by S. L. Lim
Sometimes they bickered. ‘Clean this up!’ Evelyn yelled, finding the kitchen dusted with a light shimmering of icing sugar and a faint layer of grease, Kat having taken it upon herself to make cupcakes for a friend’s birthday.
‘But I already did.’
‘No, you have not! Does this look clean to you? This is not what clean looks like.’
‘Well, I can’t right now. I’m going to Anna’s place, remember? I’ve got to go, like, now.’ Kat fiddled with her phone. ‘I’ll hire an Airtasker to clean it up.’
‘You will not. You think money grows on trees?’
‘God, Ma, I’ll pay for it.’
‘You don’t have the money.’
‘I do! From my ang pow. Also, I have a voucher.’
‘No, I won’t allow it.’
‘Why not?’
Evelyn narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t want other people coming into our house, into my kitchen.’
‘Other people are not the enemy, Ma.’
This Yannie listened to open-mouthed. It had never occurred to her before, that other people might not be the enemy.
Otherwise, Yannie found she had more time on her hands than she was used to. Back home, once the typing and the teaching were done, there was always something else to attend to. It was a constant battle against the forces of entropy that waged war on her apartment: bulbs needing changing, oil deposits that had built up on the gas range, lizards laying eggs in the stack of towels that she kept in the bottom of the wardrobe. And the endless business of meals, meals, meals: even just cooking for yourself, when an egg and a bowl of rice would do, there was the buying of ingredients and lighting of stoves and the encrusted remains in your bowl an hour later. Though she loved restaurant dinners, Yannie had an instinctive aversion to eating out, the consequence of a lifetime of frugality. Evelyn and Kat experienced no such guilt. They ordered takeaway as if they were evolved for it.
For the first time in her life since early childhood, she had more free time than she knew what to do with. It was an odd sensation. At first, she felt obliged to run around the house seeking chores, but she found that this inspired puzzlement and obligatory thanks rather than gratitude, so she stopped doing it. Oddly, this seemed to make the family respect her more. It was as if, by being found with a washcloth, a vacuum cleaner in her hand, she herself took on the properties of the menial task she had been observed doing: sucking dust, wiping grime, washing away shit. If Kat walked into the room while Yannie was cleaning, she would exclaim ‘Awww, how nice of you to help!’ in tones of patent insincerity. She would then proceed to drape herself across the most inconvenient piece of furniture so Yannie had to vacuum around her, while Kat used an implement attached to her nail clipper to push back her cuticles. (Until recently, Yannie hadn’t even known that there was such a thing as cuticles). If, on the other hand, she discovered Yannie lounging, reading a book, she would whisper ‘Oh!’ and make herself scarce immediately, seeming to recognise her aunt’s unarticulated need for privacy.
They needed her so much, Evelyn and Kat – it was as if they’d spent their whole lives waiting for her to show up. They told her over and over again – Kat in so many words (‘You’re the best!’), Evelyn more obliquely – how kind she was, and how much it meant that she was there for them and listening. It shocked her, how quickly she became embedded in their family dynamic. She took meals with them, listened to Shan grumble affably about the fattiness of the meat: ‘Setting me back a whole work-out, these worthless calories,’ he would complain. Evelyn would snap, ‘Eat a smaller portion then!’, and whether it was rudeness or some ritual they had come up with between them, Yannie couldn’t tell.
And yet she always knew she was the poor relation. It didn’t matter how much they took her into their confidence. The very reason that they could confide in her, laugh with her, vent to her, was precisely because she wasn’t part of their proper, permanent family. They could speak to her freely and without fear of judgement, because Yannie’s judgement was never a thing that they had valued much in the first place. And even if it was, even if they thought more of her now than when she’d first moved into their house, it didn’t matter anyway. Soon she would return to her natural condition of irrelevance, sent back to where she came from. Back to her habitat, living off secretarial work and cash under the table, spending her evenings combing the stores for cheaper toilet paper.
She wrote long emails to Jun, to Shuying, and to the parents of her various tutoring students. To Jun she sent brief, chatty little missives filled with funny anecdotes, emphasising how grateful she was for his help in organising the trip. To Shuying she tried to write only words which were beautiful and true. She couldn’t think of very many of those, so she ended up writing very little. At the same time, she couldn’t help showing off: the obligatory snap of herself standing on the Opera House steps, or on Bondi Beach, before the sprawling ocean. Kat loved the beach, but Evelyn avoided it, saying she didn’t want to get sand in her clothes. She looked at Kat in a faintly judgemental manner, as if her enjoyment of said sand was a negative reflection on her character.
Jun replied immediately, of course. He wrote back in long, meandering sentences, trying to impress her with his erudition, since he knew that she read novels. He sought to convey depth and sensitivity of feeling where none was warranted (‘When I saw the moth, it made me think about the suffering of your parents’), attempted humour and embarrassed himself (‘The journey was so slow – instead of an express train, maybe they should call it an express-try-ing!’), and generally inspired pity and boredom rather than what he was obviously aiming for. Shuying took a long time to write back. Eventually she emailed Yannie with a single line: ‘I’m glad that you’re enjoying yourself!’ Yannie lingered over the words, and knew just how much they meant, and how little.
One mystery remained: that of Evelyn and Shan. She hardly ever saw her brother, since he was always at work, but everything about Evelyn gave off an aura of happiness and success – of triumph, even. To Yannie, she seemed to stand upon a pinnacle, both professional and personal. She loved life, and life was fond of her, which made it all the more inexplicable that she had attached herself to Shan. Either her brother was a brilliant psychopath who had succeeded in charming and manipulating his wife to the point of blindness (see: Yannie’s whole childhood, the crumpet incident), or there was a side of him Yannie simply wasn’t aware of. Maybe when Yannie wasn’t around, he was so relentlessly charming, intelligent and erotically satisfying that from Evelyn’s point of view, these qualities made up for all the rest of him.
She assembled a case for the defence:
-that he was financially competent and seemed to have a knack for making good investments
-that, through lifting weights, he had retained a good figure and strong arms for a man of his age
-that he had a sense of humour, and also told stories with a better-than-average level of expressiveness
-the way he sometimes, with unconscious affection, put his arm round Evelyn’s back while she was working in the kitchen.
And for the prosecution:
-the flying crumpet/ mailing incident
-the time he shouted at Yannie – literally yelled at her in an enclosed space, inside the car – because she unbuckled her seatbelt too early, before the engine was switched off. This caused the belt alarm to beep for two seconds. ‘WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHO DOES THAT? WHAT THE FUCK!’ (Evelyn, who was present, said nothing but looked studiously out of the window.)
-the loud crashes and stamping which they sometimes heard coming from his study. The way Evelyn and Kat showed no surprise when this occurred but knew to make themselves scarce – Evelyn finding some errand outside the house, Kat disappearing into her room and closing the door. If she did stay home, Evelyn would somehow vanish without actually leaving – occupying less space, so that your eyes slid over her even if she was in your vicinity
-the time he asked Evelyn to move her feet. Because he didn
’t have space, and it was making him uncomfortable. They were in a restaurant, she sitting opposite him. And Yannie looked under the table and saw that Shan’s legs were stretched fully out, almost perpendicular to his torso, whereas hers were tucked under the chair. There was nowhere Evelyn could move to make more room, apart from turning sideways on her seat. And then Yannie looked at Shan’s face and saw that he was grinning, a small, self-satisfied smile, that of a boy who has successfully outwitted the henpeckers and nags and deserves to be praised for his moment of triumph.
At any rate, after Yannie had been in Sydney for a month, Evelyn invited her on a tour of Shan’s office. She accepted gratefully, of course.
*
The first thing she noticed was the dolphins. It seemed every surface was adorned with at least one LCD screen, across which floated images of improbable clarity: a flock of parrots, dewdrops on cherry blossoms, a shoal of brightly coloured fish drifting across a coral reef. The pictures were so vivid it was mildly unnerving. Real life didn’t even look this good.
‘Wah, they have done it so nicely. Look at the colour! So clear, just like real life! No need to go to all these places now.’ Evelyn was talking very quickly. Yannie wondered if it was compulsory for wives to be this excited about their husband’s doings. Heterosexual women, she thought. What a life. Perhaps her deviancy had been a gift after all.
The company was called Elite Recruitment Solutions, of which Shan was the CEO. The man at the front desk wore a waistcoat, gave Yannie a visitor’s pass and smiled scarily naturally, like it wasn’t a job, like he’d just wandered in for the opportunity of meeting her. She wondered how angry it must make him, underneath, having to dress and perform like that for a task which required no skill whatsoever. But his smile carried no trace of resentment, and he appeared genuinely happy to do his job in the most professional manner possible.
They were greeted by a slick young Asian man, who introduced himself as Nicholas Leung, although you were allowed to call him Nick. ‘Hi, I’m Nick,’ he said, in a way that made Yannie want to hit him. ‘It’s great to meet you – and to see you again, of course, Mrs Huang.’
He smiled at Evelyn in a way that Yannie thought conspiratorial. Then he turned his eyes on Yannie. He was so polite, making such a show of not noticing her fallen face and dumpy clothes that she knew exactly what he thought of her. ‘I’ll just take you to the waiting area.’ Evelyn waved. She would not be accompanying Yannie. She was going to catch up with some old friends from Allwick’s.
Nicholas seemed to be trying to get rid of her, so she resolved to hang around in his vicinity for as long as possible. It wasn’t hard – she just had to stay close to his elbow, asking questions which he answered in unfascinating detail. ‘And this is the conference room, where we host talks with our clients, and hold meetings with leaders in the industry. This is one of our workspaces, where we have computers available for visitors.’ He looked at her dubiously, as though wondering whether she had heard of computers before. ‘For security purposes, you’ll have to ask the front desk for a login. Wi-fi is available in common areas. And this is the breakout room, where we have amenities for all staff.’
‘That sounds nice,’ Yannie said. ‘But what are amenities, in this context? I thought it usually meant bathrooms.’
She was pleased to see that Nicholas looked annoyed. ‘Amenities,’ he repeated. ‘Coffee machines. Boiling water. Tea. Now, I won’t detain you any longer.’ She took a moment to be amused by the transparently false implication it was he who was detaining her. ‘I’ll leave you for a quick break before my boss comes out of his meeting. Then he can show you around.’ He said my boss with a faint aura of desire, the way that Evelyn said my husband.
She made her way into the kitchen. There was, as promised, a coffee machine, loaded with capsules that looked like they had come out of a sci-fi movie from the sixties. There were gleaming stainless-steel pitchers of chilled milk, and a cornucopia of teabags. Yannie had never seen so many flavours before. Up to this point, she had thought that tea itself was a flavour; at most, you had jasmine, green and black. The teas were creatively labelled, with names that promised narratives well beyond what she imagined a beverage could feasibly accomplish. Russian Caravan, Oriental Geisha, Scandanavian Breezes. She was just debating whether to stash a fistful in her handbag when a Chinese man appeared.
‘Hello! Hello!’ He smiled at her with the first genuine smile she’d seen since she entered the building. He looked about sixty-odd years old. Though his enunciation was Aussie, she recognised residual traces of a Malaysian accent. ‘My name is Meng. You look a bit lost. Let me help you – we oldies must stick together.’ She experienced a twist of shock mixed with sadness that he saw her that way, too.
‘I’m well, thank you.’ She smiled back at him. ‘Actually, I am a bit overwhelmed – I don’t often come to a place like this. That young boy, Nicholas, has been showing me around. Oh, and I should tell you – I don’t actually work here, I am just a visiting relative. Shan is my older brother, actually.’
‘Your brother? Wah, the CEO? Oh, wonderful, wonderful.’ The warmth of his smile never faded, but Yannie thought she detected a new guardedness in his tone. As if to make up for it, he held out his hand rather formally. She took and shook. ‘Yes, a very –’ pause – ‘a very talented guy. Really taken us all in a new direction.’ His lips turned down slightly at the sides.
‘How long have you worked here?’
‘Thirty-eight years. I was one of the first, here when the company began. From when I first started working – I came to Melbourne, you see, to study. Then it was hard, there were many problems with my visa. But there was a very kind man, the boss at that time, Dr Stafford, who offered me this job. An Aussie guy. I have been here ever since.’ His eyes softened when he said ‘Dr Stafford’. Something about him made her think of Jun. ‘It has been a wonderful experience. Watching a business grow, right from the start … but never mind, it is all ancient history now.’
‘Where is your hometown?’
‘Kota Kinabalu.’
‘Oh, very nice.’
‘You have visited?’
‘No … I have a friend from there, though.’ Jun’s family also lived in Kota Kinabalu. ‘It must be so interesting to see a business changing over time. Growing up, just like children. Is Dr Stafford still alive?’
‘Yes …’ Meng looked out the window. ‘Although he is getting doddery, these days. He lives in a nursing home. The children over here are different, how they treat their parents … Even after all this time, I find it hard to accept.’ He let out a short laugh and gestured non-specifically in the air, as if to wipe it clean of unauthorised sentiment. ‘How much longer will you be here in Sydney?’
‘Ah, I have not decided. At the moment, indefinitely. I’m staying with my sister-in-law.’ Apropos of nothing, she added: ‘I have a friend back home who you remind me of. His name is Jun.’
‘Oh, how lovely. Is he a close friend?’ Almost unconsciously Meng raised a hand to mould his hairline.
‘Yes, he has been very helpful to me. He helped me organise this trip to Australia. So much trouble – it would be hard to do without him.’
‘Oh, very nice. Very nice … Oh, look who is here. Well, I will leave you to it.’ Meng seemed in a hurry to depart. For a moment she wasn’t sure who he was talking about, and then she saw her brother approaching in the middle distance. ‘See you, Meng,’ she called after his retreating back.
Her brother came towards her. She watched him with a strange sense of deja vu: that slightly lopsided gait, familiar from childhood. An odour of importance seemed to gather around him like musk. It appeared he was a friendly kind of boss, stopping amiably to chat with several peons who orbited his person. ‘Good to see you again, Alvin. How was your weekend?’ Everything jovial he said was greeted with little outbursts of laughter, even if it wasn’t really a joke. At first she thought it was nervousness on the part of his underlings, relief that they hadn’t i
mmediately humiliated themselves while speaking. Underneath that, though, there seemed to be genuine pleasure, affection even, which she found strange. It was not as if he did or said anything especially endearing – a nod, a pro forma remark about the weekend or the weather. But that was what made it funny, she realised: small indications that their ruler was a human, just like them. And yet he obviously wasn’t, or at least not on the same terms. He acted, they reacted. He moved, they moved around him.
‘Well, mei mei,’ he said, beaming avuncularly in her direction. She noticed that he still had a dimple in his right cheek, which their mother had found so charming when they were little. Noticed, too, that for some reason he couldn’t quite look her in the eye. ‘A big place, eh? Not bad, eh? Very different from where we came from.’ Not for the first time, she was struck with an inexplicable sense that he was looking for her approval. ‘This is not the end point, mind you. I have plans to make it bigger. It wasn’t even a proper company when I first came. More a boutique family concern.’ He chuckled to himself after saying the words, attention turned to some inward hilarity she knew he wasn’t going to bother explaining. ‘Now we are planning to go public.’
‘Really? You’re not public already?’ Yannie glanced around the room, the chrome and black coffee machines, the curved glass pitchers of iced water, wondering idly why they did that – why did Australians need to ice their water when the weather was so cold over here? Anyway, it did not look how she would imagine a family business.
‘No. Well – ‘ Shan sighed, gestured as if about to embark on an explanation, then abruptly let his hands drop. ‘The ownership structure is quite weird. Let me be honest – it’s a complicated bullshit situation. I predict we will be able to float in eight, maybe fourteen months maximum.’ He snapped his fingers in dismissal, indicating their meeting was at a close. ‘But don’t go spreading this around, OK? Blood is thicker than water, ah.’
