Tuvalu (36 page)

‘You know,' she said, ‘your father thinks you'll move back.'

‘To Australia?'

‘No, back into the apartment.'

‘Why would I do that?'

‘I'm only telling you what he said.'

Having given up on the jeans and folding them as best I could, I pulled back the curtain. The store was busy.
Gaijin
—which is how I had come to think of Anglo-Saxons—browsed racks and chatted aimlessly in pairs or similarly dressed female clusters. My mother held up an almost purple T-shirt.

‘What do you think?'

‘No.'

‘Do you want to try another store?'

‘No. Let's go.'

She replaced the T-shirt and sighed. ‘I've put you in a bad mood.'

‘No.'

‘I have. Talking all about your father and going to university.'

‘You hadn't mentioned university.'

My mother smiled. ‘Hadn't I?' She turned serious again. ‘We worry a little is all. We'd like to see you with a degree because the two of us battled a sort of poverty all our adult lives and it doesn't need to be that way. You can take steps to make sure you're comfortable and uni is an obvious one. I don't care what course you do. Aren't you treading water in Japan? Maybe that's a mean thing to say, but your father and I agree. It's time to come home and start your life, your real life. In fact, your father said Anna—you know, the Livingston girl—has a spare room in a share house. He wasn't keen on the idea, and perhaps it's already filled, but wouldn't you be happier there with people around you? You've been through a lot. Maybe you should slow down.'

‘I'll think about it,' I said, wondering how I could slow down any more than I had. I was not hurt, but more pleased—pleased the two of them had talked and had taken such an interest in me.

Over time the decision to study more or less made itself. My mother and Celeste began to talk as though I would start in March. I spoke on the phone with administrative staff and academics, and wandered the windswept Monash University campus. Most students seemed to be on holiday. Those who were still around sat and drank coffee, studied or pasted up political posters. It was all very subdued.

Following school this scene might have appalled me, a continuation of study, but now it appealed. There was freedom in it and I was tempted to sign up, put my name down for something utterly useless. Something from the Arts department that, though I would never use it again, I could sink my teeth into and pass many a lazy day debating. Greek tragedy, Bolivian feminism, anthropology, dinosaur-hunting— what it was hardly mattered.

Then came Mami's letter, and I never once phoned or went near a university again.

Dear Noah,

I had someone contact you about new housing. They spoke
with Phillip who gave this address. I hope you don't mind my
using it now.

Letters aren't easy things to write. Not for me, anyway.
Whenever I write a letter it always ends up as a listing of facts,
emotionless. This will too, no doubt, since there is so much to
put down starting with this. I fucked Phillip. You'll remember
the day. Didn't you think it a little odd, me coming out of the
bathroom with wet hair?

Maybe you know. I think you knew as I stepped from the
bathroom. So I'm writing this in explanation and also as an
apology. I'm trying to write to everyone I've ever cared for and
been cruel to.

I've not slept with many people—three (that I've chosen).
I do other things, find other ways to please. I don't really like
sex, the position it puts me in, and I want to make it clear I
didn't plan to have sex with Phillip. When I felt his hand, his
finger brush my inner thigh, I fully expected to laugh at him.

But I kissed him. I let one of his hands crawl up my back,
up my neck into my hair, tugging at the roots. I let his tongue
inside my mouth. I straddled him, pulled his pants down and
had him remove my clothes. I helped him get his blind, stupid
cock inside, felt his pig-headed fingers grope for my nipples.
Looking back on it now I'd say it was his injury. He pretended
he was enjoying it, pretended he was up to the task, but he
wasn't. The way I was doing it hurt him. I could tell. I could see
it and adjusted in increments until he was in agony. I left him
unfinished. He won't get a letter. But you get this one.

Mami

Niigata

T
he cold air inside the gangplank caused me to teeter between the plane and Japan. I was done with the place and yet was allowing a girl—or the invention of a girl sculpted between transient meetings—to reclaim me. She was an illusion. Common sense told me Mami Kaketa was a bad bet. But it was beyond my control since I was in love. Being in love was the easiest way forward, perhaps the only way forward. It gave me a focus. And while it did not excuse past actions, did not excuse my treatment of Tilly or give me a true end to her, it provided an explanation. Mami was no fling. I had not abandoned Tilly for a quick screw. I had to believe that. Love, so long as it was love, was messy and beyond anyone's control.

And yet nothing is ever clean. Stepping from the plane I had the sense I was returning not to Mami but to Tilly. The charred remains of the farmhouse had not erased her quite as she had hoped. She lingered in my thoughts, danced around them. As had been my habit for weeks I thought of cockroaches, of the smell of insect spray, of freckled pale skin and red pubic hair, of a round woman waiting by an ambulance, of skinny stinking cats and smattered blood, of ghostly lace curtains, chopped wood, a huntsman spider, a knock on the door and light across long-burnt carpet. This was how Tilly spoke now. And unless I ignored her, unless I forged ahead, I feared she would speak forever.

In the customs line a middle-aged woman behind me bumped me every time we took a step forward. She seemed to be using me as a marker, a yardstick to indicate the end of the queue. I scowled but she only stared back uncomprehendingly, her face taut, her make-up thick and hard. The man in front of me constantly pulled denim jeans up to his bellybutton, outlining two flat bum cheeks, and it was not difficult to envisage what sort of a bum his wife stared glumly at before bed. Without warning, he turned to face me.

‘This line is for Japanese,' he said. His voice was loud and confident despite his heavily accented English. To reinforce his point he held up his Japanese passport and thrust it towards me. In the photo, as in person, he had the flat, unsettling face of a man struck with a shovel in early infancy.

‘You must go there,' he said, gesturing towards a long, winding line full of foreigners.

I was in the right line, being a temporary resident.

‘Don't worry about it,' I answered simply, using Japanese. A few people chuckled at his meddling and he turned around, giving his jeans another hitch. We all took a step forward and the woman behind bumped into me. I fought off a panicky suspicion I had made a terrible mistake returning, and pictured Mami lying on her bed, the curve of her hip beneath her silk slip and her wide, beautiful mouth. A way forward.

Phillip was gone. The apartment door was opened instead by a British girl with an upturned nose and a dumpy little body. A second Brit—a tall, gangly man with wiry hair— appeared behind her protectively. He yawned as if just woken.

‘Yes?' they both asked.

‘Is Phillip here?'

The man stuck his head forward, frowning. ‘Who?'

‘You mean the boy we had stay here?' asked the woman.

‘Yeah.'

At this the man, realising he was not needed, peeled back and ambled down the narrow hallway. The woman shook her head. ‘He's gone.'

‘Where did he go?'

The woman shrugged. ‘I don't know, but he left a bag of things here for a friend. What's your name?'

‘Noah Tuttle.'

‘That's the one. You'd better come in and collect it then. We were thinking about throwing it out.'

Somewhere in the main room a child started to howl. I hurriedly collected my things, which Phillip had piled into a garbage bag, and let myself out. Dragging it all to a Denny's restaurant I rummaged through and found a scrawled note. All that was written was my name and an address for a town in Niigata prefecture, high up in the mountains. I realised Mami had extended her offer to Phillip as a matter of course.

‘Shit …' I mumbled, throwing down the note, ‘she found us both a house.'

At first Phillip would not believe it was me.

‘What's your hair colour?' he asked.

‘Reddish.'

‘Wrong,' he corrected, opening the door.

‘Then why'd you open the door?'

‘Because anyone else would have said red.'

‘Why the paranoia?'

‘Tuttle,' he said sleepily, pulling me inside and locking up, ‘you can't be too careful these days.'

After this greeting I was surprised to find the vast kitchen devoid of marijuana. Instead it looked like any other kitchen, complete with all the latest conveniences. A microwave with more buttons than a stereo, a dishwasher, a fridge with a built-in ice dispenser and a knife set to rival any my mother coveted. The living room, too, looked perfectly normal: new tatami matting, two leather couches, a digital flat-screen TV, a coffee table and a small but flash sound system with the speakers on stands.

‘All came with the place,' Phillip said with a laugh. ‘We really got lucky with that Mami bird.'

I resisted the urge to ask him just how lucky he got with Mami.

‘This place is a palace,' he went on. ‘We each have a bedroom, only I'll need to sleep in yours.'

‘Why?'

‘Mine's occupied.'

‘By who?'

‘By what,' he corrected.

I rolled my eyes. ‘You're not actually growing that shit, are you?'

Phillip only smiled.

I followed him into his room, the walls of which had been lined with black plastic. He had cut this from something—garbage bags, most likely—and taped it all up. At the far end of the room, built into the main wall, there was a fan, and at our end, in the door, a cat-flap-like device. Phillip quickly shut the door behind me and pointed up at six solid banks of fluorescent lighting.

‘Cool tubing,' he said. ‘Perfect set-up. And the plants,' he ran his hand over the rows of square-potted trees, ‘all come from clones. That's how I got this up and running so fast.'

‘Clones?'

‘Yeah. Sections cut from trees. Stems. I left them in water until they grew little white roots, then transplanted them. I tell you, I'm good at this.'

‘Well I want nothing to do with it.'

‘You won't have anything to do with it. I'll run the whole thing. Your cut'll be for keeping quiet.' He patted me on the shoulder. ‘I can't believe,' he said, ‘that Mami offered to set us up. It's perfect. When I first saw that fan up there in the corner I danced, Tuttle. Honestly danced.'

‘Yeah?' I asked without the least enthusiasm.

‘Right now I'm making a deodoriser box for the exhaust fan so the neighbours don't smell all this flowering.'

‘Good idea.'

Phillip was genuinely excited. ‘It's not easy. People think it's easy but it's not. The heat's a nightmare. I've pretty much got it sitting at twenty-seven degrees in this growing room but it still rises and falls a bit. I've insulated it round the front windows and other spots where the cold was coming through. Then I just have the aircon running hot twenty-four hours. The fluorescent lighting helps, too, while the air moving through makes sure it doesn't get too hot. I crank up the aircon a little at night when the lights go off.'

‘You turn off the lights? Don't they need light to grow?'

‘It's darkness twelve hours a day, just like outside.'