Room for a Stranger

by Melanie Cheng

  Finally the captain’s baritone voice crackled through the overhead speakers. He told them they were passing through an unexpected patch of bad weather. The pilot reassured them that the conditions in and around Hong Kong were calm. As they made their descent, ducking beneath the clouds, the aircraft stopped bucking and jolting. Through the window, ships dotted the sea like freckles. Every so often an island with tufts of green broke the rippled surface. Andy felt his father relax and spread his limbs in the seat beside him. Every so often the plane trembled and Andy felt their shoulders touch.

  56

  There was still half an hour until Jillian arrived to drive her to the clinic. Meg couldn’t avoid the doctors any longer. Even if she’d wanted to, Jillian wouldn’t let her. Not after that funny turn at the supermarket. Meg was lucky the security guard had given in when she’d begged him to call Jillian instead of an ambulance. Her friend’s disapproving face was still preferable to the unrelenting questions she knew she would face from staff at the hospital. Are you married? Who do you nominate as your next of kin? Who do you live with? Is there anyone who can pick you up? Meg had worried she would see the pity mounting in their eyes and drown in it. At least the grumpy GP knew her history and wouldn’t ask too many questions.

  She was sitting in the backyard with Atticus. Ever since his escape, she’d let him roam free about the house and garden. If he wanted to leave now, Meg wasn’t going to stop him. She watched him hopping on the grass, his crimson tail flaring in the sun. Above them a plane with a matching red tail soared high across the cloudless sky. Meg wished she had seen more of the world. It was too late now, which made her sad, but only in a vague, wistful way. It was not visceral and agonising, like the grief for her parents and Helen.

  Meg surveyed the carpet of purple petals beneath the tree. Somewhere, buried within the soil, were her parents’ and Helen’s ashes. Most had probably been ingested by insects and transported away from the garden inside their little bodies, but some, certainly, remained there in the earth. When Meg died, hers would be sprinkled across the same spot, and not long afterwards the house would be sold to strangers. Nobody would visit her. Nobody would talk to her remains. When Jillian died, nobody would even know where her ashes were scattered. But just as she started to feel sorry for herself, Meg remembered the cemetery and the nameless graves with fractured headstones. Everybody was forgotten, eventually.

  Atticus picked up a white stone from the grass with his beak. It glinted like a diamond. Meg leant back on the bench and closed her eyes. She let the morning sun warm her cheeks.

  Soon she heard the blare of a horn. Meg picked up Atticus. In the kitchen she filled his bowl and returned him to his cage, leaving the cage door open. Jillian honked again. Meg grabbed her sunhat from the hook in the hallway. Before leaving, she looked back at the house—at its faded floorboards, warped at the edges; at its armchairs with cushions moulded to the shape of ghosts. Every face suspended in the dusty photo frames, except one, was now in the soil beneath the jacaranda. She reached behind her and found the light switch, her knotted fingers tracing the wallpaper like braille. There was a story here in the walls of this house—perhaps even poetry—but she didn’t know how to read it. With a gentle flick of her thumb, Meg switched off the light.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Giving birth to a book shares some similarities with giving birth to a child. It’s less messy, but—in my case, at least—it involves a comparable amount of stress, sleeplessness and muscle pain. I have been grumpy and impatient at times and first thanks must go to my children, Alyssa and Toby, who have consumed far too much takeaway and watched far too much TV this past year, and to my husband, Rani, for listening to me whinge, and for talking me through the frequent moments of self-doubt.

  It was with great trepidation that I emailed the manuscript to my agent, Clare Forster from Curtis Brown, and my editor, Elizabeth Cowell from Text Publishing—partly because it is a terrifying thing to show your work to anybody for the first time, but mainly because I value the opinion of these two very smart and astute women so much. Thank you both for your belief in the novel and for getting back to me so promptly—it made for a much more relaxing holiday in Singapore! Thank you, too, to Michael Heyward for helping me realise my dream of publishing a novel and to all the team at Text Publishing for ensuring that the book reaches its readers. Packaging is of course important and I must thank W. H. Chong for enveloping my words in such a stunning piece of art.

  I now understand that when you write a novel, you find your head bursting with obscure questions. Thank you to my mum for taking on the unofficial role of ‘baby boomer consultant’ (with help from her good friend Cath Nunan). Thanks to my dad for answering my left-field questions about Chinese language and proverbs (with occasional but essential help from my auntie Fanny). I am indebted again to Rani for reading the novel—his first!—in a couple of days and crosschecking the medical and hospital facts. Thanks, too, to the Sargents—Beth, Lynne and Graeme—for answering a last-minute query about education in Victoria.

  I have been fascinated by talking birds ever since being introduced to my good friend Sive Bresnihan’s African grey parrot during high school. The bird’s name was Cindy, after her cinder-coloured feathers, and like Atticus, she was a character. I have only become more enamoured of these brilliant creatures since watching countless videos of them on YouTube. African Grey Parrots: A Complete Pet Owner’s Manual by Maggie Wright was a particularly useful resource during the writing of this book.

  Writing with children is hard. Thanks (again) to Mum and Dad for all the babysitting, and my in-laws—Haissam, Ahed and Dana Chahal—for cooking the kids’ dinner every Tuesday and for devoting almost every Saturday night to me and Rani.

  Lastly, thanks to my auntie Wendy, who was thrust into the role of carer at a young age and who remained a carer her entire life. She was one of those rare adults who could access imaginary worlds and play with the stamina of a fellow child. Dear auntie Wen, Meg Hughes was inspired by you.

  If you’ve enjoyed Melanie Cheng’s Room for a Stranger, we think you’ll also like her award-winning story collection Australia Day.

  Australia Day is a collection of stories by debut author Melanie Cheng. The people she writes about are young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Chinese, Lebanese, Christian, Muslim. What they have in common–no matter where they come from–is the desire we all share to feel that we belong. The stories explore universal themes of love, loss, family and identity, while at the same time asking crucial questions about the possibility of human connection in a globalised world.

  Melanie Cheng is an important new voice, offering a fresh perspective on contemporary Australia. Her effortless, unpretentious realism balances an insider’s sensitivity and understanding with an outsider’s clear-eyed objectivity, showing us a version of ourselves richer and more multifaceted than anything we’ve seen before.

  Read on for a preview of Australia Day…

  Big Problems

  The Simpson Desert rippled like an orange sea through the cabin window. It was just as Leila had imagined—hot, callused, other-worldly. Like Mars. She leant back in her seat, sipped a plastic cup of red wine. It was a relief to be in the air, away from Melbourne and the Kelly family. Not that the Kelly family hadn’t been good to her. They had been more than good, paying her double the recommended hourly rate and installing a smart TV, complete with Netflix, in her spacious bedroom. Even the twins, Orlando and Olivia, were well behaved and mature. Nothing like some of the horror stories she had read on the online forums. Leila was relieved, and grateful. But Alison and James could be suffocating. While they scorned helicopter parents—the twins loved to boast about riding on motos, helmetless, in Cambodia—with Leila, the Kellys were overprotective. Leila put this down to their guilt about employing an au pair. Hiring people to look after your children wasn’t common in Australia. Mothers still prided themselves on being able to work and cook fresh meals and make costumes for the scho
ol play, even if it meant they wore a permanently frazzled look and occasionally forgot to pick up their least favourite child from school.

  Leila presumed the Kellys had chosen her, with her Syrian background, as a means of alleviating some of this guilt. She knew it was a risk, mentioning her background on the au pair website, but she also thought it was a good way of vetting Islamophobes. And it had worked. The Kellys embraced Leila’s heritage. Alison, the mother, was always probing Leila about what Syria was like, before the war had destroyed it. But Leila couldn’t tell her. She had been born and raised in London. This seemed a constant source of disappointment to Mrs Kelly.

  The Kellys were good people. James was the CEO of a not-for-profit organisation and Alison worked for Legal Aid. Though the kids could be precocious—Orlando wanted to be a human rights lawyer and Olivia described herself as an atheist—for the most part, they did as they were told. Even so, when James informed Leila they would be travelling to Bangkok for the school holidays and wouldn’t need her on the trip, Leila found herself fantasising about the sleep-ins, the long hot baths and the silence she would enjoy. Even this plane trip seemed gloriously civilised compared to her day job. She could think in peace without an eleven-year-old asking her yet another question she couldn’t answer.

  Leila leant her head against the window. Clouds cast crisp black shadows across the fissured earth below. She took a photo through the glass to send to her mother once she landed. For years, Leila’s mum had talked about visiting Australia, but the island continent with its mammoth sky and boundless beaches had always seemed a long way from home.

  A man in an akubra hat was waiting for Leila in the arrivals hall. The twins had versed her in all things outback before she departed Melbourne—akubra hats, king brown snakes, bush flies, feral camels. The man held a handwritten sign with her name on it: Leila Ayers. The Kellys had insisted on paying for her to join a tour, which was strange, given they often boasted about their off-the-beaten-track travel. It filled Leila with an odd combination of annoyance and relief. Though desperate to assert her independence, she had seen the movie Wolf Creek too.

  ‘Welcome to Alice Springs,’ the man in the akubra hat said. He was ruddy-faced with hands like slabs of meat. ‘Just waiting on a couple of others.’

  Leila nodded and put on her sunglasses. Even in the shelter of the arrival hall the light was unforgiving. She looked around, taking in the flame-red Qantas signs and the carpet with its undulating ochre design. She looked down at a backpacker, resting on a pile of bags on the floor. Leila had never travelled by herself before. After A levels, she and her friends had gone to Paris for a long weekend, but they were a large group of girls and had safety in numbers.

  Akubra-hat-man changed the sign to one that read Mr and Mrs Brown. Almost immediately, a brightly dressed couple materialised at the baggage carousel. The man wore a baseball cap, and the woman a plastic visor. Even before they spoke, Leila knew they were American.

  ‘Harry and Cynthia Brown. From Charlottesville, Virginia,’ the man said, thrusting out his hand.

  ‘Leila Ayers,’ she replied. ‘From London.’

  They followed the driver to a dusty four-wheel drive in the airport car park. As they drove, the Americans told the man in the akubra hat about their travels. They listed the names of places Leila had never heard of: Cradle Mountain, Birdsville, Broome, Rottnest Island. She listened to their descriptions of beaches and glacial lakes as she stared out her grimy window. Looking at the red earth and spiny plants, it was hard to believe they were talking about the same country.

  As they neared the town centre, Leila watched a brown-skinned boy with straw-coloured hair ride a battered bike on the road beside them. He bent his head and pedalled furiously, but he could not keep up with the bus. Minutes later she saw a woman asleep on a mattress laid straight onto the bare earth. The woman was wearing a cardigan in spite of the heat, and a mangy dog was licking her feet. Suddenly the world Leila had inhabited for the past three months—one of skinny lattes and children’s yoga and organic bakeries where a loaf of bread cost seven dollars—seemed obscene.

  Akubra-hat-man, whose name was Max, dropped Leila at her hostel. The Americans had climbed out first at a fancy resort called Palm Springs. ‘Pick you up at six!’ she heard Max yell as he disappeared in a cloud of dust. Leila looked up at the two-storey building. It was rectangular and ugly and painted a garish mauve. There was a campervan parked out the front with graffiti on the rear window: Life sux if your girlfriend doesn’t. The dreadlocked man at reception, another Brit, gave Leila the key to her room. ‘Let me know if you want company,’ he said, his smile revealing a gold tooth.

  She left the reception area and walked past the pool—a shallow above-ground structure with a few broken deckchairs around its edge. A girl in a polka-dot swimsuit was lying on a towel listening to music.

  The room was clean enough. There was a single bed, and a small TV mounted to one of the walls. The only window opened onto a concrete courtyard with a plastic table and a barbecue. The air was thick with the smell of sausages. Leila could hear two men talking loudly about full moon parties in Thailand. One was bragging about buying ‘diet pills’, which were actually ecstasy, from the local pharmacy. The other was reminiscing about an Israeli dive instructor who had a mouth like Scarlett Johansson.

  Leila sat down on the bed and pulled out her itinerary.

  Day 1: Depart Alice Springs for Uluru (Ayers Rock)

  Day 2: Uluru—Kata Tjuta National Park

  Day 3: Uluru (Ayers Rock) to Watarrka (Kings Canyon)

  Day 4: Depart Kings Canyon for Alice Springs

  Leila wondered if her father’s family had common ancestry with the man the rock was named after. She hoped not. She didn’t fancy the idea of people going around stamping their names on things.

  She peeked through the dusty curtain. In the courtyard, a group of girls in string bikinis had joined the men. One of the girls had brought a speaker down from her room. Now the shrieks and giggles were accompanied by a booming bass. Leila contemplated joining them, but the very thought made her heart race. She was not good in groups. Often she spent minutes perfecting a story in her head only to find that by the time she was ready to tell it, the conversation had moved on. She ate a muesli bar for dinner and read a book on Aboriginal history she had borrowed from the Kellys’ library instead.

  Hours passed. She read about songlines—routes taken by Indigenous people’s ancestral beings as they created everything in the natural world. She learnt about the storytelling tradition common to Aboriginal cultures—how information is passed from generation to generation through dance and spoken word and song. She discovered that Dreaming stories were not only intricate maps of the country but complex lessons in ethics and morality. As she read, she tried to block out the sound of a couple having loud sex in the room next door.

  There were ten people on the tour, including Leila—the Americans she had met at the airport, a white woman from South Africa who had recently moved to the Sunshine Coast, two middle-aged sisters from Italy who didn’t speak much English and an Australian family with young children—a boy and girl—from Sydney. Not one person on the trip was aged within ten years of Leila. She plugged herself into her phone and slept throughout the six-hour drive to Uluru.

  Apart from the American couple, everybody was staying in cabins at the camping ground. Meals were included. The first night was an all-you-can-eat, meet-and-greet barbecue. Leila picked up a plate and joined the winding queue. She was soon found by the South African lady, who had changed into knee-length shorts and Birkenstock sandals. A gold cross nestled in the speckled cleavage between her breasts.

  ‘You said you were from London?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  They moved forward in the line.

  ‘I’m Ellen.’

  ‘Leila.’

  Ellen spooned some potato salad onto her plate. ‘Do you have family in Australia?’

  ‘No.’ Leila
thought it an odd question, as if everyone from England should have relatives in the former colony. ‘I’m working in Melbourne. As an au pair.’

  Ellen picked up a burnt sausage with a pair of tongs. Without asking, she placed it on Leila’s plate. ‘I had a nanny in South Africa.’

  Leila imagined a large black woman with a white bonnet and frilly apron.

  ‘The kids still talk about her.’

  Leila walked to an empty table and Ellen followed her. There was a group of Japanese tourists at the table beside them spraying themselves with insect repellent.

  Ellen groaned as she sat down. ‘Arthritis,’ she explained and rubbed her knees with her hands. ‘So what do you think of Australia?’

  Leila flicked an ant off the summit of her potato salad. ‘It’s nice. The people are friendly.’

  ‘It’s a lucky country.’

  Leila thought of the beaches along Port Phillip Bay and the sun and the Kellys’ four-bedroom bungalow. She nodded.

  ‘The blacks only make up three per cent of the population.’

  Leila stopped nodding.

  ‘Back home in South Africa we have big problems.’ Ellen wiped some tomato sauce from her lips with her napkin. ‘Big problems.’