by Michael Earp
“Are you okay?” New asks, turning around to see my face that feels like it’s lost all its blood.
“I’m scared.”
“Of the roots?”
“The ocean.” It comes out in a whisper. It’s a betrayal to say this. The ocean gives us everything. Fish, seaweed, salt.
“Hey.” They put the oar down and hug me. “It’s all right. We’re all right.”
I breathe in their smell; they smell like the steam that comes off of rice when it’s cooked. So do I probably, we couldn’t air out the cabin because of the storm last night. Their skin is peeling a bit on their shoulder; they were sunburned while stuck in the rope.
“Thanks.”
I don’t believe them, but the sentiment is nice.
When we get to the market, the sky is still dark, and it still hasn’t even rained. The ocean rumbles under us, no storm yet. No huge waves. Just the constant threat of them.
New ties up our boat, and then we walk down a salt-encrusted pier to a market. New rummages around, getting rice and dried fruits and vegetables, some jerky, enough for both of us for a while I think. The market is mostly a bunch of tents, some in much more disrepair than others.
We stop at a shack; it has actual windows, a roof made of iron.
“It looks a bit like your place,” I say.
“There’s a few of them. Did you see the one we passed? Most are abandoned, people don’t wanna live on the ocean. I think this might’ve been the first one built, it looks the oldest, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only one on land. Like in this exact style.”
We go inside. It’s dark, musty. I sneeze a couple times. There’s a fireplace, and I haven’t seen one of those in I-don’t-even-know-how long. Every surface is covered in things that could be useful. Fishhooks, string, boxes, matches, cans of gas, dry food, tin openers. Everything you could need.
There’s a very wrinkled, grey-haired person behind the counter. Old, but very alert.
“New,” they say. “‘Bout time.”
“Sorry Peony, it was the storm.” They hug; Peony claps New on the back a couple of times. “I found a castaway. Marling.”
Peony looks me up and down, though I’m not sure what the look on her face is. I know she’s judging me in some way, but for what? She looks familiar.
“Castaway?”
“I’m from the pipes.”
“You’re a long way from home, Marling.”
“Do you know them? Zaid?”
Her eyes spark up. “You know Zaid? Big beard, loves fishing, wears an eyepatch?”
“Like the old pirates.”
Peony laughs. “That’s exactly right. How is he?”
“I … I don’t know. The storm, he said it would be okay to go out and fish. I did. I don’t know if he went out or not. I don’t know what’s happened.”
Peony seems to shrink a little. “He was usually always right.”
“I know.”
New looks from Peony to me, trying to figure out something. “That your brother?”
Peony nods. “No matter. Are you going back to the pipes, Marling?”
I nod, and I think of the cold wind, the rubbish that piles up inside. The noise and the smell of so many other people. The cosiness of New’s cabin, the warmth and the calm of the mangrove forest.
“You’ll need a map,” Peony says. “And a compass.”
“Yes.”
“Sanaa will know more about the map. New, show them the compasses.”
“Ver,” New corrects.
“Show ver the compasses.”
New takes my hand and leads me to a shelf around the side. The aisle is so thin I have to suck in my breath. “You know how to use these, yeah?” they ask.
I nod. There’s one that’s not too fancy, another whose needle is pointed the completely wrong way. There’s one with a faded red cover on it, which is attached to a chain. It’s chipped and old, and I feel like it looks like one of the cheaper ones here.
“I think she might just give these to you,” New says. “Because of Zaid. She hasn’t seen him in years. Thought he was lost forever. You’ve already given her something.”
“Marling,” Peony calls from the counter.
When we go back, compass in hand, Peony is sitting down behind the counter, writing in a big lodge book. Sanaa stands at the counter. She’s a bit older than Peony, her hair wilder. She leans on a walking stick and she’s got a map laid out on the counter.
“This is where you came from.” She points at the map. It’s the coastline, the old coastline, of Queensland. She takes a greylead and marks an “X”, a few centimetres from the old coast. “That’s where the pipes would be, I reckon. Give or take a couple of Ks.” She marks Seal Rock, a few other landmarks. “And this is where we are.”
I’m not sure how many kilometres it is, but the “X” she marks is far down the coast. Really far.
“Wow,” New breathes beside me. “Lucky you didn’t go out to sea, Marling.”
The wide ocean spreads across the page. There’s more water than even on the map, now, and it scares me. There’s so much.
“New,” Peony says, and New and I jump. “It’s getting bad out there. You should go.”
I look out through one of the dusty windows, and there are the dark grey-blue clouds, rolling quick. The wind is picking up.
“Do you want this map?” Sanaa asks me. I can see Peony watching us from the corner of my eye.
“Yes,” I say, because I feel like I should.
Peony seems to sigh.
“Do you have anything to trade? For this and the compass?” Sanaa asks.
“I’ve got some things,” New says, getting their satchel out and pouring the contents over the map. Things they’ve scavenged, I’m guessing, though I don’t really know what any of it does.
Peony gets up and looks at what New has offered. She and Sanaa exchange a glance, Sanaa nods. “We’ll take these for the map,” Peony takes a few metal screws, fishhooks, some other metal things I don’t know the use of, “and you can have the compass. For telling me about Zaid.”
“Thank you,” I start to gush, but New pulls me away.
“We have to go.”
Peony waves once, and we’re off. It’s started to rain, drizzling cold spikes made colder by the wind that almost knocks me off the pier. We get into the boat, and though the water is tumultuous, we make it back to the shack.
“Do you think she’ll storm again?” New asks me when we’re finally changed into dry clothes, sitting on the porch.
“I don’t know.” I look out at the clouds that are black now, but the distrust is there. The lines on my arms are aching, the ones Zaid called stormlines as he drew them on me. “Tomorrow, if the sea is calm, I’ll teach you how to fish. Thank you for getting the map for me.”
They smile. “Anytime.”
I don’t know if I want the map. I like the mangrove forest, the little town I got a glimpse of.
“Marling? What’s wrong?” New touches my arm.
“Nothing. I just …” I run a hand through my hair, the shells rattling. “I’m just worried. About getting back safe.”
“It’ll be all right. You’re made for the sea.”
“I do love her.”
“It was more than luck that brought you here, I reckon,” New says, standing up. “I’m gonna make lunch, will you make dinner?”
I nod, they start to cook, I keep staring out into the sea.
Being near someone is wonderful. There are lots of people in the pipes, sure. But no one I can sleep beside, no one I can hug or tap on the shoulder. No one to cook for.
I hold up the chunk of dried fish, show New how to put it on the fishhook so that it won’t fall off. It takes them a while, but at least they manage to not get the hook in their finger.
“Most of my scars on my hands are from fishhooks,” I tell them. “Or knives, gutting fish and stuff. A turtle bit off the tips of these fingers.”
“I didn’t realise it
was so dangerous, fishing.”
“Also the possibility of drowning, don’t forget that. And watch out for your toes, too.”
We had to come out quite a fair way to where the water is deep enough to find the fish we want. It makes me jittery. I run my fingers through the water at the side of the boat, and I know it’s okay. We’re okay. She cradles us in her water.
The day is warm, sometimes freezing. Depends on the wind. I’m wearing one of New’s old coats.
“Hey, New,” I say after a while.
“Do you just use a line? Is that what happens normally?”
“Oh. No, I use a net. Or traps, like lobster cages. They’re good. I lost mine during the storm.”
“Right. I was wondering, because this seems slow.”
“This is my favourite way to do it,” I say, reeling my line in before casting it out again. “I like feeling this connected to everything.”
After we catch two pretty good-sized fish, we start to pack up. New didn’t like to take the hook out of the fish’s mouths, but I had to teach them, so they did it. They vomited after the first one.
“What if I didn’t want to, um …” I pause. I feel like I should feel guilty for thinking this; I worked hard to make sure I had a life there. “What if I didn’t want to go back to the pipes?”
“What, stay here? In the mangroves?”
I nod.
“Would you wanna though? Don’t you have people in the pipes?”
“No. Remember when you asked me? I said I was alone. I feel less alone here.”
“If that’s what you want. You won’t miss Zaid?”
“I will,” I say. “I don’t know. I was thinking I could use that old abandoned shack, the one like yours on the way to the market.”
New thinks for a moment. “Let’s get these fish home, and then we’ll go look at the shack, hey?”
We keep the fish in a cool box filled with water on the porch. I’ll have to teach New how to gut them, and I know they’re not looking forward to that.
The day has warmed up, and we shed the jackets as we paddle through the trees towards the old shack. It’s slightly smaller than New’s, but from what I can see on the outside, the structure of it looks okay. It has glass in the window frames, and one of the windows is smashed. There are a few holes in the wall.
“As long as the frame is okay, it should be fine,” New says as we tie my boat to the shack.
I grip the ladder. It’s attached firmly, so I start to climb. The floorboards of the porch are sticking up in a few places, yet the wood isn’t soft when I step onto it. It creaks a little as I place my second foot down, let my whole weight settle. It’s fine.
The door has rusted off the hinges and hangs in the doorway. I move it to the side, leaving it propped up against the wall.
It’s draughty; the sunlight slips in-between some of the beams. I can fix those, though. Scavenge some planks from somewhere, get a hammer. Nails. The roof is intact, and it’s the same as New’s with the skylight in the middle.
It’s completely empty.
It would be so quiet here. I wouldn’t have to worry about guarding my things from other people in the pipes. I could have a proper bed. Could tie my boat underneath, and it wouldn’t be the only thing I had. I could have New as a neighbour, we could go to the markets and out fishing. I wouldn’t be alone.
I can hear New come up the stairs behind me. I move to let them into the room.
“Not much,” they say. “In good nick but.”
I nod. “Could be home.”
From some angles, my cousin looks a lot like me: short hair; super skinny; usually found in jeans and a collared shirt. Add enough hair product and both of us vaguely resemble missing members of some Asian boy band. The fact I’m male and she’s female doesn’t seem to dim the resemblance much. Sometimes genetics outweigh gender.
My Australian family and I were visiting Hong Kong for one of those family reunions that’s emotionally rewarding and draining in equal measure. As one of my friends once noted, group travel always means you get to see half the things in twice the time. Mum is one of seven siblings, which means there are countless cousins spread across three continents. Our family dinners in Hong Kong were so big, so inclusive of aunties, uncles, siblings, cousins and blood-related whoevers, that we kept joking we must’ve been related to at least most of the seven million-plus people on the peninsular.
It was the weekend and a small gaggle of us had met up in Mong Kok before hailing a bus together to get to dinner. After climbing out of the humid fug into the blasting chill of aircon, other family members settled into seats, wiped themselves down with the backs of their hands and immersed themselves in their own gossip. My cousin and I found a seat together and carved out a little conversation corner. We didn’t get to see each other much, but on the few occasions we were in the same country, we always gravitated to each other at family gatherings. Spend your entire life feeling like the only one in the room, you seek each other out when you’re in actual rooms together.
And when you grow up as the only queer person in your immediate family, there’s an unspoken shorthand about the queers of an extended tribe. My Cantonese was terrible, so we chatted in English about work, health, other stuff, before it turned to the inevitable: my boyfriend, her girlfriend and just good old-fashioned gayness in general.
“So,” my cousin – let’s call her Melissa – said, half-joking. “Do you think being gay runs in our family?”
We imagined it was probably a question our relatives had asked each other about us in hushed tones behind our backs. Some might see our family tree as practically infested with homosexuality. Besides us, we had another gay cousin back in Australia and another female cousin in Hong Kong had dated women for years before she’d married a man. Sometimes the younger cousins among us wondered whether certain uncles or aunties were gay – although it was always hard to tell the difference between a closeted Chinese adult, or someone who was a run-of-the-mill heterosexual Chinese adult who was sexually repressed and socially sexless. Still, was gayness over-represented in our family?
“I mean, there are heaps of cousins,” I said. “And one in eleven people are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, so–”
“Wah!” Melissa said. “Really? One in eleven seems like a lot.”
“It’s what most studies show, I think.” In fact I knew it, because I’d recently done the research for a story I’d been writing.
“Huh,” Melissa said, looking at the crowds outside with new eyes. “Maybe you’re right. Even in Hong Kong, you see it more and more nowadays. You’ve seen women holding hands, right? Not men, though – they would have to be very brave to hold hands – but definitely the women. I think being gay is becoming more common.”
“Is it becoming more common?” I asked. “Or have we always been there, and things are just opening up more?”
In some ways, my cousins and I grew up in places with similar histories, at least when it came to homosexuality. Both the Queensland state government and the Hong Kong legislature effectively decriminalised homosexuality in the same year: 1991. But while Australia had gone on to legalise adoption for same-sex couples and pass marriage equality into law, same-sex couples were still on the down low. While my boyfriend and I held hands in public in Sydney, my cousin and her girlfriend operated on a need-to-know, stealth-like basis in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was a far more socially liberal place than a lot of Asian cities and regions, however you wouldn’t hold hands as a male couple. Even heterosexual displays of affection weren’t exactly frowned upon; they’d feel out of place – as if you were making out in a family restaurant. Officially, my cousin and her girlfriend were just really good friends; even the family members who knew they were together never acknowledged it openly. My cousin and her girlfriend were simply very good mates who … you know, never left each other’s side. And lived together. And slept in the same bedroom.
When my cousin and her girlfriend visited Australia for a
working holiday, it took them a while to adjust to the reality that none of us really had a problem with gayness. I’d had a boyfriend for years; our Australian cousin was a lesbian and lived with her partner. At first Melissa and her girlfriend wouldn’t make body contact at all; wouldn’t hold hands or even refer to each other as partners. After a while, as if learning by our example, they relaxed. It takes a long time to break out of the engrained muscle memory of having to hide in plain sight.
The bus arrived and our small army of a family disembarked. As my siblings happily accosted my cousin for a chat, I hung back with my mum and aunty – now in their sixties and eighties – making sure they didn’t feel left behind.
“It’s really a mystery to me,” my aunty said to Mum in Cantonese, pointing to my cousin. “See how she cuts her hair so short? She’s always been like this. I don’t understand.” My aunty loved her niece – had been a second mother to her for years – yet didn’t understand why she didn’t conform. “Why does she dress like that?”
I took a breath. Whenever I visited Hong Kong, this backchat about my cousin’s dress sense came up constantly. My Chinese instincts told me to remain quiet and respect my elders, and after my grandmother died, my aunty – my dai yee ma – had become the head matriarch of the family. In Chinese culture, you don’t question or talk back to your elders. My Australian side however is loud and enjoys challenging authority. Who cared how she dressed? How would wearing a dress improve my cousin’s life or make her more happy? Would blouses and skirts even suit her? (In my gay opinion? No.) This time, my Australian side won out.
“Why does it matter?” I asked.
Mum turned to me, shocked. Then the shock dissolved into delight and fascination. She gave me an encouraging look as if to say, “Oh, this will be interesting.”
My aunty hadn’t reacted and we weren’t sure she’d heard me, so Mum turned to her eldest sister. “Did you hear when he asked?” she said in Cantonese. “Why does it matter?”
I assumed my aunty would scoff and say what Chinese people usually say about anything that deviates outside the norm. It’s how things are supposed to be. My aunty was also worldly though. She’d lived in the UK and Australia and – like Mum – had survived a bad marriage and divorce, in a generation where divorce was still a huge taboo. She knew the sting of social stigma and the unfairness of people judging you without knowing the whole story. My aunty considered my question, then gave a kind of nod that indicated respect. She was a reasonable woman, and her nephew had asked a reasonable question.
