Australia Day

by Melanie Cheng

  ‘Your sisters want to put me in a home,’ she said. Mrs Chan knew this wasn’t exactly what the girls had said, but she wanted to see her youngest daughter explode with indignation. She was shocked when Daisy leant her elbows on the steering wheel and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Lily and I had an understanding. We were going to talk to Rose first before we brought it up with you.’

  Mrs Chan said nothing. She was trying to understand how her three very different daughters—women who fought about anything and everything—had managed to come to an agreement on this issue.

  Daisy reached across her mother and opened the glove box. She pulled out a brochure and laid it on Mrs Chan’s lap. At the top, in English and Chinese, it said: Australia’s Number One Chinese Retirement Village. Below the heading was a quote from Confucius: Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. There was a photo on the front cover of brick-veneer houses with Chinese-style eaves. A pretty garden was framed with pink camellia and bamboo.

  ‘I’ve checked it out,’ Daisy said, staring straight ahead through the windscreen. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Mrs Chan huffed. She opened her door and stepped out onto the street. For a moment she considered throwing the brochure back in her daughter’s guilty face, but instead she settled for slamming the car door as hard as she could.

  Lying in bed, Mrs Chan looked through the brochure. The Chinese translation described the home as a deluxe facility. In total, there were eight units, each with two bedrooms. The rooms were immaculate, with built-in alarms and shiny rails in the bathrooms. Basic cooking facilities were provided, but residents had the option of two cooked meals a day in the dining room. There were weekly tai chi classes and, more recently, art therapy. Mrs Chan searched the brochure for photos of the residents. She found two: one of a man in a wheelchair holding up a crude painting of himself, and the other of a woman with rosy cheeks blowing out candles on a birthday cake.

  Mrs Chan had only been inside a nursing home once, to visit a family friend with multiple sclerosis. Lily had driven her. She remembered thinking it was like a hospital without the doctors and the frenzy. Her friend was curled beneath a waffle blanket. Other, more able-bodied residents sat in the lounge room with their eyes closed and their mouths open. Mrs Chan’s clearest memory was of a fly landing on one woman’s face and dancing across her eyelashes.

  *

  When she had first arrived in Melbourne, a year after Wei died, Mrs Chan had lived with Lily and her family. Rose and Daisy were sharing a tiny apartment in the city. Martin was just a few weeks old and his sister was three at the time. There was plenty to do and Mrs Chan had earned her keep, cooking and cleaning and babysitting. But when the kids got older and had lives of their own, everything changed. Without her grandchildren around to act as a buffer, the relationship between Mrs Chan and her son-in-law grew sour. Mrs Chan could see that her mere presence irritated Luke, like a mosquito humming in his ear. For a while she did her best to avoid him, spending the winter days reading Chinese newspapers beside a fan heater in her room. At night she retired early so Luke and Lily could watch those detective shows they liked so much. But deep down Mrs Chan knew her days were numbered.

  It was a relief for everyone when Daisy bought Mrs Chan a small two-bedroom unit in Footscray. The building was three tram stops away from Lily and not too far from Daisy’s townhouse in Yarraville. Her daughters paid for her to have a personal alarm—a pendant she wore on a chain around her neck with a button that alerted a response team—but even so the first few months were frightening. Mrs Chan had never lived by herself before. She had gone straight from her parents’ tiny flat in Kowloon to her husband’s spacious apartment on Hong Kong Island. The nine months of her first pregnancy had been quiet—weeks and weeks of watching her carefully prepared meals turn cold as she waited for Wei to return home—but then Lily had come along, followed by Rose, and finally Daisy, and Mrs Chan had never been lonely again. This new isolation took some getting used to. The silence in particular was unsettling—Australia was so quiet compared to Hong Kong. Eventually, though, she had adjusted. Mrs Chan was starting to believe she could get used to anything.

  She woke up late the next morning in a tangle of sheets. The air conditioner had short-circuited again—as it always did when the temperature hit thirty degrees. The air was hot and still, like before a typhoon, except there were no typhoons in Melbourne. Mrs Chan wet a face towel with water from the tap and held the cloth to her forehead.

  At midday, she put on a cotton dress and a wide-brimmed hat and went outside into the heat. Perhaps she would get an ice-cream. Dr Leung had said she was borderline diabetic, but one ice-cream wouldn’t hurt. The doctor had been saying she was borderline diabetic for fifteen years. Mrs Chan was not a sweaty person, but as she walked she could feel a trickle of perspiration between her thighs. The streets were abandoned. Either side of her, fibro houses blinked and sagged in the sunlight. Hong Kong summers were different—sticky and wet and less intense. This kind of heat was extraordinary, as if Australia were closer to the sun.

  What was normally a ten-minute walk to the shops seemed more like half an hour, and soon she stopped to rest in the shade of a small wattle tree. Mrs Chan took a sip from her bottle of water before pulling out the mobile phone her daughters had given her last year for her seventieth birthday. Martin had changed the settings to Chinese characters, and when her daughters called their faces appeared on the tiny screen as if by magic. But there were no messages or missed calls for Mrs Chan today. It must be thirty-five degrees and people her age were dying like insects from the heat, but none of her children seemed to care. That was the problem with Australia, she thought—so many old people left on their own. She had once heard about a woman found by police a whole week after she had died, her body half-devoured by her own starving pet dog. It made Mrs Chan furious. She stared at the empty message bank on her phone and decided to teach her daughters a lesson.

  Just up the road was an old, run-down motel. Mrs Chan must have walked past it a hundred times, but she’d never taken much notice of it before. The building had water stains like black mascara running down its ugly concrete face. She hesitated in the driveway. When a neon bulb hissed above her head she almost aborted her plan, but then a neatly dressed Asian woman emerged from the foyer and Mrs Chan took this to be a good omen. She walked through the sliding doors and approached the surly girl at the desk. She held up her index finger and, in broken English, asked for a room. The girl didn’t question the lack of luggage, or the hat, or the thongs. She just took the eighty dollars cash and flicked a battered key across the counter.

  Mrs Chan regretted her decision as soon as she opened the door to the room. There was a funny odour—like the smell of damp towels left in the washing machine overnight. Mrs Chan inspected the bed. The mauve quilt had a cluster of mysterious grey stains near the middle. The pillow looked clean enough, but when she lifted it a long black hair fell from its belly. She found a towel in the bathroom and, after inspecting it carefully, laid it on the two-seater couch in the corner. She sat down, kicked off her thongs and hugged her knees to her chest. Her daughters would never think to look for her here. She would make them worry about her like she had always worried about them.

  Somehow she dozed off, still sitting on the couch. When she woke, the alarm clock beside the bed told her it was two o’clock. She could feel a circular dent in her face where her cheek had rested on her knee. She checked her phone. Nothing. She turned on the TV. On one channel there were lots of women in bikinis with disproportionately large breasts. Mrs Chan watched for five minutes before a red message popped up on the screen. Scared that she had done something illegal, she turned off the television and sat in silence. She wondered if Wei had stayed at places like this when he travelled for work. She tried to imagine him walking through the door, loosening his tie and watching one of the big breast movies. They had been married for more than thirty years, but there was still so much she would never know abou
t him.

  When she’d first met Wei, he was already engaged to a girl from a good family. But Wei was a sucker for beauty—the rich girl never stood a chance. Mrs Chan lost her virginity on her wedding night as many women did in those days, but the way Wei unbuttoned her blouse and thrust his hands into her underwear suggested she was not his first, second or third. It would not have surprised Mrs Chan if Wei had watched the big breast movies. He must have been getting his excitement somewhere. In their last ten years of marriage he certainly hadn’t been getting it from her—they went to bed at different times, often sleeping in separate rooms because of his snoring, but Mrs Chan knew urges like that didn’t just disappear as people got older.

  Her reverie was interrupted by a loud bang at the window. Terrified but also curious, she got up to peer out from behind the curtain. Just below the window she saw a man, about thirty perhaps, or a little older, lying on the ground. He must have collapsed and hit his head on the window on the way down. There was a cut on his forehead and a smear of blood on the glass. He wasn’t moving. Mrs Chan’s throat felt tight, as if it might close up at any moment. She held her trembling hands to her neck, forced herself to swallow. No one came running—she was the only person in the world who knew this man was injured, maybe even dying. She could probably save him by calling emergency, but she wouldn’t be able to explain what had happened to the person at the other end of the line. Her other option was to drag the grumpy girl from reception to the wounded man at the back of the motel, but Mrs Chan was worried about implicating herself in the process. Wouldn’t the authorities wonder what an old Chinese woman was doing alone in a seedy motel? Hadn’t Daisy told her recently about some tourist being held in detention because she’d lost her wallet and couldn’t speak English?

  She returned to her spot on the couch and began gently rocking. What was it about rocking that human beings found so soothing? She remembered pressing baby Lily to her breasts in the early hours of the morning, not knowing how to stop her red-faced daughter from crying except by holding her as tight as she could and swaying her body back and forth in the darkness.

  Mrs Chan didn’t stop rocking until she heard the ambulance siren. Then she sat very still and watched the red light oscillating through the curtain. She heard a sharp metallic click, like a stretcher being unfolded. Mrs Chan hoped to God the man was still alive, that the paramedics hadn’t come too late. In the hours after Wei’s death, the doctors had told her it was because his heart had stopped so long before the ambulance arrived that he’d stood little chance of surviving.

  After the ambulance had left, the ridiculousness of her situation dawned on her. Mrs Chan went to the bathroom and splashed some cold water across her face. Wary of using the towel hanging from the rail next to the sink, she wiped her hands on the skirt of her dress. She returned to the lounge and picked her straw hat up off the coffee table. Just as she was about to leave, her phone rang. Martin’s handsome face flashed up on the small screen.

  ‘Poh Poh? Where are you?’ He was speaking Cantonese—Mrs Chan could only just understand him.

  ‘Outside. In the garden.’

  ‘Mum said you cooked chicken rice for my birthday.’

  Martin. Dear, sweet Martin. Thank God for grandsons like Martin.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Can I come over to eat it?’

  Her heart soared. ‘Of course.’

  As Mrs Chan hung up, she thought of all the things she needed to do. She would have to soak a new bunch of mushrooms, slice the ginger and garlic, chop and marinate the chicken. She pulled the door closed behind her and returned the key to the grouchy girl at reception.

  Martin was a good boy. Mrs Chan had known it from the moment she held his tiny body during her first night in Melbourne. She knew it from the way he always took time to speak to her, softly, away from the others. She knew it from the warmth in his eyes as he stumbled over his Cantonese words. Mrs Chan put on her hat, took a deep breath and braced herself. She barely flinched as she stepped outside into the searing summer sun.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It gives me great pleasure to publicly thank the people who helped deliver this book into the world. First and foremost I must thank the Wheeler Centre and the judges of the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. Without the recognition of that very prestigious prize, my book would probably still be sitting at the bottom of a slush pile somewhere. Instead, I am supported by a group of wonderful professionals. Thank you to Clare Forster from Curtis Brown Australia, Michael Heyward and the team at Text for their faith in the manuscript, and my editor, Elizabeth Cowell, for her amazing ability to edit in a simultaneously ruthless and gentle way.

  One of the best things I ever did was enrol in a writing course with Writers Victoria. That is where I met Mark Smith, a talented writer who has become a great friend and mentor. Mark taught me perseverance—an essential skill for any writer. He also stressed the importance of the rewrite, and over the years I have been lucky to find writer-friends like Daniel Harper and Keren Heenan to read and critique my work. Together they have helped to shape many of the stories in this collection. Mark, Daniel and Keren, thank you for your wisdom.

  Some of the pieces in this collection have been published elsewhere. ‘Ticket-holder Number 5’ and ‘Muse’ were first published in the Griffith Review, ‘Things That Grow’ appeared in Sleepers Almanac, ‘Allomother’ was published in the Bridport Prize anthology, ‘White Sparrow’ first appeared in Shibboleth and Other Stories and ‘Clear Blue Seas’ was featured in the Forty South anthology. I will always be grateful to these journals for the important work they do and for taking a chance on me and my writing.

  I would like to conclude by acknowledging my family. Thank you, Mum and Dad, for reading everything I write. Without your support and generosity I would never have been able to pursue a career in writing. Thank you to my brother, Justin, my sister-in-law, Sonia, and my good friend Vicky for supporting me at various launches and writing events. Thank you, Dr Haissam Chahal, Ahed Chahal, Dana and Hani. I am indebted to you for your cooking and babysitting and for welcoming me into your culture and teaching me a great deal. Thank you, Rani. You thought you were marrying a doctor but ended up with a doctor-writer. You have taken it all in your stride and become a great champion for the book. This book, like our children, is a product of the life we have made together. Finally, thank you to Alyssa and Toby, who—while not always thrilled with my writing commitments—have roused emotions in me I never knew I possessed and in so doing have made me a crazier, more vulnerable and insightful human being.

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  Copyright © Melanie Cheng 2017

  The moral right of Melanie Cheng to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2017

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Page design by Jessica Horrocks

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Cheng, Melanie, author.

  Title: Australia Day/by Melanie Cheng.

  ISBN: 9781925498592 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781925410839 (ebook)

  Subjects: Australia Day—Fiction. Short st
ories.