The eulogy, p.4
The Eulogy, page 4
‘If we get on each others’ nerves we can walk five paces apart.’
‘No, no, that’s not what I was thinking,’ I splutter, except it was exactly what I was thinking. ‘Of course, yes. One pm.’
I hope that Evan does not spend too long mourning me; I want him to move on, have the life he deserves, a normal, happy life. If I believed in God, I would pray that the mum from the park does not cling to the memory of what I did to her just the day before yesterday, although it feels like a century ago. I hope it does not come back to her every night, replaying the terror she must have felt when she could not locate her baby. Where’s the baby then, Kathy? Where?
My next errand is to pick up a bottle of holy water and a statue of Saint Bernadette to adorn your coffin. I consult a touchscreen, but it appears that Catholic merch is probably the only thing you cannot buy at the Hyperdome. Luckily, I know where there is a church with a gift store.
The Bradleys have always been regular churchgoers, but after you get sick we ramp up our prayer schedule and the church gets behind us. Every Tuesday of 1984, Dad, our sisters, brother and I gather with our fellow parishioners at the chapel in Kingston and pray a rosary for your salvation while you lie in your hospital bed. Even Mum comes with us from time to time, fidgeting through the decades and smiling and thanking the priest afterwards.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe is the patron saint of our little church, a long, low weatherboard on stilts to keep out the floods and the snakes, surrounded by scrub and sandy ground, which makes it hard for the parish ladies to grow the roses they used to have in Ireland. They have begun to resort to native flowers, planting banksias that we call wah-wahs, because they look like a choir of open-mouthed baby birds, crying silently to be fed.
Saint Maximilian Kolbe is a relatively young saint, like our church. He died in a concentration camp because he offered his life in the place of a Jewish man who he knew had children. You can only be a saint if you choose to die. You are not a saint if you just die anyway.
I like all the Mysteries of the rosary, but the Joyful are my favourite. Most people like the third Joyful Mystery – the bit about Jesus being born – but my favourite is the bit that comes before that. As we recite the Hail Mary, I like to imagine Elizabeth bumping into Mary and telling her the news that she too is pregnant, despite being beyond child-bearing age. Elizabeth is so thrilled! Her baby grows up to be John the Baptist and have his head cut off by King Herod, but in the Joyful Mysteries that is all unknown. Elizabeth and Mary are just two expectant mothers, hearts full of hope for the future.
Our prayers work! Well, sort of. You will never have the use of your left side again. You no longer have the ability to concentrate and your short-term memory is a blur of terrifying blanks. But Christmas 1984 comes and goes and you are alive, defying your one-year-to-live prognosis.
That should be miracle enough for me and I am happy, of course I am. But there is a part of me that can’t help thinking: If God could keep you from dying, surely He could be talked into going one step further and help you to really live?
Our old church has been replaced with a modern, high-ceilinged structure designed to maximise air flow via sliding glass doors. The chapel where we used to kneel every Sunday when we were little kids now functions solely as a St Vincent de Paul gift store. Shelf after shelf groans under the weight of the paraphernalia of a Catholic life. An entire wall is devoted to Confirmation gifts – plaques, holy cards, books of saints. The holy water and a statuette of Saint Bernadette are easy to find – she remains a popular choice. Martyrs never go out of style.
I chose Lucia for my Confirmation name. Technically, she was not yet a saint because she was still alive when I picked her, but the priest deemed her to be holy enough for the purpose. Lucia’s two cousins saw Our Lady in Fatima, Portugal. The cousins died young, like Bernadette. But not Lucia: she was destined to grow old and short-sighted and heavy, the toad-like survivor doomed to outlive the cherub-faced martyrs. She was not even given a glimpse of Our Lady, even though the cousins had long, involved, ecstatic conversations with her while Lucia stood by, open-mouthed. Just one time, Our Lady allowed Lucia to glimpse not her beatific face, but her holiest of silhouettes, to ensure that Lucia would keep the faith, or keep her mouth shut, which I suppose amounted to the same thing.
As an adult, I read about a nineteenth-century Yugambeh man named Bilin Bilin who had lived and worked the land where St Maximilian Kolbe parish church sits. I wish I had known about Bilin Bilin when I was a kid, and that I could have chosen him for my saint name instead. Apparently Bilin Bilin made a deal with the local missionaries: he would attend Sunday school and distribute bibles in exchange for his family’s protection from removal and massacre. Bilin Bilin handed out hundreds of bibles in his lifetime, but, rather ingeniously, he died an unbaptised old man. Conversion was outside the terms of the agreement. That’s just the kind of bargain I wish I had thought of myself.
In the gift store there are plenty of dioramas of the Fatima three, but I cannot find a picture of Lucia on her own; she is only ever presented as part of the triumvirate, playing the support role to the other two children’s saintly demise.
Back in the car with my Catholic loot, I place the Bernadette statuette on the dashboard for inspiration. I open my laptop. I still have no idea what I am going to say. You were my sister. I loved you. You should never have been sick in the first place, but once you were, you should never have got worse.
I am to blame. I want more than anything else to say it out loud, surrender myself to the mercy of the masses, and be forgiven.
At the same time, I want to point my finger at the gathered. Where were they when you needed to be socialised and engaged? Where were they when you needed to be washed and changed? From my position at the pulpit, I imagine considering Mum’s thinning grey hair, her small brown eyes sunk into wrinkles and liver spots. Where was she when you needed to be loved?
Mum always had a bad habit of walking away from us. As kids, whenever we went to the shops, she would march ahead with a speed I have never been able to match. As if Mum felt that in the brightly lit aisles of the supermarket she was free at last, a lioness roaming her savannah. Survival of the fittest, darlings. Catch me if you can.
I know that if Mum had been a different sort of mother, then probably you and I would never have been born – which, considering where we both are now, might have been an efficiency. But this line of reasoning reminds me of carnivores’ explanation for eating meat: the cows would not have been bred at all if they weren’t destined for the slaughterhouse. I exaggerate of course, but you see the similarities.
And yet. I have a memory from when I was eight. We are in the new single-floor house, 7 Elliot Road, Slacks Creek, which we moved into after you could no longer manage the stairs at 19 Railway Road. You and I share a room. In the middle of the night the door opens and a splinter of light falls across my body. Someone steps inside, and from the speed and bustle I know it’s Mum. She pulls your blankets up, then mine.
It turns out our paces are well matched and Evan and I quickly settle into a lunchtime walking routine. He is fit from working on production sets, while my speed comes from all the extraneous nervous energy I carry around with me. The one thing that interferes with our rhythm is the way we each deal with oncoming pedestrians. I dodge and scurry, apologising for being in a walker’s way. But Evan does not break stride, then has to wait for me to catch up at the next crossing.
One day Evan draws me to the side of the footpath. He leans toward me, as if about to tell me a secret. ‘I don’t say sorry. I say thank you.’ He smiles into my eyes.
I covertly watch how he moves, how he talks, how he breathes so easily inside his own skin. Evan takes up his allotted space on the footpath, in this city, in this country: no more, but no less, and without apology. I have never done that. I have spent my life apologising for the discomfort I cause to others for being neither one thing nor the other; for being in their way; for being what I am.
But Evan? Evan is just himself. He is nothing like other Chinese Australian men I have met. They tend to look at me with a dog-like yearning: unable to imagine themselves with a white woman, they see me, with my hybrid skin, as within their grasp. The middle-aged white men who leer at me in pubs are not entirely dissimilar, except their looks are of acquisition rather than aspiration. With Evan, I do not feel like an object of migrant ambition, nor a yellow fever trophy. I feel like myself. I feel, for the first time, that might be enough.
One Thursday lunchtime Evan has a mild limp which worsens as we progress down Philip Street towards the harbour.
‘What have you done to yourself?’ I ask.
‘Never let them get back up,’ he groans. ‘I learned that the hard way.’
I look at him blankly.
‘The one time I got into a fight and let the other guy get back up, he came at me from behind. Gave me an ankle that can predict the weather better than the Bureau of Meteorology. Rain should be here in …’ he pretends to consult the skies, but winces as he lands heavily on his right foot, ‘two to three hours.’
‘Let’s sit down.’ I guide him to a sushi shop and fetch him a cup of miso, seating myself opposite him at a small table.
‘Oh, that’s what I needed. You’re an angel,’ he says, swallowing the hot soup.
I glance at him and then quickly down at my menu. I am not used to looking at him front-on. When we walk together, I don’t have to be reminded of what a mismatched pair we are: even though he is more fully Chinese than me, he has an athletic fluency that makes women turn their heads in his direction, no doubt wondering what he is doing next to my squat and unwieldy figure. I know I will never be slim, or blue-eyed, or any of the things that men in this city find beautiful.
‘So what happened?’ I ask, studying the list of ten-dollar lunch specials.
‘I won,’ Evan says simply.
‘Really? But you got injured.’
‘Yeah, but I know kung fu. All Chinese men do.’
I make a face at him.
‘All right. But I did learn kung fu eventually, when I was older. Guys kept picking fights with me and I finally realised I was going to have to learn how to defend myself. Luckily when I was a kid, my dad taught me some basics. That got me through quite a few nasty situations.’
‘Not this one.’ I indicate his outstretched leg.
‘Trust me, this one would have been a lot worse if I didn’t already know how to fall,’ he demonstrates the motion, ‘and how to trip.’
I am suddenly looking at a tiger, graceful and dangerous in the swiftness of its shift from cat to predator. I close the menu, sure that my face is red and blotchy from the unforgiving genetic inheritance of my own father.
We walk slowly back to the office, me holding out an arm instinctively in case he needs support, just as I did for you all those years, Annie. When we part ways at the lift, he leans down and kisses me on the cheek. It is just a friendly thing to do, but for some reason I can’t stop feeling the burn where his lips touched my face.
Before I met Evan I would never have considered dating, let alone marrying, an Asian man. I know that sounds racist, Annie. It is. We were raised, we Bradley girls, to consider marrying anyone who was not Anglo as a failure. Which, considering the pickings when our sisters were young, may have been for the best.
Remember the Lin brothers, always slavering after Barb and Bev, coming up with excuses to spend time with them? Richard Lin used to watch the big kids, the only semi-Asian females within the Logan boundaries, like a hungry wolf, while Doctor Lin – our local GP who weaponised the word ‘hypochondriac’ against you – gazed imperiously down his nose at them, mentally calculating which had the greatest likelihood of supporting his success in life. One time he even asked Barb to marry him. Remember, he gave her that little Holden Gemini, the green car with the newspaper stuffed into the door panels to stop it from rusting. Barb kept the car but turned down the marriage proposal. Classic Barb.
Mum was always warning us against Chinese men, telling us that they drove flashy cars and took advantage of helpless girls. But that is not why I am leaving Evan. If anything, I am the one who took advantage of him, making him think he could have a normal, happy life with me when the whole time I knew, I knew that it was only a matter of time until I ruined everything.
After a weeknight special from the fish ’n’ chips shop, I drive back to the Logan Hospital carpark. It is a good place to sleep; there are always vehicles coming and going and it is not unusual for people to leave their cars there overnight. But just to be on the safe side, I set my alarm so that I will wake to move the car every two hours.
I am between alarms but only half asleep when a man in uniform with a twelve-hour shift’s worth of bristles appears at the nose of the Subaru’s bonnet. What at first sight looks like a gun on his hip crackles and burrs. It’s a walkie talkie.
I exhale slowly. Carpark security, not police.
The man looks like he wants to tap on the window so I ostentatiously get out of the car, stretch and yawn.
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘Oh, um. Didn’t mean to disturb. Just doing the rounds. You know you’re not meant to sleep out here though. Not safe, for starters.’ He hitches up his belt.
‘I’m just taking a nap out here,’ I say, hoping that the tremor in my voice is mistaken for sadness. ‘My husband’s in the cardiology unit. They told me to go home but I want to be nearby. In case—’
‘Oh, I see, well, all good,’ the guard nods vigorously, not wanting to have a weeping soon-to-be widow on his hands. Probably not paid enough for that sort of drama.
‘Hope he gets better soon.’ He waddles away, trying to look purposeful. When the beam of his torch is just a dancing dot of white in the distance, I ease open the glove box. Of course it’s still there. I pat the container of powder then slide it back inside. I send up a superstitious prayer that Evan is not suffering from any sort of heart troubles.
According to my car radio it is 1.37 am. Even in Queensland it gets a little cool at night in winter. I pull my jacket tighter over me like a blanket. The air smells like cooking oil and the ever-present moisture of the Logan River flood plain.
Suddenly I am four years old, and you are not sick yet, or at least we don’t know that you are sick yet. I am sitting at the top of the staircase at 19 Railway Road, waiting for something, although I have forgotten what. Then the front door opens and Dad walks in, bringing with him the smell of Old Spice and hot chips. I grab hold of his leg and he swings me along as if I am a koala and he the branch of a gum tree, as if I weigh nothing at all. He puts the grease-paper bag on the kitchen table and I run down the hallway to wake you because you and I are still the same person. We sit around the kitchen table, Dad in his nurse’s uniform, you and I in our hand-me-down nighties. We don’t need to line up the chips in order of size and count them out because the big kids are all asleep. Mum is there too, making Dad a cup of coffee and hovering in the kitchen, hair in rollers. The potato burns my tongue but I say nothing, because I do not want this night to end.
I would, on the other hand, quite like it if this night would end. I wonder how Dad did it, the time he went AWOL and drove the same route I just took from Sydney to Queensland, before either you or I were born. How he went back. Imagine if he had stayed away, eluded the military police, changed his name.
When I finally nod off again, all I see are dead people. You are with Dad, coming back to life on the funeral parlour tables. You two are not dead after all! Only crumbling a little, but we can take care of that.
I jerk awake. It is four am, the time of the morning a person can only sleep through if she is happy in her bones. It’s as good a time as any to go for a drive. I ease the Subaru past the fancy brick houses built into Loganholme’s forested hillsides, automated sprinklers daubing my car with their genteel dew. The overpass delivers me to the other side of the freeway, to the lowlands where we grew up. The houses on this side of the freeway are either kit homes, with castor oil shrubs and rye grass growing in patches in place of a lawn, or weatherboards surrounded by rusting car bodies and lantana-filled bathtubs.
Dad had been dishonourably discharged from the army, but his active service in Vietnam entitled him to a Defence Force discount on loan interest rates. The Bradleys bought a house in Logan, where once the Yuggera and Yugambeh peoples had cultivated some of the richest country in southeast Queensland. Over 150 years, the land and its people were scoured away by would-be farmers and missionaries, leaving cheap lots for sale. Although I know all of this, I cannot stop my body releasing a breath I did not realise I had been holding as I near 19 Railway Road. Home, or at least the closest approximation I have to it.
The houses begin to acquire a tended look. I look for the one-cent lolly-shop, where we once found a cockroach in a bag of jelly babies and got a whole extra bag for free. In its place rears a salmon-pink McMansion with a water feature on the front lawn. When we lived here, Logan was still a shire and the suburb of Loganlea was just a series of grassy lots punctuating the marshy delta of the Logan River, forty-five minutes south of Brisbane in the dry, more than an hour in the wet or even longer if the bridges were under water. Since then, the swamps have been drained; Logan City boasts a university campus and a hospital, where you died less than forty-eight hours ago.
I park in front of a two-storey house which has been rendered in an eggshell white. The lawn full of bindies that we used to wince across with rubbish for the incinerator, our eyes streaming from the smoke, has been replaced with an oval of grass and a tiled courtyard. The concrete verandah where Dad used to stand, hosing us down in the heat, is still there, albeit under a sheath of hardwood cladding. The new owners can tack on as many porticos and vestibules as they like. This house will always be a Bradley in its makeshift bones.
