There was an old man who reminded me of my Ong standing in the middle of the green fields. The sun was setting, turning the sky a hazy orange as he strolled slowly, hands behind his back, the way all the elderly walk in China. I wondered how long it must have taken him to reach the middle of the vast, open field and if he would make it back before dark as he continued to stroll farther away from the residential buildings. He seemed at peace, enjoying the vegetation, the greenery, the sunset. He must have been able to reflect a lot on his life with this freedom, these endless views that gave enough space for his thoughts to wander far.
My ma-ma was a short woman with grey hair and traditional Chinese composure. She wore a thick Chinese silk blouse, decorated with flowers. Her spine was arched with age, and she wobbled a little when she walked, struggling to keep balanced. Her feet were tiny and so was she, but she had a loud voice that bossed my Ong around. ‘Don’t eat that! It’s cold! Do you want to get sick? Have you had your medicine today?’
But when there was nobody to boss about anymore, she called out to him in her sleep and cried for him at the funeral. Her tiny frame seemed to shrink even smaller as we marched his coffin down the street during the ceremony, family members on either side of her to help her walk. When his body was taken to be turned into ashes, she clutched his photo to her chest. She reached out a shaking hand for someone, anyone, to hold and comfort her.
In that moment, I broke. The other relatives bowed their heads with sympathy as I ran over to my ma-ma to clutch her arm while she cried through memories of the man she had shared sixty years of her life with. The loss had broken her, but she was strong and we all knew she could clamber out of her mourning. She would bring her loud voice back to her children and offer home-cooked food around her table once more.
The Buddha’s Delight was placed in a shallow dish and shared around the table. Chopsticks clipped at the plate of food, noodles dangling and bouncing off the two sticks, smothered in the thick brown sauce. With the close air of Ong’s funeral still present in the room, there was no talking, just the sounds of slurping as we each remembered his impact on our lives.
This dish was my favourite, the noodles soft but not overcooked and the braised tofu firm enough to give a bite on the outer skin but with a mouthful of silky softness inside. But a lump in my throat made it hard for me to swallow my food. I didn’t enjoy this meal, and neither did any of us at the table.
Sydney
I bite into a bowl of yu wan and bian rou in our small but busy restaurant, tucked away in a Sydney alley. The fish balls are bouncy, and the bian rou casing has the perfect bite. Hot, salty soup floods my mouth and the comfort of familiarity washes over me. My father comes out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron.
‘Did you sort out the ABN?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
‘Good. We don’t want those bastards on our back.’
He takes a fresh spoon and dips it into my broth, slurping loudly.
‘Ach… too much MSG.’
As he walks back to the kitchen, I head to the door and flip the ‘Closed’ sign to ‘Open’. I look down the long line of customers.
‘We’re only having two sittings today,’ I announce, looking over at the picture of Ong on the wall.
‘What’s the special?’
‘Yu wan.’
Reference:
Tang-Duffy, fortuneandflavours.com, ‘Food and Chinese Funeral Practices’, 2007.
Every nerve in my body is tingling, ready to fire. I take in a lungful of musty air and twist my neck to one side until the joints pop.
‘The next competitor is number thirty-two, Andrew Raymond,’ a woman announces over the foldback speakers.
I take an assured step into the wings, draw my body up into my starting position and wait, poised for my entrance. And right at that moment, as my song begins to play, a voice starts echoing in my mind. I shake my head to dislodge his words before they have a chance to affect me, and shift my attention to my breathing.
I will not let him ruin this for me.
This is it.
This is my moment.
I count myself in—a 5, 6, 7, 8—and in an explosion of power and grace, I leap from the shadows into the blinding white lights of the stage.
Everyone thinks guys who do ballet are gay. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure most of them are. But not all of them. Not Stiefel. Not Baryshnikov.
Not me.
I’m from the kind of country town in Victoria that’s only just big enough to warrant having its own Coles, but has six pubs within walking distance of each other, and four football teams.
Dad taught me to play football the minute I could walk. He loves footy. Possibly more than he loves Mum and me. Luckily, for all concerned, we love footy too.
But the thing is, I was never really any good at football. I had the right body type, and I could sprint the length of the field faster than all the other boys, but I was very lacking in the hand-eye coordination department. Plus, I couldn’t kick for shit.
I kept playing for years—for Dad’s sake—but I knew, deep down, that I was just wasting my time. And I’ve always believed that if you can’t be the absolute best at something, then why bother? Why live a mediocre life doing one thing when you can be bloody brilliant doing something else?
And the thing is, I’m really good at ballet.
I didn’t even know boys could do ballet until I was thirteen—well into my unexceptional football career. I remember sitting on the couch one Sunday afternoon with a packet of BBQ Shapes, flicking through boring infomercial after boring infomercial, when I stumbled upon this ancient recording of a ballet called The Nutcracker.
There was a man on stage, all by himself. He looked like a footy player—strong, masculine, athletic—only he was dressed like a toy soldier. And he was dancing.
I don’t know what it was about watching this toy soldier dance, but it sparked something inside me. I stood up on the couch and watched, enrapt, as he leapt—no, flew—around the stage in this big, sweeping circle. It was like he could defy the laws of physics at will.
And then, before I knew it, it was over. The crowd erupted into applause, and I just stood there, frozen, my feet glued to the couch cushion, my eyes glued to the TV screen.
In that moment, all I could think about was my Year 7 English teacher. She always used to tell us we needed to find our true ‘calling’ in life. She’d then make the same awkward joke about how her calling was definitely not teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of smelly Year 7s, but here she was! The point is, standing there on the couch watching that toy soldier bow, I finally understood what she meant.
I took a deep breath and called out to Mum in the kitchen: ‘Mum, am I allowed to be a ballerina?’
Of course, Mum thought it was a bit—as she put it at the time—‘funny’ for a thirteen-year-old boy to want to dress up in tights and prance around with a bunch of girls in tutus. And, trust me, in my town, it was considered funny. Where I came from, no one had even seen the film Billy Elliot, let alone an actual ballet. But I didn’t care. Somehow, I just knew I was going to be brilliant at ballet.
As if it were meant to be—which, I dunno, I guess you could say it was—there was a dance studio literally around the corner from our house, perched on top of Johnson’s Hardware. I’d walked past it every day on the way to school, but never actually noticed it—which was saying something, because the words ‘The Polly Higgins School of Ballet’ were plastered on the front of the building in fluoro pink letters.
A big part of me thought the idea of rocking up to Miss Polly’s little studio every Wednesday and Friday night was a reputation-ruining, soul-destroyingly bad idea, but, despite the threat of being endlessly taunted for the rest of my teenage life, ballet was calling. So I enrolled for Term 2.
And then, after making me promise I wouldn’t tell Dad anything about it until she worked out how to ‘soften the blow’, Mum took me shopping for dance clothes. Well, that little excursi
on turned out to be a mortifying ordeal, didn’t it? Having to discuss the padded G-string I needed to wear under my tights—and the safe way to position myself inside it—in front of my mother was enough to make me want to be swallowed up by the earth on the spot.
But still, ballet was calling. Louder and louder.
The lights are so bright I can’t see the audience. Which means I can’t be distracted by Mum’s nervous grin, or be thrown off by the other parents’ cocky expressions, each and every one of them secretly praying I’ll screw up.
It’s like no one is there, like I’m totally alone.
Just me and the music.
I chaîné, I grand jeté, I pirouette, I sissonne—perfectly.
It’s like coming first in a hundred-metre sprint. Like holding up the premiership cup. That sense of fulfilment? That exhilaration, that ecstasy? That’s what I feel for every count of choreography I nail. And the more steps I execute in perfect succession, the more that feeling multiplies, until nothing else could ever possibly come close to feeling that good.
Frankly, I don’t know why teenagers waste their time on drugs and sex and alcohol when they could be dancing instead.
When I walked into my very first ballet class, the only thought in my head was, ‘Don’t get hard.’
It was the first time I’d worn my tights in public, and I was a typically hormonal teen, about to walk into a studio full of pretty girls in leotards. I knew how to hide a boner at school—carrying big textbooks always worked a treat—but in a pair of tights? Impossible. And if the unthinkable happened at Miss Polly’s studio, there was no way in holy hell I could ever show my face there again. Thankfully, it turned out that the mere thought of pitching a tent in my tights during class was stressful enough to stop it from actually happening.
My second thought—once I’d calmed myself down—was, ‘This is where I belong.’
The studio was small, with wooden floorboards, two long ballet barres screwed to opposite walls, and a whole wall of mirrors. The afternoon sun beamed through the windows and glanced off the mirrors, casting a glow over this one particular spot at the barre, which was where I always stood.
It felt more like home than my house ever did.
It turned out Polly Higgins had died about forty years ago and the ballet school was now run by her granddaughter, Miss Izzy, who was thirty-something and totally hot. Like most ballerinas, she was super thin, but really strong. ‘Lithe’ was the word my mum had used to describe her, and she’d said it with so much envy that it almost sounded like an insult. But despite whatever Mum really wanted to call her, I had a major crush on Miss Izzy. And it wasn’t as if Miss Izzy had a crush on me—she had a husband and kids, and I was a pimply thirteen-year-old boy, for God’s sake—but I knew she had a soft spot for me.
She said something to me once, about six months into my training, and I’ll never forget it: ‘I’ll only get to work with a handful of students like you in my life, Andrew.’ And she’d danced with the Royal Ballet in London—until she screwed her knee and had to come home—so I knew she knew her shit. But no one had ever implied that I was special before. Not at school, not at footy, not even at home. So, at first, I didn’t know whether to take her seriously or not. But then I started to see it too. I was different from the girls I danced with. Some of them had nice technique, and were lucky enough to be born with the right body type—the ‘facility’ as Miss Izzy called it—but none of them picked things up as quickly as I did. None of them shared my passion, my ambition.
Miss Izzy was right: I was special.
She also told me it was okay to be confident about my skills, but that there was a fine line between confidence and arrogance. She said if I wanted to become a self-obsessed bastard who’d die cold and alone in his Covent Garden flat surrounded by nothing but awards, I could go ahead and be arrogant. If not, I should stick with confident. She had a special way with pep talks, Miss Izzy.
By the time I was fifteen, I’d won all the major country-Victorian eisteddfods, and Miss Izzy said I was ready to compete in the Open Classical Championship at the Ballarat Eisteddfod: the Holy Grail of Victorian ballet comps. She said that if I won that, I could start seriously thinking about auditioning for the Australian Ballet School. Not that winning the Championship guaranteed a dancer a place at ABS, but the list of past winners pretty much all went on to study there. The Championship was a stepping stone—and a vital one at that.
My heart beats in time with the music. I can feel the rhythm of it in my bones, guiding my every movement. I feel electric, cutting across the stage like a spark of pure energy. My legs are coils of steel, my arms flowing silk. Sweat drips down my forehead under the heat of the lights, but nothing can bother me now.
I’m in the zone.
These three minutes on stage right now, this is where I find my joy. This is where I feel worthy, where I’m truly myself. No matter what some dickhead just said to me. No matter—
Focus, Andy. Just listen to the music.
This is your moment.
Do not waste it.
Picture me, sitting my dad down in the lounge room and telling him I wanted to be a professional ballet dancer. That I wanted to audition for a full-time ballet school in Melbourne at the end of the year. His response? He said I’d made a big enough fool out of myself as it was, and that prancing around like a poof as a hobby was one thing, but being a professional prancing poof was another.
And then came the silent treatment.
Mum said to give him some time, that he just needed to ‘deal with it’.
Deal with what? The fact that I was exceptionally talented? That I was good enough to go to the Australian Ballet School someday? If Dad had listened to a single word I’d said at the dinner table over the past two years he would have known how rare that was, how few people ever got the chance to dance professionally.
‘Deal with it.’ I mean, come on.
Thankfully, I had the Open Classical Championship to focus on. If I won that, it would prove to Dad that I was legit, that I wasn’t just prancing around for shits and giggles, that I deserved to go to ABS.
So I really needed to win.
And then, literally the next afternoon, I walked into the studio and there was this stranger standing at the ballet barre. A male stranger. Tall. Blond. Wearing a purple unitard and white ballet shoes, with white socks pulled halfway up to his knees. He had perfect feet and perfect calves and his body was the perfect mix of slender and muscular coveted by every male dancer in the universe.
My stomach dropped, and my chest fluttered with a strange, unfamiliar mix of excitement and terror.
Miss Izzy flounced into the studio, clearly on cloud bloody nine, and said, ‘Andrew, I’d like you to meet Kyle Shepherd, our new student. He’ll be in Advanced One with you.’
Kyle Shepherd turned from the barre, smiling with a set of pristine white teeth that matched his pristine white socks.
‘Hi,’ he said.
And everything I’d worked so hard for crumbled to pieces around me.
It turned out Kyle had just moved up from Melbourne. Something to do with his parents wanting their kids to grow up with ‘country values’, or something ridiculous like that. Kyle was the same age as me, which meant not only did I have to put up with him at ballet, I had to put up with him at school as well. And let me tell you, I’d never disliked anyone more than Kyle Shepherd.
He was the first openly gay student my school had ever had, which, you know, is fine. Whatever. Be gay. It’s 2019, be whatever the hell you want. But he acted as if ‘gay’ was his only personality trait. Like, if he were a cartoon, he’d have been drawn exclusively with glitter pens. And he’d be holding a rainbow flag. Eating fairy floss. Riding a unicorn.
For weeks and weeks I told myself not to be a dickhead about it and to just accept Kyle for who he was, because he actually seemed like a really nice guy. But, for some reason, the nicer he was to me, the more I couldn’t stand him. Wherever he went, he wa
s always smiling and laughing and dancing. Always bloody dancing. We’d be in Maths and I could see him practising entrechat quatres under the table. We’d go to Red Rooster with the girls after ballet and he’d be literally jeté-ing down the aisle between the tables. It was beyond infuriating.
All the girls at school loved him, of course, but the guys thought he was a total joke—and they weren’t afraid to show it. I think what bothered me the most about Kyle was that he literally didn’t care what anyone thought about him. Schoolyard taunts were nothing but water off a bright pink duck’s back for Kyle. Any other boy at our school would have dissolved into a pool of sweat and grease and hair product if they were teased as much as Kyle was, but he would always just laugh, toss some imaginary hair over his shoulder and walk away.
And no matter how hard I tried to avoid him, we always crossed paths in the corridors. He’d give me a playful little wave and smile his perfect little smile, and I’d be overcome by a sudden, inexplicable urge to trip him over.
Of course, as soon as the other boys noticed these small but frequent interactions, there was a sudden resurgence in the number of insults being slung my way.
‘Where’s your boyfriend today, Dandy Gaymond?’ they started asking me on the bus. Every single morning, the same question. I mean, get some new material.
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ I’d reply.
‘Do you wear a tutu when he does you from behind?’ one of them asked me one morning.
I punched him in the face.
Not my finest moment. Though Dad seemed weirdly happy about it when I brought home my detention slip. It was the first time since I’d quit footy that I’d seen him display any amount of paternal pride. I guess that’s pretty messed up, but… whatever.
Underdog Page 10
