The Golden Land

by Di Morrissey

  Natalie lay back down, feeling contented. While she had Mark’s attention and the children were happily occupied, she decided to explain what she’d been thinking. ‘Darling, I know that you want to wait until we have enough money saved to start all the major renovations but I can’t stand leaving the bathroom till then. It’s really hard trying to shower both the kids in our ensuite. And this week Brad’s had to use it as well. It’s made me realise that we need to fix the bathroom sooner rather than later. What do you think?’

  ‘I suppose so. We’ll want to get it done before the baby arrives. I wanted to be there to help, but if you feel okay to go ahead on your own, go for it. But we need to know exactly what it’s going to cost.’

  Back at home, Mark read Charlotte and Adam their bedtime stories and put them to bed while Brad helped Natalie tidy up before he put his feet on the coffee table and, with a beer in his hand, began to watch television. Mark reappeared, sat down beside Brad and topped up his glass before reaching for the remote.

  ‘There’s a footy game on. Want to watch it?’

  ‘I guess I’ll go to bed and leave you guys to it,’ said Natalie.

  ‘You sure you don’t want to watch the Broncos?’ said Mark.

  ‘No, but you two enjoy it. Good luck tomorrow with the apartment hunting, Brad.’

  ‘Righto, thanks, Natalie. How’d you go with the online sale?’

  ‘No idea! I forgot to look.’

  ‘Have a look, could be bids coming in,’ said Brad cheerfully.

  Natalie sat at the desk and logged on to her computer. She was surprised to find that there were several bids for her kammavaca.

  She skimmed through the first few then read the next with interest. ‘Listen to this. There’s a man in Connecticut in the US who’s prepared to pay three thousand dollars!’

  ‘What! I know you don’t want to sell it but maybe you should consider it. That’s more than that guy in England. Think he’s legit?’ exclaimed Mark.

  ‘No, no, hang on, you two, play the game. You gotta be cagey, that’s only his first bid. It could mean anything. Maybe he owns a museum or something,’ said Brad.

  ‘You do it, if you like. I’m too tired to wait around for someone on the other side of the world to bid again,’ said Natalie. ‘But I told you it’s not for sale! I just want to see what it’s worth.’

  Natalie went to bed and left Brad at the computer with Mark leaning over his shoulder.

  The children were well into their breakfast when Mark emerged from the shower and Brad wandered in from his bedroom the next morning.

  ‘I smell coffee! I need my caffeine fix before I can function. Morning, all,’ he called as he looked for a cup.

  ‘Morning, Brad. Hope you slept well,’ said Natalie.

  ‘Crashed. Sun, the beach and a few beers will do that.’ Brad poured his coffee and reached for the sugar. ‘How did the bidding end up? Have you checked this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet. What did you do after I went to bed?’

  ‘Oh, we posted a few comments. You know, just giving more info about your thingamajig. Drumming up some interest.’ Brad grinned.

  Natalie raced to her computer. ‘I hope you guys haven’t messed this up. What did you say about it?’

  ‘Just that it belonged to the king of Burma, the stuff Uncle Andrew talked about,’ said Mark.

  Natalie shook her head in exasperation. But then she looked at the bids. She stopped and rechecked them and turned to Mark. ‘Come and look at this!’

  Mark let out a low whistle. ‘Wow! Five thousand two hundred! When we left it, the top price was three thousand three hundred.’

  ‘And it ain’t over yet!’ Brad said with a laugh.

  ‘There’s no point going on with this,’ said Natalie, turning off the computer. ‘It’s not for sale.’

  ‘C’mon, Nat. What if it gets above ten grand? That’s a fair slice of the bathroom,’ said Mark.

  ‘Don’t be silly. It won’t reach anything like that. Come on, kids. Let’s get cleaned up.’ Charlotte and Adam followed her out of the room.

  She didn’t want to sell her kammavaca, but the offers really surprised her. It was very special to her and now it seemed other people thought it was special, too. But no-one else had a link to it as she did through Uncle Andrew. One day she would tell her children the story of their long-ago relative and the little kammavaca. She wanted them to be able to see what it was and also enjoy the illustrations as she did. She’d studied them so often they were now very familiar to her. She even had a favourite.

  It was a picture of a misty jungle with a tiny temple sitting on a distant mountain peak. In a clearing in the foreground stood a small white elephant decorated with a jewelled headdress. A richly embroidered cloth hung across its back. The jewels and beading in the tiny painting must have been done with a brush of only a single strand. When Natalie recalled the image in her mind it was as if she was really standing there in the steamy sunrise in a faraway place.

  THEY SEEMED TO BE everywhere, swarming like ants or bees, wherever Natalie turned. Tony, Mark’s friend, a builder, had pulled in tradesmen to assess and check out the whole house for the eventual renovations. They started looking at the internal structure of the framework and joists, rattling around in the ceiling. Natalie felt as though she were transparent. No-one spoke to her except Tony, who listened patiently to her, nodded and then talked about what he thought needed to be done. It seemed to Natalie that her careful plans and ideas were being ignored.

  The tradies certainly made their presence felt. They all had their radios going at full throttle, even after she asked them to turn them off while the children were having a nap. They camped around the pool for their breaks, pulling up her garden chairs to sit in while they ate from their cooler boxes, although one bloke asked if she’d mind heating up his lunch in her microwave. They talked loudly about football and generally intruded on her personal space.

  Before they started on the bathroom Tony explained that in order to replace all the pipes, the cement floor would have to be ripped up.

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘With a jackhammer,’ replied Tony. ‘It will be pretty noisy. Might want to cover your things with sheets. Everything will get dusty. Jackhammering’s a messy business.’

  Natalie covered everything she could and tried not to think of the huge clean-up she would have to do later. Not being able to stand things any longer, she headed out for a solitary walk since Charlotte and Adam were at preschool.

  Near the end of her street she was hailed by Vicki who was walking Ipoh up from the tidal sandspit.

  ‘Got time for a coffee? I’ve just let Ipoh have a run. He loves the shallows. Chases all the tiddlers.’

  ‘I’d love one. I had to get out of the house. The tradies are making me demented. They’re about to start jackham-mering the cement in the bathroom floor,’ said Natalie.

  ‘You’ve started renovating?’ said Vicki as she opened her front gate and let the spaniel off his leash.

  ‘Only the main bathroom, but we have major plans. The builder seems to think he’ll be starting on it all pretty soon but, actually, we think that the budget mightn’t stretch to the dream house being completed for quite a bit.’

  ‘Get the essentials done,’ advised Vicki. ‘The rest can wait. How’s your husband doing? I saw he had a pal with him last visit.’

  ‘Mark’s fine. Yes, Brad works with him at the mine.’

  ‘This mining thing is paying mad money. Come on in.’

  Natalie glanced around at the well-worn, but comfortable, sun-faded decor of Vicki’s house. Ipoh obviously ruled the roost, settling onto an armchair, though by the look of the doggy-worn throw rugs and cushions on the sofas, anywhere he chose was his place. Vicki set mugs, a coffee pot and milk onto the kitchen bench, inviting Natalie to pull out the stool on the other side.

  ‘Where’re your kids?’ asked Vicki.

  ‘At preschool. They really enjoy it so I feel ha
ppy about them going there, especially with all the tradies at home. I’ll have to book them in more often now. I can’t have them around the house all the time, especially with the jackhammering. That’ll be another expense, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You have no family close by who can help?’

  ‘No. Mum lives in Lismore. She owns a dress shop there, and she works six days a week.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a drive just to drop the kids off, I guess. What is it? About two hours? Listen, never feel guilty about saving your sanity. I don’t have kids. Never wanted them, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like other people’s. And not having children certainly made divorcing simpler.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Natalie, somewhat surprised by Vicki’s forthright views. ‘Have you been divorced a long time?’

  ‘Years now. My husband was a manager at a tin mine in Malaysia, near Ipoh, before tin prices went into free-fall. It was a nice lifestyle. Free house, servants; social life was a bit cliquey but that’s expat living for you.’

  ‘Sounds exotic,’ said Natalie. ‘Did you get divorced while you were living over there? I don’t mean to pry,’ she added quickly.

  ‘I don’t have any secrets,’ said Vicki, laughing. ‘Though I was the last to know, probably because I was young and naive, my husband, who was fast becoming an alcoholic, was having it off with the wife of a local bigwig. She was a very ambitious woman who felt she’d moved up a notch or three in that little social world.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Natalie, ‘So you came back to Australia?’

  Vicki smiled at her as she poured the coffee. ‘Not before I had a jolly good fling with a terribly nice man. What started out as revenge became a very pleasant interlude.’

  ‘You didn’t stay with him?’ Natalie was a little taken aback.

  ‘Matt wasn’t the settling-down type. He was a Canadian backpacker, a bit younger than me, but we certainly had fun together. After my marriage ended I decided to travel around Asia a bit before I came home, and to make my money last longer, I roughed it. You know, public buses, slow boats and cheap hotels.’

  Natalie nodded. She didn’t want to sound ignorant by telling Vicki that she’d never been out of Australia.

  ‘Anyway, I met Matt in a dinky hotel in K.L. and we just clicked, so we ended up travelling together. The travel was pretty rugged at times but I felt safe and I loved doing as I pleased. And the backblocks of South East Asia were still pretty much undiscovered, so we explored them. It was all so different and so cheap, and quite exciting at times. That’s when I first went to Burma.’

  ‘Wow! What was it like?’ asked Natalie.

  ‘Absolutely amazing. Pagodas and stupas everywhere, gold glistening in the sunlight, scenery that’s just breathtak-ingly lovely, but it was the people that struck me the most. They were so poor. We thought that we were living on a shoestring but compared to them we were millionaires. And the fear that filled that country. It was awful. We had flown into Burma quite legally, but we were watched by the military all the time. People we met were very nervous talking to us. In the end we didn’t like to ask anything but the most basic of questions because we were worried that they would get into trouble with the authorities just by being seen speaking to us. Just the same, there were some Burmese who wanted to practise their English on us and they would talk to us on buses or on those ancient trains when no-one else was watching. They would tell us how oppressive the military regime was and how they hoped that the day would come when there would be changes for the better. They asked us to tell people outside Burma what it was like.’

  ‘Is that why you became interested in the politics of Burma?’

  ‘Yes. I love the people and I know that by myself I can’t do much to change things but if enough people are interested and work towards change, who knows? Anyway, speaking of all this, are you coming to the next meeting?’

  ‘To organise the rally?’

  ‘Yes. We’re getting close and I think it needs a bit of a poke along with the nitty-gritty details. The philosophical and political content is there but always the practical things get forgotten. We need more participants. Not much point in having a rally if no-one comes. Got to give the press something to write about so that Australians will sit up and take notice. We’re doing something for Aung San Suu Kyi. For her birthday.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea. I’m finding Burma a bit like an exotic jigsaw. As I learn something, another little piece of the puzzle helps to fill in a bigger picture. But I’m very happy to help. Gives me an excuse to get away from the house,’ said Natalie.

  Vicki topped up their coffee mugs. ‘You’ll find that the more you do learn, the more the country draws you in. Myanmar, as Burma’s now called, has a tremendously ancient history, but it’s generally ignored in favour of what happened in colonial times and in the Second World War.’

  ‘I must say I was shocked to learn about the British role in Burma,’ said Natalie. ‘I always thought of the English as upstandingly correct. And yet I read how they annexed Burma as a present to Queen Victoria so that Burma became part of the British Indian Empire. I found that pretty disgusting. I’ve been doing a lot of research,’ she explained.

  ‘Yes. The British invaders were different from the others, like the Chinese and Siamese. They came, took their loot and went home. But the British, well, they were foreign not only in their looks, culture and heritage, but they wanted to stay and impose their ways onto a country anchored in thousands of years of its own beliefs and systems of government.’

  Natalie stared at this woman in her bright Bermuda shorts, halterneck top, scarlet nails and startling coloured hair. Vicki looked like a person who spent her time trawling the shops in the recycled air of the air-conditioned malls, not someone who was impassioned about another country and worked to improve conditions there.

  Vicki gave a small smile as if she’d read Natalie’s thoughts. ‘Yes, I’m hooked on Burma. I’m even doing a degree in Burmese studies so I can bore you at great length about the Pagan, Ava and Pegu dynasties.’

  Natalie laughed. ‘You are full of surprises. I feel so out of touch with all kinds of things, even local current affairs. My life is absorbed with the house, the kids . . . I just collapse at night after I’ve put them to bed. I talk to Mark on the phone every night, but his world seems to have shrunk, too. The mine dominates his every waking minute. When he comes home he just wants to chill out, play with the kids, not that I blame him because he works very hard. If I get a movie, he falls asleep in front of it.’

  ‘Life goes in stages, Natalie. You’re in the raising-the-kids phase. And I’ve seen enough to know that it’s all consuming.’ Vicki took a large sip of her coffee. ‘I imagine that husband, family, daily life can swamp you. Just make sure you think about yourself. Occasionally you should think about who you were at sixteen. What were your dreams and ambitions then? Like most of us, probably pretty unrealistic!’ Vicki said with a laugh. ‘But it’s useful to remember that once you were someone with perhaps a different dream. I never imagined where my life would take me.’

  ‘To Burma, you mean?’ asked Natalie. ‘Do you ever go back?’

  ‘Yes, when I get the chance or actually the money. Burma’s not as cheap as other places in Asia because there’s no mass-market tourism, but I still like to go, even though Aung San Suu Kyi does not encourage it. The country’s still beautiful. I ostensibly go as a tourist and that’s pretty safe, although the military watch you. I’m quite sure that they have searched my belongings in my hotel room, from time to time, to see if I’m carrying secret information, or some such thing. The military is paranoid, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to help.’

  ‘They search your things! That’s outrageous.’

  ‘That’s Burma. It’s what you have to put up with if you want to see for yourself what is happening in that country.’

  ‘It’s like another world,’ said Natalie. ‘It makes me realise how comfortable we are, and how little we know outsi
de our backyards. It makes me want to help if I can. I mean, I’ve never felt strongly enough, spoken out, stood up for anything – or thought I could make any kind of difference.’

  ‘Well, it seems to me you’ve started. By caring enough to want to know about things and come along to the rally,’ said Vicki. ‘Why don’t you bring some friends? That’s how it begins.’

  ‘I will. I wonder who will take me up on it. I know everyone is always so busy with kids and their own lives,’ Natalie said with a laugh. ‘There I go again. But what you said earlier about when you were sixteen . . . It’s made me think. I’d love to have some time for me. Though when that’s going to happen I can’t imagine, with another baby on the way . . .’ She looked down at the bulge under her shirt.

  ‘Use your mind, Natalie. Read and talk to people. That’s a form of travel, you know.’

  ‘Actually, I have a list of books that someone I met at yoga sent me. Once I’ve been to the library, I’ll try to read at night when I’m by myself. Thanks for the coffee.’ Natalie wanted to say more but was unsure what she was trying to thank Vicki for, except that she realised that the other woman had stirred something within her, something vague and ephemeral that she couldn’t explain even to herself.

  Natalie reached for the phone before little fingers, sticky from playdough, could get to it.

  ‘Hello, Mi Mi. How are you?’

  ‘I’m very well. I thought I’d ring to see how you are feeling.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice of you. I feel fine. I think my fainting was the culmination of things. I have a checkup in a few days.’

  ‘That’s good. How is your family?’

  ‘Mark is away, but we’ve started renovations on our bathroom, which is causing a lot of chaos. I have to watch Adam all the time. He’s fascinated by the tradies and their tools and he tries to help them, which is a worry. I’m trying to keep away from the house as much as possible.’

  ‘In that case, will you come to our Friends of Burma meeting? It’s the last one before the rally. I do hope we get people to come. It’s so important.’