Fishing for Tigers (15 page)

M & M,

Guess what? I've met a boy, the loveliest looking creature you'd ever see & smart & kind to boot, and he seems to have a crush on me! Weird, I know. It's possible that I'm imagining things, like the giddy, ageing divorcee I am, but . . . I don't think so.

Well, sisters, you always say I never tell you anything, so there: I've told you something.

Kisses,

M

For years my body was a mirror for Glen's mood. Clear and smooth, glowing pink with sex, splattered purple and tan with rage. An angry night would leave me hobbling and squinting like a crone. A blissful night and I would float through the day like a teenager in the first rush of love. I was beautiful or repulsive when he said so, and the rest of the time my appearance was a marker of order. A jiggly body or flyaway hair was, like unvacuumed floors and undusted shelves, a sign of laziness and disorder.

Glen and his friends would speak contemptuously of women who ‘let themselves go' after they were married. I always thought it sounded wonderful, though I wondered how these other women dared to do it, to stop holding every­thing inside, to let go.

In Vietnam, I'd done just that. It would have been pointless to do otherwise; fitting in physically was impossible and, in any case, no one except me would notice or care. I dressed for the heat and the grime and the climbing on and off of motorbikes. I ate whatever smelt delicious whenever I felt hungry. Children sometimes laughed at my hair or clamoured to stroke my pale skin. Shop girls fretted over finding pants that would fit me and seamstresses hollered my measurements across the floor or alleyway, excited by the challenge of sewing clothing of such size. Men looked at me, but never made passes. I had become used to being viewed as interesting but sexless.

So of course I wondered – then and many times since – why Cal was interested in me. When he looked at me, I didn't feel admired so much as recognised. It was like he saw me as his partner in some enterprise so secret that even he didn't know about it yet.

Both my sisters responded to the email within hours. Mel was thrilled at the notion and hoped I would send a photo of the lovely lad. Margi was tickled too, in her cautious, motherly way:
Well, enjoy the attention, Mish. You deserve some happiness
.

It's an odd idea, that some people deserve happiness. As though the universe should compensate us for bad luck and sadness. As though happiness was something one could earn through suffering. If that were true, then I'd be in a stupefyingly long line of sad souls waiting for their payout.

But I'm being too literal. All Margi meant was that she loved me.

did not act. For several weeks I lived in a deliberate fog. I didn't think through any scenarios, but I did begin noticing what seemed to me a new breed of Viet boys. Tall and well-muscled, with white teeth and an air of entitlement. But why shouldn't they feel entitled, I asked myself? They were not the trespassers here.

At work, some bureaucratic situation I had no hope of understanding had occurred and, as a result, every translator on the department's books needed to work fifty-hour weeks until the end of the month. We had double the staff necessary for the magazine which meant the translations for Mrs Lam's book began to ping into my editing folder at the rate of one or two a day.

My new favourite was the story of
. In 1950, at the age of sixteen, she lobbed a grenade into a French battalion, killing an official and injuring twenty soldiers. She was held in a tiger cage in
island prison for two years before becoming the first Vietnamese woman to be executed by the French administration.

‘They don't make 'em like they used to,' Julian said, after he'd proof-read my rewritten version of her story. ‘Sixteen year olds these days are total twits.'

‘Nah, it's a put-on,' Mario said. ‘That whole bullshit coy, giggly virgin thing.'

‘God, yeah, the giggling. Every fucking Vietnamese girl you speak to.' He put his palm over his mouth and gave a good impersonation of a giggling child. ‘Watched too many of those Korean soaps. Give me one of those 1950s girls. The kind who'd hurl a grenade without cracking a sweat. That'd be just the thing.'

‘Nah, nah, mate, you don't get it. They're all like that. Every last one of them would firebomb your house while you slept if they thought they'd get a few thousand
dong
out of it. These girls, they do what works and, because the rich
tây
s are such soft-cocks, what works is that shy giggly crap. They're all hard-arse grenade-throwers underneath.'

I took back my story, silently vowing to never ask Julian to proof-read another entry.

‘What's extraordinary,' I said, ‘is that you guys actually think you're being insightful.'

‘Come on, Mish, you've been here long enough. You can't think the local girls are as sweet and innocent as they pretend?'

‘That's not the point. There's no war on. None of us is walking around with grenades in our pockets and murder in our hearts. Doesn't mean we're not capable of it.'

Mario held up his palms. ‘Speak for yourself.'

‘Yeah, see, a Viet woman would never talk that way.'

A wave of exhaustion washed over me. I slipped my headphones on and turned the volume to nine.

The first storm of the typhoon season hit as suddenly and violently as always. One moment I was walking along Tràng
, slick with sweat, and the next I was dashing for the cover of an awning, which, within minutes, was creaking under the weight of water. On the road in front of me, motos swarmed to the kerb, drivers leapt off their seats and flipped them up to pull out their brightly coloured rain ponchos. There was a flutter of blue, pink, yellow and orange and then the bikes were flashing past again, the drivers seeming to swell and shrink as their ponchos puffed out with the wind, then flattened with rain.

Water began seeping through the awning, dripping loudly on my sun-hat. I glanced around for another shelter. Across the road was the government bookshop and under its canopy was Cal. He waved and stepped forward and I waved back with both hands, motioning to him to stay where he was. I pushed out into the stream and when I reached the other side he was holding out his hand.

‘We should get inside,' I said.

He dropped his outstretched arm to his side. ‘Okay.'

‘We can wait it out in the bookshop.'

He looked at the glass door covered in official-looking logos and flaking Vietnamese words and shrugged.

‘Although,' I said, ‘this could go on for a while. The Metropole is at the end of this block. My treat.'

‘Like this?'

Cal was wearing board shorts and rubber thongs. The rain had turned his t-shirt transparent. They might let him in if I tipped the doorman heavily enough, but people would stare. Ordinarily I wouldn't care.

There were dozens of places we could have sheltered along that road. I ran through them in my mind while Cal watched me.

I raised my arm and a green taxi swerved across three lanes and mounted the kerb in front of us. We climbed in and I gave the driver my address.

‘Are we going to your place?' Cal asked once we were moving.

‘It's dry and there's no dress code.'

‘Dad's place is closer.' He jerked his head towards the back windscreen.

‘Of course. I'll tell the driver to drop you there first.'

‘No. Don't.'

I couldn't look at him. Watching the whirling colours through the rain-spattered window made me dizzy. I closed my eyes. The taxi smelt like a dentist's office. The radio played barely audible Vietnamese folk tunes. The air was thick.

When I opened my eyes, we were pulling into my street. Cal was texting, his thumbs flying over the keypad of his tiny silver phone. I paid the driver and climbed out of the cab. For a moment I felt I was in the wrong place. The walls of my building were dark with water and the neighbourhood women had dragged their plastic stools and washbasins and cooking pots behind shuttered doors. Cal made a shivering sound, although the water was warm.

I was orphaned at eleven. For the first few years I had frequent nightmares about my parents. I saw them dying over and over, often in circumstances quite different from those that actually took them. I dreamt them decapitated by monstrous machinery, broken against cliffs, suffocated, drowned, stabbed through the throat. Sometimes I woke up without a memory of a dream but with the conviction that they were in pain. I worried they had been separated and each was terribly alone. Although my parents were cremated, images of my mother in a coffin, weeping inconsolably, would fill my head.

Despite all that, my adolescent and teenage years were okay. My sisters worked hard to keep me with them, submitting willingly to departmental check-ups and calling on a large, enthusiastic army of relatives and friends to fill in the gaps. I did fine at school, had good friends and a few semi-serious boyfriends. I had an idea I'd become a librarian like my mother, but by the time my final marks came through I was a bride-to-be in the US, taking secretarial classes at the community college in the street behind Glen's house.

A couple of years after I married Glen, a friend of his got married and at the wedding I met Glen's ex-girlfriend. She sought me out and pounced when Glen was at the bar drinking shots with the other groomsmen. ‘When I heard he'd brought a girl back from overseas I wasn't surprised,' she said. She was older than me and had TV-white teeth and shiny black hair. Her voice shook as she spoke. ‘He hated that I was close to my family. The idea that they might drop in any time drove him crazy. He was always bitching about my parents, about how much influence they had over me. Influence. Like they pointed out he treated me like dirt. Tell me – between us, honey – tell me, does he treat you badly?'

I shook my head, no.

‘Because it kills me to think of him treating you badly and your mom and dad are too far away to help you.'

‘My parents visit all the time,' I told her. ‘They love Glen.'

She gave me a look of such pity I wanted to smash my glass in her face.

I sound defensive. Like I need to prove I'm no longer a vulnerable youth but a sensible adult who did her utmost. Truth is, I did try, genuinely. Yet when I recall this time. I can't help but look at it all backwards. When I remember pushing Cal upright that night outside the
, I am simultaneously remembering our next encounter and the weeks that came in between. I try to figure out how it all happened but it's impossible to remove the flare of later events from my picture of earlier ones. Events I thought of as final turned out to be the first steps in a drawn-out sequence.