One Hundred Days, page 9
“Dad would never let you lock me up like this!” I yelled. “You take everything that’s good from me. It’s your fault he left us.”
Surprisingly, she was deadly calm. “Ha, you’re still stuck on your useless dad. Has he tried to contact you during all this time? I tell him that maybe he might want to call on his daughter every now and then to check that she’s still alive. But has he called? Have you heard from him?”
I didn’t say anything. Ever since we’d moved to the flat, I thought your Grand Mar had been blocking your Grand Par from finding me. Never had I considered that he just wouldn’t make the effort. I didn’t know what to think or believe.
“I bet you didn’t even tell him where we live, or give him our new number,” I said uncertainly.
“Why would I lie to you?” she demanded.
“You lie to me all the time.”
“I’m telling the truth.”
“Fine, then. Give me his new phone number and I’ll call him.”
“Over your Mah’s dead body!” she retorted. “You don’t want to seek him out if he doesn’t give a shit about you. I don’t want a daughter of mine to learn she has to chase useless men down, only to be hurt a hundred times worse.”
Just because he doesn’t love you, I thought, doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me. I didn’t say this, of course. I was not like your Grand Mar. I didn’t hurl terrible truths at people I loved.
On the seventh day, I told her I needed to go back to school. The Easter break had almost ended.
“When you’ve been staying away on and off all those months and pretending to go? Don’t lie to me now. It was probably one of those feral state-school boys who got you this way. Am I right? I bet they gave you that tacky ring.”
I said nothing.
“If you had hung around some good Asian girls, none of this would have happened. Those girls have their heads screwed on right, they go home every afternoon and don’t loiter, they do their homework and study and concentrate on getting smarter. And why didn’t you go to the free tutoring program like I told you to?”
I hesitated. “I went once, but it was for little kids.”
“Who was it?” She went off again, like a wound-up yapping toy that could not be stopped, and I made my eyes vague and my mouth a straight line like on a life-support machine, not emitting any beeps, forever holding my peace.
“It’s that Tweezer,” your Grand Mar shouted. “She and that brother of hers. I bet it was one of his friends!”
I kept my mouth closed, in case I laughed out loud. Even though he was tall, Spiros was only thirteen.
“Aha! I’m right, aren’t I?”
I didn’t reply. Instead, I said levelly, “The government will be onto us if you don’t let me go back to school.”
“As if I’m the one stopping you! As if it’s me keeping your lazy arse around the house all day watching television and eating. What’s the point?” she screeched. “What’s the point of you doing nothing all day while I work to death? I don’t know what sins I’ve committed to be so cursed. You’ve cursed my life.”
“I need to go back to school,” I repeated.
“How do I know where you go each day and what you do?” she yelled. “I don’t know you anymore!”
Of course not.
Finally, just when I thought she would relent, when I saw her shoulders sag and a sigh leak out, she turned to me and said, “What’s the use of going back to school when you’ll just have to leave again in a few months’ time?”
Why didn’t I run away? The truth was, I wasn’t so much scared as exhausted. I simply had no energy left to fight harder. It was like the fairy-witch putting a spell on Sleeping Beauty. Except Sleeping Beauty could rely on her looks for her revival, whereas I was more Sleeping Ugly, my mouth dry and open, lips peeling like sunburn. Whenever I woke up from one of my restless naps, I felt worse than before, dopey, oily-haired, puffy-faced, elephant-heavy. What kind of prince would bother reviving such a monster?
Where would I go anyway?
On Monday, I woke up before your Grand Mar and made toast with kaya jam. By the time she was up, I was already dressed, drinking instant coffee with sweetened condensed milk, my schoolbag at my feet.
Your Grand Mar didn’t say anything, but when she left for work, she put the spare key on the kitchen bench.
Walking down the stairs, I felt like someone had connected my nostrils up with a tube while I was asleep and pumped water into me. My fingers and toes were liquid-filled rubber gloves.
Outside, I remembered a nursery rhyme we used to sing when we walked down pavements. Don’t step on cracks, you’ll break your mother’s back. Don’t step on stones, you’ll break your mother’s bones. I wibble-wobbled on the footpath and smelled wattle. The sky was too bright. The seasons had changed without me being there, and a thought blipped across my mind – that winter would turn into spring even if I wasn’t here, that life was going on within me but it would also go on without me. I was a carrier, a shell, a cocoon, but once you emerged, I could be discarded. I knew these were bad thoughts. I did not stop them, though, because they were the only thoughts I had to call my own.
“You’ll always be welcome here,” I remembered Mrs Stubinger, the principal of Christ Our Saviour, telling me before I left. “You don’t need to be a stranger.” I walked faster. The street was like a movie set where the actors had all gone back to their real lives, after trashing the scenery at a giant end-of-shoot party. I saw an ice-cream wrapper on the pavement, among a million cigarette stubs, little fires put out after lighting up the chimneys of a thousand lungs. Green glints of broken bottles. The paper tongue of a discarded party whistle.
A car drove by and slowed down. One of those vehicles whacked together from two separate junkyard ones, the front brown, the back blue. A head stuck itself out of the driver’s seat window, all jagged teeth and craggy cheeks. “I don’t pay taxes just so youse fucking reffos can breed like animals!”
I kept moving. Soon I was at the big white cross outside the small chapel of Christ Our Saviour College. The green and white plastic sign screwed into the brick next to the office door saying Neighbourhood Watch Area. The yellow sign saying Safety House Zone.
All three hundred and fifty-two girls were in class, and the place looked deserted. I expected surreal things to happen. I wondered where that bitch Tweezer was, and what she was doing. Despite my rage, I found myself thinking of her often. Too late, I realised she’d been my one true friend.
The school was cleaner than the outside world. The only rubbish on the floor was a single serviette, like the decomposing corpse of an origami bird.
I pushed open the glass door leading to reception.
Mrs Natale behind the desk looked up, saw me and smiled. Then she saw my bump. Her eyebrows stretched to line up with the top frame of her glasses.
“Karuna, what are you doing here?” she asked.
“Help,” I exhaled, because suddenly I felt doggone exhausted. “Help me, please, Mrs Natale. I am stuck. I need to see Mrs Stubinger.”
I started to cry. I couldn’t help it.
Mrs Natale stood up. “Don’t worry, love. Take it easy. Take a seat. I’ll find out if she’s available right now.”
I sat myself on the soft, rose-coloured sofa for visitors. I looked at the modest glass awards cabinet by the reception desk, at the Red Cross Appeal trophy. On the wall was a photograph of four girls who had excelled in Year 12 last year.
Mrs Natale offered to take me to the meeting room, probably because she didn’t want me at reception.
A few minutes later, Mrs Stubinger entered.
“I’m having a baby,” I blurted out as soon as she sat down.
“Does your current school know about this?” Mrs Stubinger asked gently.
“No, they don’t care. I’ve been away so much this year.”
“Do your parents know?”
“My mum does.”
I wanted to tell her everything – the bone-deep loneliness of being locked in at home, the loss of Tweezer and the feeling of drowning in my own crazy brain.
“Poor, dear thing,” she cooed at me. “You look so tired.”
I sniffed.
“Perhaps you need to go home and rest. Does your mother know you’re here?”
I shook my head. I thought Mrs Stubinger would be able to help, but here she was, trying to fob me off.
“Help me,” I begged, “help me! Take me away. I’ll even go to live with the nuns!”
Mrs Stubinger looked at me with her understanding eyes. “Listen, Karuna, things aren’t done that way anymore. And for the better, too.”
“But when my baby comes, my mum is going to take it!”
“Take it where?”
“Just take it, look after it, make it her own baby.” I knew how I sounded the moment those words came out: like a child railing over a confiscated birthday toy she was too young to play with.
“You know, Karuna, the nuns used to take babies too, but they took them away and the young new mothers never saw them again. Your mother is probably doing what’s right for both of you.” She paused. “Does your mum hit you?”
“No.”
“Is it just you and your mum living at home?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see much of your father?”
“He moved out.”
“Do you have a stepdad?”
“No.”
“So your mother is your legal guardian?”
“Yes.”
“Sweetie, we have to let her know that you’re here with us.”
I cried some more. But in the end, I had to give in. I had no more energy to speak, let alone fight with someone who’d only offer wordy compassion but return me to the flat. I gave Mrs Stubinger the phone number for Mrs Osman’s salon.
During the forty-minute wait for your Grand Mar to arrive, Mrs Stubinger made me a cup of Milo and opened up a packet of Mint Slices. She asked the librarian, Mrs Burgess, to bring me a stack of discontinued books from the library so I would have something to read, and sent for a salad sandwich from the canteen for my journey back. And because she did all these fairy-godmother things for me, the gap between what I fantasised she could do and what she was actually doing widened until I was angry at her for not doing more. But she just sat there chatting about how it must be an exciting time for me.
She even brought in a translator. Mrs Ling taught Year Eight Maths but I had never had her as a teacher – she was straight-as-a-ruler strict. Her fringe was so even that the top third of her head looked like it had been sliced off when she sat in front of a blackboard. She had on a pleated green skirt and a matching blouse with a bow on the collar and plastic buttons with gold edges.
Your Grand Mar arrived in her shining black slacks and a regal-purple woollen cardigan with silver sequins and silver piping. I saw Mrs Ling noticing your Grand Mar’s thick hair, her unlined skin, her pencilled-in arched brows and burgundy lipstick. The two thick gold chains around her neck and jade bracelet around her wrist. Your Grand Mar didn’t look like a slacker, lazy-arse mum. Your Grand Mar looked like a grand dame, a dignified woman who took care of herself. Your Grand Mar smiled at Mrs Ling, a smile like she had lollies in her handbag for every child in the school.
Then Mrs Ling looked at me – unwashed hair like an oil spill down the polyester grey sweatshirt covering my shoulders, jeans stiff with crap from cleaning the shower-grout, belly big with you and face like a rubber mask.
Your Grand Mar and Mrs Ling talked to each other in Mandarin. I couldn’t understand anything.
“She’s okay,” Mrs Ling told Mrs Stubinger in English. “Her mother is looking after her.”
I couldn’t believe it! Mrs Ling didn’t see how sick I was. She couldn’t see that I was now just a flaking cocoon.
“I’ve been at home for two weeks, I haven’t even been allowed to go anywhere except to hang out the clothes on the rooftop of our block of flats!”
“You could get cold and sick. The worst thing is to be sick when you are giving birth,” your Grand Mar said calmly, looking directly at Mrs Ling.
“Your mother’s just making sure you get plenty of rest,” Mrs Ling said to me, and then she turned back to your Grand Mar. “You should go on walks through the neighbourhood with her. Let her get some fresh air now that spring is here.”
“Sister, I go with her to every hospital appointment,” your Grand Mar replied. “But we will go on walks together. Yes.”
It seemed crazy how this was happening, how if you scrubbed up well, you could cover all your tracks. But I would not let it go. I wanted to drag them back to me. I couldn’t do it if I kept snivelling, but I couldn’t stop either. Soon the hiccups came. I didn’t have a tissue, so I used my sleeve. Mrs Ling opened up her handbag and took out a tissue – the expensive, perfumed sort that came in little packets of ten. She was smiling but I noticed she was holding only one corner of the tissue when she passed it to me, like she was scared of catching my misery.
I wiped my nose and said, “Mrs Stubinger, I want to go back to school.”
“She go to school,” your Grand Mar said coldly. “She go to Corindirk High School.”
“But I want to come back here!”
Your Grand Mar glared at me, but I ignored her, appealing straight to Mrs Stubinger. “I know I was just average, but I’ll try harder. Please!”
“Here at Christ Our Saviour, we respect different cultural practices,” Mrs Stubinger replied kindly. “Sometimes you have to do what doesn’t feel comfortable, but will be good for you in the long term. Your mum is just trying to protect you and look after your health. She obviously cares about you very much.”
They did not understand how my world had shrunk. They couldn’t see that the bigger I got, the smaller I became, and they didn’t understand that once the baby came, I would be gone! They just let your Grand Mar take me home. Mrs Stubinger even accompanied us to the bus stop, but I bet she only did it to make sure I would never come back again.
“What did you tell the Ghosts?” your Grand Mar demanded when we got home.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie! Got me out of work for this! What a troublemaker. What sins did I do in my past life to have a daughter like you? Oh Buddha, have mercy on my soul.”
She wasn’t going to get paid that day because three customers had come into the shop for their appointments and were pissed off she wasn’t there. Bad for business, said Mrs Osman. Unreliable.
“Do you know what a stupid thing you did? They could take the baby away! This just proves that there is no way in hell you can look after this child. You keep pulling dangerous stunts like this on me.”
Your Grand Mar made me kneel in front of the bright red altar that now sat in our lounge room, the same shrine my friend had knocked over on my eighth birthday. She started chanting, her eyes closed. Forehead to the ground, and then up in a kneeling position again. “Buddhas, have mercy on us!” she wailed.
No big, fat, laughing Buddha with babies rolling all over his tummy for your Grand Mar; her gods were punitive ones, red-faced, angry, vindictive. Even the Goddess of Mercy had no mercy. There was a hole at her base and when you looked inside it you could see she was dark and hollow. Her sly brushstroke eyes had the look of a girl who knew she was beautiful because she had been told that her whole life, and she held a drooping green stalk in two sharp fingers like a posh woman with a dirty dishcloth.
Up and down and up and down she went, your Grand Mar. Knees and forehead on the ground, then back on her toes. It was the “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song gone mad. “Name oni tor hooc,” she chanted in her corrupted Pali. What did she expect would happen? I wondered. That the Heavens would open up and swallow me whole? That her gods would reverse time?
I realised that even if your Grand Mar had not given your Grand Par our new address, if he had really wanted to find me, he would have. So I knew that the one person who might have been able to help me didn’t give a shit.
I stopped praying, because I knew there was no one who could answer my prayers.
Chapter 9
I’ve found a solution!”
The next day your Grand Mar returned from Mrs Osman’s salon exuberant, like she was a gleeful housewife in a cleaning ad and I was a really tough stain.
“That old horse took a lot of convincing, so you’d better not mess up,” she said. “Consider yourself very lucky. You are getting this training for free. Other girls have to go to trades college. They have to spend money on useless things like textbooks and sit in class listening to a teacher drone on about cutting fringes. She’s even going to pay you to be her apprentice.”
Turns out, Mrs Osman would pay me five dollars a day. “We’ll need every cent we can get,” your Grand Mar said. “Soon there will be three mouths to feed in this household.”
I hated going to the salon, but I desperately needed to be out of the house because I was starting to lose the outer edges of my vision. I was worried I’d eventually go blind, like when you turn off a really old television and there’s just a speck left in the middle of all that darkness before everything disappears. So I went along with your Grand Mar’s plan.
When I got the job with Mrs Osman, no one told me congratulations, you are now a working woman; when they looked at my belly they never congratulated me. It was more like, child, what are you doing, growing like an adult? When children have children, it freaks people out.
Mrs Osman’s salon smelled sweet because of the hot sugar wax she always had boiling on a stove. She had named her business Caramel because of that, but I knew that the Women’s Weekly caramel recipe had butter in it. Hers was just cheap vinegar toffee.
“All the people naming their shops Athena Beauty or Zainab Salon, after themselves! What wankers,” she told me. “As if they movie stars. Caramel is a good name to remember, a good smell. Even the Australians like to come in here.”
Mrs Osman dyed her hair a honey-brown to match, but she didn’t bother with her eyebrows, which remained black. She dressed like an elegant liquorice allsort, lots of black broken by bands of pink, green or blue in the form of scarf, belt, shoes. Her deep-set black eyes were framed by cow-length lashes. I had no idea whether she was a lot older or a lot younger than your Grand Mar.
