After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  The hotel bar backed onto the street; the long blue-lit counter faced out onto the constant crowd of people outside. I saw them but I didn’t think they could see me, or if they could my face would have been warped through the large whiskey bottles along the bar shelf. Umbrellas were everywhere. Yo-Yo Ma was playing cello through the speakers; the music clashed with the blue light.

  ‘The people are protesting to try to keep the Cantonese language,’ the barman was talking to me as he wiped his section of the bar with a dishcloth.

  ‘Are they? Why?’

  ‘I guess to hold on to the past, you understand?’

  ‘I understand, but isn’t it easier to speak Mandarin in China?’

  ‘Yes, but students don’t like it. They want to respect their heritage.’

  ‘Do you prefer Cantonese?’

  ‘Mmm, excuse me.’ The barman left to serve a new table of one without answering me.

  ‘MING!’

  I swivelled on my barstool. ‘Michelle – when did you get in?’

  Michelle helped herself to the space beside me and leant her elbows atop the bar.

  ‘Last night, fuck knows why they flew me in a day early – dry white wine please.’

  ‘How’s work?’

  ‘I’m over it, my husband and I are trying for a baby, I want to stay home, maybe start a yummy mummy group.’ She threw her head back then to laugh and flicked her hair. I noted a clip of extensions then looked away.

  ‘It’s a protest.’ I pointed to the window.

  ‘What’s with all the umbrellas?’

  ‘I dunno. Sir? Do you know what the umbrellas mean?’

  ‘No clue, sorry.’

  I sat listening to Michelle blab on and on, I joined in when she cued me to, when she was excessively self-deprecating and then waited for me to argue in her favour about everything from domestic affairs to her supervisor’s opinion, her weight, wrinkles. She was awful, I was fifteen years older than her and she still had the nerve to talk to me about ovaries, cellulite, crow’s-feet. I quickly tired of the conversation and excused myself. I returned to my room, took a Valium and prepared for bed, then decided instead to call long distance.

  One really must psych themselves up to call The Ex, the one who broke you gently enough that you always remember them in the afterglow. I ran tipsy sprints from the entrance to the furthest window and back, five reps, then ten reps. There had been one other, a boy this time, teenage love. I’d fallen pregnant. I’d secretly planned on staying with my young aunt, having the baby, passing it off as her own – she’d agreed on principle of not wanting to deal with my murder. My aunt bought me a glory box – neat Qin dynasty engravings, teak wood. We filled it with inexpensive baby onesies, four-packs of pacifiers, spoon sets, baby chopsticks. We cooed over the baby chopsticks. We talked about seeking out a theatre company for a prosthetic pregnant stomach for my aunt when, after fifty-five days’ living with her, I birthed an aquatic alien that hadn’t parted lips in order to breathe. Plan foiled, adolescence over.

  Jenny answered, ‘Hel-lo?’

  ‘It’s me, I’m in China, just calling to say hel-lo.’

  ‘Ah, what time is it there? Post–happy hour?’

  ‘I’m not slurring.’

  ‘No, but you sound happy and I figure it’s night.’

  ‘You know me too well.’

  ‘It would seem so. How is it?’

  ‘Same, same as everywhere, far from you.’

  ‘Let’s not – can’t we just have a friendly chat?’

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘And I you, but it’s the past, it can’t be changed.’

  ‘Why didn’t we have a baaaa-by?’

  ‘Probably because we were too selfish and we would have been terrible mothers. I don’t think babies are considered cabin baggage.’

  ‘Why didn’t we adopt? We could have adopted a little Chinese baby, it would have looked like me!’

  ‘I’m pretty certain there’s a strict no-lesbians policy for adoptions in China.’

  ‘I don’t know, a Russian kid then.’

  ‘Ah, all the things we could have done differently.’

  ‘I’m so old now.’

  ‘We’re the same age, Ming.’

  ‘We’re so old, then.’

  ‘It’s relative. Life doesn’t end at forty-five.’

  ‘But it’s just so different, my whole body hurts when I stand for more than ten minutes.’

  ‘You’re kind of slurring now.’

  ‘Okay, okay, okay, I’m going to bed now, I love you.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Lock the hotel-room door, sleep well, okay.’

  ‘It locks automatically, Jenny.’

  ‘Well, stay inside.’

  ‘I promise, just for you.’

  ‘Okay, I gotta run, Ming, let’s talk another time.’

  ‘Miss you.’

  ‘I’m hanging up now.’

  I took another Valium, and fell into a deep and extraordinary sleep.

  I left the hotel at 8.00 am. All day during the expo I said the same thing over and over: ‘Our University Culture is So Respectful, Academic and also So Enjoyable.’ I potentially signed thirty-two students for our university and gave away all the Tim Tams I’d allocated for the day.

  I was too depressed or anxious to go to the cocktail event. I walked outside the China Hotel and Conference Centre and found a Nike store. In there I purchased the least expensive pair of sneakers I could find and a drawstring backpack for my high-heeled shoes and stockings. I needed to walk, and headed west, along the river – if I got lost, I’d turn back, I figured. I’d be back in time to clear my box of banners from the venue before the cocktail event finished.

  My guts hurt. It wasn’t alcohol-and-pills guts, which I knew well how to manage. It was empty guts, like where the hell was my intuition? I carried it for five or what felt like ten kilometres, holding it like a pregnant woman might hold her stomach. As I passed people in the street, I held it strategically, as if to imply, this is my baby in here. No-one seemed to pay any attention.

  After some time, I was suddenly aware of the strange street I was walking along. It was as if I’d walked all the way to Europe or to Disneyland’s version of Europe, stucco palazzo architecture. The sun was beginning to set behind me, dinnertime for normal people. I knew I should eat.

  The streets were devoid of cars, the footpath empty of pedestrians, I felt as if I were walking toward a town in prayer on Sunday morning, or a city abandoned in the wake of a chemical leak. There was no trash on the ground here either, no-one was pulling a cart of mandarins or selling dried persimmons at the edge of the street, no-one was renting mobile phone chargers, or hawking birdcages or goldfish. Then I saw a tourist couple, they had their backs to me but I could tell; I jogged a little toward them, and when I reached them I noticed they were pushing a baby stroller. I was startled by the baby then, I’d never seen white people in China with a baby.

  ‘Excuse me, I’m a little lost.’

  ‘We’re not from here, sorry – there is a restaurant just around the corner if you want directions.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I kept jogging away from the couple with the little baby; I felt light on my feet now, though I had the uneasy anxiety that comes from bare streets. I spotted more white people, another couple pushing a stroller, another couple fighting over the manual of a baby carrier. I ran, I was almost sprinting now, down another long street, the street was also empty, the air felt unpolluted, there were garden beds filled with flowers and tall old trees covered in foliage. There were baby-clothing stores, each painted pastel pink; I saw bright lights in the distance and a huge purple building. A fluorescent sign outside proclaimed it ‘Lucy’s’. I ran right up to the entrance and swung open the door, stepped in. Everything changed. It was loud, and jammed with
white people, there were chequered tablecloths, and pink pastel vinyl booths, framed pictures of Toy Story advertisements and Lady Gaga and Bon Jovi on the walls. A heavy smell of frying oil hung in the air.

  ‘Yigeren?’

  ‘Yes, table for one,’ I said to the server as she led me to a table in the centre of the circus.

  Everywhere there were newly rubber-stamped babies, hundreds and hundreds of babies being quiet, screaming, crying, squirming, throwing food, giggling, staring blankly, rocking, rolling, crawling, climbing shoulders and booster chairs and the fabric of strollers.

  I pointed to an omelette.

  What universe had I just walked into – a dream, I wondered? Had I been mixing pills again?

  At the table opposite me a baby was being fed from one of those miniature Kellogg’s boxes of cereal. My father used to bring the same boxes home from business trips, he’d give them to my sisters and me, and we’d yahoo and gallop around the house in a frenzy of sugar. Mum used to go through his pockets though and she’d always find a receipt for an eight-pack that he’d bought on the way home. He was nice like that. Mum wouldn’t be too angry.

  The omelette arrived and I tried to eat but my stomach, empty of infinite possibility, clamped shut in pain and I couldn’t eat. I tried to drink the complimentary water, but couldn’t swallow.

  I looked at the parents; they all seemed so blasé, as if this were not the most curious restaurant on earth, as if their brand-new black-haired babies had been there all along. I made eye contact with no-one yet I wasn’t hiding the fact that I was staring, transfixed. There was a little baby with a blond couple with ocean-coloured eyes, the man tall and lean, the woman stout and with a bob, they both wore polo shirts and looked like they were from a sugar and flour town, where on any given day baking supplies always outsold fresh-baked goods. There was another little baby with a ready-made nuclear family all with curly mouse-brown hair and spectacles on prominent noses, they looked like they didn’t talk about their feelings and had a lot of books in the house. There was a baby with a fat family, fat father, fat mother, two fat sons, they had big plates of waffles and sausages on the table, and they looked as if their cheeks and foreheads were trying to swallow their eyes. There was another baby with an older couple who looked hygienic and ordered, they both had polished tennis shoes on and I hoped their baby would not feel too lonely. There were so many types of husbands and wives, I couldn’t form assumptions for all of them, couldn’t imagine the spans of all the babies’ futures.

  I felt as if I were going to cry. I felt an incredible injustice. It seemed to me that I wanted their babies more than they did, that I deserved their new babies more than them. I ordered a shot of tequila – the tequila I was able to consume easily. I ordered another. I was thinking clearly then, and I made the only right decision I could. I knew what I needed to do. I planned the next ten years in my head, everything gets forgiven after a decade anyway, bankruptcy, manslaughter, multiple breaks and entries, robbery, identity theft. This would be a technicality trial, if it ever came to that, because I wouldn’t really be taking something from someone, I’d be taking something from no-one. It was valid, I told myself. Would I get homesick? I didn’t think so, I didn’t think I knew if I even had allegiances, if I was even part of Australia at all. I don’t think the country would miss me – the national anthem, all the sporting events, all the special days never meant very much to me. My parents busted their arses trying to get us girls through school, then university, trying to make sure we fit in, were the same, didn’t miss out with our Billabong school bags and Converse sneakers. But I knew for a fact that my sisters, like me, had Real Australians speak to us r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y every time they first met us, to this day. We were always going to be other. I could stay here. I could work out a job, a new ID, find an apartment, go to Shanghai. I had friends; I, we, could do it.

  I paid my bill and left the restaurant. I walked through the green square to one of the baby-clothes boutiques; lined up inside the window display were classic blond Barbie dolls holding little Chinese babies. The street led back into the part of the city I’d walked from. There was a heavy-set couple tending to a baby in a stroller about one hundred metres in the same direction. I retied my shoelaces, tightened my travel documents and cash against my hips, threw the drawstring bag of clothes into a bin and walked toward them.

  ‘What a cute baby,’ I said, trying to sound un-Australian.

  ‘Oh yes, she is, isn’t she!’ The woman cooed at the baby then.

  ‘Aww, can I hold her?’ I said, mimicking the woman’s enthusiasm.

  ‘Sure! Hun, you changed her, right?’

  ‘Good to go,’ the husband said and wandered toward the green park with his hands in his pockets. As I bent down into the stroller I saw him fish out a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.

  I picked up the baby. She felt like a warm sack of wheat against my chest. I leant her head over my shoulder and turned away slowly from the woman.

  ‘Who’s a little cutie-pie? Yes, you are,’ the woman now cooed at the baby as I bounced her, with the baby’s face toward the woman. I looked way up the street. There was no-one around. The early evening light was still slowly descending against those buildings. I wondered for a moment if they were authentic buildings, or made from fake stucco, the type that was packed with Styrofoam and stuck together with medical plaster. Over the street in the distance, I watched the yellow light slide down the soft paper billboard. I held the baby firm against me, and ran.

  Easter

  When I was younger I felt as if I could feel everything, and afterward I could own those feelings like objects to revisit. I remember precisely being too young and riding the fair dodgem cars, the thrust, the whirling movement, the thrill of the slow electric chase (I could once evoke the memory intact, with the night’s linger of boiled and fried meats, the warm wafts of powdered sugar on doughnut batter, even the damp smell of turned gravel underfoot, from night coming on in the wet earth of a gullied town oval – each smell was rotated, propelled through the carnival night from a flashing, jerking car). Later, as an idle, ‘at risk’ teenager I worked shifts at the vineyard over three consecutive seasons; I would come to feel as if the smell of sulphur could be summoned and relived at any moment. Then in my twenties I travelled alone to the Himalayas, walking the Annapurna trail, and over the days to Thorong La Pass I bottled moments: the taste of yak cheese, the pungent marijuana, the hangover from brandy and altitude, the feeling of dirty hostel blankets, every conversation. The night before crossing the pass, I awoke freezing, needing to urinate, not wanting to urinate, willing the urine to settle in my bladder until morning. Eventually I was forced to go outside. I remember this part clearly – the fell of snow, and the full neon blue moon that was close enough to reach – it was as close to science fiction as my real life had ever been. I remember talking to myself, justifying to myself that I had found God, and I remember making myself swear to hold on to the feeling of religious awakening, to not let go. I stayed outside for a long time anticipating the rest of my life having some infinite depth, an immortal anchor, being elevated in a wholly substantial way.

  When I awoke before sunrise to cross the pass, I had lost the feeling from the night before; I had the memory still, but the sense of awe was void, impossible to stir. It was the booming realisation of total faithlessness and, as I descended the mountain, I knew then that I would always return to this state, dully godless. After that I hardly remembered much and, as further confirmation of my barren outlook, was forever surprised and excited by little.

  Shameful secrets often lie in one’s undergraduate university records, as surely as in one’s childhood. If I were to be investigated through an extensive (or even simple) administrative database search, it would unearth the hundreds of dollars of unpaid library fines from my first years at college – before it had become policy to pay fines on account of one’s degree being issu
ed, and perhaps because of my being registered in an ‘at risk of welfare dependence’ zip code – as well as my mediocre grades, both of which would prove that I should never have been allowed to win a Stanford journalism scholarship. My guess is that I fell at the top of the disadvantaged slush pile. Fast forward the years that I more or less worked fairly and diligently and I was a junior at the Atlantic magazine’s European office in Paris.

  My sister and I have a few key collective memories of childhood. Our favourite is a shared noun, which we often use as a witty retort to those, and there were many, put off by our warped personalities. A typical conversation might have concluded in this vein:

  ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’

  ‘Easter.’

  It was the cue for a break-up, or a comeback for bullies who, seemingly unaware, slung taunts as questions. Pity retrieving an explanation made no sense to anyone else except Sal.

  This spring break Sal was coming to visit, the first time she’d visited me since I’d been stationed in Paris. Once, she had planned to fly to Fez, where I had been situated for a few months. I had been in a position to pay the airfare, but she had been spooked over some intense protesting broadcast on the airport-lounge TV and our reunion never materialised. It had been nine years. Nine years since I’d last seen my sister.

  Her flight came in this time with her aboard, and we took our place in the taxi line on an unusually humid Paris afternoon. She looked well: tired, but with an upbeat, un-European resolution to life.

  ‘What do you want to do while you’re here? I’ve got two days, maybe three, to spare.’

  ‘I want to try every macaron and éclair in the city, I want to go to all the places Carrie Bradshaw goes to with that prick Alex, and I also want to visit the spots where they filmed The Da Vinci Code and then get a train to Austria and visit this town called Fucking – I want to steal a road sign; Dave’ll love it.’