The Family Law (17 page)

Somehow, I thought to myself, she knew about what had happened. Perhaps Anthony had telephoned her and discussed it, and called for an emergency intervention to resuscitate my dying acting career. Maybe he had told her that I was too important to give up on, that my family members should pool their funds and send me to the intensive training camps for actors they held every summer.

‘Humphrey's dead,' she said. ‘I found him this afternoon.'

I stood there unblinking.

‘He drowned. I found him when I was taking out the bins.

There was a mouldy piece of bread next to him. I think he starved to death.'

The storm had been raging for the past fortnight now, and I'd only fed him once. She didn't say it accusingly, but I knew what she was getting at. Our bargain had been that while I wasn't allowed a dog, I was able to have a small mouse, so long as Mum had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It was wholly my responsibility. I thought of Humphrey out there in the storm, his cage slowly filling up with water, utterly forgotten, the bread rotting next to him, dying alone, no one to remember him.

‘
Humphrey
,' I whispered, under my breath. I paused for dramatic effect. ‘Should we bury him?'

‘I'm not sure,' Mum said. ‘He really stinks, and it's still raining.'

We decided to bury him the next day.

That night, in the shower, I pulled out my orthodontic plate and tried to cry –
‘Humphrey!'
– but even after summoning all the techniques I'd learned so far, it just wasn't going to happen.

That was the sign of a bad actor: not being able to cry.

Months after the showcase, Anthony and Natalya told us that because the academy's enrolments were swelling so quickly, they wouldn't be able to personally teach regional classes like ours anymore. New local recruits would take care of us instead, all of whom were highly trained professionals. We felt abandoned.

The new teachers weren't much older than we were. ‘Today, we are going to learn about American accents,' the new female teacher said, all firm breasts and white teeth. She was the complete opposite of black-haired Natalya, and we decided that we hated her. ‘Accents are important for you guys to master, because a lot of the movies and television series being made locally are actually American. Look at
Flipper
!' For the rest of that evening, we recited monologues from
Party of Five –
the episode where Bailey is an alcoholic.

 

*

 

Years later, after I'd abandoned every single acting ambition I'd ever had, I accompanied my sister Michelle to an audition for a television commercial promoting the sandwich chain Subway. Whoever was cast in the various roles on offer – young chick, feckless boyfriend, corporate businesswoman – would earn an easy $
2000
for dancing to a James Brown soundtrack. Byron, a friend of mine, was filming the casting reels. My sister was poor and enthusiastic, so I gave her a lift and helped her fill in forms about her dress measurements in the queue. Around us, women dressed for the corporate businesswoman role eyed each other's clipboards discreetly, or nervously asked one another questions. ‘So, what sort of dancing do they want us to do? Do they just want us to go crazy, you think? Gyrate, maybe? Or something more subtle?'

Suddenly, the sliding doors of the audition room opened.

‘Sorry,' Byron said to a woman around the corner. ‘Excuse me?'

Sheepishly, she walked back towards us, her high-heels in her hands.

‘Would you be able to practise your dancing somewhere else? We can see you through the window, and we don't want that in the footage.'

‘Oh, sorry!' the woman said, creeping around the building.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!' She laughed.

‘That's okay. Keep practising. Practising is good,' Byron said.

‘Just … not there.'

When the doors closed again, the woman turned to us.

‘I just think it's always good to have a bit of a run-through before these things,' she said, ‘don't you?'

There was a faint odour of desperation about her. It was both familiar and repellent, and reminded me of my teen years.

When Byron called in my sister, we shook hands and he ran through everything he wanted from Michelle. Then he turned to me.

‘Ben, aren't you going to audition?' he said.

‘Nah,' I said. ‘It's not really my thing.'

‘Seriously, it'll take two minutes of your time,' he said. ‘Just dance, buddy.'

‘No.'

Two weeks later, I was announced on the shortlist for the role. Later, I got another call to say I hadn't made the final cut. ‘I'm so sorry,' an assistant said, in a well-rehearsed tone of consolation. ‘But seriously: we loved you so much this time around, we'll keep you on the books. How does that sound?' Despite myself, I was flattered. Because if I had learned anything from all my years at acting school, it was that being kept on someone's books was one of the most important things for your career. Being on the books meant that people were thinking about you. Being on the books meant you still had a chance to make it big.

Skeletons

Growing up, none of us kids had our own wardrobe or closet. Some might interpret that as a sign of rank, Dickensian poverty –
Is it because you didn't have clothes, either?
– but it wasn't anything like that. Candy had a modest set of drawers, while Andrew, Tammy and I shared a storage closet in the hallway, each laying claim to a single shelf. Any items of clothing that needed to be hung – school uniforms, blazers, coats – were simply strung from hooks or knobs around the house in ad-hoc fashion. By the time Michelle was born, we were reaching capacity, so her garments were piled in a corner, the way a homeless person's might be, except Michelle's clothes were folded and sorted; that was the difference.

Ironically, one of the original selling points of our house had been its storage space. When my parents had first inspected it in the early '
80
s, their eyes had widened to take in the luxuriousness of the new, solid-brick display fortress. Compared to their last home – an unventilated apartment above a Chinese restaurant, rife with feral cats – this place was too good to be true. There was a handsome garage, a new dishwasher, two tiled bathrooms, cane furniture, and rooms so large you could almost have divided the house into wings.
Wings.
All that room.

If you wanted to be technical about it, then yes: each room did have a closet. But in all the years I lived there, these were never properly opened. There was an ancient, unspoken rule that the closets weren't ours to use. Most of the time, I forgot they were there. In our shared, cramped room, Andrew pushed our beds right up against the closet doors as though they didn't exist, as if they were walls that just happened to have knobs attached.

On rare occasions, the doors would eerily open of their own accord, like something sentient was inside and trying to get out. When that happened, Andrew and I would look into them and find solid, looming stacks of the unfamiliar: clothes we'd never worn, toys we'd never played with, stacked so haphazardly that it seemed they would topple over any second. Everything was jammed together,
just so
, achieving a weird static equilibrium, like they were sealed in gelatine.

These mysterious Babel-like piles of crap seemed to have been crammed into the wardrobes hurriedly; the word
abandoned
came to mind. But that couldn't have been the case. Our parents had bought the house new, which meant there'd been no previous occupants. So where had this stuff come from?

 

*

 

For years, I'd grown up with the vaguest knowledge that in
1986
– when I was four years old – the Federal Police had raided my childhood home. It sounded exciting to me, as though I had the blood of bandits and outlaws running through my veins. The police had been looking for my aunties and uncles – my mother's siblings – who'd been staying in Australia illegally. On the rare occasions this was mentioned, I pictured raids with guns, batons and flashlights, my frightened, crying young Chinese cousins hidden in the closets like Elian Gonzalez. But none of my siblings or cousins in Australia remembered the exact details. Everyone was too young.

The story began in the late
1970
s, a time when the population of Hong Kong was reduced to mute terror at the prospect of their region being taken over by the Chinese government. My mother had moved to Hong Kong from Malaysia years earlier, as a fifteen-year-old, after her family heard reports that ethnic Malays were murdering Chinese people. Now, in Hong Kong, those who'd seen the Chinese regime in action on the mainland had come back with their own horror stories: children forced to beat their parents, food contaminated by human faeces, people resorting to cannibalism. The British and the Chinese governments were starting to bicker about the terms and conditions of the proposed handover in
1997
. For Hong Kong citizens, it was like watching two dysfunctional parents fight for their custody, and suspecting your abusive father was going to win out.

‘You didn't wait until
1997
,' Mum explained. ‘You left straightaway. What if the Chinese stamped your documents, never allowing you to leave Hong Kong again? As if Hong Kong people weren't
scared
! They were scared to
death
. You'd shit yourself. If they didn't kill you, they'd torture you slowly, using your own family: your own flesh and blood! Hitler? He'd gas you, killing you instantly in private. The Communists? They'd torture you slowly and in public.'

For her siblings, any place would do: America, Canada, England. But the obvious pick was Australia, where their two youngest sisters – my mother and aunty – had already settled. Even my aunty's husband had been granted citizenship after the Australian government announced a snap amnesty for all illegal immigrants. Who'd even heard of such a thing? Emboldened by the hope that they'd be granted similar concessions by a friendly government, my aunties and uncles started drawing up travel plans. They looked at maps, read up about the wildlife, asked their sisters questions, studied travel guides.

By the time I was born, strange things started arriving in my parents' mail. Cartons of books, boxes of socks, all heralding the imminent arrival of their Hong Kong owners. An avalanche of people followed. Over three years, a total of sixteen members of my mother's extended family – men, women, children – trickled into the country on tourist visas, ready for a new start. The men were handsomely moustached; the women looked like exotic Shanghai models; the bug-eyed children were puppy-dog cute. With every batch of arrivals at the airport, the relatives hugged each other so tightly from relief and joy that it felt like they might suffocate each other.

After a few months in the country, it wasn't long before they started doing distinctly un-tourist-like things: setting up businesses, investing in property, getting pregnant, renting homes, sending their kids to the local school. They let their visas expire, quietly and without ceremony. The family pooled their resources and started a Chinese restaurant, which became an immediate and roaring success. Everyone knew my family by name. For a business packed with illegal immigrants, it was a surprisingly slick and public enterprise, operating in the open and without shame. Life was good.

For the first time in years, my mother was happy. In the first few years of her marriage, she'd felt isolated and cut off from her family; now everyone was a thirty-minute drive away. That year, she'd also gotten pregnant again. After two boys, she had a feeling it might be another girl. Coincidentally, her older sister, Janette, the other Australian citizen, was pregnant too, as was their sister-in-law Estelle. All the women in the family cooed. ‘Wouldn't it be funny,' they asked, ‘if you had your babies at the same time?' The men of the family were more crass. ‘Wouldn't it be funny,' they asked, ‘if we found out your husbands liked to have sex at the same time?' Everyone shrieked and made hooting noises. In amongst all the laughs was another simple question. But to say it out loud would have jinxed things, so no one did.
What was the worst that could possibly happen?

 

*

 

All it takes is a phone call to change everything. It was nighttime when Dad phoned Mum from work. Candy and Andrew were already asleep, while I was watching television and drinking milk, an oblivious four-year-old blob on the carpet.

‘Don't be scared,' Dad told Mum. ‘But I'm going to tell you something serious, and I don't want you to panic. Just stay calm, and listen to me carefully.'

The Federal Police, he told her, had just raided her brothers' restaurant. They'd taken her two older brothers, but had left the women and children behind. Her younger brother, Justin, had tried to escape, and no one knew where he was. ‘In a few minutes,' my father told her, ‘police will come knocking on our door too.'

Mum didn't have time to panic: as soon as she hung up the receiver, the doorbell rang. Two white men in suits showed her their badges. They were from the AFP.

‘We need to search your house.'

As the two men entered and began to question her, she instinctively put her hands on her pregnant belly.

‘Do you know your siblings are living here illegally, and on expired visas?' asked one of the men.

‘Do you know where your youngest brother is at this very moment?' asked the other.

She said she didn't, and it was true. As they searched our house, Mum was afraid they'd wake Candy and Andrew. ‘These are your kids?' the officers asked. They kept sleeping. By this point, she didn't know how to react. Are you meant to look shocked? Are you meant to look sad? How do you put the Federal Police off your entire family's scent? Or would that make you a criminal too? When they had finished searching, they thanked Mum, gave her their contact details and left. As soon as she heard their car engine start, she began making phone calls.