IN MY FINAL YEAR AT SCHOOL, I’M VOTED IN AS ARTS captain for my house. I had wanted to be a prefect and, according to the girls who helped count the votes, I may have been close. But the headmistress would have vetoed me anyway; I’m too unpredictable, and my family is too volatile. Arts captain it is instead, the perfect role for me. I’m so excited about the upcoming house drama competition that I lie awake much of the night trying to come up with the perfect choice of play.
I visit the State Library of Western Australia to do some research. When I look up at the brutalist grey entrance of the institution for the very first time, I feel as though I’m at university. The lobby is cavernous compared to anything at school.
Sitting at a long oak table, I leaf through pages and pages of texts, determined to find the perfect drama to win us the prize. In the end I settle on a flimsy little book. Once I’ve read it through three times, I know it’s exactly what I’m after.
I’ve brought a pocketful of twenty-cent pieces to push into the photocopy machine in return for A4 replicas of the book’s pages, but I choke a bit when I read a sign that only 10 per cent of any publication may be copied before copyright laws apply. This is unexpected. I weigh up my options.
Because I don’t want to break copyright infringement laws, I decide to steal the book instead. How much harder can it be than shoplifting bubblegum and clothes? Or lying to the police for Dad.
The front entrance of the library is an empty space, after which there’s the front desk with a rather stern woman seated behind it. Security plinths stand either side of the automatic door exit. I have a leather-tassel hippy satchel slung across my body.
An hour later, police escort me from the building.
I dropped the book in a pot plant next to the security plinths, planning to retrieve it from the other side once I was through – but when I reached for it the sensors picked it up anyway, and an embarrassing alarm filled the building. The librarian called the police, who arrived in a flash.
In the security room, we all watch the footage of my attempted theft. All I can do is tell the truth: I’m an arts captain at a well-known private girls’ school, and all I wanted was a book for the school play, and if this is reported to school I may lose my scholarship. The police are as perplexed as I am by my story, and by how articulate and genuinely remorseful I am, so they let me go with a warning and wish me the best of luck with the play.
I take up a library membership, borrow the book and photocopy it at home – technically breaching copyright law, but surely this isn’t as bad as the pirated videos – then give the play to all the girls performing. We have sleepovers in one of the empty bunkhouses, my old house, to rehearse.
When we win I almost knock Mrs Jackson out as I hoist the trophy in triumph. She smiles at me knowingly. ‘I always knew you would come through, Mimi.’
Given his own obsession with the law, Dad is adamant that I should become a lawyer, so I apply to do my two weeks of work experience at the Supreme Court.
The first person I meet is a tall, curly-haired clerk called Anthony. ‘Mimi KWA,’ he says. ‘Hey, you’re not related to Francis KWA, are you?’
I’m flattered. ‘Yes,’ I say proudly. ‘Yes, I am.’
He cocks his head and narrows his eyes behind his black rectangular glasses. ‘He’s quite well known around here, you know. A vexatious litigant.’
I’m thrilled. ‘Yes, yes, he is,’ I say enthusiastically.
I have no idea what he means, but later when I look it up I am mortified to find that it’s someone who sues people regardless of the merit of the case, often just to harass them. I find out later that Dad isn’t actually a vexatious litigant, as there has never been a court order against him. But now I know why the clerk laughed and walked off, and for the remainder of my two-week secondment I use my first name only, distancing myself from Kwa.
I attend quite a few court cases that fortnight, listening to the harrowing and brutal testimony of rape and murder trials, but the biggest court case in my life – the all-consuming one – is an ongoing battle of Dad’s that I’ve been helping him work on at home for about half a decade.
Dad is suing our local council, the City of Stirling, with the demand that they permit him to build a twenty-storey highrise on our block. His precedent, a few streets away, is the Observation City Hotel, built when the America’s Cup came to Perth in 1987. Alan Bond – or Bondy, as he’s popularly known – was the mogul behind the hotel. And the minute the plan was announced, Dad wanted to do the same thing on our residential street.
‘I’m just like Alan Bond,’ Dad says. ‘Bondy. He’s my mate. I am Bondy.’ Dad has only seen Bondy from a distance once, but he is so inspired by Observation City, a nineteen-storey hotel revised down from Bondy’s original 24-storey plan, it keeps him awake at night. City of Stirling approved the smaller skyscraper despite mass protests. ‘If my mate Bondy can build a skyscraper,’ says Dad, ‘so can I.’
Dad applies to rezone Mandarin Gardens for a highrise like Bondy’s. When the council says no, he unleashes a series of court cases like I have never seen before. These multiple related cases become a drain on the public purse. There are so many he literally runs from court to court some days, skidding into courtrooms and filing sessions while always apologising profusely: ‘Your Honourable Honour, I am humbly sorry for being late.’
When these Honourable Honours don’t see things the Kwa way, Dad decides to go for ‘a promotion’ from the Supreme to the High Court – because he’s ‘not getting a fair trial’ in the ‘buddy Supreme Court’. But legal work of this sort is always protracted, and it will be more than a year before Dad can be heard.
With no one managing Mandarin Gardens, and Dad spending even more time than usual on his court cases against the City of Stirling, the hostel further deteriorates. So too does Dad’s second marriage.
My world is in flux, and I struggle to keep my head above water. I can’t stand to live next door to Dad anymore, or to stay with Mum. I finish high school and spend a couple of months living in a tiny flat with my friend Narelle, both of us on the dole and still sharing our secret handshake from when we were eleven and twelve. It’s a boozed-up period, and I scald my ankle on a bar heater, causing a third-degree burn.
Rather than spiral further out of control, I defer university and make a plan to run away to England for a gap year. I’ll fund it with the money Aunty Mary Cinderella left me in the hope I would travel the world. At seventeen, I’m very fortunate to be able to abscond with a small fortune, and put distance between me and my messed-up life. Dad isn’t paying, so he’s fine with it, and Mum supports me whatever I decide, or is too ill to know. Paw Paw and Granddad are quietly pleased I am getting away and plan to meet me in London for a couple of weeks at some stage.
Kwa looking after Kwa, Aunty Mary knew I’d need to escape one day.