Behind the Moon (2 page)

‘What? Still so weak, ah!’ Tek marvelled, and his son burst into tears. Only then did the father relent. Tek said, ‘There now. No more crying, okay? Only sissies cry. Come. Climb onto Papa’s lap.’

And that was the moment his son had been waiting for. Justin scrambled eagerly onto Tek’s lap and rubbed his wet face against his father’s chest. He could feel the ribbing of the white singlet impressed on his warm cheek. Tek’s arms closed around him and Justin turned his face to burrow towards his father’s armpit, curiously sniffing in the human smell of musky sweat and slowly sloughing skin that his mother could not bear. He sighed deeply and felt content. Safe. His father’s arms tightened around him and rocked him briefly. Then Tek lifted his son off his lap and put him down.

‘Try harder tomorrow, okay?’ Tek said.

As always, his son nodded obediently. There was nothing his son would not have done for him, nor he for his son. Justin was a
good boy
. And now, this good son of his had been expelled from school. Without the benefits of a private school, how would he get into a medical course at university?

‘Those damn racists,’ Tek fumed to Annabelle. ‘I should write to the government about this.’

Being Singaporean by birth and education, if no longer by nationality, he did no such thing. He dared not draw attention to himself.

What made the incident even more frustrating for Tek was that he was denied the consolation of complaining about the expulsion to friends and colleagues. He was unable to defend his own son because that would entail an explanation of what had allegedly taken place, and he simply could not bring himself to mention it.

Instead, he told everyone, ‘Annabelle and I realised we believe in public education. Better to spend the money on after-school tutoring than on private school fees. Even if you go to private school, you have to go for tutoring anyway.’

To Justin, he said, ‘Daddy believes in you. We don’t have to talk about this again. Just be a good boy and study hard in future.’

So he did. Justin wanted to make sure that his father would never again have a reason to be disappointed in him. No shade of uneasy suspicion should furrow his father’s brow, no recoil of horror spring into those goldbespectacled eyes. Justin put the whole incident behind him and vowed to make a fresh start at his new school. He was happy to be with Gibbo, even if he had to share him with Tien.

He soon counted Gibbo and Tien as his best friends. They did everything together after school and on weekends. He spent hours on the phone talking to them in the evenings. They came over for dinner and his mother taught them how to cook. He loved them. They thought they knew him. They were wrong.

Gibbo and Tien looked at him and saw a tall, slender Chinese boy with blond-streaked shaggy hair (grudgingly allowed by Tek, on account of his son’s ‘adolescent phase’) that he tied back with a red rubber band when he played the piano. They knew the idiosyncracies of his parents. They knew his musical and movie tastes; they knocked him about the Michael Jackson dance steps he mimicked in front of video-clips and the Michael Jordan basketball moves he practised on the Cheongs’ concrete driveway. He simply smiled, and everyone liked him for that. He could take a joke, good old Justo.

He was athletic without being a jock, playing in the B-grade basketball, cricket and tennis teams at school. He was good at being B-grade. Tek proudly nailed a wooden shelf over Justin’s bed to hold the ribbons and trophies his son had accumulated. The shelf broke off from the gyprock wall one night and an avalanche of second-rate sporting triumphs cascaded down onto his head. He emerged from the rubble with a deep cut over his left eye. Blood ran down his face, nearly sending Annabelle into cardiac arrest. As vigilant as she had been over the eyepoking possibilities of compass, pencils and assorted kitchen utensils, she had never envisioned this. She took him to the optometrist and demanded regularly over the next fortnight, ‘Can see or not?’ When the cut healed, it left a thin white scar slashing his eyebrow, and the sight of it became as familiar to Gibbo and Tien as the reflection of their own faces in the mirror.

As for the rest of him, he was just ordinary: such a stereotypical Australian-born Chinese boy that he was virtually invisible. To his friends, he was
nice
; there was nothing more to be said. His slightly pimpled face was serene and beautifully blank. His easygoing smile hid the thoughts he did not utter. They touched him and clutched a skinful of flesh and bone that did not connect to the feelings or fantasies he harboured. He did not tell them because he loved them. He was protecting them from himself, for he knew he was a dirty boy. And perhaps he was also protecting himself from them.

On Saturday, 17 August 1991, Justin had a late lunch with his best friends at the Coffee Pot café inside Strathfield Plaza shopping centre. They ordered soup and toasted sandwiches, then Gibbo and Tien began a pointless argument of the sort they both frequently engaged in over some rock band they disagreed about. Justin eased back into the settee and distanced himself from his friends. He arranged his face into an expression of bland interest and tuned out of the conversation. His heart beat a rapid tattoo and his hands were trembling, for he had made up his mind about what he was going to do that afternoon. He had made an assignation earlier that week; at last he would know the taste and texture of a man’s kiss. This was the day he would learn something about love. He was almost sick with anticipation and dread.

After lunch Tien wanted to buy some things from the supermarket. Gibbo was, as ever, eager to accompany her. Justin smiled and shrugged in resignation. He had always known that Gibbo preferred Tien’s company to his own. On several occasions, he had half seriously, half playfully accused Gibbo of having a crush on Tien—a charge that Gibbo vigorously denied.

‘Yuck. All that love stuff ’s so gross,’ Gibbo had said, shifting uncomfortably. ‘It just messes everything up. Anyway, I don’t think of people that way.’

But Justin was unable to believe in his best friend’s asexuality. And even if it was true, that made things worse because it meant that Gibbo simply preferred Tien as a person to himself. Justin refused to think about it. He swept up his jealousy and tidied it away, shrugged on his habitual good-natured normality instead.

‘I’ll wait here for you,’ Justin said to Tien. ‘Half an hour max, guys, then I’m going home if you’re not out by then. I don’t want to hang around here the whole afternoon while you dither over which brand of hairspray to buy and Gibbo agonises over a Mars Bar or a Milky Way.’

He waited until they left, then he got up and settled the bill. He was at once exhilarated and terrified. He felt anxiety pressing on his bladder, gripping his bowels. He wanted to pee and he felt a phantom need to shit. He checked his watch, then he went to the men’s toilet tucked away at the back of the Plaza. As he stood at the urinal, he heard the door opening. Footsteps echoed around the corner. At first he kept his gaze in front of him as he heard trousers being unzipped. He was breathing hard and sweating profusely, as though he’d just run a marathon. Finally, he mustered the courage to slide a quick glance upwards and he saw that the man was watching him, a questioning halfsmile on his lips.

‘Hey,’ Justin mumbled in greeting. The tips of his ears burned. Slowly, helplessly, his gaze drifted downwards towards their mutual tumescence.

Nothing terrible ever happened in Strathfield except perhaps car theft, which made car insurance premiums one of the highest in the state of New South Wales. It was a staid suburb of middle-class homes and middle-class private schools churning out neatly uniformed kids. By the early 1980s, Anglos and Eastern Europeans had been joined by Indian and Chinese families who moved into the suburb and left their unmistakable imprint in the form of yum-cha restaurants, Indian spice shops and abandoned shopping trolleys nestled against rough-barked tree trunks and cracked telegraph poles. They were followed a decade later by Koreans who opened up cute shops with cute clothing and ever cuter accessories. They introduced karaoke clubs and lifted the culinary profile of the suburb with marvellous restaurants which bled the mouth-watering barbecued aroma of
pulgogi
and the sour tang of
kimchi
into the air.

In time, the red-brick façades of high-rise apartments would mushroom around this transport hub. Buses groaned and rumbled through the maze of the main square. Trains snaked regularly into the eight-platform station where children flocculated in the early mornings and weekday afternoons, scoffing down sausage rolls, hot chips and potato scallops. Schoolbags littered the train platforms for annoyed adults to stumble into or trip over, and they would spend the rest of the train journey composing letters of complaint to various school principals.

But on the whole they were not a fearsome crowd, these children, for they were mostly dressed in the regalia of private school uniforms. They did not menace the middleaged with the sight of basketball boots, baseball caps twisted backwards and baggy tracksuit tops over school trousers. Nor did the girls offend the intolerant with the Muslim modesty of elegantly arranged headscarves. Such sights were more common further west, out in Auburn, Lidcombe or Lakemba, driving a spike of fear—the culturally different mistaken for the criminally dangerous—into the tidal wash of Greek, Eastern European and Anglo-Australians whose lives had sedimented in those suburbs.

In Strathfield children shrilled and squawked like cockatoos at sunset but they looked affluent and orderly. Surging down the ramps from the train platform in the late 1980s, they ignored the advertisement overhead telling them: ‘If you’ve got time to kill, relax at Strathfield Plaza.’

On the afternoon of Saturday, 17 August 1991, while Tien and Gibbo killed time by relaxing in the supermarket, Justin was locked in the single cubicle of the men’s toilet having his first sexual encounter. He was not entirely certain whether it was consensual, for he did not dare to know what he truly desired. He hid in his passivity and refused both volition and responsibility. Pain was twisted with pleasure, he felt simultaneously thrilled and ashamed. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth to savour the sensation, but the experience was fractured by too many thoughts. Part of him was terrified that someone would come into the toilet. In another, more detached substratum of his mind, he imagined himself watching a B-grade movie that had never been made; a vastly inferior and bathetic rehash of the moment Grace Kelly kissed Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s
To Catch a Thief
. Even if there were no brilliant starbursts, only the flickering fluorescent glare overhead, he could have sworn that he heard firecrackers exploding as if it were Chinese new year.

Later, when he was alone in the cubicle, he ritualistically tore off two sheets of toilet paper, dropped them into the bowl, wadded more sheets together and cleaned himself up, wincing slightly as he wiped his tender genitals. His mother burst out of her cage and rampaged back into his head. Although he tried to shut out her voice, he could hear her reproach. ‘Ee-yer! Dirty boy! How could you? I’m going to twist your ear!’

Defiantly, he told himself that whatever happened, at least he had not touched the toilet seat. And before he left, he made sure that he washed his hands thoroughly with soap and hot water.

He swung out of the men’s toilet, mentally rehearsing what to say to Tien and Gibbo if they should ask where he’d been. And that was when he saw the people crouched in terror on the floor, the blood and broken glass. He did not fully understand what he was looking at; he had to hear it explained on the television news later that night. He had to read about it in the newspapers the following day.

Shortly after two thirty that afternoon, a Caucasian man in his early thirties wearing a grey beanie entered the Coffee Pot café and sat down in a booth. He lounged there for nearly an hour, drinking four coffees slowly. At 3.30 pm, he signalled to a waiter and asked for the bill. He got up, paid his bill and headed towards the door, making his way between the plush booths of the café. Then he whipped out a knife and plunged it into the back of a fifteen-yearold schoolgirl.

He pulled an SKS 7.62mm semi-automatic rifle from his bag and opened fire on customers in the café, shooting dead four people and wounding others. The owner of the Coffee Pot, George Mavris, heard the gunshots in the kitchen and ran into the shop to see what was going on. The gunman shot and killed George. He then left the café and stalked through the Plaza, firing randomly at plateglass windows and screaming shoppers.

Greg Read was a retired naval officer who had served in Vietnam. That afternoon, he was in the Plaza’s newsagency when he heard the rapid rattle of the semiautomatic rifle. He raced out of the newsagency and a woman screamed, ‘Look out. A man’s gone berserk with a gun.’ He could see the gunman heading his way, so he ran ahead, yelling out warnings to other shoppers. He saw the gunman heading for the escalators to the car park. Greg ran outside and bounded up the external stairs to the car park to warn others there.

Inside the Plaza, the gunman killed a man at the foot of the escalators. He made his way up the escalators, then ran up the ramp to the upper rooftop level of the car park. He leaned his rifle on the concrete balustrade, trained it on the town square, and fired at the buses and trains and shops. A volley of shots shattered the windows of a taxi, the railway ticket office, and a milk bar.

By this time, Greg Read had reached the rooftop level of the car park. He saw a woman driving out of the car park and yelled at her to lie low. She looked at him. ‘It’s too late,’ she whispered. ‘He’s already behind you.’

Greg turned and saw the gunman. He dived under a car and felt a searing sting as bullets slammed into his feet.

The gunman then wrenched open the door of the station wagon and jumped into the car of the terrified woman. ‘Where are you going?’ he demanded as she drove down the ramp to the lower level of the car park. She stammered out a reply and he said, ‘I don’t want to go where you’re heading.’