Something Special, Something Rare (18 page)

*

It's got to cure properly, the sealant. So we end up applying the second coat at midnight on Thursday, the three of us slapping our fat brushes into the wall corners, wiping up drops with a turps-soaked rag, seeing it go on shiny and slick and impenetrable. I'm light-headed and starry from the fumes, so that the Nick Cave CD they're playing tonight beats in my skull like a racing, roaring pulse.

I've never been here on the estate this late at night. As I splash the sealant on I listen to cars revving and residents shouting, doors slamming, a quick blooping siren as the police pull someone over, the thumping woofers of passing car stereos. And through it all, I hear a babel of voices; every language group we're so proud of, calling and greeting, arguing and yelling, nearly 2000 people I couldn't name and who have no use for me. Who glance at me, leaving in my car every afternoon, and look away again, busy with the demands of getting by.

I dip my brush and grimly slop on the Armour-All, over the big smiles and laughing eyes and joined hands, sealing them all in behind a clear surface which promises to dry diamond-hard.

*

‘What a great event,' says the minister, and surveying the gymnasium I can see that, yes, this is just the minister's kind of thing – authentic ethnic food on the trestle tables, a welcoming song by the East Timorese choir, real grassroots community development in the shape of 130 or so attendees. In an estate of 1800, that's hardly a throng, but the minister's delighted. And behind it all, towering across the long wall, the mural.

‘Such a positive message,' the minister is saying, ‘and I understand the community itself had a hand in creating it. Marvellous.'

A group of adolescents goes up to inspect the mural, pointing something out. These guys wanted pool tables with the grant money, and who can blame them? The two artists step up to engage them in some kind of conversation, Mandy passing a self-conscious hand through her outlandish hair as the boys look to the floor, sullen and cowed, and I think there must still be residual acetylene fumes in the air, because I'm feeling a faint itching behind the eyes, a crawling tight constriction in my throat.

‘You've certainly acquitted your grant,' the minister says, as I fiddle with my drink and watch the Vietnamese women serving the spring rolls, wondering if they see their faces in the mural, or something approximating them. Then I turn my eyes away from his charcoal lapel to catch the wondrous sight of my fabric-painting class filing into the room self-consciously and stopping the show in a blaze of embroidered hijabs and fringed shawls and gathered layered skirts, seeing me there and smiling the faint

V5

encouraging smiles of the truly dutiful, the truly kind. Yes, it's a grant acquittal to be proud of, a culturally diverse photographic wet dream, and I'm blaming the Armour-All for the pricking sting now in the corners of my eyes, for the way everyone here, all of these estate residents, seem to have formed themselves, for once, into one homogenous whole; one discreet and circumspect crowd carefully distancing themselves, with subtle and infinite dignity, from the huge sprawling image which blares at them from the wall, bright and simplistic as a colouring book.

‘Thank you,' I say to the minister. ‘I wonder if you'll excuse me.'

*

I'm on my way over to the women when the centre manager grabs my arm, flushed and expansive. ‘Great!' he says, handing me the camera. He's beckoning to the minister, grinning, glancing up at the mural to find a good place to stand in front of.

‘I noticed those empty solvent tins out by the bins,' he says distractedly. ‘Can you dispose of them somewhere else, where the kids from round here won't find them and sniff them? Ta.'

Another thought strikes him. ‘And can you get some of the ladies in your Turkish group to come over here for a photo too? In front of the mural?'

Local colour, is what he wants. A multicultural coup. Boxes ticked. Oh, here's our vision all right, sealed and impervious and safeguarded. And no matter what gets scrawled there, whatever message or denial or contradiction, you can just wipe it away. With white spirit.

I weave through the crowd, away from him. Over to Nahir and Mawiya and Jameela.

‘Here,' I say, handing the camera, against all office equipment policy, to a surprised Jameela. ‘I have to go soon, so you take this.'

Her eyes widen uncertainly. ‘To take … what?'

‘Whatever you like. Just point and press.'

I turn to go, heavy-footed across the gymnasium floor. To collect those empty cans from the skip and then drive home, head out the window, car full of dizzying, flammable solvent vapours. To sling them into my own bin, in my own less desperate suburb.

I'm at the door before I hear Jameela calling my name. She's suddenly behind me, reaching to take my arm firmly, steering me determinedly back into the waiting group of the painting class, who have assembled themselves excitedly in a quiet corner. I stand there in the middle in my jeans and black top, a dowdy, sad sparrow among peacocks. Then as Jameela raises the camera carefully I feel two arms on either side of me, stretching tentatively round my waist, drawing me tighter, and in spite of everything, I smile.

LETTER TO A

ALICE PUNG

You ripped down the wallpaper one day when you were fourteen, ripped it right off the walls all four of them and then stuck up posters all over the room to hide the scabby paint. One day it will get painted over, you told yourself. One day the broken window will get fixed. One day the carpets will get changed. One day the ceiling will not fall down. One day the cracks will not be there, one day the smell will not be there, and when that day comes you will be out. Out of there. You will not be there to see it all. One day you will be out of there and one day you will live a freshly whitewashed life. Yes you will, and the ceiling will no longer peel and fall on top of you and these four walls will no longer close in on you, and you will have cauterised your wants.

There is a depression in the wall. These depressions come about when your knuckles itch and your upper deltoids ache to exert themselves and your mind is nothing but a blank black hole screaming to see red, that is when you strike and don't think of the consequences. This is when your inarticulate rage causes you to bunch up your fist and punch the wall so hard that the clock falls down on the other side, since there is no one to listen to your choked half-finished sentences about a cousin, a cousin who was once like a brother but is now nothing more than crap for all you care, a cousin so far gone that you don't think of the money he has borrowed from you or the money he owes you, the money to get out, you do not think about it at all because you do not want to think about him. To think about him is to stumble down the path of despair and once you are on that path, you have to keep running, keep running or else if you stop and pause to see what direction you are going, you will sink to your knees and realise how much you need water, water like the water bottles they carry down the streets of Richmond and you can always tell which ones are the ones on the habit because of these water bottles.

We were powerpoints, powerpoints with the three holes, two that slanted upwards and one that was a straight stroke down, straight and narrow and sad, like the prospect of some of us spending the rest of our lives doing PowerPoint presentations because our names are Andrew Chan and we wear glasses and sit in front of our PCs after school each evening because our parents want us to study hard and become successful, because this is a land of great opportunity and we must not waste it, it is a land of great fairness where even Ah Chan selling BanCao at the market in Saigon can raise a son who can decipher strange symbols in front of a screen merely by pressing many buttons in different combinations on a black pad, and it assures him to hear the clackity clack noise like an old abacus coming from his son's room, because then he knows that his son knows more than he does. Old Ah Chan doesn't have a clue about what the information superhighway is, all he knows is that there are no casualties, none at all, and that it can only go up from here. And so he buys his son the magic machine with the clopclop buttons and with a few clackity clacks and clicks he can transport himself to a nice office and a house in the suburbs and a shiny new blue Mazda.

Chink is an insult, but chink is also the sound that money makes as it rattles in your father's pockets, it is also the sound that those machines at the casino make when he hits the jackpot, so chink is not necessarily too bad a word. Chink is the only word that governs the life of your father, chink chink chink of the coins in the gaming machine, chink chink chink one at a time and not all at once, and so he sits there to wait for the sound of all-at-once chinks, meanwhile at home the boy and the mother and the kid brother sit together for a dinner of rice and vegetables and bits of beef before parting to play computer games or watch Chinese serials in separate rooms. You go off to your room and turn up the music, real loud music, and you look at the white wall which you had determined to paint a mural on, 'cause your art teacher says that you have real talent, but what the hell, what now? What is determination now, when the father won't come back and when the father won't stop spending the money and won't stop believing in the glorious sound of the chinkchinkchink of the machine.

A steady beat of chinks from the coins in his pocket, waiting for the rapid succession of chinkchinkchinks like the quickening of a heartbeat until the glorious rushing sound cannot be separated into its individual tinkles but all pours forth like a mad gold rush.

This is a different gold rush from the gold rush of the nineteenth century when we men had to carry heavy buckets and sift away to find the little pieces, and we needed strong stomachs to swallow the pieces and keen eyes to sift through the processes of our digestive tracts to find that little hard lump.

Meanwhile, swallow that lump in your throat you big sook, 'cause big boys aren't sooks goddam it, and look at your comic books and pictures of
Dragonball Z
and pick up the phone to call the number of that little pale-faced girl with the dark eyes and the black hair, even if she makes you write her letters instead of wanting to talk in person. Let the phone ring and ring and goddam is there anyone home? Keep your finger on the little soft grey ‘off' button on the cordless phone in case her parents pick up and interrogate you worse than those Mao guards during the bloody cultural revolution that would not leave your family alone, that sent them to Vietnam, and then to this new land where little white-faced girls with black hair laugh at your stories of killing chickens in the Guangzhou countryside, and all your history becomes a funny after-dinner anecdote. Others would see your acts as barbaric, and squeeze their clean faces into squished looks of shudder-shake – ‘eww, how gross' – even as they are seated opposite you eating a McChicken burger or severing the joints of the skinny bones of KFC chicken-wings with shiny fingers.

And so you lie on your bed in your room waiting for the father to come home, and you can hear the sound of your mother's footsteps padding to the kitchen to wash the dishes from dinner. You sit up and decide to write the girl a letter, a poem even, although you know all of this means nothing to you even though the girl means something to you, little ivory-faced girl in a tower. Grab a few sheets of Reflex paper, A4, nothing fancy. Goddam if the girl is expecting perfumed notepaper, well this was the best she was going to get and she had better be happy with it. Bloody hell how are you going to do this when you couldn't give a damn about this decomposed Keats your English teacher keeps mentioning?

Words are there to convey action, not an endless quagmire of feelings, and whatever you are feeling is transformed into action. And that is why for the life of you, you can't understand why the girl will not go out with you and all she wants to do is to write these bloody letters to you and wants you to write these bloody letters back to her. The surest way to get to know a person is to meet them, and take them out in your car with your recently attained Ps, God you are proud of these plates, and ask her questions but not too many, and do something fun like going to a movie or something.

But this girl, she's a strange girl. You wonder whether you should pursue her, whether this stupid poem will persuade her to actually go out with you. Grant you that date so you can be with someone for once and not have to say a word and just forget about things and have fun. But this girl, this girl looks like she can't have fun. Something about the look in her eyes, as if she is a little scared of what she sees in the world around her. Like she spends a lot of time thinking about why it is all so terrifying, and keeping quiet about her answers. You have no time for enigmas, you want to get out there and get some action, although not necessarily from this girl, because she is a good girl. You are sick to death of sitting still, of doing nothing.

You pick up the phone again and dial the number of the girl. ‘Hello?' Ah, the familiar voice, you can imagine her now, sitting at her desk, which is where you imagine her to be, if you are not imagining her in other more pleasant places that suit your fancy but probably not her reality. You have called to chat to get your mind off things, but she does not want to chat, this girl. She wants to talk, goddam it why is it that the stereotype is true, why do women always want to talk about feelings and shit as if these feelings will change anything?

Dingdong. That's the bell. The father is home, the mother must be lying in bed, wide awake. You swear you can almost hear the bedsprings creak as she gets up. Creak creak. You can certainly hear the footsteps, the creak creak snap snap of the tendons of her feet and ankles as she shuffles to the door. You wonder whether the little brother is asleep, and whether he is going to wake up this evening. You wait to hear the inevitable question. ‘Where have you been?' Even though your mother knows the answer she asks it anyway.

She can see the chinkchinkchink in his eyes, see the bags beneath. Dark bags beneath carrying phantasmagoric gold coins. He blinks once or twice, and the illusion is gone. He is tired. So tired. The bags hang down to his cheekbones, they become bags of bones, he
is
a bag of bones. ‘How much did you use?' your mother demands. ‘How much did you lose?' the terms are interchangeable, and it doesn't matter which one comes out.

‘I'm hungry, woman, haven't had dinner yet,' the sad man in the old brown leather jacket with the elastic at the bottom grumbles.

‘If you came home earlier, you wouldn't have to eat leftovers,' grumbles the mother, as she shuffles to the kitchen, but she brings out the beef from the stove, the beef she would not let you eat too much of because she was saving it for him.