Flesh & Blood

by A. E. Dooland

  “I bet that’s exactly what you want, Mum. I bet you wish I had no friends and I could spend all day, every day paying attention to you and doing what you want!”

  “Min – Lee!” she bellowed down the phone, and the speakers hissed with static at the volume of her voice. I had to hold it away from my ear, wincing. “Listen to yourself! Listen to the way you’re speaking to your own mother!” She paused, letting silence hang between us for a moment before she spoke again. “I gave up everything for you—everything you have is because of me. And, yet, you take me for granted. You’re selfish, rude to me, so cruel to me, blaming me for things that aren’t my fault, ignoring me when you feel like it, taking away the things that are important to me just because it’s not convenient for you to share them. Sometimes I wonder why God gave me such a terrible daughter, and then I remember that He gives the toughest challenges to the strongest people. That’s the only way I get through the torment of being your mother, Min. The only way.”

  My lips were pressed so tightly together that in the mirror I could see they were white. I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to break the fucking mirror.

  “Apologise to me, Min Lee,” she demanded. “Apologise for being rude, and cruel, and ignoring me.”

  She had to be fucking kidding. “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’?”

  “Shouldn’t you be the one apologising to me? You just took all my—”

  “—I do what needs to be done, Min. And it’s really hard sometimes, especially when my own daughter acts like I’m some sort monster for simply trying to take care of her. You’re selfish and you always push me to the point at which I’m forced to—”

  “—no one forced you to spend all of my money! You just want to control every little—”

  “’Your’ money, Min? Your money? Whose money do you think paid for all your school fees for fifteen years? Whose money fed you and clothed you for 20 years? Should I have kept a ledger so you know exactly when you’re done paying me back? Should I have—”

  I was shouting into the phone, the volume making the microphone hiss. “That’s just it, Mum! When do I stop having to pay you back? When is enough enough? When do I stop having to do every single little fucking thing you want me to do, Mum? When do I get to live my life?”

  Her throat was tight. “Well, you’d be about to, Min. You’d be about to if your friends would just stop interfering with your marriage to Henry—”

  I could hear the words as they tumbled out of my mouth, helpless to stop them. “There’s not going to be any fucking marriage to Henry, Mum! I broke up with him three months ago! We – broke – up!”

  For a second, the receiver was silent. All I could hear was the sound of me panting, and my heart hammering in my ears. My reflection gaped at me.

  I did it.

  When she first spoken, it sounded uncertain. Disbelieving. “But the ring you—”

  Now there was no stopping me. “I pawned it.”

  “You pawned—” The last syllable choked off. Then, she took a few breaths, and gathered herself. “You stupid, stupid girl,” she told me, spitting the words out like she was scolding a bad child. “You stupid girl. You are throwing everything away, everything you’ve worked so hard to build. First your world-class job, now your perfect husband. You get on that phone this very instant, Min Lee! You find his number and apologise and tell him you want him—”

  “—I don’t have his number, Mum! He doesn’t want to talk to me—”

  “—Then drive to his house! Tell him you were wrong and that your stupid tramp friend has been in your ear, telling you that marriage isn’t—”

  “—stop insulting my friends, Mum! They actually care about me. About me! Me! The way I am, not the way they keep trying to force me to be! None of the things you were telling me—”

  “Shut up! Shut up, you stupid, stupid girl! You think your friends are going to hang around and take care of you when you’re old and childless? You think they’re going to spoon-feed you like I do your Grandma? No! Your family does that. Those ‘friends’ will disappear, Min, mark my words. The second you’re old and alone, they will disappear. Everyone will turn on you and you won’t even be able to afford to fill a shopping basket. No one will employ you. People will turn their nose up at you in the street. There will be no one to call at night when you’re alone and lonely, no one to—”

  “—my friends aren’t like—”

  “You’re stupid! You don’t know what people are like to old single women! If you did, you wouldn’t throw Henry away like a piece of garbage and you’d marry him quick smart. God, you are stupid! Why do I have such a stupid, stupid daughter? Henry is the best man you will ever find, Min Lee. No one else would look twice at you, you’re tall, plain, selfish, and mentally ill. But Henry—that wonderful, wonderful man—put up with you, and he was prepared to marry you, and now you’ve cast him aside—”

  “—which means you’re in luck, Mum! Now’s your chance, while he’s single. You can cut out the middleman and marry him yourself!”

  She stopped yelling at me and her words died on her lips. I thought she was going to deliver me an ultimatum, a threat, or maybe one final shocking blow—I was ready for it, I was so ready for it, because I had one more final, shocking blow to tell her myself—but then there was a smack down the receiver.

  For a moment, there was total silence, and then empty dial tones beeped in my ear.

  She’s hung up on me, I realised, staring at my red face and open jaw in the reflection. She’s fucking hung up on me!

  I yelled—a noise from deep within my chest that strained my vocal chords and echoed off the tiles—grabbing at my hair, just, fucking—why was she like this? Why? Why did she think she could just take my money whenever she wanted to—fuck her—calling Sarah a tramp? Sarah was fucking awesome. She was there for me. She made me feel like I was this funny, interesting person and just—ugh, how dare she? I leant heavily on the vanity, watching my heaving chest rise and fall in the mirror.

  The words were on the very tip of my tongue, the very edge: ‘I hate you’, but there was no fucking point in saying them. She wouldn’t be able to hear them, and even if she did, she’d probably think I was just being difficult. It would be more evidence of the great burden she had, being my mother.

  I sank down onto the closed lid of the toilet, putting my head in my hands. It was pounding.

  Well, she knows now, I thought, staring at the cracked white tiles of the bathroom floor between my bare feet. That means no more wedding talk.

  I wondered what it meant instead, though.

  Well, for starters it means you have no fucking money, I realised, feeling my heart jump-start again. I needed to inspect the damage. With shaking hands, I dialled my bank and tried to remember my phone banking password—I think it had been years since I used it—and then listened to the automated voice awkwardly recite my bank balance: ‘one…. dollar and ninety-…one cents’. I closed my eyes. She hadn’t been bluffing. Of course she fucking hadn’t. And she’d transferred it to her own account first, so I couldn’t even cancel the transaction.

  I wondered what she was going to do next.

  While I was imagining her face appearing in my bedroom doorway in the middle of the night like it used to when I was a kid, my phone buzzed in my hands and lit up.

  It’s her! I thought immediately, panicking and nearly dropping the handset on the tiles. I couldn’t do it again, I couldn’t deal with—

  The display on the screen underneath the number was a big, smiling face framed by blonde curls. Bree. I exhaled with loud, audible relief, and answered, closing my eyes. “Hey…”

  “I finally got you!” she said brightly, and then on hearing me, paused at length. “Wait, are you okay?”

  I half-smiled at that. For someone who was completely tone-deaf, she was surprisingly perceptive about the smallest changes in my voice. “No…” I told her through a tight jaw. She gave me space to reply, and I man
aged, “I fucking hate my mother, Bree...” and then, before I could stop myself, I just spilt out everything that had just happened in one big verbal vomit—the phone call, the argument, what Mum had said about my ‘friends’ and what she’d done with my money—until I felt exhausted like I’d just run a marathon. “So now I’m fucked,” I finished. “I’m broke, like really broke, and I have no fucking idea what she’ll do next. I almost expect her to call the university and cancel my master’s, or, I don’t know, harass Sarah at work and tell her she’s ruined my life or something…”

  Bree made an attempt at comforting me. “Maybe she’ll just calm down and do nothing? Like, she already spent all your money, maybe that’s enough? My dad sometimes explodes but it never lasts very long and then he acts like nothing has happened…”

  I sighed. “No, Mum doesn’t let stuff go, and I’ve honestly never talked back to her. She was really angry with me, I don’t know what she’s going to do. She’s probably planning something right now. I hope she doesn’t come here. I really hope she doesn’t come here...”

  “Do you think she would?” Bree wondered aloud. “Like, would she just show up like that?”

  “I don’t know if she’d ‘just show up’, because she has to get someone to look after Grandma, and I don’t know if she’s got enough money to drop everything and come right now,” I said, and then groaned and ran a hand over my face. “Who am I kidding? I don’t know. I don’t know what she’ll do. I’ve never yelled at her before, and now she knows about Henry and me…”

  “At least she can’t take any more of your money, because it’s all gone.” I think that was meant to cheer me up. “You should change your banking passwords right now anyway, though.”

  “I can’t,” I told her. “There’s no data reception out here. I’ll change it when I get back.”

  Bree was silent for a moment, and I knew what she was about to offer: ‘Give me your password, I’ll change it for you!’. That was not going to happen, because she’d take a peek at my account—let’s be serious, this was Bree and she wouldn’t be able to help herself—and I didn’t want her to find anything in there that might suggest that I’d gone behind her back and paid her fees.

  Fortunately, she let it go. “Oh, well, it’s good Daz is paying you in cash, at least you don’t have to worry she’ll take it from you before you can change it,” she said. “How is it, by the way? Is it fun working with them?”

  I sighed heavily; this job. “I don’t think this is going to work out,” I told her, and then gave her the abridged version of what it was like to be a genderqueer Korean artist around ‘classic country boys’ or whatever Rob had called them. “I mean, I’ll work with them for as long as they let me, but…”

  Bree had a much stronger reaction than I had. “That fucking sucks,” she said. “I thought for sure it’d be fun working with Rob! Oh, well, whatever. You can get a job somewhere else and not come out to anyone.”

  I wished it was that simple. “Awesome, it’s all sorted!” I said with false enthusiasm.

  “Don’t be like that, I’m sure we can find something,” Bree said optimistically. “Maybe if you worked around women it might be better? I mean, I know that’s weird, but if you’re saying that working around super masculine country boys makes you feel different and feminine, maybe working around really feminine people will make you feel more masculine or something? Like maybe in an office with lots of women?”

  I frowned. She was being oddly specific. “Do you have somewhere in mind?”

  “Nah,” she said innocently. “I just meant for example.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was too fucking tired to worry about it. “Maybe,” I said. “But after the day I’ve had, honestly? I just want to focus on getting this job done and getting paid so I can put something in my account.” I ran my hands through my hair. “Fuck! Why did she have to raid my account now? She could honestly have done it at any other point in my life and it wouldn’t have mattered at all. I have debits that are due to come and I don’t know what day they will—maybe even tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay if they bounce, you can pay them when you get back,” Bree told me sagely. “Big banks don’t care if you’re a few days late with payments.”

  Big banks, maybe. But dodgy pawnbrokers certainly would, and Seung had been super fucking clear about paying on time. I needed to have my cash in the bank first thing tomorrow morning, just to be sure. “Mmm,” I said neutrally.

  Bree noticed, but I think she assumed it was just because of the argument. “I suppose it’s stupid to say ‘don’t think about your mum’, yeah? I’m always really fucked up after I argue with Mum and Dad.” Her tone softened. “But look on the bright side: at least your mum knows now, right? You won’t have, like, a million texts and emails about weddings making your phone go nuts and reminding you that you haven’t told her.”

  I looked down my body at my men’s pyjamas. “I haven’t told her everything, Bree,” I reminded her soberly, “and she was so angry about Henry and me. I just…” I put my head in hands again and made a really frustrated noise. “Fuck. Everything is so fucked.”

  I would have liked to spend a bit longer talking to Bree because I was still shaking, but the other guys started to trickle back into the house, and a heavy knock on the bathroom door reminded me that I shared it with six other people. Promising I’d call her back in a bit, I hung up on her so I could quickly finish up in the bathroom, and then went to grab a drink of water from the kitchen just to make sure I didn’t need to add ‘hangover’ to my long list of problems.

  I bumped into Rob at the sink, and he gave me the once-over as I chugged a whole glass of water. “You don’t look so great,” he observed.

  I bet I didn’t. “Probably your cooking,” I told him. “I think that once a sausage turns black, you’re supposed to remove it from the BBQ, not turn up the gas.”

  He laughed. “Nah, mate, it’ll put hair on your chest!”

  There were a lot of things I disliked about my chest, but hairlessness wasn’t one of them. “Thank god it’s only for one night, then.”

  He was still chuckling. “Two nights,” he corrected me, and then double-took at my blank expression. “Oh yeah, you’d disappeared by the time Daz told us, whoops! He doesn’t reckon the walls are going to get finished tomorrow after all.”

  I froze. What? “We’re not going back to Sydney tomorrow night?”

  Rob shook his head, having another mouthful of water. “Nah, we’ll probably stay into Monday and go home in the afternoon—maybe even on Tuesday morning. Another day-and-a-half to finish up, Daz reckons. Ah well,” he said, carefully plucking my glass out of my stiff hand and washing it for me. “I’m not complaining: it’s more money, right?” He put our glasses to dry on the rack and thumped me on the back as he passed behind me. “’Night!”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Not even Bree reading me an ‘oh my god, so beautiful’ prescribed English text over the phone as a bedtime story helped me sleep. I let her go when she was falling asleep herself, and then just lay there staring at the ceiling while one of the boys snored loudly in the room beside mine. Between the human lawnmower on the other side of the wall, the fact I’d had an enormous fight with Mum, and the fact she’d taken all my fucking money right before a loan payment was due, there was no way I was getting a good night’s sleep tonight.

  To make everything a million times worse, the alcohol was wearing off and my body ached from doing all that manual labour. Normal painkillers never worked at all for me anymore, but I tried to take a couple anyway, tossing and turning for ages before I finally fell asleep. I don’t know how long that took, but when there was a loud, sudden knock on the bedroom door, I felt like I hadn’t slept properly at all.

  At least most of the guys looked even worse than I felt; there were a lot of sunglasses at the breakfast table and the Panadeine Forte was being passed around like breath mints. Meanwhile, Rob—the only one of us who hadn’t drunk—w
as whistling cheerfully away at the BBQ, charring some breakfast sausages to a perfect crisp for us.

  I could barely fucking walk because my back was killing me, so when the Panadeine Forte arrived in my hands, I nearly popped a couple of them myself. When I opened the phial and looked down at those familiar pills, seeing the shape of them all piled on top of each other reminded me of having a palm full of them on the floor in my bathroom. Pressing my lips tightly together, I passed them right along. I was not going back there.

  Jonno looked surprised I hadn’t taken any. “Tough guy, eh, Korea?” he asked me with a broad grin, accepting the phial from me and tossing a couple into his mouth.

  I stared at him. Did he just call me ‘Korea’?

  I asked Rob about it later when we were in the car on the way to the work site, and he laughed. “Yeah, I told you they’d get used to calling you ‘guy’!” he said, spectacularly missing the point. I didn’t have the heart to explain the problem with the rest of that sentence, and I didn’t bring it up with the rest of the guys when we got on site, either. They were all calling each other nicknames, too, it was just that no one was ‘Australia’ or ‘Whitey’, so I kept my mouth shut. On top of being trans and Asian, I didn’t want to also end up being known as the guy who couldn’t take a joke, or whatever they’d think about me.

  I did make the mistake of mentioning I was sore, though, which of course meant that none of the boys would even let me touch any of the pallets, or the wheelbarrow, or anything weighing more than a single brick. It was frustrating, and when I asked them not to help, they acted like I was really ungrateful. I gave up and just angrily churned the mortar by myself, thinking there was no fucking point in he-ing me if they weren’t going to so much as let me get my petticoats wet.