty orange. Her son stood on the edge of the unknown, wanting to ask further.
“I need to borrow money from you,” Đào said abruptly.
“How much?” he asked in a careful tone of voice.
“Bây giờ mày có how much money?” she demanded.
He shifted uneasily and looked around the cluttered room. “I’ve got enough,” Trung declared, ready to defy her if she was going to berate him for earning so little, for being lazy, for being selfish and wanting to enjoy his life outside the shadow of catastrophe.
“But you don’t have anything spare, do you? Nothing big saved up for a rainy day.”
“I’ve got enough to look after my family…” Trung’s voice wavered.
“Just as I thought,” Đào said, shrinking in her disappointment.
Finally, Trung gave up. “I’ve got to go, I’ll pick Tuyết up at six.”
Đào picked up the phone and dialled Thảo’s number. The phone rang and rang and rang out. She listened incredulously and then put the receiver down. She tried to breathe but her chest was heavy. She picked up the phone again and dialled, listening to the regular tone in the earpiece. She counted the rings, then the line cut out at thirty-six. No one home, or Thảo was not answering.
Tears dripped down Đào’s face, seeped into her warm skin and her clothes. She wiped her cheeks with her fingers. And tried to call again. Another thirty-six and then silence.
She turned to the horoscope page. It said: If you should search today, then you will find the precious possessions that had been long ago buried or lost.
A gem of hope sparkled in Đào’s heart, and she dragged herself to the spare room to rummage through all her upended refuse again. The empty cardboard boxes vibrated with the noise from the trucks going past.
A few of the boxes were wet at the bottom. A thin film of water covered the floor. Đào would have to tie new rags more tightly around the leaky taps, and empty and dry the boxes before the contents began to stink. She rummaged through the clean fabric offcuts from the factory: shoulder panels, collars, arms, legs, reinforcing, front panels, torsos, scooped pockets, looking for the right length and absorbency.
To her surprise, Đào found an orange-pink embroidered top. A whole one. It looked old-fashioned, but didn’t smell musty; it had the aroma of tropical fruit. She tried to figure out where it had come from, as she held it in her desiccated hands. She traced the patterns of billowing embroidered clouds, and red curls and orange petals, with her pointing finger following the stitching. The needlework was intricate, with tonal changes in the flower petals, the different shades of green on the stems and leaves, and thread of varying colours showed dappled light on the embroidered human figures.
The phone rang. Could it be Thảo? Đào put the embroidered top aside. She tiptoed slowly down the hallway. Could it be the Cowboy? Or her friends from the migrant hostel days? Đào sat by the phone. Each ring tore into her brain, and the silence between rings seemed to get longer and deeper than the one before it. Could it be Sinh, ringing to let her know where she is?
Đào snatched the handset. “Allo?”
An Australian male voice said, “Good afternoon Ma’am, how are you today?”
“What you want from me?”
He was taken aback, and after the briefest moment replied, “Ahh, it’s not what I want – it is about what you want,” and told her that she was very lucky to be given a special discount.
“You have been selected to receive an extremely modern vacuum cleaner worth a hundred dollars, for only two dollars per week, that is, two dollars per week. I know you’re a very intelligent woman, and you’re thinking this is twice as much as the best models in the stores. But this vacuum cleaner is so modern, it is not available through retail outlets. Let me give you the facts: it uses technology to clean triple the amount of dirt, as well as filth that you can’t even see.”
“Fifth?” Đào asked.
“Filth, yes, unwanted and unhygienic dirt. Your house will be spotlessly clean and will be the envy of all your friends,” the man on the phone explained.
“How many weeks paying two dollars?” Đào asked.
“You would pay two dollars a week for two and a half years.” His voice rose slightly as he corrected her broken English, “You, Mrs Na-gu-Yen, are very fortunate to be selected for this opportunity. This is excellent value to you. We do not make this offer to everybody.”
Đào pressed her lips together and worked out the maths: 2.5 years was 130 weeks, times 2 equals $260, which was $160 more than what he said the cleaner was worth if she bought it outright. With her calculation, Đào did not feel the least bit invisible, or inadequate, as she told the man on the phone, “Me no-Englit!” and hung up.
Đào rushed back to the spare room and the embroidered top. In her haste to get to the phone earlier, she had dropped the orange top on the floor, and now the sleeve was wet, deepening the colour of the fabric and embroidery.
It reminded her of a holiday at the end of school, before she was about to be married. She had felt so womanly as she stood with her girlhood friends on the beach. They were wading out from the shore, to look at the mussels growing under the pier, laughing, and taking in the coastal air at Vũng Tàu.
She knew for certain now that she did not bring it with her on the boat journey over. The embroidered top had come from Vietnam. That style and workmanship did not exist here. Đào wondered how she had kept it for so long, it would have been after Vũng Tàu, then over twenty years of marriage, then her escape from her homeland as it descended into social and economic chaos.
She discovered other impossible things in her over-cluttered house:
children’s socks, her red wedding áo dài, her dead husband’s glasses. Things she did not bring with her to Australia. It was as though they had floated up to the surface from forgotten crevices deep below. Somehow, time had returned to the beginning, as though the past and the present had been shipwrecked against one another.
Seeing these objects made Đào realise more keenly how she had been reduced. All the things in her house, collected and cluttered together with all of her concentration and effort, had no story or meaning to her. The furniture, the modern appliances, the boxes of clean good scrap fabric, the plastic containers – all evoked nothing inside her.
She looked for Sinh amongst the impossible objects. For any clue about Sinh’s whereabouts here in Australia.
Nothing.
Horrified, Đào decided to incinerate her objects. Despite the pain this separation caused, she hoped that if she returned the impossible things to the past then Sinh could be found.
Trung
“Where is grandma?”
“She’s out in the backyard,” Tuyết answered.
“It is very cold for grandma to be outside,” Trung said.
“She’s keeping warm by the fire.”
“The fire? What fire?” Trung repeated.
“Grandma is burning her clothes in the steel drum. She poured some smelly water onto the clothes, and I wanted to come out and watch but she yelled at me, and made me to go back inside, but I watched the clothes floating up to the sky as smoke, and then the phone rang, and I ran to pick it up, and it was you, and now we are talking,” his daughter relayed.
Trung glanced along the cord of the public phone.
“Hurry and get grandma to come to the phone,” he told his daughter.
He could hear the creaking of the door, and a slice of traffic rumbling, as he waited for his mother to come in from the backyard.
“Sao?” his mother answered, as though phone calls were charged by the word.
“What are you doing? I am not going to let my daughter visit if there are fleas or lice there,” he said quickly.
“No, it has nothing to do with Tuyết,” then his mother’s voice became distant, “I’m only destroying what should not be here.”
Trung did not know what this meant, but pictured her house full of the junk she’d accumulated since they arrived. He had borne her disappointment in him for so long, that he did not even know who she was when she turned her attention elsewhere.