Australians are different. We get sort of reverent in the bush, conscious of spirits. They say it’s Aboriginal stories we’re picking up on, or maybe the Irish in us. Or maybe it’s what happens when you haven’t found any treasure, you’ve used up all your screaming, and you are still faced with nothing.
My sister is missing, but only from me. Her missing is targeted. Like a drone it homes in on me over all this desert. It’s either lost or it hasn’t been told the war’s over.
Up ahead there’s a road-work vehicle with lights flashing on its roof. It annoys me that they’re working on the road now, at Christmas, but there’s so much road they must have to work on some part of it all the time. I slow down, and as I approach the lights I realise I’m annoyed for no reason. It’s not road works at all, it’s a fire. There’s a line of smoke on the horizon ahead. I must have missed the worst of it. The red fire front slides across the country, erasing everything, turning the bush from green to black. So many small animals bolt in front of it that the birds can have their pick. I see them hovering, little specks of predation sailing over the smoke. But I am stuck behind the line.
I get out of the car and lean on the roof to watch. A truck comes rolling out of the east, not a fire truck but a working vehicle, the tank on the back commandeered for today. Men in orange safety vests collude with hand gestures that look like fly-swats. Eventually they wave me through with a similar gesture. I get back in my car and ease past them, smiling at their blackened, sweat-lined faces.
I obey the sign that tells me to put my radio on and drive slowly through the smouldering scrub listening to wind warnings. A couple of weeks ago, two trucks got trapped on this highway, fire on both sides. The drivers died. I count my breaths, remember to take them deep. There’s no point thinking about their families.
Before my sister went missing from me we got along pretty well. All sisters fight but the age difference protected us. I didn’t mind taking care of her, but I was glad when Helen grew up a bit, started being responsible for herself.
Then when she was nineteen she started seeing this bloke Colin. Colin was twenty-five. He was from a huge family. He was all right – we didn’t mind Colin – but his family was too big for us. It stretched out across half of South Australia, crossing state borders as far up as Alice Springs and across to Kalgoorlie. It had tentacles and entanglements. He was brother to half the Abos in the country. Helen wanted to marry into this.
She was very traditional, my mother. She said things like, ‘I just don’t trust them’, and ‘What kind of future can you have with someone like that?’ She didn’t mean anything bad by it. It was just her generation, and she wasn’t nearly as bad as my father.
My father had only passed away the year before. He wouldn’t have allowed anything like this to have happened to his youngest daughter. Helen was always his little angel.
Mum was still missing Dad pretty badly I guess; he might have been a hard man but he gave her a lot of structure, discipline, parameters. Without him, she found it difficult to understand Colin, what he was and what he meant.
When I got a job offer in Perth I asked Mum if she wanted to come with me. It seemed like the best answer for everyone: to move out beyond the borders of Colin’s family. Even so, in the west we kept an eye out for people he resembled. For people who called each other brother, sister.
I told Helen I didn’t care either way, that she could marry whoever she liked, that it was her funeral. I promised I would keep in touch.
That was fifteen years ago. That was the last thing I said to my sister.
I reach the line of the fire and drive through it slowly. The wind has dropped and the fire is just a fizz now, like a cartoon bomb fuse. Away to the north, the smoke is higher, and the radio says the wind is changing direction. The radio says they will probably have to close this road. Then it fizzles out. I play with the dial, but there’s no more reception.
I hold my breath as I drive from burned country to living, as if I’m crossing some kind of threshold. But on the other side, I feel exactly the same.
The radio kicks in again at Port Augusta, as I drive past the suburbs full of government housing. I try to find a station playing something other than carols as I navigate the area, but end up with some 1950s crooner, dreaming of a white Christmas.
Weatherboard buildings, identically mistreated, leer like beaten faces from these streets. It’s a wonder they don’t hide them better. I pass a dusty park, a broken swing set. A single unsupervised child spins round and round on a roundabout, her eyes huge and hollow. Then the stink of cheap sausages on somebody’s barbecue. I roll up my window.
A drunk old woman stumbles across the street with a Santa hat on. I brake in time but she still gives me a fright. I try not to stare at her. She ignores me, not even flinching. It’s as if I don’t exist.
I cross the sickly water. The bad smell wasn’t just meat. I want to turn around and drive straight back to Perth, but there’s nowhere to pull off the road, and the presence of other cars travelling at speed makes me sit forward in the seat and hold the steering wheel hard. I should take a break but I keep going. Before it disappears again, the radio news says they have closed the road behind me. I’m stuck on this side, maybe for days.
It’s four more hours before I get to Adelaide, but the last stretch of highway goes quickly. It’s built up, there are mountains and ruined farmhouses to look at, and before I know it I’m travelling through the dismal small towns which are backed up against the north end of the city like traffic.
It goes too quickly. I arrive in Helen’s neighbourhood at two in the afternoon, weary and nervous, just as unprepared for this as I was when I left Perth.
I pull up in the street opposite her house and sit in the car, like a bad actor on stake-out in a television cop show. It’s a nice neighbourhood – I realise guiltily that I was expecting weatherboard housing, broken swing sets, drunk grandmothers and the stink of cheap meat. I was hoping for no children, but I can hear them from here. They are either screaming or laughing, it’s hard to tell. My eyes hurt from the drive. I wait for my head to settle.
Family is a kind of fog that won’t clear, a blind place in the mind. You navigate through it because you must, without knowing where you’re going. There’s no rule that requires us to stick together, and the advantages of doing so are not always clear. I suppose that goes for the species as a whole.
I could waste all day sitting in the car and thinking abstractedly about the idea of my sister. I could attempt to compose the right words to say what I have to say, but every phrase seems to rise lifelessly and fall again from my thoughts like ashes.
I get out of the car and walk up the neat steps. The potted plants and toy-strewn porch, the miniature gumboots beside the door, describe a family at once structured and playful, and I feel a pang of something like envy. I find myself hoping that for some reason I have come to the wrong house. I knock twice heavily on the door with my bare knuckles before I notice there is a doorbell. I wait a moment before I press it.
My sister answers the door while calling out to someone behind her, so when she looks at me for the first time in fifteen years she’s still wearing a natural, intimate smile. It collapses pretty quickly. I watch her try to rebuild it.
‘Helen,’ I say. I shouldn’t have come here.
She pulls me inside by the shoulder, but we don’t embrace. There’s no happy family reunion. She closes the door behind me as though she’s worried the neighbours will see me.
Inside, the house is cool and a little dark. I face my sister in the hallway. Neither of us moves. Neither of us speaks. I have no words for this and my body appears to have come untied. I am loosened from the earth like some kind of vapour. The children have gone quiet; my suspension in their house, my particulate strangeness, has spread through the building like a poison gas.
And then I sa
y it.
‘Mum’s died.’
My sister does not collapse in the way that I did in the hospital corridor when brought this news by a doctor. She puts one hand on my shoulder and her expression wrestles with itself. She looks the same: still a teenager but with more laugh lines, her face already beginning to replicate that of our mother, translated through her own experiences. Her eyes are clear. Mine are cloudy. I look like my father but she has won his stoicism, his quality of bearing up.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Helen says, but we stand in the hallway for another minute, looking at each other. It is a slow process of recognition, as scraps of memory and image fall into place: a childhood photograph of us playing on Glenelg beach, her eyes straining in the sun; a portrait of a great-grandmother, throat enmeshed in some torturous collar; a face my father would make when he’d come home tired and disappointed from work. Then these images dissolve, resolve into the single person before me, this human being my sister, and I am relieved. I realise I was afraid that I would not recognise her at all.
Mum died slow and angry. The sicker she got the more pain came out of her. It came in words and fluids, her sorrows bubbling out of her like volcanic mud. It was wet rage, viscous, and when she passed away her body was left tiny and spent. Cremation seemed superfluous; she might have crumbled easily in a fist.
I thought of bringing her ashes with me, but I never really decided I was going to come. Besides, Mum and I had already chosen the place she wanted them buried: under a rosebush in the memorial garden near her retirement village, beneath a plaque with a simple name and dates, with no sentiments. With no survived-by, no beloved-wife-of.
‘What about Dad?’ I asked her when we were about to sign off on it. I wondered about her loyalties, having survived him all these years.
‘This will do,’ she said. Her tone was firm and final.
We think we are strong in my family. We think we are stoic. But really we are all runaways, selfish and childish. We are only loyal to our own endurance.
They say that having children fixes you and I can see that it has fixed Helen; her anger has been dug out, the gaps sealed with Polyfilla.
There are lots of children around, more than could reasonably be hers. Helen doesn’t say which ones belong to her and Colin. I was afraid there would be children, afraid of telling them they’ve lost someone they never knew. It doesn’t seem necessary now and, anyway, it’s not my responsibility.
We stand in the kitchen and hold cups of hot tea, raising them out of danger when the children run through. They have recovered their noise by now and they glance at me without much curiosity, entranced by their own games. I’m just a visitor, no one of note, an older woman who belongs to their mother in some vague way.
Helen doesn’t remember how I have my tea but she remembers that I don’t like fruitcake. We study the pattern of her kitchen floor together as the kids dart in and out like fish. Colin looks in once, but my sister tells him something with her eyes and he bows out. I turn my own eyes back to the ground. We hear him rounding up the children for a game in a booming voice. I wonder what sort of man he is.
‘How?’ says Helen. Her eyes are closed. I notice the twinkle of grey lights in her hair, a twitch at the corner of her mouth that our mother affected in the months before her death.
‘How?’ she says again, this time with her eyes open, looking at me as though I have not heard her. But I have heard her. It’s just that I do not know the answer.
A toddler, her eyes wide and brown, stumbles into the kitchen and clings to Helen’s trouser leg with sticky hands. I hear Colin calling the kids together and another adult voice laughing. I look down at this child who comes to my knees, and she looks up at me with solemn grace.
‘I’ve missed so much,’ I say.
‘Come on,’ my sister says. ‘There’s still heaps of food left over.’
Demolition
There’s the orange cat, its marble eyes an inch from mine. My personal spy peering in from the roof of the apartment next door. China has made me paranoid about being watched, even by inscrutable pets. I slam the window closed. The cat doesn’t flinch, keeps staring for a moment, then slinks away. Even with the window closed the noise from the street persists, and with it the knowledge that Jeremy has gone.
Cold wind, autumn smog. The light is bad white, white that is really orange and grey. I stand and watch it pour across the floor. The caged bird in the courtyard downstairs makes a sound like an electric pencil sharpener. I overslept. You should be packing, says a voice in my head. But I don’t move.
I don’t want to move. We have lived here for two years, more or less happily until the last couple of months. We had a good relationship with the neighbours, the landlord, the people in the shops around here. With each other.
For Beijing, this is a quiet neighbourhood, which means the whirl of sound can be broken down into its component parts. Apart from the bike bells and traffic, the shouts and the marching band noise of the school, it’s mostly construction. In the daytime, it’s the jackhammering and the toy sound of ordinary hand tools. At night, I hear the tip trucks moving piles of soil and rubble, delivering materials, taking fill away. The men are pretty quiet at their work. A serious business, rebuilding the city, and in part a stealthy one. There is sometimes a sudden eviction of whole apartment blocks by night. One day the demolition mark is painted on the wall in white: the rough strokes of the character chai, inside an emphatic circle. Then the walls are gone, like the cat when you turn away. A Cheshire city. The third time you look, there’s a skyscraper.
I’m pretty sure that cat’s not working for the Party, but we are under some surveillance, or Jeremy was. He was the activist. I’m a bit more ambivalent about it all. Development isn’t something you can argue with. People deserve a better quality of life than they get in these old houses. Our place is renovated, a foreigner rental, but most of them have shitty roofs and shot plumbing. There are bad smells when it rains. You have to use the public facilities. It’s quaint for us, so Asian, but who are we to decide it should all be preserved? Anyway, I didn’t want to fight him on it. The anti-demolition stuff kept him busy and out of my hair and I believed, I admit it, I believed it spent some of the energy that he used to use going nuts. So we had an understanding, which was fine. Until the fox fairies.
About three months ago, we went down the street to get breakfast, and there was the chai sign. The corner house was marked. The house was the last in a row of collapsing old courtyard places that leaned up against the back of the boutique shops on the main street. The cancer of demolition had come to us.
We stood outside the house looking at the mark. Mrs Hua, the old lady who lived next door to the condemned place, had come out of her house and was staring at the white character. We’d never spoken, but I sometimes nodded when I saw her sitting in the sun with her red neighbourhood vigilance armband on, watching the street. She never acknowledged me. I figured she was one of those homophobic neighbours, who preferred to pretend we didn’t exist.
She was only small; the chai sign circled her, a white paint halo.
‘Mrs Hua,’ Jeremy said. We walked over to her, one on either side. She didn’t react, even when I came close enough to hear her thin breaths. Her eyes were blank. Jeremy’s were bright and hard on the other side.
Jeremy called a meeting. I sat in but I couldn’t really keep up with the language like he could. The local police came, told us the house was run-down. No one lived there. I could see it was pointless. You can’t fight when things are falling apart. The journos we emailed couldn’t find room for the story. I thought that would be the end of it.
Nothing changed for a couple of weeks. Every day we walked past the circled character, like a big scratch of a moon in the concrete, expecting the place to be gone. Mrs Hua kept standing out in the street and looking at it. But she didn’t talk to us. She di
dn’t come to any meetings. She just scuttled back into her place and shut the door. I figured it was over. It was a dump. The roof was a wreck with a tree shooting through it, the tiles off, replaced with a plastic sheet held down by rocks. The house was going to fall down either way.
But Jeremy wouldn’t stop talking about it. Every time we met friends he’d be going on about it. He’d stay out late to keep talking. Some nights he wouldn’t come home.
‘Fox fairies!’ His voice shook into me, a train through a tunnel. ‘Raj, they can’t do it. It’s full of fox fairies!’
‘I am asleep,’ I said, crawling out of a dream.
‘I’ve figured it out,’ he said. ‘I’ve figured it out!’ He drummed his hands on the desk. A plastic drink bottle rattled and toppled, rolled under the bed.
‘Hang on. Start again.’ I looked at the clock. It was two in the morning.
‘The corner house. It’s got fox fairies.’
‘Have I missed a gay subculture?’
His grin was orange in the dark. ‘That’s the defence, you get it? Traditional culture. This whole neighbourhood is full of it. Fox fairies. She really has one. Mrs Hua. She said she’s been looking after one for years. They are guarding this hutong. They’re guarding it.’
‘Mrs Hua talked to you?’
He nodded. His forehead was shiny with sweat. I wanted to reach out and wipe it with my hand but I couldn’t be sure how he would react.
‘Are you sure this actually happened?’
‘Oh fuck off, Raj. As soon as I get excited about something you start thinking I’m losing it. It always has to be the fucking disorder,’ he said. ‘Well it’s not. I wish you’d just fucking listen.’
‘I’m sorry, baby. I don’t mean to pathologise.’ I sat up in the bed and watched him pace. His arms were stringy and pale.
The Rest is Weight Page 5
