The Crying Room, page 16
Instead of bells, some of the women held signs: ‘End Deforestation Now’ and ‘Trees Are the Lungs of the Earth’. The women called themselves the Green Order, and their parades were a form of protest. She’d never seen them before, but she’d heard about them on the news. Mostly they were known for their overnight plantations in city parks across the country and around the world: they had made plantations at St James’s Park in London and the gardens of Versailles. They were careful to plant trees native to each area. Afterwards, governments weren’t sure whether to cut down the trees or to leave them standing.
The women continued towards Circular Quay, a dancing and chiming mass of green. Susie saw that police officers were standing behind the plastic barriers, watching the women with a cool indifference. Some had their arms folded; several wore metallic sunglasses. The expression on their faces seemed very close to hatred.
The next morning Susie woke early, as she often did, and walked towards the harbour. There was a park she passed through with a jetty, and she often stood at the end of it and peered into the harbour. She liked to watch the seaweed sway, stretching out and contracting like long strands of hair.
That morning the sun was rising as she saw the harbour, and when she entered the park there in front of her was a copse of trees where there had once been open space: hundreds of green trees standing there silently. When the wind blew they whispered among themselves. Some were taller than her. Around each tree was a mound of loose earth as though it marked a grave.
She kneeled in front of a tree and took a handful of earth and held it to her face. It smelled of nutrients; it smelled of growth. Her mind moved to the rings inside the trunk: growth lines radiating outward, like grooves in a record. She thought of the sound of their record-player in their lounge room, its soft warm hum. And how it remained there in the background between each song and in the air around her even once the music had stopped.
14. Home Alone
SHE WAS QUIET. Perhaps that was why Susie enjoyed her company. They could share their sadness and speak around its edges. Her name was Xiyu, but she told Susie to call her ‘May’ because that would be easier for Susie. Susie wondered if it was confusing to be known by more than one name.
They’d met at a commemorative event, a year after the disappearance, held at a shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur. They had exchanged emails every few months since. They’d also met in person when the Malaysians handed down their findings and at the five-year anniversary in China.
By email, May’s language was formal. When booking her flight, she’d written, ‘I hope to have this matter resolved shortly.’ She often ended her emails with, ‘I hope you have a good week ahead.’
At the airport, Susie was unsure how to greet her. May walked straight up to her and held out her hand, but Susie pulled her in for a hug that was loose and left space between them. May was short and wore glasses, and her clothes were demure and sexless; she tended to wear pastels. She blinked often and firmly as they walked through the terminal.
With one hand Susie lifted May’s suitcase into the boot of her car, and May balanced her smaller bag on her lap. As they drove to the city, she said, ‘It’s always hard for me. Boarding a flight.’
‘Yes.’ Susie understood it was hard to board an aeroplane, knowing it was possible for a plane to fall out of the sky. ‘Though we have a saying in this country: lightning never strikes twice.’
May nodded vigorously. ‘In China we say that lightning always hits the highest mountain.’
‘Oh,’ said Susie, entering the tunnel with the orange lights, swooping down and around to the east. ‘Is that a Chinese proverb?’
‘No,’ said May carefully. ‘I believe it’s scientific.’
On Saturday they drove to Kinsale to see Allison. It occurred to Susie that she only visited Allison when something new was happening in her life. It was an old instinct, she knew, that had formed before she even had words for it.
Monica was learning to drive, so Susie sat in the passenger seat, quietly gripping the doorhandle and focusing on her breath. Monica still lived in Melbourne, although she had finished studying. Susie tried not to feel offended that she’d moved so far away, though Monica explained that it was to do with the quality of the course.
May sat in the back with her knees pressed together, and every now and then she made a little noise in her throat that caused Susie wonder if she had something to say.
‘Why is your forest black?’ May eventually asked as they drove down the Illawarra Escarpment.
‘Bushfires,’ Susie said. ‘They get worse every year. It’s so bad in some areas, the bush no longer grows back.’ Teams of workers had started replanting areas of bush that had burnt too often to recover on their own. Some businesses gave their employees five days of leave per year to contribute to the effort.
May took a photograph through the car window.
As they approached the town, there were posters for the Kinsale Show, which was being held that weekend. A clown’s face was printed in the background, and Susie couldn’t help but think it looked dangerous and mad.
They arrived midafternoon.
‘I expected you earlier,’ Allison said when she opened the door.
‘Sorry,’ Susie said, even though she’d told herself she was finished with apologising to her family. It had become like breathing for her.
Sam emerged from his bedroom. He was in his last year of a degree in accounting; it had taken him six years to complete, and he still lived at home. He was planning to work at his mother’s firm after graduation.
That night they took May to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Graham stayed at home to watch the football. Susie felt faintly embarrassed by the curved bamboo font used on the awning. May nodded to the waitress as they entered the room. The table they sat at was circular, with a spinning mechanism for sharing food.
To one side of the room was a fish tank that bubbled in deep, low plops like a large pot of boiling water. Inside, an orange goldfish was motionless; only its enormous fins rippled in the current from the air pump.
The menu was laminated and fogged; it was difficult to read, and the plastic pages stuck together. May looked at the menu for a long time, running her finger over each item. They ordered the banquet, and the Peking duck came out first.
‘Is the food like this in China?’ Susie asked.
‘It depends,’ May said, ‘where you eat it.’
‘Monica,’ said Sam, ‘I read your short story.’
Susie looked at Monica, who blushed. The short story had been published in an anthology the previous month.
‘What even is a “crying room”?’ Sam asked. ‘I mean, it’s not real, is it?’
Monica shook her head.
‘You mean there are different recipes?’ Susie said, talking louder to May.
May had just taken a bite of her pancake and was chewing very slowly.
‘So, why did you write about it then, if it doesn’t exist?’
Monica wiped her mouth with her napkin. ‘I can’t really explain it, Sam. It just came out.’
Sam looked towards Allison with a smirk.
May swallowed her mouthful and said, ‘Different regions have different dishes. Also, this sweet sauce is not something I’ve tasted before.’
Susie nodded.
‘I didn’t really get it, Monica,’ Sam said.
Susie spun the banquet wheel too quickly, and a spring roll fell off. ‘Dumpling, Allison?’
‘There’s a whole genre, Sam, called speculative fiction,’ Monica said quietly.
Sam was drinking a Chinese beer and coughed as he took a sip.
The waiter brought a beef and black bean dish to the table, and the plate was sizzling. May recoiled when he placed it in front of her.
‘Is the story about Susie?’ Allison asked. She held a cup of jasmine tea to her mouth, and it made a circle over her face that looked like an oxygen mask from an aeroplane.
‘It’s not about me,’ Susie said. ‘She just used my name. She did ask if it was okay first.’
‘But how can you write about Susie?’ Sam asked.
‘There’s a difference between the thing, Sam, and the way it is written,’ Monica said.
He raised his eyebrows and took a sip of his beer.
Monica walked to the toilet after folding her paper napkin and leaving it on her seat. Susie had been hoping to shield her family’s dysfunction from May. She was sure there were no dysfunctional families in China, because its citizens held more concern for their basic liberties; they didn’t have time for squabbles.
‘I would say,’ May said suddenly, after she’d eaten the beef, ‘that overall the food in China is more,’ and Susie didn’t understand the word she’d used, so she asked her to repeat it, twice: ‘subtle’.
Allison asked, ‘But why did Monica name her character after you?’
‘I don’t know – I didn’t ask why, I just let her do it.’ Susie glanced towards the toilet door. ‘It seems like writing is important for her. I respect that.’
‘Are we all supposed to feel sorry for you, is that it?’ Allison said as the waiter placed a bowl of fried rice down beside Susie and she saw that the ham had been cut into little pink cubes. She chose not to answer Allison’s question. It was easier that way: Allison felt she’d scored a point that Susie was happy to let her have.
When they got home, Monica disappeared quietly into the lounge room where she was sleeping so that Susie and May could share her old bedroom. Susie glared at Allison when the door closed.
‘What?’ Allison said.
‘Nothing,’ said Susie, and the thought of conflict made her fatigued.
‘Don’t you think I know my own child?’
‘I didn’t say that, Allison.’ Susie yawned and peered at the door to Monica’s room.
‘I did the hard work raising her for the first decade of her life. You just took her in so she could go to a better school.’
May shifted on her feet. Susie apologised internally to May.
‘I’m tired,’ Susie said eventually and went to Monica’s old room. May was sleeping in the bed, and Susie was sleeping on an old mattress on the floor.
After she turned off the lights, Susie lay on her back and thought about all the responses she might have made to Allison: It’s not my fault you couldn’t be kind to her, or, We both know she came to live with me to get away from you. But Susie could never say those things to Allison without unleashing a torrent of her fury, to which Susie felt ill-equipped to respond.
May sighed as she fell asleep. There were mattress springs digging into Susie’s back. She thought about going into Allison’s room and asking whether there was something else she could sleep on. But Allison would take it as an implicit criticism of her, and perhaps that was the way Susie would mean it. At some point she fell asleep, and in her dream she was telling Allison that her mattress was faulty and that it made noises, but Allison was busy cleaning the bathroom and kept asking Susie to repeat herself until she eventually gave up.
In the night a rattling noise woke her. It sounded at first like a clawing at the door. It took Susie a moment to remember where she was. In the dark she saw a cloaked figure by the door. ‘May?’ she said; her voice was hoarse, so she repeated it. May rattled the door again. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The door is stuck. Can I turn on the light?’
Before Susie could answer, the light was on. Susie pulled the blanket over her head; through the material there was an eerie red glow like light shining through skin.
May held the knob and shook the door. ‘It won’t open.’
Susie was getting hot under the blanket, so she lowered it and squinted into the light. May had a foot against the doorframe and was pulling at the door.
‘Wait!’ Susie was defensive about Allison’s door. She stood up. ‘Let me try.’ She grasped the metal handle, still warm from May’s grip. She pressed hard, but the handle wouldn’t twist all the way down. ‘It’s an old door,’ she explained to May.
‘I just wanted a glass of water.’
Susie stood back from the door, panting, and turned towards her bag. ‘I think my water bottle is still full.’
She handed it to May. The water gurgled as May drank, and there was an intermittent lisp as the emptying bottle pulled in air. When May was finished, she wiped the spout of the bottle with her pyjama sleeve. ‘Tell me, Susie, are we trapped?’ She seemed very concerned.
Susie looked at her watch. It was almost five. Out the window there was an old gum beside the house, but she wasn’t sure if the branches could hold her weight. ‘I may be able to climb out the window, but I’d rather wait until it’s light.’
May lay on the bed with her hands over her chest, like a corpse. ‘Do you ever think of him coming home?’
Susie sat on her mattress, and the springs gave a clunk. She shook her head, because she didn’t want to admit to it. At first her only emotion towards Will had been anger, because he was always going off, and he should have stayed at home with them. Why weren’t they enough? But the anger finally gave way. And now she thought about him opening the front door in that way he had, the click of the key and the sudden inward swing of the door. The way he’d raced down the hall and dropped his bag. She’d imagined it too often – even after the investigators had started to find pieces of the plane. There was something wrong with her, she thought, that she couldn’t just draw a line under the incident and say, There, that’s it. Others, she knew, had let go. She’d never stopped grieving, not really; the loss had just become more comfortable to live with.
May said, ‘I still say hello to my mother when I get home each night. I know it’s wrong, but I don’t want it to stop.’
Susie felt a sensation in her chest. It seemed like heaviness, but then it travelled up the back of her throat and pulled down the corners of her mouth and settled behind her eyes. She found that she was crying. She’d become too accustomed to sadness; she wore it, nestling inside it and pulling it over her like a fur.
May handed her a tissue folded into a rectangle, from a small plastic pack, then lay beside her and held her. May didn’t speak, and they soon fell asleep.
Susie woke up to a screech outside the bedroom. May was breathing gently in her ear, and her arm, still under May, had gone to sleep. She extracted it and looked out the window.
On the window ledge, a cockatoo was peering in. It cocked one eye towards her and nodded. She could have sworn it said, ‘Lenore.’
She heard a noise from the kitchen, and she stood beside the door and called out, ‘Hey!’
Allison was banging the drawers. This was what Allison did when they came to visit: she made them all an elaborate breakfast in a surly mood, thinking that it was what they expected of her.
‘Hey, Allison!’ she called out so loudly her throat hurt.
May sat up, rubbed her face, stood beside Susie and jiggled the doorhandle.
‘Allison, we’re stuck here.’
The noise from the kitchen didn’t cease. Susie banged her knuckles on the door until they were sore.
It was almost 9 a.m. May was pacing the bedroom. Susie heard the opening of a door, and she stood and banged on the door again. The handle turned.
Before Susie could move out of the way, the door slammed against her toes. ‘Ouch!’ she called, and she was worried because she felt nothing, but then pain flooded her body. She hobbled around on her heel. ‘The door was jammed.’
Sam was standing in the room, shirtless. ‘You just have to give it a good shove with the handle down.’ He shrugged and walked away.
‘Allison,’ Susie said as she emerged. May rushed off to the bathroom. ‘The door didn’t open. We were stuck there all night.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Allison said. ‘It’s a bit stiff, that door. I’ve been meaning to get it looked at.’ Then she said, ‘The pancakes I’ve made are getting cold.’
Susie seethed quietly while she poured the maple syrup over her pancake. She took a bite. ‘Geez, these are really good!’
‘You sound surprised,’ Allison said.
Susie remembered the bird on the windowsill. ‘Is there a pet cockatoo that lives around here?’
That lunatic next door,’ Sam said.
Allison looked at him sharply. ‘Yes. He’s a retired academic. What was it he studied again, Graham?’
‘Gothic American Literature,’ said Graham. It was the only thing Graham had said since they had arrived.
‘He moved down here two years ago with his wife,’ said Allison, ‘but she died of a brain tumour. Gone in three months.’
Susie stiffened. She felt it when anyone mentioned death; her sadness rose up, inside her and she had to push it carefully back down, like attending to plumbing.
‘Should we take May to the show?’ Allison asked.
Graham excused himself from the table.
‘Show?’ May said. ‘What sort of show is it?’
‘That’s just what they call a fair,’ Sam said. ‘They’ve got heaps of rides and shit there … I mean stuff.’ He looked at Allison.
‘Oh,’ said May.
‘I suppose,’ Susie said.
‘They still have the pet parades in the showground and baking in the pavilion,’ Allison said to Monica. ‘Remember that time we entered Gertrude?’
Gertrude had been their pet bunny.
‘Yes, but she didn’t win anything,’ Monica said flatly.
‘Was it always like this?’ Susie said to Monica when they arrived at the show.
She nodded.
They walked past the laughing clowns that slowly shook their heads as though they were appalled. At another stall, people paid to shoot slug guns at metal ducks. There were dents where the bullets had hit, and each time someone fired there was the squirt of pressurised air. The soft-toy prizes that hung from the walls had sagged and faded over the years, and the woman manning the stall had red skin like sunburn that never went away.
‘Can we ride the dodgems?’ Sam said loudly.
Susie remembered him as a boy, before he’d learnt to be cruel.
