Behind the Moon (13 page)

Outside, a dog barked, then lifted its voice in a compulsive howl. One by one, dogs around the neighbourhood began to bay in a canine chorus. Seconds later, they heard the wail of a siren swelling in the night. Two blades of light sliced through the venetian blinds and angled away. The ambulance had arrived.

Linh picked up her handbag. ‘Why don’t you give me a lift home, Gibbo, since I drove you back the last time.’

He couldn’t believe that she was smiling encouragingly at him. She’d brought a drunk home and he’d puked all over her. She’d cleaned him up, then mopped up his car. And now, despite the tragedy and the farce of this evening, despite the sheer humiliation of it all, she was actually smiling at him.

His heart tumbled over in his chest and he said, ‘Linh, I love you.’

B-grade Gay

‘The breeze blows cool, the moon shines clear,’ he said, ‘but in my heart still burns a thirst unquenched.’

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

When Justin kissed Gibbo on the beach it wasn’t because he was all that attracted to his best friend; as a matter of fact, he wasn’t. He felt something that was deeper than attraction, stronger than sex. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t know how to convey it with words. All he knew was that he wanted to comfort and he needed the intimacy. Nobody was more important to him than Gibbo. He had no memory of his life before they became friends.

There was a time in their friendship when there were only the two of them messing around on the piano in his parents’ living room, playing ‘Chopsticks’ or ‘Heart and Soul’ duets together. Their bums bumped on the piano seat and they shoved and elbowed each other in rough playfulness. Their hands reached across the other’s half of the keyboard and each banged out false notes and tried to put the other off until they both collapsed in a fit of laughter, pushing each other off the seat.

Justin pretended that he dreaded piano lessons with Miss Yipsoon, but the truth was that he looked forward to those Saturday afternoons with Gibbo. He was realistic about his talent. He scraped through the Australian Music Examination Board exams with a B or B-plus and made his mother sigh over the certificates. ‘Must practise harder,
leh
,’ she chided him every year. ‘You don’t practise enough. That’s why you don’t get A-plus.’

When Annabelle listened to her son playing, she compared him with Brendel or Barenboim and noticed everything that wasn’t right. She heard each false note, every stumbling arpeggio and ungraceful acciaccatura. She shook her head sadly over sonatas which seemed only to string together his mistakes. B-grade pianist only! He was never quite good enough for his mother.

Gibbo, on the other hand, made him feel great about himself. Everything he did—four octaves of D major arpeggios played with both hands; simple Clementi sonatinas; the thumping chordal satisfaction of ‘Great Balls of Fire’; the tremendous skill it took to stand on the back porch and arc his piss so that the tip of the parabola fell with unerring accuracy into the small black pot of his mother’s curry plant; breast-stroking in the Lidcombe public pool and letting out an underwater fart so sustained that bubbles trailed him halfway down the length of the pool—every single thing elicited awe-filled admiration from Gibbo and a dogged determination to emulate his achievements.

That was when there were only the two of them. Things changed when Gibbo was with Tien. One day, not long after the Strathfield Plaza massacre, Justin said to Gibbo, ‘Supposing you, Tien and I were in a yacht sailing across Bass Strait. Maybe we’re doing the Sydney to Hobart race, I don’t know. Anyway, this storm blows up and the mast cracks and the yacht capsizes. What are you going to do? Do you rescue Tien or me?’

Gibbo frowned in confusion. ‘But you’re the one who’s a good swimmer. You’re better than both of us. In fact, didn’t your mum make you do your lifesaving bronze medallion?’

‘Yeah, but just suppose you’re the only one with the life jacket but it can only support the weight of two people, max. Who do you choose?’

‘Well, Tien, I guess, because you did your bronze medallion and she didn’t.’

‘Yeah, but what if I didn’t?’

‘But you did.’

‘You’re such a dag,’ Justin said, exasperated. Then, grinning broadly so that it seemed like a joke, he punched Gibbo lightly on the arm and said, ‘If it was me choosing who to save, I guess I’d have to choose you because you’re my oldest friend.’

Gibbo reddened and looked embarrassed.

All through their friendship Justin had put Gibbo first, but after the incident at Reef Beach he realised that it wasn’t worth it. Gibbo had no loyalty to him. He’d apologised over and over again, begged Gibbo to forgive him. But Gibbo couldn’t. He never rang and, just like that, he cut Justin out of his life.

Justin had tried to make himself normal for his parents—the good son—and then he’d tried to make himself normal for his friends. He now realised that it was impossible because he didn’t know what normality was. He wanted to be himself, but he didn’t know who he was either. People said being gay wasn’t a lifestyle, it was an orientation. But this wasn’t entirely true as far as Justin could see. Being gay was a complicated affair. Gayness was an identity and, if you got it right, it was a means of belonging. If you didn’t, if you were an Asian gay, it was practically an oxymoron.

He needed to acquire the accoutrements of a gay identity but he didn’t know how to go about it. Nothing in his background—growing up as a first-generation Singaporean Australian in the western suburbs of Sydney—had prepared him for gay society. All he knew were the camp stereotypes that straight people assumed in their wilful ignorance: limp-wristed ponces who gestured eloquently, elegantly, and sounded like English thespians in the Royal Shakespeare Company; the Qantas trolley dollies satirised by Steve Vizard in his television comedy sketches; transvestites as in
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
; or the annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras which so horrified Tek and Annabelle.

He assumed that he would have to gravitate to Oxford Street or the Cross to explore his gayness, but he didn’t feel confident enough to do it. A couple of times he’d ventured timidly to cafés in Darlinghurst and sat outside, slowly stirring his cappuccino, keeping an eye out for overtly gay men so that he could see what he was supposed to look and act like. All he knew was that he didn’t look right because he was Asian. He did not have the right clothes or hair or the right body type. Despite years of elocution lessons with Gillian, he didn’t speak properly either. His voice was not modulated correctly, his vocabulary was severely limited and he considered his conversational style lacking in droll wit and eyebrow-lifting irony. On top of being Asian, he wore the wrong clothes, had the wrong hairstyle and was altogether too much of a westie.

He experienced the familiar sense of inadequacy— B-grade gay only, must practise harder!—and was not comfortable venturing into the eastern suburbs. Instead, he stumbled upon a subterranean intervarsity Asian gay club and he despised himself both for this racial segregation and for his hateful feeling of superiority to the foreign students around him. It was safe and it was dull. There wasn’t much booze at these affairs, what with the well-known low tolerance of Asians for alcohol: one drink and they all turned beetroot red. The best thing about club meetings was the food—long drawn-out dim-sums in Chinatown or lavish Thai dinners in a restaurant on King Street, Newtown, where the transvestite waiter tossed his hair and flirted with them as he recommended the house specialties that were not on the menu.

Justin did not feel as though he fitted in. He felt he had depressingly little in common with other Asian gays. He was about to give up when he met Jordie Kok, overseas student and jazz pianist extraordinaire. Like Justin, Jordie was studying architecture and, from his first year, was rarely seen strutting around campus without a grey plastic drawing cylinder tucked importantly under his arm. He shared a flat with three other Malaysian students in Randwick and they spent what little spare time they had playing mahjong and cooking fried rice, beef rendang and—their student special—chicken drumsticks braised in Coca-Cola.

Justin’s infatuation with Jordie was fundamentally aural: before he ever set eyes on Jordie, he heard him ripping through jazz riffs on the piano at a university Asian fashion parade. He didn’t remember anything about the clothes, but he kept wondering about the pianist who was hidden from sight behind a bank of plastic palms. Who was this guy (or girl; it was impossible to tell from the jeans and sneakers pedalling away, which was all he could see of the pianist) who effortlessly reproduced Herbie Hancock and Dave Brubeck, Errol Garner and Oscar Peterson?

After the show, when people clustered around the models, he made his way to the pianist—a slender, absurdly youthful-looking Chinese boy in a bronze silk shirt tucked into ripped jeans tightly girdled with a brown belt that accentuated his girlish waist. Two symmetrical floppy locks of hair, dyed orange, fell over his eyes from the bum-part in the middle of his forehead. Except for the ravages of acne scars, he had the dreamy good looks of a 1990s English boy-band member. As Justin introduced himself and paid him extravagant compliments on his piano playing, he looked up and smiled, and his fingers, still splayed over the piano keys, meandered into a sentimental improvisation of ‘Misty’.

Justin fell in love.

It lasted nine months. They were inseparable in the first flush of love, though always careful in front of Jordie’s flatmates and Justin’s parents. It was easy to find excuses to be ensconced in Jordie’s room most weeknights and practically all weekend: they were in the same architectural course and had a lot of group work to do together. They flirted with each other over drawings and snatched midnight kisses while building plywood models and writing impenetrable, jargon-ridden postmodern architectural briefs. They spent a lot of time visiting art galleries, wandering through city streets and criticising the uninspiring design of every high-rise building in Sydney’s CBD except for Harry Seidler’s Australia Square, which Justin felt obliged to defend for patriotic reasons.

Such was the power of love that Justin weaned himself off Schwarzenegger-type blockbusters and abjured Mel Gibson films unless they were of the
Mrs Soffel
type. Instead, he made himself watch arthouse films like
Baraka
and
Powaqqatsi
at the Valhalla cinema. He even forced himself to hysterical heights of enthusiasm over an obscure indie film about peasants from a tiny tribal village in Tibet or Nepal who spent the entire film coaxing donkeys to cart a dray of huge truck tyres up an impossibly steep mountain goat track, only to see them all roll off into the ravine on the other side of the Himalayan pass. ‘So profound,’ Jordie sighed, and Justin agreed. There was nothing he would not do for love.

He felt amply rewarded when Jordie came over to his parents’ house and played old Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes. Tek wandered up from the rumpus room and started singing along. Annabelle marvelled at Jordie’s piano skills—definitely A-plus! His parents loved Jordie and Jordie, being Malaysian, understood ‘Uncle’ and ‘Auntie’. He fitted right into Justin’s family and there was little need for an embarrassed exchange of glances or an agonised, long-suffering, reproachful ‘Mu-um!’

Justin wondered why he had never before cultivated any Asian friends apart from Tien. He made up for it now. He befriended the Malaysian flatmates and was rewarded with steam boat dinners in winter and largely alcohol-free birthday parties where a state of intoxication was unnecessary for them to start squirting soy sauce and flinging flour at each other. He loved Asians! He loved their warmth, their easy intimacy, their hospitality, their slapstick sense of humour, their love of soft toys with big soulful eyes. He learned to appreciate Dr Mahathir. He wanted to be a Malaysian. He would go to Malaysia with Jordie over the Christmas break, buy a batik shirt and wear a sarong to sleep in summer.

He was feeling disgruntled and homesick in Penang when he first realised that although he and Jordie had been going out for eight and a half months, they had yet to have sex. He didn’t know if it was mandatory; was it normal to be a celibate gay at the age of nineteen? he wondered. They kissed and touched a lot, but that was all. And even that was missing on the trip to Malaysia. He had not realised how schizophrenic so many Asians were—entirely different people in the presence of their parents than they were in the company of their peers—until he saw Jordie playing the filial son to his father. And then he realised that he himself was no different; he too had his separate masks, one for his friends and another for his family. He understood Jordie’s servility even as he resented it.

Jordie’s father was a successful architect who designed and developed hideous resort hotels polluting several Malaysian beaches. On weekdays, Mr Kok insisted that Jordie accompany him to the office so that he could get practical, hands-on experience. ‘Never too early to start learning to take over the company,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Justin can take care of himself. I’ll leave him the keys to Mummy’s Mercedes in case he wants to drive himself around.’

On weekends, the golf course beckoned. Mr Kok was obsessed with golf. He had swung his club around most of the famous fairways of the world. On the rare occasions when they had to queue for a table at dim-sum, he stood in line and visualised himself addressing the ball. He raised an imaginary driving iron in his clenched hands for the backswing, followed through with a twist of his torso and narrowly missed knocking out the people queuing in front of him. Jordie was compelled by his father to genuflect at the golfing green. He was incapable of saying no. One of the Indonesian maids woke him early on the weekends and he had to accompany his father to the golf club for a full 18-hole game. Justin was also invited but he had never played before.

‘Never?’ Mr Kok was dumbfounded. ‘You must learn! How are you going to get on in life if you can’t play golf?’

Jordie looked apologetic and tentatively suggested that Justin might like to accompany them to the golf course, carry the bag and act as their caddie. Mr Kok applauded this idea; he approved of young guests being useful. Justin looked appalled and said that he’d rather sleep in. He could see straight away that he’d embarrassed Jordie and displeased the father. He later overheard Mr Kok telling his son that it was a pity Justin’s parents had not brought him up better, but that was the problem with migrants who let their children get too Aussified. They did not have manners.

Justin felt incredulous anger that this Malaysian man had the gall to criticise an Australian. At the same time, however, his resentment was laced with shame, especially when he noted the way Jordie did not meet his eyes. Until then Justin had always considered his Asian parents the embarrassing factor in his social or love life; he had not thought that an Asian might actually be ashamed of him.