The End of the World

by Paddy O'Reilly

  She shook her head. The thick hairs of her wig flopped heavily against her shoulders and I saw the line below the hairpiece where her make-up ended. Underneath, her skin was milky white.

  The coffee arrived and Flora reached for the sugar bowl. I leaned back and glimpsed her feet under the table. In the white court shoes, they looked massive, like loaves of bread.

  ‘So, how long have you been in Japan?’ I asked, since it seemed I would get no answer to my last question.

  ‘Very long. I travel here, there. Many jobs. I teach English. I am good teacher. Can you give me a job?’

  ‘It’s a difficult time for schools. Student numbers are down. Do you speak Japanese?’

  ‘No.’

  When the spaghetti came, Flora picked up the fork and twirled the strands delicately before raising the fork to her mouth.

  ‘Mieko told me that she can’t help you find a job because you won’t give her your passport. She needs the passport number for her forms. Did you know that you need to show your passport before anyone can give you a job?’ I was speaking hesitantly. Mieko said that Flora was touchy about her passport.

  Flora slammed the fork down on the table and flung her hands in the air, knocking the light shade just above the table. The light swung backwards and forwards, throwing us in and out of shadow and light.

  ‘I have no passport. My parents bring me when I am young. From Russia. We run away from Russia.’ Her voice was higher than before, and shrill.

  ‘Well, then, you must have some sort of papers,’ I said.

  Flora looked at me with her head tilted, as if she had just learned something new about me. She patted down her wig, then picked up her fork and started eating again. I guessed that the hand-throwing display would have been effective with the Japanese, sending them into a panic.

  ‘Are your parents still here?’

  ‘They died. I am a woman alone. I have no family, no money. You understand...’ she paused, her fork halfway to her mouth, and smiled at me. ‘We are women and we are foreigners. It is hard for us. Hard.’

  I was trying to guess Flora’s age. She was wearing so much make-up that it was difficult to tell. I thought perhaps she was in her forties. None of the little she had told me made any sense. If she had come as a child she would have been able to speak Japanese. Yet her accent did seem slightly Russian. The oddest thing about her was that she seemed to think I believed she was a woman.

  Flora had finished the spaghetti and was reapplying her lipstick. There were only two other customers left in the restaurant. The snoring man had woken and scuttled away as soon as he saw her. The remaining couple was sitting in the opposite corner, leaning together and whispering. They were teenagers. They had probably never imagined anything like this burly cross-dresser with the loud voice and the hands like plates.

  ‘I can’t help you if you won’t show anyone your passport.’

  ‘I cannot. Why won’t you help me?’ Flora raised her hand to her throat, as if she could feel the knot tightening. ‘Nobody helps me. I must beg for food. These people,’ she gestured around her, ‘this country, they are so cruel.’ Her muscular face squeezed up and her nose started to redden.

  I imagined her shaking Mieko’s tiny hand, how Mieko’s arm would disappear almost up to the elbow. Despite the pity I felt for poor ugly Flora, a laugh was beginning to well up inside me. I pictured Flora stepping into the women’s toilets at a department store and trying to cram into a squat toilet cubicle. I saw her on the subway at rush hour, the fake pointy breasts crushed against a businessman’s head. I imagined her lining up with a row of women a third her size at the beauty parlour.

  Flora coughed politely opposite me. Her lipstick had bled in little cracks out of the corner of her mouth and she was patting down her wig again. The teenage couple had given up whispering and now were staring in silence.

  ‘Flora,’ I said. ‘I want to help you. I don’t know what to do. Do you have somewhere to stay?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I stay with the nuns. They let me sleep there.’

  She was so passive. I felt a strange, unreasonable anger.

  ‘Your name is Shanti?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, my parents are Indian Australian.’ I had been asked so many times I always jumped in first.

  ‘You belong in Australia. I don’t know where I belong.’

  ‘My husband is Japanese,’ I said. ‘I think I belong here now.’

  ‘Soft skin.’ She reached over and touched my hand. Her nails were bitten down so far the fingers looked like stumps.

  I gave Flora my telephone number and told her I’d think about what work she could do. She was to call me the next day. She asked for money again and I gave what I had left after paying the bill, enough for two or three meals. When she opened the clasp of her handbag to put in the money, I saw the red Russian passport. Flora saw that I saw. She closed the handbag and slid the handle up her forearm so that she was holding the bag tight against her body the way my mother did when she walked up the street. There was something so pathetic in the way Flora played a woman that I felt like weeping.

  That night I told Shoichi all about Flora. He laughed as I described her white shoes and her clumsy make-up and how her badly cut skirt rode up on her thighs when she walked.

  ‘Poor thing,’ he said. ‘Can’t you give her some work at the school making tea or something? To tide her over?’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘She’d scare away the students.’

  ‘I suppose my company could put her in the back office for a week or two. We always need photocopying and filing done.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want Flora near either of us.

  ‘You didn’t tell me Flora was a man,’ I said to Mieko on the telephone the next day.

  Mieko called out to someone in her house, ‘Otoko da yo. Yappari.’ She returned to the phone. ‘So sorry. We weren’t actually sure.’

  ‘That’s why she can’t show us her passport,’ I said. ‘Because it would say she is male.’

  ‘Look, I am very sorry for him or her, whatever she is. But she can’t use my name like she does, like I’m her sponsor. This is not a big city. Everyone will hear about her and think she is with me. I will lose business. We have to make her go to Tokyo. Did you tell her?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about it anymore.’ I said.

  I knew that Flora would not call me. She would have to leave the city now. I knew what she was, and she knew that I knew. I thought of Flora travelling around in her big white shoes, clutching her handbag like a talisman. She was like a rogue elephant charging across the country with the natives cowering in their houses as she thundered by.

  A month later I saw Flora’s picture on page ten of the Asahi newspaper. She was in Tokyo, living in a hostel, and she had been charged with shoplifting. She must have thrown her Russian passport away–the article said her origins were unknown. The authorities had designated her a stateless person.

  Inches Apart

  If you sit on the high stools at the bar in this café, you will see yourself, and the person you are talking to, and the waiters, and the other customers, all stained by a yellow light. Their skin and yours will look muddy and ill. Your clothes will seem drab. You will want to watch the person who is speaking to you, but you will be drawn to the mirror, and the discoloured image of the talking person. The voice will come from the person beside you, but the face in the mirror will be saying the words.

  And eventually you will lose track of the conversation. You will forget to nod and smile at your friend’s

  jokes. You will be watching the shape of your friend’s lips in the mirror, the way they move so easily to form words, the way they fall slack when your friend realises that you are no longer listening. Then you will jerk your head

  away from the mirror and you will reach out a hand
to reassure your friend.

  ‘In a dream,’ you will say, but you are wishing that you could see your own mouth shaping words as you speak.

  ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s get going.’

  You look into the mirror again, as though his second face will be mouthing different words, words that he really means. The silent mouth will say, Are you bored? Perhaps it will say, You never listen to me. The mouth might stretch into a wide, long yawn of disinterest, or squeeze tight with irritation. But he has turned too, and now you are looking at an image of him looking at an image of you.

  ‘Are you stoned?’ he asks. He has stopped looking in the mirror, he is examining your eyes, your flesh eyes, and you feel absurdly victorious because you have outstared his image. You think he is like a dog that drops its gaze when you stare too long.

  Now you must speak.

  ‘No, I’m not stoned,’ you answer, ‘just tired, I suppose.’

  Tiny wrinkles trickle from the corner of your eyes when you speak. Two furrows, deepened by the yellow tint of the glass, track between your eyebrows and your nose.

  ‘Do you want to go?’ he asks.

  You have never noticed before that his ears move, riding the taut skin of his cheeks when he speaks. There is a single, black, shiny hair growing from a mole under his ear. He has clipped the hair, you see. Now it waves as his Adam’s apple moves up and down, it is like the chitinous black leg of an insect. You reach over to touch the hair. Your finger stubs against the glass.

  He has not seen your mistake. You are lucky. He is gazing out the window at people passing by on the street. You can see the backs of the same people dressed in heavy overcoats and colourful scarves. He sees the people walking towards him and you see the people walking away.

  You wish he would join you in your conspiracy of images. His mirrored profile juts out toward the street, and you wish he would turn, give you the softness of his full face, remark on the moon shadows under your eyes or trace the outline of your breast with his finger on the glass. If he would look now, he would see that the muscles of your face are loose, unguarded. If he saw your face now, and if you spoke, the skin of your jowls and neck would quiver, but you would not reach up and stroke your throat as you usually do. Your firm expression has collapsed. He has the chance to see, in the mirror of this café, the weary yellow roads that make up your features. But he keeps his gaze directed at the street.

  If he would look now, the two of you would join looks at a point somewhere between your faces and the glass. You would be freed, at this distance from yourselves, to ask questions that have never passed in resonant air across your tongues. Instead of your eyes following everything that moves around you, your gaze would be pinned at the meeting of the vectors between flesh and reflection. You would ask if he wished to be elsewhere. He would answer, pinned to the truth. He would ask if you wanted him here in this café, or if you would prefer to have the mirror alone. And because you are fixed on your vector, you would not pretend to be offended. You would not pretend that you think he is calling you vain. You would answer by stretching out a palm to the mirror and when he placed his hand on yours, you would see the hands joined twice.

  If he would only look now, he would see you smiling at the picture of the hands, but he is watching a man and a woman arguing in the street. He is frowning, and you wonder if he knows how you peer at his expressions when he is distracted. You have caught him before, watching you in the same way, and your eyes have flickered, startled.

  He looks at your face, then at your reflection. You are composed now. You smile and lift your eyebrows, and say, ‘Ready to go?’

  He leans across and kisses your cheek, and he ruffles your hair with his hand.

  ‘You are tired, aren’t you?’ he says. In the mirror, his face and your face are only inches apart. If you turn your head, your nose will brush against his cheek, your chin might touch the waving arm of his mole.

  He is staring into the mirror. Your eyes follow the line of reflection, almost become fixed. Then they drop like the eyes of a dog.

  ‘Don’t forget your coat,’ you say.

  He will be cold. When you tell him, he will be cold.

  Where We Come From

  My mother, Jacinta, is a fox–cunning and lustrous with rich red hair. She comes from French and Scottish blood. She boasts that she can cook a three-course gourmet dinner for the price of a McDonald’s family meal. She marinates ducks in a special vinegar and orange sauce invented by her French grandmother and passed down to her. The day I was heading off to high school, still gawky and clumsy in my body, she told me a time would come when the French elegance and the Scottish thriftiness would reveal themselves in me.

  ‘Just wait,’ she said.

  My father died later that year. I asked her what I would inherit from his side.

  ‘Oh heavens! I don’t know,’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps some good common sense?’

  These days, on Wednesday mornings, my mother strolls around the Mt Dandenong bush track while I run three circuits. Today as we head off I race away, round a curve, plunge into the scrub and vomit. Bile burns my throat. After the second circuit I give up the jogging and fall in beside her.

  ‘Not running?’ Jacinta says, panting slightly from the rise of the track. ‘That’s a first.’

  When I was young my mother called me the white wolf. I had white blonde hair, unlike anyone else in the family. And I loved to run. From the time I was two, she told me, I used to take off and run wherever my skinny legs led. Neighbours brought me home, or policemen, or strangers who read the address she had engraved on my nickel bracelet.

  ‘You needed to be free. I never really understood,’ she said.

  After my father’s death, my mother began to tell me stories about why I looked different. ‘Do you know why you have such light hair?’ she would start. The first story came at Christmas. She had drunk four glasses of champagne and a cognac. She told me my father shouldn’t have died and left her, she had to find a job, and it was time I stopped calling her Mum.

  ‘Your brothers have moved out and you’re already thirteen. I’m more than just a mother, you know. I’m a whole human being. It’s time you called me by my name. Say my name.’

  ‘Jacinta?’ I said, feeling strange saying it.

  ‘Yes, Jacinta. I’m going to be Jacinta again. And it’s time you knew something about yourself as well. It’s time you knew where you got that blonde hair from.’

  There were more stories, year after year until I turned seventeen. One night she arrived home from a cocktail party with her lipstick smudged and a fingernail broken and bleeding. ‘I should tell you about your real background,’ she said, slurring her words.

  ‘I know already,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

  ‘No, the real story.’

  This is the story she told.

  I was a late child, born many years after my brothers. My mother’s pregnancy was hard and she retched with me for months. The night I was born, my father waited in the hospital carpark with the radio tuned to a concerto by Mozart and a crossword and pen on the passenger seat beside him. My auntie had to run through the rain to tell him a daughter had been born. Inside the hospital, my mother was gazing at the tufts of white hair on my head and weeping.

  ‘I’ll see my wife when she is settled,’ my father told my auntie, who stood in the drizzling rain beside his door with a newspaper held over her head. ‘What colour is the baby’s hair?’

  ‘She already has a floss of white hair, like a little angel,’ Auntie Jill said, smiling. ‘And lovely green eyes.’

  ‘Come and get me when the baby is washed,’ my father said. He shut the door in Auntie Jill’s face and picked up the crossword.

  An hour later I was clean and swaddled, waiting in my mother’s arms for the arrival of my father. He stopped at the door of the ward
. Three other mothers lying in their beds with their babies asleep in cribs beside them looked up and smiled. Only my mother did not smile. She held me close with the blanket pulled tight around my head. She whispered my father’s name. He strode to her bedside and pulled back the blanket to reveal my pale hair gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Then he swivelled with a squeak on the lino floor and walked out without looking back. The other mothers watched him go before they turned over in their beds and picked up magazines to shield their faces from my mother’s defiant stare.

  ‘He is not the father,’ she announced to their pink-frilled backs.

  They rolled over, expecting to hear that the tall dark-haired man was her brother or friend. But, flushed and exhausted, my mother held me up a little higher so that the women could see me. On her left hand the gold wedding ring gleamed dully. My head drooped backwards on its soft weak stem and my hair stood out from the skull.

  ‘He is the cuckold,’ she said to the women. ‘And the child is a bastard.’

  Perhaps these were not her actual words. But they are typical of my mother’s extraordinary stories. She tells them like a raconteur, yet she seems unaware that a story can do more than make people gasp or laugh.

  I used to think about the birth scene often. I pictured my mother coming home, by taxi, to the house where her other two children, boys of ten and twelve, sit on the floor watching television amid a mound of soft drink bottles and empty containers of sweet and sour pork and banana fritters from the local Chinese café. As my mother walks in through the front door she sees my father, my father in name rather than the man whose seed made me, lying on the couch absorbed in watching television.

  My father fails to look at her when she shuts the door loudly. In fact he closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep.

  ‘Boys, this is your new sister,’ my mother says, lowering me so that my brothers can see my red, wrinkled face gazing blindly at the ceiling.