Dark Roots (16 page)

It is the look he had when I let the fish go.

The Correct Names of Things

All the time I worked at Eddie Lim's café, I never once saw him or any of the other kitchenhands eat Chinese food. When 11.00 p.m. rolled around they went and got hamburgers, and ate them sitting in the greasy wreckage of the kitchen, staring into nothing, and chewing. Overlaying everything else would come the smell of hot cardboard, wilted french fries. After clean-up they would play cards till dawn.

‘Hey, Ellen!' Eddie would shout. ‘What you want?'

I would pause from scraping plates, and think about the menu in its oily plastic cover, the food customers had been buying all night: glistening chunks of spare ribs, chicken, pineapple.

‘Nothing, Eddie. Thanks.'

‘You gotta have
some
thing!' His face, round as a dumpling, blinks reproachfully — Jackie Chan in a big, crumpled apron. ‘Wonton soup? Whaddayou say, huh?'

Later when I go home I will pull my shirt over my head and smell a gust of sweet and sour sauce. My hair hangs limp with cooking fat. In the afternoons, before the dinner rush, I like to watch Joey boil the chickens, strip off the skin like a steaming, waxy rubber glove, and cut it up for spring rolls. The flesh is torn up for chop suey and the feet and head go back into the pot for soup stock. Joey's wrist flicking in a measure of monosodium glutamate, catching the drip on the lip of the pot, tossing the wok so that everything inside rolls over like a wave on a smoking black beach is worth watching. When the dining room is set up I help him prep. Spring rolls, he tells me as I stand alongside him wrapping, should be tight as cigarettes. I laugh and agree, saying mine look more like soggy cabbage wrapped up in a serviette. We say all this with a mixture of fifteen English words and elaborate mime. Joey is a refugee, with the same shock of hair as the suspect shot by the South Vietnamese general in that famous piece of war footage, the same neat checked shirt. Now he drives a rusting old Falcon station wagon, small and precise as a child at the wheel, and makes Chinese food. When he cuts vegetables, he sets the cleaver against the tip then the first knuckle, then the second knuckle of his left forefinger, the cleaver blurring and deadly, every piece of carrot precisely the same. At times like this, watching the calm, relaxed planes of his face, I wish I spoke whatever language he is thinking in.

‘You no like my food, Ellen?' Eddie is pretending to be hurt, now. He sits on the high stool at the takeaway counter. ‘You take these instead.' He hands me a plastic bag of fortune cookies. ‘Maybe you get a good fortune and marry that boyfriend and have babies.'

‘Eddie, I'm too young!' I put the cookies in my bag. This happens every Friday night. At home, I have a container full of prophecies and aphorisms, tiny slips of waxed paper with blue words advising me to turn catastrophe into opportunity, to eat well and make my peace before going into battle.

‘Anyway,' I say, ‘I notice you guys aren't eating anything off the menu.'

Eddie's sweet pork-bun face creases in delight.

‘No …' he says, fumbling under his grease-stiff apron for cigarettes. ‘We only like
Chinese
food.'

He cracks up laughing at himself, cackling as he turns the ‘Open' sign around. Now he will wash up. Then he'll store what's left in the refrigerator, wipe the benches down, take out the roll of money he's made tonight, and cut the cards.

It is 1981 and I make $23.50 a night. Upstairs from the restaurant is a discreet brothel and at 10.30 p.m. someone always comes down to pick up some takeaway. The women look tired, like any other shiftworker, sick of spraying their hair, bored but not really hungry. One of them is only seventeen, three years younger than me, and when she comes down she orders a batch of caramelised apples. She has a sweet tooth, and a vague air of being elsewhere, and she seems always just out of the shower. The other women tell me that that's what she does. She showers and men pay to watch her. Amazed, I watch those men arrive and slip upstairs as the night progresses. Some of them are wearing jogging gear, some tie up a dog to the post outside. All night as I pack and add up and ask if people want forks or chopsticks, I am thinking of her, drying herself and getting back into the shower, over and over. Dreamily, I stare at Joey's hands guiding the cleaver, that repeated, precise bending of the finger, shaving so close to catastrophe and blood.

My boyfriend is studying marine biology, and wants to change to economics/law. In 1981 you can contemplate things like this, because education is free and the university is full of people on a kind of long, messy postponement, swapping courses midstream like trying on clothes. I am enrolled in a bachelor's degree in Russian literature, and under the takeaway counter is a copy of Gogol's
Dead Souls
. My boyfriend often turns up at my place in the middle of the night. He likes to go and see bands; he considers punk rock an omen of social anarchy. He crawls into bed smelling of rum and a deep, bitter cloud of cigarette smoke, crunching fortune cookies. Jangling energy seems to ring off him, as if decibels of music are leaking from his skin. ‘
Things are rarely what they seem
,' he whispers, reading the blue words, and then: ‘A tall, dark stranger may well slip into your bed. You would be unwise to refuse him.'

He laughs at himself, twitching, humming, manic. I try to imagine him as an economist or lawyer. I can't imagine him as anything other than what he is: twenty years old and in a perpetual state of pleasing himself.

‘Sweet and sour pork!' Eddie echoes me. ‘Lemon chicken! Large fried rice! Gotcha!' As he rattles back the order for Chinese food Chinese people would never eat, his accent takes the words and chops the consonants, makes them one-syllable Chinese again. ‘Swee sou' po'! Spri' ro'!'

After hours, I practise this cartoonish delivery at Eddie's request. ‘Shor sou'!' I cry. ‘Lar' fry rie!'

‘See? So easy to speak Chinese!' cackles Eddie as he scrubs the bench, having to wipe tears of hilarity from his heavy-lidded eyes. Composing himself with a sigh, he collects all the receipts and stuffs them up on the shelf where he stores tins of soup that nobody ever orders, that are covered with a patina of dust and oil. Shark Fin Soup. Bird's Nest Soup. They are not on the menu. Four soups are served at the café, and they are all ladled from the same pot, rendered down from chicken feet and necks. I clean up splattered soy sauce and think of what my boyfriend has told me about sharks. ‘No bones,' he'd said. ‘Only cartilage. So there's no skeletonic remains so that scientists can carbon date how long sharks have been on the planet.'

Sceptically, I'd asked: ‘What about teeth?'

‘That's the freaky bit. Their teeth are constantly falling out and being replaced so that we can't even tell how old individual sharks get. They could live for hundreds of years, for all we know.' This was at the beginning of his marine biology course last year, when he was still interested and his tutor apparently hadn't taken a dislike to him, when he still talked of us going up to Cairns and getting our scuba-diving certificates. ‘We should keep a shark in captivity for years and years,' he'd said, grinning, ‘just to watch the bastard age.'

All that bone-free shark to eat, I used to think, and the Chinese make a soup out of the fin, of cartilage and grey skin. Or not a bird or an egg, but a bird's nest. That was before I watched them cook, and learned they wasted nothing, that they shaved a piece of beef so thin it was almost transparent, that they filled rice paper with chicken skin and cabbage and could roll it up as tightly as a cigarette. I made the mistake, too, of thinking their gambling was reckless, that maybe they were betting for fun.

During the week, I go to lectures, I attend my tutorials in small carpeted tutors' rooms lined with books. I am two months away from graduating, I have been asked to consider honours the following year, there are rumours of tutoring positions. I picture a room like this, branches knocking at the window, surreptitious reading all day, a swivel chair. The air conditioner hums discreetly. It is the beginning of the 1980s, and the university has money and it wants women — on its staff, on its committees, on its books.

‘The world is your oyster,' says the Dean when he sees us. We are nearly all women, in Literature. The boys have finished with Arts, they have discarded Humanities and are ready for the new toys now: computer science and economics, ready to claim the decade ahead. Predatory and boneless, my boyfriend is drifting along there with them, moving on a tide and ever alert to the main chance, unable to stay still.

You will soon discover wealth
, I read as I eat fortune cookies and watch the midnight movie.
The brave must grasp the dragon's tail. What is most valuable we cannot count.
Almond and egg flavour crumbles on my tongue. Tonight two little children were sitting in the café when I arrived, doing their homework at the corner table. They were half-Chinese, polite and excited, jumping up to glimpse through the servery and hovering round the swing door.

‘Finish your homework,' Eddie had said sternly. ‘My kids,' he'd added to me in explanation.

The children smile at me sweetly. I gape to encompass the sudden idea of Eddie with a Caucasian wife, and he shrugs.

‘Didn't work out,' he says. ‘She says I can have them for this weekend. Sit down and do your homework!' he repeats to the children. They return to the table, obedient and whispering. He brings out a plate of prawn crackers and puts it down in front of them without a word. As he hastens back to the kitchen, I see tears deep in the creases of his blinking eyes. The other kitchenhands busy themselves with chopping. It's like being shown the back of a photograph — lines and lines of mysterious text about something you assumed was simple.

I dip prawns in cornflour paste, breadcrumb them, slide them into oil. Joey sharpens a cleaver, sniffing with a cold, singing phonetic Bee Gees to himself. On the counter are twenty-five separate containers each holding one ingredient. A day to shop, a day to chop, Eddie tells me, smacking a knife into piles of cabbage. Four weeks and I will graduate with distinctions, three more essays including my masterly piece on
Dead Souls
. I will have a degree from an institution dedicated to the pursuit of pure knowledge, which has intimated it may have a place for me. My boyfriend is restless with a nihilism I don't have the experience yet to recognise as selfishness, that I misinterpret as something deep and attractively Russian.

Suddenly a man appears outside and sets up an aluminium ladder against the wall of the restaurant. In his hands he carries a huge pair of wire cutters.

‘What's that bastard doing?' cries Eddie Lim. I go outside and ask. The man says he is cutting the restaurant's electricity supply. Eddie is a delinquent client with a three-month outstanding bill. Eddie's restaurant is about to go broke. His face is trying to be expressionless as he says this, but he cannot prevent a slick grin sliding across it as he hands me a card.

‘Tell the Chink,' he says.

‘Wait, we have customers, we cooking right now,' says Eddie, appearing, but he feels the man's sly pleasure and is abashed by it. It isn't until he fumbles under his apron, scarlet with shame, hunting for his betting roll, that the man lowers the wire cutters and snorts with contempt. Customers inside pause over their soup, watching.

‘Wait,' says Eddie. ‘Please.' His face is as boxed as when he watches the cards fall. He takes out his cheap cigarettes and holds the crumpled packet carefully in his left hand, still digging. In his right hand, when he withdraws it again, is a box of matches, a few folded notes, a scrap of white paper with figures on it. He blinks, defeated. Down the steps comes the seventeen-year-old girl from the brothel, slowly and coolly folding her arms as she stands at the base of the ladder.

‘What's the problem here?' she says, and I feel a sudden intense change, the two men seem to lean towards her, her lazy adolescent certainty speaks a language to them that streams straight past me. She shifts her weight to her other leg like something underwater changing direction, and looks steadily up at the man from the electricity company on the ladder, and under her gaze he descends like someone suffering vertigo.

‘No problem,' he says, and I can tell there won't be. Back inside, I roll chopsticks inside paper serviettes, thinking that I am twenty years old and the owner of 145 pieces of Confucian advice and I know nothing at all. That night as I'm packing to go, Eddie and Joey sit on the floor in the kitchen shuffling cards, shuffling debts and alimony and war and missing relatives and proceeds from thirteen straight hours' work in a dead suburban shopping mall. I know nothing.

‘Have a think over the holidays,' the Dean says. ‘The option's there.' At home in my flat it spreads itself out like a logical road map where you follow directions from here to there and end up tenured, making money talking about words, opening books whose significant passages have been underlined and trammelled into elegant arguments lasting years. ‘The pursuit of knowledge is an admirable thing,' says the Dean, and then, ‘There are plenty of worse jobs,' smiling with a lame attempt at mateyness. My boyfriend fails three subjects and launches into an assessment appeal with more energy than he's devoted to two years of study, and in February gets busted and charged for selling hash to an undercover narcotics agent at a thrash gig at the uni bar.