Fishing for Tigers (20 page)

I hadn't seen any more of Mel than Margi in the past fifteen years, so why was one so vivid and the other so ghostly? I spent the afternoon imagining Mel and failing to imagine Margi in my office, on the back of a
, at the fruit market, making coffee in a
phin
. Of course I considered that my subconscious had assumed Margi's cancer was fatal and erased her already. This I dismissed as nonsense. The dead I could see, though they refused to be transplanted to my chosen city. But they were there the second I summoned them: my father in sailing-boat printed pyjama pants carefully sliding a freshly cracked egg into a pot of boiling water. My mother in a short cotton nightie calling for Margi to come eat some breakfast. The two of them at the kitchen table giggling harder and harder as the three daughters become more and more annoyed at being left out of the joke.

The dead were vividly in their place and Margi was not among them.

I called her when I got home and we spoke for a few minutes. I wanted to ask her what she was wearing and how her hair looked and what books she had read lately. Instead I asked how she was and she told me about the pain she experienced on urinating and the difficulty of remaining cheerful for the children and the brilliance of her doctor and the toughness and pragmatism of Mel. I expressed surprise at this and she expressed surprise at me not recalling how Mel had always been the one to step up in a crisis.
When Joel was sick, when Brad had that car accident, when I was retrenched, when Lucy broke her leg
– and I did not remember any of these events and so I only said, hmmm, but she went on –
and when you came home, Mischa – that terrible night when we finally saw what that man had . . . It was Mel who calmed us all down, re-booked your flights so you'd have more time with us. Even when we were kids it was Mel with her system of envelopes and that bloody calendar, making sure the bills were paid and dentist appointments kept.

Oh, yes, of course, you're right, I said. After we hung up I scrolled through old emails and photos, dug out my childhood photo album and re-read birthday cards. I couldn't make any of it cohere. Mel was not the flaky sweetheart of my memory but nor could I accept her as the hero of Margi's telling. And Margi had become in my mind a distant, loving but firm mother-figure and I knew this was unfair and ­inaccurate but I had nothing with which to replace it.

How did they think of me, my sisters? I couldn't guess. I had spent so long as a ghost, insubstantial even to myself. With a thrilling jolt, I realised this was no longer true. I had become interested in my own life.

very year for Henry's birthday we went to dinner at the Indian restaurant near the American Embassy. I was so anxious about seeing Cal and my friends together that I almost cancelled. But I had avoided Cal all week and knew that if I skipped the dinner party he would assume there was something wrong, which there was, of course, but not with him. We'd been together only half a dozen times, but already there had been hints of drama. He would search out meaning in every facial expression, read rejection into an unanswered text message. I had years of practice in pre-empting reactions and so fell into the habit easily. Of course, with Glen, the consequences of mismanaged communication could be broken bones; with Cal, I knew the worst that could happen was sexual withdrawal.

I was unintentionally late to the party. When I arrived I stood in the doorway a moment and watched Cal nodding enthusiastically at something the pretty Vietnamese girl beside him was saying. I checked my reflection in a bejewelled wall mirror and when I turned back to the table he was looking right at me.

‘Sorry, sorry.' I kissed Henry and Matthew, Amanda and Kerry, Collins and then, because it would be strange not to, Cal. ‘The cab driver mistook me for a tourist, circled the bloody lake, meter ticking away.'

‘When are you going to suck it up and get a bike, Mish?' Henry asked, his cheeks already flushed with booze.

‘It's pouring out there. Don't tell me you didn't cab it here?'

‘We did,' Cal said. ‘The old man insisted.'

‘I didn't want to risk destroying that hair-do you spent an hour sculpting.'

The Vietnamese girl giggled and Cal threw her a flirtatiously hurt look.

I sat in the empty chair across from her and introduced myself. She was Mai, a friend of Henry's. ‘She speaks three languages,' Cal said.

‘My English is not so good,' she said. ‘My German is better. My Vietnamese is, I think it is not immodest to say, excellent.'

‘Your English sounds bloody good to me.'

‘That is because you are Australian and a teenager and so do not speak it properly.'

‘Ha!' Henry kissed her cheek, leaving a shiny smear of chutney. ‘Mai works at the Goethe Institute,' he said to me. ‘We sponsored a thingummy there and Mai was the translator.'

‘Great job she did, too.' Collins leant into the conversation, his torso crossing mine. He smelt like fresh mint, which annoyed me because I loved it so. ‘Having said that, I wonder if anyone there – me included – actually knows that to be true. I mean, no one there was bi- let alone tri-lingual. You could've been making it all up. As long as you sound confident, we all just nod along.'

‘It's true. Translators have great power. I could say anything, and you would believe me.'

‘You have something on your cheek.' I held up a napkin. ‘Would you like me to . . . ?'

‘I've got it.' Cal cupped her chin in his hand and turned the right side of her face towards him. He took the napkin from me without looking away from Mai. He wiped her cheek with a great deal of care.

I had intended to stay sober so as to manage Cal and his affections, but this now seemed unnecessary. I ordered a beer and a whisky and knocked back the latter before the waiter had finished opening the former. I ordered more of both.

I nodded along to encourage Collins's monologue about, I think, his time in India, while I listened in on Cal and Mai's conversation. He was telling her about his grandfather. A chemist, apparently, who spent the last twenty years of his working life on the production line at Sydney's Homebush abattoir. He had never told me this, but then I had never asked.

‘The thing that bothered him the most, he said, was how empty the streets were. He said it was like a movie he'd watched where some bloke woke up and everyone else was gone. Sometimes when he was walking to the train station early in the morning, he had what he calls “dizzy breathing attacks”. He said it was like there was only him in the whole world and even nature itself had abandoned him.'

‘I understand,' Mai said. ‘When I was in Berlin I was, at first, afraid to go out on my own. I felt very small, very lonely. I became used to it and when I returned to Hanoi, at first, I felt too crowded! Has your grandfather returned to Vietnam? He may find it too busy for him now.'

Cal's response was too soft for me to hear. I wished Collins would stop talking for ten seconds or that Amanda and Kerry would stop cackling or that the restaurant's agon­isingly incongruent Euro-electronica would stop playing. Cal and Mai were huddled together now, practically whispering into each other's mouth.

‘Anyone would think they were a couple.'

‘What?'

Collins pointed his chin across the table. ‘The two young-uns. An adorable couple, don't you think?'

‘Oh, no. She's far too old for him.' It came out more caustically than I had intended and I realised I was quite drunk. There was a great deal of food on the table, but it seemed no one was eating. I ate a piece of oily naan and two cold samosas, and then ordered another beer.

Mai smiled in my direction. ‘Cal tells me you work for
VietVoice
?'

‘He tells you right. I do. Do you know it?'

‘Oh, yes. It's very popular. We're always sure to have copies in our waiting areas. This month, I enjoyed very much the article about hip-hop dancers in Lenin Park. I often see the dancers as I pass the park on my way home from work. It was so interesting to read about their lives. Did you read it, Cal?'

‘Nah. I'm not such a fan of the mag.'

‘It is very middle-class, isn't it?' said Collins.

‘I don't even know what that means,' Cal said. ‘It's just not my thing, is all.'

‘I'm working on a book at the moment,' I said, hating the loud rush of my voice but unable to stop myself. ‘It's a major work. Very important. A history of Vietnamese women.'

‘Ah! This is a good project, I think. Have you been to the Women's Museum? Of course you have! You know, it is okay, but not great. Maybe your book will be sold there. Maybe the curators will use your book, improve their displays. Oh. I am very happy to hear about this book.'

‘There's a long way to go yet,' I said. ‘It's a labour of love, really.'

‘Yes. I understand this. At work, we have many labours of love.' She smiled, clasped her hands. ‘Tell me, Mischa, what do you think of
The Tale of
?'

‘Oh. Oh. That's a big question. I mean, it's beautiful and important, obviously, but I find it troubling.'

Mai nodded, turned to Cal. ‘Do you know
The Tale of
?' He shook his head and she turned back to me. ‘I understand. The story is lovely, but it is the . . . the . . . veneration of it that is troubling, as you say. Yes?'

‘Yes. Exactly.'

‘Do you know, Mischa, the story of
Trinh? This is my very favourite.'

‘Yes, of course. My street is named after her.'

‘Ah! You live on
So lovely. I wrote my dissertation on Lady
. I know by heart her words. Ah, let me think in English.' Mai furrowed her brow. ‘ “I want to straddle big winds, to tread on ferocious waves, to behead the ocean's sharks, to chase away aggressors.” '

‘ “I cannot resign myself to bowing down and becoming a man's concubine”,' I finished. My skin was hot. Of all the Vietnamese stories I had read, this was the one I returned to. It lit me up in a way I couldn't explain.

Mai grinned. ‘You love this, too. I can see.'

‘I do. I love it.'

I was aware of Cal pretending not to look at me and of Collins pretending not to look at Cal. I was aware that Henry was drunkenly slurring into Matthew's ear. I think Amanda and Kerry had gone to the bathroom or else to the bar to smoke. Afraid of my fluttering heart, I stopped drinking.