Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

  ‘What’s the point of anything we do?’ Jillian sat back in her chair. ‘At our age, other than eating and sleeping, everything’s pointless.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Even sex.’

  Meg blushed. Her friend was right.

  ‘You know, I used to feel sorry for you,’ Jillian said, her tone biting. ‘You gave up so much to care for your mother, and for Helen—I thought it was admirable. But now I think you were just scared. Scared of making a life for yourself.’

  Meg bristled. When things got tough, Jillian had always paid others to do the hard work for her—a nanny for the kids, a night nurse for her dying mother. Meg didn’t have that luxury.

  When the waitress arrived with the bill, instead of throwing five dollars onto the table like she normally did, Meg let Jillian pay. Outside, she followed Jillian to her red Mazda, which was parked near the corner in front of the pilates studio. They rode in silence in the car.

  ‘How’s the Chinese boy going?’ Jillian asked when they stopped at an intersection. Meg knew this was her friend’s way of apologising—softening her voice, feigning interest.

  ‘His name’s Andy,’ Meg said. ‘And it was good to have him around the other night.’

  ‘For the intruder who wasn’t an intruder.’

  Meg thought of responding with some smart remark about a friend who wasn’t a friend, but then thought better of it. She stared out the window at the powerlines sagging overhead.

  Andy wasn’t home when Meg got back. She filled and boiled the kettle and opened the door to Atticus’s cage.

  ‘Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man,’ Atticus sang as he climbed onto her hand. Meg scratched the smoke-coloured feathers around his neck. She took him outside into the backyard and sat down on the stone bench beneath the jacaranda.

  Meg’s mother had always kept the backyard pretty before she became too frail to tend to it. For years after her death, Meg had paid a local handyman to weed and prune the garden, but when he’d fallen off a roof and broken his leg she hadn’t looked for a replacement. That was six months ago. Now the garden was thick and wild. The house on Rose Street was the only home Meg had ever known, and she couldn’t even take care of it. Perhaps Jillian was right. Perhaps she’d been a coward, hiding from the world, using Helen and her mother as an excuse. Perhaps if she’d gone to university and got herself a well-paying job like Jillian, she could’ve employed a nurse and had her own family. Perhaps if she’d done that she wouldn’t be alone now, using cheap rent to lure a young man to stay with her, for companionship and the illusion of security.

  Meg was still going over all this in her mind when she heard the phone ring inside the house. By the time she got to it she was breathless.

  ‘Hello?’ she croaked into the receiver.

  ‘Margaret?’

  It was Patrick. He insisted on calling her Margaret even though she’d told him many times to call her Meg. All his life he’d been Pat or Paddy or Patto, he said—only his mother had called him Patrick. He was ringing to invite Meg to join him for a few days away on the coast.

  Meg stared at the fridge door. Her eyes flicked from the magnet Jillian had brought back as a souvenir from Paris to the mugshot-style photo of the Bangladeshi boy she sponsored through World Vision.

  ‘Well?’ Patrick said after several seconds had passed.

  ‘Yes.’

  Now it was Patrick’s turn to pause. ‘Yes?’ he repeated, as if he couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Yes,’ Meg said again.

  26

  Ming waved his hand in front of Andy’s face. ‘Man, you’re like a zombie today!’

  They were in the one section of the library where chatting was permitted. A few noisy groups of students were working on projects around them. Normally Ming would be holed up in his apartment until the very last hour before the exam, but he’d texted Andy that morning, inviting him to catch up for lunch.

  Andy told his friend what had happened the night before. How the police had arrived at midnight, and how, after speaking to them, he hadn’t been able to sleep.

  ‘Hasn’t this place been broken into before?’ Ming said. ‘Where do you live now? The ghetto?’

  Andy explained that this time the burglar was actually just a drunk teenager, lost on his way home.

  Ming shook his head. ‘I don’t understand why people drink alcohol. Why would you want to feel out of control?’

  Andy sneaked a look at Ming’s hands. The eczema had made his knuckles dry and scaly, like the skin of a lizard.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Ming asked.

  Andy nodded.

  ‘Let’s get some sushi.’

  They crossed the campus in silence. Andy sensed something was up. In the food court, they ordered and paid for their sushi and walked to an empty table in the courtyard. Finally, when Andy was biting into his tempura roll, Ming revealed what was on his mind.

  ‘This is what my dad’s getting me if I get straight H1s on my exams,’ he said, putting his iPhone on the table. On the screen was a picture of a car—a glossy, black, expensive-looking car. Andy didn’t know what make it was—he’d never been interested in such things. But Ming seemed unperturbed by his lack of enthusiasm. He pushed the phone even further towards Andy. ‘It’s the latest SLC Mercedes.’

  Andy wiped the soy sauce from his lips. ‘That’s great.’

  ‘I’ll take you for a spin during the break, when I get back from Hong Kong. We can drive down to Brighton.’

  Andy knew Ming would get straight H1s. Ming always got straight H1s. And Ming’s father always bought him an outrageous reward. Andy couldn’t help but think of his own father, shuttling back and forth between home and the hospital, the two lines between his eyes growing deeper with each passing day.

  ‘I’ve got a date with Kiko,’ he said, without thinking.

  Ming put the phone back in his pocket. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  For all Ming’s talk about sex and women, Andy had always suspected he’d had little experience with them.

  ‘After the micro exam. We’re going for pho.’

  Ming scoffed. ‘That doesn’t count!’

  ‘Two people having a meal, alone.’

  Ming stirred a large dollop of wasabi into his pool of soy sauce. Andy felt satisfied that he had, at the very least, taken some of the shine off his friend’s fancy car. Neither of them spoke as they finished their sushi.

  Ming closed his empty sushi box and wrapped the rubber band around it. Only minutes ago he’d been buzzing with excitement, but now he looked dull and deflated. ‘I’d better get back to the library,’ he said.

  As Andy walked to the tram, he was overwhelmed by regret. Not just because he’d upset Ming, but because in talking up his meeting with Kiko, he’d felt like a fraud. What he’d told Ming was true: he did have a lunch date with Kiko. The morning after speaking to the police, Andy had exchanged a series of text messages with her, in which they’d joked about all the mildly-offensive-and-possibly-racist things people had said to them over the years. Kiko had told Andy that people sometimes mistook her mum for the housekeeper. Andy told Kiko about his recent experience with the man on the tram. Kiko told Andy about all the men who’d shouted ni hao at her from passing cars. Andy told Kiko about the building manager on Spencer Street who’d got him mixed up with the Korean accountant who lived ten floors down. It was surprisingly fun to share these experiences with someone who really understood them, and when Kiko said she had to go, Andy sent a message asking her again about the pho.

  He studied the text messages now as he travelled home on the tram. The last message was one word: yes, with a single x for a kiss. Andy liked that one the best. He was so distracted he almost missed his stop, pressing the button at the very last minute. The tram lurched to a halt. On the brief walk home, Andy planned what he would wear to his post-exam date with Kiko. By the time he arrived at the house he had settled on black jeans and his Astro Boy T-shirt.

  The sobbing was so loud, Andy could h
ear it from the front garden. It was different from the muffled cries he’d heard through Mrs Hughes’ bedroom door a few weeks before. This was completely uncontrolled—it reminded Andy of his mother’s wails as she was dragged from the house by ambulance officers. He found the old woman in the kitchen, slumped over a cup of tea.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Andy asked.

  She looked up, her face crumpled. ‘Atticus has gone.’

  Andy’s eyes found the empty cage.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ she said, burying her face in her hands. ‘I was distracted. I’ve been so distracted lately—’

  Andy wanted to ask how it had happened, but worried it would only distress her further.

  ‘Where could he be?’

  ‘I last saw him in the garden.’

  Andy went outside. He’d arrived home later than usual, and the sun was setting. In this light even the untamed garden looked pretty—you could be forgiven for thinking the disorder was deliberate. He sat on the stone bench and searched the trees around him. Atticus was grey with a crimson tail. If he was there, he’d stand out amid all the green, and if they didn’t see him, they would hear him—he was never quiet for very long.

  Andy sat there, scanning the garden, but there was no sign of Atticus. For the sake of Mrs Hughes, who he assumed was listening from the kitchen, he called the parrot’s name loudly a few times, but after ten minutes of looking, Andy knew in his heart that the bird was gone. He turned his attention instead to the sky—to the clouds, long and low and tinged with pink. He thought of Atticus and tried to imagine what it must be like to fly.

  Ex-students had told Andy and Ming that on the aptitude test to get into medicine there’d once been a question asking candidates if they ever dreamt of flying. Ming had told Andy proudly that he dreamt about it all the time. Andy wondered what this particular detail revealed about a person’s suitability for a career in medicine. Andy’s recurring dreams were about turning up unprepared to an exam and standing naked in front of a crowd of girls—he’d never had a dream about flying. The closest he’d come was during his first flight to Australia, when he’d looked out through the cabin window at the red roofs and green lawns and blue pools and felt a certain freedom in his insignificance. Perhaps after thirty years in a cage, reciting nursery rhymes, Atticus wanted to feel that too.

  After a reasonable amount of time had passed, Andy went back inside the house. Mrs Hughes looked at him with a hopeful face, but on seeing his empty hands she dropped her head.

  ‘I’ll put something on Facebook and Gumtree,’ Andy said.

  She nodded.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ he told her, resting a hand on her chair. He studied the dandruff scattered like snowflakes across the back of her blouse. ‘Do you have a photo?’

  As soon as he said it, Andy realised he could have used any photo of an African grey parrot from the internet—they all looked the same—but Mrs Hughes seemed grateful for something to do. She retreated to her room to search for a picture.

  27

  Meg pulled the shoeboxes of keepsakes out from under her bed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a photo of Atticus, but she knew there would be one buried in there somewhere. She emptied the first box onto her bed. Photographs and receipts and letters spilt out across the bedspread. She picked up a black and white picture of her and Helen. It had been taken in summer and they were dressed in T-shirts and shorts. Helen was nearly as tall as her, even though Meg was five years older. Meg was stocky, like their father, with a barrel chest and a short neck, while Helen was lithe and athletic, her legs impossibly long. It was the only photo Meg had of Helen before her fall. After the accident their mother had hidden all the full-length pictures of her sister.

  The shoeboxes were accidental time capsules. Over the years Meg had stuffed anything and everything inside them. She discovered two tickets to West Side Story at the Princess Theatre—a fortieth-birthday gift from Helen. She found her grade four report card, which said she was an intelligent but nervous child. She uncovered a necklace she and Helen had made from the shells they’d collected one Christmas holiday at Dromana. As she touched the shells, rolling each one between her fingers as if the chain was a kind of rosary, she felt an ache behind her breastbone. She was the only one left in the world who could make sense of these little treasures. Without her, they were rubbish—box after box of meaningless junk. She was a natural custodian—a keeper and guardian of things—but now, without anyone to share her memories, she began to question their accuracy. Was it really Safety Beach they had gone to? Had they really had prawns with thousand island dressing for lunch? Meg needed someone else—her mother, her father, Helen—to corroborate these memories and bring them back to life. Without her family, they were hazy, obscured by the cloudy lens of age.

  She supposed somebody had to be the last to go. It made sense that it was her, but that didn’t ease the loneliness. She’d been at all their bedsides—her mother, her father, Helen—and while there was peace in their faces at the end, all of them had squeezed her hand. Who or what would she squeeze as she lay, breathless, in her final hours? The clean, dry fingers of a nurse? The bedrail? The starched sheets of a hospital bed? Perhaps Jillian was right. Perhaps this isolation was of her own making. Maybe it was time she took control, became less passive and more active.

  She packed away the necklace and the report card and resumed her search with renewed focus. This time she didn’t permit herself distractions. Her concentration paid off—she found a photo of Atticus within minutes. She walked back to the kitchen and handed the photograph over to Andy, who was eating instant noodles beside the empty cage. When he was finished, he retreated to his room with promises to upload the image to the internet.

  Meg packed the shoeboxes safely back beneath the bed. When she was done, she pulled her suitcase down from the top of her wardrobe. Untouched for decades, it was covered in what looked like a mix of cockroach poo and cobwebs. She set to work immediately, cleaning it with Windex and a sponge. The task was therapeutic—for a few brief moments she forgot about what Jillian had said. It was only once she started packing and caught sight of her limp clothes hanging in the cupboard that Meg felt the sting of her friend’s words again. As she folded her navy blouses and black slacks, she understood that what people most craved in the world was often what they were most afraid of. For Meg, it was, and always had been, the attention of others.

  Her mood lifted slightly at the discovery of one of Helen’s old dresses—an emerald green sundress with tiny yellow flowers—which had been hiding for years on a hanger beneath a heavy coat. When she lifted the fabric to her nose she thought she could smell Helen’s perfume amid the mustiness, but it must have been her imagination—she knew smells didn’t last that long. Either way, she felt good when she put the dress on. Her sister had always been slimmer, but Meg had lost a couple of kilos in the past few months and the dress slipped on easily enough. If someone had been inclined to look, they might catch a glimpse of her bra where the fabric gaped between the buttons, but it didn’t matter. The cheerful pattern brought some colour to her otherwise ashen face.

  Anne had always maintained that a person could dress their way to happiness, but Meg wasn’t so sure. She didn’t believe you could create joy simply by throwing on a brightly coloured dress—she certainly couldn’t shed her anxiety about Atticus like a pair of old slacks. But she did feel different wearing her sister’s clothes—more confident and optimistic—as if she was less Meg and more Helen.

  28

  It was the night before the exam, and Andy was grateful for the distraction. He wouldn’t have known how to occupy himself—it seemed senseless to study but also impossible to relax. He threw himself into the task of editing Atticus’s photo. He played with filters, fiddled with the background, zoomed and cropped. Around eleven—aware that, while he worked on the image, someone could be identifying the missing bird—he uploaded the photo to Gumtree and a Facebook page called Lost Pets of Melb
ourne. Now he and Mrs Hughes could do nothing more but wait.

  Andy turned off the light, but he wasn’t tired. As he lay in bed, his mind raced. He thought of his mother. He tried to imagine her, watching television or pacing the halls of the hospital. Perhaps the doctor had given her a sedative and she was already fast asleep. Andy was terrified that one day he would shatter under the weight of his anxieties, as she had done. He couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d still be the happy woman his father had married if she’d never fallen pregnant with him. Andy had only ever seen glimpses of that other woman over the years. There was one memory that stood out: the day he’d got a good mark on a big maths test. He’d been about eight—still in primary school. As a reward she’d taken him out for lunch, just the two of them. Andy had ordered a baked pork chop and iced lemon tea. His mother had put the exam paper—with its 98% scrawled in fat red pen at the top—on the table between them. As they ate, her smiling eyes had darted from the paper to Andy’s face and back again, as if she couldn’t quite believe his success. Andy had lived on that memory for years, calling it back every time she snapped at him, or called him an idiot, or yelled that she wished she’d never had him. He’d tried to convince himself that the woman smiling at him across the table that day was his real mother—not the person sitting on the couch with glassy eyes, barking orders at him.

  Feeling his chest tighten, Andy forced himself to think of things other than his family. He turned his imagination to the boy who called himself Kanbei. What was he doing right now? Was he sleeping, brushing up on his microbiology or playing video games on his computer? The boy looked like a gamer—pale and unkempt and dressed in black from head to toe. Andy wondered what his story was. If Kanbei was so smart, why couldn’t he find a better, more secure source of income? Was he on drugs? Did he have a huge gambling debt? But such thoughts weren’t helping Andy to relax. He threw back the sheets and walked to the bathroom. He emptied his bladder, washed his hands and opened the mirrored cabinet above the basin. He kept his toiletries in his room—he’d never looked inside the cabinet before. The diazepam was sitting there on the middle shelf at eye height, its label turned outwards to face him.