Behind the Moon (25 page)

It wasn’t just about easy lust but about romantic longings and suburban dreams. He wanted to lay his devotion down at someone’s feet. All he asked was the right to follow at her high heels and be petted from time to time. His needs had always been impossibly simple. He wanted to browse companionably through the homewares section at Kmart, picking out kitchen appliances. His ambition was to be the Barbecue King, wheeling out the new state-of-the-art barbecue, heating up the coals and slapping down the tangy marinated T-bones, a blue and white striped butcher’s apron wrapped around his waist and a pair of tongs in his hand. Competent. He could imagine his wife and her friends sunbathing on the pool deck, sipping cask wine, tossing to him the occasional friendly comment about the salivating smell of spitting sausages. In the pool, his kids and their friends splashing and whooping with joy. Happy family friends all around. His happy family. He wanted to do with his kids all the things he’d never done as a child. If it was possible for his father to get married and have a family, if it was possible for someone to fall in love with Bob Gibson, of all people, how could this be so impossible for him?

Yet he was prepared to release these dreams from his sweaty clutch and let them float away if only Linh would return his love. He couldn’t say exactly why he loved her. He only knew that he went to sleep jerking off to his fantasies of her. He said her name with a catch in his throat. Yearning squeezed out from the clutch in his gut and escaped his lips in a long slow groan. When he awoke, his first thoughts were of her. He tried to wrench his mind away so that he could concentrate—first on his studies, then on his job. But the yearning simply to be with her diffused like a gas leak in his mind. He was fired with the hot helium of his love for her, floating free of anything that might anchor him to a loveless reality.

Gibbo was programmed by popular culture to believe that love would overcome all obstacles and triumph in the end. Patience and persistence were all it took. Linh simply had to see that no-one else appreciated her the way he did. Others—like her own daughter—saw her impatience and severity and withdrew from the spiny carapace of her. But he alone could understand her kindness and generosity and strength. This was a woman he had puked all over and who then turned up two weeks later, placed a comforting hand on his shoulder and gave him a second chance.

He knew the greatness of her heart. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t believe, was that she might glance at his love in that distorting hall of mirrors and recoil from a monstrous terror instead. That she might look at him and his desperate wooing and see not a lover but a stalker. Not the faithful hound but the ferocious hunter tracking her down for the kill.

It was this that he wept for, not just the order keeping him away from her, but her deformed view of him that warped him into a mould of frightening obsession when he had only intended unswerving devotion. She did not see him as he really was and, because of this misrecognition, she made him doubt himself.

Bob hulked outside his son’s room and wondered how he was ever going to make things right when he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a conversation with his son. And he wondered how he was ever going to look at himself in the mirror and recognise a father, however flawed, if he didn’t even try.

He shuffled into the room with the uncertain gait of a man who had no right to be where he was stepping. He closed the bedroom door behind him and hovered at the edge of the room, uncertain whether to move towards Gibbo, hunched up at one end of the bed. Father and son were both dumbstruck, gazing at each other in an eternity of acute awkwardness.

‘What do you want?’ Gibbo said at last. He rubbed the back of his hand under his dripping nose and wiped it on the bedcover, not caring that this brought a reflexive frown to his father’s face.

‘Ah. Just thought we might have a chat.’

‘About what? If you’re gonna tell me off, don’t bother. After court today, I don’t reckon you need to say anything more, do you?’

‘No, I wasn’t—I just thought it might help to talk about it, that’s all. Yeah. Look, son. I’d, uh, like to help.’

‘You wanna help? Go away and leave me alone then. Last thing I need right now is to talk to you.’

His son’s hostility was like a whip-slash across the face. He flinched but didn’t budge.

It was the easiest thing to do, Bob thought. It was what he’d always done before. He should just turn around, open that door and get the hell out of his son’s life. Being here only made things worse. He’d never been able to do anything right by his boy. He started towards the door, then he hesitated. To their mutual surprise, he plonked himself down on Gibbo’s bed and shifted his bum on the doona to make himself comfortable. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

‘What d’you think you’re doing?’

‘Gonna sit right here till you feel like talking,’ Bob said.

He was a stubborn man; he would put his stubbornness to good effect now. Night after night he came in and settled himself on the bed. His son ignored him and turned away. After a few hours, Bob would get up, stretch and yawn, then he’d say to Gibbo, ‘Night, son. See you tomorrow.’ It almost sounded like a threat.

After eight days, Gibbo said, ‘Why should I talk to you anyway? Do you remember what happened the last time you made me tell you something?’

‘No. When was that? What happened?’

‘It was the day I came back from my camping trip with Justo. You took one look at my face and—’

‘And I said what the fuck did you get up to ’cos your eye was all swollen and your lip was cut. You wouldn’t tell me so I shook it out of you,’ Bob remembered. He could not look at his son.

‘You promised me you’d never tell.’

‘I know. And then I told Tek his son was gay during that bloody dinner.’

‘How can I trust you after that? You let me down.’

There were so many things Bob wanted to say in his own defence:
I was off my face, don’t you see? It doesn’t excuse
what I did but still . . . And then there’s you. Look, Nige, you
may think I hate you but I don’t. I’m your dad. I couldn’t ever
hate you. I mean, it’s quite the opposite, really. Yeah. Don’t
you know how bloody mad it made me when those two kids
dumped you after school was over and they moved on and got
themselves new friends? You were chewed up and spat out but
you did nothing. You just took it. Do you know what it does
to me to see you all alone like this? That night, well, I couldn’t
take it anymore, son. I wanted to hurt them the way they
hurt you. Instead, I just ended up twisting the knife in your
pain. And that was after I forgot your twenty-first, too. So I
guess I was mad at them and I was mad at myself
. He could hear the words in his head but his tongue refused to utter them. In the end, there was nothing to say in his own defence except, ‘I’m sorry.’

Bob left his room then and Gibbo sat on his bed and stared at the closed door. He couldn’t believe it. After all this time when he’d been winding himself up to speak, to finally confide, his father just up and left. All that bullshit about wanting to talk then, when he had to apologise, he couldn’t take it. What kind of father was that? He should have known better than to let his heart crack open slightly. He’d know better next time. He turned out the bedside lamp and buried his face in his pillow. He understood dimly that he was reacting in an adolescent fashion, and this only served to further depress him.

But Bob was back the next night. It was one of those dreaded Saturday nights when all Gibbo could find to do was maybe walk down to the Horse and Jockey hotel where he now worked part-time, knock back a few schooners, then shuffle home to stretch out in bed and read in his underwear while feeling sorry for himself. Bob poked his head in and asked hesitantly, ‘Don’t suppose you wanna go out for a drive?’

His son looked up in surprise and faint suspicion. ‘Where to?’

‘Dunno. Goulburn, maybe.’

‘You’ve gotta be joking. What for?’

‘Aw, thought we might stop by Macca’s or the Big Merino. Grab a bite to eat.’

Gibbo was silent for a moment. Was he going to be moron enough to give his dad another chance? He shouldn’t. The old man didn’t deserve it.

‘Yeah, all right, I suppose,’ Gibbo said unenthusiastically.

It was better than he’d expected, Bob thought, satisfied. He’d been going about this talking business all wrong. Sitting there on the bed with nothing but air and silence between them, it was awkward. A man couldn’t just sit there and look at his son and ‘share’. He needed to be doing something. So fine. They’d do something. They’d go for a drive to Goulburn and even bloody Canberra if that’s how long it took them to start talking.

Father and son came to look forward to those Saturday night drives out of Sydney. They went out west to Lithgow, up the coast to Newcastle, down to Wollongong and the Southern Highlands. They never saw anything much except the road unrolling before them and oncoming headlights slicing through the darkness; it was the novelty of each other’s company they secretly enjoyed, although they’d never say as much. Gibbo stored up puke stories from the pub to relate. Bob retaliated with gruesome gynaecological horrors from the hospital. Sometimes they laughed and almost liked each other.

Then, one night, as they were driving home through Galston Gorge, Bob cleared his throat and was finally able to say, ‘Uh, Nige. I just want you to know, mate, that I, uh, I really enjoy these drives. Yeah. I mean, whatever you’ve done, son, whatever’s gonna happen, your mother and I, we’re behind you. You’re a good man. Yeah. I, uh, you know, love you and all that. So, yeah.’

Gibbo began to cry. He cried because this should have been a great moment of revelation; perhaps even of reconciliation between father and son. If this were a movie, he could hear the soundtrack in his mind: the swelling finale of some angst-filled father–son song. And it wasn’t because he was ungrateful for Bob’s efforts that he did not respond to his father’s fumbling overtures of friendship. He realised fully the magnitude of Bob’s words and actions, and was astonished and gratified by the evidence of his father’s love.

But he also realised something else: in the end, your parents are your parents and, although the quest for their approval might bend and shape the pattern of your life, it could never fill the empty womb that grew within you still. So although Gibbo reached out, grasped Bob’s free hand and felt thankful for this new-found connection with his father, he wept because he could not rid himself of the gnawing need to be chosen, to be loved by somebody else.

Making Amends

If you still care for what we both once felt,

let’s turn it into friendship—let’s be friends.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

The storm blew in on boiling clouds one late summer afternoon. There was scant warning, only the eddies of scuttling leaves raked by the talons of a southerly wind. The sky cracked with lightning, lobbed down hailstones the size of a child’s fist. Spears of rain drummed down on red-tiled roofs and creaking gutters spouted plumes of dirty water. Windowpanes shook and shattered. Pockmarked cars stalled along the kerbs of sloping streets awash with the water that spewed out of drains clogged with dog crap, dead leaves, cigarette butts, chip packets and plastic bags. The television news that night would show the aftermath: scragged branches of trees gashed by hail damage, a litter of sticky leaves everywhere, black overhead cables snaking crazily from a power pole snapped like a matchstick, neighbours in wet shorts and rubber thongs sloshing out of flooded houses, and State Emergency Services workers suspended from rooftops in canaryyellow cherry-pickers.

A quarter of an hour and it was all over. Brown squares of lawn were covered by hail that glistened eerily white under a pus-coloured sky. Light rain shimmered as the sun squinted through ragged clouds that were already pushing further east. The air snapped with sudden cold and the clean smell of ozone. Children burst forth into backyards to scoop up fistfuls of frozen ice, chucking them at each other in the nearest they would probably come to a snowball fight. And then, of course, the sting of ice on the skin and the yawning mouthfuls of wailing complaint.

When Linh returned home from the hospital, she found that the power lines to her apartment block were down. Across the road, neighbours were tying blue tarps over roof tiles. She lit some candles but there was not enough light to assess the damage caused by a window carelessly left open. Water ran along the ledges and dribbled rivulets of dirt down the beige walls. The carpet was soaked under her feet, the kitchen tiles gleamed wetly. She slid open the glass door to the balcony and saw that her terracotta pots of herbs were smashed. Shredded coriander, mint and basil leaves glowed greenly against the moist black soil that spilled and ran like cheap mascara across the tiles, smearing the pastel-coloured towels that had hung from a collapsed clothes-horse. Hailstones had slashed through a jacaranda tree and dumped purple petals like confetti over the mess. She shook her head wearily and stepped back inside. Everything could wait until the weekend.

Twenty-four hours later she found that the mess on the balcony was gone. Broken shards of pottery and soil had been swept up and removed. The tiles were scrubbed clean. Ranged neatly along the left wall were new pots of herbs. Her towels had been re-laundered, neatly folded, and left in a basket by the sliding door.

There was no note to say who had done this for her, but she knew nevertheless. She had seen him in his car, parked across the street in the evenings. She had been slightly alarmed when she first noticed his reappearance, but Gibbo never approached her or got out of his car. Before she went to bed, she twitched the curtain aside and glanced out into the street. He was always gone by then. She lay awake in the dark and thought about him.

Little things started to happen which might or might not have been good. She wasn’t entirely sure at first. Each day her letterbox was cleared of gaudy pizza pamphlets and the clamour of real estate agents insisting they had found a buyer for the apartment she had no wish to sell. The local council collected the garbage on Thursday mornings, and Linh found that by Wednesday evening, the dark green wheelie bin would have been rolled out to the kerb. When she returned from work on Thursday afternoon, the garbage bin would be in its place around the back of the apartment block. Such little things he did for her, all the while keeping his distance. If Tien had been around to stoke the drama, Linh might have continued to be apprehensive. In her daughter’s absence, she felt herself softening into a slow warm smile that someone should care enough to do these things for her. He never asked for anything in return these days. Not even acknowledgement of his presence.

She smoothed back the curtain and looked out the window one night. And there was his car. She couldn’t see him in the dark. She watched for a while, then she slipped her stockinged feet into a worn pair of mules, took a folded sheet of paper out of her handbag and let herself out of her flat. She paused at the front entrance and cast a quick glance at the windows of the other apartments above. Then she shrugged, crossed the road to the car and stooped beside the rolled-down window.

‘Hello, Gibbo,’ Linh said.

‘I’m not doing anything,’ he said anxiously. He would not look at her directly. She saw his hand darting towards the keys bunching around the ignition, and suddenly she realised that he was afraid, not of arrest, but of the expected slap of rejection. It buoyed her like nothing else could, this sense of power over him. She was soothed by his fear. She felt the last vestiges of her desire for revenge dissolving.

‘Thanks so much for clearing up the mess on my balcony the other day,’ she said. ‘It was kind of you.’

He remained silent. He stared at his knuckles plumping around the steering wheel.

‘Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?’ she said.

Gibbo finally looked up at Linh. ‘What about the AVO?’ he said.

She reached for the piece of paper she’d slipped into her pocket. She unfolded it and held it out in front of him. Then she ripped it to pieces.

‘I’ll go see the magistrate tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

She opened the car door and held out her hand, palm upwards in a hesitant question. After a moment he put his own hand into hers and let her draw him out of the car. They stood by his car and looked at each other.

‘Why are you doing this?’ he blurted out.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered honestly. ‘I guess I just feel like it.’

‘Are we going to be friends?’

She said slowly, ‘Yes. Maybe.’

‘Don’t let me hurt you again,’ he said. She understood that he was pleading for himself as well.

‘Things will be different this time,’ she said, and she smiled tentatively. ‘We’re going to be friends.’

Gibbo decided to move out of home for the first time in his life.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Gillian kept asking. She scanned his face anxiously for signs of psychological neuroses. After all, he had been stalking a woman more than twice his age eight months ago and, although Linh had recently had the AVO revoked, she did not know whether Nigel was normal now. Something had malfunctioned in his brain; what if it should happen again?

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ he said patiently. ‘I’m all right now. I just need to make some changes. You know. Move on and all that.’

‘What about your meals?’

‘I know how to cook. Auntie Annabelle—Mrs Cheong—taught me and Tien, remember?’

She did. The first time Gibbo had tried to stir-fry choy sum, he’d heated the wok until it was smoking, poured out sesame oil and threw in minced garlic and waterlogged vegetables. The kitchen had nearly burnt down when he tried to douse the flames in the wok with the bottle of cheap brandy that he’d intended to use instead of rice wine. She doubted his ability to take care of himself.

‘How are you going to pay the rent on your parttime job?’

‘I’m flatting with three other guys. Don’t worry,’ he repeated.

‘Quit nagging and just let him do it, Gill,’ Bob said. ‘It’ll be good for him. Toughen him up and teach him to stand on his own two feet. We can help him out from time to time if he runs a bit short.’

Bob helped him to move his meagre belongings into an apartment in Auburn. He shared the flat with Tien’s cousin Thuy—Uncle Duc’s black-sheep son—Phil, a New Zealander who coached swimming at the Auburn pools, and John, a Lebanese intern working at Auburn hospital. Gibbo felt comfortable with the mix; it was his second multicultural reject group. They had their own lives and they did not expect much from him except the rent on time. He tried to do the same. He hung out with John and learned to identify body parts and recognise the symptoms of rare diseases, converted to vegetarianism because of Phil, lost weight, cooked bok choy for his flatmates and did not set fire to the wok or the kitchen. He basked in their enjoyment of his cooking and seriously considered becoming a chef. He began to watch cooking programs on the ABC, jotting down the recipes solemnly and venturing all over the city in search of obscure ingredients.

One Sunday afternoon, as he was returning from a day in town, he got off at Strathfield station on impulse. He wandered through the piazza and the shopping centre and marvelled at how much it had changed since the Koreans moved in. He bought a cactus arrangement in a brightly painted clay pot, then he walked over to the Cheongs’ and rang the doorbell. Sadness washed over him as he heard the familiar tinny tune of ‘London Bridge is falling down’ and he felt homesick for his youth. Annabelle answered the door.

‘
Ai-yoh
, Gibbo! So long I never see you!
Wah
, you lost so much weight. So handsome now,’ she said as she raised herself up on tiptoe to hug him and kiss his cheek. ‘Come in, come in.’

She sat him down in her kitchen and poured him a glass of sweet chrysanthemum tea. ‘So what happen?’

‘You mean about the AVO?’ he mumbled, reddening slightly. ‘Linh had it revoked. It was . . . a misunderstanding.’

‘No, no. I mean how you lose so much weight? Before you so fat. Must tell my sister-in-law.
Ai-yah
, I tell you, that woman likes to wear very short denim shorts. She thinks her legs still so nice but I tell you, from the backside, when she walks, look like two pigs fighting to get out of her pants.’

‘I’ve only lost about five kilos, Auntie,’ Gibbo said.

‘Is it? How come I thought you so much fatter than that?’

‘I’ve become vegetarian,’ he volunteered. ‘I cook a lot of those
choy
dishes you taught me.’

‘
Wah!
So clever one,
lah?
’

‘
Yah lah
,’ he said, and they grinned at each other.

Her smile faded. She put out her hand and squeezed his arm. ‘Honestly, it’s so good to see you. I miss seeing you around. And Tien also. Remember? You all always hang around in the kitchen while I cook. And my poor Jay also.’

Gibbo cleared his throat. ‘Um. Have you heard from him lately?’

‘
Yah
. He rings me every week. He was always such a good boy.’

‘Is Uncle Tek still angry with him?’

‘No. Yes. Actually, I’m not sure. He got over being angry but then last Chinese new year, Jay turned up at my sister Isabelle’s house and told everybody he’s a homo.
Aiyoh
, I tell you! Some of them are so nasty! Anyway, Jay thinks that his daddy should have defended him but Tek didn’t say anything so Jay was rude to him. Now Jay won’t talk to his daddy. He say Tek is still ashamed of him. And maybe Tek is still angry because Jay was so rude. He say Jay broke his heart.’

‘Oh. What about you?’

‘
Hi-yah
, what to do? If he likes men, he likes men, isn’t it? I just tell him to make sure he use condoms and keep clean. Otherwise can get all kinds of infection. You also, you know. Must be careful. You got girlfriend or not?’

‘Not.’

‘Oh well. You still so young, isn’t it? Got plenty of time. Or are you still in love with Tien’s mummy?’ When he dropped his eyes, she sighed and pushed her chair back. She walked over to him and rubbed his shoulder. ‘All of you young people today. Fall in love here, fall in love there. What to do?’

He looked up at her. ‘I never had the guts to ask you. Are you and Uncle still mad at me for what happened at the Dead Diana Dinner?’

‘No! How come you think we’re mad?’

‘Well, I mean it was me who told my dad about Justin being gay and everything. I spoilt your dinner.’

‘No, no. Not your fault. You so poor thing. We all forgot your birthday. It was your birthday that was spoilt. I tell you, we never blame you. True, you know.
Yah lah
, Tek was so cranky, but at your daddy and then my Jay, not at you.’

‘Well, has Justin said anything about me?’

‘No.’ She leaned her hip against the edge of the table and looked down at him. ‘You know, my Jay was always so quiet. Such a good boy. I didn’t know he could hold a grudge for such a long time. I brought him up and I bathed him and washed his clothes and I cooked for him and I know what he likes and doesn’t like to eat. I know him so well on the outside but not on the inside.’

‘Me too, I guess.’

‘So. Do you ever see Jay?’

‘No.’ Then Gibbo made up his mind. ‘But I’m planning to get in touch with him soon. And Tien also. I’ll write to her. I want to make things right with everyone.’

Gibbo met Justin at Miss Yipsoon’s house—neutral territory. Miss Yipsoon waited in her kitchen with the door open slightly. She could hear nothing. After a while, she pushed the door open and poked her head in. She frowned. Gibbo and Justin sat on her mustard-coloured velvet sofa and stared down at the pink and green roses of her Chinese carpet. They were not talking. She stalked in, opened the lid of her old brown Beale piano and picked up the scarred wooden ruler. She marched over to the two young men and smacked them on their ears.

‘Ow!’

‘What the fuck was that for?’

She smacked Justin on his other ear. ‘Swearing, for one thing. And for not talking to each other. You call me up and you tell me you want to make up with each other. You ask whether you can meet at my place, where you first met when you started piano lessons. Fine. I let you meet. I put out the rice crackers and prawn chips for you. And what do you do? You don’t talk. You don’t touch my rice crackers or prawn chips. You just stare at my carpet!’

‘I don’t know what to say to him,’ Justin complained, rubbing his stinging ears. ‘Shit, that hurts.’

Miss Yipsoon raised her ruler again and he jumped up and backed away, holding his hands out defensively. ‘Okay, okay. Sorry.’

‘If you don’t know what to say, then this is what you’ll do,’ she decided. She walked over to her bookshelf, pulled out a battered yellow book of duets and placed it on the piano. ‘You can both sit down and let me see how much practice you’ve been doing lately.’