Tuvalu (12 page)

I started towards the house. I was halfway up the path when, looking behind me, I noticed a green aluminium shed shrouded in vines. This shed was tucked in a front corner of the yard, opposite the gate. Somehow, probably because of the vines, I had failed to notice it. But now a door flung open and without warning a plump, pyjama-clad Asian woman stepped out, looking me up and down without embarrassment. The door behind her was heavily padded and, with it now open, loud classical music sent the birds in the persimmon tree flapping for the sky.

The woman, clearly in her fifties, twirled a metal can-opener by its handle, one hand resting on a voluptuous hip. Then, grinning like a child, she stood straight.

‘Quick quick,' she called out.

‘I'm here to see my mother.'

‘Quick quick!'

I had assumed this woman would accompany me into the house. But, with an upside-down hand, she gestured for me to step inside the shed. When I did, my eyes hardly able to see in the gloom, she pulled the door shut, bolted it and dropped the opener onto a pile of identical openers. This pile came to my knees, spilling across the floor.

‘What is this place? Why have we come in here?' I shouted over the music. But I could hardly hear my voice; I had to imagine the words. The woman, silhouetted in the light of a battered desk lamp, put on a welding mask. She shrugged, turned her attention to a workbench with a small vice, dropped the mask's visor and tapped the welding rod to get a light. For a moment I felt as though I was staring into the sun. Then came blackness.

‘What are you doing?' I shouted.

‘Wait wait.'

White splotches danced inside my eyes, maliciously centring themselves in front of anything I attempted to look at. I tried to blink them away. She again welded together two perfectly good openers, ruining both. How she did this without burning holes in either her flannel pyjamas or abdomen I could not say. New splotches joined the dance.

‘Are you Celeste?' I yelled. ‘Can you show me where my mother is?' But the woman waved me off, beginning to sway in time to the music, a big smile on her podgy face. Her lips, as if instruments themselves, moved in time with the melody.

‘Like?' I think she shouted.

‘What?'

She cupped a hand behind her left ear, already lodged at a right angle to her temple, and demanded, ‘What you say? Say again!'

‘I said, “What?” '

She frowned, finding a remote control amidst the openers. The music cut dead and, just as there had been an absence of light following the welding, there was now an absence of sound. In the furious silence I had the sensation we had detonated something. I could not hear a thing—birds, traffic or any of the noises which had filled the enchanted yard on the other side of the padded door.

‘What you say?' she asked again, voice expanding like a pressurised gas to fill the room.

‘Is Mum here?'

‘Dips,
ne
,' she said nodding.

‘What?'

‘Okay, I am Celeste. Dips is here now.'

I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘You're Japanese?'

‘Sort of, sort of no,' she said. ‘C'mon. All done. We go see Dips now, shall we?'

Celeste exited the shed, crossed the front yard with me in tow and slid back an almost invisible glass door. She gestured for me to enter.

‘Dips?' she called, following me in. ‘Dips? Where are you?'

The floor had tatami matting. Four walls, all made of glass and meeting each other squarely, formed a long rectangular void. We did not linger to appreciate it though. Celeste led the way, her face turned towards me as she talked of welders, up glass stairs to the second floor. At a glance this level looked like any normal apartment. It had solid walls, carpet, doors, power points and a digital television. We passed through a beautifully appointed kitchen and down a long hallway filled with ghoulish paintings, finally stopping in front of a closed door.

‘Dips?' Celeste called out, rapping this door with one knuckle.

‘Yes?'

My mother's voice.

A moment later the door opened wide, revealing a bathroom. Steam billowed out, running along the low ceiling. My mother, her hair longer than I remembered, wrapped a towel around her head and smiled. She wore loose-fitting jeans and a singlet.

‘Well,' she said, ‘it's fantastic to be able to
see
you!' Without the slightest hesitation she stepped forward, scooped me up in her arms and gave me a hug, tightening her grip in degrees until I finally protested. I felt a smile burst forward, become a laugh, then censor itself. I hardly knew my mother in these surrounds. I could not recall ever having seen her so animated.

‘It's been a while since I've done that,' she said. ‘I'm thrilled you've come, but I have to ask, did you tell your father about this place? The address?'

‘No. He was asleep when I left.'

My mother rubbed the back of my neck with an outstretched hand, examining me as a tourist might a statue.

‘Dips?' I asked.

‘A school name,' she said dismissively. ‘I can't believe you found your own way here. I was going to have Celeste call. Thankfully, though, that won't be necessary.'

At the mention of her name, I turned to ask Celeste about the front gate. But she had vanished.

‘Interesting house,' I said to the empty hallway.

‘It is.'

‘Is it Celeste's? I don't see much evidence of a husband.'

‘Yes, all hers.'

‘And who is Celeste exactly?'

‘Celeste? Celeste is Celeste. A school friend. An old school friend.'

I followed my mother as far as her bedroom, lingering at the door while she removed the towel from her head and used it to dry her hair in a careless fashion. The room, spacious and with vertical blinds, was dimly lit. In one corner golf clubs and a tennis racquet were propped against the wall. The unprepossessing single bed was perfectly made. And the bedside table, the only other furniture in the room, was devoid of books or a lamp. I wondered at the new interest in sport, and what had become of my mother's classics.

Content to leave her hair somewhat damp, she led me back through the apartment towards the kitchen. Celeste certainly had money. The basics—the carpet, furniture and fittings—were all modern and expensive-looking. Yet on both floors, over all this, or rather, built into it, was a curious addition: art. Bizarre works of art caught my eye at every turn. Celeste was an artist who chose as her palette the most mundane, everyday items available to her. In one room there was a vacuum cleaner with a thick skin of condoms, all in fluorescent, transparent wrappings; in another, a lamp made of tightly woven twigs. In the kitchen the fridge had been turned into a skyscraper, complete with lit windows and tiny business people working at cluttered desks. Even Celeste's dog, a Great Dane which carried itself around the apartment like a stallion, often breaking into a canter, wore her art, its thick collar studded with old bike pump valves.

‘I like it,' I said uncertainly.

‘Do you really?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Then you shouldn't say you do. That's a bad habit. It's hard enough working out what you do and don't like in this world without lying.'

‘That's a very serious thing to say. You sound like Dad.'

‘Well, in many ways your father's a smart man.'

We brewed coffee and, blowing steam from the tops of our mugs, stepped onto the second-floor balcony. A view of the front yard greeted us, the shed's aluminium roof barely visible through thick leaves.

‘She'll be deaf soon,' my mother observed, nodding towards the shed. ‘Already I have to shout at her. But she only enjoys music when it's loud. It's been that way as long as I've known her.'

‘Why isn't there any art in the front yard?' I asked. ‘Compared to inside, there's nothing. Only that path and the crazy old gate.'

‘It's what Celeste calls her “Pretty Much Normal Zone”. If she has to entertain people who can't appreciate what she does with her life—and there are more than a few—she does it in the front yard. She rarely invites people inside the house. Not unless she's opening it up to the public for an exhibition, and I can't remember the last time she did that. All her shows have been failures. Newspaper people get in and they find it too easy to mock. If you ask me they're scared, but—'

‘Scared?'

‘Scared to like it. Or maybe it's just no good. I really don't know.' My mother withdrew a pack of menthol cigarettes from her jeans, unwrapped it, checked under the lid for a number, then selected the corresponding cigarette, counting her way from the front left filter. She had always been superstitious about which cigarette to smoke first, fearing cancer, and it pleased me to see this superstition remained. I looked her over as she lit up.

My mother might have been a little heavier, but not overly so. Her greying hair had the same severe style it had had all my life, administered with a hand mirror and sewing scissors, and her jeans were still faded and frayed from overuse. In fact, the only real difference was her skin. Previously dry, pale and often besmirched by acne, it was now clear and moist. There were three sharp sunburn lines —one just above the collar of her singlet and two halfway up her arms. The long forearms, toned and coated with fine, almost white hair, were deeply tanned. I pictured the golf clubs and racquet in her room, so alien to my understanding of her.

‘Must be nice not to have to sneak out for a cigarette,' I said. My mother smiled and nodded.

‘It is, though I'm smoking too much now.'

And here the conversation stalled. From our vantage point we could make out the tops of trucks passing on the opposite side of the wall. One or two belched smoke and I followed a burst up into nothingness. Somewhere off in a side street schoolgirls were laughing.

‘Are you angry with me?' my mother asked finally.

‘Angry? No, I don't think so.'

She rubbed the back of my head with her free hand, roughing up my hair. She had a beautiful face. Most of it was her smile, but there was something more. She was one of those lucky women who aged gracefully no matter how little sleep she had, or how stressful her daily routine. Though not without wrinkles, my mother's face still held a certain youthfulness from every angle, impossible to define because it had no substance beyond an impression. Even her hair, the colour of cold ash, did nothing to age her.

My mother smoked calmly. Whereas my father had been eager to speak, she did not appear to need to. I could not be sure, however, as I found her difficult to read. She had become impossibly complex in the space of a few years: more like me, with hopes, miseries, strengths, weaknesses, convictions and doubts all suddenly on display. Before, she had been my mother—nothing more, nothing less. Now she was human and flawed, confusedly looking for happiness. I felt scared for her, and the realisation was as unwelcome as it was unsettling. I had never worried for a parent.

‘What's Celeste doing with those can-openers?' I asked.

‘No idea. You never know until she's finished.'

‘Was she always like this?'

‘No, I don't think so. To be honest, I didn't know her well at school. She only attended for a while. The middle years. We were awful to her. And people were probably awful to her family, too, because they went back to Japan and she finished high school and university over there. She only came back here when she was in her forties, after a messy divorce. That's when we met up again, realised we'd been in the same year. She has three grown children I've never met.'

‘How long will you be staying with her?'

‘As long as she'll have me. I'm her chef. It's a live-in position.'

I felt, hearing this, an obligation to ask, ‘Did something happen?'

‘With your father? No.' My mother butted out her cigarette forcefully, squashing it into her coffee cup. ‘Nothing ever happened.'

That night at dinner Celeste took a long time to settle. She kept pulling her shirt out from between the three neat rolls of fat circling her stomach.

‘Thinking,' she kept saying to me. ‘Still thinking about openers. Thinking, thinking. Sorry. Must not, I know. But what to do, what? So many fucking openers.' She asked for ideas (which we gave and were rebuked for), and only began to let go of the topic after a third glass of wine. ‘Aha!' she shouted at one point, banging the table. ‘That's it! I'll take them apart, then put them together, but all mix up.' Her face dropped. ‘No, no good.'

‘Celeste, Noah is living in Japan, remember?'

‘I remember. Of course I remember.' She turned on me and spoke in rapid, flowing Japanese. Sentences leapt from her, all tumbling over one another. The speed of them marked such a change from her halting English that they sounded beautiful—free. I tried to understand, to pluck words like tadpoles from this stream but they slipped past, hiding among one another. Embarrassed, I had to ask for a translation.