Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Jamie Marina Lau

  She bites her fingernails so that her hands can fit into Latex gloves. I ask her why she doesn’t just cut her nails, she leans in and whispers: do not trust nail clippers.

  Before bed we watch a television show about the hazards of motorbike riding. It’s a PG-rated nine-o’clock couch show.

  PEW

  Aunty Linda wears a long black slumber dress made of velvets and tassels, slinging off her body.

  We’re sitting in the second row behind where the pastor will sit after his sermon. This is a thick cherub’s home with many strangely very-in-tune voices. It is well with my soul, it is well. It is well with my soul. When death like a river, attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.

  A big bald man with lungs like bombs and a beautiful voice standing next to my Aunty Linda like a black panther. This makes me cry. Not him—but the whole place, which is a thick round tulip waiting to burst in warm yellows. All these voices like pollen. And Lord haste the day when the faith shall be sight, the clouds be rolled back as a scroll. The trump shall resound and the Lord shall descend, even so it is well with my soul.

  Little sandwiches in the hall out the front and these styrofoam cups with sweet juice. I’ve been crying because the voices altogether are so much nicer than my own.

  A man and a woman about a metre and a half away from each other have a conversation about the worship singer’s dirty kitchen. A carefulness on eggshells. Cardigan metropolis and a hushed-voice millennia.

  When Aunty Linda gets in the driver’s seat and I get in the back seat she asks me what I thought of her Baptist church and had I ever been to any Baptist church before? I tell her my mother used to take us, me and my dad and my big sister, but we stopped going after she left. Dad says he prays from the brown couch now. My Aunty Linda says yes, people can pray from anywhere and can practice their faith from anywhere, and then I don’t know what to say. I flatten my lips. Aunty Linda asks if I enjoyed it and I tell her I cried; there’s something about so many voices. And she says she cries sometimes too and then we leave it at that and she buys me a hot fudge sundae from the drive-thru. It drips from my spoon onto her cheap leather seats and I try to wipe it with my finger so she doesn’t see. A hot and cold untidy secret.

  Back at Aunty Linda’s, she hangs her cloaks in the wardrobe again and brings me into her bedroom, asking if there’s anything from her cupboard I’d like to take home because she’s getting fat from eating too many potatoes and ground roots and gravy and microwave meals.

  She tells me, don’t be shy, I’d like to go shopping anyway.

  Sometimes, she says, she even uses shopping more as an excuse to continue eating from the freezer. I’d like to go shopping with you, my favourite niece.

  I pick a little red tube top with boob pads. I take some long jeans and cut them at the bottom. Some thick T-shirts and a brown turtleneck that pulls up all the way to my bottom set of eyelashes. It is a fabric sack for my body. I take a pink T-shirt that says Glamour on it and a white T-shirt with gold sequins that spell out: Feline Girl. I’ve had a makeover. She gives me some thick gold band earrings too. She tells me that she’s never worn them in her life, no need to worry about getting earhole fungi. I tell her I was never worried about getting earhole fungi.

  PRECIOUS CHINESE TAKEAWAY

  I have missed the oil since being away. If turnips are lively and yams are brooding then takeaway meals are shiny. I have a fat plastic bag of new clothes from Aunty Linda. When I get in the door, he immediately asks from the brown couch what the junk is in the bag. I tell him that it’s not junk, that it’s clothes for my body because I am growing. And I need new clothes because my T-shirts are beginning to get short so that people can see my belly button. Everything is a step-by-step exercise machine guide for my dad. Or recipes from the cooking channel. Otherwise he will not listen. He smiles.

  Santa Coy is a tall deodorant roll-on stick standing in the kitchen. A camel beanie dome to cover his newly shaved, empty head. He’s holding a spray can. I ask the two of them if the millipedes came back again. Dad tells me no, says that Santa Coy is making us a painting to hang in this ugly living room we live in.

  Santa Coy nods, I thought you might be here today. That’s why I came.

  He keeps spraying a big canvas. I tell Dad I hope he is paying Santa Coy. Dad says he is—that he’s paying him with more Chinese takeaway meals. He laughs, a thunder from his belly. He’s the only one entertained by it but that’s all that matters—in here we are all his entertainment machines: the television, me, the brown couch to sink into, Santa Coy spraying millipedes, Santa Coy making Basquiat-lite art. Strong stripes and red and black, only Santa Coy doesn’t live in ’81. Basquiat was fumes or SAMO turned into material, anti-material. Santa Coy makes reprints.

  I ask if I can help. Dad sniggers and tells me that this is definitely an individual art project.

  Santa Coy is an art star in his own right.

  Santa Coy will be an icon. No room for any less.

  My dad, the art teacher at the local university a year ago—and now just a brown couch. My dad: not Basquiat, and not Andy Warhol. Trying to be Monet with fuzzy quick paintings of real life. He’s really just the art configurator at the front desk asking you to line up to view the hand gestures.

  Santa Coy holds up the canvas and asks what we think.

  He’s the president of this home in Chinatown now reeking with blue lights through blind slits.

  Dad has been looking for art projects everywhere except in me. He puts his finger to his chin, a low hum coming through his nostrils. He erupts in a dark blue voice, declaring that we should order takeaway.

  Then we’re an almost-square around the table again. My dad has recruited me a big caretaker, a husband he will talk to.

  Me and Santa Coy sit in my bedroom with the computer in front of us watching Adult Swim. The computer on his lap. I tell him that he’d better put it on the carpet or it’ll cook his ovaries. A welcome-home ceremony. Nobody talks and we keep turning the volume up. Santa Coy sits so that my skin doesn’t touch his. And we never talk about why he’s started making paintings for my dad.

  TWO

  LOVER

  Our home is full of red and yellow and dark blue paint—the easiest paints to buy. Red and yellow make flashing orange, yellow and blue make a nauseating green, and red and dark blue make throbbing purple. This home has turned into a Santa Coy art exhibition.

  Dad invites all his old university colleagues over and he’s wearing an Armani suit I’ve only seen him in once, at Aunty Linda’s second wedding. My big sister wears a bright green sequined dress. Her black hair is permed and fuzzy, her lips red like a fancy woman’s pregnancy. Her husband is here and has shaved off all his ginger beard. He has been wearing this polo shirt all his life.

  Everybody here is a new clam shell and fresh juicy shrimps on the island bench from Costco. There are dips, but only hummus, and a dish of mayonnaise. When one of Dad’s old colleagues in a brown hat asks me what in the hell this white dip is, I tell him it’s home-brand mayonnaise from the supermarket and he gives me this look and laughs a big sucking gape and says, oh this is just marvellous.

  I hear somebody saying: art is just irony now. I wonder if this shrimp is irony.

  I wonder if I eat this shrimp if it’ll be irony. The white hunk I swallowed before is probably just irony. These two shrimps were in love before they killed them and put them in black, shiny containers.

  The champagne has been put out on the bench after being stored at the bottom of our fridge for about a year. Dad drinks some now, but not the way he drinks beer. He is like a shaved arena tonight. New lamps glistening off the buttons of his blazer sleeves. The lights are warm and yellow, but dimmed so that the space is like a hot hug.

  Santa Coy is not wearing his camel beanie in the middle of the room while talking to two men with white hair in white suits. He keeps glancing at me. I’m sitting on
a bench stool and then my sister comes up to me and asks how Dad found this guy. I say he didn’t, that this is the guy that gave me his computer because he loved me, then helped us kill all the millipedes that were trying to make us pity them. He went down to get the Chinese takeaway and offered to buy me a burger, all because he loves me. And she twists her mouth in a big knot.

  She says, oh darling.

  Dad has taken my three bossa nova CDs and is playing them on repeat. Everybody’s eyeballs right up against Santa Coy’s paint strokes.

  They marvel at the imaginary stories behind them.

  I overhear a conversation about my dad. They talk about how much he seems to want to live in a house by the sea. They talk about how all the protégés he kept from the university already lived in a house by the sea, so they never delivered him any fame.

  There is no politeness about cigarettes in here.

  My dad makes a speech in the centre of the room about the art world falling to its death in the gutters of design and architecture paradises. He talks about how the internet is making us take art for granted. He wants to take us back to 1981, to the drug scene in New York, disco fever at four in the afternoon and virtual fuzz games where we put on giant goggles. There is something about doing it by hand. He calls Santa Coy a lovechild of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Yayoi Kusama. Dad is sweating.

  I wonder where Yuya is tonight. The school play was last week and I didn’t even make it to the night performances because I was needed to get more paintbrushes—Santa Coy kept throwing them at the canvas while my dad laughed in bellows. It’s all been one big game show. I missed my play and so there was one less beggar, but it didn’t matter anyway.

  BASQUIAT

  Under a plastic palm tree outside the shopping mall. Santa Coy has written “Santa Coy’s Hot Sauce” all over the pavement in front of us. He sketches the grumpy grandfathers on the little circle tables eating burritos from tissue paper wrapping. They are angry because their cheeks have started to sag over their lips.

  My dad has instructed Santa Coy to draw one person everywhere he goes. When Santa Coy draws me he draws me with the tiniest eyes. I ask him how I will see where I’m going. This is a felony. Santa Coy sniggers like Dad does and tells me that I don’t need to see.

  A woman with a pram, and a greyhound who thinks he’s the shit. She’s dressed in racing clothes, and drops a coin right in front of us. I am scowling about this, and Santa Coy tells me it’s because of my new clothes. He tugs at my T-shirt that says Feline Girl. He jangles my gold loop earrings.

  I snatch my body back. These are nice, I say.

  Besides, this is him: a beanie and a slimy white T-shirt with a black rectangle logo in the middle and thick JNCO jeans from the 1990s or something. I tell him he isn’t on a catwalk in 1994 of the spring season DNKY, you can’t dress like this. His facial expression jumps, wow. He crosses his arms, raising his brows.

  He asks me, you into fashion?

  I tell him yes, as a matter of fact fashion is my whole life.

  His face is a giant ticking smirk.

  He says: then you’ll know it’s pronounced D.K.N.Y., not ‘dinky’, dinky.

  STREET

  Santa Coy is Chinatown’s most glamorous little prince. We’re sitting outside this yum cha place and a man in a short chef’s hat is pouring sappy oil in the gutter. He turns around, looks at us for a while. When Santa Coy and me stare back the man winks at Santa Coy. Santa Coy raises his eyebrows and says good gracious. Should I go flirt with him? he asks.

  I roll my eyes. Santa Coy thinks he’s an edgy prince.

  He offers me a cigarette. It’s in close range to his body so that he seems reluctant about it. I take it and smoke it like the world is closing in on us. When I’m with Santa Coy we never talk about my dad. So I ask him if he likes my dad and Santa Coy says that he’s nice. I tell him that Dad put on an entire exhibition for him, that of course he’s nice. Santa Coy pulls his mouth to his nose.

  He says, cool it dinky.

  I stamp the cigarette a few times.

  Alright, alright, says Santa Coy. It’s out.

  He takes a huge, long drag.

  It’s a blue-and-pink light paradise in Chinatown tonight. Laundry from windows and signs with writing about a fish heads sale. I want to get a job here, I tell Santa Coy. I’m grown up now, I need a job here. He asks if I mean here in Chinatown. I tell him exactly, right here, where it smells like dried-up fish and people are eating sea life. There are more ramen joints here than there are hot-and-sour soup joints, even though this is Chinatown. There’s always the sounds of Chinese opera no matter which laneway you walk. Of course here, in Chinatown. He is not any kind of prince.

  Santa Coy tells me he doesn’t believe in jobs. I tell him this is 100 per cent because he’s got people helping him out. When you’ve got no one helping you out, you need a job. He doesn’t say anything and offers me another cigarette instead, reaching right out to pass it to me. The chef from the yum cha comes out into the laneway again with the plastic rubbish of udon packets. He winks at Santa Coy again and Santa Coy yells, piss off!

  Santa Coy gets his thick marker out and starts drawing hieroglyphics on the wall of the yum cha. We’re trying to show that rubbish man that we’re better than his wink.

  We buy wine from the grocery store and the man asks where Santa Coy got his big long coat from. Santa Coy says from the Philistines. The grocery man nods quickly, out of politeness, he asks: where is that?

  We leave.

  We drink wine leaning against shutters of a store which sells fabric imports from Hong Kong. We are a sort of Holmes-Watson situation. A considerable biography happening of one of us, I don’t know who—but Santa Coy thinks it’s of him. The sound of the pots-and-pans drummer a block away is just phantom.

  Is not one of us the other’s apostle, one of us the other’s messiah.

  PHARAOH

  A woman gets into a cab with a man wearing sunglasses. They’ve come up from the mahjong club underground. I look down inside and see a table of four women. They’re queens, but they scowl at each other.

  Outlaw Star is playing on the television in my neighbour’s apartment. An intergalactic space shuttle of the 1970s.

  In the corridor Santa Coy jumps back and forth between narrowly spaced walls.

  Once we’re inside I run hot water from the kitchen sink to rinse mugs left with colour stains from Santa Coy’s brushes. This is a tomb. I am washing the dead artist’s loin cloths. Santa Coy claims his work is about death, even though he has never died. And maybe he’s being ironic. He brings me more mugs to wash.

  He says, thanks dinky.

  LATE NIGHT

  They keep playing No Wave while I’m trying to play some damn bebop in my room.

  It’s a Dizzy spell.

  I smack the door against its frame ten times in a row and nobody hears. Santa Coy bumps into me in the skinny hallway holding a charcoal stick on the edge of his fingers. He’s got yeasty breath. I ask him to turn the music down or off. He jabs his hands into his pockets.

  He says, ask your dad to. Then shrugs. Santa Coy is now playing a clarinet and the windows are open and the slight wind outside whips the plastic jungle plant in the corner of the lounge room. When it stops Santa Coy will stop. He is playing along with the wind, or he is controlling it.

  SWIMMING POOL

  If you stay in a swimming pool too long your fingers will prune. But if you stay out of a swimming pool too long they forget the sweetness of chlorine.

  The swimming pool is a late-night hub for people with firm abdominals. It’s open ’til 11pm and Yuya has been coming here with her dad for the last two weeks. Her dad swims laps in the medium lane and Yuya swims laps in the fast lane. I swim in the slow lane because Yuya has told me that’s where she started. Breaststroke is a meditation but then Yuya tells me that it’s only for old ladies.

  We’re sitting on the edge of the pool, drinking out of recyclable mini water bottles that Yuya’s dad bought
us from the supermarket.

  Yuya tells me: never drink while eating, I saw you can actually get cancer from it.

  We swim another three laps and Yuya’s dad is still going when we finish. She tells me that he is just showing off to me. She’s chewing on the spout of her bottle. She says that her ma doesn’t give any more love to him since she started her new healing business.

  Our ankles are being kissed with little pecks by the water.

  In Yuya’s car I ask if I can sleep over please? I tell them, my dad keeps playing these idiotic songs too loud.

  Yuya’s dad says as long as it’s okay with my parents. I correct him and tell him it’s just my dad and that he’s pretty much okay with anything.

  Their house is the smell of steamed rice. Honey is in the kitchen bowing her head a bunch of times, pecking it against the kitchen counter tops. We ignore her and sit at the circle table. She bows for another twelve minutes, then gives us little cups of white rice and some sauces in shallow trays. We pray between clasped hands, all four of us.

  I tell everyone that my Aunty Linda took me to church last weekend. Yuya and her dad and Honey look at me all together. Yuya clears her throat. She says that I have to respect the food in front of me. I tell her that I am, I’m very thankful for it. I know that not everybody gets food. I don’t know why I get food and other people don’t. That the hungry are kind, and the full are guilty. Yuya clears her throat again and tells me I have to respect the food by not talking. I ask if God doesn’t want us to talk. Nobody says anything.

  When we are in Yuya’s bedroom she apologises that we can’t talk around the dinner table. I ask again if God asks them not to talk. Yuya still doesn’t answer. She’s already got her second chocolate bar open and anointed around her chin and almost up one nostril.