Australia Day

by Melanie Cheng

  ‘Ma.’

  ‘What? Is something the matter?’

  Stanley imagined coming straight out and saying it, like some American son in the movies. I’ve met someone. He pictured the fallout. Is she Chinese? What does her father do?

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. I have a new study partner, that’s all.’

  ‘Study partner,’ his mother scoffed, before blowing her nose into the phone. ‘That’s the problem with Australians. They think everybody’s equal. You can’t study in groups. Everybody’s at different levels.’

  Stanley scratched big circles onto an old gas bill with a biro. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And you should call your grandma.’

  ‘Why? Is everything okay?’

  ‘You need to apologise.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For never calling.’

  Sleep evades him. Five years ago, when Stanley had first arrived in Australia, he’d downloaded albums of traffic noise from the iTunes store. Now, in the impenetrable blackness of the bush, he finds his earphones and plugs himself in. As he listens, he pictures himself back on the balcony of his parents’ Mong Kok apartment, perched on a plastic stool between a sagging clothesline and a dripping air conditioning unit. He imagines himself looking up at a sky that is not flat and blue and interminable, but choked with smog and cut into neat slices by the blades of the buildings.

  At three am Jessica sneaks into his room.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ she says before sliding into the bed. She slips her fingers inside his T-shirt. Stanley feels her hot breath on the back of his neck.

  ‘Me neither.’ He doesn’t turn around to face her. He doesn’t want her to know about his body’s dramatic, involuntary response to her presence in his bed. Instead they lie, curled together, facing the wall.

  ‘I never knew you were a teddy bear kind of girl.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Jess play-punches him on the shoulder.

  ‘I hope this bed has seen more teddy bears than boys.’

  Jess laughs. ‘Dad made sure of that.’

  ‘Your dad’s scary. He should get a job at Guantanamo Bay.’ Jessica says nothing, but Stanley feels her body stiffen beside him. ‘I’m joking.’ Talk of Neville is enough to make Stanley lose his erection. He rolls to face his friend and runs his fingertips across her lips in the dark. ‘I like this.’

  Jessica buries her face in Stanley’s shoulder. Her hair smells of sweat and shampoo and apple pie. Stanley wonders if she can hear his heart doing somersaults behind his sternum. If she can, she says nothing. Within minutes he hears heavy breathing, quickly followed by a soft snore.

  When Stanley opens his eyes the next morning, Jess is gone. For a moment he wonders if he imagined the whole thing, but then he discovers one of Jessica’s earrings buried beneath the doona. He stuffs the earring inside his backpack. Even though nothing happened, he doesn’t want Neville finding any evidence of Jessica sharing his bed.

  Stanley peers through a gap in the curtain. The entire Cook family is outside his window, cleaning the barbecue and filling an esky with beer. He takes advantage of the momentary privacy inside the house to brush his teeth, shower and dress. There is no lock on the bathroom door, only a sign with a picture of roses, which says Patience is a virtue.

  Once clean, he goes outside to look for Jess. He finds her with her father, beside the barbecue, counting sausages.

  ‘How many people are coming again?’ Stanley hears Jessica ask.

  ‘Around twenty, give or take.’

  Stanley’s heart sinks. Jessica had given him the impression it would just be a family thing.

  ‘Morning, sleepyhead!’ Jessica calls when she sees him.

  Stanley feels his cheeks burn.

  ‘Must be all that beer from last night!’ Neville jeers.

  ‘Be nice, Daddy,’ Jess says and waves a pair of heavy tongs at her father.

  ‘Your dad’s right,’ Stanley says. ‘Chinese people lack a specific enzyme for metabolising alcohol.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Jessica places a sympathetic hand on Stanley’s shoulder and looks at her father. ‘He can’t help it.’

  What’s left of the morning is spent preparing for lunch. Pam makes an enormous batch of potato salad. Neville appraises the piles of meat. Jessica marinates the chicken wings. Stanley hovers, arranging sauce bottles in a straight line on the table. At midday, the first guest arrives—a short, barrel-chested man with grey sideburns and laughing eyes. Jessica introduces Stanley as her good friend from uni. The man shakes Stanley’s hand. When he finds out Stanley is a medical student, he launches into a detailed account of his wife’s battle with pancreatic cancer—a story, he says, that Jessica has heard a thousand times.

  Minutes later, a ute and two four-wheel drives storm up the driveway. Family friends pour out of the vehicles, carrying desserts and six-packs of beer. Jessica, away for so long in the city, is the unofficial guest of honour. She rolls her eyes when nobody is looking to show Stanley she hasn’t forgotten him, which makes him almost content to sit on a plastic chair next to the speakers with Rhys. After twenty minutes, Rhys leans into the esky beside him and pulls out a cold beer. He passes it to Stanley.

  ‘Thanks,’ Stanley says, not daring to rebuff what he imagines is a rare gesture of kindness. For another twenty minutes they sit in silence, watching the group and taking swigs from their bottles.

  ‘I hate Australia Day,’ Rhys says, finally, before cracking open another Carlton Draught.

  Aside from the citizenship ceremony, today is the first time Stanley has celebrated it. He nods.

  ‘Bunch of nostalgic bullshit,’ Rhys says. Then, sensing he might have offended Stanley, he adds, ‘Thanks for saying you liked my painting.’

  Stanley can feel the alcohol in his cheeks, his hands, his feet. He resists the urge to scratch. ‘No worries.’

  He is saved from any further awkward questions by the late arrival of another guest. Stanley recognises the Toyota Tarago straight away. When Eddie Mitchell emerges from the van, the throng immediately makes way for him. As Eddie walks up, Neville yells his name and gives him a loud slap across the shoulder. Jessica is no longer the centre of attention. Everybody is watching Eddie. Everybody except Rhys, who is watching Stanley.

  ‘Happy Australia Day,’ Rhys says and raises his beer.

  The rest of the afternoon is a blur. When Linda arrives, Rhys disappears with her inside the house, leaving Stanley alone on a camp chair under a tree. He drinks two more beers in quick succession until his head is swimming. Only Mrs Cook seems concerned about his welfare, stopping every half-hour to talk and to offer him a plate of food. Chicken wings and potato salad. A sausage with sauce on white bread. Pineapple cooked on the barbecue with a large mound of vanilla ice-cream.

  As Stanley eats, he watches Eddie. Jessica’s ex-boyfriend has not dressed up for the occasion: he is wearing a T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder and faded board shorts. Everybody wants a piece of him. As soon as he finishes talking to one person, another partygoer sidles in. Stanley wonders who invited him. He suspects Neville, but really it could be any of them. Even Jessica. It’s clear that she’s still in love with Eddie from the way she drifts around him—pretending to ignore him but laughing loudly and never quite letting him out of her sight. It is only once Eddie disappears to the toilet, late in the afternoon, that she goes in search of Stanley.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says when she finally finds him. But she doesn’t clarify what she is sorry for. It could be anything: her invasion of his bed last night, inviting Eddie, the way she’s ignored him the entire day.

  All the silent watching has made Stanley angry. ‘Did you know he was coming?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Jess says, but she won’t make eye contact with him. ‘We were together for two years—I guess he became part of the family.’

  ‘And they still accept him, after what he did?’

  ‘I told them when we broke up it was a mutual thing.’

  Stanley thinks b
ack to that day in the anatomical pathology lab. How desperately he had wanted to make Jessica smile, how delighted he was when she did.

  ‘He’s broken up with Stephanie.’

  Stanley’s head pounds. ‘How convenient for you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Stanley feels two hands pressing down on his shoulders like sandbags. It’s Eddie.

  ‘Lover’s tiff?’ Eddie jokes. He lets go of Stanley and sits down on Rhys’s empty camp chair.

  ‘Shut up,’ Jessica says, with the same tone of feigned annoyance she used with Stanley the night before.

  Stanley examines Eddie, takes in his eager-to-please eyes, his dopey smile. For once Stanley feels a kinship with the guy. Then he looks at Jessica, the girl responsible for bringing them here, to the middle of nowhere. There is a cluster of pimples on her forehead and the first blush of sunburn across her nose. When she leans into the esky, Stanley catches a glimpse of the tattoo on her lower back—the Chinese character for double happiness, written crudely, as if by a child.

  When they head back to Melbourne the next day, Stanley insists on driving. It feels good to grip the wheel with both hands and steer the car down the gravel driveway. Stanley’s headache is gone, but the sunlight is intolerable. Jessica lends him her sunglasses. At the halfway point, they stop to fill up the car with petrol and grab a Big Mac meal from McDonald’s. Jess feeds Stanley French fries as they speed down the freeway towards the city. They don’t speak. They only stare through the windshield at the straight black road and the clear blue sky and the occasional bright yellow hazard signs.

  Big Problems

  The Simpson Desert rippled like an orange sea through the cabin window. It was just as Leila had imagined—hot, callused, other-worldly. Like Mars. She leant back in her seat, sipped a plastic cup of red wine. It was a relief to be in the air, away from Melbourne and the Kelly family. Not that the Kelly family hadn’t been good to her. They had been more than good, paying her double the recommended hourly rate and installing a smart TV, complete with Netflix, in her spacious bedroom. Even the twins, Orlando and Olivia, were well behaved and mature. Nothing like some of the horror stories she had read on the online forums. Leila was relieved, and grateful. But Alison and James could be suffocating. While they scorned helicopter parents—the twins loved to boast about riding on motos, helmetless, in Cambodia—with Leila, the Kellys were overprotective. Leila put this down to their guilt about employing an au pair. Hiring people to look after your children wasn’t common in Australia. Mothers still prided themselves on being able to work and cook fresh meals and make costumes for the school play, even if it meant they wore a permanently frazzled look and occasionally forgot to pick up their least favourite child from school.

  Leila presumed the Kellys had chosen her, with her Syrian background, as a means of alleviating some of this guilt. She knew it was a risk, mentioning her background on the au pair website, but she also thought it was a good way of vetting Islamophobes. And it had worked. The Kellys embraced Leila’s heritage. Alison, the mother, was always probing Leila about what Syria was like, before the war had destroyed it. But Leila couldn’t tell her. She had been born and raised in London. This seemed a constant source of disappointment to Mrs Kelly.

  The Kellys were good people. James was the CEO of a not-for-profit organisation and Alison worked for Legal Aid. Though the kids could be precocious—Orlando wanted to be a human rights lawyer and Olivia described herself as an atheist—for the most part, they did as they were told. Even so, when James informed Leila they would be travelling to Bangkok for the school holidays and wouldn’t need her on the trip, Leila found herself fantasising about the sleep-ins, the long hot baths and the silence she would enjoy. Even this plane trip seemed gloriously civilised compared to her day job. She could think in peace without an eleven-year-old asking her yet another question she couldn’t answer.

  Leila leant her head against the window. Clouds cast crisp black shadows across the fissured earth below. She took a photo through the glass to send to her mother once she landed. For years, Leila’s mum had talked about visiting Australia, but the island continent with its mammoth sky and boundless beaches had always seemed a long way from home.

  A man in an akubra hat was waiting for Leila in the arrivals hall. The twins had versed her in all things outback before she departed Melbourne—akubra hats, king brown snakes, bush flies, feral camels. The man held a handwritten sign with her name on it: Leila Ayers. The Kellys had insisted on paying for her to join a tour, which was strange, given they often boasted about their off-the-beaten-track travel. It filled Leila with an odd combination of annoyance and relief. Though desperate to assert her independence, she had seen the movie Wolf Creek too.

  ‘Welcome to Alice Springs,’ the man in the akubra hat said. He was ruddy-faced with hands like slabs of meat. ‘Just waiting on a couple of others.’

  Leila nodded and put on her sunglasses. Even in the shelter of the arrival hall the light was unforgiving. She looked around, taking in the flame-red Qantas signs and the carpet with its undulating ochre design. She looked down at a backpacker, resting on a pile of bags on the floor. Leila had never travelled by herself before. After A levels, she and her friends had gone to Paris for a long weekend, but they were a large group of girls and had safety in numbers.

  Akubra-hat-man changed the sign to one that read Mr and Mrs Brown. Almost immediately, a brightly dressed couple materialised at the baggage carousel. The man wore a baseball cap, and the woman a plastic visor. Even before they spoke, Leila knew they were American.

  ‘Harry and Cynthia Brown. From Charlottesville, Virginia,’ the man said, thrusting out his hand.

  ‘Leila Ayers,’ she replied. ‘From London.’

  They followed the driver to a dusty four-wheel drive in the airport car park. As they drove, the Americans told the man in the akubra hat about their travels. They listed the names of places Leila had never heard of: Cradle Mountain, Birdsville, Broome, Rottnest Island. She listened to their descriptions of beaches and glacial lakes as she stared out her grimy window. Looking at the red earth and spiny plants, it was hard to believe they were talking about the same country.

  As they neared the town centre, Leila watched a brown-skinned boy with straw-coloured hair ride a battered bike on the road beside them. He bent his head and pedalled furiously, but he could not keep up with the bus. Minutes later she saw a woman asleep on a mattress laid straight onto the bare earth. The woman was wearing a cardigan in spite of the heat, and a mangy dog was licking her feet. Suddenly the world Leila had inhabited for the past three months—one of skinny lattes and children’s yoga and organic bakeries where a loaf of bread cost seven dollars—seemed obscene.

  Akubra-hat-man, whose name was Max, dropped Leila at her hostel. The Americans had climbed out first at a fancy resort called Palm Springs. ‘Pick you up at six!’ she heard Max yell as he disappeared in a cloud of dust. Leila looked up at the two-storey building. It was rectangular and ugly and painted a garish mauve. There was a campervan parked out the front with graffiti on the rear window: Life sux if your girlfriend doesn’t. The dreadlocked man at reception, another Brit, gave Leila the key to her room. ‘Let me know if you want company,’ he said, his smile revealing a gold tooth.

  She left the reception area and walked past the pool—a shallow above-ground structure with a few broken deckchairs around its edge. A girl in a polka-dot swimsuit was lying on a towel listening to music.

  The room was clean enough. There was a single bed, and a small TV mounted to one of the walls. The only window opened onto a concrete courtyard with a plastic table and a barbecue. The air was thick with the smell of sausages. Leila could hear two men talking loudly about full moon parties in Thailand. One was bragging about buying ‘diet pills’, which were actually ecstasy, from the local pharmacy. The other was reminiscing about an Israeli dive instructor who had a mouth like Scarlett Johansson.

  Leila sat down on the bed
and pulled out her itinerary.

  Day 1: Depart Alice Springs for Uluru (Ayers Rock)

  Day 2: Uluru—Kata Tjuta National Park

  Day 3: Uluru (Ayers Rock) to Watarrka (Kings Canyon)

  Day 4: Depart Kings Canyon for Alice Springs

  Leila wondered if her father’s family had common ancestry with the man the rock was named after. She hoped not. She didn’t fancy the idea of people going around stamping their names on things.

  She peeked through the dusty curtain. In the courtyard, a group of girls in string bikinis had joined the men. One of the girls had brought a speaker down from her room. Now the shrieks and giggles were accompanied by a booming bass. Leila contemplated joining them, but the very thought made her heart race. She was not good in groups. Often she spent minutes perfecting a story in her head only to find that by the time she was ready to tell it, the conversation had moved on. She ate a muesli bar for dinner and read a book on Aboriginal history she had borrowed from the Kellys’ library instead.

  Hours passed. She read about songlines—routes taken by Indigenous people’s ancestral beings as they created everything in the natural world. She learnt about the storytelling tradition common to Aboriginal cultures—how information is passed from generation to generation through dance and spoken word and song. She discovered that Dreaming stories were not only intricate maps of the country but complex lessons in ethics and morality. As she read, she tried to block out the sound of a couple having loud sex in the room next door.

  There were ten people on the tour, including Leila—the Americans she had met at the airport, a white woman from South Africa who had recently moved to the Sunshine Coast, two middle-aged sisters from Italy who didn’t speak much English and an Australian family with young children—a boy and girl—from Sydney. Not one person on the trip was aged within ten years of Leila. She plugged herself into her phone and slept throughout the six-hour drive to Uluru.