One Whole and Perfect Day Read online

  ‘Home?’ he echoed weakly, because this was his home, this house in the mountains, this room, this bed –

  ‘Your mum’s place,’ said May.

  ‘You know it got pulled down. There’s only flats there now.’

  ‘I meant the suburb,’ said May. ‘It’s still there. The place where you grew up.’

  ‘Rent a room there, you mean?’

  ‘Rent a room? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Well, you said, “Go back home.” ’

  ‘Only for a few hours, love. You wouldn’t need to rent a room just to walk round the streets for a bit. You know, walk round where you used to go with your mum when you were little. Didn’t she used to take you shopping? To the barber’s? Things like that?’

  ‘Ah.’ Relief flooded through him like a warm sweet tide.

  ‘It might jog your memory, see?’

  So it might, thought Stan, and he pulled the doona up to his chin, snuggled closer to May, and fell asleep quite easily.

  21

  THE OLD PLACE

  It was years since Stan had been back to the suburb where he’d grown up, and there’d been changes even then: the bootmaker’s gone, and the Ham’n’Beef where Mum had sent him on summer evenings when it had been too hot to cook, to get sixpence worth of devon and a shilling’s worth of ham. But the Misses Parrs’ haberdashery had still been in business, and Coco Pedy’s Fashions, where Stan had often waited, scarlet and embarrassed, for Mum to come out of the ladies’ fitting room.

  Now, turning from the station into Good Street, Stan stopped and stood, bewildered. Except for Woolies and the old Royal Hotel, both of them shabby and down at heel, almost everything had gone. Coco Pedy’s was a video shop, the Cash’n’Carry had become some kind of herbalist’s, and on the corner where the Misses Parr had sold their embroidery silks and knitting wools stood the Hong Kong Star Emporium.

  Even the people had changed. He stood on the side of the footpath for a full ten minutes and in all that time, apart from a couple of schoolkids, he saw only one Australian face. Saris and veils passed by him, men in funny caps, even a tiny old lady in black pyjamas and a big straw hat – the exact replica of a picture he remembered from his Grade 2 Reader, Our Oriental Friends.

  Stan’s face took on an expression his mother and sister would have recognised immediately: pouched cheeks, pursed lips, a deep grieved groove between his brows. Stan was in the sulks. Anyone’d think he’d caught the QANTAS flight to Singapore instead of the 7.30 down to Central! ‘What did we fight the bloody war for?’ he muttered, and at once, almost as if she was standing there beside him, Stan heard Lily’s voice. ‘Well, you didn’t, Pops, did you?’

  Okay, so he’d had flat feet and the army wouldn’t take him, or the navy, or the air force. He’d have gone if he could have.

  ‘Pops!’ Lily’s voice scolded inside his head. ‘You’re a racist, Pops!’

  ‘No I’m not. It’s just that –’ And here he’d stop. Because how could he explain to Lily, when he hardly understood the way he felt himself? When he couldn’t find words for the way the world kept changing on him? How, standing on the once-familiar corner of his old beat in the city, staring up at the tall buildings whose smooth glossy sides reflected clouds – the din of traffic all around him, strange music, the mysterious words of unknown languages – Stan would feel like a kid in a fairytale, a kid who’d been asleep inside a mountain for a hundred years. And woken in some foreign, unfamiliar land.

  He’d never imagined it could happen here in the tatty old suburb where he’d been born.

  ‘Pops! lmagine!’ Lily’s voice again.

  ‘Eh? Imagine what?’

  ‘Imagine if there was a civil war, here.’

  ‘Here?’ Stan had paused and looked around him. He and Lil had been walking down a quiet side street in Katoomba. It was the middle of the school holidays and Lily had been visiting with him and May. They’d gone out for bread and now they were walking home. ‘Here?’

  ‘Yeah, here.’ Lily had spun round on her toes, arms outstretched, embracing the peaceful neighbourhood. ‘It’s not impossible, you know, Pop. Australia’s not all perfect, like you think.’

  ‘Look, I don’t think that.’

  She wouldn’t let him finish. She never did. ‘And imagine you were on the losing side and got kicked out –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If there was a civil war, Pop! And you had nowhere to go except on some tatty old boat to another country, with nothing, and then, when you got there, to this other country, people started giving you a bad time, especially the old ones. Called you names and stuff.’

  ‘I don’t call them names.’

  ‘Huh! Look how you’re saying “them”. ’

  Useless to argue. ‘It wouldn’t bother me if they did call me names.’

  ‘Oh yes? I bet it would. When you were in a strange place and all on your own.’

  ‘Listen, Lil, I –’

  ‘Pop, people from other countries are human, like us.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’ He’d said it wrong; he realised the moment the words slipped from his mouth.

  ‘What?’ Lily’s voice had risen dangerously. ‘Not human?’

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant. You always take me up the wrong way, Lil. I didn’t mean they –’

  ‘Look how you’re saying “they”!’

  Stan took a deep breath. ‘People from other countries, then. I didn’t mean to say people from other countries weren’t human. You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. All I meant was, well, they’re different from us.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know they’re not like us, Pop? Have you ever really met an Asian person? Got to know them? Ever in your life? Made a friend?’

  He’d got her gist: she thought he was one of those types who wouldn’t give a home to refugees, who chucked boat people overboard, locked them up in prisons, kids included.

  Stan felt hard done by. Of course he wasn’t like that! ‘Just because I get things wrong sometimes,’ he began, ‘use the wrong words . . .’

  She mowed him flat. ‘Wrong words! Is that what you call it, Pop?’

  ‘Struth! Give us a go! Ms Politically Correct!’

  ‘Big Bigot!’

  His lips had twitched. Then Lil’s lips twitched. Suddenly they were laughing.

  It was always like that. He and Lil could row and row, bawling insults at each other, and yet despite their differences, they never really fell out. He never lost her like he’d lost Lonnie . . .

  Hang on a minute! What was he thinking about? He hadn’t lost Lonnie; he’d chucked him out, he’d written him off, hadn’t he? Lonnie was no loss to him.

  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.

  22 FIRST QUARREL

  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 a
s 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.