Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

  ‘A stray I rescued. I’ve named her Miss Marmalade.’

  ‘She’s lovely,’ Meg cooed, relieved, and passed the iPad to Jillian.

  ‘You should get one. They’re easy to care for,’ Anne said. ‘So long as you don’t have allergies to them.’

  ‘I’m not sure Atticus would approve,’ Meg said, taking a sip of her coffee.

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot about that.’

  ‘Speaking of companions,’ Jillian said, and nudged Meg beneath the table. ‘I snatched a glimpse of your new housemate coming out of the shower this morning.’

  Anne put her coffee down. ‘New housemate? You didn’t tell me about this.’

  Meg studied the elaborate leaf design the barista had fashioned in the foam on her cappuccino. Anything was better than looking into the interrogating eyes of her two friends. Sometimes, with their pointy faces and feathery shawls, they reminded Meg of a couple of vultures.

  ‘Is he Chinese?’ Jillian said, and Meg saw the couple at the next table giggle some more.

  ‘Shhhh.’ Meg held a finger to her lips.

  ‘Oooh!’ Anne said, clapping her hands. ‘Now I am interested.’

  Meg explained the homeshare arrangement to Anne. Jillian knew all about it, despite her feigned ignorance. It was Jillian who had brought home the brochure from the library, setting the whole thing in motion.

  ‘What a wonderful idea,’ Anne said, and Meg thought she seemed genuine. ‘I guess it must get lonely, and scary, with everything that’s happened.’

  Meg shrugged, keen to avoid talk of the intruder.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Jillian said in such a salacious tone that Meg felt her cheeks flush.

  ‘He keeps to himself.’

  ‘Studious, I imagine,’ Anne said. ‘They always are.’

  ‘Anne!’ Jillian exclaimed, but she was smiling.

  Meg looked over at the amused couple sitting beside them. She took another sip of her coffee. ‘I don’t actually know what he studies.’

  ‘Medicine, I bet,’ Anne offered.

  Jillian slapped the back of Anne’s hand. ‘I hope he’s a contemporary dancer, just to prove you wrong.’

  Meg licked the froth from her lips. ‘I’ll ask him.’

  6

  It was ten am and Andy was on the tram, studying photos of possums on his smart phone. He couldn’t believe one of those pink-nosed creatures was responsible for keeping him up all night, and yet he found numerous online forums devoted to discussing their roof-surfing habits. Some people suggested traps, while others swore by aluminium skirts wrapped around neighbouring trees. Andy even stumbled across the poem Atticus had quoted from that morning—‘In Possum Land’—written by a famous Australian poet, Henry Lawson.

  Ming was waiting for him at the tram stop next to the medical building. His friend was hunched over his phone and didn’t see Andy arrive. He flicked Ming on the ear.

  ‘Hey!’ Ming said, pulling out his earbuds. ‘You’re late.’ He hitched his bag onto his shoulder and they walked to the laboratory together. ‘Man, where were you last night? I sent you three messages about going for wonton noodles.’

  Andy had seen Ming’s texts, but they’d only depressed him—an unwelcome reminder of how far he was from the city.

  ‘My phone was on silent,’ he lied. ‘Anyway, now it takes me thirty-five minutes on the tram to get to Chinatown.’

  Ming huffed. ‘I don’t know what you’re thinking, staying with an old woman in the middle of nowhere. I told you a thousand times you’re welcome to crash on my sofa bed.’

  Andy had been tempted by his friend’s offer, but he knew that Ming suffered from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, and during swot vac he spent entire days locked in his apartment, washing his hands. Luckily Ming was smart and studied consistently the rest of the year.

  ‘Mum and Dad wouldn’t accept it,’ Andy said, knowing his friend would stop probing when he heard parents were involved. He and Ming were both from Hong Kong, and both only children—if there was one thing Ming understood, it was the irrational and unquestionable authority of family.

  ‘So, what’s it like?’ Ming asked.

  Andy thought of the dark corridors and the dust and the rodents on the roof. ‘Horrible.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  Andy frowned. ‘Seventies, eighties? I don’t know—it’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Australians always look older than they are,’ Ming said. ‘My mum says it’s the hole in the ozone layer—the sun’s too strong for their skin.’

  Andy cleared his throat. ‘She’s got a pet parrot.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah, an African grey something called Atticus. He’s nearly thirty, older than us.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘I swear. It’s crazy. This morning he was reciting poetry.’

  Ming put his hand on Andy’s arm, his black eyes glistening. ‘You should teach it Cantonese. Get it to say some Confucius.’

  Andy had hoped to impress his friend but, as usual, Ming was making a joke of it.

  ‘I don’t know any Confucius.’

  Ming stopped to think. ‘Neither do I.’

  During microbiology prac, Andy copied Ming’s answers. He found the Latin names of the bacteria impossible to commit to memory. Streptococcus, enterococcus, haemophilus—they all sounded the same to him. A little like Australian names when he’d first arrived in Melbourne—Laura and Lauren, Daniel and Danielle, Christine and Christopher. It was confusing.

  As the tutor wandered around the lab, peering over students’ shoulders, Andy watched Kiko—a half-Japanese, half-Australian girl who sat at the bench opposite him. Andy had spent countless hours sketching her and studying her movements. He felt like he knew her intimately, even though they’d never exchanged a word. Sometimes, when he was at the library, he would watch her through the floor-to-ceiling windows. She always sat on the lawn near the law building to eat lunch with her best friend, Muneera. While Kiko kept to herself, everybody in biomedicine knew Muneera. In tutorials, she answered questions in an urgent, explosive way, as if she was on a game show and a lot of money was at stake. Kiko seemed content to remain in Muneera’s shadow, which amazed Andy, but not as much as the fact that Kiko—and indeed the whole world—seemed completely unaware of Kiko’s beauty. Perhaps it was because she wore shapeless jeans and never applied make-up. But such things didn’t bother Andy—if anything, they endeared her to him. In Andy’s mind, Kiko was perfect. Even at a distance, through the library’s unwashed window, her glossy hair and fleeting smiles were a welcome relief from the schematic diagrams of polymerase chain reactions. Andy’s notebook was full of drawings—of the back of Kiko’s head, of the perfect U made by her earlobe, of her big brown eyes with their long black lashes.

  The tutor asked Kiko if he could take a look through her microscope. Andy watched the lanky scientist lean over to adjust the focus of the lens. He was inches from her. Andy wondered what she smelled like—something citrusy, he imagined, something like freshly peeled mandarins. As the tutor examined the slide, Kiko studied her fingernails. She bit a sliver of nail and looked up, self-conscious. Andy peered into his microscope, pretending to be fascinated by the pseudohyphae of a fungus.

  7

  At dinner the next night, Meg asked Andy what he was studying.

  ‘Biomedicine,’ he said through a mouthful of mashed potato.

  ‘Is that a science degree?’

  Andy swallowed. ‘Pretty much. It’s a three-year science degree with a focus on medical subjects.’

  Meg suppressed a sigh. She would’ve loved to prove Anne wrong—wiped some of the arrogance from her perfectly made-up face. But if Meg looked disappointed, Andy didn’t notice. In fact, nothing much seemed to register with Meg’s new housemate. In the three days they’d lived together, she could count on one hand the number of times he’d made eye contact.

  She watched him now, pushing a piece of steak around his plate with his fork. That morning she�
�d walked all the way to the butcher, and now her knees were throbbing beneath the table. She’d spent fifteen dollars of her pension on the meat, only to have Andy spit the half-chewed chunks into his napkin.

  ‘Perhaps once a week you could do the shopping and buy some things, like noodles, for yourself.’

  ‘Okay,’ Andy said, pushing back his chair. He picked up his plate with its rearranged but otherwise untouched food.

  ‘I want you to feel at home here,’ Meg said. ‘My house is your house, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I mean it.’ Meg leant back and curled a finger around one of the bars of Atticus’s cage. ‘Invite a friend over. Anything.’

  The parrot jumped from his swing to perch on the bars of the cage. Meg scratched the back of his neck.

  ‘Fine and dandy. Sugar candy!’ Atticus sang.

  As soon as dinner was finished, Andy retreated to his room. Meg sat in the lounge, alone, watching The Voice. When Meg had applied to the homeshare program, she’d been seeking the protection of an extra body—preferably male—inside her house. She’d hoped for somebody quiet, somebody who kept to himself. She’d said as much to the skinny lady with kind eyes at the homeshare office. But now Meg wondered if perhaps she wanted more than that—some company, a snippet of conversation, some remedy for the loneliness she’d felt since Helen had passed away. And while she’d slept more soundly these past few nights knowing Andy was in the next room, now she found herself scrutinising their interactions. Why didn’t he make eye contact? Did he hate her? What did he do for all those hours, locked away in his room?

  Meg had travelled briefly in her thirties, before her father died. She’d even stopped over in Hong Kong, where Andy was from, on her way to London to visit her aunt. But that was a long time ago. The glimmering metropolis she saw nowadays on TV was unfamiliar. All she could really remember was the smell—a mixture of rotting vegetables and dead animals and sewage—that had flooded the plane like mustard gas as they landed at Kai Tak airport, and the rage she’d felt on returning to the hotel to discover she’d been pickpocketed—her wallet missing and the bottom of her handbag slashed open like the belly of a fish.

  Meg decided against sharing such stories with Andy. She didn’t want him to think that the only recollections she had of his home were bad smells and petty crime. If anything, having Andy in the house made her realise how little she knew about the world. Her universe, after her parents had passed away, had been the family home and Helen. For years Meg had listened to Anne and Jillian speak of Paris and Rome without so much as a twinge of envy, and yet now, with the arrival of this quiet student from Hong Kong, she felt a burning curiosity about the world.

  Meg sat up in her recliner, found her slippers with her feet. She turned off the TV. She hadn’t really been watching it. These days everything was reality television, but the shows were unlike any reality Meg had ever experienced—home cooks creating masterpieces from gold leaves and salted caramel, people losing two-thirds of their body weight as a woman with a fake tan yelled at them, D-grade celebrities agreeing to live together in a house with no walls and cameras in the bathrooms. What ever happened to Bandstand and I Love Lucy? Those were the shows she and Helen had watched as teenagers, but they seemed tame and simple by current standards. Meg supposed they couldn’t go back to that age of innocence. Not after all the revelations about celebrities like Bill Cosby and Rolf Harris. She supposed they were stuck with people kissing in swimming pools and crying into their tiramisu. Meg accepted this. She only wished they would all do it a little more quietly. Nobody valued silence anymore—if anything, they seemed unnerved by it. She was shocked when she saw young students, Andy’s age, walking around with headphones the size of earmuffs clamped to their temples—unaware if the birds were chirping or the leaves were rustling or a truck was hurtling towards them.

  Meg turned off the lamp and made her way across the dark room to the hall. Outside Andy’s room, she stopped and listened for the creak of a floorboard, the groan of a mattress spring, a snore, but there was nothing. As she walked the short distance to her bedroom, she felt acutely aware of her heavy, hippo-like movements—the beams of the house seeming to crackle like dry kindling around her. When Andy moved out, Meg wondered, would he leave a trace? Or would his presence be as ghostly as a breeze wafting through the dusty hallway?

  8

  Andy was lying on his bed, glowering at his laptop. He was studying his academic transcript from first semester. The last thing he wanted to do after the collapse of his father’s cleaning business was to create more stress for his parents by failing his second year of university. In the first few weeks of the semester, fresh from the holidays, Andy had been feeling upbeat, but as assignment deadlines loomed and the exams crept closer, his earlier optimism disappeared.

  Last week, he’d broken down during a meeting with the course coordinator. The coordinator had been so concerned, she’d organised an urgent appointment with the counsellor. For an hour a woman with polka-dot stockings and dangly earrings had asked Andy about his feelings. She’d interrogated him about how he felt about everything from being separated from his family to the changeable weather in Melbourne. She’d taught him a couple of relaxation techniques, which Andy had found helpful, but he couldn’t understand how spending an hour a week explaining his feelings was going to help him pass his exams. If anything, it was one hour less spent studying—maybe more, if he considered the time required to get to the appointment plus the minutes waiting for her to finish with the student before him. For most of the session, Andy stared at the infinity tattoo on the counsellor’s wrist, tracing its curves with his eyes, over and over.

  He kept thinking back to what Ming had said about paying somebody to sit his exams for him. Apparently such a service existed—run by an extensive underground network of ex-students. ‘I swear,’ Ming said as he slapped Andy on the back, ‘we could get a Vietnamese girl to sit your neuroscience exam and nobody would know the difference.’ Andy couldn’t tell if Ming was joking. It was easy for him—he was smart and knew how to study. He had good genes too—his dad was a neurosurgeon and his mum was a cardiologist. His only impediment was his OCD, and even that seemed to work in his favour. It made him obsess about nitty-gritty details like which three bacteria most commonly caused meningitis in neonates—the perfect skill for acing exams. Sometimes Andy wondered why Ming was even friends with him. The only conclusion that made any sense was that he found Andy entertaining. Perhaps watching Andy fail was as compelling as a Korean soap opera, or a five-car pile-up on the freeway.

  Andy agreed with Ming’s prediction that nobody in the exam room would notice if someone else was in his seat. The classes were so big and so much of the content was administered online, it was hard for students to keep track of their classmates. Not to mention that on exam day everyone was so focused on themselves and their palpitating hearts, they wouldn’t pay attention to one extra stranger. Especially not a quiet, bespectacled Asian stranger.

  Andy chewed his thumbnail. He’d never been a great student. He’d always had to work longer and harder to do as well as his cousin, Wei, who’d been in the same class as him at school in Hong Kong—his smarter and better-looking cousin, or so all the teachers said.

  Andy snapped the lid of his laptop shut and pulled his notebook from his backpack. He looked at the drawings of Kiko scattered amid all the diagrams of the optic chiasm. His eyes lingered on a sketch of her profile. The nose was wrong, but he felt a swell of pride at the pleasing curve of her hair and the perfect arc of her ear.

  9

  They settled into a routine quickly. Meg woke early, sometime between six and seven. She drank a cup of English breakfast tea and ate two pieces of marmalade toast before washing her mug and plate and leaving them to dry in the dish rack. While she showered and dressed for the day, Andy made a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen. He left his mug—a Pfizer one, advertising Viagra—unwashed in the sink. He didn’t eat bre
akfast. As Meg moved around the house, spraying the few house plants in the lounge room with water, Andy got dressed.

  Occasionally, when Meg had sat down in the lounge to rest her legs and read a few pages of her book, she would catch a glimpse of Andy before he left for the day. He was always in a rush—to leave the table, to go back to his room, to get away from her and the house. A few times she had yelled goodbye, only to be answered by the slam of the front door.

  While he was out, Meg followed the sun around the house like a cat. She spent the morning in the east-facing lounge room and the afternoon on the back verandah. It was the start of spring, and she enjoyed spotting new eruptions of colour amid the leafy mess of the backyard. The jacaranda wouldn’t bloom until late November, but even its empty branches looked majestic in the afternoon light.

  Sometime around five o’clock, the smack of the flyscreen door would rouse Meg from her nap on the back porch and she’d move inside to make a start on dinner. Meg hadn’t minded cooking so much when she was doing it for Helen, but living on her own she’d come to loathe it. After Helen’s death, Meg had often settled for a bowl of stale cereal with long-life milk, or skipped dinner altogether. Nowadays she spent a good ten minutes trying to decide whether to defrost some bolognese sauce or throw a handful of fish fingers into the oven. She supposed it was better this way—at least her body got a bit of protein. But she wondered how long she could keep it up. Andy hadn’t mentioned the ten hours of weekly service and Meg hadn’t had the guts to bring it up again. She could tell from the nervous way he moved around the kitchen that he’d never cooked for himself. The only things he’d contributed to the pantry so far were a cardboard box of Cup Noodles, three KitKats and a jar of instant coffee.

  Tonight she made a salad from some leftover pasta and a can of tuna. She popped two pieces of frozen bread into the toaster. As she dished the salad into bowls, Andy entered the kitchen. He pulled a glass tumbler down from the cupboard and filled it with tap water.