Behind the Moon (30 page)

‘Now, as I said before, except for the other women at the table, nobody was paying any attention to what they were doing. This guy, our host, didn’t realise that he’d aimed the bottle right at Miss F-Cup. When the cork popped, it shot out like a bullet and struck her on her left breast. She screamed and clutched her breast. The champers fountained out and drenched her across the table because it’d gotten all fizzed up while the host was jogging back from the kitchen. And then, right before our very eyes, we saw that big left breast deflating like a punctured balloon.’

‘No!’

‘Yes! The impact of that cork made the saline bag of the implant explode and it leaked out quickly. So there she was, the former Miss F-Cup, drenched in champagne, sobbing for her lawyer, cradling her chest, one big overinflated soccer ball on her right and no left breast!’

Annabelle shrieked with delight. ‘True or not?’

‘True,’ Tien said with a straight face. ‘Absolutely true.’

‘Bullshit,’ Bob said, throwing Tien an exasperated glance. ‘That’s medically impossible. Isn’t that right, Tek?’

Tek agreed, and the two doctors got into a technical discussion about the probable velocity of flying corks and the durability of breast implants. Gibbo looked at Tien and rolled his eyes, grinning widely.

But Linh looked at her daughter and felt troubled. Tien was not herself. She had changed. She went through the motions of normality. She was helpful and efficient and entertaining when she needed to be. She learned to comfort and to listen. She became adept at saying the right thing. In fact, this was a new and improved version of her daughter whom everyone liked. Yet something was missing. This new Tien said and did all the right things, but her eyes were lifeless and devoid of emotion. Linh did not know how to reach inside and pull out the real Tien—the difficult, guiltridden daughter swinging between angry rebellion and filial duty, whom she loved so much but was always hurting in a multitude of unintentional ways. Linh put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and squeezed it gently, and she felt her heart contract with pain when Tien glanced at her with those blank eyes and quickly turned her lips up into an automatic smile.

After dinner Linh and Tien helped Annabelle with the dishes, then they brewed a pot of Chinese tea and brought it into the living room. Only then did Tek tell them about the case.

Justin had been bashed up and left to die on Tamarama Beach. He’d been having sex in the public toilets. His partner was still missing and the police were searching the coastline for the body of a Caucasian male in his early twenties. Three men had been arrested and charged but while two had been remanded into custody, one had been released on bail.

‘What do we do now?’ Gillian said. ‘One young man missing, presumably dead, and Justin still in a coma! It’s preposterous that a murderer is out on bail. We must be able to do something. Surely we can write to our local MP or the newspapers?’

‘What’s the point? They won’t do anything,’ Tek said. ‘All we can do is wait.’

‘What about justice?’ Gillian demanded. She reached for her handkerchief and blew her nose emphatically. ‘That young man should be in jail.’

‘Anyway, the main thing is Jay,’ Annabelle said. ‘I want to bring him home soon. I just know he’ll wake up if he can come home and sleep in his own room.’

Tien said nothing. She lowered her eyes to hide the rage that blistered her heart. That night she dreamed of Justin walking out of a toilet block into an ambush of brutal fists. As in her first days as a refugee in Australia, she began to grind her teeth in her sleep once again. When she woke up, her jaw was sore and her pillow was wet. She was almost surprised to find herself trembling with a deep and bitter fury. She took a few deep breaths to calm down, and she congratulated herself that by the time she appeared at breakfast, she looked completely normal.

Tien had not seen her cousin Thuy since her wedding to Stan. She was surprised when she learned that Gibbo was sharing an apartment with him. In his younger days, he’d run away from home to hang around Cabramatta and Canley Vale, terrorising shopkeepers with other teenagers. He’d since straightened himself out and was belatedly following in his elder brother Van’s footsteps. Thuy went back to TAFE, sat for his HSC again and was now studying pharmacy at university—appropriately enough for a former small-time dope dealer. Tien arranged to meet him at Bankstown shopping centre on the weekend. They walked around for a bit, window-shopping and catching up, then she took him to a Vietnamese restaurant and bought him a bowl of
pho
.

Under the raucous din of cheerful family chatter, she asked him softly, ‘Are you still in touch with your Five T friends?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘A couple of them I see on special occasions. Birthdays and Tet, that kind of thing. But mostly I’ve left all that behind. I’m straight now. A good little Vietnamese son at long last. Why?’

She told him and he choked on his noodles, spluttering soup all over the table.

‘Careful,’ she said, pulling out tissues from her bag and handing them to him. ‘New cardigan here.’

‘You’ve gotta be kidding, right?’ he asked.

She shook her head and his face settled into a frown. He looked remarkably like Uncle Duc and Ong Ngoai just then. She stared at him and recognised in that stern frown an auspicious future as an upright family man and pillar of the community. She couldn’t help smiling at the irony of it all.

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, Tien. You don’t want to go down that road. Believe me. It’s just not worth it.’

They argued about it all through lunch. Then they walked back to Linh’s car, which Tien had left in the car park next door, and sat in the car, still arguing.

‘All right,’ Tien said at last. ‘If you won’t help me, then I’ll go and find someone who can.’

‘You’re nuts. I’m going to tell your mother and Uncle Duong,’ he decided.

‘They’ll never believe you. I’ll just deny it. And even if they did, what could they do to stop me? You’d just be worrying them unnecessarily.’

He looked at his cousin. ‘Look, if you’re really set on this, let me get someone to do it for you. I’ll even do it myself. Don’t go messing up your life, Tien.’

‘Too late. Anyway, I don’t want you involved at all. Once you put me in touch with your friend, you’re out of it. Besides, I need to do it myself. You needn’t worry. Nobody will ever know if I do it the way I planned.’

When Tien dropped him off at Uncle Duc’s, Thuy unclipped his seatbelt but he did not get out of the car. ‘I’ll give my friend a call, but I’m really not happy about this. Take some time to think it over, Tien. I’m serious. Look, we don’t know each other that well, but for some reason you’ve always been my favourite cousin. Probably because you were a bit of a rebel. Like me.’

‘Well ditto, and for the same reason too,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

A few weeks later Tien invited Gibbo over for dinner at her mother’s. The three of them ate together, then Linh left for her shift at the hospital.

Tien waited until she heard the front door lock, then she said to Gibbo, ‘I can’t stop thinking about that guy who’s out on bail.’ She stacked the plates and brought them over to the sink to wash them. Gibbo automatically got up, grabbed the tea towel and stood ready to dry the dishes. He’d been well trained by his mother and Annabelle. ‘It’s so unfair, you know? Justin’s in a coma, his partner still hasn’t been found, and this guy’s just out there on bail until the trial, which won’t be for another year. It’s just not fair.’

‘No, it’s not. But we can’t do anything about it,’ Gibbo said.

‘Yes, we can.’ She paused what she was doing and turned to look at him. ‘I know who he is, Gibbo. I found out. And I know where he hangs out too. I’ve followed him to his regular pub. We can do something. We can punish him, Gibbo. Look at Justin! Doesn’t it just wreck you? Doesn’t it make you so fucking furious you want to tear the world apart?’

He was shocked at the wildness that suddenly sprang into her eyes, the rancour in her voice. He put a placating hand on her sleeve. ‘Don’t take it so hard, Tien. I love Justin too and I’d give anything for him to wake up. But it’s not up to us to take revenge for Justin. It wouldn’t be right.’

‘What’s not right is for Justin to be in a fucking coma. And it’s not revenge. It’s justice. That guy, he needs to be punished now.’

‘Come on. Don’t talk that way. That’s not justice. That’s vigilantism,’ Gibbo said. ‘You’ll only make yourself sick in the head if you go on like this, Tien.’

‘Hear me out, okay? I know where he hangs around. What’s wrong with slipping a little something into his drink? Something that’ll, you know, just give him diarrhoea or something. Perhaps make him vomit. What’s so bad about that? It’s not half what he deserves. Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? Justin was sodomised with a fucking broken beer bottle! Who’s going to pay for that?’

She took the tea towel from him and dried her hands with it, then she found a tissue and wiped her eyes and blew her nose inelegantly. Every time she thought about what had been done to Justin, something hot and tight and hard lodged at the back of her throat and breathing became difficult. Her heart twisted with viciousness.

‘I can’t sleep at night for thinking about it,’ she said. ‘I have these nightmares every time I go to sleep. I see what was done to him. I see his face. Every night. And I feel so fucking useless. I feel like I’ve failed him over and over again and there may not be another chance to make it up to him. I need to do something to make things right for him. And it’s such a little thing. Please, Gibbo. It’s such a fucking small thing.’

He looked at her uncertainly. ‘You’re just gonna slip something into his drink that’ll give him diarrhoea but it’ll be fairly harmless otherwise? Kind of like Agarol?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And that’ll be it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You promise it’ll be safe?’

‘Yes, I already told you.’ She busied herself with the dishes and did not look at him.

He sighed heavily and gave in, as she knew he would eventually. ‘
Hi-yah
. All right. What do you want me to do?’

‘Just help me distract him so I can slip the laxativething into his drink. I’ll chat him up or something and you keep watch that nobody sees me doing it. Okay?’

‘That’s the grand plan?’

‘That’s it.’

He shook his head but he said, ‘All right.’

It was working beautifully. Tien didn’t even have to chat him up. All she had to do was wear something very tight without a bra and he just homed in on her. They sat at the bar, flirted, slugged back beer and crunched salted nuts. She was completely calm. She was utterly convinced by the rightness of what she was going to do. It was justice.

The only thread of regret that ran through her mind right then was the lie she’d told Gibbo to get his help, and the shock of her family when she turned herself in to the police the following day for taking a life. She’d told Thuy that she could get away with murder and perhaps she could; but she wouldn’t, because justice had to be done. Even as he had to pay for his crime, she would have to pay for hers. That was what made her act an execution of justice, she told herself self-righteously. In
The Tale of
Kieu
, her namesake Dam Tien told Kieu: ‘your name is marked in the
Book of the Damned
. We both reap what we sow in our past lives: of the same League, we ride the selfsame boat.’ In her conscience, mitigating circumstances were no excuse; the ancients knew that from both East and West. Oedipus killed Laius and married Jocasta unwittingly, and still he stabbed his own eyes out with the pins from his mother’s dress because he had to pay for his actions. How much more her act of premeditated murder—even though it was justice?

She saw Gibbo pulling out a stool. At her signal, he started a casual conversation with the other guy, successfully distracting him. Tien withdrew her right hand from her bag and felt the small phial warm and snug in her palm. She eased off the plastic lid with her thumbnail. She glanced around quickly to check that nobody was looking. And jolted when a gentle hand was laid upon her shoulder. She looked up, straight into her mother’s eyes. Their gazes held for several long seconds, then Linh bent to kiss Tien’s forehead.

‘Hello, darling,’ Linh said. ‘
Con gai
, will you give me a lift home?’

She felt her mother’s hand grasping the wrist of her right hand and slipping her fingers into Tien’s tightly clenched palm. Slowly, bending to her mother’s will, Tien released the bottle. Linh slid it out and turned it upside down so that the clear liquid splashed onto her dress.

‘Thank you,’ she said softly. ‘You are a good daughter who does indeed understand
hieu thao
.’

They did not speak until the three of them were back in Linh’s apartment. As soon as Linh shut the door, Tien grabbed the nearest thing she could find—a heavy cutglass bowl Linh put her keys in—and hurled it at the huge television screen. The shattering glass released something wild in her. Tien whirled around to face her mother, ready for battle. Instead, Linh handed her a pair of heavy winter boots from the shoe-rack beside the door. Tien threw those at window. They thumped harmlessly and thudded to the ground. Then Linh ran into the kitchen and raided the cupboard for china plates and porcelain soup bowls. Tien wrenched open the sliding door to the balcony and shattered the stoneware on the tiles. She picked up a cushion from the sofa and went berserk in the room, swiping at and smashing whatever she could see, and still it did not soothe or satisfy.

‘Did you tell her?’ Tien screamed at Gibbo. ‘Did you betray me with your fucking big blabbermouth the way you betrayed Justin?’

‘No, Tien. It was Thuy,’ Linh said. ‘Gibbo thought it was a harmless prank but Thuy told me what you’d bought and what you were going to do.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Gibbo said, bewildered. ‘What was in the bottle?’

‘GHB—an anaesthetic. Ninety millilitres of it. More than enough to send him into a coma and kill him.’

Tien sank down onto the carpet by the badly damaged coffee table, buried her face in her arms and wept.