The coconut children, p.21
The Coconut Children, page 21
Before the day had even broken into light, Vince was woken up by the bedroom door crashing against the wall.
‘Aye, thằng quỷ! Get up! Get up!’ his father barked, standing over him. ‘You think you wear the pants in this family now?!’
‘Huh?!’
‘I said, do you think you wear the pants in this family now?’
Vince’s eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw his father’s face for what seemed like the first time. His steel wool hair and his snarl of a smile. Monstrous in the dim moonlight. He wore a sadly sensible coat over his wife-beater, looking like a travesty of a real working man. For a moment, Vince could do nothing but stare in disgust.
Then he kicked the sheets away from his body, got up and towered easily over his father. ‘Who’s gonna if I don’t? I don’t see any other man in this house!’
There was red rage in his father’s eyes, and then the blackest darkness. ‘That’s funny,’ he said, with a snort of almost-laughter. ‘That’s very funny. You crack me up, thằng quỷ. You really think you’re somebody, don’t you?’
Vince looked over at Emma’s cot. Her eyes were still closed, but her brows were scrunched together with worry. Either she was having a bad dream, or just about to wake up to one.
‘Do you know how you came into this world? You came into this world with your mother screaming, clawing for an escape,’ his father spat. He reached up and grabbed Vince by the collar, pulling his ear closer to his words. ‘That’s your beginning.’
Vince shoved his father off and seized his neck with both hands, pinning him to the wall.
‘What are you always saying that for, old man?!’
He wanted to savour this moment. He wanted to lift him higher and higher, to make the struggle between every gasp for air last longer than the one before; it calmed him. But he didn’t want to wake Emma. Vince dragged his father out of the bedroom, bashed his body against the narrow corridor, opened the front door and threw him onto the prickly lawn. His father only stared wildly and tilted his chin up to tempt him. Vince fell onto his chest and pressed his fist to his father’s cheek, pleased at the fit. He swung. Blood poured out of his nose instantly.
It occurred to Vince then that he’d never seen snow. He couldn’t remember ever imagining it, not even in school when they would cut snowflakes from sheets of paper to study symmetry. Now, like a child, he wondered how perfect this moment would be if snow came floating from the sky. Would it be fluffy? Would it melt on his tongue? He wanted to mimic fallen angels, to play in an eternal white stained with his father’s blood.
‘Vince, let go!’
He didn’t have to turn his head to know that it was his mother, standing in the doorway. He heard the panic in her voice, but even louder than that was the accusation. She must have thought he had been the one who started it. He did not have to look up to know what kind of story her eyes were telling her. Love is not blind; it has its own way of seeing.
Vince wanted so badly to storm to Alex’s house, but with Emma in the equation running away would solve nothing. His father stopped writhing, only looked up at him with a shit-eating grin. Vince held his throat a little tighter, pushed it down a little harder. At last. The fear had finally been reflected into his father’s eyes.
‘Ông cảm ơn ông trời đi,’ he taunted one last time before he let go, moved past his mother in the doorway and shut the door behind them. He locked it with a click. His mother looked at him, pleading.
‘He can’t be around Emma when he’s off his fucking face like that,’ Vince said, frustrated that he had to explain this to her.
‘Vince, you know how your father is when he’s drunk,’ she pleaded. ‘He’s going to get himself killed out there!’
‘Only if we’re lucky.’
His mother moved to open the door. His father was already waiting at the step, catching his breath, with his forearm leaning against the doorframe and the sleazy smile of someone who has been forgiven too easily. Vince could not see his mother’s face but he knew what it must have looked like: anxiously in love.
‘Mẹ s nói chuyện với ba con. I can calm him down,’ his mother assured.
He had heard that line too many times before – it was an empty promise she made to herself. Vince could hardly watch as his mother draped that man’s arm over her exposed shoulder and hobbled with him back into their bedroom. Vince could only stand in the corridor as his mother closed the door on him.
He went into his room, hoping to get some rest but Emma was wide awake. He so badly wanted to see her smile; every wobbly tooth could be a mooring post for him to tie the rest of his life to. Vince took her in his arms and tried to rock her back to sleep. He took off his jade necklace and placed it in her tiny hands before laying her down in her cot.
Vince heard murmuring in his parents’ bedroom and covered his sister’s ears; when his father’s voice was this soft, it could only mean one thing. He couldn’t close his eyes when he finally got into bed. He felt that he was being watched. Not by anything divine. He was certain the sky pitched above his head had no eyes – if it did, it must have blinked the last century of massacres away. No, something in his blood was murmuring to him. It throbbed with the stories his mother had told him about the deaths of the strangers whose pictures presided over their altar.
Black and white footage of a young opera singer performing for army troops rolls in his head, so grainy it is as though he is watching through a curtain of rain. She is his grandmother. She wears his proud chin and his dark eyebrows. She dances as though gravity is greedy for her mass. She is singing but he can’t hear the words. A bomb is thrown from the audience. The explosion is silent. Not even the scraps of shrapnel slicing through her throat could manage a sound.
There were other bombs too. Other bodies. A second cousin, a young farm girl destined to take one tragic step in a cassava field. A great-uncle’s torso found in the mangroves, ribbons of flesh. An aunt, believed to have reached Malaysia, found floating face down in a prawn fishery. A boy from a nearby village, whose mother agreed to give every strand of gold she owned to anyone who would get him across the border into Cambodia, shot in the back of the head in the middle of the jungle, but only after being forced to write a note: Mother, thank you for praying. I have arrived safely. Please send the necklaces.
These were the historical deaths; and then there were the deaths he’d grown up with, deaths on every street corner, in every stairwell, at every hour. When your sky is patched up with someone else’s last moment, you can’t think of how you can begin, where to begin, if there’s any room left for beginnings anyway when so much has ended.
In that faraway bedroom, the blinds were shut and the night was sealed in tight, yet Vince’s father still fumbled everywhere to switch off more lights. He could only make love to his wife like this: in a dark deepened by drunkenness. He no longer noticed how she trembled at his touch. He undressed her desperately, aimlessly, the way a drowning man struggles for something to hold onto. He held her hard and rough. It was the only way he knew how. She’d slip through his fingers otherwise.
Even in the stillness of this room, with no splinter of moonlight permitted, the puckered knife scars on her ribcage and the skin all around rippling reminded him of a stormy sea. Her cry for help which had once felt so far away was now echoing in his eardrums. His woman, his first love, his one and only.
She was no longer the girl that they’d had their way with. Her skin sagged in places which were once firm, taut, untouched by time and gravity. Whenever she reached for his face, he would pin her wrists to the mattress. He did not want to look into her eyes. Anything but her eyes. He thought about those other men and wondered if, as he stroked her, she still felt her skin scorching in the places their hands had been. Did she still feel them? He closed his eyes. It had happened so long ago, there was hardly any pain left in him. Only shock. Like a third-degree burn plunged into a bucket of cold water. A wound wondering why.
At the refugee camp, he had held her hand as the old herbalist lady stuck a mulberry stick inside her, and refused to leave her side even as she slept two days away in the bed of roses between her legs; but the unborn disobeyed them both. All the rau răm in the world could not keep this baby from claiming its birthright. When the Australians finally flew them in, she was rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital. She gave birth an hour after midnight. They named him after the hospital and made a vow to forget.
From what seemed to be far overhead, he grunted away. She could feel the mist of his breath hovering over her cheeks but he touched her the way only memories could. Wherever he was now, he was in peril. The sound of waves threatened him from every compass point.
Imagine life is an empty bag of rice. Just a few streets away, the local school has been bombed to rubble. The neighbourhood children play with land mines and collect used ammunition for fun. They polish the shells, hold them in front of the sunlight and compare whose bullet shines the brightest. They are young, but they already know that fearing for your life often gets in the way of living it. 1981. In the dark, the tiny boat pulls away from the dock. Twelve days pass. Drops of sweat loll suggestively on backs of necks, on foreheads and collarbones, only to dissolve in the monsoonal air. You would trade the ocean for a gulp of water.
One clutched breath hangs over the boat; a curse or an incantation. Two children die on board and their parents hold them to their chests, weeping, before lowering their tiny bodies into the darkness. You pray for water to be more than water, for wood to be more than the weight it can hold. Suddenly, a break of light. A boat in the distance. The people hold on to this drifting chance for dear life. Their stomachs have been empty for days, their bones ache against each other, but the sight of the vessel gives them enough strength to murmur hope out of their parched throats. As it comes closer, they realise it is a fishing boat approaching; no lights, no flag. They see the cargo pants, the headbands, the jungle of black hair. They know what these things mean.
Frantically, fathers drizzle their daughters with fish sauce and smear their faces with oil from the engine. You look to your wife and do the same. But her beauty shines through like a death wish. The pirates board the little refugee boat. All this time, you do not know what to do. Your instincts fail you. It’s the same with everyone else. The rough days at sea with scarcely anything to eat and sitting still in one corner have numbed your body. The pirates throw babies off the boat. Unhinge the jaw of an elderly man and rip the gold teeth from his mouth with a pair of rusted pliers. They see your wife, and there is nothing you can do. Rough hands riding that ripple of black hair, making it into a rope. Teeth and tongue marking soft, supple skin. An oyster knife between a little girl’s legs. You think about how purity is a word as hollow as a plastic pearl smothered in enough light to fool the world. You wonder if you will ever live to forget this moment of two lovers perishing, each too weak to end the world.
You come to another country, scared but hopeful, to make a life for your family. You sit in a factory where the boss treats you like a thằng khung because you don’t understand what he’s saying. On the train to and from work, you are cornered by men who teach you that English is a language of spit and spite. Women hold their children close to their chests, as if you are the very monster she has not told them about. Go back to your country. Go back? Can’t you see that I’ve gone through hell to get here? I could do suspect sketches of the devil to prove it to you, but he keeps wearing different faces, sometimes even my own.
Who is your wife? The only woman who still obeys you. Who is your son? Why don’t his eyes look like yours? Why does he keep growing, and growing, and growing? When will he stop? It becomes easier to beat your children than to raise them, to stare them down than to look them in the eye. You are ashamed of your house, of your name, of your shoes. There are days the sky looks so deep that you fear falling over the edge. Everywhere is an edge.
But he didn’t want to think about this right now. He didn’t want to think of all those ruined girls either, their long hair, as black as a thousand prehistoric nights before the first fire. He only knew this bedroom, this drooping mattress, this groaning bed frame, this woman’s warmth, as ordinary as an oven.
‘Anh xin lỗi,’ he murmured again and again. ‘Forgive me.’
She held onto the nape of his neck to keep herself from sinking. In this act of faith, of one body becoming a revelation to another, all he could find was reason for apology. But she was wiser. No matter how fragile they were, she knew that nobody could make love without the desire to preserve it. Though sex and love are not the same thing, they are intimate with each other. Tonight at least, she knew she would be sleeping in the same bed as happiness.
Tomorrow, they will each wake up with an unbearable bitterness in their mouths. Disgusted at themselves, they will wonder if they might ever be kissed again. They will dress themselves very carefully. When their nakedness is no longer, he will let the light into the room. He will touch his forehead to hers. Brush a finger across her cheek, hope that it has healed. She will not flinch. He will breathe a sigh of relief. She will smile that lazy smile that he despises. He will put on his shoes and ask what’s for dinner. As though he expects himself home in the evening.
For now, the morning doesn’t yet exist.
There is no night dark enough to defeat the day’s definition.
But their shadows come close.
Chapter 15
The Love Life of Fruit Flies
At the Boys’ School, Oscar had been stuck at the end of the canteen line since the beginning of recess. He fumbled the cough lolly coins in his pocket, where no-one could take them. Only four minutes until the bell for second period. Older boys were jumping the queue like it was a game of leapfrog, propelling themselves forward by way of his stooped back and not even looking back to thank him for his service as a human springboard. Oscar stared at the canteen ladies. Why didn’t they ever say anything?
A hand weighed down on his shoulder. He turned around, slowly, to see who it belonged to. He’d been standing in the middle of the swarming canteen area but felt as though someone had just now intruded on his hiding place.
‘Hey, Oscar! I thought that was you. How’ve you been, brother?’
He’d never felt so glad to be found. ‘Hey, Vince, I’ve been okay.’
Vince stood before him, with a gracious smile, looking impossibly older than Oscar would ever be. It was not just his height, or how he was so strong it seemed his Adam’s apple could be dislodged as a missile at any given moment. It was his eyes. They seemed ancient. He’d lived so long he imitated no-one.
‘Just okay?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Things haven’t been good at home?’ Vince asked in a whisper.
This was the first time anyone at school had asked him about home. Oscar gave a smile, lopsidedly indecisive. It made him happy to share a secret with Vince, even if that secret was his own misfortune. ‘Have you got a mum?’
‘What’s yours been like?’
‘Just yelling and screaming all day. She never gets tired of it.’
‘You been bringing too many girls home and she can’t sleep?’
They laughed; Oscar, cynically.
‘How do you deal with that? When your mum goes crazy?’
‘I just kind of . . . disappear.’
‘Disappear? Where do you go?’
‘I don’t know. Inside. It’s the only way out, away from all the yelling.’
Vince nodded and jutted his jaw out. He tried to imagine what the inside of a person could look like – found himself thinking of himself as a room with an undependable door, someone sinister always just behind it. After a while, he said, ‘I used to do that too, when things got bad. Hide inside.’ Then he looked up. ‘But you can’t live there, bro. What class you have next?’
‘Sport,’ Oscar replied, the word leaving a bitter taste in his mouth.
Vince laughed, and his dagger-like eyebrows softened their stance. ‘You don’t like sport?’
‘No. We’re doing the beep test.’
‘I see. You got the beep test.’ He looked down at the younger boy, at his resentful eyes which looked like they were figuring out the distance between this world and the next, and his scrawny legs which seemed unprepared for the journey. ‘Well, I’ve got a free period so I’ll just be chillin’ on the Middle Oval. If you want, you can tell your teacher you got to go sick bay and come chill with me.’
Oscar nodded and let him see his real smile for the first time.
‘Sweet,’ Vince said, laughing and giving Oscar a pat on the back.
Oscar checked to see what was still up for grabs in the canteen and noticed the queue was suddenly in order. The boys in line were still as rowdy as a cavalry, but no-one was being shoved in front of.
‘Vince,’ he said, almost flinching from the sound of his own voice, ‘how come you don’t push in like everyone else?’
‘Oh, I never do that. I’m very polite on those terms.’
‘Why?’ Oscar dared himself to say.
‘Because,’ Vince said, and then laughed, ‘I don’t fuckin’ know . . . Because it’s important to me.’ He thought about the time he bashed a kid in juvie for hogging the PlayStation and not letting anyone else have their turn. ‘Gangsters got to have good manners.’
The bell rang for the end of recess. The line began to scatter and Oscar moved to the side, out of sight from the canteen ladies who shooed the kids away like a swarm of flies.
‘What you want, Oscar?’ Vince offered.
‘I was just gonna get some cough lollies but I think it’s too late –’
‘Cough lollies? You got to eat real food, bro, you’re growing! You eat eucalyptus all day and you’ll turn into a koala,’ Vince said with a grin. ‘Get to class. I’ll see you in a bit then.’
Vince stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled over to the canteen lady. Oscar waited just long enough to watch him lean over the counter and survey the food left over, his back muscles tensing under his white shirt.
