Behind the Moon (10 page)

He woke up just before midnight, sitting in the passenger seat of his car as Linh watched him from the driver’s side.

‘Wha’?’ he asked her stupidly for the second time that night.

‘You stink,’ she said, wrinkling her nose and holding her hand up to sniff her perfumed wrist. ‘You had better get to bed, Gibbo.’

He rubbed his burning eyes and slowly realised that they were parked outside his parents’ house. All he had to do was unlock the car door, push it open, stumble up the neat paved path to the front door, unlock it, and he was home. He shut his eyes, groaned, and his head flopped back onto the headrest.

‘Too drunk,’ he said.

‘You’re telling me.’

‘Engineer. Rhymes with beer.’

‘Go on, Gibbo,’ Linh said, giving him a light shove. ‘You should go in.’

He cracked open an eye to look at her, felt a rumbling in his gut, and nausea was like a tsunami swamping him. Huge peristaltic waves of sick juddered in reverse along his alimentary canal. He tried to hold it in. His cheeks ballooned like a blowfish. Vomit erupted from his mouth, spraying the dashboard, windshield, landing on Linh’s left shoulder and spattering the fake Louis Vuitton handbag on her lap.

The next morning, his car had been cleaned up and the windows rolled down. The stink of puke would take several days and multiple sprays of Glen 20 to eliminate. He didn’t know how he was ever going to face Linh again. He needed a buffer zone of several years. Instead, he would have to meet her at the Cheongs’ Dead Diana Dinner a couple of weeks later.

On Saturday, 6 September 1997, Gibbo turned twenty-one.

In houses all over the city and in bedrooms everywhere, young people were showering, spritzing on deodorant or antiperspirant, tugging and teasing hair, blow-torching follicles, shaving and waxing faces, legs, arms and other body surfaces and crevices he preferred not to think about unless they looked like the airbrushed layouts in his pitiful porn collection. He imagined the musical clink of metal hangers, the susurration of synthetic fabrics yanked out of overfull closets and dumped, rejected, in gaudy hills on unmade beds. There was never anything to wear. Hair was carefully arranged into casual disarray and sprayed into armoured stiffness. Earrings, nose rings, eyebrow rings were attached. Beer was swigged, pills were popped and bodies then rotated in front of mirrors with inadequate length and lighting while heads twisted to gain anatomically impossible viewing angles. The arse always looked too big in the mirror.

All over the city, all over the world as Saturday night lapped the spinning globe from east to west, young people—normal people—were getting ready to go out and party with friends. How much more, then, should this have applied to Gibbo on the night of his twenty-first birthday.

Had he been in any way normal, he might have arranged for a piss-up at the pub with his friends. Or perhaps his parents might have hired a hall and a sound system, scraped together a few CDs, platters of finger food, lots of booze, and arranged for a slide show of embarrassing baby photographs, followed by speeches from family and friends inducing even more delightful discomfiture.

But Nigel Gibson, self-confessed friendless loner and lard-arse freak, an athletic philistine who tripped over his tongue as well as his feet, buttoned his twelve-dollar blue and yellow floral Hawaiian shirt over a white Bonds T-shirt, shrugged on an over-zippered, over-seamed tan leather jacket and prepared to accompany his parents to their friends’ house for dinner. Why? Not because they had remembered his birthday, but because Princess Diana had died and that was the momentous event they were marking. Even his mother had overlooked him and, really, he should have refused this dinner out of pique so that they would realise how terrible it was that they had
forgotten
, how much he had been
hurt
, and they would have to make it up to him.

Yet he said nothing and glumly agreed to go because he had nothing better to do and no-one better to do it with. At dinner, Annabelle Cheong would undoubtedly ask, with characteristic Singaporean bluntness, ‘
Wah
, Nigel, how come you so fat?’, followed by a contradictory exhortation to eat up and don’t be shy. Justin would spend the entire dinner avoiding him because they hadn’t talked since that appalling incident at Reef Beach. Tien would be artificially polite and over-friendly to him to hide the fact that they no longer knew each other. And as for her mother, he didn’t even want to think about how, just a fortnight ago, he had puked all over Linh in the front seat of his car. To top it all off, they were going to spend the entire evening watching the live broadcast of Diana’s funeral on television.

The Dead Diana Dinner

I fear that, if and when a storm breaks out, it will wreak harm on you and grief on me.

Try for your freedom—run or fly away!

Our love has had its time—this is the end.

We two shall soon be traveling opposite paths

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Bob Gibson was a bitter man who lived his life in a slowsimmering rage, perpetually pissed off by the world. He worked as a surgeon in a public hospital and the human race disgusted him. He resented his former registrars who raced ahead to take on more senior positions at prestigious hospitals in Sydney’s northern and eastern suburbs while he was stuck out in the west. Not that he’d ever move; he knew where he belonged.

He was a westie—born and bred in Toongabbie—and proud of it. Anyone who couldn’t hack him, well, they could just piss off. On the one occasion he attended a flash medical conference in Double Bay, sponsored by a multinational drug company, he wore his short-sleeved shirt with a fat, colour-slashed tie, broadened his Strine and sat by himself in belligerent silence. Bunch of wankers, he thought scornfully as he glanced around at his colleagues sipping cocktails before the conference dinner.

So he stayed out west and was driven apoplectic by patients who continued to smoke right up to the very hour of their surgery, and who then had the temerity to raise the issue of lawsuits if things went wrong. Any occasion at the Gibsons’ was usually flavoured with revolting stories about the astonishing and imaginative variety of things men and women found to put up themselves, cautionary morality tales ending in ruptured colons, septicaemia and peritonitis. He had no time for the petty foibles of ordinary men and women and, most of all, he had no time for Diana.

He blamed her for everything that subsequently went wrong. In fact, as far as he was concerned, it all started when that tiresome woman died and they had to gather at the Cheongs’ to mark her funeral even though she meant nothing to him.

Bob had been fuming for the best part of a week since the car crash. At first the news of her death bounced like a rubber ball off the solid wall of his indifference. Truth to tell, he didn’t even remember where he was or what he was doing when he heard about it, although he later announced provocatively that he’d been busy taking a crap in the dunny.

‘Too much bloody couscous along with all that other multicultural crap Gillian makes me eat these days,’ he growled at anyone who would listen. ‘Tells me I need more fibre in my diet,’ he said, sliding his eyes sideways towards his wife. ‘History of bowel cancer in the family. Got me eating All-Bran in the morning and food that tastes like soggy pillow stuffing. Helps keep me regular, she says. Well, I’ll tell you what. That couscous went through my gut regular as an express train. Where, in all that, was there time to take in what had happened? Not that it mattered fuck-all to me. Diana’s dead. So what?’

But it mattered to Gillian and Annabelle. The women had run into each other on Victoria Avenue, Chatswood, a week before Diana’s accident. For a moment they just stared at each other in mutual surprise.

‘Eh! What are you doing here?’ Annabelle exclaimed.

Gillian tried to pull herself together. She air-kissed Annabelle’s cheeks perfunctorily. ‘What a surprise to see
you
here.’

‘I came to buy Tek some thermal underwear,’ Annabelle confided. ‘And also to visit Mr Vitamin to buy Vitamin C and echinacea. So cheap, you know!’

They looked at each other and felt awkward. Their children had not been friends for some years now, not since high school. They did not know why. And they did not know whether they were still connected if their children were no longer friends.

‘How is Gibbo?’

‘He’s fine. In his fourth year of engineering.’

‘
Wah
! So clever.’

‘How’s Justin?’

‘Doing architecture.
Ai-yah
, my boy never study hard enough. Otherwise he could be a doctor instead.’

‘Oh.’ Gillian could think of nothing else to say. She nodded and began to walk away but Annabelle’s curiosity could not be satisfied so easily.

‘So what are you doing here?’ she repeated.

For a moment Gillian thought about lying. Then she said, ‘I went to get my biopsy results. I didn’t want Bob to know so I came to a GP in Chatswood.’ And to her great embarrassment, she began to cry. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m being silly.’ She opened her handbag to grope for a handkerchief but Annabelle was already offering her a tissue. She took it, murmured her thanks and mopped herself up.

‘Come,’ Annabelle said, grabbing Gillian’s arm. ‘I take you for dim-sum at this special restaurant.
Ho sek
, ah— delicious, you know. Cannot say no!’

It was still early and the queues had not yet begun to form outside the Chinese restaurant. They were seated straight away. Annabelle ordered a pot of tea, then she leaned towards Gillian and asked quietly, ‘Was it bad news?’

‘No,’ Gillian said. ‘That’s why I feel so silly. It was good news. It was benign. But for a few days there I wondered.’

‘Yah, I know,’ Annabelle nodded. ‘I had a scare a while back. There was this lump on my head and I had all these headaches so I thought it was a tumour,
lor.
Actually it turned out to be a big pimple that nearly got infected. And also I had to change my specs to bifocals. But I tell you what,
lah
, I was so scared before I found out. I thought, what will happen to Ah Tek and my Jay?’

That was just it, Gillian thought. Annabelle held her husband and her son in the iron grip of her love. They were her first concern. How could Annabelle possibly understand what it felt like to realise that she’d lived most of her life on a famine of affection, indifferent to—if not actually irritated by—her husband, obligated to her son, and the one creature she’d felt any overwhelming fondness for was that strange refugee girl, Tien, whom she’d pushed away before there was any trouble with the mother? She was a good woman; she had helped many people. But was she incapable of loving? Where were the people who really mattered to her?

She looked at Annabelle and felt a strong need to connect with someone. She said, ‘I really miss having the kids around. I haven’t seen Tien and Justin for so many years.’

‘
Yah lah
. Me also. One moment they such good friends and now look! Never see them anymore. I don’t know what happened. So sad, you know.’

‘Maybe we should do something,’ Gillian said slowly.

‘What to do?’

‘I don’t know. But we’ve got to do something.’

A week later they turned on their televisions to learn that Diana had been in a car accident in the Pont D’Alma tunnel in Paris. Annabelle rang Gillian at midday. ‘Eh! Come over and watch with me. Got CNN, you know. Also BBC,’ she added as a concession to Gillian’s English sensibilities.

As long as Gillian had been alone, it had been a mildly shocking piece of news. Once she was with the Cheongs, however, the emotional reality of other people, the presence of an audience to act and react with, transformed the event into a communal melodrama staged in Annabelle’s plastic-shrouded living room. In Annabelle’s obsession with cleanliness, clear plastic sheeting covered the sofa—although lace doilies were placed over the headrests— plastic squares were cut out to fit the coffee and side tables, plastic jackets hugged the hi-fi system, and the lampshades were still entombed in plastic. The house was redolent with the synthetic lemon scent of Ajax Spray ’n’ Wipe.

Shock and grief were cultivated within this antiseptic atmosphere. The two women sat in front of the television sipping tea and nibbling on the pineapple tarts that Tek had brought back from a recent trip to Singapore. The news coverage of the accident was unremitting, cutting rapidly from the commentary of grave-faced anchors perched in front of bustling news rooms, to the latest updates from European correspondents ‘on the ground’. They watched the Parisian night sky pale into dawn and gasped at the mangled metal of the car, the scatter of glass winking in the pewter light.

By evening their eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. A gentle hill of soggy pink tissues bulged from the waste basket. Tek shuffled and looked distinctly uncomfortable.

‘What’s it got to do with us?’ he asked.

The answer lay in the avalanche of tributes; the rapidly assembled hagiographies; the sight, on television, of ordinary people on the street—mums and dads with their little kids—as well as dignitaries and celebrities sorrowfully launching forth their hearts to those poor boys who must be so traumatised; and even the sight of the overweight black man in Muslim garb prostrating himself at the foot of the black iron gates of Buckingham Palace, wailing, ‘There is no justice!’, as if his heart were breaking. As though her life, let alone her death, could possibly matter to him.

This was a personal tragedy on a global scale, and Gillian felt particularly proprietorial towards the event, for had she not been born in England and come out to Sydney in the late 1950s as a ten-pound immigrant? As for Annabelle, she was an avid collector of women’s magazines with Diana on the cover and her hair was still styled like Diana’s. So the world mourned, and Gillian and Annabelle along with it. Hugging each other at the end of the evening, they cradled their grief and agreed to nurture it by getting together for dinner on the day of the funeral.

‘We’ll get all the families together,’ Gillian said. ‘And you know what? This will be a great chance for the children to meet again.’

‘Yes! They can friend each other again over food,’ Annabelle said excitedly. The two women beamed in satisfaction.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Bob grumbled when Gillian told him about it later that night. ‘Diana’s dead and you want to hold a dinner? A Dead Diana Dinner. Bloody hell.’

The three families, plus appendages, were at the Cheongs’ just after six that evening: Annabelle, Tek and Justin; Gillian, Bob and Gibbo; Tien, her mother Linh and her fiancé Stanley Wong. Introductions were made and, like the first time Tien had met him in their Year 3 classroom, Gibbo stared fixedly at his feet and avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. When she greeted him, he looked past her shoulder and nodded in awkward greeting. There was nothing but a residual embarrassment. It would have been easier if they had never been friends.

‘Good to see you,’ Justin managed, but the words rang phoney even to his own ears.

Gillian and Annabelle’s enthusiasm camouflaged the tension. Gillian had made a pot of curry and a pavlova which she now gave to Annabelle. ‘
Ai-yah
, I told you no need! So kind of you. Tek, see how kind Gillian is. She made us curry.’

Her husband looked unenthusiastically at the porcelain bowl Annabelle held. ‘Great. Thanks.’

‘
Ai-yoh
!
Ai-yoh
! You all so grown-up already!’ Annabelle said as she hugged and kissed Gibbo and Tien. ‘So good to have the three best friends here for dinner once again. Remember how you used to come over all the time? Mustn’t be a stranger now, you know.’

She made them take off their shoes by the front door. She stooped to arrange the shoes neatly on the plastic hall runner so that stray dirt from the soles would not contaminate her cream carpet. Then she ushered them into the dining room and got them seated. Tek rolled his 80centimetre television into the dining room so that they could have dinner while they watched. Annabelle darted out into the kitchen and returned with huge platters of something that looked like burnt boots and discs of hardened lard.

‘Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding,’ she told them triumphantly. ‘Made especially for Diana’s funeral. Oh, and Gillian’s curry.’

‘I’m afraid it doesn’t quite go,’ Gillian said apologetically. ‘I thought you’d make something Asian.’

‘You should have,’ Tek muttered as he sawed away at the roast beef.

It was a dismal meal. Chewing doggedly on chunks of over-roasted meat and unyielding pudding, they waited for the awkwardness to dissipate, but the atmosphere simply grew more stilted and unnatural. They were overwhelmed by indigestion and everything in the universe seemed to circle back to this: the acutely uncomfortable feeling of fullness, of massive solidity, nudging insistently against the heart.

Only Bob seemed satisfied, perversely cheered by the obvious failure of the Dead Diana Dinner. He squirted tomato sauce until his dinner plate was a massacre of meat and bleeding pudding, defoliated of wilted greens which he had brazenly dumped onto his son’s plate.

Tek opened more bottles of red wine and topped up glasses. They would need it to get through the meal, let alone the evening.

Annabelle, who ordinarily prided herself on her culinary skills, fibrillated with embarrassment and slid apprehensive glances around the table. If only someone would let her catch their eye so that she could apologise profusely for the meal. But all eyes were fixed on the TV screen featuring the flower-decked coffin bearing the white envelope inscribed ‘MUMMY’, while all mouth muscles were involved in the unrewarding task of mastication.

Because the television was his and he had paid nearly ten thousand dollars for its behemothic mass and booming sound, and simply because he was a man, Tek would not relinquish his right to the remote control. In his role as host, he reluctantly deferred to Gillian’s wishes and stifled a yawn at the BBC’s dignified but silent camera work, zooming in on the carriage until the bobbing envelope filled the screen. Nobody said anything but the bleeding obvious, punctuated by long pauses. ‘And there we have . . . on the gun carriage . . . a poignant card . . . from the young prince . . . Mummy.’ They could see that for themselves. It was boring. Were they going to watch the jogging coffin the whole night? For God’s sake, why didn’t the commentators
comment
? That was what they were paid for.

Tek craved garrulous American sentimentalism, a flood of soothing banality to fill the silent space in which only the clink of cutlery could be heard in the dining room. He wanted the comfort of noise.

He flicked the channel and ignored the deliberate hiss of Gillian’s inhalation. That was better. They knew how to liven up a funeral, the Americans, with their wide-angled shots of the gun carriage and the tripping horses, the zoom-ins on the teary, sporadically applauding crowd swarming from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Then it was ‘Over to you, Dan’, and a cut to the studio for commonplace observations from the sculpted faces of immaculate presenters wearing their Serious and Distinguished looks, followed by a live satellite feed from London for a comment from the bouffant-haired thirtysomething woman in the street: ‘You know what? I flew all the way from Chicago to be here? It’s like, such a tragedy and I’m, like, how could I miss this last chance to say goodbye? I’d kill myself if I didn’t come. She was so special, you know? She was like someone you felt you could pick up the phone and talk to and say, hey, come over and we’ll bitch about men, you know? I feel so sorry for those poor boys. My heart just goes out to them and I’m, like, I feel your pain, you know?’ At that point her young friend with the beaded hair, who had been hovering impatiently next to her, stuck her heavily made-up face into the camera and shouted, ‘I just wanna say one thing. Princess Diana, if you can hear me out there and I know you can ’cos you is an
angel
. Yes ma’am, an
angel
. You go, girl!’