The End of the World (10 page)

‘Poor thing,’ he said. ‘Can’t you give her some work at the school making tea or something? To tide her over?’

‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘She’d scare away the students.’

‘I suppose my company could put her in the back office for a week or two. We always need photocopying and filing done.’

‘No,’ I said. I didn’t want Flora near either of us.

‘You didn’t tell me Flora was a man,’ I said to Mieko on the telephone the next day.

Mieko called out to someone in her house, ‘Otoko da yo. Yappari.’ She returned to the phone. ‘So sorry. We weren’t actually sure.’

‘That’s why she can’t show us her passport,’ I said. ‘Because it would say she is male.’

‘Look, I am very sorry for him or her, whatever she is. But she can’t use my name like she does, like I’m her sponsor. This is not a big city. Everyone will hear about her and think she is with me. I will lose business. We have to make her go to Tokyo. Did you tell her?’

‘You don’t have to worry about it anymore.’ I said.

I knew that Flora would not call me. She would have to leave the city now. I knew what she was, and she knew that I knew. I thought of Flora travelling around in her big white shoes, clutching her handbag like a talisman. She was like a rogue elephant charging across the country with the natives cowering in their houses as she thundered by.

A month later I saw Flora’s picture on page ten of the Asahi newspaper. She was in Tokyo, living in a hostel, and she had been charged with shoplifting. She must have thrown her Russian passport away–the article said her origins were unknown. The authorities had designated her a stateless person.

Inches Apart

If you sit on the high stools at the bar in this café, you will see yourself, and the person you are talking to, and the waiters, and the other customers, all stained by a yellow light. Their skin and yours will look muddy and ill. Your clothes will seem drab. You will want to watch the person who is speaking to you, but you will be drawn to the mirror, and the discoloured image of the talking person. The voice will come from the person beside you, but the face in the mirror will be saying the words.

And eventually you will lose track of the conversation. You will forget to nod and smile at your friend’s
jokes. You will be watching the shape of your friend’s lips in the mirror, the way they move so easily to form words, the way they fall slack when your friend realises that you are no longer listening. Then you will jerk your head
away from the mirror and you will reach out a hand to reassure your friend.

‘In a dream,’ you will say, but you are wishing that you could see your own mouth shaping words as you speak.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s get going.’

You look into the mirror again, as though his second face will be mouthing different words, words that he really means. The silent mouth will say, Are you bored? Perhaps it will say, You never listen to me. The mouth might stretch into a wide, long yawn of disinterest, or squeeze tight with irritation. But he has turned too, and now you are looking at an image of him looking at an image of you.

‘Are you stoned?’ he asks. He has stopped looking in the mirror, he is examining your eyes, your flesh eyes, and you feel absurdly victorious because you have outstared his image. You think he is like a dog that drops its gaze when you stare too long.

Now you must speak.

‘No, I’m not stoned,’ you answer, ‘just tired, I suppose.’

Tiny wrinkles trickle from the corner of your eyes when you speak. Two furrows, deepened by the yellow tint of the glass, track between your eyebrows and your nose.

‘Do you want to go?’ he asks.

You have never noticed before that his ears move, riding the taut skin of his cheeks when he speaks. There is a single, black, shiny hair growing from a mole under his ear. He has clipped the hair, you see. Now it waves as his Adam’s apple moves up and down, it is like the chitinous black leg of an insect. You reach over to touch the hair. Your finger stubs against the glass.

He has not seen your mistake. You are lucky. He is gazing out the window at people passing by on the street. You can see the backs of the same people dressed in heavy overcoats and colourful scarves. He sees the people walking towards him and you see the people walking away.

You wish he would join you in your conspiracy of images. His mirrored profile juts out toward the street, and you wish he would turn, give you the softness of his full face, remark on the moon shadows under your eyes or trace the outline of your breast with his finger on the glass. If he would look now, he would see that the muscles of your face are loose, unguarded. If he saw your face now, and if you spoke, the skin of your jowls and neck would quiver, but you would not reach up and stroke your throat as you usually do. Your firm expression has collapsed. He has the chance to see, in the mirror of this café, the weary yellow roads that make up your features. But he keeps his gaze directed at the street.

If he would look now, the two of you would join looks at a point somewhere between your faces and the glass. You would be freed, at this distance from yourselves, to ask questions that have never passed in resonant air across your tongues. Instead of your eyes following everything that moves around you, your gaze would be pinned at the meeting of the vectors between flesh and reflection. You would ask if he wished to be elsewhere. He would answer, pinned to the truth. He would ask if you wanted him here in this café, or if you would prefer to have the mirror alone. And because you are fixed on your vector, you would not pretend to be offended. You would not pretend that you think he is calling you vain. You would answer by stretching out a palm to the mirror and when he placed his hand on yours, you would see the hands joined twice.

If he would only look now, he would see you smiling at the picture of the hands, but he is watching a man and a woman arguing in the street. He is frowning, and you wonder if he knows how you peer at his expressions when he is distracted. You have caught him before, watching you in the same way, and your eyes have flickered, startled.

He looks at your face, then at your reflection. You are composed now. You smile and lift your eyebrows, and say, ‘Ready to go?’

He leans across and kisses your cheek, and he ruffles your hair with his hand.

‘You are tired, aren’t you?’ he says. In the mirror, his face and your face are only inches apart. If you turn your head, your nose will brush against his cheek, your chin might touch the waving arm of his mole.

He is staring into the mirror. Your eyes follow the line of reflection, almost become fixed. Then they drop like the eyes of a dog.

‘Don’t forget your coat,’ you say.

He will be cold. When you tell him, he will be cold.

Where We Come From

My mother, Jacinta, is a fox–cunning and lustrous with rich red hair. She comes from French and Scottish blood. She boasts that she can cook a three-course gourmet dinner for the price of a McDonald’s family meal. She marinates ducks in a special vinegar and orange sauce invented by her French grandmother and passed down to her. The day I was heading off to high school, still gawky and clumsy in my body, she told me a time would come when the French elegance and the Scottish thriftiness would reveal themselves in me.

‘Just wait,’ she said.

My father died later that year. I asked her what I would inherit from his side.

‘Oh heavens! I don’t know,’ she laughed. ‘Perhaps some good common sense?’

These days, on Wednesday mornings, my mother strolls around the Mt Dandenong bush track while I run three circuits. Today as we head off I race away, round a curve, plunge into the scrub and vomit. Bile burns my throat. After the second circuit I give up the jogging and fall in beside her.

‘Not running?’ Jacinta says, panting slightly from the rise of the track. ‘That’s a first.’

When I was young my mother called me the white wolf. I had white blonde hair, unlike anyone else in the family. And I loved to run. From the time I was two, she told me, I used to take off and run wherever my skinny legs led. Neighbours brought me home, or policemen, or strangers who read the address she had engraved on my nickel bracelet.

‘You needed to be free. I never really understood,’ she said.

After my father’s death, my mother began to tell me stories about why I looked different. ‘Do you know why you have such light hair?’ she would start. The first story came at Christmas. She had drunk four glasses of champagne and a cognac. She told me my father shouldn’t have died and left her, she had to find a job, and it was time I stopped calling her Mum.

‘Your brothers have moved out and you’re already thirteen. I’m more than just a mother, you know. I’m a whole human being. It’s time you called me by my name. Say my name.’

‘Jacinta?’ I said, feeling strange saying it.

‘Yes, Jacinta. I’m going to be Jacinta again. And it’s time you knew something about yourself as well. It’s time you knew where you got that blonde hair from.’

There were more stories, year after year until I turned seventeen. One night she arrived home from a cocktail party with her lipstick smudged and a fingernail broken and bleeding. ‘I should tell you about your real background,’ she said, slurring her words.

‘I know already,’ I said. ‘You told me.’

‘No, the real story.’

This is the story she told.

I was a late child, born many years after my brothers. My mother’s pregnancy was hard and she retched with me for months. The night I was born, my father waited in the hospital carpark with the radio tuned to a concerto by Mozart and a crossword and pen on the passenger seat beside him. My auntie had to run through the rain to tell him a daughter had been born. Inside the hospital, my mother was gazing at the tufts of white hair on my head and weeping.

‘I’ll see my wife when she is settled,’ my father told my auntie, who stood in the drizzling rain beside his door with a newspaper held over her head. ‘What colour is the baby’s hair?’

‘She already has a floss of white hair, like a little angel,’ Auntie Jill said, smiling. ‘And lovely green eyes.’

‘Come and get me when the baby is washed,’ my father said. He shut the door in Auntie Jill’s face and picked up the crossword.

An hour later I was clean and swaddled, waiting in my mother’s arms for the arrival of my father. He stopped at the door of the ward. Three other mothers lying in their beds with their babies asleep in cribs beside them looked up and smiled. Only my mother did not smile. She held me close with the blanket pulled tight around my head. She whispered my father’s name. He strode to her bedside and pulled back the blanket to reveal my pale hair gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Then he swivelled with a squeak on the lino floor and walked out without looking back. The other mothers watched him go before they turned over in their beds and picked up magazines to shield their faces from my mother’s defiant stare.

‘He is not the father,’ she announced to their pink-frilled backs.

They rolled over, expecting to hear that the tall dark-haired man was her brother or friend. But, flushed and exhausted, my mother held me up a little higher so that the women could see me. On her left hand the gold wedding ring gleamed dully. My head drooped backwards on its soft weak stem and my hair stood out from the skull.

‘He is the cuckold,’ she said to the women. ‘And the child is a bastard.’

Perhaps these were not her actual words. But they are typical of my mother’s extraordinary stories. She tells them like a raconteur, yet she seems unaware that a story can do more than make people gasp or laugh.

I used to think about the birth scene often. I pictured my mother coming home, by taxi, to the house where her other two children, boys of ten and twelve, sit on the floor watching television amid a mound of soft drink bottles and empty containers of sweet and sour pork and banana fritters from the local Chinese café. As my mother walks in through the front door she sees my father, my father in name rather than the man whose seed made me, lying on the couch absorbed in watching television.

My father fails to look at her when she shuts the door loudly. In fact he closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep.

‘Boys, this is your new sister,’ my mother says, lowering me so that my brothers can see my red, wrinkled face gazing blindly at the ceiling.

‘Hi Mum,’ my brothers say, glancing at me before trotting off to their rooms. At their age they can read the density of the air, the muscular depth buoying up my mother’s light remark. And my mother and father are left alone in the room with the child that is the offspring of the wife but not the husband, a half-sister sprung from my mother’s adult education class in Northern European cooking, the fruit of my mother and her Swedish teacher’s passion for salty gravlax and sour cream.

‘Are you going to leave me?’ my mother says to my father, still standing at the door in her best tweed suit with her overnight bag slung over one shoulder and her Nordic baby cupped in one arm.

‘Would you rather I was the laughing stock of the neighbourhood?’ my father answers, his eyes still closed. ‘Would you rather I raise the cuckoo in my nest?’

My mother hesitates, unsure of whether the question is rhetorical or not.

‘We could say my grandmother’s family was Swedish,’ she says finally. ‘The child is a throwback. Recessive genes.’

My father does not answer. My mother takes this as encouragement.

‘Like the Sinclairs, who had that child with the disease that skips generations,’ she goes on hurriedly, adding almost as an afterthought, ‘I love you, Jack. I want us to be together. I made a mistake.’

My father starts to weep. And my mother knows she has won. The cuckoo can stay. She lays her hand on my head, covering the hair that is not white, not gold, but in between, a hybrid colour. My father looks at her in all her glamour, straight from the hospital but still sleek and wicked as a fox, and he covers his face with his hands. He could never leave her.

Of all the stories Jacinta told me, this was the easiest to believe. Its ugliness rang true to me. When she first started to tell me the stories, she preferred exotic, thrilling tales. I was thirteen when she told me my great-grandfather was a champion Nordic skier who died tragically during a mountain rescue of orphaned children. At fourteen I almost fell for the tale of the Finnish sealer who was swept out to sea on a freak current and seduced the daughter of the Scottish captain who rescued him.

‘Of course she had to marry quickly to hide the pregnancy, so her father chose a suitor from the French aristocracy, your maternal great-grandfather. Your true heritage is a secret passed down by the women of this family.’

When I was sixteen, she whispered to me that my father was not my real father, that she had fallen in love with a German tennis player and had a short passionate affair while he was here for the Australian Open.

The sordid Swedish story suited me better. I remembered my parents’ difficult communication, my father’s reticence, his hours smoking cigarettes on the verandah in the dark. The story explained the coolness my father had shown toward me.

When I turned eighteen I started my research.

‘What cooking class? What are you talking about?’ Jacinta said.

‘Where you met my father, the Swedish cook. You know, the affair.’

‘Oh, that! That’s a story for you and me. Imagine if your brothers knew, or your auntie. That’s our little secret. No more about that now.’

‘But where did you do the cooking class?’

‘Darling, I really don’t remember. Some adult education college, I suppose.’

I nursed the dream of a reunion with my real father who would cry out with joy when he saw his face reflected in mine. I didn’t care that he wasn’t a hero or a prince. Ordinariness made him more likely to welcome me.

I finally tracked down the man who had taught Swedish cooking at the Centre for Adult Education twenty years before. He worked in the restaurant of a large hotel in the city.

I was the only person in the restaurant on a Tuesday night. The waitress led me to a corner of the room and shook out my damask napkin before placing it on my lap. After I ordered she stood with her arms folded at the door of the kitchen, where my Swedish father’s accented voice shouted Australian curses at the saucepans, the stove, the fish that refused to lie flat in the pan.

I ate my fish, paid my bill then sidled up to the kitchen door, pushed it open and spoke the Swedish greeting I had rehearsed a hundred times with my language tape. As the words came out of my dry mouth I noticed his hair, pale like mine but thin and bristly over an angry pink scalp.

‘What are you saying?’ my Swedish father shouted at me. ‘What do you want? The dining room is outside!’

My legs tensed. This was the sensation I had first felt as a child–the need to run like a wolf. Wolves run all day. They cover vast distances in a steady lope. Do Swedes run? I wondered.

‘You took a class in Swedish cooking in 1972 and you had an affair with my mother. I think you are my father.’

His face turned bright red. He stared at me, his mouth open. The waitress sat on a stool in the corner, nibbling on a carrot. She looked away to the side as she chewed, as if she was trying to pretend she wasn’t there.

‘Good God,’ he said, and laughed. It was an odd, braying laugh. ‘Good God, I am homosexual. You have made a mistake.’

I retched all night as my body tried to purge his sour food.

I am usually a careful person. I have chosen an isolated life: working at my job, jogging and training, a quick daytime movie as I move from workplace to workplace. I am cautious with strangers. But Lindsay didn’t care about caution or containment. I met him on my rounds, travelling from town to town filling orders for computers and fixing software problems. Lindsay told me he waited for my arrival each month. One night he convinced me to come out for a drink, and in a dark velvety corner of the bar he butted me gently with his head and licked my throat. His hot breath melted me. I forgot all my fears.

I drove to his town each month and we leapt on each other. A month ago he asked me to marry him. A panic overtook me. I said things I didn’t mean. I swapped my service area with another employee. I took off, not realising I had Lindsay’s offspring growing in me. But I cannot have a child. A child needs a father and I cannot provide one. After years with a father who disappeared to the verandah and the rest of my life without one, I can hardly imagine what a father might be. My mother is the one with the imagination.

After the Wednesday morning walk we always have tea in the café with the red checked tablecloths. Jacinta orders Devonshire tea. Today I order black tea. We sit by the window watching the red and blue rosellas line up on the balcony rail.

‘No coffee?’ Jacinta asks. ‘Look at those birds. They shouldn’t feed them. Wild things aren’t pets.’

‘Felt like tea,’ I say.

She stares at me. My pale face. Trembling hands.

‘You’re not?’

I take another hesitant sip of tea.

‘Get rid of it,’ she says. She takes a scone from the plate, tears it in half and smothers the pieces in strawberry jam and cream. Watching makes my stomach heave.

‘Does the man know?’

I shake my head.

‘Don’t tell him. He doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. You would have introduced me. Wait till you find the right man.’

‘The right man?’

‘A real father for your children.’

‘I don’t know if I want children,’ I tell her.

She pretends to be looking through the window but I can see she is examining her reflection in the glass. Behind her reflected face, the rosellas nudge each other back and forth along the balcony rail, ducking their heads and preening their feathers as they wait to be fed.

My mother tucks her glossy red hair behind her ear, then reaches over to touch my hand.

‘Before I met your father—’ she begins but I hold up my hand like a stop sign.