Odyssey In A Teacup (20 page)

Evelina was twelve, but she looked much older. A tall girl with short brown, wiry hair, she had a husky voice and was quite well developed for her age. And she was streetwise. She had a better grasp of the birds and the bees than Sylvia did. And Evelina swore. Sylvia never swore. Ever. Not according to her (telling Joe that he thought his shit didn’t stink didn’t count, apparently). And although, on occasion, Sylvia called me a ‘bloody bitch’, this also wasn’t swearing (supposedly) because technically, neither ‘bloody’ nor ‘bitch’, in and of themselves, were swear words.

As Evelina and I had sat propped up in our beds with our hospital-made milkshakes, she’d told me stuff that made my eyes bulge. Amongst other things, she taught me the
fuck
word. Well, she didn’t actually teach it to me. She just helped me understand what it meant. I’d already heard it numerous times at home, because Joe often uttered the standardised
fuck
and
fucking
. He also regularly expressed a variation of it.

When I was nine years old, on one of the Sunday family get-togethers at our place, Ralph, Maxi, Vette and I were playing hopscotch in a secluded area of the backyard, between the garage and the neighbour’s fence. I’d meticulously drawn the squares in white chalk, and numbered them one through eight. In front of the first square, I’d carefully written ‘START’. And at the end, just above seven and eight, I’d written ‘FUCKET’. I decorated the grid with little flowers in soft pink and lemon-yellow chalk. Zelda found us and wanted to play as well, but we wouldn’t let her, so the bloody bitch (that wasn’t swearing, remember?) went and told on me. Sylvia came out, took one look, gasped, dragged me into the bathroom by my ear and, raging about my ‘filthy language’, washed my mouth out with soap. Why? The same way that she punctuated a lot of her sentences with ‘
pest’
, Joe punctuated a lot of his with ‘fucket’: ‘Yes, I will get it done, fucket!’ ‘Who ate that last piece of cake? Fucket!’ ‘Stop nagging me, fucket!’

For a fourth-grader, my grammar skills were pretty good, but I wasn’t quite sure what part of speech ‘fucket’ was. Was it a noun—concrete or abstract? Or maybe an action verb? Or a helping verb? Whatever; I didn’t realise it was such a bad word and was really shocked at Sylvia’s response. And indignant. It wasn’t like I’d actually said it.

‘I just
wrote
it!’

‘It’s the same thing as saying it!’

‘But it didn’t come out of my bloody mouth; it came from my bloody hands!’

Bad call. Apparently ‘bloody’ in this context
was
swearing.

‘
Oeuf!
Go to your room and stay there until you learn it’s not all right to swear!
Pest!
’

‘But if dad says it, then he swears! Why is that all right?’

‘He’s an adult, he’s allowed to swear.’

‘Will I be allowed to swear when I’m an adult?’

Fair question, I thought. Seems she didn’t agree because she slapped me. You can’t win an argument with someone who’s hell-bent on having the last word (even if it’s only in the form of an imprint on the cheek). Well, she couldn’t keep me in my room forever, and in the end, I didn’t learn it’s not all right to swear; I just learned it’s important to
whisper
filth. And I used to whisper to Myron that Sylvia was a
bloody fucketing bitch
. Used to modify a noun, in this case definitely an adjective. My grammatical repertoire was expanding.

On this cruise two years down the track, with my extended ‘adult’ vocabulary, with what Evelina had taught me about sex a year earlier and from what I’d seen in the movies, I just knew there was the potential here for a shipboard romance with Reggie.

God knows, I tried to attract his attention. I wore my most flattering romper suits during the day, and my prettiest dresses, frilled bobby socks and patent leather Mary Janes to dinner. But it was all in vain. Apart from affectionately tousling my hair occasionally when he walked past me, Reggie didn’t really notice me.
Fucket!
It turned out to be a horrible case of unrequited love. I felt so unattractive. Still, I soldiered on doing all the things you do on a ship. During the day, I played deck quoits and deck tennis, swam in the pool, posed for the ship’s photographer and played board games with Myron. Night-time activities included dinner theatre, a mad-hatters evening, a fancy dress parade, and dreaming of Reggie. The days and nights were a blur, though. Sleep brought some respite from my suffering.

Finally, we disembarked in Singapore and indulged in four days of endless shopping. My parents became versed in the art of bargaining. They were on a roll. And at age eleven, I learned the value of retail therapy. Most of what we bought—cheongsams, Chinese pyjamas, fans, ashtrays, statues of dragons (all of life’s necessities)—came from one shop. Every time Joe successfully negotiated for a lower price (and the exchanges were easy, as the staff spoke fairly good English), he smugly and shamelessly confided, ‘See, that’s how it’s done!’ On the last day, as we left the shop, there was a lot of bowing on the part of the staff, and a heap of thank-yous.

‘Please, you come back soon, Ben,’ the manager said to Joe.

‘The name is Joe, and yes, we will come back one day.’

The manager then bowed again, smiled and said, ‘Ben.’

I asked Joe why this man called him Ben, even after he corrected him. Joe said it was a mark of respect. I didn’t question this because he was a know-all, so I assumed he knew everything.

We were now on our way to Kuala Lumpur and I was well over Reggie. Here, there was no shopping, just three days of sightseeing. On our last day there, Sylvia and Joe took Myron and me to a garden that housed a miniature replica of a torture chamber. Legoland Malaysia wasn’t built yet, so the torture chamber was probably the next best thing.

‘It’ll be educational,’ said Sylvia.

So for ten minutes, we walked through a cave-like chamber filled with a bunch of figurines graphically depicting every manner of ancient torture—people being disembowelled and decapitated. Eye gouging, burning, boiling, whipping, crushing, and water torture. All the stuff that an eleven and twelve-year-old really didn’t need to see. The only thing missing was a figurine of a car (or a chariot because it was ancient times) carrying a family of four, and with a trail of phlegm boomeranging between driver and rear passenger.

Educational, my arse.
That night, Myron had a fitful sleep filled with nightmares, and I lay awake crying. I felt like such an ingrate because I didn’t appreciate any of it. And I swore I’d never go back to Kuala Lumpur just in case the authorities arrested me and tortured me for being a
pest
.

We sailed back to Singapore, where we did a bit of sightseeing and a bit more shopping. We then reboarded for the journey home. The voyage was uneventful until we passed Christmas Island, which was in the throes of a cyclone. Calm waters turned feral … for three days. The boat was pitching violently and we were hurling heftily. We spent most of the time confined to our bunks. Our cabins didn’t have en-suites so we had to use the communal bathroom across the hall. Myron lay on the top bunk and moaned, while I moaned on the bottom bunk. On occasion, I watched as a waterfall of vomit cascaded from his bunk, splattered and pooled on the floor next to my favourite pink
Oomphies
slippers. We chucked in the cabin, in the hallway, on the floor of the bathroom. Sometimes, we made it to the bowl. I even felt too sick to feel pity for the housekeeping staff.

We subsisted on Dramamine injections and, courtesy of our steward, Fu, dry crackers and water. But Myron really shone on day three when he spewed his shark’s fin soup in the middle of a dining room full of people. My time in the sun came the next day.

After our first real breakfast, Joe took us up to the top deck for some fresh air. Although it was smooth sailing once again, my world was still rocking, and within two minutes on deck, the urge to heave overcame me. Joe roughly shoved me to the side of the ship. I honestly thought he was going to throw me overboard as a sacrifice to the gods, rather than chance another humiliating incident like the day before. Instead, he yelled, ‘Over the side, over the side!’

Rarely the obedient child, this time I happily hung my head over the railing and threw up (or down, depending on how you look at it). Who could have known that four crewmen were suspended on a platform cleaning the side of the ship? One unfortunate sailor ended up with a vomit beret. The rest of my chunder painted a variegated abstract pattern—like a Jackson Pollock—down the ship as it plunged five floors into the sea. I’d horked two boiled
oeufs
, eight buttered toast soldiers, a grilled tomato, one bacon rasher, and some orange juice.

When we entered Fremantle Harbour a day later, the earth was still swaying on its axis (not rotating). As we stood at the railing waiting for the ship to dock, at Sylvia’s urging, Myron and I went and thanked Fu for tending to us during the rough days. And as an afterthought, I asked him why the store manager at the shop where we’d got all our bargains would call our dad Ben, even after he corrected him and said his name was Joe. Was it, as Joe decided, a mark of respect? Fu looked a little taken aback, then started laughing so hard I thought he’d shit his pants.
When he managed to come up for air, he said, ‘Aw, Missy Lootie ...
ha ha hee hee ho ho ...
in Chineeese, ‘ben’ mean sitoopid.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
WEDDING DAZE

We all laughed when I finished telling Reuben the story, but then he looked deflated. I felt guilty for taking the wind out of his sails—his surprise was a lovely, romantic gesture. But I was also a little annoyed because, like Sylvia and Joe, he was making decisions for me. Then I felt guilty for feeling irked.

Reuben shrugged. ‘Oh well, I guess Surfers it is.’

‘Maybe we can fly to Noumea?’ I tried to compensate a little, maybe somehow meet in the middle (flying was okay; I never needed another vomit bag after that trip).

‘It’d be too expensive. Cruises are the most economical way to travel overseas.’

Reuben was an accountant and was very prudent when it came to money matters. Meanwhile, Joe tried in vain to be equally prudent as he griped about the mounting cost of the wedding—back then, the bride’s parents were the ones who footed the bill for the whole thing.

Sylvia bit back. They snapped at each other over the next five weeks. It was like living inside a Pac-man maze. When she assumed the pac-mantle, he was like Clyde (the egotistical ghost who tends to retreat), and when he assumed the pac-mantle, she was like Blinky (the bad-tempered, bossy ghost). They took turns trying to bite each other’s head off—
waka waka waka.
Nothing new, except that it was probably the only time Joe fought honestly (a man with all guns blazing instead of a sniper). And as the day drew closer, just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, the best man, Reuben’s closest friend, Norbert, arrived from New York. It was five days before the wedding.

Norbert was short, stocky and fair-skinned. He had oily, wavy, oily black, oily hair. Oily. A receding hairline made his forehead appear very large. His thick black handlebar moustache warehoused small particles of whatever he had just eaten (and just plain whatever), and he ate with his mouth open (
ecch
). Norbert’s manner was as oily as his hair. He licked his lips a lot (
ecch
again) and
he had the habit of audibly sucking in air between his bared, clenched teeth whenever he saw a woman he fancied, which was pretty much every woman (
ecch
one more time). He even tried this one on Sylvia when she came into the lounge all dressed up for the Friday night dinner at Greta and Rudy’s. Oh ...
ECCH∞
(= ECCH
ad infinitum
).
She
found this flattering. Oblivious to his creepiness, she thought Norbert was a good catch. ‘He’s Jewish and he’s a lawyer!’

Huh? How can a lawyer be a good catch?