Behind the Moon (3 page)

She stopped the car and he looked at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered as he thrust open the car door and got out. Moments later, he turned the rifle on himself and shot himself through the head.

He had already killed seven people and wounded another six that afternoon.

Justin pushed past the turnstile and ran through the supermarket, searching aisle after aisle for Tien and Gibbo. He felt a rising tide of panic as he failed to find them anywhere. He shoved his way out of the check-out lanes and scrambled through the shopping centre, ducking in and out of shops, dodging people crouched sobbing beside the wounded and the stunned. He could barely hear the swelling police sirens for the beat of blood in his ears. It took him nearly twenty minutes to find Tien and Gibbo in the Symonds Arcade leading out of the north side of the plaza. They huddled together wordlessly, wrapping their arms around each other, rocking slowly for comfort.

‘We didn’t know what happened to you,’ Gibbo said. ‘We thought you were still waiting in the Coffee Pot.’

Tien was crying silently. He could feel her tears soaking into cool wetness on his T-shirt. She hugged him so tightly that, when at last she drew away and fumbled for a crumpled handkerchief, the medallion he wore under his T-shirt was imprinted on her cheek.

‘I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you,’ she said. Her eyelids were swollen and the tip of her nose glistened with traces of teary mucus. She was not a girl who wept gracefully; she was ugly with fear and shock.

Justin simply looked at her and shook his head. He was overwhelmed by her concern for him. He was still sore from sex. He did not deserve her friendship. He stepped towards her and clasped her close. He felt such love for her in that moment.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. He felt like an adult, full of meaningless reassurance that his friends did not believe but took comfort from. ‘It’s okay.’

For a moment, Gibbo stood beside them uncertainly, locked out of their circle of twined arms and braided bodies. Then he too threw his arms around them.

‘Yeah, we’re all right,’ he said. And he tried not to think of those who were not.

On Saturday, 17 August 1991, Justin lost his virginity in a public toilet and, because of this, was saved from the massacre which began at the Coffee Pot, where he should have been waiting for Gibbo and Tien. Survival brought its own guilt. He was still young enough to place himself at the centre of all that happened around him. Through his mind ran the refrain: ‘Dirty boy. It’s my fault. It should have been me. Dirty boy.’

He vowed to himself that what happened was a oneoff lapse. It wouldn’t happen again. He would be a good boy. He would not grow up to be gay. He looked towards Tien, and wondered if she could save him.

A Surfeit of Mothers

Within a stranger’s gate Kieu slaved and lived, confiding in her shadow or her heart . . .

All heaven was one white expanse of clouds— she peered far into space: where was her home?

Nguyen Du,
The Tale of Kieu

Tien Ho would never outgrow
The Wizard of Oz
. She saw it for the first time when Gillian Gibson took her and Gibbo to see a special screening at a community centre during the school holidays. Later, she asked Gibbo to videotape it when it was broadcast on television. They watched it over and over again. Even when she was a teenager, she was transfixed by it.

Once, she was serving in Uncle Duc’s restaurant when, suddenly, on the small black television mounted above the cash register, she caught a glimpse of the familiar sepiastained barnyard a-clatter with activity, all the adults scurrying around doing important adult things while the little girl and her dog just got in the way. Tien simply stood there with a bowl of steaming
pho bo
in her hands, ignoring customers’ gestures for attention and Auntie Phi-Phuong’s annoyed hiss.

She looked at Dorothy, and she knew just how she felt. She’d been that little girl. They told her to get out of their way, the adults; to find some place where she wouldn’t get into any trouble. She knew they loved her. Of course they did. But sometimes their love was so hardlacquered with impatience and obligation that maybe her heart was cracked with doubt because, after all, they were not really her parents. They were only Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, and the only one who truly belonged to her was Toto.

Growing up, Tien had Auntie Ai-Van and Uncle Duong and their three daughters who formed a closed circle against her because they were already a family. They didn’t need another daughter, especially one whose different skin colour attested to dubious parentage and the sins of her missing mother. But Uncle Duong and Auntie Ai-Van took her in because they were obligated to, and because they were basically kind people. She was not mistreated; she had a well-cared-for childhood. She loved her Auntie Ai-Van and Uncle Duong. Dutifully.

But whenever she watched
The Wizard of Oz
, her dark round eyes bored into the screen as though, by sheer willpower, she could thrust herself through the staticcharged pane into that vibrant Technicolor world. And she swore to herself that if, by some miracle, she should ever succeed, unlike Dorothy she would never click her red heels together to return to a land bleached brown and white. No. She would stay with her friends in Oz because however much your family might love you, they were not sufficient; they could not make you heart-whole and happy.

All her life she felt as if there was a Tien-shaped treasure box inside her that she could never quite manage to prise open. But if she could, she would find whatever it was she needed to make life feel just right. As she grew older, however, she began to wonder whether there was anything inside this box but air. Or, even worse, perhaps there was just another, smaller Tien-shaped box nested inside the first, and yet another inside that. An infinite progression of Tien-shaped boxes locked inside each other like Russian
matryoshka
dolls.

She looked at the television screen and whispered the words along with Dorothy. ‘Some place where there isn’t any trouble,’ she said. ‘Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon. Beyond the rain. Somewhere over the rainbow . . .’

Tien Ho had arrived in Australia from a refugee camp in the Philippines in 1982. She was nearly eight. For nine months she stayed in a refugee hostel in East Hills with her relations who had escaped with her from Vietnam. There was her grandfather Ong Ngoai, Uncle Duong, Auntie Ai-Van and their three daughers: a dactylic triplet of pretty, hair-tossing girls who came to be known collectively as Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie. They were much older than she was. They did not play with her. They rolled their eyes and giggled when they looked at her, and they linked themselves with secrets breathed behind cupped hands. Then there was Uncle Duc, Auntie Phi- Phuong and their two sons, Van and Thuy, who were too bitterly engaged in their own intense rivalry to pretend any interest in her.

Her mother Ly-Linh, Tien was brusquely told, had not escaped from Vietnam. When she asked why not, the adults refused to discuss the matter further. It was left to Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie to tell her that her mother had given up her place in the boat for Ong Ngoai.

‘He begged her to escape,’ Tiffany volunteered. ‘He said you needed her to look after you.’

‘She didn’t want to, I suppose.’

‘She didn’t look after you very much even when we were in Vietnam.’

‘She left you with our mother and went out to work.’

‘As a bar-girl. She knew lots of American men.’

‘Maybe she had a boyfriend waiting for her. That’s why she didn’t want to get on the boat and come with you.’

‘She had many boyfriends in Saigon.’

‘Even
black
American ones. Like your father. They were not married when they had you, you know.’

‘She did not behave well during the war.’

The girls giggled. They were not deliberately cruel; they were at an age when the sexual exploits of adults provoked avid curiosity and half-mocking, half-uneasy laughter.

Tien did not say anything, but she felt the stirrings of shame for her mother. Later, she asked Auntie Ai-Van what had happened to Ly-Linh.

‘Duong wrote to our neighbours in Cholon, but we never heard from her. The communists came and got her, I suppose,’ Auntie Ai-Van said in Vietnamese. ‘Better not talk about her, Tien. You just be a good girl. Life is hard enough without fighting ghosts as well.’

Eventually, Uncle Duong’s family moved into a small, red-brick, white-trimmed 1960s apartment block in Auburn along a fissured bitumen street near the train station. Further down the road, halal butchers and kebab eateries nestled next to Chinese poultry shops, Vietnamese grocery stores and narrow doorways where bright-coloured bolts of cheap synthetic cloth angled out of cardboard boxes. The Hos were invisible in the multicultural mix. They felt safe.

The family argued long and hard over who should be responsible for bringing up Tien: Duong, with his three girls, or Duc, with his two sons. In the end, Duong got Tien, and Ong Ngoai went to live with his younger son, Duc.

‘You can come stay with us, Tien,’ Auntie Ai-Van said kindly, and Tien said thank you politely.

She knew that she had debts to repay, but she was only eight. There was nothing she could give this family which was almost-but-not-quite hers. There was nothing she could lay down at their feet like a puppy plopping down a wellchewed bone, mouth open and tongue lolling in the hope of eliciting a laugh and a pat. She tried to keep out of Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie’s way whenever she could. When she could not, she sucked in her stomach, tucked her things tightly around her and tried to take up as little space as possible in their shared bedroom. She never lost her temper and she never showed her hurt. She kept her feelings to herself and tried to efface herself from their lives. They did not mean to be unkind, but there was a shortage of mothers, and not enough of Auntie Ai-Van to go around.

Then Tien had to repeat Year 3 and, because of that, she met Nigel Gibson and acquired her second surrogate mother.

Tien’s new classroom was a demountable aluminium cage which steamed in summer and froze in winter. The desks were arranged in pairs. At the start of the school year, the children were allowed to choose whom they wished to sit next to. Tien stood at the front of the class and watched as everyone else partnered up. Finally, there was no-one left but a fat, freckled kid with muddy brown eyes and a thick thatch of coffee-coloured hair. A birthmark in the shape of Tasmania drifted southwards under his right cheekbone towards the isthmus of his ear. His meaty shoulders, swelling under a too-tight grey school shirt, were slumped in the expectation of rejection. Even when the teacher introduced him as Nigel Gibson, he barely looked up from the polished gloss of his large black school shoes.

They were the two class rejects. They had no choice but to sit next to each other. Tien did not talk to him much at first, and he kept his face carefully turned away from her. Even when he forgot his red pen which he used to rule the margins in his exercise book, he did not ask to borrow hers although it was in plain sight. He just sat there, growing red-faced with silent anxiety.

Gibbo was a bubble boy, a hungry soul encased in a stout body. Trapped behind his physical and social ineptitude, he looked out longingly at the world that passed him by. At lunchtime he sat by himself, breathing heavily as he turned the pages of a picture book wedged between the folds of his stomach and his thighs. He cast occasional furtive glances at boys roughing each other up, girls skipping or swinging from the monkey bars, kids swapping the toy fad of the month. Nobody ever played with him. The only notice they tossed his way came via the occasional well-aimed missile—a scrunched-up brown paper bag, an empty drink carton, a browning apple core— hurtling towards his head.

By Year 3, he had learnt that school was about survival. All he had to do was survive until the last bell rang and he could scurry back home, safe. He couldn’t afford to look ahead to the long years of primary and high school that stretched before him. One day at a time was best and, by the age of eight, Gibbo knew that he could live through almost anything, even the scatalogical atrocities children were sometimes driven to perpetrate. He didn’t need to reach Year 9 and read
The
Lord of the Flies
in order to learn the cruelty that lurked inside kids. He was used to being the schoolyard reject, the fat kid everyone picked on. He even resigned himself to a weekly wedgie.

Then one day, Tien walked across the playground and sat down beside him. He looked at her in faint alarm. He knew she was supposed to have come from Vietnam, but she did not look properly Asian. She was repeating Year 3 and she was two years older than everyone else. In winter, her skin was the warm colour of a piece of KFC chicken, freckled with those eleven secret herbs and spices. In summer, she tanned to a crisp dark shade of honey-soy chicken wings. Her black hair kinked wildly around a raw-boned face.

She had enormous cow eyes and a big, wide mouth like Whoopi Goldberg. When she laughed, she looked like a Muppet. Her nose was large and flat. StephanieTiffany-Melanie insisted that she sleep with a wooden peg pinned to her nose in order to raise the bridge. They had seen it on
Little Women
. For a year and a half, she did as they demanded and she got used to breathing through her mouth, panting like an overgrown mongrel.

She wasn’t Asian, she wasn’t even Eurasian. The other Asian girls whispered that so-and-so heard someone say that Tien’s father had been a black man. One day a few of the older boys yelled at her crudely, ‘Hey, Abo! Whatcha doin’ here?’

After her shower that night, she wiped away the steam from the mirror and stared at herself, running her waterwrinkled fingers over the homely reflection. Then she padded out to the living room in her pyjamas and asked Uncle Duong, ‘Was my father a black man?’

He was embarrassed so he pretended not to hear. She asked again, but still he ignored her. Finally, Ong Ngoai, who was having dinner with them that night, beckoned to her.

‘He was only half black.
Un métis
,’ her grandfather said. He rarely spoke to Tien but when he did, it was usually in French. The French might have vacated Vietnam more than three decades ago, but they had never vacated Ong Ngoai’s head. ‘
Il était Américain
.’

Tien was delighted. ‘Cool,’ she pronounced carefully, still prodding her way through the idiom of casual conversation.

But Auntie Ai-Van frowned disapprovingly. ‘We shouldn’t talk about your father or mother.’

Tien went around telling everybody that her father was American. She watched
The Cosby Show
on television and fell in love with the family. She imagined her father as a Bill Cosby look-alike, loping along the skyscrapered streets of a blindingly bright American city that held out the promise of everything she could ever ask for or even dream of. Some day, he would return and claim her. He would take her back to America, and at last she would go home.

Had she not been two years older and taller than most of her classmates, she would have been bullied mercilessly. As it was, kids sidled around her and left her alone. By default, she was thrown together with Gibbo for every activity where a partner was needed, and so he became her first friend. There was nobody else. And when Gibbo saw her struggling with English, he mentioned hesitantly that his mother was an English teacher and an elocutionist; perhaps Tien could have some after-school tutoring. Desperate not to live through Year 3 a third time, Tien asked Uncle Duong and Auntie Ai-Van if she could have afterschool lessons with Mrs Gibson.

‘Why should she have lessons specially?’ StephanieTiffany-Melanie protested.

‘So expense,’ Auntie Ai-Van agreed doubtfully, but Ong Ngoai overruled them. They had to make up for Tien’s mother’s sacrifice, he reminded his son and daughter-inlaw. They had a debt to repay.

‘What sacrifice?’ Tien asked, but as usual the child’s question was ignored.

Tien was allowed to go home with Gibbo three times a week. She had her English lesson for an hour, then she did her homework with Gibbo. Uncle Duong picked her up afterwards. The first time he came to fetch Tien, he stared in amazement at Gibbo’s father and blinked hard. ‘Oh, it is really Bob Gibson!’ he said, clasping the other man’s hand warmly and pumping it up and down. Then Bob’s eyes bulged in alarm as he was enfolded in the ropey arms of a skinny man a full head shorter than himself and probably half his weight. ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’

Gillian was surprised. She later asked her husband curiously, ‘Do you know Tien’s uncle then?’

He reddened a little and, looking away from her, mumbled, ‘Yeah. Knew the family when I was in Saigon.’