by Kyo Maclear
And until Iris came along, I told myself that was just fine.
The suitcase turned up the day I visited my mother’s flat with Mrs. Almeida. I was staring at a pile of recent mail when Mrs. Almeida came from the bedroom clutching it to her chest. I think I found something, she said, placing it on the coffee table.
It was a simple cardboard case, fastened with twine, hastily knotted and criss-crossed in every direction. I was reminded of one of Christo’s wrapped objects. I reached out to touch it, then began untying the knots. At some point, Mrs. Almeida noted the futility of my efforts and went to get a kitchen knife. I tucked the blade under a length of twine and lifted it up.
What I saw inside flooded me with incomprehension. There were drawings I had done, photos, letters I had written from Vietnam, postcards, a book report on David Copperfield, a set of baby teeth in a film container, my first spoon, a stuffed owl, a collage I had made in my mid-twenties, an anti-Apartheid T-shirt I had designed in my early thirties. My heart struggled to absorb it all. Here was her love.
Through all the twists and turns of her life, here was proof that she had been watching.
I picked up a photo of Pippa leaning against a car, long sweep of hair and Cleopatra eyes.
Mrs. Almeida leaned over to look.
“What a beauty. Even at the end she could still turn a head.”
IN THE DINING ROOM NOW, I am sitting at the table across from Iris. We’ve just returned from a nearby juice bar and Pippa’s closed suitcase is laid out between us.
Iris picks up her domed plastic glass, takes a sip of fuchsia liquid and says, “Can we open it now? Can we peek inside?”
I nod.
A moment later, Iris opens a small pillbox she has pulled from the case. “What is it?”
“It’s baby hair.”
She hesitates, impressed by the strangeness of the items, then begins setting them one by one on the table, outtakes of my life. Precious nuggets and debris. She is looking through a few postcards of Tu Do and the Continental. It makes me miss Saigon. I’ve never been back. I wonder what became of Dinh and Anh and Arnaud? Is there a plaque somewhere in memory of Joseph? I want to see the trees that have been replanted along the boulevards, eat a mangosteen . . .
I snap from my reverie to find Iris holding up a photo of a very young Pippa, sitting on a park bench.
It has been over six months since Pippa died. In recent days, I have seen her on every corner, in every movie and magazine. I see her in an eddy of leaves in the street and the orbit of birds in the sky. If there is an afterlife, I know she is turning over stones and dreaming up a world of maximum disorder. At the best and worst of times, I see her in myself, in my habits of avoiding the hurry of crowds, in the greater comfort I sometimes find with strangers over friends and family, in my love of drawing, and in the strong affection I have for sleep and long aimless walks. A stray is a dog who has snapped its leash, a chord at the end of a song, a straggle of green growing amidst rock. It is the part of us in revolt. Maybe we all have a stray inside ourselves. Pippa’s was just more obvious.
When Iris is done and everything is packed away once more, I close the suitcase. Iris lifts her juice, winter sunlight blazing on the plastic cup in her hand, straw searching for a last rattle of liquid.
She rolls up the twine, sets the shambly ball on the table and smiles. After two weeks with Iris, I can see that she does not pity me. She has a disconcerting habit of trusting the empirical universe, of seeing objects without the shadows thrown on them. I realize I am holding my breath. So I exhale.
It’s time to release my mother’s ghost so that I can free up both arms for the present.
A stormy February morning. When I leave for the airport it’s raining. The raindrops are falling from incandescent clouds. Iris and Oliver have decided to wait back at the flat. I’ve brought my sketchbook in case I’m early.
This morning when I woke up, I decided, Today, I’ll veer from habit. Today, I’ll unplot myself. I put on a white tunic shirt and beige jeans, clothes I never wear, and calmly walked out into the living room.
“Are you meeting a Swami?” asked Oliver.
“You look biblical,” said Iris.
I drank coffee instead of tea. Chose muesli over toast. All morning I made infinitesimal changes.
Just as I was leaving, Iris walked over to the hallway and grabbed from a hook my hat, the only heirloom I possess of my birth father. It is a dark brown trilby with a narrow brim. She placed it on my head, adjusted it. Tipped it forward: suave. Cocked it to the side: jaunty.
“There,” she said. “You look a bit better now.”
Iris will not be parted from Oliver. All morning long, she has been bouncing behind him, telling Oliver she wants to be a reporter just like him.
It was Iris’s idea to make a birthday mural, which is what they were doing when I left. They have chosen a birthday theme: “The Circus.” Iris’s first theme suggestion was “The Jungle” but then she nixed that as too “Nammy”—which Oliver and I understood to mean too “Vietnammy.”
Now I am driving along the M4 about to reach the turnoff for Heathrow. I have Solomon Burke playing on the stereo. His songs are all slow build and aching lift. I can feel my heart plumping up with expectation, a helium fullness rising in my chest, and I have a stupid grin on my face.
Kiyomi saw my mother differently, even at the end. Where I saw her as this tragic and formless person, Kiyomi saw her as someone who never dodged life. She was always in the moment, she wrote in her condolence card. When everyone else became more conventional, she never changed. I loved the crazy way she dressed and the unphony words she used to greet me. She was always getting right to the heart of things, living her life in a very fluid and full way. She included a tiny drawing of my mother and, as I looked at it, it became more and more beautiful.
There is still time before Kiyomi arrives. I’ll find a coffee and sit with this blank book for a while. A blank book is nothing like the blank of a bomb falling or a parent leaving, nothing like loving and losing, or daring and failing, though it might contain those blanks too. I’ll sit and maybe ease into the full range of it, the emptiness, the boundlessness, the certainty of uncertainty. Surrender. Receive. I’ll weep onto this page that can hold anything.
Acknowledgements
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the people who helped in the creation of this novel in so many different ways.
Thank you to my parents, Michael and Mariko Maclear, for raising me on an excellent diet of news and art.
Thank you to my four pillars, David Wall, Naomi Klein, Nancy Friedland, Avi Lewis; and to Naomi Binder Wall, David Chariandy, Hiromi Goto, Mike Hoolboom, Kelly O’Brien, Terence Dick, Cindy Mochizuki, Brett Burlock, Tara Walker, Nobu Adilman, and my teachers at Octopus Garden and Centre of Gravity for sukha and friendship during the writing of this story.
For grants and writing space, thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Chalmers Family Fund, the Hunter family and the K.M. Hunter Artist Awards, the Toronto Arts Council, the National Association of Japanese Canadians Endowment Fund, the Gladstone Hotel and the Banff Centre.
Thank you to legendary reporters Malcolm W. Browne, Martha Gellhorn, Gloria Emerson, Ryszard Kapuściński, John Pilger, Horst Faas, Peter Arnett, Pham Xuan An, Henri Huet, David Halberstam, Michael Rubbo and, again, Michael Maclear, for setting the gold standard against which engaged journalism is still measured.
And to artists Mieko Shiomi, George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Yoko Ono and Dick Higgins, for dreaming up an alternative world of flux.
Thanks to my hosts in London and Saigon, particularly Kirsty Shields, Patricia Manning, Robin Maclear and Andrew Maclear.
Thank you to the ever-trustful Heather Frise for giving me her beautiful drawings before she knew anything about this story.
Many thanks to the following works from which passages in the novel appear: Just Kids by Patti Smith (Ecco, 2010), quoted on p. ix; Saigon AP Bureau Handbook b
y Malcolm W. Browne (1963), quoted on p. 198; The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster (Yearling, 1996), quoted on p. 279; Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (Chartwell Books, 2009), quoted on p. 279.
Thank you to Allyson Latta (whose wonderful assistance went above and beyond the call of duty), Noelle Zitzer, Ingrid Paulson, Carolyn Ovell, Allegra Robinson, Deborah Viets . . . and the rest of the lovely people at HarperCollins Canada for making the book come true. Thank you to Natasha Haines and Alexandra Craig for helping it travel.
Finally, and above all, thank you to my editor, Phyllis Bruce, and my agent, Jackie Kaiser, who worked resolutely, waited patiently and who provided a compass, whenever I needed one, along the way.
This story about a lonely boy yearning to belong really couldn’t have found a more amazing family.
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM PAN MACMILLAN
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I used the same flowers again and again: a bouquet of marigold, grief; a bucket of thistle, misanthropy; a pinch of dried basil; hatred. Only occasionally did my communication vary.
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Heartbreaking and uplifting, The Language of Flowers is a redemptive story about the meaning of flowers, the meaning of family, and the meaning of love.
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Among the gaudy, busy streets of Macau, Grace Miller has lost her way. Her marriage to Pete, her Australian husband, is fraying and her dreams of having a family seem impossible.
With the heralding of a new year she resolves to do something bold. Something her impetuous Mama might do. In this pocket of China, filled with casinos and yum cha restaurants, she opens a small cafe called Lillian’s. A sanctuary of macarons and tea, Lillian’s becomes a place where the women of Macau come together, bridging cultural divides and sharing in each other’s joys and heartbreaks.
For Grace, life seems to be finally coming together. But when Pete does the unthinkable, the secrets Grace thought she had buried rise to the surface, and it’s now or never to lay old ghosts to rest, and trust her heart to lead her.
First published 2012 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
Copyright © Kyo Maclear 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
Adobe eReader format: 9781743348864
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Online format: 9781743348888
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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