9

Leaving Simon’s car parked on the edge of the city, we pool our loose change and get a bamboo steamer’s worth of xiao long bao and a small container of chilli-spiked soya sauce from the dumpling house two doors down.

Simon has a range of plastic bags from his car boot clutched in both fists. ‘Just like a homeless guy,’ he mutters as we head up the stairwell to the accompanying rustle. ‘Thanks for the offer.’

I shrug apologetically as I unlock the front door. ‘Smells like teen poverty. Don’t thank me yet.’

Only hours ago, I would have killed to prevent him seeing this, but now it doesn’t seem to matter. Snapping on the light in the front hall, I say casually, ‘Just incidentally, if you reveal the location and condition of my crib, I will be forced to kill you.’

Simon’s laughter turns into a small sound of surprise as I light up the place in increments. It’s the bombsite I left it last night: everything hanging open; papers, books, cushions all over. As I pass through the living room, I turn on a lamp and fire up the ancient wall-unit gas heater. It hiccups a couple of times before roaring to life.

‘Were you…?’ Simon says hesitantly from behind me as I kick things aside on my way past Mum’s room.

‘Robbed?’ I reply, not bothering to explain. ‘No, I just like living like this. Bathroom’s that way.’

I shut the door to my bedroom before pointing him down the corridor, and he disappears into the tropics with his bundles of bags, swiftly engaging the bolt.

While I’m wolfing down my half of the dumplings at the kitchen bench, I hear water starting through the pipes and the mental picture of what he’s doing in there is enough to drive me outside. I head downstairs.

I can see Boon’s profile through the glass. Usually he has at least one customer with him, or a graceful-looking assistant in a flowing pantsuit with the kind of straight black hair I would trade my wavy mud-brown mane for in a heartbeat. But it’s late in the afternoon now, and he’s alone, so I open the door that leads into his shop from our stairwell. A bell tinkles and the old man looks up in surprise, his face clearing when he sees it’s just me.

‘Avicenna,’ he says kindly, before his expression goes complicated, anxious, and he half turns to look at something in the shelving.

Behind him are a couple of wooden stepladders giving access to rows of wooden shelves—separated into cubicles—that reach right up to the twelve-foot ceilings. Each cubicle is packed with lidded jars and tins with peeling paper labels. Propped in the gaps are calendars written in Chinese characters on paper thin as onion skin; incense holders; tiny shrines to unknown gods; characters out of Chinese mythology with long, flowing beards and wooden staves, cast out of shiny porcelain.

Boon runs one hand across the ends of his wild fringe of hair, before tugging the sleeves of his patterned pullover down. His gaze is enquiring, but wary.

‘You knew them,’ I state baldly, ‘before I was born.’

Boon blinks. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I did. I remember the day Greyson first met your mother.’ He smiles. ‘At some, ah, alternative lifestyle exhibition. They were very big, you know, in the 90s; almost every weekend, something “spiritual”. They had stalls next to each other. On their feet nine hours a day for three days straight. Who wouldn’t fall in love in such circumstances? Greyson told me. It was meant to be.’ Boon’s smile fades. ‘Greyson was the eldest son. The only son. His mother…’

The old man clears a small space, pushing pens and paperwork aside and sitting down on a battered metal stool behind the scratched, glass-fronted counter. He waves at me to come closer and I pull out a matching stool at the front of the counter, sitting on it gingerly. Up close, Boon’s eyes are eerie. There’s a distinct ring of blue around the dark irises, like his gaze is channelling an eclipse of the moon.

‘She never talked about where she came from, your mother. She was a person without history, without family…’ He gropes for the right words. ‘Greyson’s own mother suffered a lot to come here, and when she came, she still suffered. The language, you know; working in markets and restaurants all over town. Every day of the week, rising before dawn. She struggled to have Greyson. She was already old when he was born—she wanted him so much!—but her husband went to Sydney after, and he never… But by then, you know, she couldn’t stop working; she didn’t know any other way. She could never understand how her son would give it all up for someone so…’

His voice falters entirely to a stop.

‘White?’ I query finally.

Boon’s mouth turns down at the corners. ‘Different. We fear what we are not. That is something we all share.’

He sighs and gets back off his stool, pretending to straighten a couple of glass canisters on a shelf just behind him. ‘Your grandma doesn’t want to meet you,’ he mutters gruffly. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘She knows I’m here?’

He nods. ‘But she isn’t. I mean, she doesn’t live here anymore. She went back to Hong Kong a few years ago and she won’t come back now. Not even for you. The pain…’

I look down at the countertop, which has grown blurry, understanding.

‘Greyson was my godson and I loved him,’ Boon says simply, his back still to me, ‘the same way I loved your mother. When you were born, I knew. When Greyson…’ His voice wobbles. ‘I also knew. We were always in contact; your mum was good like that, always writing. When she said she was coming back to Melbourne after all these years, well, of course, you had to come back here and Ping—your grandma—she understood that. Your mother and father were happy here. It was already set up: just one new bed needed, a cleaner, not much work to do.’ Boon turns and looks at me beseechingly. ‘But Joanne insisted on taking the top floor this time. No changes, she said; I wasn’t to do anything. I couldn’t stop her.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, confused. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

Boon turns back and reaches into a wooden cubicle at head height, taking down a silver key on a short length of red string that had been hanging on a hook I hadn’t even noticed was there. ‘She borrows this sometimes. Just to sit. For thinking, she said. Your mother said you didn’t need to know—I wasn’t to show you, it wouldn’t help, you wouldn’t remember—but you should see it. It’s part of your history.’

He takes his own set of keys out of his khaki trouser pockets and comes around the counter.

First flicking off a bank of lights, he locks the shop’s main door from the inside and leads me into the stairwell that smells of decaying boxes, before locking up the shop from the outside. Pocketing his keys, he begins mounting the stairs. ‘The Mei Hua Bean Sprout Company,’ I say in sudden realisation. ‘That was my dad?’

Boon’s soft laughter precedes us both. ‘It is your grandma. It should have been your dad’s. Ping sold the business, years after he died, to someone who came out from the same village, on the same boat, in the late 1950s. She’s very traditional. She only kept the business name. And this building.’

I go rigid in shock, but Boon doesn’t see because he’s already opening the mysterious door on the second floor that leads to the apartment only ever filled with silent voices. He swings the door wide and says apologetically, ‘It’s very dusty. It’s been left exactly the way it was when they lived here, when you were born…’

Boon doesn’t come past the threshold. He just presses the key on a string into my hand and tells me that I will know where to find him.

The light is fading, but I don’t touch the switches, or any of the surfaces, which are covered in a furry pelt of dust. I stand in the doorway. The apartment is a carbon copy of ours upstairs, only nicer. It’s dusty, sure, with a closed-up, musty smell. But it still looks like someone could be living here. Every magazine on the coffee table is stacked in a neat tower; the furniture is heavy, minimalist, matching, all in hues of black and grey and coffee. A man-cave, bach-pad; frozen in time for years.

But then I start seeing feminine touches. A couple of small framed Japanese woodcuts on the walls: of blossoms and geisha, 19th century-style; a couple of handcrafted throw pillows on the brown leather Chesterfield that have Mum written all over them. I recognise the quilting blocks she must have used, because years later she was still making the same ones out of the fabric from T-shirts I’d grown out of. There are pillows just like them, upstairs in our apartment.

She’d called the pattern The Mariner’s Compass: a large, foregrounded, four-pointed star with a series of four rays set on the cross coming out from behind it, with a smaller, eight-pointed star sitting behind, for backgrounding. Mum taught it to me, she’d said once, piecing fabric together in front of the TV. One day, darl, I’ll teach it to you. And I think I drawled something along the lines of: I don’t do craft and you can’t bloody make me, so quit asking.

The cushions have a Mariner’s Compass set into the middle in an alternating pattern of blues and reds. I almost cross the rug and pick one of them up to hug it to me, to see if it smells of her—all warm vanilla and rose oil—but I force myself to stand still and just look.

This must have been where she came to commune with her dead. I can almost feel him, in here with me, the air heavy with presence.

There are two pairs of slippers by the side entry to the galley kitchen, in his-and-hers colours and sizes, and my eyes sting at how well suited they seem to each other, how they’ve been placed together with such care. It’s clear from the way the dust has been disturbed that Mum only ever came here to think in one place, and I gingerly follow her tracks now, as if walking more heavily might somehow raise the dead.

I’m led to the windowless bedroom they must have shared. There is a neatly made up double bed with a navy-patterned duvet cover and matching pillowslips, the feather pillows gone lopsided from gravity. My gaze takes in the Moses basket on a stand in the corner of the room, made of some woven kind of off-white plastic, a hospital-issue blanket draped over the end of it.

But the footprints I’m following don’t extend past a vintage armchair, set up at the foot of the bed that faces a retro-looking, empty wardrobe with two mirrored doors that swing outward from the centre. There are still hangers inside the wardrobe, pointing every which way, and both doors are wide open as if the thing has only just been hurriedly emptied.

Cautiously, I enter the dim bedroom and sit down in the chair, this tight and constant ache in my throat. I imagine Mum sitting here: then and now. I imagine her, then and now, listening for the front door to open; for the confident footsteps that will take him through the living room, down the hallway, to her. I imagine him placing a hand on her shoulder and the two of them looking at each other, reflected in the doors.

Only it’s Simon Thorn with one hand on my shoulder and my mobile phone in the other, and my eyes are wide, my scar dark with fearful blood. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks me hoarsely, his face shadowy in the mirror.

My throat is still clamped tight from the shock of seeing him here. But seeing him has also made me notice something behind him on the wall, to the left of the door. And I point to it now. Simon turns to look, then turns back, puzzled.

The walls are a faded olive-green colour, save for a darker, rectangular patch just beside the light switch. On the wooden bureau below is an empty, glass-fronted photo frame, the warped cardboard backing lying abandoned beside it. I take my phone from Simon’s outstretched hand and see Wurbik’s number repeated in the screen of missed calls.

‘Please turn around and go back outside,’ I say quietly as I rise from the armchair and hit call back.

I meet Wurbik on the ground floor. Boon’s back inside his shop, talking to a customer, but I see his eyes slide sideways, taking in the fuzz gathering outside. ‘Ask him,’ I say urgently, ‘what she took. Get him to tell you. Then tell me. Please? It’s important I know what it was.’

Wurbik nods as we mount the stairs, a police photographer and a forensics guy following closely behind us.

When we stop on the first landing, Wurbik reminds me again: ‘She’ll be on the evening news; it’s already on the net, just went live.’ Then he opens the door to the apartment and the three of them fan out, making very little noise for such big men.

Upstairs, Simon—now freshly shaven, in a clean but dingy white T-shirt and grey trackpants with frayed cuffs—turns the TV up loud as I sweat the lentils with a spoonful of tinned curry powder and chopped onion, then drop two cans of tomatoes right over the top and leave it on a low flame to turn into sludge. Dinner sorted.

I get out of the kitchen in time for the lead story, which is Mum.

There is that cropped photo of her beaming, long hair hanging down across her shoulders, big blue eyes crinkled up at the corners, my tanned and disembodied arm slung around the base of her neck.

‘Wow, she looks young,’ Simon exclaims softly. ‘You wouldn’t—’

‘Know we were related?’ I say absently and he falls silent, listening.

I don’t really take in the words that the pretty reporter lady is using, although some part of my brain must be ticking away, mulling them over, because later, a long while after we’ve turned off the TV, I remember she mentioned they found Mum’s bank-issue name tag. It was in the gutter near one of the exits to the Flagstaff Gardens, the pin badly bent, like it had been hastily ripped off. Wurbik hadn’t mentioned that bit, the same way Malcolm had omitted to mention that he was Homicide.

Simon’s writing our talk—the one about John Donne and the secret wife—sitting on the floor at the coffee table, while I stare into space between running to answer the phone. It’s been ringing off the hook, with especial surges after each newsbreak and late edition. Like every person who ever met Mum somehow caught the news and wants to share it with me. Old clients, mostly; sobbing about how extraordinary she was and wanting to know whether she’d be back, like I could answer that. The ones who are digging for information, I hang up on straightaway.

‘It must be a terrible thing,’ I say aloud to the water stains on the living-room ceiling, ‘to be so needed.’

Simon ignores me, his lips moving silently as he reads parts of the talk to himself. It occurs to me that the two of us must be the two least-needed people in all the world.

After a while, I just hang up as soon as I hear crying down the line. It’s easier for everyone concerned, seeing as I never got around to having that standard response ready.

‘I’m going to leave the phone on message bank,’ I say roughly, as Simon peers into his banged-up laptop screen with a pinched expression—the one I always call his resting bitch face—still ignoring me. I scoop up our dhal-encrusted dinner bowls bad-temperedly, along with all the partially drunk cups of instant coffee that have gone cold. Still his expression doesn’t change. ‘Going to bed?’ I bark as he continues typing and deleting and ignoring. ‘Hey, I said…’

‘Yeah,’ he replies, not looking up and not missing a beat, ‘eventually. But not with you so stop asking and go, already. You make too much damned noise for someone who claims they aren’t doing anything. It’s distracting.’

Huffing away across the room, I drop all the crockery on the counter with a loud clatter that makes him sigh, before turning back to the phone and engaging the recorded message button. Mum never had it on record because she didn’t like messages building up. She always said: If it’s important, they’ll call back.

But mediation is necessary tonight. And I know I’ve done the right thing when I’m soaking our dinner things in the sink and a couple of criers get through to the recorded machine voice and hang up abruptly, cut off mid-sob. I turn the volume on the ringer down, conscious that Simon will be out here later, sleeping on a couch two sizes too small for anyone. Except maybe Mum. But as I’m turning off the kitchen light, the phone goes again, and this time there’s the beep and then it’s just silence being recorded.

One cat and dog, I count automatically. Two cat and dog.

I get up to ten cats, ten dogs, and still there is only breathing. The constancy, the peculiar quality of the waiting, the watchfulness, seem familiar, and I remember all the hang-ups. I snatch up the handset, conscious that all this is being recorded.

Simon’s humming to himself in the other room as I say sharply, ‘Avicenna speaking.’

It might be my imagination, but the breathing seems to grow erratic, anticipatory. Usually at this point, whoever it is just puts the phone down. But tonight the silence stretches out further; the faintest electronic buzz in the background. And I want to leap into that buzzing void with questions and threats and fury, but the rational part of me is saying in Mum’s voice: Do not engage. It was a lesson we learnt the hard way from Graham of Rainbow. But the void is still open between us, beckoning, and unable to stop myself I grate, ‘Who is this? What do you want?’

The breathing stops altogether and it’s unbearable: whether to hang up or hang on. Then across the line I hear a voice—hoarse and male—say: ‘Slut got what was coming. And you’ll get yours, too.’

I scream, dropping the handset like it’s made of maggots, and hear Simon overturning the coffee table behind me as he surges to his feet.