Unpolished Gem (18 page)

She started to cry. “Agheare, I can’t work there any longer! I can’t do it! I can’t work there and I can’t work at home and I can’t work anywhere!”

What could I say?
Just give it another little try?
My shoulders were slumped like hers, I realised. I straightened my back. I stood up, I made her a coffee, I sat back down again. “Does Pa know about what happened?” I asked.

“Of course he does! He was there when I came back to the shop!”

“What did he say?”

“It was a mistake! He wanted to save face! Giving me $
100
short to take to the bank is not a bloody mistake!”

“Maybe you should quit.”

“What? And become a useless person?” she cried.

“Ma, you are not a useless person.”

“I can’t work and I can’t not work! My mind is going crazy! I am thinking crazy thoughts.”

“You are not going crazy.”

“Yes, I am.”

My mother would tell my father about her impending insanity when he came home from work in the evenings. My father would tell my mother that strong people did not lose their minds. “Go learn English again. Develop your skills. Take care of the kids. We have enough money for you not to work.” My mother would be at this stage a raging, heaving tempest and my father would be at the end of his tether. There would be enough negative energy in that room to create a black hole on this earth, and to suck in all the sickly miasma of human failings.

“Mr Badger’s going to go shopping tomorrow,” my brother would tell my sisters in my room, making Mr Badger move on his two furry pompom excuses for feet. “What should Mr Badger buy?”

“Can we buy stuff to make pizzas?” asked Alina, sitting on the floor of my room.

“I like walking to the shops,” said Alison.

I was glad to know that there were a few people in the world who still thought that walking a kilometre to the local Safeway was a great adventure. As we walked to the shops, I had a long deep think, even though I didn’t want to. I had to let certain inevitabilities sink into my mind. Things were not going to be this way forever. These moments with the little ones would not last, they would grow up and lose the dimples on their fingers and the excitement of their days. Most of all, I knew these days would not last, that they were very limited, because my mother was losing the will to persist in her job.

Sure enough, even though we had worked out a perfect plan for my mother to keep working and finish at
3
.
30
so that she could pick the kids up after school, when the new and final term of school began, I got the flu. It was the perfect excuse. My mother stopped working for a week at the shop, and we all knew by the end of that week that it would probably be forever.

PART IV

W
HEN I trudged back to Retravision after school in my blue blazer in the searing thirty-degree heat, I came across Aunt Que in the little makeshift office. The office was squashed between the Hi-Fi section and the small appliances, and had only room for a desk and a chair. Aunt Que was sitting on the chair, at the desk, and when she saw me, she sniffled. Funny that. Sniffling at work, must be hayfever, I thought, or the endless dusting of toasters. My family worked and practically lived at the shop, it was a second home, except that instead of dusting one toaster, you had to dust a dozen, and instead of watching one television after school, I could watch seven all in a row.

All our goods were kept upstairs, which meant that whenever a customer wanted anything, I had to run up and collect it for them. I would walk down with the fifteen-cup Tiger rice cooker extended in front of me as if I had got myself in a peculiar family way. In a way, I had. Our store was supposed to be a nationwide franchise, and yet our in-store price tags, labels and advertisements were usually hand-written in the dramatic-flourish brushstroke hand of my father, or filled with cheesy bug-eyed cartoons drawn by me. “Agheare, can you help me with this advertisement for the
Herald Sun
?” my father would ask me. “Agheare, does this sound right?” Letters of employment and commission were written in the upstairs of the shop, where my father and I sat at the computer crammed between television boxes and shelves of ice-crushers. We were working on a tender submission to buy a block of land from the government. My father wanted to build an electrical appliance store with a community park at the back. He had a vision of a grand utopia where electronics and the environment would be coupled in a lasting union of family fun and Saturday barbeques. I translated simple Teochew into technical business terms, and kept my teenaged self invisible on paper.

“Little Aunt, have you seen my father?” I asked. Aunt Que finally looked up at me; her eyes were rimmed red and the sniffling had not stopped. “Your father is at the hospital.”

I froze. “Why?”

“Your grandmother wasn’t feeling well today.”

“What happened?”

She told me. I didn’t understand. I made her repeat it in English. In Teochew the word sounded benign, like the careful imprint of a calligraphy brush, not the heavy finality of the English Stroke.

I had my secret places, the darkened room beneath the stairs, the attic. I went beneath the stairs, where the TDK tapes were crammed. In the darkness of the triangle-shaped enclosure, I wiped my eyes.

Granny had a stroke. I remembered the last time I saw her, in her woollen suit with the frog buttons, sitting on the edge of the double-bed we shared in Aunt Que’s house in Coronation Street. The bed was double in anticipation of the nights I would sleep over. I never had rifts with my brother because I claimed Granny and her love as my own. He could have my parents, just as long as I had my grandmother and her stories and I could follow her everywhere. My grandmother was putting on her brown corduroy slip-on shoes, and I was holding her walking stick. “Come with me to buy flowers for the Buddha,” she told me, and off we went to Footscray. Grandchildren were meant to be arm attachments for elderly people, like soft chattering walking frames. I held my grandmother’s arm as she shuffled slowly down the street. A plastic bag floated past, and she jabbed it with her walking stick. “Cause people to trip and fall!” she muttered as we searched for the nearest bin, “Who could be so evil-hearted as to throw rubbish everywhere?” Old people, I thought, grew younger the older they became. They would see things differently, making a difference in whatever way they could, without being afraid of looking foolish. “Just accruing merit points for my next life,” Granny told me, “making sure I don’t turn into the dung-beetle.”

Outside my alcove, I heard voices. Some Chinese lady was haggling over the price of a pre-paid phone card with one of the salespeople. “Aiyah, why not give it to me for twenty-two hah? Yes, I know twenty-five dollars is printed on the front, I am not blind, you know! But come on, I am a faithful longtime customer, give it to me for twenty-two dollars and I will take two!”

Unbelievable, I thought, but then, so many things seemed unbelievable. “Your grandmother will live forever to torment me!” my mother used to cry in the nadir of her despair, and now it was not at all certain how far forever extended. When I was ready to emerge from my dark niche, I put on a diluted customer-service smile and walked quickly back to Aunt Que’s office. She was still sitting there, and she looked up at me. Her look reminded me of an old photograph I had seen of her, one of the grainy black-and-white photographs taken at the Thai refugee camp. It was a look she had attempted to eliminate ever since she arrived here, to rub out the raw peasant emotions, to be more of a market-place, marketable person. But now her mother had had a stroke, and she was stricken. For over four decades, my auntie had never been separated from her mother. Not during her youth, not during the years under Pol Pot, not even during marriage.

I stood in the doorway again. “What happened to Granny?” I needed details.

“She hadn’t been feeling well for the last few days,” my auntie told me. “She had headaches, and all sorts of other aches, and when she woke up this morning, she complained that she was unsteady on her feet. Then, this afternoon she fainted. Fortunately your mother was there at my house. She called me, and we sent for an ambulance.”

*

Later that evening, our family went to visit my grandmother at the hospital. Everything was white and blue. The walls were white, the blankets were blue, the bed was white, the curtains were blue. And in the middle of this counterfeit cumulus-cloud-on-a-summer’s-day décor, my grandmother lay in the middle of the bed, a drip extending from her arm. Her eyes were shut, but when we arrived, they slowly opened. I noticed that one eye was smaller, the eyelid seeming to have contracted.

“Your grandmother does not know she is blind in one eye,” my father later whispered to me. “Don’t tell her.” There were many things the doctors told my parents, none of which could be repeated to my grandmother. The entire left side of her body was immobilised by the stroke, and she lay in her bed, crying like a cat, tearlessly but loudly. I remembered how back in Braybrook, stray cats would come and live in our backyard and have kittens under our house. My grandmother mewed like those kittens after their mother was hit by a car, and I knew that she knew the truth no matter what the doctors and well-meaning relatives hid from her.

We placed advertisements in the weekly Chinese newspaper to find a carer. Most of the women who applied were illegal immigrants from mainland China, who worked and sent all the money home to their sons and husbands. One after another, they slept on a little fold-up bed next to my grandmother’s white hospital-issued bed with the metal bars, and after a month or two, five at the most, they would leave. My grandmother was not the softest old soul to look after. She scratched, and she bit with every ounce of energy she had whenever she was being carried to the toilet. If anyone dared to try to feed her, she would yell, “Stop it! Stop it or else when I finally go, I’m going to drag you with me!” When her threats did not work, she would pick up her porcelain bowl and attempt to do grievous bodily harm to the poor soul who had dared offer help. Acupuncture doctors were brought in to try to restore movement to her legs, and she would scream her cat-being-strangled scream whenever the needles poked into her skin. She cursed those who caused her pain and cried Armageddon to them, calling forth all the ghosts she could name, and the ones she couldn’t, she made up.

*

Sitting in literature class, we were discussing
King Lear
, while outside the window the gum trees tossed their heads in the grinning daylight. We spoke about life and death and God, leaving no room for my grandmother and her miscellaneous assortment of ghosts for every agonising occasion.
Paganism
was written on the board, in my teacher’s sweeping handwriting. “Who can tell me what this means?” she asked.

“Belief in many gods?”

“Good. There are some cultures that still do this, aren’t there?” Then she turned to me. “For example, the Chinese. They believe in and worship many Gods. Don’t you, Alice?” And I did not think of my grandmother and her many gods, the chants, the plastic blue meditation mat, the swirls and whorls of the pattern on it – ten thousand shades of blue like a frenzied ocean, the smell of incense in my pores. The red-faced sword-wielding God whom we kept outside. The good-for-business God whom we called Grandfather. The Goddess of Mercy with her China-white face, her royal porcelain contentedness sitting serenely on a lotus surrounded by bald little babies, pouring water out of a vase. And the dust falling on them in the new house, because we no longer had Granny to maintain the shrine, and we no longer needed to light incense to hide the smell of baby pee rising from the carpets.

“Er, my grandmother worships many gods. Buddha, Goddess of Mercy, Lord of Business, she prays to them all to bless us.” Laughter in the classroom. I didn’t know whether they were laughing at my grandmother, at me or with me so I decided to laugh along, so that it would appear to be with me and not at me. I could hear Grandmother’s voice in my head: “Stupid white ghosts don’t understand bugger-all about real people, about the need to be protected.” They were already ghosts, what need did they have of protection from ghosts? I turned back to my book, trying not to think about the strangled-cat screams and the light always left on in her room because my grandmother was afraid of the dark.

I turned back and read about King Lear going mad, mad mad, poor mad and cold old man, growing old and senile with his grotty ally Gloucester. I did not think about my grandmother diarrhoea-ing all over the floor, the mess to be cleaned up by the latest Shanghai carer who we declared as our “cousin” to health authorities because secrets should never be told. “Oh, the madness, the passion, the pain, the poignancy of
King Lear
, this is life, this is distilled emotion!” cried my Literature teacher. “Oh, the beauty and horror.” So in essays I wrote about the beauty and the horror, and the madness and the glory. I did not think of the madness of my grandmother, whose mind was still so sharp but who could only stare at the ceiling and wait for my auntie to arrive home from work. None of that seemed real. The only sort of real that had any meaning and depth was depicted in the white and black pages of Shakespeare, the universality of human experience accessible only to erudite people who could read it. We were living a new life now, there was no room in my head for death and disease and illness.