Behind the Moon (8 page)

‘Hey, you know what? It’s been so long since we’ve really had a good chat,’ Tien said.

‘Yeah, you’re right. We should do this more.’ He grinned at her and, just like that, her night was suddenly perfect. She wanted to extend this moment of intimacy.

‘You want to get some VBs and go somewhere else?’ she asked.

‘We could do that,’ he considered. Then he said, ‘Nah. I’m buggered. I just wanna get out of these clothes and crawl into bed. Feel like I’m choking. Take a raincheck, eh?’

‘Sure.’ She hid her disappointment behind a smile and was rewarded with a light, friendly punch on her arm.

It was not even eleven when Justin pulled up to the kerb outside the apartment block where she lived. He put the car into ‘park’, leaving the engine running and the headlights on.

‘Well,’ he said, drumming his fingers lightly on the steering wheel. ‘That was all right, wasn’t it? Thank god it’s only once in a lifetime.’

‘Yeah,’ Tien said. She unclipped her seatbelt and wriggled around to face him. ‘It was a really great night. I had such a good time, Justin.’

‘Yeah, good. Me too. Specially Macca’s! Not.’

‘Yeah.’

He waited for her to say goodnight, but she didn’t.

Tien sat there in the darkness, expectant. Throughout her HSC preparations, even during the exams, she had obsessed about this night. This was the night when something was meant to happen between her and Justin. There had to be more to it than this.

The street was quiet, the darkness pierced only by the lit windows of houses and apartments. The car engine sputtered and she could feel the framework vibrating. An empty cassette case shivered on the dashboard. The digital clock glowed eerily green. Minutes flickered by. Still she did not say anything. She just scraped up all the love and yearning inside her and focused it into a gaze so concentrated she was nearly cross-eyed. After all this time, he simply had to see how she felt about him.

Justin shifted in his seat and looked away. ‘Well,’ he said with forced cheerfulness. ‘Getting late. Thanks for a great evening, Tien.’

And she remembered that this was Annabelle Cheong’s son. He would never initiate ‘dirty things’ with a girl unless she showed him that she was sexed up and seducible. She would have to make the first move. Tien cleared her throat.

‘Justin,’ she murmured in her best husky voice. And she began to undress in the front seat of Annabelle’s car.

Tien realised something almost immediately: if you’re not used to wearing an
ao dai
, never attempt to seduce someone while trying to take it off. Her zip ran off its track and locked into the fabric halfway down the zipper but, in her excitement and nervousness, she did not notice. So when she tried to pull the long skirt up and over her head to expose her breasts, the narrow sleeves got caught at her elbows. She sat there in a silk dress that had suddenly transformed into a straitjacket. Her dress was over her head, and her arms were crossed in front of her face, entangled in the material she was trying to tug off. She struggled in vain for several seconds. It was hot under all that fabric. Her arms felt wrenched out of their sockets. She began to think she was suffocating. Panic gushed up swiftly.

‘Justin, help me,’ Tien begged.

For a moment, she thrashed on by herself, wondering whether Justin had left the car in disgust. Then she heard him sigh, and she felt his hands gripping the fabric near her pinioned arms. After a lot of tugging and the sound of ripping silk, her arms were free. She sat there in the loose white silk trousers of her
ao dai
and a matching white lace bra that contrasted starkly with her dark skin.

At this moment, she reached a point of no return. She had humiliated herself so completely that she had nothing left to lose. So she took a deep breath, reached around her back and unhooked her bra. She forced her lips to tilt up into a smile, turned to Justin and said, ‘Okay. Let’s try this again.’

And that was when she noticed the look of horror on Justin’s face. He wrenched open the car door and stumbled out.

Tien sat there in the front seat of Annabelle Cheong’s car, her bra hanging loosely from its shoulder straps. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, they were wet with tears. She dashed them away and swiped her hand under her nose like a little kid.

‘What’s wrong with me?’ she whispered.

‘Hey. Don’t cry.’

Tien heard the car door opening. Justin climbed back in. She could not look at him. She remembered that she only had her trousers and bra on. She crossed her arms over her breasts and turned her back to him.

Justin shrugged off his dinner jacket and wrapped it around Tien. He hugged her and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I feel so stupid,’ she sniffed. ‘I don’t know what to say to you now.’

‘Me neither,’ he admitted.

‘I guess you think I’m a slut.’

‘Nah, no way. I was just, I don’t know, taken by surprise. Yeah.’

She dashed the tears away from her eyes and looked out the side window. ‘I know I’m not pretty or anything. It’s just that I thought you’d want to. I mean, I thought all guys want to if they get a chance. And it’s not like I’m expecting, you know, anything after.’

He looked at her and recognised her low expectations of life in himself. For the first time since he’d known her, he felt that he understood her—this twin soul who believed she could snatch a fistful of happiness in the front seat of a car and that it might just be enough to get her through. In understanding, he loved her a little and his voice was tender as he uttered the age-old cliché: ‘It’s not you, Tien. It’s me. It was just such a shock. I’m sorry I didn’t handle it better.’

He shut his eyes for a moment and thought of his parents. He took a deep breath and said, ‘You looked really beautiful tonight, Tien. You sure you want to do this with me?’

She turned around slowly and, even through the darkness, he could see that she was radiant with incredulous hope. Hesitantly, she reached for his hand and gripped it tightly. ‘Of course I want to. If you want to, that is.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ He could do this, he told himself. He would make himself want her, like any normal guy. ‘I just don’t want you to be sorry after.’

‘No! I couldn’t be. I want you to be the first. I l—’

He put his hand over her mouth quickly and said, ‘Don’t say it, okay? In fact, let’s agree right now that we won’t say anything. We’ll just do it but we won’t talk about it ’cos we don’t need words. Okay?’

She nodded silently and he kissed her on that full wide mouth smudged with lipstick. The car was still running. He shifted the gear. ‘Let’s go somewhere more private, eh?’

They drove towards the Potts Hill reservoirs near the Chullora railway workshops where steel skeletons of electricity towers hulked overhead, dragging thick black power lines like musical staves across the sky.

Justin nosed the car into deep shadows and parked it. Silently, he unclipped his seatbelt and she did the same. He leaned towards her and locked his arms around her body. He hugged her for a long moment and turned his nose to sniff at her stiff sprayed hair. He did not move.

She couldn’t gauge his mood. She didn’t understand him.

‘Are you crying?’ she asked uncertainly.

‘No. Course not.’ Grimly, doggedly, he began to kiss her. Their mouths opened and tongues melded. He ran his hands over her back and across her breasts, patting and kneading mechanically.

It was not what she had expected. Where was the epiphany of passion, the thrill and the ache in belly and breasts? Arousal was intermittent. Lust flared and fizzled out. Her nipples pinched in the cool night air but she remained stubbornly dry. She had waited so long to make love with Justin. Now she had to squeeze her eyes shut and block out the reality of the man so that she could focus on the fantasy that had stirred love’s desire in the yearning dark of lonely nights. She ran her fingertips across his smooth skin and marvelled at the liberty he granted her. Her flesh pressed into his, she breathed in his air. They had never been closer, never more intimate.

And she felt so alone. She could not break past his skin to touch the essence of him. It was such hard work with so little reward. At last she pulled away from him and said, ‘It’s not going to work, is it?’

‘No, I guess not.’ He sighed and felt sorry for her. ‘Um. There are other things we can do.’

He reached under the loose elastic of her trousers to try to masturbate her, but she pushed his hand away. She sat back in her seat and pleaded, ‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing. It’s not you.’

‘What is it then?’

He kept silent. He badly wanted to take her into his confidence but he did not dare. He groped for her hand and squeezed it gently, hoping that in this pulse of flesh there would be some measure of comfort and the faint hope of friendship.

But she refused to be comforted. She bleated the phrase he did not want to hear. ‘Justin, I love you.’

He fumbled for words, but anything he clutched at was bound to be inadequate. He was learning that in the wide range of human experiences, the ones that truly mattered had the narrowest of vocabularies; the emotions that were most deeply and individually felt found expression through the quotation of other people’s clichés.

‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘But just as a friend. I’m sorry.’

She couldn’t let it go. She said hopefully, ‘But we had a good time tonight, right? Maybe if we just give it a go again some time, something’ll happen. I mean, I really love you.’

Why did she have to keep thrusting her love at him until he had no choice but to lie? In his desperation to give her what she wanted so that he could get away, he said, ‘Yeah, sure. We can give it a go. See what happens.’ When he dropped her home shortly afterwards, he promised, ‘I’ll call you.’

Tien said she didn’t expect anything from Justin. She lied. Over the next week she waited for him to phone her but he didn’t. Finally she rang him. He wasn’t home. Annabelle said he’d gone away with Gibbo.

‘Camping with
Gibbo
?’ They hadn’t mentioned anything about it to her. Her heart cramped with hurt and jealousy. She felt betrayed. How could it be that Justin meant everything to her, and yet she was only ever the friend of his best friend? She loved him until she was sick with yearning, but he always put Gibbo first. She blamed Gibbo. She said to Annabelle, ‘Can you ask Justin to ring me when he gets back, please? It’s important.’

She waited, but he did not call. Then, just before Christmas, she got a tacky card with a Christmas tree on it.
Gone to Singapore to visit the rels. Have a good Xmas. See
you when I get back. Luv ya! Justin
.

She knew better by then but she could not help rereading the card and clutching that last sentence like a lifeline. ‘Luv ya!’ At nights she hugged her pillow to her chest, squeezed her thighs together to ease her sexual ache and repeated the words to herself: ‘Luv ya!’

In early January she heard from Gibbo that Justin was back. She tested him with silence. Still he did not call. She took his Christmas card out, tore it into tiny pieces and dropped it into the large garbage bin behind Uncle Duc’s restaurant. She dumped the remains of pork and duck bones on top of it.

Justin finally phoned her in February, a few weeks before university started.

‘I’m really sorry I didn’t call sooner,’ he said. He sounded tense and upset. ‘I’d like to try and explain and make it up to you.’

‘Nothing to explain or make up for. No expectations, remember?’ she said breezily. ‘Hope you had a great summer. I’ve been so busy at Uncle Duc’s restaurant I don’t know where this summer’s gone.’

‘Oh. Well, can I take you out for lunch? I’d really like to have a chat with you.’

‘Not this week. I’ve got heaps of stuff to do.’

There was one of those long, awkward pauses between them, like a rubber band stretched too taut. She could feel their friendship snapping. It wasn’t her fault, she told herself. He couldn’t expect forgiveness that easily. He had to earn it. She wanted him to prove that he was truly sorry. She wanted to be wooed away from her grudge and back into friendship, but he didn’t know how to make things right.

‘Um. Are you okay?’ he asked diffidently.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You’re not mad at me?’

‘Why should I be?’

Another pause. Still he did not tell her what she needed to hear.

He should have recognised that in her deep hurt, she flung out words like a barrier he had to break through. He was supposed to say, ‘I know you’re not all right. You can’t be. I was so mean to you and I’m sorry. Talk to me. Let me make it up to you.’ And if he said it often enough, if he really persisted in grovelling, she would know that their friendship meant something to him; she would know that she was important. Only then would she unbend and forgive him. But he was a guy and he compounded his crime by taking her at her word.

‘Well, some other time then. Give us a call when you’re free, okay?’

‘Sure thing,’ she said carelessly. With Justin she had always found it difficult to express what she felt. Now she had reached a stage where her words conveyed the opposite of what she actually meant.

Best Friends at the Beach

He yearned and pined—he seemed to have his soul inside a kiln, his heart beneath a plow.

The silkworm, spinning, wasted day by day; the gaunt cicada, bit by frost, shrank more.

He languished, half alive, half dead—he’d weep real tears of blood, but lose his soul to dreams.

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

A few days after the Year 12 formal Justin rang Gibbo and asked him whether he was game to go camping somewhere around Reef Beach. ‘I need to get away for a bit.’

‘I don’t think we’re allowed to camp there overnight, are we?’ Gibbo said doubtfully.

‘Who’s going to know?’

‘All right then. You’re on. Is Tien coming as well?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Justin said shortly. ‘D’you think her mum would let her go camping with two guys? My own mum wouldn’t be too happy about it either.’

In fact, Annabelle was unhappy about the whole trip, but Tek encouraged them. He said, ‘You should do it. It’ll toughen you up. If you were Singaporean citizens you’d both have to do your National Service now that you’ve finished school. I tell you, they’d make NS-men out of you. You have to camp in the most terrible conditions with the heat and humidity and mosquitoes and thunderstorms. My nephew got a fungal infection in his feet because he couldn’t change his socks for a week and he had to tramp through mud during the rainy season.’

‘Ee-yer,’ Annabelle exclaimed. ‘So
lah-cha
. Dirty like anything.’

One of the reasons Justin was so fond of Gibbo was that Gibbo had known Tek and Annabelle since he was a child. There was no need to explain his parents to Gibbo, no need to feel embarrassed or ashamed of the things they said or did. Gibbo accepted with equanimity Tek’s obsession with karaoke and made no comment when he came over for dinner and, immediately after the meal, Tek pushed back his chair and disappeared down into the rumpus room to transform himself into Frank Sinatra getting a kick out of you.

Neither did Gibbo raise his eyebrows or take offence when Annabelle knocked on the toilet door and called out, ‘Gibbo, are you doing a
berak
? Use the Harpic powder after you flush and don’t forget to open the window. So stinko otherwise.’

‘Mum!’ Justin said, highly embarrassed.

‘But he has that cheesy-lamby smell like all the
ang
mors
,’ Annabelle protested.

‘That’s so racist,’ Justin accused angrily.

She said, bewildered, ‘But it’s true, you know. I can smell it.’

Gibbo just replied obligingly, ‘Okay
lah
, Auntie.’

He loved Annabelle more than his own parents. Whatever she might say, her actions demonstrated her kindness. She was ever-willing to teach him and Tien how to cook. She was always eager to chat with them and she met them on their level effortlessly. He adored the way she spoke because there was something about Singlish that precluded the polite formality that maintained emotional distance. His mother’s precise English was a language that kept others in the visitors’ lounge; Annabelle’s Singlish hauled him right into her kitchen, sat him down on a stool and fed him food to welcome him. After that, she could comment tactlessly on his
ang mor
smell all she wanted; he knew it was not personal and he did not mind. But Justin did not understand this.

Justin had often wondered how any other friend of his, let alone any future partner, would deal with his parents. He loved them, but he simply could not envisage inviting anyone home to meet them. He did not see how anyone could like him enough to distinguish him from his parents’ behaviour. He could not step outside his own wincing reaction to Tek and Annabelle long enough to imagine that other people might genuinely like them, idiosyncracies and all. Their perceived transgressions loomed large in his mind and he could not see them clearly for their imagined faults. Guiltily, he struggled against their Asian oddness and resented the knowledge that he was contaminated. In feeling ashamed of them, he also felt ashamed of himself. He did not want to be Asian and he did not want to be gay.

Ever since the Strathfield Plaza massacre and his first sexual experience in the toilets two and a half years ago, Justin had maintained a certain distance from Gibbo because he was afraid of what he might start to feel if he were to get too close to him. Yet he did not see how he would ever be accepted by anyone else because Gibbo had known the Cheongs almost all his life and was practically a part of the family. Gibbo not only accepted them, he emulated them.

So when Annabelle turned to the boys and said, ‘You better make sure you don’t forget to bring toilet paper and disinfectant,’ all Gibbo said in reply was, ‘Okay
lah
, Auntie.’

They didn’t forget, as it happened. Neither did they forget their sleeping bags, a slab of beer, two cigars that Justin had bought from the tobacconist in Strathfield Plaza and a couple of joints he had acquired somewhere else, a plastic cigarette lighter, a mammoth bag of corn chips and two limp rump steaks they picked up from a boutique butcher which were so expensive they couldn’t afford anything else. They caught the ferry from Circular Quay over to Manly and did the Esplanade walk along the north harbour coast towards The Spit, lugging their loot down to Reef Beach and dumping it where seaweed was scribbled along the high-tide strand.

In a few weeks’ time it would be Christmas. Justin would fly to Singapore and face the annual gathering of the Cheong relatives—all the successful uncles and studious cousins who would have heart attacks if they really knew who he was and what he’d done. Gibbo would have Christmas lunch with his parents and spend the rest of the day hiding in his bedroom and nurturing his loneliness.

But for now it was a perfect, warm and bright December day. The HSC was over and the rest of their lives had yet to begin. For the first time in years it was just the two of them again: Gibbo and Justin. Kicking sand into each other’s faces, dunking each other in the waves, it was as if time had concertinaed and they were simply kids once more, back on Miss Yipsoon’s piano stool mucking around and consolidating their friendship through the rough and tumble of play like a couple of scrapping puppies.

When the bright afternoon smudged into dusk, they clambered carefully over sharp rocks and threw out a tangle of fishing lines with no hope of hooking anything more than Coke cans coughed out of the sea. They started to feel hungry so they gathered up twigs and soggy driftwood, trying to fire up the sorry pile with the cigarette lighter. After half an hour of scorching their fingers on the flickering flame, they still had no success, so they set alight individual sticks and tried to sear their raw pieces of rump steak with the smoking brands. It was a disgusting dinner, of course, with the meat half charred, half raw, but they laughed and were happy.

They consigned their steaks to fish bait, stuffed themselves with corn chips and got plastered on VB. They lit their cigars, choked and spluttered and puffed away with watery eyes, feeling rather grown-up before they lurched over to throw up on the rocks. Reaching into the depths of their backpacks for plastic boxes of Tic-Tacs (they’d remembered the toilet paper but not toothbrushes or toothpaste) to remove the taste of puke from their mouths, they grinned idiotically at each other and felt exhilarated by enacting the sheer normality of being two Aussie adolescents smashed at the beach.

At two in the morning, when the wind blew strong and cold over the surging waves, they wrapped their unzipped sleeping bags around themselves and smoked their joints in silence. Justin shivered and squirmed closer to Gibbo for warmth.

‘That’s one consolation for all this lard on me anyway,’ Gibbo said thickly. ‘Don’t feel the cold much.’

‘Come on, you’re not that big.’

‘Too fat for girls like Tien and her cousins,’ Gibbo sighed. ‘Too fat to be going anywhere. You ever notice that, Jus?’

‘What?’

‘People like us. You wanna move up and move out of the west, you have to shed the load and get built and fit. You’re lucky ’cos you’re not fat. There’s a bell curve of fat between the Blue Mountains and the coast. People look at me in all my lard and think I’m going nowhere, and the sad thing is, they’re probably right.’

‘What a load of crap. Lots of big people are really successful and earn heaps more money than my dad. Anyway, you’ll be glad of all that fat when you’re middle-aged,’ Justin said. ‘Have you ever noticed how skinny people seem to age more quickly? I think the fat stretches out the wrinkles and keeps you looking young. Decades from now, when those trendy eastern suburbs types are cling-wrapping their wrinkled faces, you’ll still be looking young.’

‘But fat,’ Gibbo objected. ‘Anyway, years from now doesn’t count. How’m I ever gonna get a girlfriend looking like this?’

‘Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,’ Justin scoffed. ‘Fuck girls, eh?’

‘That’s the problem. Wish I could.’

Justin snorted with laughter. ‘What are you worried about? I’m sure you’ll get good marks in the HSC and you’ll be off to uni next year where you’ll meet lots of new people.’

‘Yeah, but we’ll all be split up and what’ll happen to me then? Who’s gonna wanna hang around me at uni?’

‘Who gives a shit about people at uni? We’re still friends, aren’t we? Gibbo, mate, you’re the best.’ Justin flung his arms around Gibbo and hugged him tight. ‘You’re my best friend, you know that?’

Sloppily sentimental from too much unaccustomed booze and bong, distressed by his friend’s dull gloom, he sought only to give comfort and take a little bit for himself. He turned his face towards Gibbo’s—fleshy, familiar, and so loved by him just then—and stroked his thumb over the Tasmanian birthmark. He kissed Gibbo long and hard. Love detonated like dynamite through him. Like an explosion of fists on his face.

Tek and Annabelle were horrified to see the cuts and bruises smudged over their son’s face when he returned the next day. Annabelle raced for the Dettol and began disinfecting Justin’s wounds.

‘What happened?’ she demanded.

‘I slipped and fell on some rocks,’ Justin said.

She shot a seriously annoyed look at her husband. ‘You see. I told you it’s not safe. This is what happens when you try to make an NS-man out of your son and tell him to go camping.’

Gibbo picked up the phone to ring Justin several times but he was always too angry and too ashamed to dial Justin’s number. He did not know what to say to his oldest friend. He rang Tien instead. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He felt that if only he could talk to her, they would be able to sort things out. But he could not reach her. She was never in and although he left several messages with her mother, she did not return his calls. He didn’t know what he had done wrong. He did not have the courage to ask. It was the end of the Three Mouseketeers.

When university started they were scattered; different universities, different courses, different life directions. Gibbo made a number of acquaintances in his engineering classes and socialised in the most basic manner. He went to the pub with them after class, got blind drunk, and chanted collectively: ‘Engineer! Rhymes with beer! Engineer! Rhymes with beer!’ He thought he was enjoying himself; he was doing all right. Then he discovered that these were not the kind of friends to whom he could really talk, or the kind who would even ring him up to hang out on weekends. Nothing in his experience of watching cheesy American campus movies had prepared him for university life where, after classes and the pub, people just disappeared back into the suburbs from which they came. And when they moved on to different classes the following year, he didn’t see them anymore.

That was when he realised that his friendships—such as they were—had congealed into a pattern of association by default, followed by the fragmentation of the group when the centrifugal forces of life circumstances flung them outside his physical orbit. He ached with fear that he would always be alone.