Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  ‘Yes.’

  She had heard plenty of music before, but always from a machine. She never imagined the instruments that wrung sounds out of the air.

  ‘Do you want to learn?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you want to learn how to play the guitar?’

  ‘Me?’

  Bác Phong pursed his lips, ‘Yes. Why don’t you come to my house for a lesson on Saturday morning? Would Nga be okay with that?’

  Linh did not know how to reply.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Let me handle this. I’ll visit Nga tomorrow and ask her myself,’ Bác Phong offered.

  Linh supposed that he went to their house during the day, while she was working at the café. When she came home that evening, she almost expected the house to look different, to bear a trace of their guest. But nothing was out of place. Nga was sitting at her sewing table, positioned at its usual six o’clock spot.

  ‘You will wake up two hours early tomorrow to do your chores, then you will catch the eight o’clock bus,’ Nga said, her eyes still on fabric in front of her. ‘I am going to tell you what to say to the driver and how to get to the house from the bus stop. Listen carefully.’

  His home was in Sài Gòn, a forty-five-minute bus ride from Ngày Mới. Linh sat on the bus the next day, jiggling the sticky rice ball that Nga had packed for her breakfast. The windows were closed to stop the dust from getting in. The rice swelled in the heat and she had to lap it out of her sweaty palm. After the last mouthful, she snapped her sticky fingers together. She thought she would die from the heat.

  Linh got off at a stop just past Củ Chi. She walked the rest of the way, following the instructions Nga had made her repeat back three times. From down the road, she saw Bác Phong sitting in his front yard under an old orange tree with a dense green canopy. A birdcage hung behind his head. Linh had never seen a kept bird before. Its feathers were green with a splash of red on the neck.

  ‘Welcome, Linh. Sit down,’ Bác Phong said. He already had the guitar cradled in his lap.

  Linh stepped into the shade of the orange tree and shivered. She thought it must be the coolest spot in all of Vietnam. She couldn’t smell sugar anymore, only the faint bitterness of orange skin.

  ‘Watch my left hand,’ he said.

  Linh gazed at his grip on the neck of the guitar. His fingers stretched across the fret and pressed down, white from the pressure. He strummed a chord.

  Bác Phong then reached over and placed the guitar in her hands. Linh plucked a string. A note rang out and floated up on a quiver of air. Linh picked the note again, amazed that she could flick the strings and make the heat ripple. She plucked again. Her world seemed marvellous for a moment, as she touched and the thing sang back. So, so, so, so, so. Flick and ripple. She forgot her own skin, and the heat, and listened to the note so, which seemed to have no beginning or end. Her little brown finger, crooked into the belly of the sound hole, picked until it cramped.

  About an hour later, someone called out to Bác Phong from inside the house. Linh raised her head from the guitar and stared at the dark hallway beyond the open door. A woman emerged, in a white pyjama suit with ruffles at the shoulders, as if called forth by the note from the guitar. She had a small face and her hair was tied on one side. She repeated the words, but they were still indistinct.

  ‘No. Medicine is not till one o’clock,’ Bác Phong replied.

  The woman spoke again. This time, because the phrase was familiar, Linh could make it out: ‘What are you doing?’ she whined.

  ‘Nothing, I’ll be in soon,’ said Bác Phong.

  The woman took a step back and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway.

  ‘Starting an instrument is always difficult,’ Bác Phong said to Linh, picking up the guitar from her lap. He took a deep breath. ‘Why don’t you come back for another lesson next Saturday?’

  Over the following weeks, Linh found her mind slipping back to Bác Phong’s fingers, and the vibration of the guitar when she held it, like a live, humming animal in her arms. Her mind dwelt only on the music lessons, and she wondered if it was possible that she had never had any other thoughts at all before. She wiped tables, washed dishes, peeled fruit and candied coconut, thinking all the time of Bác Phong’s fingers.

  And his glasses too. Nobody wore glasses in Ngày Mới; people just squinted if necessary. Was it the glasses that made Bác Phong’s gaze different, or had she never noticed anyone else’s eyes before? She imagined fingers inside her head, trying to catch a slimy, wriggling fish that kept leaping into the water. The little wet thing rolled against the nerves in her skull and nestled into her cheek, just in reach of her tongue.

  She did not tell anyone about the fish in her head, but one day at the café she asked Trang about Bác Phong’s wife.

  ‘She’s not from here. I think she’s from Sài Gòn. Why?’

  Linh told her about the guitar lessons.

  ‘Why is he giving you guitar lessons?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t be so dumb. Why is he giving you guitar lessons?’

  Linh was afraid of getting it wrong again. Trang rolled her eyes. She was pouring sugar into pickled lime juice, her long nails flat against the stirring spoon. This week they were painted yellow-green like raw mango.

  ‘I don’t think he’s giving anyone else guitar lessons. How are you paying him?’

  ‘I’m not paying him.’

  ‘But why is he doing it? It’s not like…’ Trang clucked and turned around. ‘Are you, what, are you touching him?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You know you probably have to.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t know how to, do you?’ Trang chortled. ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, touching him?’

  ‘Linh. I’m not going to tell you what to do.’ Trang fiddled with a piece of old lime, spreading its flesh against the side of the tub. ‘I mean, I’ll tell you how to start. He’ll know what to do then.’

  That night, when Linh squatted in the backyard to bathe, she trickled the water slowly down her body. A joint bulged on the side of her right knee and she massaged it, hooking a knuckle underneath the knee, where it was softer, like bands of plastic. She ground her knuckle up and down. If she could just do this every day, Linh thought, her legs might become soft and smooth. The muscles crunched as she rolled them back and forth. She imagined that every touch was colouring her in, giving her texture.

  The next Saturday, when Linh arrived, Bác Phong was already sitting in the yard and the front door was open once again. This time Linh felt cold under the orange branches, imagining Bác Phong’s wife lurking out of sight, two steps beyond the door, listening. Had he ever taught his wife to play guitar?

  She fiddled with the same string while he talked. She strummed as though scratching a scab, itching to be touched. But she still couldn’t play chords, couldn’t even hold down the strings with her left hand.

  Bác Phong reached over and pressed his fingers on top of hers.

  She glanced at him and words popped into her head, I feel very close to you. She looked at the open door. There hadn’t been any sound from the house. Linh leaned forward, but as she did, Bác Phong leaned back and reached for a glass of black coffee perched on the potted plant behind him.

  ‘What does Nga think of the lessons?’ he asked.

  ‘She says you are kind.’

  ‘You know, Nga really loves music.’

  Linh watched heat waves and string vibrations materialise in the air between her and Bác Phong. She sniffed loudly, arching back so they wouldn’t touch her. Beyond them, she spotted the glint of Bác Phong’s glasses.

  ‘…in seventy-five when I came to Ngày Mới for the first time. The Communists were looking for families with large estates, so we sold everything in Sài Gòn and came here. I went to the Văn Thủy sugarcane stand every day to see her.’

  He was staring at her no
w.

  ‘You must already know this. Nga must have told you,’ he said.

  His voice was suddenly softer and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, massaging his knuckles anxiously.

  ‘What has she told you?’ he implored.

  Stunned, Linh didn’t say anything. But Bác Phong began to nod slowly, as though gathering some meaning from her expression. He sprang back in his chair and rubbed his thighs, his black slacks riding up.

  ‘It wasn’t just me,’ he pressed on. ‘Nga felt something too. We went on walks together. I came to visit your grandfather’s house once and brought eggs for the whole family. Did she tell you about that? Eggs were expensive after seventy-five. But she wouldn’t marry me.’

  A square of light reflected off his glasses. His eyes were now fixed elsewhere.

  All the strands that Linh had strung fell limp, soft like cobwebs, and now she too sat staring off into the canopy of orange. Wouldn’t marry me, marry-me, marry-me. The words echoed in her head.

  ‘Nga wanted to leave Vietnam, but I still had my family estate to look after. This estate. My brothers have gone. Now it’s just me. When Nga married Anh Xuân, his family was going to go to America,’ he said.

  He turned to Linh.

  ‘You never knew your father. You look a little like him. Has anybody told you? You have his mouth,’ he said.

  His gaze fell to her lips, and Linh burned with the realisation of her hideousness. Look away, look away, look AWAY. His brow wrinkled and Linh thought he might have heard the shouting in her head, but then he turned away to stare at the road outside his front yard.

  ‘Nobody thought Nga would be with a man like him,’ he continued. ‘Your father was not a bad man. But he was quiet and secretive. He was never a man of words. Nga couldn’t talk to him, not the way she could talk to me.’

  Linh had never known her mother to be talkative. She was horrified to see tears in Bác Phong’s eyes.

  ‘It was what we did. I spent hours at her sugarcane stand every day, and we talked and talked. She wouldn’t let me feed the machine, in case I made a mistake and wasted the sugarcane. There wasn’t much to go around in those years. She barely had any food and, although my family had more than most, I didn’t eat much that summer at all. I lost a lot of weight. I was chubby back in Sài Gòn, but when I was with Nga all day, we just chewed on sugarcane pulp, and coffee beans, and rice paper, and talked…I began to know her so well I could tell what she was thinking just by looking at her. Can you imagine knowing a person that well? I never did again, not like that.’

  He was still staring into the distance and Linh didn’t know what to do to remind him she was there. What-we-did, what-we-did, what-we-did, she echoed.

  ‘But her choice was simple: she wanted to leave Vietnam. She had you while he went off on a boat for America. He was going to petition for both of you after he had arrived, found a place to live, set up a life. Of course, she never heard from him again. Maybe he died at sea, but more likely he left her.

  ‘I’ve been coming into Ngày Mới for decades now, and she’s been waiting for your father all that time. Wouldn’t even look at me again after she married that man. Such an honourable woman. Just the woman to love…

  ‘Are you interested in what I am saying?’

  When Linh stood up and walked away, she knew that she could never come back to the orange shade. Her heart filled with shame. She stepped out of the front yard and down the length of the house, forty-two steps. Around the corner, she faced the sun head-on and everything before her swam in the white light. If she stopped counting, she could skip a beat and slip away. Or the heat could dissolve her if she didn’t know when to stop. There was so much road, so much time, and such a dry little body. Linh squinted and walked down the other side of the house, forty-eight, forty-nine, woman-to-love, woman-to-love, one-hundred-and-two, woman-to-love, one-hundred-and-three, walking in tight, straight steps.

  All the way back to the highway, on the bus, and down the dirt road, to the other side of the irrigation ditch to her house, she counted. Linh held her breath as she reached the door and knew Nga would be sitting at the sewing machine on the other side, her arms tense, the lines of muscle running down to her forearm. Every three seconds a knot unravelled, a thrumming sound escaped from her mouth, th, and the string, which ran from her lips to a front yard on the edge of town, was plucked and the air shivered.

  Nga laid down the pieces of cloth in a neat stack. Finished, she dragged the worktable backwards to catch the moving sliver of light. She sat down and surveyed her new position in the room. A spider’s web reflected light in the corner of the room, above the altar. Nga stepped over, climbing a shoe rack on her third step, and waved a duster at the corner. Stretched out, she saw herself covering the length of her wall. Her left foot curled and she held her breath, feeling that she had caught the four walls of her life in the sole of her foot.

  When the girl came home and asked about Bác Phong, Nga laughed softly, th. Did he tell you about the eggs, she asked, is he still proud of that? You are so dumb, th, when are you going to learn? Only believe half of what men tell you, th. Now, go and light your father a stick of incense and put on the fan, will you, we’re going to die in this heat. Th. She gripped the sewing table as though it needed steadying and went back to work.

  Bình stopped the Commodore behind the petrol station, where he wouldn’t need a parking ticket. He was a few minutes late, but there was no sign of Tuấn. A white middle-aged woman with ragged hair and pink pants eyed him uneasily through the window as she walked by carrying her Safeway bags. Bình rolled down the window, but there was no breeze on such a humid summer day. He lit a cigarette and pulled out his battered paperback edition of To Kill a Mockingbird, the title printed in large white letters on a black background. After a few moments, he let the book drop out of his hand without having registered a word.

  He had read the book countless times; holding it now was just a matter of ritual. It had been in the box of Salvos donations he received when he moved into his rented unit five years ago, in 1989. The pages were yellowed but the spine was tight, so he knew it hadn’t been read. At first Bình used it as literacy material, flicking through to see which words he could recognise. When a volunteer at the learning centre approved of his copy, he tugged it away from her grasp and shrugged, but he began to try harder to read the book. Slowly, he got a vague idea of the storyline. The idioms became clearer by the fourth or fifth reading. He read it for the eighth time when he was enrolled at university, in the government-sponsored program. By the eleventh reading he was thinking about metaphors.

  The passenger door creaked open and the Commodore shook as Tuấn swung his gangling frame inside.

  ‘Fuck you, Tuấn, what took so long?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. A fiftieth birthday party stayed late.’

  Bình spat onto the footpath before rolling up the window.

  ‘Did you at least get paid overtime?’

  ‘Nah,’ Tuấn said through gum, ‘it wasn’t very long.’

  ‘You idiot. Do you think you’re doing those people a favour?’ Bình reversed the Commodore. ‘Cleaning up after their shit…If you’re not getting paid, you’re letting them take advantage of you. They think they’re so much better than us, but they’re only Chinese.’

  ‘They’re not so bad.’

  ‘I’ve seen how you are with them. You have this dumb smile for them, and you say please and thank you and sorry all the time.’ Bình switched into an exaggerated Vietnamese accent. ‘And they don’t do shit for you.’

  He glanced at Tuấn, who was picking dirt out from under his fingernails.

  ‘You don’t even care!’ Bình shouted. He knew he was overreacting but couldn’t help it. He slammed the dashboard with the heel of his palm.

  As they headed along the Monash Freeway, neither of them spoke. Around the Chadstone exit, he pushed down on the accelerator to provoke Tuấn, who always drove carefully, below the speed limit.
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  ‘Look, man,’ Tuấn said heavily, ‘I didn’t make you drop out.’

  Bình turned to look at Tuấn again. Although they were both twenty-eight, Tuấn seemed thinner and more worn, as if he carried every grievance on his loose skin. He was the kid who had fed Bình water when they were strangers on Bidong Island. Bình had woken up from a hellish fever to see Tuấn baring his yellow teeth through the ugliest smile he had ever seen. They were both the first in their family to escape Vietnam and had no one to follow, so when asked where he wanted to settle, Tuấn pinched the skin on his ribs, and said, ‘I hear they eat a lot of butter in Australia. I can really fatten up with some butter, hey?’ And Bình had followed.

  Bình had long fingers and smooth, pale skin. Before he died in the war, Bình’s father used to examine his hands, turning them over and tugging at the joints. ‘These are your mother’s hands. She washed clothes and gutted chicken with her bare hands all day—no matter, they would stay just like this, smooth and white. A scholar’s hand,’ he once said, then slipped a pen into Bình’s palm. ‘One scholar is a blessing for his whole village.’

  Bình’s knuckles were turning white on the steering wheel. ‘What the fuck, what does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘You hate working at Cô Năm’s grocery shop, Bình. Stop being so stubborn. It’s not too late to go back to the university,’ Tuấn said.

  Bình stared at the road. Tuấn hadn’t commented, but they had driven well past their destination, Springvale. In fact, if he kept going, they would reach the university. But he used to take the train there. Students like him didn’t have cars. When he started working at Cô Năm’s grocery shop this summer, Uncle Ba lent him some money to put a deposit on a car. The shop was close to home, but the car was useful when Cô Năm wanted him to go to other grocery stores at seven in the evening to pick up the cartons of green soya milk and fermented pork patty that were cheaper because they were about to expire. Piece of shit though it was, the Commodore was the most expensive thing Bình owned and it cemented his withdrawal from university.