‘Tell me,’ my father said, ‘has your mother ever spoken to you about a women named Celeste?’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Well, it seems she’s safe.’
‘Who? Mum?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It seems, Noah. I didn’t say I know.’
‘Can you tell me what you do know?’
‘Not on the phone, no. Come home.’
I nudged at a piece of chewing gum with the tip of my sneaker, trying to conjure a prudent reply. The hostel phone booth was no larger than a refrigerator. To its dull walls tenants had affixed all manner of ads, some for phone cards, others for sex. I ran my eyes over each, one after the other, as if for inspiration.
‘Okay,’ I said, relenting. ‘I’ll get a flight home.’ I could see no alternative.
‘For good?’
‘No, just to visit.’
‘Ring me when you’ve booked it.’
‘Okay. Bye.’
‘Goodbye.’
After hanging up I could not stand to be in the hostel. My room felt like a dank cave. I walked to the train station and sat inside its rumbling frame. Japanese people passed me by. Most wore suits and looked to be in a hurry. They left a cold impression.
I had set myself down opposite a payphone where an elderly woman now dropped a handful of coins. They clattered loudly. When she stooped to pick them up, talking into the receiver as she did so, she could not reach even one. A few metres away a six- or seven-year-old boy broke free of his mother’s grip and stood staring at the scattered change. His hands were at his sides, fingertips twitching as if about to draw unseen pistols. His eyes never left the money. He took one step towards the closest coin. The woman on the phone peered at him. Then his mother called his name and he shot up the stairs like a startled lizard.
The elderly woman finished her call, unconsciously bowing as she said goodbye to the person on the other end. She collected the money and methodically climbed a wide staircase to the train platform, leaving me staring at the payphone. I envied her—envied her having someone to call. Before Tilly returned to Australia we had agreed not to waste money on international calls and not to e-mail more than once a week. Tilly had initiated this and I had agreed, unaware how lonely Japan would become without her.
I needed to speak to her. I could not hold off until I was back in Australia. Strings of thought had clogged my mind like dental floss in a drain, forming a solid, putrid blockage. I could untangle nothing. Everywhere I looked I saw only strangers. Even my parents were strangers. There was no one but Tilly. I decided to call, to tell her about Phillip’s moodiness, about Harry, the loan, my father’s letter and my mother’s disappearance. I would tell her about my trip home and ask if I could visit her, perhaps even suggest we drive north.
The call connected without delay.
‘Hello,’ she said softly.
But I remembered Mami’s blue slip, her sleepy breath on my neck and, afraid to lie, hung up.
Dinner with
the Livingstons
A week later my flight touched down in Melbourne. The jolt was like being rear-ended in traffic. One of the compartments fell open and a woman’s purse dropped to the floor. I stared out the window, watching the flaps lower and slide out stages on the back edge of the wing. There was a sustained shudder and the plane lurched slightly towards the terminal. I found the forces involved dwarfing, and to take my mind off them I thought about the 25,000 yen Harry had given me three days after our lunch. It was the easiest 5000 yen I had ever earned. I had put it towards securing my hostel room for four more weeks. Nakamura-san, if I understood her Japanese correctly, had guaranteed to leave everything as it was.
My father met me in the Arrivals area. At first glance he was as I remembered: tall, scrawny and a little ungainly—like a rope. He had not seen me exit through the automatic doors and was busy inspecting other passengers, eyes sifting through them. One young woman carrying a screaming child caused him to frown.
He spotted me before I could reach him and in that instant I saw he had in fact changed. He was now almost completely bald and his face showed weakness, frailty and fear, emotions foreign to its stern English cast. Instead of waving he brushed down his suit jacket and pulled it taut. He stood as rigid as a post. I dropped my bags in front of him. Blood thumped in my ears and my face flushed an uncomfortable, searing red.
‘Welcome home,’ he said.
‘Thank you. It’s hot.’ I tried to smile but it felt fake, like smiling for a photo. My father’s hand was dry and chalky when at last he offered it. The shake had no real strength and I was relieved to let go.
‘The car’s in the car park,’ he said. ‘I see you’ve collected your bags already.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Shall we?’
‘Sure.’
All sorts of people, many overweight and sweating, hemmed us in as they waited for loved ones to emerge from the doors. It was bright in the terminal. The walls seemed to reflect the sun. Two children, oblivious to the world around them and shouting abuse at one another, swung around my legs, treading on my feet. A stooped woman, pursuing both doggedly, almost clipped me and thrust up one hand in apology.
I threw my backpack over my shoulder, grabbed the suitcase handle and tried to follow my father.
‘I think it’s this way,’ he said, not offering to take a bag.
Outside the sun bore down unmercifully. A layer of sweat itched its way up and out of my forehead. It rallied into drops then rolled down into my eyes. I kept within a metre or two of my father, inspecting his suit. It was a brown thing from the seventies, like every other suit he owned. My father wore suits year round, regardless of the temperature, and always with a collared shirt.
He pointed out the car. ‘There it is.’
It was no surprise to see the old Datsun. It was as much a part of the man as his suit. But it was nevertheless a disappointment to find it cowering there between two Mitsubishi sedans. I dumped both my bags, circled it, then pulled my finger through a layer of dust on the rear window. It had only two doors, one grey, the other primer-pink. The rest was an awful flecked blue. The rusty hubcaps on the back wheels were a different pattern to those on the front, and both rear indicators were smashed out. Little globes hung on long red wires, bouncing gently in the morning breeze.
We climbed in and belted up. I wriggled in the lumpy, unaccommodating passenger seat, its vinyl scorching hot, while my father battled to get the engine started.
‘It’s been playing up,’ he said, as though it had not been temperamental all its life. ‘It’s the heat. Summer sometimes gets to it.’
‘I see.’
The engine spluttered to life, then roared fiercely, like a dragon waking to a sword. People stared but my father did not mind the attention. Unlike me, he associated poverty with honesty.
He talked to me as if I knew nothing of my home city. ‘This freeway system Melbourne’s got is a curse. I don’t have an e-tag thing, so we have to call up to pay. Now they’re saying something about using it too much.’
‘Really.’
We waited for a blue light—deep behind the dusty, plastic screen that defined the dash—to fade away.
‘What did you do about your job?’ my father asked.
‘I told them there was a death in the family.’
He grumbled. ‘You shouldn’t ever lie like that.’
We drove to the car park exit wordlessly and paid to be let out. It felt anticlimactic to be back in Australia. I kept expecting something to happen, but without knowing what. Then it occurred to me it was as though I had never left, as though in all the time I had been away I had really just been at home, living as I always had. My memory of Australia and its memory of me ended at the same point. Neither of us could do anything but pick up from where we had left off. Japan was unrecognised here, just as any changes which might have taken place in Australia, within my father, were unrecognisable to
me. Certainly from the outside everything looked similar enough to assume nothing had changed. Driving along back roads (to avoid paying the toll), the factories we passed, all with their roller doors down and cheap brickwork graffitied, looked as they had travelling to the airport two years earlier. Only the cityscape had changed. When it fell into view it looked small and timid.
Home was exactly as I remembered. It was the same diminutive apartment with its wood-veneer kitchen, drab but cluttered living room and two boxy bedrooms. No wonder my mother had left, I thought. Personally, I had not dwelled on the place once since packing my bags. Every breath since leaving had been fuller, as if my life began the moment I slid my keys back under the locked door. The TV sat atop the same Akai cardboard box. And above this, Jesus, perfectly white and with ragged, rock-star hair, still looked upon me with a fixed, condescending calm. He held out both his arms as though delivering some inarguable point, and I remembered that, as a child, I had often sat wondering what it might be.
Something, however, was different. It took me a moment to determine that most of my mother’s possessions were missing. There was no bookshelf holding her complete set of classics. Her reading light was gone. And in the kitchen, where the lino was now peeling up from corners of the floor, her prized knife set had vanished. This, above all else, knocked the air from me—robbed me of the confidence I had been so careful to affect. If there was one thing my mother fussed over it was her cooking knives. She found a certain perfection in them, in their craftsmanship. And without them the kitchen was not the kitchen at all, but a foreign space. It was difficult for me to picture my mother standing in it, turning a knife over, maybe deciding to sharpen it. Or to picture the different dishes she had experimented with on those nights when my father, usually insistent on sausages and sweet potato, did not care what was served.
‘You can put your things back in your bedroom,’ said my father.
‘Thank you.’
I walked past my parents’ room, facing the sun and stained an off-brown by canary-yellow curtains, towards my own room, stark and bare. Here the same humourless sun streamed through, untroubled by curtains. The room had been gutted, save for the bed. Even the little desk I had sat at to study for my school exams was gone. I had expected to feel awful entering this room without my mother in tow, peeking over my shoulder to make sure everything was in order and ready. But it was such a prison, and so reflective of my father’s personality generally, that a part of me secretly rejoiced at her escape—a happiness barely tinged with grief.
My father appeared at the door, looking forlorn. ‘You must be tired,’ he said. ‘What was it, a nine-hour flight?’
‘Eleven.’
‘The Livingstons are coming for dinner. Do you remember them?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘They heard about your mother. I haven’t seen them for years, but they rang. I felt I should invite them.’
‘What will we eat?’
‘I’ll get takeaway later on.’
‘Okay. I might have a nap.’
He only nodded. The apartment’s oppressive silence rolled over the two of us like a wave in a calm ocean, perceptible, but only as a surge in that which prevailed. My father tapped a fingernail against the wooden doorframe. Clearly he had something he wanted to convey to me, some onerous, slippery lump of information, much like vomit, that he wanted up and out before the guests arrived. But no matter how he cleared his throat, he was unable to find a way to bring it up. He walked back through the apartment to the kitchen with it still rumbling inside his stomach.
I slept for hours, tired from the overnight flight. When I finally woke it was already dark. I thought I was still in Japan, in the hostel. People were talking and it took me a moment to realise one of them was my father. The flight, the touchdown and the airport all came back in a rush of soundless images.
‘Shit,’ I said.
I listened to what I could of the conversation while I showered, flossed, brushed my teeth and put on deodorant. They were talking about the Australian Football League, a topic for which my father had no shortage of anecdotes. In the time it took to ready myself for an entry he told five long-winded tales, all of which I had heard him tell a hundred times before. Perhaps our guests had too, because their laughter was scant and forced. I checked my face in the medicine cabinet mirror and saw I had forgotten to shave. There was a distinct line where my pale skin ended and red stubble began, but I could not bring myself to hunt for a razor and cream.
I entered the living room with all the warmth I could muster. I was dressed down in cargo shorts and a tatty Japanese T-shirt, on which was written ‘Forever until the death ripped us apart!’ My hair felt dirty beneath my palm and my shoes were full of holes. I could tell that my father was disappointed. He tossed our guests an embarrassed smile before waving me towards him. Beneath the single living room light, his bald head, gratuitously buffed with a lotion, shone like vegetable oil.
‘Noah,’ he said, ‘you remember the Livingstons.’
‘Of course.’
The Livingstons were three in number: an obese, bearded man with a toupee, his thin, haggard, bleach-blonde wife and a beautiful, surly young girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen. This girl seemed to me to be an amazing accomplishment for any two people, let alone the pair claiming to be her parents. My father reminded me of their names in an obvious fashion he clearly felt to be subtle.
‘This is Steven, his wife Alison, and their daughter Anna. You went to kindergarten with Anna. That’s how we first met the Livingstons. Sort of a PTA thing, wasn’t it?’
Mrs Livingston nodded sharply.
‘Nice of you to come,’ I said, before taking my seat at the dining table, surprised to learn Anna was twenty, like me. My father had done his best to clean the apartment. He had lined up motley cushions on the 1980s Ikea couch, straightened the magazines on the coffee table and put some sort of a cloth over the cardboard box supporting the TV. But there was still no escaping the clutter which defined the room. There were thousands of things, all acquired over time and kept for no reason. They were artefacts mostly, made from pine cones and whatnot, and all picked up on family driving holidays. There were also countless plastic folders, two filing cabinets, five or six vases, assorted pens, a model car and a hundred or more keys. The latter, clumped on wall hooks like fruit, must have been baffling to our guests, even if they knew my father liked to hoard things. Whenever he stumbled upon a key he invariably pocketed it, then took great satisfaction in hanging it on a hook. Locks, by contrast, hardly interested him.
I realised I was still embarrassed to have people see the place. Especially a pretty girl. She looked bored and was ignoring the story her father was trying to tell. Probably she had heard it before, although a second and third retelling could not have hurt. I was having a good deal of trouble understanding its thread.
‘The native deer in …’ he said, before pausing to think. A bottle of wine had been opened, which was unusual. Though my father had poured himself a glass, it was untouched. The only other person drinking was Mr Livingston and he appeared to have consumed two beers and most of the bottle of red wine on his own. He had a flushed excitement about him, cheeks splotched red.
‘The native deer in Finland,’ he resumed, ‘took a real battering in the war, what with Russia traipsing through and then the Germans. Although the Germans were welcomed, I suppose. Though not by the deer. Did you know that Finland has the highest number of sport shooters per capita in the entire world? I didn’t, but they’re all out there, looking for these deer. Not to mention problems with crossbreeding, by which I mean farm deer … interfering with the wild population. Of course, the ones we have now at our place near Berwick aren’t fromFinland. But I find deer fascinating.’
Mrs Livingston looked mortified by this proclamation. ‘You’re slurring your words, dear,’ she snapped coldly. ‘Don’t pour yourself the last of that beer.’
But Mr Livingston went ahead and poured the
dregs into his glass anyway. He kept on about deer, their daily routines, until it occurred to him no one cared, that he was being a bore. He quickly and conspicuously changed the topic. ‘Have you heard Anna’s news?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said my father.
‘Well, let me tell you. She—’ Mrs Livingston poked her husband between the ribs and hissed. He twisted away from her sharply, like a carp from an electric shock. To my amazement he kept on talking. ‘Yes, Anna’s becoming a model.’
‘Really?’ asked my father, looking at Anna. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a model visit this house.’ There was very little humour left in my father’s words; he was a man with no interest in drinkers or the media. He kept his focus on Anna, who appeared to be perfectly relaxed. She raised a single, plucked eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Livingston, ‘she was discovered in a train of all places. The man who scouted her says she can do catalogues, things like that. From there, who knows? Perhaps she could join a soapie.’
Anna fell back in her chair. She wore a tight top and her small breasts jutted out at my father like a rebuke. She toyed with her navel ring. ‘I want to be an actress,’ she said. ‘Or a TV host. Or anything in the media, really.’
‘A news anchor, perhaps,’ suggested my father.
‘Except that.’ Anna flashed a simple, sharp smile across the table. There was no question of my father understanding its meaning.
I kept staring at Anna’s face. As a matter of course, this soon led me to stare at her body. From where I sat I could make out the exact shape of her upper torso: wide shoulders running down through an impossibly slender middle, then back out to her hips. I knew better than to stare but it was such a beautiful shape. There was nothing else remotely interesting in the room and Anna could have held my attention in a storm. She brushed a long strand of blonde hair from her face, refusing to acknowledge my existence.
‘A country girl in modelling,’ her father said. ‘Who would have thought? Though I think the country is good for the skin. Certainly, the animals appear to be healthier and … well, it’s the air, not to compare anyone to an animal.’ He fell quiet.
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