‘I like meat,’ Andy said, ‘and vegetables.’
‘Maybe one day you can cook me some noodles.’ Meg went to the fridge and pulled out a tray of lamb chops. She glanced at Andy, who, at the mention of cooking, had stopped slouching and was now standing tall and stiff in the doorway. ‘Or not. We don’t have to decide straight away.’ Meg couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten Chinese food. It was probably back when Helen was alive, before the engine in the old Holden had given up and they could still drive to the takeaway place up the road.
Andy sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Your home is very big.’
Nobody had ever called Meg’s home big before. It was a modest three-bedroom brick house with a small backyard and a leaky roof. They’d moved in soon after her dad had been promoted to manager at the textile company, a few months before Helen was born, seventy years ago. Over the years, nearby houses had been transformed into glassy spaces with exposed beams and Danish furniture, but Meg and Helen had made no improvements to theirs, other than the odd coat of paint every couple of decades. But Meg supposed it would be big compared with flats in Hong Kong. It made her wonder about the home the boy had left behind.
‘I guess it’s a good size,’ she agreed. ‘And your room? How do you like that?’
‘It’s fine,’ Andy said, studying his fingernails.
Meg hated the word fine—Helen had only ever used it in the most sarcastic way. But it was possible Andy meant it sincerely. Meg’s friend Jillian said that some cultures didn’t indulge in sarcasm. Perhaps Chinese culture was one of them.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you a cup of tea or something?’ she offered.
‘Maybe just some water.’
Meg took a tumbler from the dish rack and filled it with water from the tap. As she put the glass down in front of Andy, a few drops splashed onto the table. Andy mopped them up with his sleeve.
‘You’ll dirty your clothes doing that,’ Meg said. She pulled a tea towel from the handle of the oven and wiped away what little water remained. ‘How are you with cleaning?’
Andy sipped his water. ‘My father used to own a cleaning business. He taught me how to polish mirrors.’
Meg thought of the mirrored cabinet above the sink in the bathroom and the full-length mirror in her bedroom. ‘Well, that will take all of fifteen minutes a week. What else can you do?’
Andy frowned at the tiny bubbles on the surface of the water. It was hard to believe he was twenty-one. Meg sat down in the chair beside him.
‘Do you like birds?’ she asked and opened the door to Atticus’s cage. The parrot climbed up her arm, coming to rest on her shoulder. ‘Atticus,’ Meg said, turning to rub her nose against his beak, ‘this is Andy.’
Atticus tilted his head to the side and looked at the boy.
‘In Hong Kong we have a bird market,’ Andy said. ‘People sell all kinds of birds there.’
‘How rude!’ Atticus shrieked, and made a tutting noise. The silver feathers around his neck pulsed.
Andy’s eyes flashed wide. ‘He talks?’
It had been a long time since Meg had introduced Atticus to anyone—she’d forgotten the thrill of it. ‘Oh, yes. He’s particularly fond of children’s nursery rhymes.’
‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle!’ Atticus sang.
‘That’s amazing.’
‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall! Humpty Dumpty had a great fall!’ The bird made a whistling sound to indicate the egg plummeting towards the ground.
Andy smiled.
‘You can pat him if you like,’ Meg offered. She extended her arm and the bird sidestepped towards Andy. ‘He loves a little scratch.’
Andy stuck out his index finger and poked the back of the parrot’s head.
‘Do you have any pets in Hong Kong?’ Meg asked, just to keep the conversation going. It was clear from the tense way Andy was sitting that he’d never owned an animal.
‘Hong Kong isn’t like Australia. We don’t have backyards.’
‘Of course.’
‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?’ Atticus interjected.
Andy pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped his finger with it. ‘What does his name mean?’
The bird stuck his head into the open end of Meg’s sleeve. ‘I’m not sure if it has a meaning,’ she said. ‘It’s just a name. From the book To Kill a Mockingbird.’
‘Atticus is a mockingbird?’
Meg laughed. ‘No. He’s an African grey parrot. But sometimes I do think he might be mocking me.’ Andy seemed perplexed by this and Meg shook her head. ‘It’s a silly joke.’
Atticus emerged from Meg’s sleeve, his feathers ruffled. ‘Peekaboo! I see you!’ he cried.
‘He may not act like it, but he’ll be turning thirty later this year,’ Meg said.
‘Thirty? That’s older than me!’
‘In captivity they can live up to fifty years—in the wild, up to eighty.’
‘Wow.’
Satisfied that she had impressed her guest, Meg returned Atticus to his cage. She filled his bowl with seeds before turning back to the stove. ‘I’d better get started on dinner,’ she said.
That night Meg felt lighter than she had in years. Andy was quiet—painfully so—but the house felt different with him there. Atticus, too, seemed pleased with the new addition to the household. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him so excited. Meg had always suspected he’d become depressed—at the very least, severely bored—after Helen had passed away. He’d started plucking at the feathers on his belly, which she’d never seen him do while her sister was alive. No doubt the vet would approve of this new companion for Atticus too—someone younger and livelier than Meg. Not that Andy was particularly animated. In many ways he was like her—reserved and introverted—which was perfect, really, just what she’d been hoping for. Andy would save money on rent and Meg would sleep more soundly. It was a win-win situation.
4
Andy pulled the curtains closed and blew the dust from his fingers. Like so many in Hong Kong, he and his family had become fanatical about cleanliness and hygiene after the flu epidemics. They wore masks on public transport. They doused their hands with sanitiser after touching a door handle. When they were in a lift they used their elbows instead of their fingers to push the buttons.
All through dinner Andy had battled nausea at the memory of Mrs Hughes handling her pet parrot. He’d watched and waited for her to wash her hands, but she never had. When she finally put the plate of lamb chops in front of him, Andy felt ready to vomit. He’d chewed the meat for five minutes before spitting the remains into his napkin.
Now he pulled a packet of Wet Ones from his duffel bag and began wiping things down. He started with the window ledge, followed by the desk and the wooden headboard. When he was finished, he appraised the pile of blackened wipes in the rubbish bin with a revolted satisfaction. By ten o’clock, after he’d changed the sheets on the bed—replacing the rose-coloured quilt with his plain blue Ikea doona—some of his initial unease had abated. While he longed to have a shower and wash away all the grime, he worried the noise of the running water would wake the old lady.
As he lay in bed, Andy found himself wondering about his host. She was old—probably in her seventies—and most likely widowed. He assumed the room he was staying in had previously belonged to her daughter. It had marks recording a child’s growth on the back of the door and the initials H. H. were scratched into a corner of the bedside table. He found it unnerving to be in such a feminine room. Andy was an only child. Apart from his mother—a serious woman who rarely wore make-up—he hadn’t had much interaction with the opposite sex. At school he’d steered well clear of girls, the pretty ones in particular. He was suspicious of the way they could reduce his friends to a bunch of clowns with as little as a flick of their hair.
Andy patted the mattress. He felt the curve of springs, like a buried rib cage, beneath his fingertips. He supposed Mrs Hughes’ daughter ha
d brought boys into this bed. His best friend, Ming, had told him that Australian girls lost their virginity early. Ming said that by the time Aussie girls graduated from high school there were no virgins left, and by the time they went to university they were experimenting with sex toys and threesomes. Andy wasn’t sure how Ming knew all this. On the rare occasions Andy had asked him, Ming had waved his hands and said, ‘It’s well known,’ which made Andy feel stupid.
At ten-thirty his phone beeped on the bedside table. He picked it up and saw a message from his aunt.
How are things at the old lady’s house?
Winnie was the only one in his family who messaged him in English. Andy looked around at the stained carpet and the bookcase full of books with faded yellow spines.
It’s good, he typed. He didn’t want his aunt to worry.
Great! See what a genius your Auntie Winnie is? If only your Uncle Craig appreciated this!
Andy sent her a smiley-face emoji.
His aunt sent three blowing-kiss emojis back.
Andy put his phone on the bedside table and picked his microbiology textbook up from the floor. He had an exam worth thirty per cent in eight weeks and he’d barely studied for it. The pink cells and eggplant-coloured bacteria in the photographs reminded him of Mrs Hughes’ quilt, the one he’d buried beneath the bed. The book informed him that the ‘lancet-shaped, gram-positive bacteria’ were actually Streptococcus pneumoniae, a dangerous pathogen responsible for ear infections and pneumonia. Andy found it hard to believe that these tiny dots—which during his first prac he’d mistaken for dust on the microscope lens—could kill people. In fact, he found most things he studied in biomedicine a little hard to fathom. Things like neuroplasticity and phantom limbs and auditory hallucinations. It all felt more like magic than medicine. Ever since he was a child, Andy had been deeply suspicious of magicians. He envied Ming, who approached each new topic with a clear and open mind—like a child, innocent and trusting.
Andy studied three pages before dropping the book to the floor. As he turned off the light he remembered how, before retiring to bed, Mrs Hughes had thrown a blanket over Atticus’s cage. She’d said the darkness simulated night-time and helped anxious birds to sleep. Andy had felt jealous of Atticus then. He wished someone would smother the endless chatter of his brain with a big black sheet.
5
When Meg woke up, she felt refreshed. In the mirror, her cheeks looked less jowly and the bags around her eyes were not so grey. She briefly considered applying some lipstick before breakfast but then scolded herself for her vanity—young people like Andy didn’t care how an old woman like her looked. She was invisible, whether she wore lipstick or not. She closed the zip on her make-up bag and ran a comb through her hair.
When she got to the kitchen she found Andy sitting at the breakfast table, staring into his coffee.
‘Good morning!’ she said, which seemed to startle him. ‘How did you sleep?’
He shook his head. ‘All night there was a banging noise on the roof.’
‘That would’ve been the possums,’ Meg said. ‘Do you know about possums?’
‘In possum land the nights are fair!’ Atticus sang from his cage. Meg removed the cover and stuck a finger through the bars. The parrot bit down on her knuckle with his beak.
‘I don’t think it was an animal,’ the boy said. He looked wretched. ‘It was too big to be a possum.’
‘Believe me, it was a possum,’ Meg insisted. She put two pieces of bread in the toaster. ‘Would you like some breakfast?’
Andy glanced at Meg and then at Atticus. ‘No thank you.’
She filled the kettle from the tap. ‘My friend Jill is picking me up this morning. We go for coffee every Wednesday.’
‘Okay.’ Andy took off his glasses and rubbed his face vigorously with his hand. ‘I have uni.’
‘Oh, good.’ The toaster beeped and Meg plucked the toast from its metal grills. ‘Don’t forget to lock the door on your way out.’
Andy stood up. ‘Do you mind if I take a shower?’
‘Go right ahead.’
As Andy left the kitchen, Meg wondered what Jillian would make of her new housemate. She would probably say he was a typical millennial—rude, self-absorbed, brittle. Jillian was constantly bemoaning millennials, but Meg didn’t believe people fitted neatly into categories. She was supposed to be a baby boomer, but she wasn’t a fat cat like Jillian with lots of investment properties. She didn’t have a book club or go on luxury holidays like their friend Anne. Perhaps Andy was the same. An outlier.
Andy emerged from the bathroom just as Jillian arrived. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and was clutching his pyjamas to his chest. On seeing the women, he scurried to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. Meg grabbed her jacket from the hatstand in the hallway.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, avoiding Jillian’s suggestive smile.
Every Wednesday Meg, Jillian and Anne drank coffee at Café Bonjour, a small place next to the chemist along Meg’s local shopping strip. Jillian and Anne both lived on the other side of the city, but unlike Meg they still owned cars and could make the trip across town.
The manager of the café was a Vietnamese woman who played Edith Piaf on a loop and served baguettes stuffed with chillies. Meg liked the coffee, but she couldn’t eat the baguettes. The one time she’d tried, the crust had shredded the skin on the roof of her mouth and she hadn’t been able to eat anything, other than yoghurt, for days. The suburb had changed so much since she and Jillian were kids, back when they could buy sixpence-worth of their favourite lollies—freckles and snakes—from the milk bar. Now the main street boasted an organic food store, a nail salon and a pilates studio with a terrible name: Keeping Karm. Every week Anne declared how much the suburb had evolved—as if, rather than a postcode, it was some kind of living, breathing organism.
Anne was already there when they arrived, reading the newspaper on her iPad. She was a self-confessed iPad addict, which intrigued Meg, who couldn’t get her head around how to use a smart phone. But Meg was impressed by the way her friend’s arthritic fingers danced across the small screen—here, a photomontage of her five grandchildren; there, the latest article from the New Yorker.
‘Ladies!’ Anne said when she spotted her friends.
Meg braced herself for the next hour and a half, which would be less a conversation and more a competition between Anne and Jillian for centre stage. Meg missed the days when it had just been her and Jill. They’d been unlikely friends since the age of five and had endured so much together—Helen’s accident, relationship break-ups, losing their parents—and even though Jillian had left to live in places like Sydney and London, it was never long before she returned to their little suburb, first for weddings and the births of her grandchildren, and later to care for her dying mother.
The weekly coffees had started at Jillian’s insistence after Helen had passed away. In spite of Meg’s initial reluctance—she hadn’t wanted to monopolise Jillian’s time, she always seemed so busy—the catch-ups had been a welcome distraction. That was three years ago. Now they hardly ever spoke of Helen. Instead they talked about books and Jillian’s children and how long Meg had been waiting for her knee replacement in the public health system. What had begun as therapy had morphed into a kind of habit. Often Meg wondered if Jillian felt sorry for her. Though her friend liked to paint herself as tough—one of the original feminists, who’d only married to relieve her lovesick husband of his suffering—in truth, she had a gentle heart. But she was also easily bored, and Meg wasn’t surprised when one day Jillian suggested they search Facebook for old high school friends. Meg had agreed—she couldn’t bear to see Jillian restless—but she was disappointed.
Meg wasn’t on Facebook, so Jillian did all the work. She reported back that some of their classmates had moved interstate and quite a few had died. They both took delight in the discovery that bitchy Robyn—who’d been blessed (or cursed) with huge breasts in first form—h
ad been married and divorced four times. The only person Jillian had found who wasn’t awful and still lived in Melbourne was Anne ‘Hound Dog’ Harris. Robyn had given Anne the nickname after discovering her one afternoon in the school toilets, bawling her eyes out about a boy. From that day on, when the nuns were out of earshot, Robyn would point to Anne, make her best Elvis face and sing the chorus of ‘Hound Dog’. Anne would sit at her desk, steely-faced, and silently endure Robyn’s torments, but it must have had an effect on her, because by the time they all reached fourth form, nothing seemed to touch her. Even the nuns, sensing her fearlessness, treated her with a special respect.
At their reunion, Meg was thrilled to discover that Anne had lost none of her steel. Everything about her, from her sharp-edged earrings to her patent-leather heels, was unapologetic and bold. Anne told them she now ran a high-end clothing boutique.
‘I’ve ordered for you, Meg,’ Anne declared when the women sat down. ‘But Jill’s order is always so complicated with her skinny this and decaf that, I figured she could do it herself.’ As she spoke, her oversized red hoop earrings jiggled and bounced. In spite of the twenty-degree day, she was draped in a shaggy, mustard-coloured shawl.
The waitress, a timid girl with smudged eyeliner and a French accent, arrived with the two coffees. She took Jillian’s order.
‘Just an extra-hot skinny decaf latte for me,’ Jillian said.
‘See?’ Anne picked up her coffee before putting it straight down again with a clatter. She shook her fingers and inhaled through gritted teeth. ‘Why do they insist on serving hot drinks in a glass?’ She frowned and wrapped a serviette around the tumbler.
Meg saw the young couple at the table next to them snigger.
Oblivious, Anne continued. ‘So, ladies, I have news.’ She paused, making sure she had their full attention. ‘I have a new companion.’
Meg felt her heart hammer—was Anne mocking her? Did she know about Andy? But then she saw Anne hold up her iPad. On the screen was a photo of a scrawny-looking kitten.
Room for a Stranger Page 2
