One Whole and Perfect Day (13 page)
As he stood there in Good Street remembering past quarrels, a violent pang of hunger gnawed suddenly at Stan’s innards. His mum and Emmie would have recognised this symptom, and so would May: Stan always got hungry when he got upset.
Time for a Chiko roll. Yeah, he really fancied a good old Chiko roll. And with a small sigh of anticipation, Stan set off in search of a takeaway.
Though Stan hadn’t noticed, it was a beautiful day, the kind of day you get occasionally at the end of winter, after months of wind and cold and rain. Through the grimy window of her westbound train, Clara’s mum could see a sky the colour of new satin ribbon, a true and perfect cerulean. The shabby old weatherboards beside the railway seemed to have a shine to them; there were fat green buds on the trees along the nature strips, and freesias and little white daisies coming up through the grass on the embankments. In a few short weeks it would be Spring.
The route Rose travelled on the way to buy her favourite sweets was the same she used to take thirty years ago, to and from her school. How early she’d had to get up! On winter mornings it had still been dark when she and her parents ate their breakfast in the small kitchen of their house in Troy Street. A tightness came into her chest when she remembered that table set beneath the window, just big enough for the three of them; Dad in his grey suit, ready for the office, his hair slicked back neatly behind his ears, Mum in her red silk dressing gown. How young they’d been! Rose marvelled. Not that she’d realised it then.
‘I’m an orphan,’ Rose thought, and she almost smiled, because the word sounded so ridiculous applied to her: a small woman with greying hair who’d be forty-five next birthday. Her mum and dad had only been in their late thirties when they’d died. Drowned, both of them, together, in a ferry disaster in Malaysia, visiting the town where they’d been born. Rose hadn’t gone on that trip with them; it had been September, too close to her first-year exams at university, and they’d all agreed she was old enough to stay home by herself. ‘Next time,’ Mum and Dad had promised her. ‘We’ll all go when you finish your degree.’ But there was never a next time, and Rose had never finished her degree. The high marks she’d earned in those first exams had seemed like a taunt to Rose. Her friends had been afraid to congratulate her: how could you congratulate a person whose parents had just died?
The train slowed, brakes squealing; Rose got up from her seat, walked up the aisle and through the doors into the glittering morning. Then up the steps and down the ramp, across the road and round the corner into Good Street, towards the white façade of Lakshmi Palace of Sweets. The shop hadn’t been there in her parents’ time; her mother’s love for gulab jamun was a memory of her own childhood in Malaysia, when her grandmother had bought them from the Indian shop every year as a birthday treat.
How astonished Mum would have been to find that she could actually buy her favourite sweets in this old Australian suburb, which back then had been a place where the tastes of other countries were unknown. Rose gazed through the window at the gleaming trays of jalebi, sandesh, rasgulla, barfi, ras malai. If Mum was here they would have made this little trip together. But Mum wasn’t here, and that was that.
Only it wasn’t really, because you kept remembering, and what Rose remembered most from that summer of her parents’ death was the aching loneliness, the hollow sense of absence, as if a real physical space had been carved out beneath her ribs. And this hollowness was echoed by her footsteps on the shiny wooden floors of the empty house where the three of them had lived together, and later, when the house was sold, in her small flat near the university. Rose shivered – tock tock tock on a summer’s evening – for her that had been the very sound of loneliness. And because she had never seen the place where her daughter now lived, Rose feared such loneliness for her. She swallowed. It was three whole weeks since Rose had heard from Clara.
On this same bright morning, Clara and Lonnie were having their very first quarrel. It sprang out of nowhere, like a small violent cloud on the edge of a calm horizon, so small that at first you barely noticed it. Only when you looked again that little cloud had covered half the sky.
They were sharing a bucket of chips on the lawn of the Eastern Quadrangle, the place where Jessaline had first glimpsed Clara with her boyfriend. Now Jessaline saw them again as she passed on her way to the bus-stop, to catch the number 147 which would take her to David Jones food hall in the city, where she would roam blissfully all afternoon, skipping her classes and gazing at exotic foodstuffs instead, planning menus for the restaurant she hoped to have one day. Wandering DJs was homework, Jessaline told herself, homework for her new career in Hospitality.
She waved, and when Lonnie and Clara failed to notice her, Jessaline didn’t feel the least bit neglected, as she might have done only a few short weeks ago. Once you got a life, reflected Jessaline, you didn’t have time to feel touchy or paranoid. ‘Once you get a life,’ she hummed, ‘a life, a life . . .’
The quarrel hadn’t quite begun as Jessaline passed by. Clara was telling Lonnie about the problem she had with her mum. ‘She wants to see my room. She hasn’t asked, but I know she wants to. And I should invite her, only –’
‘Only?’
‘It’s like – like it’s my own private place and I don’t want family in it, not yet, not till I’ve got over them.’ Got over all those quarrels she’d had with her dad. And with her mother too: about the way Mum simply put up with stupid stuff from Dad. Even the sight of her mother’s sad, quiet face could make Clara feel upset, and then enraged. In the peace of her room at Mercer Hall she’d begun to get free of all that; she didn’t want Mum coming there. ‘I feel sort of – torn,’ she confided to Lonnie.
Lonnie understood exactly what she meant, because didn’t he feel the same way? He was torn about Nan’s party: he wanted to go for her sake, and because he loved that little house up in the mountains, the pretty rooms he seemed to have known forever, the long lush garden with its views of blue ridges and endless sky, the hammock swung between the apple trees; it had been a good part of his life.
But how could you go to a party for someone who’d written you off? There was something implacable about writing a person off, something as cold and hard and glittering as the edge of Pop’s shiny axe. Pop mightn’t have cut Lonnie’s head off, but he’d wounded him all the same. Banished him.
‘He goes over the forks,’ Clara was saying, running her small white teeth along the edge of a salty, crispy chip. For a moment, because he’d been thinking of him, Lonnie thought she was talking about his pop.
‘Goes over the forks?’ Pop would never do such a thing.
‘My dad,’ said Clara.
‘Ah.’
‘When Mum does the washing-up. He goes over them, to see they’re washed properly. And if they aren’t, if there’s the tiniest little speck left on one, then he makes her do it again. And she
shouldn’t
!’ exploded Clara, the old rage boiling up inside her.
‘Forks,’ murmured Lonnie, and he smiled. He couldn’t help it, this image of three grown people fighting over forks was laughable.
‘What are you smiling about?’ asked Clara in a low fierce voice he’d never heard before.
‘Just, ah, you know, forks. It seems so –’
‘Petty? To carry on about?’
‘Um –’
‘What about your
axe,
then? Your pop’s axe that you keep going on about?’
Lonnie’s smile vanished. Forks were no match for Pop’s axe: the glint of it, the sheer ugly
size
. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, he’s not going to cut your head off or anything, is he? He’s this poor old man, almost eighty!’
‘Poor old man?’ Lonnie was incredulous. He pushed the bucket of chips aside, the better to see her face. She was serious! She actually thought Pop was some kind of harmless old pensioner! He sprang to his feet. ‘My pop’s worse than your dad, any day!’
‘Oh?’ Clara jumped up too. ‘You want to bet?’
‘Sure.’
She seized his hand. ‘C’mon,’ she said.
‘Where are we going?’
Clara wouldn’t say.
Twenty minutes later they were in the main street of a quiet inner suburb, half-concealed behind a skinny coral tree.
‘Now watch that door!’ ordered Clara, pointing across the road.
‘The brown one?’
It was a very narrow door, squashed in between a chemist’s and a fruiterer’s. Gilded letters on an upstairs window read, Charles M. Lee, Tax Accountant.
‘That’s your dad’s office?’
‘Yes.’ Clara checked her watch. It was two minutes to one. Abruptly, the brown door opened and a stout bald-headed man, arms laden with files, burst out of it. He glared at a council rubbish bin, dropped the files inside it, kicked the bin sharply, and stomped away up the street.
‘Your dad?’ asked Lonnie.
‘No,’ said Clara, adding impatiently, ‘How could he be?’
‘Huh?’
‘He’s not Chinese, is he?’
Lonnie stole a quick glance at her. ‘Oh, right. Yeah. I forgot.’
Clara grinned at him. ‘You’re so – quaint.’ She flung her arms around him.
A distant clock boomed out the hour. Clara jumped away. ‘Now!’ she cried, and as the sound died away the brown door opened again and a small slender man emerged, blinking into the sun.
‘
That’s
him.’ Clara grabbed Lonnie’s hand and together they followed the small man up the street.
‘What if he looks round and sees us?’ worried Lonnie.
‘He won’t,’ said Clara confidently.
Half a block further, Mr Lee turned off the main street into a small paved square. He sat down on a bench and took a brown paper lunch bag from his plastic carrier.
‘Ham and pickle,’ whispered Clara. ‘He always has the same. Sliced
very
thin. And if Mum doesn’t shave it thin enough then she has to do it again.’
Lonnie studied Clara’s father. He looked so harmless, so mild. ‘He’s sort of – small.’
‘Hitler was shortish,’ retorted Clara, and yet even as she said this she was thinking how unsettling it was to see her dad out in the world, away from home. If she’d been a stranger instead of his daughter she’d have thought he looked lonely sitting on that little bench; lonely in the way a kid would look, eating lunch by himself in the playground because no one would play with him. Serve him right! she thought. Only then – perhaps it was the warmth of Lonnie’s hand clasped in hers, or the happy thought of her room, her own private place waiting at the end of a short bus ride, or her life itself, which now seemed full of promise (she didn’t know quite what) – all at once Clara could imagine herself saying, in a calmer older voice, ‘He’s not a bad old stick . . .’
Could that be? Ever?
Lonnie was squeezing her hand. ‘Hey! We quarrelled,’ he said. ‘We quarrelled, Clara.’
So they had. ‘It was a kids’ fight,’ she replied, and waited, because perhaps he wouldn’t understand what she meant.
He did understand. ‘Yeah, wasn’t it? Like: who’s the biggest bogeyman? Your dad or my pop?’
They giggled. Clara leaned forward and kissed his cheek. They didn’t ask each other who had won the bet.
Emerging from the park where he always went to eat his lunchtime sandwiches, Charlie Lee saw his only child, his once-precious daughter, kissing a great Australian lout in the middle of the street. A long-haired lout, the sort who, if employed at all, would always be late with his tax. Charlie stood stock-still, his fists clenched by his side, waves of rage and shock rolling through his blood. This was what they left home for, he thought bitterly, these girls . . .
He wouldn’t tell Rose, he decided, crossing the road and striding down towards his office. He wouldn’t tell Rose because what Clara did now was none of their business, she wasn’t – she wasn’t their daughter anymore.
Stan was raging: the blasted fish and chip shop had gone, a brash new computer store in its place! He walked the length of Good Street like his mum had done seventy years back when she’d trudged from one greengrocer’s to another, looking for a penny off a pound of beans – only Stan was looking for a takeaway.
And when he found one, it was the wrong sort. He realised this the very moment he entered the shop: posters with Chinese writing on the walls, and in the shining trays beneath the glass-topped counter, noodles and vegetables, bony objects in a thick black sauce, tiny white pastie things . . .
The old woman behind the counter smiled at him. ‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘Yes?’
Stan flushed and pointed to the pasties, they looked the safest. ‘Um, what’s in those?’ Now it was Marigold’s voice he heard in his ear; Marigold on the evening he always thought of as The Night of the Chooks’ Feet. May’s birthday, when Marigold had taken them to that big Chinese restaurant in town. She’d ordered the Banquet. Stan’s fork (he’d refused the chopsticks) had hovered above his bowl. ‘But they’re feet!’ he’d protested. ‘Something’s feet. I’m not eating feet!’ Though he couldn’t help noticing how May was tucking in quite happily, and Lily, and the boy who’d still been his grandson back then, so that Stan, fork down, arms folded sternly across his chest, had felt an odd little sense of being left behind.
‘In these?’ The small voice dragged him back to the present, to the old lady behind the counter beaming at him, pointing to the pastie things. ‘In these?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Wegetarian.’
They were out, then. After the shock he’d suffered (the place where he’d grown up vanished while his back was turned) Stan felt he needed meat. Meat of some kind, anyway. ‘Got any Chiko rolls?’
‘Ah, chicken!’ She pointed to a tray of skewered meat. ‘Chilli or satay?’
Stan didn’t fancy either. ‘Not chicken,’ he said. ‘Chiko.’
‘Chiko?’ She leaned her head to one side, eyes twinkling up at him. He had an uncomfortable feeling she thought he was a fool.
‘A Chiko
roll
,’ said Stan. His mouth filled with saliva. Even to say the words brought the taste of chewy yellow batter, and that unique and unforgettable grey mince. ‘You wonder what it is,’ May always said.