Gook
After finishing uni, I got a job in Sydney working as an assistant lexicographer for the Macquarie. I had just become engaged to Phuong, whom I had met in my first year at the university. We drove down from Brisbane, stopping off at Coffs Harbour, where my mother now lived in a small unit, close to the ocean. When I introduced Phuong to her, she was delighted and immediately began to talk about grandchildren. Then she asked me when I had last seen Jimmy. For a moment, I didn’t understand whom she meant. She had never spoken my father’s Christian name to me before. He was always ‘your father’. I told her we were going to stop by his place on our way to Sydney.
‘I write to him every week,’ she said. ‘But he never replies.’
It was still Christmas at my father’s house in Newcastle, as it had been for three years. My father had never taken down the decorations after my mother left. There was a broken windowpane in one of the front windows, and the lawn was weedy, the grass long.
I begged Phuong to wait in the car first. ‘You don’t know him,’ I said. ‘I have to see what state he’s in.’
I collected the mail and walked up to the house. I wondered if one of the envelopes contained the latest issue of Tits, or perhaps one of my mother’s letters, and then I wondered which would be more welcome to my father. I knocked on the door and waited for some time before he answered.
My father was wearing a frayed dressing-gown my mother had bought him years before, and he had a cigarette in his mouth. He had become an antonym of himself. The last time I had seen him he had still looked quite young: thin, tall and with a full head of hair. Now he was old, fat, stooped and balding. He saw me looking at his belly and said through the smoke, ‘Do I still have two feet, then? I haven’t seen them in a while.’
He offered me his hand, which trembled a little, and I shook it.
‘So where’s this girl of yours?’ he asked, stepping out onto the front porch.
I waved at Phuong and she started to get out of the car.
‘I thought Phuong was a funny name.’ He squinted so he could see better. ‘You never mentioned she was a gook.’
Without a word, I left my father on the porch and hurried down the path. Taking Phuong’s hand, I led her back to the car.
‘Son,’ my father was calling, as he carefully made his way down the porch steps. ‘Son, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I … She looks a lovely girl. Son!’
‘What is it?’ Phuong asked.
‘We’re going,’ I said, opening the car door.
‘Why?’
An 1893 dictionary of slang defines gook as a low prostitute. It was adopted by American marines in the Philippine–American War to refer to all Filipinos (perhaps taken from gugu, a mocking of Filipino speech) and expanded throughout the twentieth century to embrace all South-East Asian countries, including Vietnam, where Phuong’s parents had come from.
‘I’ll tell you on the way.’
‘Son!’ I heard my father again as we drove away. He jogged awkwardly after the car, then stopped, and leaned over, holding his knees.
I didn’t speak to my father for five years.
Fuck
My mother called me from the hospital to tell me my father had had a stroke. He had telephoned her earlier that day, shouting gibberish into the phone. At first my mother thought that he was simply drunk, but there was a tone to his nonsense that scared her. She immediately caught the train down to see him. On arriving at the house, she found him in the bedroom trying to pull his work overalls on. He had retired the year before. When he saw her, my father said thickly, ‘What’s for tea, Mary? I’m fucking starving.’ His mouth was horribly twisted, and his right arm hung limp at his side.
I found my mother sitting by his bed at the hospital. My father was asleep among the various lines and tubes that were keeping him alive. He was completely bald now, and his skin had a yellow, coarse look, like the old newspapers you find under carpets. I kissed my mother, then leaned over to look at my father. He opened his eyes, said quite clearly ‘Fuck!’ and closed his eyes again.
‘The doctors said the stroke has affected his speech,’ my mother explained. ‘They told me the name of it, but I can’t remember. Dys-something. Or a-something-ia. It’s the bit of the brain where you form words, where you choose them. The doctor said he can’t censor himself. He’s been swearing the whole time he’s been in here. They said, in the scans, there was evidence of older lessons in his brain. Lessons. Is that right?’
‘Lesions?’ I suggested.
‘Yes, lesions. That maybe he had a small stroke years ago, and we never noticed, not with the drinking he did. And he said things … He couldn’t stop himself from saying those bad things.’ She began to cry.
‘What’s that fucking racket?’ my father said, drowsily. ‘I just want to sleep, for fuck’s sake.’
We took my father home three weeks later. He had lost much of his memory of the past ten years, and his speech was confused. He would ask for a fork when he meant a knife, and call my mother a ‘silly tart’ when she brought him one. But then he would shake his head, saying, ‘I’m sorry, hen. I can’t help it. My fucking brain is fucked.’
When he was stronger, I introduced Phuong to him. My father took to her straightaway, and Phuong was fascinated by his swearing, especially the infinite uses he made of fuck, a word that could be traced back to the eighth century.
‘Och, I don’t give a fuck!’ he would say when he disagreed, or ‘Get to fuck!’
When she heard him, my mother would cry from wherever she was in the house, ‘Oh, Jimmy! Can you please mind your language!’ She had returned to look after my father. I don’t think he ever realised that she had left him: my mother never mentioned it to him.
After the stroke, he never smoked or drank again. His speech gradually became more coherent, but no less filthy. When I visited him he would stand up and say, ‘Come here, you daft bastard!’ and then embrace me. Then he would turn to my wife and, kissing her cheek, say, ‘I don’t know how he was smart enough to get someone like you, hen. He never had any common sense. As thick as pigshit, unstirred and undiluted. Except for his words. I’ll give him that, the bastard.’
In my father’s curses was his blessing.
Damn
My father came to live with us after my mother died. She was killed by an aggressive form of cancer that, up to the end, she was unable to pronounce. My father stayed at her side the entire time in the two months she was dying. When she was asleep, he would pray to God, unconscious of his blasphemies.
‘Our father who art in heaven,’ he would plead, ‘for fuck’s sake, help my wife.’
One afternoon my father began to tell, once more, the story of the cock.
‘Oh, Jimmy,’ my mother said feebly. ‘Not that again.’
‘Just listen,’ he said. His recollection of the story was remarkable, although he had to stop half-a-dozen times when he couldn’t find the word he wanted, and then my mother would help him.
‘Greenhouse,’ she would say softly. ‘You were fixing the greenhouse.’
As he neared the end of the story, I straightened up as — for the first time — he deviated from the well-rehearsed script of decades.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘your mother went away to get a … What is it? Damn! Ah, a handkerchief because of my nose. And I thought … And I thought to myself, Jimmy, you’ve got to see this lassie again. So I took a whatdoyoucallit … a rock. And I put a fucking crack in the lounge-room window!’ He laughed. ‘I cracked it, and I showed it to your mother so she would have me back again to fix it. So she would have me back …’
He looked down at her, and my mother took his hand.
‘You never told me that part,’ she said, smiling.
She died the next day.
My father was silent at the funeral, perhaps afraid of swearing in front of my mother’s friends and relatives, and making her ashamed of him once more. So he didn’t say a word throughout the service,
or in the car, or at the cemetery where he stood holding my son’s hand as his wife was laid to rest.
I drove my father back to the house to pack his things. When we got home, my father sat on the back deck as I shifted boxes into a truck. It was after sundown by the time I had finished, and my father was still sitting there, in the dark. I went out and sat beside him.
‘Damn,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘That’s the only time your mother ever fucking swore at me,’ my father said quietly. ‘Just the once. She said, “Damn.”’
I didn’t tell my father that damn came from the Middle English dampen, itself derived from the Latin damnare, to condemn, to inflict loss. He already knew exactly what it meant.
For a moment I could think of no word to comfort him. Then I cried out ‘when!’, and without a second’s pause my father farted, loudly, enormously.
And he threw back his head and roared his laughter at the darkness.
The Sixth Cycle
JACINTA HALLORAN
From her chair in the day ward, Teresa looked out over the elm trees in the park across the road. The first time she’d been there the trees were bare. By her third chemo cycle there were new leaves budding, like little tumours, on every twig on every tree. Now it was mid December, and the leaves were thick and lush, and the trees threw dense circles of shade onto the grass. This afternoon, if she felt well enough, she’d say goodbye to everyone then cross the road and stand under one of those trees for a minute. Her little farewell ceremony. ‘All finished before Christmas,’ the oncologist had said the last time she’d seen him. ‘That’s nice timing.’ As if she’d somehow planned it.
Lucia, her yoga teacher, had suggested a mantra for chemo days. It is what it is, no more and no less. When, at the end of a Wednesday-night class, Lucia had first whispered it to her, Teresa had felt drowsy and warm, but perhaps it had been the heat in the room, or the way Lucia had said it: all brimming with confidence, her soft Scottish brogue so soothing, her hands lightly resting on Teresa’s temples. It is what it is, no more and no less. Lucia wasn’t young, but she seemed it. She’d travelled the world: South America and India, years of her life spent in places that weren’t home. She was open to everything. Now, as the nurse — Joanne it was today — wheeled the IV towards her, Teresa wished for Lucia’s flexibility of outlook. A flexible body and a flexible mind: six months’ worth of salutes-to-the-sun and breathing — so much breathing — yet, still, she didn’t have either.
‘Your last day,’ Joanne said, tightening the tourniquet on Teresa’s arm. Joanne had round cheeks, a Cupid’s bow of a mouth, and a blunt, brown bob that swung like a curtain. ‘You must be happy.’
Happy? Was she happy? Was that what it was; this strange anticipation that sat, like a bubble of air, just under her sternum? But she was being too literal: an English teacher’s habit. ‘Yes,’ she said with a smile. ‘Very happy. Though you’ve all been wonderful here.’
‘We do our best,’ Joanne replied, tapping confidently at a vein on Teresa’s left forearm. She picked up the IV cannula and steadied it against Teresa’s skin. ‘Okay, here goes. Lucky last needle.’
From time to time during the morning, Joanne walked past and asked Teresa how she was feeling.
‘As well as can be expected,’ she’d reply, or ‘Pretty good, thanks.’ The nausea was manageable, so long as she didn’t think about it.
She’d learned that trick during her first cycle, on her way back from the bathroom, where she’d been vomiting her heart out. She’d stopped to fix a twist in her IV tubing when a man in the chair nearby had spoken to her.
‘Keep your thoughts above your stomach,’ he’d said. Just like that.
‘Are you offering me advice?’ she’d countered irritably. Her hands were tingling uncomfortably — the nurses had warned her they might — and she was still feeling sick.
‘Yes.’ He looked at her over the top of his reading glasses. ‘I’ve found it’s best to think abstractly, or to look out the window, or read something you love.’ The book on his lap was A Passage to India. ‘Just don’t let your thoughts drift down to’ — he patted his stomach — ‘you know where.’
She smiled at the familiar tone of his voice. ‘Let me guess. You’re a teacher.’
‘More or less. University academic. Botany. And now a self-proclaimed expert in chemotherapy. Last dose today of my second course.’ He was thin, and as bald as a billiard ball, but he had a kind face.
‘A Passage to India is one of my favourites, too,’ she’d said.
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ Joanne asked as she changed the IV bag.
‘Having lunch with my brother and his family.’ Teresa smiled so that Joanne could see she was looking forward to it. ‘He has four teenage sons: can you believe it? The youngest are twins. All lovely boys.’ She was gilding the lily: Callum, the fifteen-year-old, had been a handful all year, and lately the twins were at each other’s throats. Just last month their mother, Meredith, had talked to Teresa about it. Should they change schools? The all-boys thing had worked well for the oldest one, but perhaps the others would do better to mix with girls. What did Teresa think? ‘The best thing you can do for boys is to integrate them socially,’ she’d told her sister-in-law. ‘Some of the most positive friendships I’ve seen at school have been between boys and girls.’ She’d been surprised at her directness, but Meredith had taken it well. Her diagnosis had made her more forthright, and Meredith less so.
Joanne flicked at a bubble in the IV tubing. She had lovely nails, Teresa noticed; all the same length, perfectly shaped and lacquered with shiny clear polish. ‘What about you?’ Teresa asked. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’
Joanne raised her eyebrows. ‘We wanted to go to Thailand on the twenty-second, me and my boyfriend. You know, just forget about the whole thing. But my mother had a fit when I told her. So we’re flying out Boxing Day instead.’
The night before, Meredith had dropped by Teresa’s house with a plastic container of chicken-and-sweetcorn soup. ‘It’s light,’ Meredith said. ‘Good for summer.’ She’d also brought two magazines: Vogue Living and Marie Claire.
‘You really shouldn’t have,’ Teresa told her, as she put the soup in the fridge. ‘You have enough to do as it is, and with Christmas coming.’
Meredith was dismissive. ‘It’s no trouble. I have to cook anyway, so I just make a little more. Six or seven: what’s the difference?’
So Teresa had her magazines, and she always brought a book or two along with her. Today it was two of the texts for next year’s literature class: D.H. Lawrence’s short stories and A Passage to India. Last month, when she saw the Forster novel on the Year 12 reading list, she remembered the man who was reading it the day she’d felt so ill. The botany professor, she called him. She hoped he’d got back to work, to his plants and his students. She imagined him in a glasshouse, whistling while he worked, with dirt under his fingernails.
She read quickly through one of the Lawrence stories: the imagery was all well and good, but his attitude to women! The girls at school would hate it. She could just imagine the arguments in class: the girls articulate and indignant; the boys stirring them up for a laugh, yet secretly enthralled. And she, their teacher, trying to keep the peace, to get them to focus on themes and characterisation, all the while a little in love with them all; with their energy and youth, their possibility.
She picked up A Passage to India and began to read.
‘So it really is a favourite of yours.’
She looked up to see the botany professor, dressed in khaki shorts and a checked short-sleeve shirt. He was no longer bald: instead a hopeful white fuzz, as fine as fairy floss, crowned his head like a halo. He pointed to the book in her hand, and she felt dizzy, unmoored, as if the two of them had suddenly changed places. ‘It’s a Year 12 literature text for next year,’ she said. ‘I’m just refreshing my memory.’
‘Then I hope your students enjoy it as much
as we both do.’
He hadn’t asked if she was a teacher. She liked that he didn’t seem to bother with redundancies. He simply put two and two together and got on with it.
‘Are you here for a check-up?’ she asked.
‘Preliminary blood tests,’ he said, sitting down next to her. ‘I’m back for another course of the best stuff next week.’
‘Another full course?’ He’d barely been away. Just five short months.
‘Yes, the works. So long as I can manage it. Which I will.’
He stayed to have a cup of tea with her. There was a plate of fruit too, brought by Joanne; thin cantaloupe slices and cubes of watermelon and grapes, cold from the fridge. The professor ate steadily while they talked about books. He was a fan of the modernists, he told her, reaching for another slice of cantaloupe. His appetite seemed infectious, so much so that she surprised herself by eating a whole bunch of grapes.
When the fruit was all gone, and she was afraid he might at any moment get up and leave, she found herself saying, ‘I don’t know what to think about it: having cancer, that is. I don’t think it’s given me any wider perspective, any great insights. I don’t feel particularly spiritual.’ She stopped. Had she upset him? He didn’t look upset. He wasn’t squirming in his chair. ‘But there’s one thing,’ she went on. ‘It sounds ridiculous really.’
‘I don’t mind ridiculous.’
‘It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Not analysing in any way, but I often find the thought has drifted into my mind. It’s about these two men.’
‘Ah! Sordid confessions.’
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