Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

  ‘I know.’ Mrs Hughes shifted position, tucking her legs to one side. ‘English is a confusing language. All those silent letters. The k in knife, the w in wrong. What’s the point of them?’

  For a few minutes they sat listening to the birds and pondering the absurdity of the English language. When they heard Atticus shout ‘Mary, Mary, quite contrary!’ through the kitchen window, they both laughed.

  Mrs Hughes looked around the backyard. ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about gardening?’ she asked.

  ‘Only rich people have houses in Hong Kong,’ Andy replied, picking up a twig from the ground and snapping it in two. ‘Some people are so poor they live in cages, like animals. Like Atticus.’

  Mrs Hughes frowned. ‘Tell me something nice about the place you come from.’

  Andy gazed up at the sky as if the answers could be found there. ‘In the apartment where I lived as a kid, there was a security guard at the front door. He had a dog called Fei Jai, which means fat boy in Cantonese. After school the guard would let me take Fei Jai for walks. When people saw me with him I’d tell them he was my dog. I liked that.’ He pulled a yellow dandelion from the ground and tore the petals off one by one. ‘And at the end of the street where we live, there’s a place that sells soup noodles. It’s very famous in Hong Kong. It has pictures on the walls of all the important people who’ve come to eat at the restaurant. People like Jackie Chan and Chris Patten—the last governor of Hong Kong. My dad and I would watch the queue from the window of our apartment, and when it got shorter, around ten or eleven pm, we would go down and get a bowl of noodles each. The owner would give us extra dumplings because he knew we were neighbours. It’s the most delicious soup I’ve ever had.’

  Mrs Hughes massaged her knee. ‘My favourite memory is baking pear and rhubarb crumble with my mum. I remember rubbing butter into the biscuit crumbs and the smell—that sweet, warm vanilla smell.’

  ‘The olfactory bulb is the part of the brain responsible for smell. It connects directly to the memory centre,’ Andy said.

  ‘Is there anything you don’t know?’ Mrs Hughes laughed.

  Andy thought about the upcoming exam, and his meeting with Kanbei. ‘Lots of things.’

  The sun had fallen behind the neighbour’s wall. Andy shivered.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Andy?’ Mrs Hughes said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Do you think it’s crazy for a woman my age to start dating again?’

  Andy swallowed, his throat dry. Had the old lady misinterpreted his invitation to Chinatown the other night? Was this her way of propositioning him? Panicked, he turned away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Hughes said. ‘It was a silly question. It’s just that I had lunch with a man today…’

  On hearing this, Andy felt relieved, and then ashamed.

  ‘His name’s Patrick. A widower.’

  Andy was genuinely shocked that Mrs Hughes had been on a date. But when he saw her gloomy face and the nervous way she rubbed at a spot on her skirt, he couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her. ‘I don’t think it’s crazy,’ he lied.

  The old lady studied her hands. Andy stared at them too—at the branching blue tributaries of her veins, at the scaly patches that were probably early skin cancers.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  21

  For a long time Meg sat on the toilet and stared at the blood. It was the middle of the night and she’d got up as she did every night, around one am, to use the toilet. She hadn’t had any pain and the blood had come as a shock. It wasn’t a lot—just a small blot on the paper—but it had been twenty years since she’d experienced such a thing. She searched the cupboard beneath the sink and was relieved to find a packet of Helen’s old incontinence pads behind the first-aid kit.

  At her last appointment, the GP had told Meg she wouldn’t need pap smears anymore. The doctor hadn’t explained why, but Meg understood. If cervical cancer hadn’t got her yet, it probably never would—she would most certainly die from something else, like a heart attack, before it could. But the GP had also warned her that bleeding after menopause was a bad sign, and that if it ever happened, Meg should make an appointment to see her straight away. ‘It’s a red flag,’ the doctor had said, laughing. ‘Excuse the pun.’

  Meg couldn’t sleep. The pad felt bulky, like a nappy between her legs. She stared at the ceiling in the dark, remembering how she’d locked herself in the shed and waited to die the day she got her first period. Her mother had finally coaxed her out to explain that she was not, in fact, haemorrhaging to death as she had concluded, but going through a normal developmental process. Her mum had then launched into a very brief, but nonetheless embarrassing, spiel about how babies were made. Meg remembered feeling betrayed. She’d preferred the idea that a baby was a magical gift, dropped in clean white sheets from the beak of a stork onto a freshly swept doorstep, instead of something born of blood and cramps and incapacitating mood swings. It was the last and most alarming of a string of disappointing confessions—that it was her mother, rather than the tooth fairy, who’d sneaked into her bedroom to bury a coin beneath her pillow; that it was her father, rather than Santa Claus, who for years had eaten the biscuit and drunk the port on Christmas Eve. If life had turned out differently and she’d had children of her own, Meg wasn’t sure she’d have been able to tell them such fibs.

  She closed her eyes, and Patrick’s smiling face appeared behind her lids. She wondered what a man like him wanted with an old woman like her. She was not worldly or funny or wise. She was not rich or smart or beautiful. While flattered by his attention, she was also suspicious of it. Last month she’d watched a current affairs program about a widow who’d given her life savings to a con man from Nigeria. But Patrick drove an expensive car and dined at fancy restaurants—Meg was quite sure he wasn’t after her money.

  She’d only ever had sex with two men—Terry Costas, the bookish Greek boy who’d lived across the road when she was growing up, and Tim O’Malley, her boss at the post office. The sex with Terry was terrible—being virgins, neither of them had any idea what they were doing. Terry had got a cramp in his calf muscle the first time, and the second time Meg’s earring had got tangled in his hair. But Meg had loved Terry for his patience, and the gentle way he’d traced a figure eight across her back with his fingertips after the sex was over. They’d only done it a handful of times before Meg had ended it for fear of being discovered by her father. It was the 1960s and the beginning of the sexual revolution, but sex before marriage was still a scandalous thing in suburban Melbourne. Terry had travelled to Greece soon after Meg had called things off—sometimes, in a moment of self-indulgence, she wondered if she’d broken his heart. Months later, his parents—who knew nothing—had told her he’d died in a motorbike accident in Athens. Meg had offered her polite condolences before running home to bawl into her pillow.

  Tim, a married man, had arrived in Meg’s life decades later, when she was well into her forties and had resigned herself to a life without marriage and children. She didn’t love Tim, but he was a kind and generous lover. He rarely spoke of his family and it was easy for Meg to pretend he was single—not because she was jealous, but because she didn’t like to think of someone being hurt by what they were doing. The sex with Tim was better than with Terry, if a little stressful—moments stolen in the back room amid the packages, at the end of Meg’s shift. Tim couldn’t get home too late or his wife would become suspicious. But the speed and efficiency had suited Meg too—she was busy caring for her dying mother and looking after Helen. When they’d ended the affair, it was with the same businesslike amicability with which they’d conducted their relationship—neither of them had shed a tear. There had been nobody since.

  Lying in bed, Meg calculated that it had been thirty years since anyone other than Helen had seen her naked. Once, long ago, she’d had a figure she was proud of. She wasn’t tall and slim like Helen, but she had a nice womanly silhouette. Now grey hai
rs sprouted from her chin and nipples, and her skin hung slack, like old trackie dacks, from her bones. She couldn’t imagine anyone, let alone someone as elegant as Patrick, wanting to get anywhere near her.

  Meg wondered if old men stayed up late too, thinking about such things. It seemed to her that age was kinder to them. Men had drugs to help them have sex. If they wanted to, they could father children well into their eighties. Women’s fertility ended at menopause, after which they grew shapeless and hairy. Meg recalled her mother’s shrivelled body on her deathbed, her once-lovely breasts sad and shrunken.

  Perhaps, Meg pondered, instead of a disease, the return of her period signalled a restoration of her fertility—a miraculous reversal of the ageing process. Maybe tomorrow she would wake up with a smooth face and a flat belly. She thought of Andy and tried to remember how she’d felt at twenty-two. In hindsight, she wished she’d been having sex with boys and touring the world with Anne and Jillian, instead of baking cakes with her mum and reading books at the library. But it was easy to think that now, after the fact. Terry and Tim had pursued her. If they hadn’t, Meg knew nothing would have happened. And while she’d enjoyed the sex, she’d felt guilty—with Terry because she was young and unmarried, and with Tim because of his wife and family.

  Meg was born shy. According to her parents, as a little girl she’d spent entire family gatherings hiding behind her mother’s skirt. Things had only got worse when she’d turned five—the year she’d started school, and Helen had arrived. Her sister was a difficult baby from the start, loud and sleepless and constantly demanding attention. One time, on Boxing Day, when Meg was seven and Helen was two, her parents had got halfway to Dromana before they realised they’d left Meg at home. That day, like most days, she’d been swinging on the hanging tyre in the backyard, her head buried in a book. Even then, Meg had preferred to be on her own. People bored her with their dumb questions. She would much rather be reading about the adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables, or writing her own stories about smart, feisty girls who forced the world to take notice of them. But those had been the golden years before the fear, before Helen’s terrible accident.

  22

  Andy found Ming in the library. Unlike the other students, slumped in their seats with unwashed hair and bloodshot eyes, Ming was sitting erect, with a straight, taut spine. On the desk beside his laptop, three sharp pencils were arranged in neat parallel lines.

  Andy pulled out one of Ming’s earplugs.

  Ming snapped his laptop shut. ‘Why don’t you say hello like a normal person?’ he said. ‘With a tap on the shoulder or something?’

  ‘You’ve known me for two years now,’ Andy said, taking a seat beside his friend. ‘You should know I’m not normal.’

  A girl at an adjacent desk glared at them.

  ‘Let’s get a coffee,’ Andy whispered.

  ‘I can’t,’ Ming said, opening his laptop again. On the screen were the multiple-choice questions from the past exam paper that had been doing the rounds. ‘The microbiology exam’s next week.’

  ‘You know,’ Andy said, waving his finger, ‘studies have shown that caffeine improves concentration.’

  ‘I’ll have a coffee on the morning of the exam, then.’ Ming put his earplug back in.

  Andy had known it was a long shot—when it came to swot vac, Ming didn’t socialise—but he desperately wanted some company. He left the library and roamed the campus. It was November and the sun was warm. A couple of students were kicking a footy to each other across the lawn. Otherwise the place was deserted. Andy supposed most people were at home or in the library, cramming for the upcoming exams. The few who were lounging on the grass looked defeated—staring into space with vacant eyes.

  He walked towards the coffee shop. When he’d first arrived in Melbourne he’d been baffled by Australians’ love of bitter drinks. He’d never been able to stomach beer—it made him sleepy and itchy—but he’d started drinking coffee after reading about the effect of caffeine on academic performance. As a chronic insomniac, he was quickly hooked.

  Today he ordered a flat white. While he waited, he looked out through the window at the courtyard. He recognised Kiko straight away. She was sitting at one of the outside tables, bent over a textbook, sipping her drink, which Andy knew must be a hot chocolate. Whenever he followed Kiko to the café after lectures, she always ordered a hot chocolate.

  As he watched her, his heart fluttered. He remembered his conversation with Mrs Hughes a few weeks ago. Surely if a woman her age could find the courage to put herself out there, Andy could too. When his coffee was ready, he picked it up and opened the glass door.

  Kiko sensed his presence in the courtyard immediately. She looked up from her textbook and smiled.

  ‘Is anybody sitting here?’ Andy said with a croaky voice.

  ‘No,’ Kiko said and gestured to an empty chair.

  Andy sat down. He cleared his throat—he’d had a cold recently and couldn’t seem to shake it.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Kiko asked, and offered him her water bottle.

  Andy nodded. He took a sip of her water. It was not lost on him that his mouth was on the same spot that Kiko’s lips had been just minutes before.

  ‘Aren’t we in a few lectures and pracs together?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’ While Andy was thrilled that Kiko had recognised him, he was disappointed she wasn’t sure where she knew him from. ‘Microbiology.’

  Kiko closed her laptop. ‘You ready for the exam?’

  Andy thought of Kanbei in his black hoodie. ‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’

  Kiko’s face dropped. ‘Gram-negative, gram-positive. It’s all so confusing.’

  Andy stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Andy.’

  She surrendered three slim fingers to Andy’s palm. ‘Kiko Mathews.’

  Andy pretended he hadn’t practised writing her name over and over in the margins of his notebook. ‘Is that Japanese?’ ‘Yes, my mother’s Japanese.’

  It was not unusual to see Eurasians in Hong Kong. They stood out with their brown hair and round, double-lidded eyes.

  ‘Do you go back much?’ he asked.

  ‘Every two years, to see my cousins.’

  He’d always wanted to visit Japan. He pictured cherry blossoms, fast trains and quaint houses with paper walls.

  ‘Do you speak Japanese?’ he asked.

  ‘Hai.’

  Andy recognised the word for yes. It was very similar to Cantonese.

  ‘And what about you?’ Kiko asked.

  ‘The only thing I know is that you say moshi moshi to answer the phone.’

  ‘No.’ Kiko laughed. ‘I mean where are you from?’

  ‘Oh.’ Andy studied the dried milk on the plastic lid of his coffee. ‘Hong Kong.’

  ‘I love Hong Kong!’

  Surprised, Andy looked up.

  ‘I love the lights and the food and the Star Ferry,’ Kiko said.

  Andy rarely crossed the harbour on the Star Ferry—it was quicker to take the train. But talk of home stirred something inside him. He thought of his mother, roaming the psychiatric ward in her pyjamas, and his father, eating instant noodles alone in the kitchen.

  Kiko must have seen the change in his face. ‘Is something wrong?’

  Andy shook his head. ‘No, I’m just hungry. Do you want to get some lunch? I know a place that does good pho just off campus.’

  She glanced at the time on her phone. ‘I really should be studying. I need to brush up on my gram stains.’

  Andy thought of Mrs Hughes again. ‘How about after the exam?’

  Kiko considered this. ‘I guess I’ll need a break before neuroscience,’ she said.

  Andy told her his number, and Kiko punched it into her phone. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails perfect pink discs.

  ‘I’ll send you a missed call,’ she said.

  Despite the warning, Andy jumped when his phone vibrated in his pocket. His sweat glands were p
umping like sprinklers; his heart was pounding against his breastbone. As they said their goodbyes, Andy felt both relieved to be rid of Kiko and desperate to see her again.

  23

  Meg prepared the table. She’d never invited a man to her house for dinner before. Earlier that day, Patrick had said he’d like to see where she lived, and Meg, drunk with flattery, had said he should pay a visit. But instead of nominating a date later in the week, which would have given her some time to go to the shops and buy ingredients for dinner, she’d agreed to his suggestion of that night.

  Meg was relieved to hear Andy’s key in the lock at five o’clock. It would be good to have a chaperone, someone to ensure Patrick didn’t try anything. As much as Meg would love to know what that might feel like after all these years, she did worry about her sagging breasts and ill-fitting dentures. She didn’t expect Andy to refuse to stay.

  ‘I don’t want to get in the way,’ he explained.

  ‘You won’t,’ Meg said. ‘Please?’

  Andy shook his head.

  ‘But you have to eat.’

  ‘I’ll eat something quick in my room. I have an exam next week.’

  Meg was starting to think Andy didn’t like her cooking. She decided to try a different tack. ‘This can be your ten hours of mandatory service.’

  That got Andy’s attention. He looked up at her with defeated eyes. Meg felt bad then, but not so bad as to let him off the hook.

  ‘It won’t take ten hours. One and a half, maybe two.’

  Meg picked flowers from the garden while Andy showered and dressed. She’d just finished arranging the kangaroo paws in a vase when the doorbell rang. She looked at the clock on the wall—Patrick was ten minutes early. When Meg checked herself in the mirror in the hallway, her reflection seemed especially pale. Maybe it was just nerves, or maybe she’d lost more blood than she thought.

  ‘One minute!’ she called through the door before rushing to the bedroom to apply some blush. When she re-emerged she was amazed to find Andy and Patrick chatting and laughing in the hall.