by Irma Gold
When he wakes it is in the usual way, with a cry. But the pills have changed things this time. He cannot hear his heartbeat so close and hard, and before long he is asleep again. He dozes in a kind of aware and dreamless state, with the sound of black cockatoos crying like children outside.
When he wakes the street is purple with the coming dark. He hears the screen door on its springs and realises it was the sound of Magdalena’s car pulling into the drive that woke him. He hears her clomping around in the hallway, in and out of her room and the bathroom on that unfathomable circuit of preparation for a night out.
Dad, she yells. Dad, are you awake?
He sighs, rolls over and lets the momentum of the roll carry his legs over the edge and up. His pillow is dark in spots where he has dribbled and the whole thing is wet with humidity despite the air con. He hears the short burst of life in the taps and then the creak of them as his daughter runs the shower.
Shuffling out to the kitchen Sebastiao looks around for cardboard boxes, for the giant television he will now have to live with in his small living room, but all he sees are Magdalena’s handbag and the small and, he has to admit, beautiful packaging of a new mobile phone.
He takes a can of soft drink from the fridge and walks out onto the back veranda. The garden at this time of day is a danger. In the purple and dark green he can sometimes see shadows of the jungle. Even the click of the watering system in the neighbours’ back yard has the ghost of a cocked gun in it. He tries for other memories, images of the girls as children, knotted together in their play.
Five girls made the family stand out, he knew. Because of Luisa, because of all those girls, the street had them marked out as Catholics when the real reason his wife had visited a church in Timor was to speak her own language. It was only later, after the scare with the pills, that she had turned back to the things the priests said there and had pulled some kind of instruction from it.
For Sebastiao belief was a luxury. It only worked if you didn’t think about it too hard. Or if you had been lucky enough never to have seen certain things. He knows the things his wife has seen, so he guesses it is a trick of the mind she has managed. She uses it, she says. But she has never tried to get him to follow.
Their five children were not born of obedience to the church. Luisa had wanted them, each time another, and he did not need convincing. He understood it the way he understood the times she got caught somewhere in a memory. He knew he could gently pull her out and back to the present with his arms and voice and she would be grateful. To put numbers to it was never the thing. It was a feeling. Back there where she sometimes got caught were so many dead: here were five living.
Sebastiao pulls his cigarettes from behind the pot plant that hides them from his wife and daughters. It has been a week since his last and the pack has a light fur of mould. The cigarettes themselves are less affected and he pulls an almost clean one from the pack and smokes. They are Indonesian cigarettes. He smoked this kind before the invasion and only smokes them now to bring back those earlier memories.
Inside the bathroom the shower has stopped but the rain on the tin above him is loud. He hears Magdalena start the hairdryer. Over the side fence Sebastiao’s neighbour Roy comes out with a beer, which he raises to Sebastiao in greeting. Sebastiao nods back.
It is like this here. When the rain stops Sebastiao might walk over and tell Roy about the burglary, ask if he has noticed anything. But for now the roar of it excuses their silence. They sit like captains manning ships that are sailing dangerously close to one another.
What he knows about Roy has mostly come from his second eldest, who was close to Roy’s daughter for a while and would report back from dinner with the family and occasional sleepovers. Roy’s girl, who had only a much older brother, was quiet when she visited Sebastiao’s family. Her eyes would follow the back and forwards and up and down of his daughters’ conversations.
Roy’s wife Jan always served his food on the same plate, Sebastiao’s daughter said. And he had to use the same knife and fork for every meal. If they got mixed in with the rest he got angry. He was a bit crazy from the war, Sebastiao’s daughter said.
So here they were, he and Roy, in their bubbles of shelter from the rain, the puzzles of their life picked over by children who didn’t know enough to solve them but who got an outline that was close enough. Did anyone have to know exactly why Roy needed his particular knife and spoon, or was it enough to know that he needed them?
He hears the hairdryer stop and start until finally it goes quiet altogether. Then Magdalena is there beside him, shaking her head at the cigarette but in an affectionate way, like she’ll never give him up to anyone.
Dad, you’re not even ready. We’re going to be late.
She is dressed up, her beautiful face made less so by makeup but lovely anyway. Sebastiao almost forgets to ask about the television.
Oh, she says, over her shoulder without care. They’re delivering it all tomorrow.
Then she’s gone inside with the glass drawn shut between them and only his rage again, held in with the smoke from his cigarette. He lets it out slowly, the way the meditation tapes Elly gave him always say to do.
He never decided not to tell them. Not formally. He and Luisa never discussed it. Sebastiao just kept waiting for the right age. For his daughters to have the understanding that would hold what he had to say. But as they got older and older and never seemed ready he began to understand that here in this country, they never would have that understanding. It was exactly what he was withholding from them. He thought he could tell Elly once, when he realised she knew the reason her mother had gone to hospital in an ambulance when she was five. But if he told Elly could he expect her to keep it from the others? And so the story is still just his own.
He wonders how much they learned at school. They could look things up now. Sebastiao has never been online but he imagines the basic facts are there. During the referendum, when the footage of the graveyard massacre was being played on the news again, he could tell they paid attention, but they never asked him anything. He wonders if Elly has researched the invasion. Whether it was included anywhere in her studies at university.
He wonders how they could describe it, the fence of legs. His parents were long dead by the time the Indonesians made him and all the others walk in the line through the jungle and fields. The soldiers yelled from behind or, if they were the eager kind, walked a little ahead with their guns trained on the terrain in front, waiting for whatever fear would drive from cover.
He sees the same thing in police searches now: long lines of figures walking shoulder to shoulder through the bush. When they are looking for evidence of a crime they will do it, or if someone has gone missing. He feels anger and sadness at the sight of it. And wonder. At the sight of so many figures searching for that one missing person. The fury on behalf of all the missing who were never found. His parents and all the bodies that were lost, laid out in daylight and stepped over, barely seen.
At the restaurant they are at a big table by the window. Four of his daughters and their partners, his wife, and their first grandchild, who sits higher than them all in her special chair. His middle daughter calls on someone’s mobile and is handed over to him. From Perth she wishes him happy birthday in a voice that is clear and close across all those miles. He has never been happy to have her so far from home but he keeps it to himself. Wish I was there Dad, she says.
They say these things, his daughters. He knows they mean something when they say them, but it is not exactly what they say. His daughter is a lawyer who works long hours and never takes leave. In this country, whatever she wished for she could have. If she wished she was here, she could fly here. No-one could stop her. To wish he could visit his own parents—it almost makes him smile. To wish he had disobeyed the soldiers and turned to see them. Wish seems a flimsy word to him.
You are always here, he tells his daughter.
His girls do not speak Tetum, nor Portugu
ese. They sing Happy Birthday in English after dinner as a waiter walks toward the table with a cake full of sparklers. The sulphur spark of them catches in Sebastiao’s nostrils.
They clap, watching Rosa who is clapping too, just a little behind the beat. The focus on her and away from Sebastiao is a relief as he waits for the sparklers to burn down. He misses the old-fashioned candles. They never prolonged the moment this way. Make a wish, yells Magdalena.
Dad never wishes for anything, she says to her boyfriend Aaron. Fishing and driving, that’s all he needs, right Dad?
At times, even when he grows angry at his youngest daughter—at her television shows and her hours in the bathroom, at the way her face lights up when her phone does and she’s lost to them for a whole meal—Sebastiao cannot deny a jealousy somewhere in him. It’s a feeling so soft and unnamed it is almost affection.
Since Magdalena has been old enough to bring this new boyfriend to family dinners Sebastiao has found himself thinking of the girl he was engaged to before the invasion. This boy’s hand on his daughter’s knee or shoulder sparks in him the memory of sitting next to the girl in public, the sides of their arms touching. And later, in the street outside her house, the way she bent over to look at something on the ground that wasn’t there. The drop of her breasts made clear to him and the smile that told him he was supposed to notice.
He watches his daughter and her boyfriend laugh and feed each other fruit from the dessert platter and the small jealousy stirs. A wish. Not to be them, but jealousy of his own young self and the things that never were.
As they wait for the bill he feels tiredness sink over him. In the baby chair Rosa is beginning to twist and whimper and Elly fiddles with the latches and buckles in a practiced way that prompts pride in him from somewhere. Elly hoists her out over the half-filled glasses and dirty plates onto her lap.
She is talking across the table to Magdalena and to her husband next to her. And at the opposite end of the table to Sebastiao his wife is reaching for the baby, bouncing the child on her knee to distract her from the pace and throb all around and from the way Rosa feels like crying.
He hopes that in the dark his wife won’t notice the things that are missing. If he shepherds her through to their bedroom and ensuite he can buy another night before she has to know. He knows it is silly, to think that a grown woman whose faith grew strong as a tree from the bodies of her own children will blink at something as small as a missing jewellery box, but he worries. Like the wood rot he knows is spreading under the kitchen, like the rumours he has overheard at the depot and even the things his youngest daughter gets up to in the night, the burglary is just another small thing he doesn’t want to risk testing her with.
When the bill arrives he pulls out cash from his shift and won’t let Elly or her husband pay. He walks up to the counter himself to make sure. The girl at the register is Chinese and as always he wonders where her parents came from, whether she had relatives in old Timor, uncles or grandparents who died on that wharf, or whether her family came for gold and has been here in Australia for a hundred years. She has painful acne and thick glasses and Sebastiao feels quickly protective of her. He leaves an extra tip.
When he turns back to the table and his family, he watches them without him for a minute. Only another year, maybe two, and his youngest will be gone. Maybe moved in with this boy, maybe off to work somewhere else. She is wrapped in Aaron’s arms now, still talking to her sister. Always talking.
They don’t speak his language, any of them. Not the language he spoke as a child and not the one he speaks now. Its silences and small angers make no sense to them. And even as he watches them Sebastiao knows he will never understand theirs.
He walks back to the table and plants a kiss on the crown of Magdalena’s head. She laughs but he feels her stiffen too and he wants to kiss her again to make it better, or take back the kiss so that she’s wholly happy again. He wants to thank her, thank them all. Sit with them and say nothing, and have them promise, without him asking, that never again will they leave his house empty.
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