Australia Day

by Melanie Cheng

  Sukhon is holding a tray of champagne flutes. Kat and Raf take one each. The chef stands behind a platter of seafood. Sashimi slices arranged in a fan. Ice glinting like diamonds. Lemons like polished gems.

  Couples mill about the tables, the women in loose summer dresses, the men in candy-coloured shorts. On each table lies a placard with the lyrics of a Maldivian folk song.

  On the horizon of the vast Indian Ocean grow green palms

  This is my homeland, this is the Maldives

  From the clear blue seas, we grow like pearls

  This is my homeland, this is the Maldives

  Raf pulls Kat away from the party, out of reach of the candlelight. He kisses her, in the darkness, with a warm, open mouth. The air is still. There are no clouds. Stars—long dead—wink at some shared celestial joke. And all the while, the ocean wraps its black arms around the island. Sleeping. Breathing. Waiting.

  Ticket - holder Number 5

  For as long as she could remember, Tania had carried a canister of capsicum spray in her workbag. She’d never had cause to use it, but she believed it was only a matter of time. Last Christmas Eve, Sheila from the Dandenong office had been verbally abused by a customer—some derro who said her mouth looked like a cat’s arse and that he wanted to slash her from ear to ear. Poor thing had to take three whole months off work. And when she did come back—at significantly reduced hours, mind you—she’d only managed one shift before breaking down and begging her manager for a transfer.

  Anna from customer service said that even now, almost a year down the track, Sheila couldn’t sleep unless she drank a whisky or took a sleeping pill. Post-traumatic stress, they called it, like what soldiers get after the war. Which made a lot of sense to Tania. Because sometimes that’s what it felt like. War. Tania versus the guy done for drunk driving who came in early for his licence. Tania versus the taxi driver from Pakistan who slipped her a fifty in the sleeve of his road rules book. Tania versus the pensioner with cloudy corneas who recited the eye chart from memory. They made her sick. She tried to hide it behind smiling eyes and a gentle I-give-a-shit voice, but she knew that one day, when she wasn’t on top of her game—when she had come down with a cold or hadn’t had enough sleep or was late getting out to lunch—one of the smarter ones would see her distaste like a crack across her broken face and they would snap like the derro had with Sheila that day in the Dandenong office, and that’s when she would be waiting, like a cowboy in the movies, with her hand on the cold metal canister of capsicum spray.

  Tania parked her Daihatsu and swiped herself through the back door. Thank God for the back door. Once upon a time she’d had to plough through the mob at the front entrance, all bitching and smoking as they counted down the minutes to nine am.

  Counter 3. Her office: an eighty-centimetre square of bench-space between two thick perspex plates. They were not supposed to have personal items cluttering the area—random spot inspections occurred approximately twice a year—but Tania had made it her own with a photo of her two-year-old granddaughter and a picture of a beach she’d ripped out of a Women’s Weekly.

  Ticket-holder number 5 drove a 2008 Honda sedan. She had the frightened look of someone surviving on shots of espresso and adrenaline.

  ‘How can I help you today?’ Tania asked with a smile.

  ‘My husband’s dead.’ Her voice was flat and lifeless, as if it had died along with her husband.

  Tania pulled out the box of tissues she kept for such occasions in the top drawer of her desk.

  ‘The car was in his name.’ For what seemed like a long time, the widow sat and stared at an invisible spot behind Tania’s head.

  ‘And you’d like the vehicle’s registration transferred into your name,’ Tania suggested after several minutes had passed.

  ‘Yes.’

  Tania licked her index finger and retrieved the relevant form—easily recognisable by its lime-green colour—from the organiser on her desk. ‘You’ll need to fill this out and bring it back, together with your husband’s original death certificate.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Plus the transfer fee.’

  The woman took the form in her bony, blue-veined hands. She frowned, as if contemplating what to do with it: eat it, preserve it or, in an angry rage, destroy it.

  Tania looked at her watch. It was nine-twenty-three. The queue was making its frustration known with dramatic sighs and restless shifting feet. She would have to move this widow along, and quickly.

  She had just composed her concluding remark—a perfect amalgamation of sensitivity and no-nonsense expediency—when she heard it. A loud plopping sound, like the first fat drops of rain. But it was not rain. It was tears. The widow’s tears, exploding on the green canopy of paper.

  ‘I have copies of his death certificate,’ she said, placing two crumpled documents on the desk. ‘But the person I spoke to on the phone didn’t say I’d need the original too.’

  Tania shifted the tissue box a little closer to the woman’s hand.

  ‘I have a three-year-old at home. Brie. And I’m thirteen weeks pregnant.’ The woman touched a spot below her navel. ‘We just bought a house and we have two hundred thousand dollars of debt and even though I know he’s dead, I can’t stop saying we.’

  Tania held out a tissue. With her eyes she implored the woman to wipe her melting face.

  ‘I need to sell the car. But I can’t do it unless it’s in my name.’

  People had cried in front of Tania before, many times—on average once per week—but she had never given in to them, no matter how sad the story. On the odd occasion that she had felt herself softening as she listened to their sorry tale, she reminded herself of her own struggle: her father’s handprint, a bloodied stamp, across her mother’s sunken face; raising Leah from the age of two as a single mum; waking up after having her breast and its walnut-sized cancer removed at the premature age of thirty-one. Nobody had cut her any slack and she had managed to survive. She was probably even better for it. Hardened. Inured. Unbreakable, almost.

  But today was different. There was something about this widow and her spiky words that struck at Tania’s heart like a mace. The overall effect was one of disorientation: of being bombarded with so many emotions at once that it was impossible to focus on just one. All she wanted to do was get away, get to some place where she could breathe again. And in her desperation to escape, she broke a cardinal rule of customer service. She said: ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  The tearoom was empty. Relieved, Tania steadied herself at the sink. Her boss spent Sunday nights screwing Anna from customer service and Monday mornings sleeping in. He didn’t answer his phone before ten am, and even if he did, Tania wasn’t going to call him. She wasn’t going to beg him for a concession she knew he would never make, a concession that she—hard-arse Tania as he liked to call her, before giving her a good slap on the bum—would never request.

  She called Leah instead.

  ‘I told you not to call me at work,’ her daughter said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Is it an emergency?’

  ‘No. It was a mistake.’

  ‘What was a mistake?’

  ‘Calling you.’

  ‘Are you sure everything’s okay?’

  ‘I dunno, Leah, you’re the psych nurse. You tell me.’

  ‘Mum…’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. Just checking in, making sure that little Bella’s okay.’

  ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘And Eric?’

  ‘Since when did you give a shit about Eric?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Now you really have got me worried.’ There was a scream followed by a loud bang. ‘Look, Mum, I’ve gotta go, but I’ll come round when I finish work. I’ll bring leftovers. We’ll have coffee, watch Farmer Wants a Wife.’

  When Tania returned, the woman had wiped the mascara from her cheeks and was sitting straight-backed in the chair.

  ‘I can go home and get the original.’


  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Tania said, surprised at the pleasure she gleaned from the disbelief on the widow’s face. ‘I’ve sighted the original, and I’m satisfied.’

  ‘But—’

  Tania held up her hand. She stamped the documents. ‘You’ll receive the rest of the papers in the post. They should be there by the end of the week.’

  An ever so faint pink, like the colour of cherry blossoms, flushed the widow’s pale cheeks.

  ‘Thank you.’

  But Tania couldn’t bear to look at her.

  ‘Thank you,’ the woman said again.

  Kevin, from the adjacent cubicle, leaned back in his chair and pointed to his Casio watch. He was fastidious about his appearance, from his bushranger hair and thick-framed glasses all the way down to his Astro Boy socks.

  ‘I was starting to worry that Tania the Great had taken a fall from her golden perch.’ He had not yet forgiven her for spilling punch on his limited edition Reebok sneakers at last year’s Christmas party.

  ‘It’s all under control, Kevin.’

  ‘And then I saw who you were dealing with.’

  ‘I have work to do, Kevin.’

  ‘I forget the name. Alice, or Alicia, or something equally pedestrian.’

  Alice Pickering.

  ‘She was in here last week. Some sob-story about her brother dying in a car crash and needing the rego transferred into her name.’ Kevin laughed. ‘No documents. Nothing. Just unwashed hair and one hell of a performance.’

  Tania gripped the edge of the desk. She watched the slow bleach of her knuckles.

  ‘She should’ve gone into acting. Better than Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman. Almost had me fooled. She was really…’ Kevin chewed on his lip as he searched for the perfect word. ‘Authentic.’

  In the queue, a teenager with a scorpion tattoo was cursing his girlfriend on the phone. A frazzled mother looked poised to smack a toddler, who was pounding sultanas into the floor. A pensioner’s malfunctioning hearing aid stabbed the air with its high-pitched ring.

  Tania pressed the big red button that directed the next ticket-holder to her desk. As she waited, she forced herself to think of Sheila and the derro in the Dandenong office. She willed herself to remember the man’s needless violence and Sheila’s long and sleepless nights. She imagined that it had been Leah, or a grown-up Bella, whose face the derro had threatened to slash from ear to ear. And then, choked with indignation, she plunged her hand inside her workbag and felt for the cold metal canister of capsicum spray.

  Hotel Cambodia

  Through the brown shields of her sunglasses, she watches her flesh sweat like a Sunday roast. Beside her, ice cubes pop and crackle in a glass of Diet Coke. Soon she will slip into the pool. But not yet. For now the heat is bearable. She will wait for the prickle and the pain.

  A volunteer at the NGO had warned her about the end of the dry season. Melissa had looked at his Celtic skin—papery stuff destined to sprout skin cancers like tiny horns in old age—and inwardly scoffed. Unlike him, she had Asian heritage. Her colouring was a direct result of ancestors toiling, knee deep, in rice paddies under the sun. Never mind that she had grown up in air-conditioned apartments in Singapore, or that her own mother was of Anglo-Celtic background. In this instance, she would abide by the old Australian adage: She’ll be right.

  But she wasn’t right. During her first twenty-four hours in Phnom Penh, she didn’t pee, not even a drop, her kidneys trapping fluid like some super-strength sponge. And as she consumed litre after litre of ‘mineral’ water—which she suspected was rebottled tap water—she observed locals on motodops in flannelette pyjamas and skinny jeans with nothing short of pure awe.

  Now, after three months of sweat and thirst, she can don jeans with the best of them. On bad days, of which there are many, she wonders if this is her greatest accomplishment. But then she scolds herself for her cynicism. Nobody forced this upon her. Nobody was in the room cheering her on when she googled the words NGO and Cambodia and nurse. And though many colleagues applauded her altruism, another friend had said, ‘What’s with you white people going to third world countries and making yourselves uncomfortable?’ At which point she had blushed and said nothing, because, while strictly speaking she was not white, she had lived a privileged existence compared to him.

  Melissa takes off her sunglasses and stands up. In the shallows, a Khmer girl of about fifteen frolics with a younger boy. Aside from a bored waiter, they are the only three people at the pool. She dives in. The cool water is like a balm against her sunburnt skin. There is a froth of bubbles, brown legs, muffled shrieks. She lets her body float, arms stretched in surrender to the blistering sun. It is here and only here that she can come close to forgetting: a motorcyclist’s skull, cracked open like a coconut, blood forming a black ribbon in the dust; a tearless woman holding her cleft-lipped baby to the van’s windscreen, for sale, like a sack of rice; row after row of ramshackle brothels full of teenagers in Tweety Bird pyjamas. Here, for a measly five US dollars, she can pretend she is just another tourist, relaxing after a week of marvelling at the detailed carvings at Angkor Wat.

  She swims to the edge of the pool, rests her elbows on the tiles. A man with a hairy gut emerges from the change room. She can tell immediately from his board shorts and thongs that he is Australian. He heaves himself onto a lounge, wheezes in and out.

  Melissa has met many expats since arriving in Phnom Penh. There was the Christian missionary who had returned from a day in the provinces, flushed and smug, after ‘saving’ one of the minority Cham people from the clutches of Islam. There was the vegan aid worker who—in a managerial position he would never have landed back home—prided himself on the number of Khmer friends he could call his own. And then there was the British pensioner in the foot massage parlour who moaned, as if in the throes of orgasm, while a teenager yanked on his toes. Melissa would like to think she is better than all of them, but sometimes she’s not so sure. After all, she had only looked to Cambodia when the hospitals in Melbourne failed to provide the validation she’d been searching for. At the idealistic age of eighteen, she had chosen a career in health to make a difference, save lives, change the world, and Cambodia, with its reputation for tragedy, seemed like just the place to do it.

  Brian had picked her up from the airport. He and his wife were devout Christians who had left their grown sons in Arkansas to establish a women’s refuge south of Phnom Penh. Brian was tall with dreadlocks and a wardrobe of paisley shirts. He looked like an extra from Jesus Christ Superstar. In the car, he told Melissa how he’d found God late in life after what he hinted was a less than pure past. God had given him sobriety and clarity and an opinion, it seemed, on everything. What affection Melissa lacked for Brian, she reserved for his wife, Hope, a retired short-order cook with a gentle voice and a huge heart.

  And so it was that Melissa moved in with the loving evangelical couple from the States, who treated her like a prodigal daughter. Every morning, before a breakfast of bacon and eggs, she held hands with Brian and Hope under the table as Brian said a lengthy grace. Breakfast was followed by a cold shower—something Melissa had found difficult at first, but which she now asserted was a refreshing start to the day—and then she dressed in her uniform of long skirt and modest long-sleeved top. When she was ready, she stepped through the gates of the compound to a chorus of motodop drivers yelling ‘Lady!’ and finally haggled a good price for one of them to take her the short distance to Antoine’s clinic.

  Antoine, like many foreigners in Cambodia, was something of a maverick. He’d been born in Montreal, but for decades he had called the small apartment above the clinic in Phnom Penh home. Though he loved to smoke and drink and joke around, nobody really knew much about him. Some claimed he had started out as a cardiologist in Canada but fled after a procedure on a patient had gone horribly wrong. Others speculated he had French-Cambodian heritage and was simply returning home. A Khmer doctor once told Melissa he had spied a crumpled photo of
a Cambodian girl—a daughter or lover, perhaps?—in Antoine’s wallet. But the mystery surrounding Antoine only made the expat community love him more. The patients were eternally grateful to him, always keen to share a story about how the Canadian doctor had saved their life, or their arse. Certainly it was a change from Australia. Antoine lorded it over everyone from his perch on the front step of the clinic, cigarette in hand. Between consultations, the other doctors conferred about their crudely constructed management plans. They set fractures on drunks with little, if any, anaesthetic. They watched a Khmer nurse jump on a distressed-but-very-much-alive patient’s chest and, for reasons unclear to all of them, commence cardiac compressions. It was shocking and terrifying and exhilarating. But the skills Melissa learnt in a private practice devoted to expatriates—how to treat dengue fever with intravenous fluids and dispense chlamydia treatments like lollies—did nothing to prepare her for the malnutrition and post-traumatic stress she would encounter in the provinces. The young father with leukaemia who couldn’t afford a blood transfusion. The mother of three with HIV banished to a hut on the edge of the village. For the most part, the expats got better. The Khmer, dehydrated and overworked and terrorised by their past, almost never did.

  But it was bearable, because every Sunday, while Brian and Hope went to church, she could come here, to Hotel Cambodia. Within its high brick walls, she could get her weekly fix of luxury, and tranquillity, and reality. Or unreality. Because she couldn’t tell anymore.

  Melissa goes for one last swim. She feels the water smooth her hair, dissolve the grime from her face. In the shallows, where the Khmer kids are playing, two feet hang like slabs of dough beneath the surface. When she looks up, she sees that they belong to the Australian man. He sits on the edge of the pool—a hirsute freckled hulk—as the children orbit like satellites around him. When she’d first arrived, she might have tried to tell herself that the Khmer kids were the Australian man’s adopted grandchildren, that he headed an orphanage and was taking two lucky orphans for a swimming lesson. But she has driven past the cardboard brothels late at night. She has seen seven-year-olds wearing rouge and lipstick and high heels. She knows there is an area in the red-light district nicknamed ‘Kiddies Corner’. Her brain spews out images like some rogue polaroid camera. Blackout curtains. Carpet stains. Mini bottles of brandy.