Dark Roots (17 page)

Stare calmly in the eye of adversity, bow like a reed
. On a hot, still evening at the end of summer, I unroll one that says:
The root of true wisdom lies in calling things by their correct names
. I watch Joey's hand move from bowl to bowl at the restaurant, as I float in a limbo of wondering why I'm stalling my answer to the Dean, why I'm not jumping at the chance, my only chance. My window of opportunity, the Dean had said, as if I was buying insurance. Joey, humming tonelessly, picks up what he needs, in a handful, a pinch, a ladleful, watching the contents in the wok and then jerking his wrist with calm precision, and suddenly he has made an omelette.

On Chinese New Year, the shop glittering with red and gold decorations, Eddie calls me into the kitchen and with much ceremony presents me with a moon cake.

‘Good luck!' he says. ‘Story of this is that wise woman sent message in the moon cake. The guards never think to look inside the cake. The woman was smarter than all of them. Inside, you eat it and see.' He and Joey and the other shy Chinese kitchenhand I know as Henry watch me as I raise the cake to my mouth and take a bite. It tastes like solid lard, a mashed slice of fat and sugar. My throat tightens. I take a breath and chew, moving the texture around my mouth, thinking of jasmine tea and coriander, lemon juice to cut the grease, something hot and astringent to wash this down. I swallow.

‘Mmmm …' I say. Their faces wreathe in smiles, nodding and grinning for me to continue.

I am twenty years old, and I will never teach in a university. I will withdraw from my honours proposal and drive alone to Cairns, where I will fall backwards off a boat holding goggles and a mask to my face, into eighteen metres of reef-fringed water and another element entirely. I will float weightless and astonished, my vision crammed with the lesson of what is always under the surface.
The fiercest dragon curls around its treasure. Burn the candle only when you need the light.
This is the first day of that journey north, the day I stand in the fragrant chaos of Eddie Lim's kitchen. I never find out what language they speak to each other as they work, but I ask their real names and they draw them for me in sharp characters on the back of a docket, flushing with pleasure.

‘Delicious,' I say to a beaming ring of faces, and bite again. Fat coats the inside of my mouth, but it is so simple, this gesture of chewing and swallowing, savouring something so unfamiliar — a fin, a feather, a nest — all these remnants of flight and current.

‘And look!' crows Eddie over the laughter of four displaced people. I glance inside the chunk of crumbling cake in my hand to see a hard-boiled egg yolk. I smile in recognition as I look at it, this dense, hidden message. How strange that this is the correct name for the thing, a moon cake, when my first glimpse through swimming vision convinces me I am staring at a tiny, buried, golden sun. How strange and gentle and quiet it is, learning to name something.

Wheelbarrow Thief

Stella lights the candles.

‘Looks beautiful, darling,' says Daniel. He grabs and kisses the top of her perfumed head as she hurries past. ‘Thanks so much for this. I mean it. You're amazing.'

But Stella is gone, choosing CDs and inserting them into the random play shuffle, putting more splintery pieces of red gum on the fire (kneeling carefully in her most flattering short black dress), and then casting another assessing eye over the table. She looks approvingly at the lyrical simplicity of the lacquer bowls and chopsticks, the only colour on the table the five gerberas, so vividly pink and orange that she feels slightly nauseated. Daniel must not know about the nausea. Must not guess until after this dinner, when she can pour them both a Cointreau and break the news to him, watching his eyes. Stella has been fighting nausea all day, and didn't it say in her book it would only last until the end of the morning?

Sipping lemon and water in the afternoon, she has taken each slimy piece of squid and washed it and felt along the rubbery seam for the clear spine of cartilage like a little transparent wing, and slivered each piece and brushed it with wasabi. Another sip of lemon water and then rolling up the nori rolls around that glutinous rice, raw shreds of salmon, the smallest line of shaved carrot. Stella has had to stop several times, her throat full of the sensory overload of raw fish, her tongue squirming in her mouth. But now, look. Perfection. Each piece a poem. Each messy gut and tail and vein discarded, wrapped in newspaper and safely in the bin.

Daniel will be flushed and expansive.
I have some news
, she will begin, her hair falling against her face by the firelight,
I know it is unexpected news, for you as well as for me …

Stella swallows, wonders if she could be wearing too much perfume. ‘Is this scent too strong?' she asks Daniel, who stops her, nuzzles into her neck, licks a line up to her earlobe.

‘Hmm ... no, I don't think so ... just let me check this bit again ...' They giggle together. Stella feels a pulsing drag deep inside her, a slow-motion somersault.

‘Oh my God, I have to blanch the vegetables for the tempura.'

‘Not in that stunning dress, surely. You're a vision, sweetheart.'

She smiles.

Champagne for when the guests arrive. The professor and his wife punctual to the moment, so Stella lets Daniel pour the drinks while she slips out to the bathroom to check whether she needs just a touch more blusher. Her eyes in the mirror are glittering. She brushes her hair up off her face and sprays it with volumiser. The scent hits her somewhere in the back of her mouth. She leans on the edge of the tiled sink, and gags. The doorbell. More of them are arriving.

‘No, it's Stella's apartment,' Daniel is saying. ‘Much grander than a struggling doctorate student could afford.'

‘But Daniel spends a lot of time here,' Stella adds with a smile. She and Daniel have always referred to it as a flat. Large and old, it has two bedrooms, one of which was recently vacated by her ex-housemate Helen. Stella has meant for some weeks to advertise the room, so that the rent becomes more affordable, but this last week she has found herself standing in its doorway, watching the light fall into the empty space, trying to envisage it piled with Daniel's books, a desk, a lamp. Her mind treads down the path nervously, craning to see ahead. A cot.

‘Also,' Daniel continues, refilling glasses, ‘Stella's life is civilised enough to have not only a dining room, but six matching chairs. Isn't she lovely?'

Daniel goes on living at the university, he has told her, because he needs the privacy for his work and he wants tenure. He can attend functions, keep an ear to the ground, make himself a permanent presence on campus so that he will seem a natural choice for a position. He tells her this on a Sunday morning, lounging on her bed eating croissants and reading the paper, which she has slipped out early to buy, looking so much a fixture there, so familiar and in place, that it makes her want to weep with frustration.

He is listening with the appearance of deference now to the visiting Fellow, underdressed in that careless academic way in a shrunken fair-isle vest and colourless corduroys. Daniel listens and nods, squeezes his hands between his knees, looking at the floor with a small smile on his face. Everyone in the room except Stella mistakes this for respectful attention. The fact that she knows better, that she has seen him sprawled naked in the morning, dozing, and ragged-breathed with desire, quells her apprehension.

‘And what do you do, Stella?' asks the professor's wife, whose name, in her nervousness, Stella has forgotten.

‘I am a publicist.'

‘Oh, that must be interesting.'

‘Well ...' Stella takes a breath. At this moment, she knows, she is still mysterious. There is still the possibility of wit and assurance; she could now simply by opening her mouth and saying the right thing command the surprised attention of the whole room. Daniel's pretty girlfriend, and do you know she had the most interesting stories …

‘Yes,' she says, ‘it is.' The professor's wife looks a kind woman. Stella is aware that she has published a volume of poetry and that she is involved in the university Dramatic Society. Stella has managed large productions that she knows this woman has dressed up to see in the city. She has some tales to tell of stars' tantrums, some choice morsels of backstage gossip and hair's-breadth financial cliffhangers, which would give her the floor right through the tempura and yakanori. She could divert the conversation like a river from the discourse of metaphysical poetry to something in which only she had insider knowledge. Stella considers this power, holds it concealed like a rabbit in a hat.

‘It can get a bit hectic, though,' she says.

And feels poised attention shift back, sliding away on another current altogether.

I don't care
, thinks Stella, putting her hand over her champagne glass as Daniel does the rounds again.
I can relinquish this easily, easily
. The thought of conception has shrunk the importance of the status of work. She even catches herself thinking of it as the job she used to have, an old role. Underpinned with conception, even the discourse of metaphysical poetry seems an etcetera. There is a hotter vein running under it now, a molten lode which heaves up, causing fault lines, cave-ins. Stella hugs the chaos to herself. This is not a discourse. It will never be reduced to discussion.

Stella seats herself last at the table, and lifts her spoon of clear soup. A gust of seaweed assails her nose, the smack of a wave under a pier, piles of kelp and mermaid's necklace crusty in the sun.

‘Delightful,' pronounces the visiting Fellow, and she catches Daniel's loving eye. It has been worth it, making the stock from scratch. She had to read the recipe several times; surely she wasn't meant to throw out all the vegetables she had sliced according to directions? But she sees now, what seemed like waste is actually a kind of gift. Something reduced to its essentials, a sum total strained of its parts. Stella bathes in the appreciative silence, concentrates on keeping hers down.

In the kitchen a little while later, she hears Daniel's voice rise, the professor's respond, the professor's wife interject something flippant and conciliatory. When the visiting Fellow begins to rumble dogmatically, Stella's fingers tremble over the hot oil. There is going to be an argument.

The oil turns slickly in the wok. She drops in a tiny spoon of batter to test the heat, and watches it sizzle, prepares the plates with radish flowers and cucumber. She drops battered vegetables into the oil, fishes them out when they're golden onto absorbent paper. Her stomach pitches and tosses at the sight of so much grease. Perspiration stands on her forehead.
I am pregnant
, she thinks.
This is how it feels, this seasick, heavy ache
.

She hears the professor tap the table for emphasis, it sounds like someone knocking on a chest checking for false sides. She moves back into the dining room, bearing a platter of tempura. Each piece is golden and crisp, and she moves around the table selecting some for each plate, thanking the women as they praise her skill. The three men, staring at each other's mouths, waiting for their chance to speak with barely disguised impatience, hardly notice. Daniel pauses, looks down at his black lacquer chopsticks as if they, and the food he must eat with them, are something in a museum.

Stella bends her head to a secondary conversation started by the Fellow's wife, her eyes drawn again and again to the gerberas, so vivid they could be cartoon flowers.

‘Ah, I have a story for you,' Daniel says, swallowing wine. Stella glances up and is in love with his face in the candlelight. The argument is dissipated — this is what academics do, there is no need to be upset. She knows the story he will tell; they have read it together in a volume of Zen parables that morning in a bookshop. Daniel, instead of finishing his mouthful, scoops another piece of sushi between his lips, and talks around it.

‘There was once a man who worked in a factory, a very cunning man. The factory owners had heard rumours that he was a thief. And every day when he left the factory, he would be wheeling a wheelbarrow heaped full with sawdust.'

Stella experiences a shock of realisation that Daniel has recalled the story word for word. She herself, preoccupied with a lurching stomach, with packages of fish, with nerves, had barely skimmed it. Daniel takes another piece of raw salmon, scrapes off the wasabi, eats it. Inside her, Stella imagines another fish, eight weeks old and gilled, clamped, trembling.
I have some news, sweetheart, unexpected for me as well as for you …

‘Anyway, each day the guards sift through the sawdust, suspiciously looking for things he might have stolen. And each day there is nothing there but sawdust, and they wave him through the gates.'

You'll have your doctorate in November, we'll have a whole three months to get ready.
Who knows how it happened? Who knows how anything happens. Don't you ever feel your body might take the decision out of your hands for a reason?

‘Finally …' Daniel pauses for effect, making eye contact with each of them. ‘Finally they realise he is stealing wheelbarrows.'

They clap, they smile appreciatively. Laughter should not greet a Zen parable; it is not that kind of punchline. Daniel grins at Stella. He will be a great lecturer. He scissors another piece of sushi in his mouth, chewing as casually as if it were a French fry.