Behind the Moon (31 page)

‘I want him to pay,’ she sobbed. ‘How can people do these things and just get away with it? There’s all this pain and rage inside me and it just keeps growing. Like it’s been there all my life and I feel so fucking mad and I just don’t know what to do.’

‘I know. I’ve seen it in you.’ Linh knelt beside her daughter and put her arm around Tien’s shoulders.

‘Help me.’ Tien turned to her mother and clutched her tightly. ‘I need you, Mum. Make it go away. Make it better.’

Linh slowly rocked her daughter back and forth, stroking her hair. ‘I want to. I wish I could.’

Gibbo looked at them. He did not know what to say. Instead, he fetched a broom and dustpan. He stepped outside onto the balcony and made himself useful clearing up the mess that Tien had made.

Later, after Gibbo left, Linh put her daughter to bed and brought her a bowl of soup. She sat beside Tien and stroked her hair while Tien ate.

‘There’s something I should tell you,’ Tien said. Her fingers bunched on the blanket. She took a deep breath and said, ‘I went looking for my father when I was in the US.’

Linh said nothing. She took Tien’s empty bowl and put it carefully on the dresser, then she sat back down and kept on stroking her daughter’s hair. Tien looked at her.

‘Mum, he’s dead.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He went missing in action shortly after he wrote to you and has never been seen or heard from since. So he did love you, Mum.’ It was important to Tien to be able to give her mother this. ‘He wasn’t just another Pinkerton to your Cho-Cho San. He did love you. He was really going to marry you.’

Linh nodded slowly. She would think about this later when she was alone in her room. Then Tien said, ‘There’s more. I found out where his parents and family live. They’re in Lafayette. I flew there and drove to their house. I parked across the street and I saw them. But I couldn’t get out of the car. I just couldn’t.’ She looked at her mother with exhausted eyes. ‘I panicked and thought, what if they can’t accept it? What if they don’t believe me, or they hate me for telling them I exist? And I told myself that if it was you, you would’ve just marched up to the door to get it over and done with. But I didn’t have the guts.’

‘Maybe the timing wasn’t right,’ Linh said. ‘Still, you did a lot to find them in the first place. That deserves credit, doesn’t it? I never had the courage to find out for sure what happened to Bucky. You did.’

‘I thought that if I could just meet my father and get to know him, then everything would fall into place. Life would be good. I’d know who I am and what I need to be normal. I thought he might be the key. Now I’ll never know. I suppose it doesn’t seem all that important at the moment, compared to what the Cheongs are going through. But I wanted to be happy. It should be enough just to be alive, but somehow it isn’t.’

‘Everybody wants to be happy, yet who really is?’ Linh sighed. She pulled the covers around her daughter. ‘Get some rest now. I will tell you a folktale Ong Ngoai used to tell me when I was a child.

‘There was once a young boy called Cuoi who was born into a very poor family. They were so poor he couldn’t go to school. Instead, he had to herd buffaloes for a rich farmer. One day, while he was out gathering wood, he came across a beautiful tiger cub. He picked it up and started to play with it, but suddenly he heard the fierce growl of the mother tiger in the jungle. Frightened, he threw down the cub and quickly climbed up a banyan tree. When he looked down from the branches, to his horror he found that he had thrown the cub down with such force that the cub’s head was smashed. He feared the worst. Then he saw the most amazing thing. The tigress gathered the fallen leaves of the banyan tree, chewed them into a pulp and smoothed the paste over the head of the cub. Immediately it jumped up and ran away, as if it had never died.

‘After the tigress and her cub disappeared into the jungle, Cuoi climbed down from the banyan tree. He realised that it had miraculous properties, so he uprooted a sapling to take home. He planted it in his garden and warned his mother never to throw rubbish or dirty water where the banyan tree was planted. “Otherwise the tree will shake itself free of the earth and fly up to the sky.” But his mother thought he was talking nonsense, and she did exactly that. She threw rubbish and dirty water around the tree.

‘Then one day, when Cuoi was returning with his buffaloes, he saw his miraculous banyan tree pulling itself out of the soil, ready to rise into the air. He ran towards it and grasped its roots to haul it back down, but he was so slight in stature that the tree lifted him up into the sky instead. He managed to climb into its branches and they travelled for many days.

‘Finally, they reached a place where there was no poverty or trouble, only permanent peace. When Cuoi climbed down and looked around, he realised that he was on the moon. The banyan tree sank its roots there. Cuoi sat at the foot of the tree and looked down on the earth. He saw poverty and suffering and war and injustice, but he also saw the ones he loved. Although he was not unhappy on the moon, he longed to return to earth but he could not. Vietnamese children say that on certain nights, they can see Cuoi sitting at the foot of the banyan tree in the curve of the moon. He turns his head towards them and smiles, but he cannot return to his ordinary life and the ones he loves.’

Linh looked down at her daughter, breathing heavily in her sleep. She bent and pressed her lips to Tien’s forehead. ‘I’ll go with you to meet your grandparents if that’s what you need,’ she promised softly. Then she switched off the light and closed the bedroom door.

Before she climbed into her own bed that night, she drew aside the curtains and looked out into a black sky pricked with stars and scraped by the silver fingernail of a dying moon. She rested her elbows on the windowsill and thought about Bucky for a long while. Then she tilted her face towards the moon and said, ‘Bucky, I hope you found your banyan tree.’

Summer passed in a blur of blinding light and heat-hazed days. Then there was a bite to the air, chimneys bleeding loops of smoke, and the friendly argot of flocking birds at dusk, wheeling and arrowing northwards in annual migration. An autumn moon swung and the Southern Cross spread-eagled over the night sky.

Justin was discharged from hospital. He was still in a coma when Tek and Annabelle brought him home. Linh volunteered to take time off work to help nurse him. They brought him up to his bedroom, and Tien and Gibbo were surprised to see that the blue bedroom was unchanged since their childhood.

His high school trophies still perched precariously over the bed on a mended shelf. Sporting paraphernalia was tucked in a corner next to a cupboard crammed with clothes he’d given up wearing after high school. A pine bookcase still held his HSC and university textbooks along with a few paperbacks with pistols or planes on the cover, the complete Narnia series, and a plastic snowdome with an improbable Germanic nativity scene: snowy pine forests framing a frozen lake where mittened and scarfed children skated adjacent to a quaintly pretty wooden hut enclosing Joseph, Mary, baby Jesus in the manger and a few bored cows looking on. If you held it upside down, you could trace your finger over the words ‘Made in China’ on the white plastic base. When you tipped it the right way up again, everyone perished in a blizzard. Tien had given it to him one Christmas as a kitsch joke. On the wall, giant black and white posters of Humphrey Bogart and James Dean were beginning to fade from long exposure to the afternoon sun while Mel Gibson and Mark Lee were frozen in immortal youth within the framed poster of
Gallipoli
.

‘How could I know, Tien?’ Annabelle asked, and Tien nodded in agreement.

This was the bedroom of a stranger. She felt sad for its bland innocence. There was nothing which revealed the boy who grew up in this bedroom: his fears, hopes and sweaty desires. Nothing seemed connected to him as a person. Looking anew at this room, she realised that it was a room carefully constructed to reflect the good Asian son: hardworking, studious, healthily athletic, with no hint of unusual interests to disturb his parents’ normal ambitions for the personal and professional success of their child. It was a room which masked the person that he really was; the person who was, in effect, a stranger to his family and friends because he had been hiding from them for so long.

‘I want a second chance,’ Annabelle sighed. ‘You think you know your children but you never do when they’re adults. If only he’ll wake up, I want to get to know him this time.’

Later, after Annabelle went downstairs to make lunch for them, Tien said to Gibbo, ‘Do you think we really knew him at all?’

Gibbo looked at her and said slowly, ‘I don’t know if I ever knew him or you. Not really. Do we ever know anybody completely? You’re both my oldest and best friends, yet after a lifetime together we still shocked each other.’

‘I shock myself,’ she admitted. Then she asked, ‘Are you still angry with me? I wouldn’t blame you if you were.’

‘No. Why should I be?’

‘That incident in the pub—you know. And Mum. The AVO. I could go on.’

‘Well, you always had a hell of a temper,’ he said, and grinned.

‘And I always took it out on you. Sometimes Mum, but mostly you. I’m sorry. It was so slack because you were my best friend.’

Gibbo looked at her over Justin’s sleeping form. ‘So here we are again. The Three Mouseketeers back in Justin’s room. All for one and one for all. Where do we go from here?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Tien said. ‘But I’d like to think we’re still friends of sorts. That we have something to build on.’ She tried to smile. ‘I mean, nobody else could put up with me. Just ask Stan. He couldn’t. And now I’m back to plain old Tien Ho again.’

‘Well, if you ask me, plain old Tien Ho is a pretty good thing to be,’ Gibbo said. ‘Plain old Tien Ho was my best friend. Still is.’

Right at that moment, Tien knew that she would never find another friend like Gibbo. She walked around Justin’s bed to Gibbo and hugged him. ‘Gibbo, I really love you,’ she said. ‘You’re the best friend anyone could ever ask for. I’ll never let you down again. I’m always here for you now. I swear it.’

Gibbo nodded and squeezed her tightly. He knew that she meant it at that moment, and he accepted her good intentions. But their friendship could not be snap-frozen at this point. When Justin woke up and healed—and Gibbo was clinging determinedly to that hope—there would be an inevitable loosening of the strands of their lives as new friends and lovers were hooked and looped in. For whatever the strength of their friendship now, he knew they would not resist the pull of romantic love and the promise of that special partner if and when one came along.

The saddest myth the world ever told itself was the story of Hermaphroditus, he thought. Lonely people like him believed they would be whole once they found a soul-mate they could merge with. Full connection. Not just sexual, but mental and emotional intimacy. He knew it was an impossible fantasy but, like everyone else, he was helpless to resist it even though it seemed to him that the people all around him—even those he was closest to—only ever presented amputated selves to him. He would never see them as they really were. He thought about himself and realised he was no different. But he also realised that this was something that he could live with. There would never be a merging and a wholeness, only the quiet thrill of sharing ordinary lives and a patient waiting for an occasional glimpse of slivers of the self.

Life rutted into a routine of sorts. The Gibsons went over to visit the Cheongs several times a week. Gibbo and Tien sat upstairs with Justin while Bob and Tek bickered over everything for half the night, then trooped down to Tek’s karaoke den to fight over the microphone, sing at each other, and disparage the other’s musical tastes and talents. Everyone was surprised and appalled when Bob was converted to karaoke. He was blessed with a terrible, honking voice and a tuneless ear.

‘There ought to be a UN statute banning him from singing for the sake of human rights,’ Gibbo said, wincing at the sound of his father bellowing out Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’.

Eventually, Tek and Annabelle started inviting Dirk Merkel around for dinner. It was not only an act of reconciliation with Justin’s sexuality; it was also an offering of faith. This was the partner their son had loved above all others. When Justin woke up, he would know that the man he’d loved was welcomed by his parents. He would know that he was fully accepted, that their love came without strings.

‘All my life, until the Dead Diana Dinner, my son never gave me any trouble,’ Tek said to Dirk one night. ‘From the time he was a baby, he was always such a good boy. He was always so good-natured and obedient. He studied hard and tried his best in everything. Whatever he is, I know that he is a good son.’

‘True, you know,’ Annabelle said. ‘Jay is
ho tai sek
and
ho kwai
. So lovable and such a good boy. You know, I never have to tell him to clean up his room or sit down when he use the toilet at home so he doesn’t shee-shee everywhere. And then, when he learn how to drive, he always fetch me where I want to go. He never complain,
lor
. Always help me around the house, not like young people today. Except for Tien and Gibbo, of course. My Jay is very lucky to have his friends here, like before when they were young. He’ll be so happy when he wakes up and sees all the people he loves around him.’

In the end there’s simply the Cheongs and the Gibsons and the Hos. Waiting. Watching. When they look back on their lives, they are acutely conscious of how often they’ve messed up. There’s no doubt they’ll do so again. And yet if you offered them a fresh start, they wouldn’t take it because, even if such a thing were possible, it would unravel the thick threads that knit them together, making a messy but meaningful pattern of their lives. When they’re all together, even if they’re steeped in fear and pain and confusion, they are no longer living on the fraying fringes of a difficult and hostile world; they are at the stable centre of the universe and life is simply the way it should be.

So they stumble through their joys and sorrows together, lurching past the heart-stabbing treacheries that sometimes go with a lifetime of love and friendship. When they slip and fall, they clamber back onto the same path of the social cripples and the lamed in love. They lean and groan and cheer each other on, arms entwined around each other’s shoulders. Limping along the yellow brick road towards that place where there will be no trouble. Never getting there.