Fishing for Tigers (19 page)

Walking to and from work I noticed the way that young couples on motorbikes nuzzled and whispered and sometimes groped each other as they sat in the traffic. Around the shores of the lake, each tree seemed to shelter a grasping, necking couple. In the corner table of my favourite coffee shop, I saw a young man's hand go all the way up a girl's skirt while she coolly sipped her
. Another couple sat across from them, kneading each other's thighs. Walking home one night, I heard grunting coming from a side-alley. I peered down and saw a man grinding somebody into the wall. I stayed a moment, to reassure myself that nobody was being hurt and then I stayed longer because, I suppose, that's the kind of woman I had become.

When I told Cal about the couple in the alley he was excited. He said he wanted to do exactly that, to fuck me up against a wall, knowing that any minute someone might walk past and see us. I told him it was impossible. We could go to jail or be deported, publicly shamed. It would be a stupid, pointless risk given we had the privacy and comfort of my apartment and the money to pay for any hotel room in the city if we wanted a change of scenery. That's a shame, he said.

A few nights later as I walked him home (not all the way home, his father might see) he pulled me into an alley and pressed his hard-on into my hip.
Please
, he breathed into my ear,
I can't stop thinking about it, please please
. I made him promise to be fast and quiet and to run as fast as he could in the opposite direction if anyone interrupted us. I stepped out of my underpants and unzipped his jeans. He opened me up with his fingers and said he was worried he had pressured me and we didn't have to if I didn't want to. Something about his sweetness combined with his ­unashamed desire sent me out of my mind. I swear the presence of Uncle Ho himself couldn't have stopped us.

It was after three when I got home. I showered and climbed into bed and lay in the dark, too high to sleep. I dragged my laptop from the bedside table. I wanted to describe what was happening to me, to put my elation into words.

There was an email waiting, from Mel.

Darling Mischa,

I tried to call earlier, but the line kept dropping out before the second or third ring. We've had some bad news, I'm afraid. As you know Margi has been unwell for a while now & we finally know why. It's cancer of the bladder. Grade 4. The whole goddamn nightmare. She didn't want to tell you, as you are far away & can't do anything but worry, but I reminded her of how devastated she and I were when we discovered that you'd been keeping the extent of Glen's violence from us. So she consented to my telling you, but only if I also told you that there's no need to worry, that she has great doctors & a positive attitude & will be right as rain before you know it.

She wanted me to tell you that, and so I have, but between you & me, Mish, I'm bloody terrified. I wish you were here & that you were terrified too. Then I could force myself to be the big sister & in comforting you I might manage to comfort myself.

Will keep you updated.

M xx

round the turn of the century, Mel, like many middle-class over-educated Westerners, discovered Buddhism. For a few months she tried to convert Margi and me by emailing long, horribly written passages from her Journey into Buddhism class notes. Margi replied with point-by-point rebuttals citing everything from the
New Scientist
to the scripture lessons of our childhood. I was, as so often back then, a silent observer. I read every word of Mel's exhortations and Margi's demolitions of them and never formed an opinion about either. Reading their exchange aroused in me the same feeling that looking at photos of my sisters and their families did: a vague wonder that these interesting, clever women with full, happy, always-progressing lives could have anything to do with me.

By the time I arrived in Vietnam, Mel had stopped calling herself a Buddhist or trying to convert others, but she was still committed to daily meditation. When I called her on my third day in Hanoi, she cooed soothingly until I had exhausted my sobbing and then gently suggested I seek out a Buddhist temple. ‘You don't need to pray or anything,' she said. ‘Just sit and be quiet for a little while. Breathe out the negativity and breathe in the peace.'

The only temple marked on my tourist map was the Temple of Literature and, as I've said, I did find it a place of peace and healing. It was months before I discovered that the stacks of votive paper and incense on the shrine at the back were offerings to Confucius not Buddha. ‘Same thing, I suppose,' I said to Mel, who assured me, with an exasperated sigh, that they really weren't and that if I was going to live amongst followers of both, then I should take the ­trouble to learn the difference.

So I dutifully read up on the history and present condition of each. I learnt which of the many temples and pagodas in the city were Confucian and which Buddhist and began to understand which aspects of Vietnamese culture emanated from one and which the other. I took part in vegetarian feasts prepared by Buddhist monks and celebrated Confucius's birthday surrounded by children stuffing cake into their laughing mouths. I edited a book on the religious traditions of North Vietnam and developed a decent grasp of Taoism and the traditional animist religious beliefs. On an excursion to the south I visited the Cao
Holy See and learnt all about Caodaism, the indigenous mash-up of Buddhist, Taoist and Confucianist philosophy stacked into a Roman Catholic structure. I took scores of photos of the brightly painted frescoes featuring the religion's guiding spirits and saints: the sixteenth-century Vietnamese poet Nguyen Binh Kiêm, the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen and the French writer Victor Hugo, Confucius, the Buddhist Goddess Quan Âm, Jesus. I sat through a midday mass and because watching the rows and rows of expressionless white-robed monks made me anxious, I looked up instead and studied the painted dragons and unicorns and phoenixes and tortoises and the many large, open eyes watching me from the pastel-coloured walls.

For a non-religious, sceptical westerner it was fascinating, but beyond providing quiet, sheltered places to sit and breathe, none of the religious traditions, beliefs or philosophies I came across did anything for me on a spiritual level. I doubt, actually, that I have a spiritual level.

Nevertheless, as I read Mel's email I began to pray and my prayer was one word:
please
. I walked downstairs and through to the kitchen and stood at the window and prayed
please
to the dark bulk of the church. If I'd had a household altar I would've piled fruit and rice wine in front of it. If I'd had incense I would have lit it. I stood at the window sweating and praying
please
as the panic frothed.

I don't want to go back
, I thought, and my panic was replaced with shame.

When Cal come over the following night I considered telling him that my sister had bladder cancer. Instead, I tied him to my bed and bucked and ground my mind blank.

I was catching my breath, returning to myself, when he asked what it was that I liked about him. I laughed and he pouted.

‘I'm serious.'

I untied his wrists and collapsed by his side. ‘I like that you ask serious questions immediately after sex.'

‘Come on. Really.'

At that moment, what I liked was that his pecs were so high and hard that when I tried to rest my head on his chest I slid down until my face was nestled under his arm and I could inhale his football locker-room scent. If I told him that, he would think I was mocking him.

‘I like everything about you. Honestly. I can't pick out a single thing.'

‘Lame.' He roughed up my hair with the palm of his hand. ‘You know what I like about you?'

‘What?'

‘Your tits.'

‘They
are
nice.'

‘And I love the way you never take things the wrong way. You're so chilled out, not always looking to be offended or prove a point like most of the girls I've been with.'

‘Perhaps they were intimidated by being with someone so close to perfect. They might have felt they needed to find some tiny flaw or fault to make them feel worthy.'

‘I never said I was perfect.'

‘I wasn't being sarcastic.' I breathed him in. ‘You're divine, Cal. You have no idea. You're gorgeous and funny and adorably thoughtful and – hmm, now I think of it, this is exactly why no girl your own age could possibly know how amazing you are – you treat women like human beings and you don't do it because you want to look good or get laid, you do it because it's never occurred to you not to. I've never met a man who does that. Never. Oh, some of them try and they get points for that. It's certainly better than not bothering at all. But you're for real.' I propped my head on my elbow and looked up at his heart-squeezingly earnest face. ‘You know, now that I think of it, it's what makes you such an amazing fuck. You don't have any of that virgin-whore bullshit. You take a woman at her word.'

‘I don't think that's so unusual.'

‘It is for men of my generation, believe me.'

He screwed up his face. ‘Don't say that. It makes you sound like someone's grandmother.'

‘As long as I don't sound like yours. That would really kill the mood.'

‘I don't know what my grandmothers sound like. One of them died in a Malaysian refugee camp, leaving my grandpa alone with three daughters under ten. The other one didn't want to know about her nip grandson. She's dead now too.'

‘Shit. Sorry.' I flopped onto my back.

‘Yeah. Talk about a mood killer.'

‘Do you know much about her – your Vietnamese grandma, I mean?'

‘Nah. It's this weird thing with my mum and aunties – they don't talk about life before they came to Australia. Not just that they won't talk about the bad stuff that happened; they won't talk about anything – their school, what games they played, what they did for holidays – nothing. Grandpa does sometimes, but not if the
girls
are around, because they shout at him. Everything I know I know from him, but it's not much. She ran a fabric shop, was a good businesswoman, she looked like my Aunty Sue but had a temper like Aunty Dee. She was thirty-seven when she died.'

I sat up and drained the water glass by my bed.

Cal stroked my lower back. ‘You okay?'

‘Thirsty.'

‘Mish.' He kept stroking me.

‘Sorry. It's just . . . My mum died when she was thirty-seven, too.'

‘Shit. I didn't know your mum was dead.'

‘Both of my parents. Same accident. He was a little older than her, though. Forty-two. I was eleven.'

His arms went around my neck and he kissed the top of my spine. ‘Why didn't you ever tell me this?'

‘It didn't come up. This is strange, the weird coincidence of it. Thirty-seven, three young daughters. My mum and your grandma.'

‘Sometimes grief catches you off guard – that's what Grandpa says. He'll be going about his day, everything fine and then
bam
he's curled up in bed, can't even speak. When he gets like that, I take my homework in and do it on the floor of his room just so he won't be alone.'

I pressed his linked hands to my lips. ‘He's lucky to have you.'

‘He doesn't right now.'

‘No. Right now, I'm lucky to have you.'

My phone rang then and Cal said
leave it
and so I did. When I checked later there was no message. The missed call number was Mel's, but it was far too late to call back.

Amanda's sister Jill came to visit and the three of us went to lunch at a Buddhist restaurant halfway between Amanda's university and my office. Jill was an editor – a real one – back in New York. I entertained her with stories from the
VietVoice
editing desk and her honking laugh made our fellow diners stare. I cringed at first, but then noticed how Amanda glowed every time her sister honked and so I ramped up my performance and left lunch feeling foolishly virtuous.

I tried to imagine my sisters in Hanoi. Mel, I could see, with her floaty muslin skirts and bright silk scarves. Her everyday inner-city hippy look screamed
tourist
here and she would be overcome by street vendors from whom she would buy one of everything offered. She would try to speak to everyone she met, taking one or two words of English as encouragement. She would visit the Buddhist temples and pray, spend far more than necessary in the streets of the Old Quarter. She would deal with every squat toilet and skinned animal cheerfully. She would be curious and naive and positive.

Margi, I had trouble picturing. Last time I'd seen her she wore her school-run uniform of track-pants and an oversized t-shirt. The most recent photo I'd seen of her was a family portrait shot in a mall studio. She wore a high-necked white blouse and gold earrings. I couldn't imagine what she would wear here. It's trivial, I know, but that's the point. I couldn't see her. Not her clothes or jewellery or hairstyle. The face in the family portrait didn't match the one I remembered from my brief visit six years ago and that one didn't match the one I'd held in my mind all the years before that. She'd been a girl when I left home, though the baby on her hip and the frown-lines on her forehead disguised the fact.