Noble Sindhu Horses

NOBLE SINDHU HORSES Lynette Chataway

… a profound and moving work Amanda Lohrey

Pandanus Online Publications, found at the Pandanus Books web site, presents additional material relating to this book. www.pandanusbooks.com.au

NOBLE SINDHU HORSES

NOBLE SINDHU HORSES Lynette Chataway

PANDANUS BOOKS Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Cover: Orange Orbit, © Susan Lesley Andrews, Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney 2005. © Lynette Chataway 2005 This book is copyright in all countries subscribing to the Berne convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Typeset in Garamond 10.75pt on 13pt and printed by Pirion, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Chataway, Lynette. Noble Sindhu horses. ISBN 1 74076 150 2. I. Title. A823.4 Editorial inquiries please contact Pandanus Books on 02 6125 3269 www.pandanusbooks.com.au Published by Pandanus Books, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Pandanus Books are distributed by UNIREPS, University of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 2052 Telephone 02 9664 0999 Fax 02 9664 5420 Production: Ian Templeman, Justine Molony, Emily Brissenden

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Jan McKemmish and Amanda Lohrey for their continued support during the writing of this book and Australian Volunteers International for giving me the opportunity to live and work in Thailand with my family. This experience was the catalyst for Noble Sindhu Horses.

Mules are good, if tamed, and noble Sindhu horses; and elephants with large tusks; but he who tames himself is better still. The Dhammapada, Chapter XXIII: 322

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rancis holds The Discerning Breeder’s Guide to Selecting Sound Bulls under one arm and rushes from the house. He throws the book, and some other bits and pieces, onto the back seat of his car, and sets off. He has been asked to judge the cattle at the Haden Show and if he doesn’t hurry he will be late. While he drives along, Francis goes over the bull selection criteria in his head, and eats a peanut butter sandwich left over from yesterday. ‘Internally, check the reproductive organs for healthy glands.’ A quick look over his shoulder reveals he has brought the necessary armpit-high gloves. Good. ‘Externally, check for any swellings, bits missing, correct tone and size, the bigger the balls the better.’ Another glance at the back seat, and Francis swerves onto loose gravel. He brings the car under control and climbs the shoulder onto the road again. He bangs his fist against the

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steering wheel. ‘Bugger, no scrotal tape,’ he says. Like a stethoscope around the neck of a doctor, the scrotal tape lends some credibility to his work, Francis feels, and he has left his on the kitchen table. Ten minutes more and Francis is heading down the main street of Meringandan. An odd flapping noise and the smell of burning rubber cause him to pull over. He gets out of the car and can’t believe his luck. He has a flat tyre, his second in as many days, and, unfortunately, he hasn’t had time to get the first one fixed. Ava is house-sitting for her Aunt Dorothy, and slowly going out of her mind with boredom. When she hears a car stop, she looks up from the book she is reading and watches a man squat down beside what is obviously a flat tyre. ‘Bugger,’ he says. He turns in her direction and she begins to read again. Ava is wearing a blue dress and is sitting on a cane chair under a blooming mauve crepe myrtle tree. One of her bare feet rests on a similar chair nearby, and there is a cat sleeping on the pathway. Francis is reminded of a painting that used to hang in his grandmother’s bedroom. He thinks it was by Mary Cassatt, but he is not sure, and there are differences. His grandmother’s woman read a newspaper, not a book, and she wore a white dress. Both women, however, look as though they are pretending to read, as if the book and newspaper are there to give them something to do with their hands, like smoking.

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Ava’s mind had been jumping from one idea to another like a pronking springbok. It began with Daniel Defoe, the author of the book she is reading, leapt to the year of his birth, 1660, moved to Charles II, crowned King of England that same year, then onto his rumoured many mistresses, and just when a picture of the licentious Charles was forming in her head, the main feature of which was a neck blotchy with syphilis, Francis appeared. Ava wonders what sort of person wears khaki overalls in the middle of summer. She doesn’t know that the overalls, like the scrotal tapes, are a prop. Francis walks over to the fence and tells Ava he has a flat. ‘No,’ she says, and looks around him towards the tyre. Francis thinks to point out which one it is when he realises that she isn’t serious, and says instead, ‘My problem is I don’t have a spare and I’m supposed to be in Haden,’ he looks at his watch, ‘in about five minutes. I’m judging the cattle. Or at least I will be if I can get there in time.’ ‘I’ll give you a lift.’ Ava closes the book and stands up. ‘I need an excuse to get out of here,’ she says, surprising them both. Francis entertains Ava with information gleaned from The Discerning Breeder’s Guide during the drive. It is Ava’s idea and Francis, suddenly feeling awkward, is pleased to be given a job to do. Not that reading about electroejaculation and rectal massage does much to put him at his ease.

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‘Normal testicular tissue is firm and resilient. Abnormally soft and abnormally firm testicles and those with a low degree of resilience are unacceptable,’ he says, thankful that people wear clothes. There are pictures of corkscrew penises that spiral to the right but he thinks that he doesn’t know Ava well enough to draw her attention to these. He turns the page and reads out information at random. ‘Apparently, bulls do not die from too much sex,’ he says. ‘A yearling bull can service cows quite a lot larger than himself.’ And then, finally, ‘The two commonest causes of bull breakdown are hip arthritis and broken penis.’ ‘If they broke down though, wouldn’t they get shot?’ Ava asks. ‘Which means they do die from too much sex.’ But Francis is wondering about the broken penis, how painful that must be. And this is their beginning. Nikkon Nikkon is born during the rainy season. The narrow twisting streets of Toong Siow, 30 kilometres south of Chiang Mai City, are rivers of glutinous mud and floating debris. Twelve local people die the day Nikkon is born. Most of them are drowned, sucked under the torrents of inescapable spreading water while doing

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everyday things such as shopping and returning home from school or work. Others find themselves crushed to death beneath the crumbling concrete walls of unstable buildings. Nikkon, however, does not know any of this as he struggles to be free. He does not know who he is, or where he is headed, and the memory of who he was is fast becoming mere fog, dividing and separating into droplets that will soon disappear completely. The birth is difficult enough. He remembers this for a while. His mother’s stoical acceptance of imminent death is shared by Nikkon, who is at one with her and at one with her pain. The grunting and sweating, the omnipresent terror filling the room, filling the world he will soon enter, is Nikkon’s first indication that this life is not going to be easy. The rain pelts down. On each interior wall of the tiny village house, waterfalls flow to the floor where they join each other to form a dam. Nikkon’s mother, Jirapun, focuses on this body of water. She watches it grow, watches it slowly edge its way to where she is squatting, and, when the first waves lap her feet, it is a sign for her own body to erupt and overflow, to tear and release a baby, who can only scream his way into existence. Jirapun does not

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stop pushing until she is empty, until she is in danger of giving birth to her organs — her kidneys and lungs. On the floor between her feet is a blue-faced boy attached by a twisted snake to a blood pudding. When Jirapun sees them both she relinquishes the hold she has on her ankles and collapses backwards, waiting to die. Her older sister, her pi sow, takes over, dabbing at her wounds, inspecting the damage, while Jirapun shuts off her mind, concentrating only on the insides of her eyelids. A tiny star begins to form when she presses against them. The star grows and changes colour before finally settling on bright orange, the same shade as the robes of a monk. It is a good sign. Nikkon has no plans to evade the present. He is eager for this moment, has waited so long for it, and he clutches at the air as if trying to reel it in. Unlike his mother, Nikkon is all eyes, though his surroundings seem shrouded in the same dense fluid they were surrounded by in the womb. This makes it difficult for Nikkon to get his bearings, to plan his immediate future. His father, Pornchai, is away in the next village where he goes when he is not busy planting rice. He helps his brothers weave roofs out of teak

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leaves. As Pornchai sits, intent upon his work, a large hand-rolled cheroot filled with northern tobacco sends out smoke signals from his mouth, and he thinks about his wife. He hopes she will be done by the time he gets home, and he hopes she has a boy. He remembers seeing a calf born. It came out only half formed, its tongue protruding from its mouth and its eyes milky and startled-looking, as if they had seen something ghastly in there. The calf was furless and veiny and dead, and Pornchai hopes Jirapun can do better. The thought that he might arrive before it is all over sees Pornchai ride home in the rain via the local restaurant. He has a glass of water and a bowl of Gaeng Hang Lay, before he goes upstairs, where he has sex with one of two sisters. The older, more beautiful sister is menstruating, so the younger one must do what Pornchai wants.

Nikkon

Nikkon is rocked in a large cane basket that hangs from two ropes under his grandmother’s house. Another rope extends to where his bony grandmother, Khun Yi, sits on a colourful striped mat like a big beach towel, although Khun Yi has never been to the beach, nor is she going. She has heard that

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in coastal areas people stomp on your feet, steal your money and stab you in the stomach. Her head is bowed so that her scanty bun — the size and colour of a calamari ring — can be seen bobbing about on the back of her neck. She is preparing microscopic pieces of fish, rice, chillies and bok choy for lunch, and she looks like a little monkey as she does so. Khun Yi’s hands are brown capable paws that work patiently. Every now and then, when she remembers — between slicing, flaking, and chopping — she gives the rope a tug, and the basket is set in motion again. As Nikkon lies there he tries to determine the smells of the world. The first and the most potent smell is of stinky pig. The family’s financial investment, unnamed pig, lives close to the house. Nikkon has never seen pig, but he can picture her smell. It is black and fetid and lurks in dark corners like a leech wet and full of eyeless surprise. Every time pig grunts, or thrashes around trying to tear down the ramshackle walls of her pen, Nikkon begins to cry, and the rocking takes on new momentum. The second smell is of the talcum powder that Khun Yi liberally dusts across Nikkon’s face after she bathes him. It gets up his nose and works its way through his respiratory system into his infant lungs.

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The talcum powder Nikkon sees as yellow and white speckled irises that float in a pond of fragrant water. He can smell the cooking, too. The fish and vegetables and hot water metamorphose into a group of sweaty moths, red, green and purple, which take it in turns to circle his conscience. Khun Yi herself smells warm, and is liver-coloured and comforting. Nikkon looks at the floorboards above his head and sees that the sky is an unfriendly thick mass of darkness. He wonders what it would taste like, and saliva trickles from between his rosebud lips. He longs to rise out of his basket, to take up a vertical position, but as yet Nikkon can lift only his head, and move his legs as if already off to work on a trusty bicycle. Every so often his own urine hits him in the face as it arcs over his body like a liquid rainbow, and Nikkon can taste the saltiness. He is not yet in control. If it is very hot, Khun Yi fans her grandson with a banana leaf. Back and forth she rocks him, the fan waving to and fro. Scrawny dogs scurry around in the dirt chasing even scrawnier chickens that are under the house searching for shade and scraps. Nikkon worries that, lost in thought, or just confused

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by her many roles, Khun Yi might suddenly jerk the rope, or worse, accidentally hack at it instead of the defenceless fish and vegetables she is killing, and Nikkon will find himself being tipped, before he has perfected a plan, into an unknown, larger and more absurd world. Nikkon has no knowledge of whether he would waft to the ground like a butterfly’s wing or drop like a stone. He fears, though, that in either case, before he makes contact with the dirt, before Khun Yi has time to adjust her bun and come to her senses, the emaciated and mangy dogs will eat him. Potential smell number five: Nikkon’s own demise. Fear. Nikkon imagines the chickens waiting on the sidelines will move in and peck at the leftovers until his bones are huge calcified toothpicks. Khun Yi, alert now and not wanting to waste an opportunity, can gather these up and sell them in the market as elephant hat pins, the smaller ones as planting sticks. Nikkon’s life is in danger of being reduced to the menial before he has a chance. There is much trouble for a small boy to borrow these days.

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At 3am, Nikkon wakes to see the retreating back of his mother. Her bare feet glide noiselessly over the floor, her steps restricted by the tightness of her grabprohng. She moves like a Chinese princess with the feet of a deer. Her husband lies on his back dreaming of Guy, a new girl he has had. Guy’s body is as yet unchanged by childbirth, her hips still firm to his touch and her breasts sweet tight oranges, sohm, to be tasted by his lips for the price of a meal. Pornchai’s hand works rhythmically at his crotch as he dreams. The bed cover moves as though it is sheltering a mole that has lost its way. Nikkon knows not to disturb his father so early. He dresses silently then wakes his younger sister, Kanjana. Together they descend the stairs to where their mother is cooking kow niow. Nikkon thinks his mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her tawny-brown skin shines as if it has been buffed and polished. Her large teeth, like white howlite stones, flash each time she looks at her children and when she speaks to the customers, who come to buy her noodles. Jirapun and her children arrive at the market each morning by four. They position their pushcart in the same place among the ruts and potholes and set out

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the same dozen blue bowls, the same metal spoons, next to the same charcoal stove, which is lit ready to heat water. Nikkon and Kanjana squat in the dirt and watch the people around them. Prasert, the crippled Hmong, drags himself by. His legs bend forward at the knees and have the disturbing look of an umbrella that has turned itself inside out. Prasert is unable to walk, because his legs won’t straighten. The soles of his feet are as soft as sponges, and he has sores on his limbs that are left uncovered. Flicking flies, he nods at those who drop coins into his tin cup, clink, clink. This is Prasert’s full-time occupation. He makes more money from people hoping to gain good merit than Jirapun does from those needing to eat. Beside the crippled begging Hmong is the Muslim butcher setting out his meat, still warm from the kill, on a rickety folding table. He positions the pigs’ heads in a row at the back, their mouths open as if caught mid-sentence. Deep impressions from the fatal blow can be seen on their skulls, and dried blood cakes their nostrils. Other children squat beside baskets of onions and delicate mouse-ear mushrooms. Large vats of oil bubble to release aromas of unwashed skin and compost. These vats fry bananas and chicken, and

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last year a baby girl fell headfirst off a table into the boiling oil and was fried. The girl was taken home, where the local maw visited and treated her with a potion that came wrapped in leaves, and caused her to cry out in pain when it was rubbed over her blistered and broken skin. Infection set in and the girl died two days later. Her parents pay homage to her now by making small offerings of rice, water and flowers, which they leave on a shelf attached to an inner wall of their house. At night they pray for her, and for themselves. As a spirit, the girl is powerful, with the ability to cause the family’s tiny crops to fail or their son also to die young. The market is noisy, though slow. People move among the different stalls selling water snakes, toads whose hind legs are tied together with twine, live and dead chickens — both with their heads still attached. The shoppers turn their noses up at everything they see, squeezing the fruit and dismissing the vegetables as not green enough, or too green, not firm enough, or too firm. They buy the produce anyway and place it in their baskets. They buy exactly what they need for that day, and nothing more. Jirapun’s customers are men and women on their way to work. Some, like her husband, are farmers,

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while others, not so lucky, are labourers, or they gather plants and bark to sell as ingredients in cooking and medicine. A nearby village, Barn Tawhy, has recently become a centre for woodcarving, and anyone who is remotely gifted with a knife works there. At first, carved elephants are the big sellers, though eventually it is the larger-than-life American Indians with eagles on their shoulders that attract the gaze of the moneyed tourists. At 8am, the market is finished and Jirapun and the children trundle their cart home. At 4pm, they will trundle it back again and set up for the afternoon trade that catches the workers on their return journey. The house is quiet. Pornchai has eaten the breakfast Jirapun left for him and is gone. The dogs lounge under trees scratching at their fleas. The pig cares for her squealing litter of eight, and the chickens sedately peck at imaginary worms and draw hieroglyphics in the bare dirt with their claws. In time, Khun Yi will sweep these away unread with her straw rake. She will poke at the dogs with the handle and they will half-heartedly stagger to the other side of the yard looking for peace. The last US troops are pulling out of Vietnam, but the fighting continues. Jirapun has heard of Vietnam,

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but not of the US, of troops, of fighting. She does not know about guerillas and their warfare. She lies her 25-year-old body down on a mat and closes her eyes on a world that will always be brown and grey. She has shared this vision with her children, and only Nikkon will not accept it.

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va studies history after she and Francis marry, and after she gives birth to Elizabeth, who arrives eight months later. They are renting a house on the outskirts of Toowoomba with a verandah overlooking the deep alluvial soils of the Lockyer Valley, where heavy vegetables — potatoes and beetroot — are grown. The green leaves of the vegetables provide a stark contrast with the fallow ground, which, from a distance, looks like coffee-coloured snow. Francis tells Ava that the area relies totally on underground water and that there is a problem with salinity. Ava would like her husband to keep such information to himself, because now even though she cannot see the salinity, she knows it is there, like cancer, invisible and insidious, and it spoils her view. Francis wouldn’t understand this. He presumes that sharing his life with another extends to sharing his knowledge. He doesn’t realise that Ava’s failure to

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complete any course of study she has so far undertaken is because she keeps coming across things she doesn’t want to know. They plan their future on the verandah. Two children, three at a pinch, a ginger cat, a black and white dog, their own house in the country with views of the mountains. They tell each other how important it is to get involved, how important it is to do things to make the world a better place. These ‘things’ they will do are abstract concepts that they trust will some day develop form and structure. But there is no rush. There is so much time, so much life ahead. Ava and Francis go bushwalking and mountain climbing every spare weekend. Ava speeds ahead while Francis tramps steadily along with Elizabeth on his back, pointing out different plants and animals to her even though she is too small to understand. They join groups: Community Aid Abroad, Amnesty International, the Bird Watchers’ Society (though it is months before they manage to get up early enough to meet with the others for a walk), Friends of the Art Gallery, Friends of the University’s International Students, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, and, for a time, they enjoy a very social life in a place once voted Australia’s mostlivable city. And there is no denying that it is livable. Ava and Francis do a lot of living. Ava plays tennis and takes Elizabeth to playgroup. She paints flowers on Vegemite jars

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then uses them to hold hundreds and thousands, peanuts and birthday candles. She discovers she has a flare for interior decorating that sees the little renter transformed. And Francis, now working for the Department of Primary Industries, visits farmers, whose wives are intelligent and can bake chocolate cakes while taking care of triplets and doing the bookwork. He writes papers about heat stress in cattle and passing on the family farm — who wins, who loses — and is nominated for an award by the Rosalie Shire Council for his contribution to viable rural communities. They accumulate stuff: useful things, like chairs and cutlery, and the not so useful, like doilies and pot plants. When Elizabeth is three, when life is meandering along quite nicely, when they are thinking of buying a house and having another baby, Francis surprises himself by applying for a job as a dairy specialist at an agricultural college in Northern Thailand. He is again surprised when he gets the job, and even more surprised when Ava agrees to go. He was so surprised. Ava tells Francis that she is going to have this engraved on his tombstone. In his coffin she imagines him looking like a stunned mullet. His eyes will be as round as records, his mouth also. Their friends are proud of them although they say they wouldn’t want to go themselves. Some rally around and help pack, promising to write and to take good care of the

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furniture and cartons they have been asked to mind while Francis and Ava are away. Ava reads a lot of literature, trying to decide what they should take. Apparently, towels in Thailand are synthetic and it is almost impossible to get sheets. They do have tampons, but sunscreen and moisturiser are expensive. Ava is in charge of the bottles of malaria tablets and roll-on insect repellent, and the decision about the iron. Should they take the iron or not? Francis does a little packing of his own. He doubts he will ever need it, but he includes the scrotal tape in his baggage allowance. He hasn’t worn khaki overalls for ages so he leaves them behind, but three times he packs The Discerning Breeder’s Guide before admitting that Ava is probably right. It does take up too much valuable space. Nikkon

Every second week, Jirapun takes Nikkon into a room at the back of a shophouse to have his hair cut. Nikkon sits on a board balanced between the two arms of an elaborately carved teak chair. His feet rest on the seat of the chair and, directly in front of his face, not two feet from his nose, is a large picture of a topless woman. Jirapun averts her eyes from the picture, but Nikkon does not, as the woman has full, fascinating breasts.

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The breasts are not pendulous like a pig’s, but stand perpendicular to the woman’s chest, and take up a lot of room. If she were to have 10 to 14, like nameless pig, her whole body, including her face, would be covered in breasts. Her nipples are erect and are the colour of lychees. To the left and right of Nikkon’s head are more pictures of topless women, but Nikkon is not interested in these. He is in love with the woman near his nose, and her lychee nipples, and in his mind he calls her Awn. Kanjana accompanies Nikkon every fourth week to have her hair cut, but pays no more attention to the pictures than she does to the air she breathes. Neither she nor Nikkon have ever seen a real naked person, and when they bathe they wear sarongs. Kanjana’s is tied under her arms and Nikkon’s around his waist. The hairdresser uses clippers to cut Nikkon’s hair and each time she leans forward her free hand goes to the neck of her shirt to hold it against her body. Nikkon has seen his mother and grandmother repeat this gesture many times. To attend school, Nikkon’s hair must not grow more than one centimetre from his scalp, while Kanjana’s

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is to be cut level with her earlobes. The children look as if they are joining a military regime, which in a way they are, as corporal punishment is the order of the day. Nikkon has been hit for not standing tall enough, not greeting his elders formally enough, not speaking clearly enough, and for not wearing the correct uniform in the rainy season when nothing is dry, and for kicking up dirt when everything is and the playground resembles a dust bowl. Nikkon shows no emotion when the stick is wielded at him. Education is a privilege and teachers are to be respected. At school Nikkon studies English. ‘Hello, my name Nikkon. I eight (nine, ten, eleven) years age. My father farmer. My mother shopkeeper. One young sister, Kanjana. I live Toong Siow. I like eating food. I like playing. How do you do?’ When Nikkon finishes primary school he is amazed at how little he has learned. Nikkon knows that the problem lies with Crew Sar, whose method of teaching English is invariably to get the children to open their Dutch Governmentsupplied readers to a specific page from which they all read aloud. When they finish, they take up Dutch Government-supplied pencils and copy down the page they have recited in a Dutch Government-

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supplied writing book. The bell goes before they are finished and they stop work and thank Crew Sar in English, ‘Thank you, teacher,’ before she moves on to illuminate another class of students. The Emperor’s New Clothes is a favourite of Crew Sar’s, and every second or third lesson is devoted to this story. ‘Many years ago there was once an emperor who was so excessively fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on them,’ the children begin in their singsong voices, emphasising the wrong words, the wrong syllables, their brains comprehending nothing. They stand during the recital. Meanwhile, Crew Sar rests her head on the nearest table, closes her eyes and mind to the babble of the children, and dedicates the lesson time to organising her own wardrobe, which, like the Emperor’s, is extensive and which, also like the Emperor’s, eats up quite a bit of available cash. Crew Sar rests her head not only to think, but because she is tired. After school she earns extra money tutoring students, who want to study at the Chiang Mai University high school. To do so they need to pass an entrance exam that demands a sound knowledge of English. Crew Sar tutors these ambitious students in her own home, where she has

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a strategically placed bamboo chaise longue that she stretches out on while teaching. The fact that Crew Sar takes and fails the entrance exam herself each year is not revealed to those who come to her for help. If it was revealed, would anyone tell Crew Sar that her lessons are a waste of not very valuable time? Would they tell her she is stupid and her methods ridiculous? Would they ask why she is in love with the Emperor? Would anyone even think such punishable thoughts? Nikkon does not know enough of The Emperor’s New Clothes to yell, ‘But the Emperor is not wearing any clothes!’ He does know, however, though he keeps the knowledge hidden behind a military face with expressionless features, that Crew Sar’s English lessons are fraudulent, that if he makes it in life it will not be because of his first-class education. He also knows that Crew Sar, in her fine silk skirts and button-up jackets with embroidered lapels, is more naked, is more transparent, than the beautiful Awn could ever be.

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It is still dark, not yet dawn. The old Monk is at least 60. His eyes, like eel eyes, are dim and unreadable. He has bare feet and, as he walks, his toenails dig little trenches in the earth, which has been softened by the monsoon rains. Nikkon’s grandmother, father and mother prostrate themselves on the floor when the Monk enters their house. Nikkon and Kanjana wait in a nearby room where they kneel in a corner making themselves as small and insignificant as possible. Nikkon has never been away from home before. The road to the market, to the next village, to school, all contained in an area with a 12-kilometre circumference, is his whole life. The old Monk has come to change this. He has come for Nikkon, who agrees that change is necessary, but who still can’t help feeling the dread he suspects would engulf him if he were being escorted to face a firing squad. Kanjana, sweet as ever, holds his hand. Nikkon wears the white robe of a novice and he is bald and cold. Last night his mother snipped a lock of hair from his head as a keepsake before it was shaved. His eyebrows were also removed, and Nikkon took on a smooth vacant look that Kanjana couldn’t quite believe in. His parents poured water

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over his head to wash away his hair, and his sin. Nikkon wondered about this sin: wondered what it looked like being condensed by water. He imagined it could be diluted, but not dissolved completely. By age 11, Nikkon knows he has sinned. He is not stupid. His dislike for school, which is a privilege, is a sin, as is, he suspects, loving Awn and her beautiful breasts. Nikkon believes, however, that these two sins are minor when compared with the one he is knee-deep in now, of not wanting to enter the monkhood. He has had plenty of time to prepare himself, has seen others from his village leave and come back no worse for wear, but he still can’t help wishing Kanjana were a boy so she could go instead. If she did go he would happily do her chores, he tells himself. He prays and makes an offering of thanksgiving, changes robes, says goodbye to his sister, mother, father and Khun Yi, and follows the Monk outside, and down the colourless road. It has been agreed that Nikkon will stay in the monastery for three weeks, though as Pornchai watches him go, he hopes Nikkon will choose to return, perhaps permanently. Jirapun, on the other hand, hopes only that her son will be blessed for his effort.

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The boy and the old man walk silently in single file, and watch as the sun rises and its rays mix with old forest fire smoke and ash that cannot escape beyond the mountain ranges. The sky is burnt orange and, with each passing step, Nikkon is drawn closer and closer to a place that does not exist in real time. His bare feet absorb the road until there is no road behind any more, no past, only a split-second present, and a long winding future. Nikkon is tireless, but no more so than his elderly partner, and they walk effortlessly for 15 hours past waterlogged fields of rice and plodding buffalo, whose small minders stand to attention until they are out of sight. At midday strange things begin to happen. Faces appear in the folded cloth on the old Monk’s back. The faces stare at Nikkon with curious expressions as if they cannot quite see him, as if they are peering into a darkness too thick to penetrate. Nikkon’s attention is drawn away to an injured dog that is struggling to drink from a dirty puddle. The dog does not have the energy to move closer to the water, and tries to stretch its tongue to reach it. Why does no one help? Nikkon wonders. Why do I not help? The dog dies mid-battle, with its eyes on Nikkon.

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After a while an ancient woman, completely mad, with birds nesting in her hair and red stained teeth, appears, and begins to throw rocks at Nikkon. The rocks Nikkon catches easily or bats aside with one hand. They are wet and slippery and, upon closer inspection, Nikkon sees that they are not rocks, but fish. He throws two back, and watches as a bird swoops out of the woman’s hair to eat. And the old Monk keeps walking. The only time he shows any other sign of life is when they pass a small boy, who is naked except for pieces of string tied around his wrists and ankles. The boy rubs his dirty fists into his eyes and cries for his father. The Monk says, without turning his head, ‘Your father is dead, son,’ just as a man arrives to take the little boy home. ‘Don’t cry. Paw is here,’ the man says, and Nikkon wonders how the Monk could get it so wrong. Jirapun and Pornchai said to Nikkon before he left home, ‘Be good and your good deeds will protect you.’ Nikkon wonders if this is what he is to be protected from: an old woman and flying fish? A dying dog? Faces hidden in folds of orange? Lost boys? He longs to ask the Monk but does not have the words.

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Their journey’s end is a roadside temple, gold-clad and steep-roofed. Here Nikkon is shown to a room that is already home to half a dozen young boys. Nikkon learns that these boys are either orphans or have been given away by families too poor to keep them. Nikkon does not want to think about what happens to their sisters. He sleeps on the hard floor and rises at three for prayers, meditation, study and work. He learns things he does not fully understand: kill no living thing; if one is hateful or violent, rebirth is in hell; if greedy, it is as a ghost; if guilty of acts of delusion or confusion, the torment of life as an animal lies ahead. To reach Nirvana Nikkon must see things as they really are. He must attain a deep insight into reality. Nikkon shakes his head, bewildered, and mulls over such concepts as he sweeps, and dusts, and cares for the older Monk, who treats him like a son. Later, Nikkon takes to the streets with a begging bowl. Pieces of fish, glutinous rice, black beans in coconut milk, longan and jackfruit, are thrown together in the bowl by others also trying to work out a precarious future. Nikkon eats two donated meals before midday, and then nothing. After his allotted 21 days at the temple, a paltry time in retrospect, not worth half the fuss he made

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(Nikkon hopes Kanjana, at least, has forgotten), the old Monk takes Nikkon home. They do not walk but travel back in a dilapidated bus, in which they share the front seat. There is nothing to see out of the windows. The return journey is uneventful. Nikkon is glad to be going home and when he gets there he is pleased to hear his family has already gained something from his absence. ‘The rice fields have never looked so lush. There will be enough and some left over,’ his father says.

Nikkon

Nikkon has been to the restaurant before. Stopping on the way to or from the fields, or the next village, Nikkon and his father have often taken the time to exchange pleasantries with the owner and his daughters. Nikkon lost a tooth there once years ago among the kaep moo, and his father got angry because Nikkon cried so much he had to be taken straight home. At other times when the meal is over he watches as his father climbs the ladder-like stairs to the floor above. Nikkon takes himself outside when this happens to wait for his father’s return. He throws stones at a lone pine tree trying to hit it.

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For some inexplicable reason, Nikkon thought that the rooms above the restaurant were filled with stuffed animals. Any whispering and exchanges of money that went on he put down to the fact that there was a collection, most likely illegal, of marbleeyed creatures stored upstairs. The restaurateur may have killed them himself, using the meat — rhino, black bear or cheetah — in his cooking, which could explain the whispering. The money was just men paying to have a look. Nikkon hadn’t really thought much about it except to decide that he wasn’t invited to climb the stairs because he was too young to be trusted, or that the silent, sawdust- filled giants were so lifelike they would make him wet his pants. Now Nikkon finds himself upstairs though he has paid no money. He follows his father into a room as austere as any he saw at the monastery. Nikkon’s eyes rove the walls expecting to pop out of his head should they encounter so much as a stuffed mouse. But there is nothing. Even his father has disappeared. A narrow platform bed covered by a woven blanket, a small table with a jug of water and a roll of toilet paper on it, are the only pieces of furniture. On the wall next to a tiny shuttered window hangs a picture of the Queen dressed in royal purple.

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Nikkon stands in the middle of the room facing the door, his arms held stiffly by his side. He watches. His father must surely come back. The door opens and a woman appears. She does not look at Nikkon, but walks across the room just close enough for him to feel the air move as she passes. Nikkon shivers though he is feeling hot. The woman closes the shutter on the window and returns in the darkness to where Nikkon stands. She takes hold of his shirt and gently draws him to the bed. Nikkon sits beside her, letting his eyes become accustomed to the dimness, studying his clenched fists, which now rest on his thighs. The woman undresses. She takes Nikkon’s hands, slowly unclenches his fingers, and runs them over her body. Nikkon thinks. His first thought is that these aren’t Awn’s breasts he is touching, and this isn’t Awn. Her skin would be softer, like her name. Her breasts rounder. Not like these dry, empty appendages that feel as though they have had the life squeezed out of them. He thinks that he does not know what to do, and he says, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The woman doesn’t speak, but instead removes Nikkon’s clothes and covers his body with her own. The blanket scrunches up uncomfortably under Nikkon’s back.

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It is all over very quickly. She is easy to enter and moves back and forth until Nikkon can’t help but explode. And during the explosion Nikkon is troubled by the thought that his father might enter the room and catch him. If he did, Nikkon would die. And then it is over. The woman sits up and dresses quickly. She hands Nikkon his clothes, turning them the right way in, hands him the toilet paper. She walks to the door, where she says before leaving, ‘You were very good.’

Nikkon

Nikkon is slightly taller than his mother and his father and is twice as tall as Khun Yi. Each morning he dresses for work while Kanjana talks to him through the wall. She teases him about a girl named Kittystar, who works with him and who Kanjana has spied him talking to. What she really wants to know is whether Kittystar is in fact Nikkon’s girlfriend, or if this is something she has made up herself. Nikkon gives no clue. Nikkon has beautiful skin that is fairer than the skin of his parents. He wears long pants and a longsleeved blue shirt to protect it. He wraps a colourful checked cloth around his head, Lawrence of Arabia

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style, bringing one corner across his face so that only his eyes remain uncovered. He wears old mismatched gloves that reach almost to his elbows and, when he gets outside, he slides his feet into a pair of rubber thongs. Next week he will buy himself a pair of shoes so that his feet can be protected from the sun and dust. He looks like a terrorist as he waits for a lift. He has a large-bladed knife tucked through the waist of his pants and the metal feels good against his skin. Sometimes Nikkon fights off imaginary predators with his knife. He thrusts it into the ground, splitting the earth open, causing irreparable damage. Nikkon has a job carving and painting small wooden birds at a factory in Barn Tawhy. He is in charge, too, of sawdust. This he sweeps into a corner and forgets about. Because he wants to buy a motorbike, Nikkon works seven days a week. It is Nikkon’s friend, Barngtook, who gives him a lift. Barngtook already has a motorbike, and they pick Kittystar up on the way. Kittystar and Nikkon talk at work and gain some physical pleasure from being squashed together on Barngtook’s bike, but they have yet to visit each other’s family.

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The employees at Barn Tawhy are young. Some are as young as 11, though most are 16 or 17 like Nikkon, Kittystar and Barngtook. On this particular day, Nikkon wakes up feeling unwell. He is feverish and knows that if he stays home his mother will make him lie by the fire under a blanket to sweat it out. He won’t be allowed to bathe. He will be so hot he will hardly be able to breathe. Jirapun will stick odd-smelling plasters on his head and make him drink a thick concoction that looks like it is awash with drowned beetles. These lumps will stick in his throat and for days after Nikkon will think he can feel them trying to claw their way back up his oesophagus. It has happened before. Nikkon chooses to go to work. The building that Nikkon and his two friends work in is Building Number Three. It is long and low with a wooden floor, wooden walls and shutters and a teak-leaf roof. Building Number Three nestles with a dozen or so identical buildings just off a deeply rutted road that leads to an impressive temple famous for the gaudily painted concrete animals that roam the temple yard. Dirt paths bordered by low hedges link the buildings together, and trees with canopies that seem too heavy for their slender trunks flourish in the bright sunlight.

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In the early afternoon, Nikkon rests outside under such a tree, longing for relief from the stifling heat of the factory, and his fever. His fellow workers, also taking a break, are stretched out on the floor inside, shoulder to shoulder, like dolls cut from folded paper. Nikkon thinks he is hallucinating when he sees cerise-coloured flames reach out of the building’s windows and lick at the roof. He knows he isn’t hallucinating when he hears the frantic screaming. A thick black cloud of smoke has surrounded the factory and 22 people are trapped inside. Nikkon’s sawdust has combusted. Nikkon remembers watching a truck overturn when its front wheel fell off. Nikkon knew the driver, who lived in Toong Siow. He had just started driving the cattle truck for a man from the city. The truck was full of buffalo when it overturned, and they were flung in every direction. The young driver climbed out of the truck. He had a cut on his forehead that was bleeding into his eyes and he looked like he was going to seek help from the gathering crowd. Instead, he ran like a madman across a field, and disappeared into the scrub. The crowd took off after him.

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‘Why are they running? It wasn’t his fault,’ Nikkon said to the person closest to him. ‘Whose fault was it, then?’ he was asked in return. Nikkon now runs for his life. At home, he lies down beside the charcoal stove even though it is not lit. He has a piece of flannel that has been soaked in Mekong whisky on his forehead (why whisky? Nikkon is not thinking straight), and a blanket covering his chest. An almost empty glass with black beetles clinging to the sides stands near his elbow. Meanwhile, Jirapun, Pornchai, Khun Yi and Kanjana search for Nikkon among the faceless, skinless corpses laid out beside the smouldering ground where Building Number Three once stood. They cannot believe their good fortune when they learn he is safe, that, contrary to what they believed, he did not, after all, go to work this day. Nikkon does nothing to correct their delusion. ‘Lord Buddha smiles upon us,’ Pornchai says, raising his hands to the heavens. ‘What can we have done to deserve such blessing?’

3

T

hough it is the middle of the night when they land at Bangkok airport, there are more people around than at a post-Christmas sale. Elizabeth swings from a railing that separates one row of people from another while they wait to go through customs. Her little fingers grip the railing tightly, her legs kick higher and higher. People smile at her and then at Ava and Francis. One woman asks if they are missionaries. She thought they might be, she says, because they are travelling with a child. The woman looks like a missionary herself — it is the little headscarf, the belted dress — and Ava and Francis move quickly away when they have answered. Outside on the footpath, hot blasts of damp air periodically hit them in the face. It is like breathing lukewarm water that has been laced with petrol and smoke. They were expecting smells: of fish sauce and garlic, of coconut milk and sewage, fundamental aromas of food and people. But what greets them is more manufactured than natural.

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Thais, seemingly unaffected by the heat, walk back and forth with luggage and purpose, their immaculate hair and clothing remaining unruffled and dry while Ava and Francis stand melting and bewildered. A small army of men surrounds them, and they begin to talk at once. It would seem that they all want to drive them to the motel that Ava has booked, though who would know for sure? Not Ava or Francis, who can’t begin to think with so much noise going on. They wish they had taken more time to form a plan before they left the security of the airport. Now they find themselves being herded into a car by the most persistent of the men, who has taken charge of their luggage trolley and of Elizabeth. Electricity wires snake along the outside of the smoggrey buildings they pass, and people rest on their haunches against these buildings watching life unfold around them. A sudden braking, a regular occurrence as the driver knows only one speed, causes Francis to let go of the door handle he is clutching, as if poised for escape, and to grab hold of the dashboard. There is no seatbelt and he thinks it might have been wiser to put some of their bags on the front seat and his body on the back. The cause of the braking this time is a multi-vehicle accident, which, when they crawl past, looks as if a tower of motorcycles has come crashing down like a tower of canned soup, or a house built of cards. Bikes lie on their sides everywhere, wheels still spinning, and people

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stand or sit nearby as if waiting only to catch their breath before untangling the wreckage and riding off again. Their driver regularly overtakes on the wrong side. For some reason, this puts Francis in mind of extreme sports such as BASE-jumping, or free diving, something he has never considered doing. He speeds unashamedly and weaves in and out of the traffic. At one stage he comes dangerously close to clipping a motorbike that is being ridden by a woman, who uses one hand to steer and the other to hold onto her baby. After this, neither Francis nor Ava can look. They know that they will have to repeat this journey in a couple of days when they catch the plane to Chiang Mai, and the thought fills them with dread. After an hour more of touring innumerable back alleys, which seem like tunnels as high walls line each side and street lighting exists on main thoroughfares only, they arrive at their motel. Francis wakes the sleeping girl at the desk and she gives them the key to a second-floor room. All three trudge upstairs like overworked packhorses wrestling with their luggage and they roll fully clothed into the hollow of the bed that takes up the majority of the room. There are no sheets or pillows, and only one itchy blanket for the three of them to share. Elizabeth is squashed between her parents, who face opposite walls. No one speaks. Ava can’t because she has found herself counting the number of weeks that must pass before she can go home again. It is the traffic that has

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brought this on. She can protect her family from Japanese encephalitis, from malaria and rabies, but she can see no way of controlling the traffic, which can be heard whining like a chorus of crickets outside their window. Fifty-two times two equals 104. Easy. Francis, on his side of the bed, has gone one step further, and is silently estimating that, give or take a few, they will spend 730 days here. Not, thankfully, in this room, but in this country. He tries to break the days down into hours, 730 times 24, but falls asleep during the process. While he sleeps, he dreams that Elizabeth has brought a crash helmet with her. It is big enough for a child to hop right inside; there is a hatch that she can pull shut behind her, and Elizabeth is now as impregnable as an armadillo folded in on itself. In his dream, Francis is very proud of this display of initiative on his daughter’s part. He likes the idea of Elizabeth rolling and rebounding from incident after incident like a pinball. Too soon, however, Francis recalls that the only predator of a balled-up armadillo is a human being. According to National Geographic, the South American, three-banded armadillo can be scooped up and carried off as easily as if it were a rockmelon. There have been campaigns launched to save it. The armadillos are sold for meat or as pets. Callous abduction or road death? In his sleep, Francis struggles to decide which it must be for Elizabeth. He thinks there is no other choice.

4

A

rrangements have been made by their Thai employer for Ava and Francis to receive a month of language training in Chiang Mai City. They are booked into the Rendez-vous guesthouse, where violent videos run late into the night, and rats, breeding at an alarming rate due to the garbage-collection strike that has overwhelmed the city, gnaw holes in the oranges and bananas that Ava buys to keep Elizabeth vitamin efficient. At first, Francis hides the evidence from Ava, who has read a report in the Bangkok Post about a Chinese woman, who awoke to find a rat scuttling down her throat: her husband did attempt to grab it by the tail but he couldn’t pull it out. Ava could picture the rat’s feet spinning on the spot trying to gain a foothold, so it could propel itself forward. She thought about the wriggling that the woman must have felt in her stomach when the rat could go no further. And she thought of the possibility that

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the same thing might happen to her — and, if it did, was Francis as reliable, as quick-witted in an emergency, as the Chinese husband seemed to be? When Elizabeth finds a rat drowning in the toilet and tells her mother, Ava claps her hands to her ears and yells for Francis to flush it. ‘For God’s sake, Ava,’ he says. ‘I wish you’d never read that stupid story.’ He leaves the room, then comes back. ‘You’ll just have to sleep with your mouth shut,’ he tells her. ‘I already do,’ Ava snaps as if Francis, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, is somehow able to do something more about the rats, something insuperable, but won’t. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about,’ he says. Each morning they attend a language school where Elizabeth draws on pieces of paper and Ms Mamiow encourages Ava and Francis to repeat after her the same word ad nauseam. After each repetition she shakes her head and says the word again — sometimes louder, sometimes softer — but always as if she thinks them incapable of getting it right. Pretty soon Ava wants to give up and asks Francis what sort of language uses the same word for both near and far anyway? ‘Saying they’re the same word is like saying Polish and polish are the same,’ he says. ‘The pronunciation makes all the difference. Near and far have different tones, and different meanings.’ Despite Ms Mamiow’s lack of belief in his ability, Francis is enjoying himself.

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‘Think of it as singing,’ he tells Ava, who can’t sing. ‘That might help.’ But each conversation is already beginning to resemble a solo performance in which Ava unfailingly sings off-key. She doesn’t want to sound like the tourists she hears at the Rendez-vous, who practise speaking to the locals and cause looks of incomprehension to appear on their faces, but she fears this is just what she does sound like. The highschool French that comes back to her like traumatic repressed memories at the most inconvenient moments also causes problems. In the afternoon Elizabeth has a sleep. Francis lies beside her and reads his Lonely Planet Thai phrasebook, while Ava goes for a walk. Their guesthouse is situated in a lane, which comes off a main road. Next door is a small house that looks as if it has grown up out of leftover pieces of wood, tin and rampant vegetation. At the front of the house is a flimsy awning, which extends onto the road, and every time Ava passes, a mother and baby can be seen sitting together on a woven rug in its shade. Ava thinks that the mother must do the washing for Rendez-vous guests as wet, Western-style clothing dangles from wire hangers hooked into every available space. Dogs in a sad state of repair wander up and down the lane, and there are potholes filled with poisonous-looking water. The garbage-collection strike has caused mountains of sodden rubbish to swamp each corner and most of the narrow footpath. There is nowhere to

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walk but on the road. Everything smells like a bucket of rotting scraps. Yet the mother and baby radiate peace and contentment. When Ava walks past the woman greets her, and Ava can’t help but feel overgrown and inadequate. She admires the beautiful baby, with its bangled wrists and ankles, as best she can in a garble of French/Thai punctuated with hand movements, and she wonders how they can stand the putrid smell and the less than striking surroundings. It is as if an invisible shield surrounds them and their rug. Everything beyond this sacred area is insignificant. The serene will look upon a serene world. The miserable will find only misery. Ava read this on a desk calender. At the time, she thought of herself as somewhere between the two extremes. The mediocre will wallow in mediocrity. The apathetic will flounder in apathy. Now though, Ava feels she might be moving on, or moving back, to a more primitive time, in which she has the chance to relearn something as basic as crawling before she walks, something that she might have lost touch with over time. In Bangkok, Ava saw an advertisement promoting a Leo Sayer concert. Leo Sayer. She and Francis could hardly believe it. And songs by Air Supply could be heard seeping through the darkened entrances of bars on Patpong Road. When Western influence invaded Thailand why did it have to be represented by music and musicians from the dead past? It is as if Thailand has to work through the worst of the

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Seventies and Eighties before it is allowed to move on. Ava cannot define what is missing from her own life (despite her tone-deafness, she knows it is not music), but which leaves her feeling defeated now in the face of a lovely young mother and her baby. But that there is something is plain, and Ava hopes to find it, or for it to find her, before she leaves. Ava’s walk takes her along the moat surrounding the Old City. Her destination is one of the many ancient temples that Chiang Mai is famous for, but she needs to pass through a marketplace first. For homework, Ms Mamiow wants Ava and Francis to visit the market and practise speaking Thai. (Ava wonders what the market people did to deserve this punishment.) She has been to many now, and has watched plump fish in the throes of death flop around in shallow troughs of water. Their sides slashed, they were still alive, just, and the message to register with the consumer was one of freshness. The fish looked to Ava as though they were waiting in an emergency ward for someone to stitch them back together, an impossible task as their wounds gaped terribly. She has visited markets where warm meat is sold inside a screened room. Pork, chicken and thin slices of buffalo can be bought here from people who wear shower caps for hygiene. Small electric fans with plastic bags tied to their cages keep flies off the meat. Ava has visited spice and clothing markets. She has visited handcraft, Chinese and vegetable markets, and, each time she hesitates, a stallholder

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thinks she wants to buy something. If she says, ‘Mai ow, khup khun ca,’ people incorrectly presume she knows more than these five words and she is drawn into a conversation she has no hope of understanding. If she says, ‘No, thank you,’ in English, she feels fraudulent. What, after all, are the painful mornings with Ms Mamiow about? Ava happily trades the marketplace for the peacefulness of the temple compound. There is too much bare dirt for her liking and what trees there are have leaves that are covered in dust, but there are less people to badger her. She sits on a garden edge or wooden bench and watches women sell little birds in bamboo cages to tourists who release them for good luck. The birds fly into the air, enjoying their freedom just long enough for the tourist to disappear, then they land and are captured again. Ava enters into the cool darkness of the temple before she leaves and she admires the paintings on the ceiling and walls. The colours would look as much at home on a plywood tissue box as they do inside a 13th-century temple. The subjects, too, have been exploited. Stone statues of Buddha can be found in Australian garden shops, and Buddha candles, T-shirts and bedspreads can be bought cheaply nationwide. Ava finds this irreverent, like hearing songs by Kurt Cobain being piped into Coles supermarkets, and seeing faded reproductions of anything by Van Gogh lining the walls of discount stores.

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She keeps her distance from the monks, who must get sick of being treated like tourist guides, and studies the statues of Lord Buddha. He can be found sitting, standing and reclining with his hands purposely placed to express specific mudras. Ava has invested in a commentary that explains the meaning of these mudras. One hand on the other, palms up, represents Meditation; a raised hand symbolises Casting Out Fear, though if combined with another position, it indicates Teaching. The introduction to the commentary tells Ava that Buddha encouraged his followers to always question everything. ‘Take nothing as a given,’ he said. ‘Personal experience is all.’ Some temples claim to house relics of Lord Buddha: his teeth and bits of bone. Ava is surprised at the lax security in place for such treasures: they sit willy-nilly in flimsy boxes or are embedded in crumbling statues. After she has travelled the country and visited numerous temples that make the same claim, Ava begins to realise that in Thailand, Buddha relics are as prolific as rats. And, irreverent thought, that if put back together, the phenomenal philosopher would have a skeleton to rival the blue whale’s, and more teeth than a great white shark.

5

W

hen Ms Mamiow has finished teaching Ava and Francis what they realise later is the Thai equivalent of Shakespeare’s English, they move to Toong Siow and their own house. They buy a set of shelves, a simple wooden bed, a radio and a bucket with a lid at the Buffalo Market, and when they have everything in place life takes off again at a rocketing snail’s pace. Ava’s mother, Martha, comes to stay with them during their 11th month in Thailand. It is the middle of the hot season (she was warned) and she spends much time fanning herself with a piece of the Weetbix box she cleverly smuggled over with her. The Weetbix themselves are a thing of the past, and it is cooked rice and milk for breakfast once more. To get to this point, this almost halfway mark in their two-year hiatus, Ava and Francis have needed to draw on all their reserves of self-sufficiency. Time, it seems, has solidified,

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has become like the beads of an abacus that move slowly, one by one, from right to left at the close of each day. And nothing, not a weekend away, not 10 days at a resort, not an elephant ride nor a trek in the mountains, not even a visit from Ava’s mother, can make those beads move any quicker. Ava has carved out a life for herself. On Fridays she teaches English at the village school, which Elizabeth, though too young, also attends. She practises daily the art of peeing while squatting flat-footed over a ceramic hole in the floor, and she reads novels donated to the Agricultural College as part of an overseas aid package. These novels are proudly displayed behind glass in the foyer of the main building. Whole shelves are dedicated to Tom Clancy and Stephen King, and there are other, even less interesting stories featuring snow avalanches in American national parks and mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Ava reads them all, becoming particularly fond of a complicated story about a cat named Thomasina, who manages to get herself buried alive. While underground, squashed in a shoebox, the cat relives a former life spent as an Egyptian god. Ava reads a chapter of this book each night to Elizabeth. Eventually, Thomasina is dug up alive and well, and the story ends. When it does, Ava begins it over again. Francis spends his spare time polishing his language skills, and taking risks eating food bought from dingy roadside stalls. He says to Ava, ‘It’s lucky we get on, isn’t it?’ as he

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pops another greasy fried banana into his mouth. ‘It could be ugly if we didn’t.’ And Ava knows what he means. Her mother’s advice to her when she first started going out with boys was to make sure she’d been camping with a man before she married him. ‘You can always tell what a person’s really like when they’re camping, you know, lazy and grumpy, or flexible and easygoing,’ she said. Ava thought this sounded like good advice. She feels that she and Francis have been camping now for more than a year. During her stay, Martha occupies her time giving Ava advice and writing long letters home to her husband. Dear Bill [she writes], I know you will be surprised to hear how our daughter and son-in-law are living. In fact I cannot believe it myself that a man as highly qualified as Francis is being expected to stay in a house without hot water, a washing machine, or proper kitchen. No one seems to have considered how this might affect Ava and Elizabeth. The house itself is adequate enough I suppose, though the roof apparently leaks, but the water situation bothers me. There are taps in the bathroom, but you can’t drink from them, and quite frankly the water smells. Ava says it is piped up from near the pigsties, and I’d say she is probably right. I worry

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about Elizabeth. Imagine not being able to get a drink out of the tap whenever you wanted to! Francis has set up a little tank to collect rainwater off the roof, which Ava then strains through a pillowcase (they’re a pretty versatile pair, aren’t they?), and they keep this in a bucket. But many’s the time I’ve caught myself, cup in hand, in the bathroom before I realised what I was doing. As I said, there is no washing machine so everything is done manually (by that I mean plastic tubs and elbow grease!). The contaminated water is used for this purpose, and the clothes never seem to smell right to me though the detergents are very strong. The skin on my hands (and Ava’s, I noticed) is a real sight. The electricity comes and goes as it pleases. Usually it goes when I am about to make a cup of tea. The local people are the same. The front door is never shut when Ava’s home so people traipse in whenever they feel like it. They look in the refrigerator (the size of an esky, there is no freezer) and under the lids of pots on the two-ring gas stove (like a camping stove). The woman over the back walked in yesterday while I was trying to make a stew and stood right at my elbow watching and asking questions which I couldn’t understand, and made chopping motions with her hands before she walked out again shaking her head. I don’t know how Ava stands it.

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A couple of other women come in regularly and sit on the floor smiling (not doing needlework, as you’d expect). I never know what to say to them. If they bring their husbands the men play with the Lego and build towers and things for Elizabeth to knock down before they build them up again. I hope they are all there (the men not the Lego). F and A are both so thin. I am worried that they are getting paid practically nothing, which will put them behind for the future, don’t you think? It’s not as if they own a house, or anything substantial in Australia. I have tried to discuss a few things with Ava, but she says I mollycoddled her too much as a child and I’m not to do it now, and she says an experience doesn’t have to be good and easy to be one worth having, which is true, but last week Elizabeth vomited through the screen door and Ava said, ‘How am I supposed to clean that up, Lizzie, without a hose?’ Elizabeth was obviously very sick but I didn’t want to interfere. They don’t seem to own a thermometer and Elizabeth lives on worm tablets and goodness knows what else as she seems to eat all her meals away from home. Elizabeth and I went for a walk the other day and there was an insect nest on a tree and she said, ‘You can eat the babies, you know. It’s called ma-laang.’ Apparently, she’s eaten insect larvae somewhere. She also points out the different weeds and leaves that are edible, which is really very clever, isn’t it?

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She goes to school too and I asked her how she knows what to do and she said, ‘It’s easy. I just do what everyone else does.’ Apparently, she did ask one day during rest time if she could go to the toilet. She said it in English and the teacher, also speaking English, said, ‘No playing with toys, sleep now.’ I guess toilet does sound a bit like toys. Goodness knows how I’d go trying a foreign language! I had a stomach upset and Francis said he’d get something to fix me. He came back with a cup of molasses and made me take some. It worked but I’d hate to think how clean it was. I know I won’t be complaining again until I get home (bet you can’t wait!). People congregate at the hospital up the road as soon as the sun comes up. I don’t know what is wrong with most of them. Hopefully not anything too dreadful because Ava took Elizabeth there to get the last of her rabies shots. I made sure it was a new needle from an unopened pack they used. I’m not sure Ava would have thought to. It is so hot over here and not as green as it should be. It’s not like a jungle at all and you can’t see the mountains for all of the smoke. I think they burn the fields after they pick the rice. The guidebook I read on the plane coming over gave the impression that Chiang Mai was a kind of Shangri-La in a misty valley, but really it is a very hot, dusty and noisy place. The Hill tribespeople are colourful and interesting looking and the

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Thai people are for the most part quite helpful. I don’t feel like I am going to be mugged or anything, which is a blessing. There are many different types of snakes and I have seen a lot of them. Elizabeth and I found a cobra skin poking out of a hole that went under the house yesterday and I gave her a good talking to about how she was never to touch a snake. There are two big spotted lizards, bigger than bearded dragons, that live on the bathroom window sill and I don’t know if they’re poisonous or not. They’re actually quite pretty and not a danger as they live on the other side of the flyscreen. We’ve been to some interesting places this week. We caught a bus to The Golden Triangle (I’ll tell you about the bus trip in a minute, it was unbelievable) and what was really interesting is that there is actually a triangle of golden sand in the river that can be seen only during the dry season. I had my picture taken so you can see the sand in the background. But the bus trip was the most memorable thing. The driver (and I am not exaggerating) kept leaning back in his seat the whole time to watch this dreadful Thai comedy on a television suspended from the ceiling. He watched the TV more than the road and I have never been so scared in my life. When we were crossing a mountain range he turned the telly off and concentrated a bit more but Francis said that was only because he’d lost reception. We stayed in Chiang Mai at a middle-of-the-range motel, one full of Europeans and Americans, with a pool, and the staff

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were very rude. A porter grudgingly carried some of our bags to our rooms where he pushed open the door, flicked the switch for the ceiling fan, and, when it didn’t go, he stood on the bed (my bed) and gave the blades a twirl like he was winding up an aeroplane. The fan did start then and the man had taken his shoes off, but it was odd, wasn’t it? We have visited many beautiful temples and fabulous markets. The guidebook says you should bargain with the people but I find everything so reasonably priced I never bother. I’ve bought some wonderful pieces of material and some shirts for you. The director of the college is not a very nice man. I don’t understand all of the reasons why, but he doesn’t seem to want Francis working here. Apparently, he is not the one who employed Francis, that one was posted somewhere north. Anyway the new director avoids F and won’t allow him to do half the things he’s here to do. Francis doesn’t seem to mind. He says he has enough things to keep him busy. But he was building a fence the other day with a group of workers, which is not really what he studied for, is it? Ava does the shopping early in the morning. Francis takes her and Elizabeth on the back of an old motorbike the college is lending them and they are back home before six. There seems to be a great variety of fruit and vegetables so there is nothing to worry about there. In fact, they have this little type of mandarin that doesn’t look much, like a lime really, dark

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green, yet it peels easily. It is called ‘sohm’ and is very sweet and they grow all year round. Francis says they wouldn’t sell in Australia because they are the wrong colour, but I’m going to bring some seeds home anyway. I don’t care what colour a mandarin is, do you? I better not go on for too much longer. I’ll be home soon enough and I can fill you in on all the missing bits then. Love, Martha. Martha seals these letters up in an envelope and takes her time at the post office choosing a stamp to put on the front. She likes the ones featuring the King in a tall military-style hat. She imagines he is seated on a horse although the picture does not include a horse. The King looks so brave and handsome. Bill is under strict instruction not to lose these envelopes. Martha will soak the stamps off when she gets home. Nikkon

The work is not hard but it is outdoors and Nikkon struggles to keep from turning mud-brown. Being a thong-wearing pushbike rider is enough of a burden without looking like a despised Easterner. Nikkon’s new job is at an agricultural college where he is in charge of 23 cantankerous Brahmans. Twenty-three. The same number of people who used

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to work in Building Number Three, Barn Tahwy. Now only one is left. This fact is not lost on Nikkon, who fills his day from seven until four searching out feed for the half-starved beasts. He thinks back to his lessons as a novice: those guilty of acts of delusion or confusion come back as animals. Nikkon pats the Brahmans between the eyes if he can get close enough. He would like to whisper in their ears, make amends, and then move on. After the fire, Nikkon was offered a job in Building Number Five carving wooden hippos with wideopen mouths. There is a degree of skill involved in this. If the mouth is too wide or too long the hippo will topple forward onto its face. Despite encouragement from his family, who saw the extra skill required as a promotion of sorts, Nikkon had to refuse. It would be too upsetting. There would be too many memories. He would feel bad being there when so many others weren’t. What he didn’t tell them was that he no longer had a knife to carve with. His old knife, the one with the impressive blade that felt good against his skin, was lost in the fire. There have been other changes in Nikkon’s life. His sister, Kanjana, is married and lives with her husband’s family.

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Nameless pig number seven, that solid family investment, is no more. She got sick and it was unanimously decided that all food and water should be withheld to hasten her passing. She died in agony, too insane from thirst to protest, and was not replaced. Nikkon’s grandmother, Khun Yi, is also dead. She wasted away gradually, despite being fed, and in her coffin she looked like something an archaeologist might uncover. Her skin was stretched tight and paperthin, her arms and legs gnarled and branch-like. Jirapun has stopped selling noodles at the market and grows ornamental trees at home instead. The family finds itself caught up in a building boom that is transforming Chiang Mai City into a little Bangkok. Ornamental trees are in high demand by landscaping companies, which take over a site as soon as the builders down their tools: a metal bucket, a trowel, a piece of rope. Rubbish has become a feature of the countryside. Bits of paper and plastic, bright and unexpected like fantastically coloured flowers, can be seen along roadsides and against fences. There are still a few inbred third-generation chickens wandering around Pornchai’s yard though these are

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now kept in order by Nikkon’s fighting cock. This bird, despite its biceps, has yet to win any fight other than the ones it picks with the scrawny chickens. The mangy dogs have scratched themselves to death. The beautiful Awn, soft and tender, and her fascinating breasts have disappeared from the hairdresser’s wall. Shiny posters of pick-up trucks and cowgirls in white leather fringing are in her place. Nikkon has thought of changing hairdressers, but the problem is endemic. And, finally, a hospital has opened its doors opposite the agricultural college and a year later a large sign is erected over the entrance. ‘AIDS patients afternoon ONLY.’ Nikkon thinks AIDS must have something to do with the Hmong or lu Mien, who form the two largest groups milling around the water fountain and its communal tin cup in the waiting room. An Australian doctor, however, sets him straight. He gives a talk, open to the public, about AIDS, at which there is not a Hmong or lu Mien in sight. The doctor discusses safe sex and puts a condom on a banana.

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Nikkon has never used a condom. He occasionally sleeps with the women he thinks of as belonging to his father, but spends most evenings drinking whisky and rolling cigarettes. At work, he is one of four farmhands in the animal production group. The other three are the handsome Nimachai, who is the chief cow-milker, dark little Burm, who helps Nikkon and Nimachai and lives in a room attached to the pigpens, and Boonlurt, who cares for the chickens and, should one die, takes it home to feed his family of five. These men are responsible to the college teachers, the Ajarns, who specialise in talking down to them. Nikkon thinks the Ajarns don’t have a clue. He supposes they may be good at teaching the theory of raising cattle — Nikkon has seen their blackboards covered in convoluted technical terms — but he believes the closest they get to an animal is when they direct the students to shovel the dung from the ground-floor classrooms each morning. Nikkon moves the Brahmans from small paddock to small paddock. He fixes the rickety fences they destroy along the way and wrestles with those who escape. Sometimes he has to tie them up to be artificially inseminated.

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Farm machinery lies rusting in the Brahmans’ paddocks. No one knows how to fix the machines so they stand as monuments to a foreign technology that was always going to be out of place here. And the Brahmans are as useless as the rusty tractors. Most are too thin to get pregnant, and if any do give birth no one knows what the next step is. Nikkon sees himself as being in control of a herd of overgrown pets. ‘I don’t know why they don’t sell the excess cattle and use the money to properly look after those they need to keep,’ Nikkon says as he sits down to dinner at home. Jirapun has bought a piece of floral-patterned linoleum that now defines the eating area and they sit on this. ‘It is not good for a man to know more than is necessary for his daily living,’ Pornchai says as he skilfully uses his thumb to grab hold of a boiled prawn floating in a bowl of murky water. He eats the prawn with a little ball of rice. Pornchai is shirtless and faded blue tattoos rise and fall with the contours of his chest. The tattoos are reminders of old army days and time spent shooting Laotians across the border. Nikkon has heard such talk before; has heard it from birth. He must be patient. It is not possible to

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change past karma, or to change this life. Look to the future, his father says. Look to the future. He tells Nikkon this when they go to the temple with their incense sticks and lotus flowers, when they press gold leaf onto the Buddha there, or drop copper coins into a beggar’s cup. ‘Remember, you don’t want to end up grovelling in the dirt with the buffalo shit, or come back as a dirty, pockmarked Hmong,’ his father warns. ‘Remember, elephants in battle endure the arrow sent from the bow, for the world is evil,’ his father warns. And what the fuck would you know? You! A dumb farmer! Nikkon thinks, turning crimson for fear he has said it out loud. ‘Remember, mules are good, if tamed, as are noble Sindhu horses, but he who tames himself is better,’ Pornchai warns. This is his favourite parable and he quotes it tirelessly, though Nikkon suspects that he has no idea what a Sindhu horse is. And Nikkon, who does know, who knows too much and not enough, feels a part of him wilt in protest every time he hears it.

6

W

hen Martha finally leaves, Francis thinks she is taking with her enough jewellery, enough handpainted umbrellas, fans and material to open her own shop. He is relieved she is gone and that he no longer has to apologise for Chiang Mai failing to live up to the extremely colourful descriptions found in her guidebook. And Ava knows without being constantly told by her mother that living in Thailand is not easy. The difficulties are not caused, as Martha suspects, by a lack of material goods and services, but by a lack of things for Ava to clutter her mind with. Radio Australia can be heard for a meagre 15 minutes each morning, and one hour is filled in the afternoon by Ava doing a lap of the college grounds with Elizabeth. This lap takes her past the college houses, out of which come other mothers who do laps also, some with children they feed on the go. The staple diet for anyone

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under five appears to be watery cooked rice. Ava hesitantly practises her Thai on these women, and grows weary trying to decipher their answers word by word. The heat gets her down too, and causes her skin to break out. She has more blemishes now than she did as a teenager. Yesterday however, an old man with a face like a dried apple stopped to offer Elizabeth a handful of salty crackers, and Ava was overcome by a sensation she thinks must be joy. The day before, two little dishes of pungent food left on the doorstep with an unreadable note had the same effect. Ava can’t help but collect these moments, committing them to memory like she did Elizabeth’s first smile, her first step. For some reason they are that important. Francis has a few sensations of his own. He is not sure his would be called joy, but they lead him to believe that if he hadn’t married Ava he would most likely marry a local girl and stay forever. Nikkon

Crew Sar, Nikkon’s schoolteacher extraordinaire, had a least-favourite story in the Dutch Governmentsupplied reader. It was The Fisherman and His Wife. ‘There was once a fisherman and his wife. They lived together in a vinegar jug close to the sea, and the fisherman went there every day and he fished.’ Eventually, the fisherman catches a fish. The fish is magic and can grant wishes. First, he gives

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the couple a hut, then a big stone mansion, then he makes them King and Queen, then Emperor and Empress, then Pope. He has reached the end of his tether though, when he is asked to make the fisherman’s wife God. Sacrilege: to want to be God. The fisherman returns home to find they are living in the vinegar jug again. When Nikkon first wanted a motorbike, all that time ago when he worked at Barn Tawhy, any bike would do. It didn’t matter how old it was or how many ccs it had, or what colour it was, just as long as he didn’t have to pedal it. Now Nikkon works hard, each weekend doing two milking shifts on top of caring for his pets at the college, and he saves every piece of baht that he can. Even so, he still needs a loan to buy a clappedout Honda step-through with no mirrors and torn upholstery from a man who is stooped and continually spitting green phlegm onto the ground. Nikkon is disappointed. In his heart of hearts, he sees himself driving a shiny pick-up, the fringed cowgirl being an optional extra. He pictures himself touring around, music blasting, one arm casually draped through an open window. He pictures the blessing he will have a monk paint on the ceiling above the windscreen, and the cream plastic

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Buddha he will hang with gold thread from the rearvision mirror. Nikkon can picture it all. Everyone else seems to own a pick-up. Farmers have them. Workers at the college. Women separated from their husbands. Women who’ve never had a husband. And when Nikkon travels along the road to Doi Inthanon, or in the opposite direction to Chiang Mai City, pick-ups can be seen crashed in almost every ditch as if they are disposable, like styrofoam coffee cups, or latex rubber gloves. Twenty labourers can be packed into the back of a single pick-up and transported to far-flung building sites. Nikkon wonders what happens to these labourers when the cars veer off the road. He imagines them flying through the air, arms outstretched and ready to roll, to break their fall like stuntmen and women. The bulletin board outside the local police station tells a different story. Pictures of accident victims are pinned up by the dozen. The headless, torso-less, limbless leftovers of human beings, scraped together before being sent back to their families in bags, are standard fare. The photos are in stunning colour. They are there as deterrents. But Nikkon still wants a pick-up.

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Giant mimosas with their thorny shafts have taken over many of the rice fields. Farmers sit at home counting their money instead of working the land. Pornchai has not sold out to the developers and for this Nikkon is glad. He has never entertained the thought of being a farmer himself, but gains comfort from the fact that the land is there. He feels more secure, as if a rock wall supports him, and not one made of sand. This rock wall is essential for Nikkon’s wellbeing. In his mind, he presses his back against it readying himself to push off into the world. The frustrating thing is that, despite the wall, Nikkon has yet to go anywhere. But he is ready. On the opposite side of the road to the towering uncultivated mimosas is a row of shops. Nikkon stops at the same one each morning to buy a tonic to set his blood racing. The shopkeeper’s daughter serves him. Lukett finds Nikkon attractive and giggles about him with her sister and mother. She makes sure their hands touch when she gives him his change. Nikkon is a good catch. Everyone thinks so. He is young and healthy with a steady job. His family is local and well liked. They own land.

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The shop is halfway between Nikkon’s work and his house. When it is raining he takes shelter under the awning, and shakes the rain from his plastic jacket with its Washington University logo, and wipes the mud off the back of his trousers. He talks to Lukett’s mother, who discusses the weather with him — mostly rain — and each other’s health — mostly good. During the dry season a small dog bites Nikkon and he stops at the shop to wipe the blood from his leg. Lukett is there and does the wiping for him. She asks many questions to determine if there is a possible rabies risk. Nikkon dismisses such a thought as nonsense. And, for the first time, he notices Lukett’s large gold earrings and the way they bounce off her cheeks when she laughs. He notices how slim she is, how high her breasts sit on her chest, and he wishes the dog had been bigger, that the threat to his life had been surer. An abbot and two novices officiate at the wedding. Lukett wears a dark-pink silk gra-bprohng and shirt, a wide silver belt, and enough lacquer in her hair to starch a pair of sheets. Nikkon wears grey trousers, a white shirt and borrowed black, lace-up shoes.

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They move into an empty house on the college grounds. It is lowset with a wooden floor and woven bamboo walls. The shutters are propped open with a stick to let in light and air, and the roof is a combination of iron and leaves. There are two large rooms and two small rooms, and all come with mice. With the money they are given at their wedding, Nikkon and Lukett buy a charcoal stove, a fibre mattress, two quilts, a clay pot, a wok, a sharp knife, some bowls and spoons, some cups and a bucket. Nine months later in a hospital, with a doctor present, and Nikkon hovering outside, Lukett gives birth to a baby boy. The baby is called Raak. For one month, Lukett and Raak sleep in a separate room to Nikkon. Lukett wears a knitted hat and socks to bed, and she wraps a shawl around her shoulders when she sits to feed the baby. She gets up as little as possible to hasten her recovery, and when a month has passed her legs are weak. But she is so very happy with her son that she shows him off daily to her adoring family. Each morning Nikkon plays with Raak before he goes to work, where he eats breakfast with Burm and the pigs.

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And when he goes to work Lukett feeds Raak, who is thriving, with three chins already, and then walks to her parent’s house. She laughs with her sister. She laughs with her mother. With her friends. With the neighbours. Sometimes she forgets to be home before Nikkon. For dinner, they eat whatever Lukett is able to buy at the market on the walk home — boiled pig’s blood and stir-fried pork liver are nutritious and cheap. The food comes in a little plastic bag secured in one corner with a rubber band. Both bag and band are discarded out the window when dinner is over. During the rainy season, when water fills every depression, the bags look like clear jellyfish bobbing about. Where are the chooks? The plants? The pig? Whatever Nikkon expected, it was not this. He thinks of his mother. Her piece of floral linoleum, the bowls of food she prepares from ingredients she grows herself. He thinks of her howlite teeth flashing as she eats, and her capable hands clearing dishes away, washing clothes, sweeping. Then he looks at his own home fire, which is never lit, his bed, which is never rolled, at the shiny wok, the sharp knife, the mice who have no shame and greet him at the door, or do acrobatics on the rafters.

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And he knows he is being harsh, expecting Lukett to be like his mother when he has no desire to be like his father, or hers. He knows it is too much to ask Lukett to make the transition from daughter to wife, from child to mother, without some problems. But even so, Lukett’s earrings are fast losing their magic. Cracks are beginning to appear in Nikkon’s solid wall. And Raak, thriving despite his father’s lack of satisfaction, grows fatter while Nikkon grows lonelier.

Nikkon

Nikkon lets out the throttle on his bike. He has no plans for where he is going. He just needs to go, and he rides recklessly. Dust billows around him, being pushed every which way by the wind. It clings to his brow, his hair and to the people who scuttle like lizards to get off the road when he zooms past. If he could, if it were possible, he would lift his front wheel off the ground, then the back wheel, and direct his bike skywards. Sometimes Nikkon feels as insignificant as a slug, as small and defenceless as pupae, the world washing right over him, rushing right by, but not today. Today he is as big as Doi Inthanon, as significant as this greatest of all mountains, and nothing can touch him.

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He rides aimlessly, past vegetable farms, lumyai and mango orchards, canning plants, temples, schools, restaurants and construction sites until the inevitable happens and he runs out of petrol. His bike coughs and splutters beside the river and, when it stops, every muscle in Nikkon’s body is knotted, his teeth are clenched and they grind against each other, while his hands, unaided, form fists when they let go of the handlebars. Nikkon takes deep breaths until he is dizzy. He then stumbles between two trees to reach the water where he thinks about diving in. He pictures himself sinking like a rock, his rigid body unable to relax enough to form strokes. The river is murky, but not so murky as to completely obscure the outline of a buffalo that is cooling off in the water. Its stout legs paddle to keep its body afloat and the buffalo’s nostrils can be seen above the surface. Nikkon watches as it glides past. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the buffalo that draws the cart, Nikkon whispers. He rode a buffalo once. It belonged to his uncle, and it would be difficult to find a more gentle creature. Around the field it wandered, Nikkon perched on its back like a bird. Wild buffalos, however, fearlessly stamp their forefeet and snort loudly before

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embarking on an unprovoked attack. Nikkon has been told to avoid the wild buffalo. Avoid the wild, ride the tame: the nucleus of all teaching. The grass on the riverbank is high. Nikkon looks around and sees that an old man is sitting crosslegged in the shade of one of the pipal trees. Nikkon could swear the man wasn’t there before. He appears to be watching the buffalo, too, but when it passes by his eyes remain fixed on a single spot as if locked onto something only he can see. ‘Sawadee kup,’ Nikkon says, his hands clasped together, forefingers touching his forehead, in a high wai. The man turns towards him silently clasping his own hands together in return. Nikkon moves a little further away. He is surprised to find himself trembling. The fact that he has now run out of petrol is reducing him in size. He is becoming more molehill than mountain-like, is fast losing his powers, his three-dimensional qualities. Soon Nikkon will be less dangerous than a dragonfly. He kneels in the grass. ‘Must have the right meditation,’ he says, his eyes closed tightly. ‘The right meditation, the right meditation,’ which too soon becomes ‘The right medication, the right medication.’

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And, when Nikkon loses concentration totally and finds himself needing the right cart for his buffalo to pull, he opens his eyes, giving a startled yell as he does so. The old man is no longer under the pipal tree where Nikkon left him, but is sitting immediately in front of him. He has a beautiful piece of purple and gold material carefully folded in his lap. Because Nikkon can think of nothing else to say, he points to the material and asks, ‘What is that?’ The old man rubs a corner of the cloth between his thumb and forefinger before carefully replacing it. ‘Twenty baht,’ he says, his eyes staring at Nikkon’s chest. ‘Twenty baht,’ Nikkon repeats as if it is a description and not a price. Nikkon looks at the material. It is very fine. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a five-baht note. It is all he has with him. ‘Enough,’ the old man says. He reaches out and takes the money. Nikkon lifts the material off the man’s lap, exposing his naked feet with toes of uniform length. He watches as the old man makes slow movements with his hands before finally resting them, one in his lap where the material was, and one in front of his shoulder poised as if preparing to push Nikkon away. He doesn’t blink or appear to breathe. And Nikkon goes.

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On the very long walk back to his village at the end of a somewhat disappointing day, Nikkon decides that he will give the material, tucked now inside his shirt, to his mother, or to Lukett. But when he arrives home he decides he will keep it for himself. He wraps it in rice paper and places it at the bottom of the basket where he keeps books and comics. His mother would only scold him for wasting his money on her, and Lukett would not, which Nikkon thinks might be worse.

7

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va thought that open-heart surgery without anaesthetic could not hurt more than giving birth to Elizabeth. She claps her hands together when she realises she has managed to convey this concept to the women who are visiting her house on Christmas night. Ava, Francis and Elizabeth had eaten lunch at a hotel in the city where they sat beside people they didn’t know, experiencing a little of what the homeless must feel when they celebrate Christmas with the Salvation Army. Now it is evening and a group of neighbours has brought food to Ava and Francis’s house to share. Thais don’t celebrate Christmas themselves, but they are adaptable, and besides, a rumour has circulated that the farang family now has a vacuum cleaner, a first for the college, and the women, at least, are keen to investigate. As well as the food, they have also brought a large, beautifully wrapped box for Elizabeth.

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So, while the men eat what looks like lolly snakes submerged in thick coconut milk, washing it down with whisky, Ava sits at the bottom of the stairs and helps Elizabeth open the box. Inside are coloured pencils and a colouring-in book, hair clips and hair ties with glittery stars attached, a brush and comb (is there a message in this for Ava?), a bright orange skirt and yellow top, some socks, and a multitude of little plastic things that will not survive the night. With no obvious vacuum cleaner to distract them, the women watch Elizabeth and ask Ava if she will have another baby. Ava tells them what a nightmare Elizabeth’s birth was, and they quickly launch into stories of their own. One young woman is pointed out as having given birth to twins. Feet first they came, Ava is told, and both were dead on arrival. ‘I’m sorry,’ Ava says to the woman. ‘It is best,’ she says, and smiles while the others nod in agreement. ‘Why?’ Ava asks, thinking the babies might have had other problems. ‘Two is bad luck,’ the woman says. ‘Very bad luck.’ Ava learns that the woman is still childless despite the fact it is years now since she lost the twins. Ava wonders what they must make of Siamese twins, of their country’s name — albeit a superseded one — being used to identify such babies. Probably they have never heard

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of such things. Siamese twins, like Pol Pot with his killing fields, like Aung San Suu Kyi and the Burmese Liberation Army, are most likely a complete mystery to them. Ava’s language skills are improving, but she doubts they will ever reach the standard necessary to tackle such complex topics. Nikkon

This past year has seen two very odd things happen. The first of these Nikkon read about on the front page of a newspaper. Jewels worth a fortune went missing from the house of a Middle Eastern prince. This in itself is not odd, but these same jewels were next spotted thousands of kilometres away around the necks and on the fingers of four women, who were guests at a charity ball in Bangkok. The women are the wives of government officials, who had returned from the Middle East where they represented their country at an important meeting. Photographs were taken at the ball though they are not in the paper. At least they are not on the front page. The story continued on page four, but Nikkon had already stuffed that part of the paper into his stove. He would like to have seen the pictures of the women, and the jewels.

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The second and more relevant odd thing is that the specialist the college employed from Australia, the one who arrived with his wife and child, has, since the day Nikkon discovered him wandering among the mimosas, become Nikkon’s friend. When Nikkon thought of farangs before, he pictured Prince Charles and Princess Diana. When he thought of Australia, he pictured Austria. He practised his English on Francis at their first meeting. ‘Hello. How do you do?’ he said, and smiled, his thongs slapping against his heels as he made his way over to where Francis stood. Nikkon had never seen a farang up close. This one had brown hair and a tatty beard. He had round blue eyes magnified behind a pair of glasses, and he was tall. To Nikkon’s surprise, he wasn’t wearing Nike shoes or a Nike shirt or cap. In the beginning, Francis’s Thai was woeful, and Nikkon’s English (thank you, Crew Sar) was not much better. One day on the way to a far paddock, they passed Nikkon’s house. ‘My house,’ Nikkon said in English. ‘Do you live alone?’ Francis asked, shuffling through the pages of an English-Thai dictionary. ‘Yes, but I have a wife and son, who last week moved into a new house on Surwanirat Road. It will

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be more comfortable for them there. It is beside the house of my father-in-law. He built it for them and I visit on weekends. My son is five and a big fat boy.’ Nikkon spoke in slow loud Thai, but Francis got lost after ‘Yes’. In his mind, Nikkon added, my wife, who is also fat, will not have to walk anywhere. She will have access to a television set and will be able to watch soap operas full of Eurasians with irritating voices. She will have her mother for company, and I need not worry about her any more. Or about Raak. Nikkon invited Francis to the house-warming party and when Francis arrived he put an envelope containing money in the clay jar by the door. Francis sat on Nikkon’s floor with both legs to one side like a woman, and Nikkon wondered if he should point this out to him, or would that be impolite? Nikkon heard, a few weeks later, of another mistake Francis kept making. He filled in the time sheet with the correct time. Someone was going to speak to him because the time sheet read like this: Suriwit 7.07 Bowarn 7.08 Jetsin 7.09 Francis 8.10 Wantahnee 8.11

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What Francis needed to have pointed out to him was that when the time reached 8.30 a red line was drawn across the page, and anyone under the line was considered late. The employees, who got to work on time tried to give the others some leeway, and Francis kept mucking it up. Other misdemeanours Francis was guilty of included: his wife bearing no resemblance to Princess Diana; his daughter attending a local public school; being scruffy and over-friendly with the workers. These were to begin with. The list would surely grow. Now, today, in his college house — the one with the jellyfish pond and mice — Nikkon wonders what it would be like to be someone else. Someone like Francis. He drinks whisky while he wonders. Burm has come over because he can no longer stand the smell of pigs, though he is beginning to take on the smell himself, and they discuss this together. Nikkon has heard that the Australian Government gives Francis’s wife money each week to stay at home with their daughter, money equivalent to the amount that Nikkon receives for working each month. He tells Burm this and they picture themselves diving headfirst into a vault full of baht, doing backstroke, like Scrooge McDuck.

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Nikkon likes to read comics. Among his pile from Japan is a prized Donald Duck one. ‘You dirty bastard,’ Uncle Scrooge yells at Donald. ‘You scumbag.’ Nikkon laughs. ‘You dirty bastard scumbag, Burm,’ he says. Nikkon wears many hats. He is an entrepreneur. As well as being a keeper of large pets and a weekend milker, he is starting a little business of his own. He sells milk door to door. A local farmer who keeps cows behind his house supplies the milk. The dairy industry is The Next Big Thing, and Nikkon plans to get in on the ground floor. He has a couple of people interested already and it is only early days. Nikkon has a marketing strategy. Now that there are farangs at the college, ones he has personal contact with (he recently sang the National Anthem on tape for the woman, who wanted to learn the words), he can use them as a major selling point. ‘How do you think they got so tall?’ he will ask potential customers. ‘It is the milk. They drink it by the bucket full.’ People will sign up in droves. Nikkon visits the farang house to set his plan in motion. Their house is the same as his except they have wall-to-wall linoleum and a completely tin roof. Nikkon offers Francis a bag of milk, which Francis politely declines. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he says. ‘If

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it’s like the milk from the college it will be full of antibiotics.’ Francis’s Thai has unfortunately got better. ‘Most cows I’ve seen are being treated for mastitis and their milk is contaminated.’ A row of imported powdered milk cans stands along one wall bearing witness. Nikkon wonders why he did not notice them before. He hopes he has not made a fool of himself. Nikkon looks at the cans and pretends not to mind. He pretends that he was just passing and had dropped in on the spur of the moment. ‘I’m going to give a talk next week about milk and milk safety,’ Francis says. ‘You should come.’ ‘OK,’ Nikkon says with a smile and a wave. So Francis is planning to tell everyone about the contamination and the recommended withholding period. Nikkon putt-putts away. In his mind’s eye, he watches his milk empire crash, spread thinly and disappear into the dust.

8

F

rancis initially believes he is in Thailand to give advice. With this in mind, he puts together a booklet of recommendations for the college. Chapter one of his booklet is dedicated to the idea of getting rid of unproductive cows. For every milk-producing cow there are six that aren’t. Some, despite being eligible for the old-age pension, are still waiting to have their first calf. Francis, however, does not know that each cow, no matter what its condition, is considered to have the same level of permanency at the college as the buildings and the religious icons do. He can fix the cows if he likes but there is no way he can get rid of them. Chapter two of the booklet suggests options for dealing with woody weeds. These run rampant in the paddocks and Francis suggests a fertiliser program that will allow the grass to become more competitive and eventually take over. First though, the paddocks must be cleared of the

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broken glass, coils of wire, bits of tin and concrete rubble that lie hidden and as lethal as bear traps. Francis sweats over his wording here. He doesn’t want to offend, doesn’t want to imply that the paddocks are a disgrace. Which they are. Chapter three discusses the silage pits that won’t drain and have consequently become stagnating ponds full of breeding malarial mosquitoes. It also discusses the feasibility of having so much highly mechanised, broken equipment in place. Francis has yet to come across a gate that opens. All are huge, steel contraptions that slide on grids, or at least they do until they are kicked by an animal or are backed into by a vehicle. Then they become barriers that make coming and going unnecessarily difficult. Also mechanised are the underground septic tanks that catch the effluent from the penned cattle. This effluent is to be pumped into a tank that is then loaded onto a trailer and towed from paddock to paddock to spray on the ground. There is one flaw to this process. No tractor that the college owns is robust enough to pull the tank around when it is full. Francis gives a copy of his booklet to the director, and to anyone else involved with cattle production. He hopes a round table discussion of his recommendations will follow. But, in a dirty partitioned-off area of the tractor shed, which serves as the Animal Science building, Francis waits in vain. It eventually occurs to him that there will be no discussion, round table or otherwise. Those above give orders to

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those below. Francis’s uncertain position in this hierarchy oscillates between being godlike, due to his Westernness, and being someone the director has taken pity on and offered a job because of his inability to get one in Australia. Consequently, most people ignore him completely. The next time Francis sees his report it is in the administration building, sandwiched between a Japanese cookery book and a biography of Thailand’s King Rama V. Francis takes his disappointment out into the paddocks, where he busies himself helping the workers manage the pastures and the cattle. He gives talks about milk hygiene and tactics for controlling the spread of foot and mouth and he organises a tour of the college grounds for the workers to make them aware of the dangers that surround them. He points out electrical cables running through drains, and the numerous bottles of poison that stand open on shelves in the horticultural shed. And he slowly masters the language, and how to play checkers, and learns to worry less about trying to change the unchangeable. He tells Ava that he has learnt more from these people than they can ever hope to learn from him. But he is not able to explain just what it is he has learnt. He tells Ava that he likes the way the men aren’t afraid to touch each other. ‘They sit on one another’s lap to eat lunch,’ he tells her. ‘They walk with their arms around each other’s waist,’ he says. But he neglects to mention, or fails to see, that these same men

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refuse to touch women in public, refuse to hold their wives’ hands, and Ava finds this annoying, particularly as culturally sensitive Francis has decided to follow suit. Francis avoids all physical contact with Ava in public, yet she has seen him cuddled up to the farm staff like a character from a 1950s Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis movie. Ava is, frankly, jealous. ‘You’ll have to be careful when we go home,’ she tells her husband. ‘You know how homophobic your father is.’ When gay people are mentioned, Francis’s father threatens to have a stroke. ‘But this isn’t about sexuality,’ Francis says. ‘It’s about expression, openness, tapping into who you are.’ He sounds like he is about to burst into song. ‘It is not,’ Ava says with some venom. ‘It’s about being men in a man’s world. It’s about inequality. About one group having the power to do whatever they want while the other group waits under a palm tree for some attention.’ Like me, she thinks and watches her husband dress for work. ‘It is about sexuality,’ Ava says after some time, with renewed energy. ‘Men sleep with prostitutes, come home, infect their wives, and then whinge when they get sick. Francis tucks a handkerchief into one pocket, his phrase book into another. ‘The women have to stagger around and care for their husbands who will no doubt be suffering more than they are,’ Ava says, petering out. She remembers the children who loose out all round. The school

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Ava teaches at is a welfare school where there are many orphans. No one says what killed their parents, but it is not difficult to guess. ‘I wish we could adopt some of the children,’ Ava says, confusing the issue. ‘Okay, if you want,’ Francis says with false amicability, and heads out the door. In front of the house he throws one leg over another symbol of manhood that he knows he won’t be enjoying when he returns to Australia. He kick-starts his bike and takes off. He has a helmet on, but he doesn’t do it up. And, somewhere along the straight bitumen road that has speed bumps, which everyone rides around, Francis exchanges one set of flawed cultural mores for another.

9

‘W

ell, how was it?’ friends ask when they see Ava, Francis and Elizabeth after they have arrived home. ‘Good. It was really interesting,’ Ava says and waits for the questions to flow. ‘Did you have servants?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was it hot?’ ‘Sometimes.’ ‘Dirty?’ ‘Some places.’ (Ava and Francis begin to wonder if anyone read their letters.) ‘Are you glad to be back?’ ‘I’m not sure.’ ‘Where to next?’ ‘Nowhere at present. We have to get our heads around being here first, find somewhere to live. Buy a car.’

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The flow is a trickle that soon fades away when the conversation turns to the problem of aluminium windows in old Queenslanders, and how expensive it is to replace them. Francis is told he should seriously consider getting a fourwheel drive; they’re safer than cars. Everybody has one he is told, which is true. There are several parked on the road out the front of Martha and Bill’s house where Ava, Francis and Elizabeth are staying, and where three other couples — Elaine and Neville, Penny and Ed, and Caroline and Owen — have gathered to celebrate their friends’ return to Australia. Two of the visiting couples have children, while Elaine and Neville are bringing up dogs instead. Penny is having the fillings in her teeth replaced to stop the mercury leaching into her system and making her sick. ‘You should all have yours looked at,’ she says to no one in particular. And Caroline is concerned for her pregnant sister, who has inhaled the fumes of her oven cleaner. Caroline wants to know if this could affect the baby. Her husband thinks not, and the others agree with him. Ava and Francis are asked where Elizabeth will go to school. They look at each other. They have given school little thought. Check out the extension program, they are told. ‘She might be gifted,’ someone says, though with little conviction. ‘Don’t live too far out,’ Penny says. ‘You don’t want to spend all day driving Elizabeth around.’

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‘Why would we do that?’ Francis asks. ‘Not you, Ava. If Elizabeth is like my girls, she’ll want to do other things. Like music.’ Penny’s girls play the harp and the cello. It seems the bigger and bulkier the instrument the better. ‘Then there’s ballet and gym,’ Penny continues, turning to Caroline, who knows the commitment required for ballet and gym. Meanwhile, Ava waits patiently. She knows these people well, these people who sit on her parents’ lawn on this autumn day in Brisbane. The last time they gathered together like this was more than two years ago, after the funeral of Ava’s Aunt Dorothy, who died suddenly of a heart attack in the passenger seat of Martha’s car. To a person, they were all eager for details back then, marvelling at Martha’s presence of mind to keep her head together enough to get Dorothy to a doctor. ‘How did Martha know her sister was dead?’ Ava was asked. ‘How do you think?’ ‘Was Martha scared?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did Dorothy die instantly?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Suddenly?’ ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

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‘Could she have been resuscitated?’ ‘No. Let’s change the subject.’ Ava remembers giving an elaborate, inane account of her aunt’s bedroom as she left it. Dorothy never married so Ava and Martha were in charge of packing Dorothy’s things up before her house was sold. There were photographs of nephews and nieces on every tabletop, an open packet of chocolate biscuits beside the bed along with John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, which must say something, and a manual on how to build a mud-brick house. Her nightie was on the floor and the bed was unmade. Her sheets and pillowcases were black satin, as was her underwear. This snippet of information caused smiles all round and Ed said, ‘Good for her.’ Now, Ava thinks, give these people time. Don’t demand too much; after all, they cannot be expected to understand what I’ve been through, what I have seen first hand, what I know. But if they would just hurry up and ask the right questions they will learn. Ava is unsure of the motive behind this desire to teach. Is it their knowledge or her own that she wants to increase? Ava planned to come back stronger and more interesting, her experiences pinned to her chest like a row of military medals, which others couldn’t help but notice. Instead, she feels as if she is drawing attention to a prosthesis in the place of a missing breast and her action is making

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people uncomfortable. What experiences though? Could Ava make people understand there was a purpose behind teaching English to children whose futures would most likely see them toiling on building sites, or selling fake Levis at the market? Was there a purpose? Ava thought so. Could she articulate it? Probably not. Francis has his experiences filed in his head. He sits on the ground, upright, legs crossed, alert. He knows they should repack their bags and go to an airport before it is too late. But where would they go? He looks at Ava. She stands with one hand on the stair railing, caught between coming and going, wearing jeans and a T-shirt (in his mind he imagines diaphanous garments, earrings, a genie vest and harem pants; he wishes for them). ‘Tell the one about Op, the English teacher,’ he says, staring into her face. And, like Scheherazade, the spellbinding narrator of The Arabian Nights, Ava begins: ‘We had been in Chiang Mai for a few weeks when one of the English teachers came to visit us. Her name was Op and she took her shoes off at the door, as was the custom, and headed for the bathroom to wash her smelly feet, as was not. Op’s English was soon exhausted and my Thai at that stage was non-existent, so after a polite length of time Op stood up to leave. At the door, however, she turned and asked, “Have you ever had a fuck?”’ Ava lowers her voice on the word ‘fuck’ in case her mother, or Elizabeth, can hear

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from the kitchen. ‘As you can imagine I didn’t quite know how to answer, so I just stood there like I’d never heard the word. I wondered for a moment if I should point out that I did in fact have a child — a clue, surely. Op said, “You know, fuck?” She looked at the ground for inspiration. I think I may have half-heartedly shaken my head before she said, “If you haven’t had one you will tomorrow.” Well, of course that intrigued me. Sadly, though, Op turned up the next day with a bag full of vegetable marrows. “Fuck,” she said, handing them to me. “This is fuck. Its taste is good.” Francis and I ate one that night and the taste was not good. In fact, we’ve had better fucks, haven’t we, Fran?’ Ava looks at Francis, who half smiles. Though he suggested Ava tell the story, he isn’t listening. ‘You can imagine how many pathetic jokes we made up that involved Op’s marrows,’ Ava says. ‘Op invited us to her wedding soon after.’ People laugh and refill their glasses, take biscuits and dip from the tray being circulated. Ava feels her audience will not want to hear about a wedding so, like Scheherazade, who chooses the right moment to stop, she falls silent. Francis is lying on the ground now, resting on his elbows. Ava is sending him telepathic messages she hopes he can read. Francis speaks up and Ava stifles a groan. ‘I have to tell you about my stay in hospital,’ he says. ‘Remember, I got hepatitis? From contaminated food we think.’

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‘Are you sure it wasn’t the water, Francis?’ Martha calls through the window. ‘Remember the smell?’ So she can hear, Ava thinks. ‘I was in hospital for over a week, in a public ward, and I had a drip attached to my arm that no one bothered to check. When I saw my blood being sucked up the tube I thought I’d better do something about it so I got out of bed. I had to trundle the drip post thing, whatever it’s called, with me, and I managed to find a very starched and efficient-looking nurse who fixed me up. She was incredibly grumpy though. I asked the man in the next bed what was wrong with her. He said that it was expected I would bring someone with me, Ava I suppose, to check drips, change sheets, help with showering, refill the water jug, and so on. Nurses apparently are there to help the doctors not the patients. Novel concept, I thought. Anyway, at night, the helper slept on some kind of mat under the bed. Ava naturally enough couldn’t come because of Elizabeth.’ ‘That’s not the only reason. I wouldn’t have gone even if I could have.’ Ava does not elaborate and Francis keeps talking. ‘Eventually I got better, but Ava never quite recovered. Her reputation was in tatters. People didn’t forgive her for not taking proper care of Khun Francis, as they called me.’ ‘Only some people, Francis. Anyway I checked out one of the women’s wards and do you think they had anyone helping them?’ Ava asks. ‘No, of course they didn’t.’

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‘Ava got a bit of a reputation for being an all-round lousy wife, really. First, she wouldn’t care for me and then she wouldn’t cook. People asked, where is Ava? Is she sick? when they caught me struggling away at the stove, and I’d say, “Nope, just lazy.”’ Francis now looks at Ava, who can only think to say, ‘He’s joking. He probably cooked twice the whole time we were there,’ before she has a sudden overwhelming desire to cry. Ava had hoped the conversation would be more serious somehow. Instead, she can see the day unfolding into one long session of story after story like the Brothers Grimm. Or worse, someone might suggest they toss a football around. But Francis is not totally at odds with his wife. He is aware that if the talk were to turn to poverty, for instance, or the toll AIDS is taking on rural Thailand, all eyes would glaze over. This suburban green lawn is no place to discuss sweatshops and brothels, orphans growing up in mental institutions, the selling of the Hill tribes’ children, or the wretched state of beggars. Though perhaps it is the best place: removed, remote and the people unaffected enough themselves, unrelated to anyone suffering. World Vision, after all, probably doesn’t screen many advertisements in the Horn of Africa. Francis has a go.

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‘You know,’ he says, ‘after two years, we still couldn’t figure out what the story was with the beggars. Some people said we shouldn’t give them money because it encouraged them. I mean, many were horribly deformed and, in a number of cases, it was supposed to have been self-inflicted, so giving them money encouraged others to harm themselves or their children. I don’t know. Elizabeth refused to pass by without giving them something, and she was probably right. And Ava gave one man, who wasn’t even begging, all the money she’d just drawn out of the bank. It was supposed to last us a week!’ He was the oldest, thinnest man Ava had seen and probably sick as well. It didn’t make sense to peel off one note when there was plenty more where that one came from. Ava presses her lips together. She is pulling what Francis calls her Martha face. ‘You think that’s bad, you should go to Kenya,’ Owen says. ‘It’s worse there.’ ‘Or India. The footpaths are covered with homeless people. They have open wounds, it’s horrible. You soon learn to turn a blind eye. Sad to say, but true,’ Owen’s wife Caroline pipes in. They sound like they are talking about a type of rodent, Francis thinks, a type of cockroach, or some mice. People are beginning to pick at the grass and Ava feels responsible. She begins telling anecdotes of the animal

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variety to jolly things along: honey ants that ate toilet paper and the clothes off the line; cows with infections that spurted pus like fountains; dogs that hung around outside restaurants waiting for people to vacate so they could climb on the tables and eat the leftovers; rats as big as cats; and fearless cobras. The appeal of any story is short-lived, however, and there is an expectation that Ava and Francis should pick up (and shut up) from where they left off. To fit in again they need to take out a loan and begin securing Elizabeth’s future. They need to buy a hulking great four-wheel drive to rumble through the streets in and a house full of lead paint to give themselves something to talk about. And they need to think about having another baby: only children are spoilt. These are the messages Ava has tuned into. She is shocked by their intensity. Her planned conversation starter, something she never leaves home without, was, funnily enough, to be about the loss of identity she experienced while away. Ava was surprised to learn how much she relies on others to give her a sense of who she is. When language became difficult, when she could no longer communicate easily, and comments such as I like that skirt, You’re so funny, How did you know that and even It’s good to see you were no longer forthcoming, or if they were, the spontaneity was lost in translation, Ava felt herself becoming less and less substantial, becoming less and less connected, as if she was in danger of flying to pieces,

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of exploding, or imploding. And therefore, part of her longed to come home while another part felt guilty that she did not have the stamina to try harder, to search more thoroughly among her Thai friends for greater points of reference, for reflections she could believe in. What Ava is hearing today, the self she is seeing mirrored in these people, makes her want to run screaming into the street. She is disappointed because she had been looking forward to moulding her old self into an improved model. Now, however, she hesitates before she pulls the cobwebs of the past over her head like a too-tight wedding dress. But she knows that if she hesitates for too long, the dress, like her life, will no longer fit and where will she be then? Francis will tell Ava later, during the post-mortem, that he could never understand what she saw in these people anyway, why she invested so much in them. ‘We’ve always had different values,’ he’ll say. ‘You know that.’ But Ava didn’t know. Now she takes herself upstairs to see Elizabeth, who is sitting in the kitchen peeling pawpaw with her grandmother. ‘It must be good to be home,’ Martha says. ‘At least you know what you’re eating.’ She holds the pawpaw up and smiles at it while she speaks. ‘Did I tell you I had to toss out those orange seeds I brought back with me? Apparently, you’re not allowed to bring things like that into the country.’

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‘Hmm,’ Ava says neutrally. ‘Okay. Tell me what’s changed?’ her mother says. She is using what Ava thinks of as her bright voice and, when Ava hesitates, she goes a shade brighter. ‘Just two things, that’s all. Tell me two things that you’ve noticed are different.’ ‘Let me think a minute,’ Ava says, not sure if Martha is talking about changes to herself, or the landscape. ‘Well, we never had Clint’s Crazy Bargains before, did we?’ Her answer comes quickly, as if she is competing for a prize. ‘That’s one. And I’d have to say there are a lot more mobile phone towers. Will that do?’ Martha laughs, ‘Sure.’ These are the answers she wants to hear. The ones she is expecting, hoping for. She and Ava go downstairs together, each holding one of Elizabeth’s hands. ‘Come on, lunch is ready,’ Martha says. ‘I think we’ll eat inside, though. It looks like it might rain.’ While she speaks, her eyes scan what Ava can only describe as a cloudless sky.

10

A

va and Francis sit on the edge of the bed; two beds, actually. They have been staying with Martha and Bill, in Ava’s childhood bedroom, for three weeks now. The twin beds have been pushed together by Ava’s thoughtful parents. With one toe, Ava traces the imprint in the carpet where a leg once stood. And Francis, with his toe, pokes an open suitcase and the lid falls shut. ‘Some things don’t transfer well, do they?’ he says and looks at the lacquerware, the wooden horses, the ornamental cats and picture frames that surround them. ‘We’re no better than your mother. I can’t believe she has put both of those ugly fans in the same room.’ Francis is referring to a pair of large handpainted fans Martha bought when she was in Thailand. He is looking into a box containing a clay vase as he speaks. It has hairline cracks running from top to bottom and if it ever did hold water, it certainly wouldn’t now.

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‘There is a slight difference,’ Ava says. ‘Mum bought her fans. We didn’t buy this stuff. It was given to us.’ ‘Yes, but we didn’t have to bring it home,’ Francis says. Ava looks at a particularly gruesome teak clock with galloping elephants carved along the bottom, a present from a teacher she taught with. Then she picks up the shimmery pink silk suit it was wrapped in and she has to admit Francis has a point. ‘I think Liberace would baulk at wearing this in public,’ Ava says of the suit as she leans back on a pillow, closing her eyes. Already she has put on a kilo. Her plan to wear make-up as part of the new Ava has fallen by the wayside. Through the wall they can hear muffled voices coming from the television. Every so often Elizabeth and Bill laugh. Ava remembers being driven mad by the TV when she lived at home. She remembers bashing on the wall, remembers yelling, ‘Turn it down, I can’t sleep.’ She has the desire to attack the wall again, but for different reasons. ‘What was the name of those people we met?’ Ava asks. ‘Those missionaries from Adelaide working with the Lahu? The ones who visited you in hospital.’ Francis shrugs. ‘I was thinking how the woman said she never found it hard living in a Lahu village, despite no roads, electricity,

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running water or shops. It was returning to Australia that was hard. I never understood what she meant before.’ ‘I couldn’t imagine a Lahu village being very comfortable,’ Francis says, leaning back also. ‘No one mentioned comfortable. I said hard as in difficult, not the opposite of soft. You never listen.’ Ava is suddenly very annoyed. She would like to accuse Francis of trying to sabotage this conversation as he does every conversation, but it wouldn’t really be true. ‘No,’ he says gently, ‘but you implied she feels more at home in a Lahu village than she does here.’ ‘Well, I didn’t mean that,’ Ava says and then changes her mind. Ava has always been an observer; less inclined to become involved. The groups they joined were always Francis’s idea. Life, for Ava, is something to see as much as it is something to do. But what Ava sees is becoming distorted, like looking through the wrong end of binoculars, or wearing your mother’s prescription glasses. ‘Yes, I did,’ she says, and adds, ‘Don’t you feel out of place now?’ ‘I can’t say I’d want to live with your parents forever, but that’s not going to happen,’ Francis says. ‘And I can’t say whether I feel at home or not because I’m not at home. I do know what you mean, Ava. I’m not trying to be difficult, but I’ll wait until life returns to normal before I decide.’ The sooner that happens, Francis thinks, the better. Ava’s

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thoughts and feelings are too familiar. He understands the anger that simmers just beneath her skin. But someone has to remain grounded in this family and it can’t always be Elizabeth. The family has allowed itself a month’s holiday to settle in, catch up with friends and family, and Francis is beginning to think a month may be a tad too long. Nikkon

One of the government wives involved in the Middle Eastern jewellery heist has been found dead with her son in a crashed car. They both have large holes in the back of their heads and the story is that the ruby ring the woman was wearing caused the holes during the crash. Apparently, without leaving her finger, the ring smashed the woman’s head in and then ricocheted into her son’s. Both died instantly. There is no counterargument but there are pictures. Nikkon reads the story during a break from his new job. This Brahman bodyguard, weekend milker, exdoor-to-door salesman, has taken up landscaping in his spare time, and he wears a Yankees baseball cap to work. Nikkon is hoping to win the contract to landscape the grounds of a new apartment building in Barn Tawhy and, on the owner’s recommendation, has

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begun the work already. He is showing his initiative and has transformed a number of small dirt and rubble areas into interesting gardens featuring ornamental trees, courtesy of Jirapun. Nikkon is thinking of adding a pond and knows a man who keeps fish. He would like to add a waterfall, but the engineering skill is beyond him. After two busy weeks, in which Nikkon spends every spare minute he can landscaping, a representative of his potential boss arrives to tell Nikkon his services are no longer required. The potential boss’s brother has decided to take on the job, and he will begin tomorrow. The man hands Nikkon some money and stands watching, arms folded, while Nikkon packs up his things. He keeps watching until Nikkon is gone. Up ahead Nikkon sees Pornchai and Jirapun coming along the road. They have been to the market and the basket on the front of their bike contains plastic bags with handfuls of different cooking ingredients in them. Their faces light up when they see Nikkon and they pull over. Nikkon knows that if he studies the contents of the basket he will be able to tell what his parents are having for dinner. This thought makes him depressed so he doesn’t look.

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‘How’s it going?’ Pornchai asks. ‘What have you been up to?’ Nikkon answers steadily. ‘You know how it is. I seem to spend all my time working. How are you?’ ‘Good, good. Where are you at now?’ Pornchai asks. He spits red betel nut onto the ground, but some of it is still attached to his front teeth. Nikkon concentrates on this redness, this vegetable blood, in his father’s mouth as Pornchai continues, ‘You’ve got the Brahmans, you’ve got the cows, and now you’re turning your hand to landscaping, I hear.’ His father is holding up fingers, one, two and three, as he speaks. Nikkon agrees. ‘That’s about it. As a matter of fact, I’ve just come from the apartments, and the boss there tells me he has a whole other block lined up for when I finish this one. He seems pretty impressed with what I’ve done so far.’ ‘You’ve done well. Next you’ll be having to decide where your future lies. Which path you want to follow. Animals or plants. I’ve always liked working with plants myself, but then I never worked with animals, and I might have liked that just as well. Having choices is good fortune. Come over and see us soon. When you have a free moment,’ Pornchai says.

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Jirapun, on the back of the bike, looks at Nikkon as they pull away. She looks with eyes that want to see into him. But it is like seeing into mud. Nikkon meets her gaze. He waves and Jirapun waves back and keeps waving when Nikkon is no longer in sight. Nikkon remains on the side of the road lost in thought. He remains motionless wondering about the options available to him, the paths his father was referring to. It is clear, despite what his father says, that Nikkon’s future unwinds as straight and narrow, as ancient, as the fossilised trunk of a branchless tree. Nikkon walks the tree in his mind, searching for opportunities to march off in a different direction, to deviate if only ever so slightly. There are few opportunities. Nikkon sits and sits, and then he rides home on a motorbike that will never be anything but what it is.

11

D

uring unbearably hot afternoons in Thailand (43 degrees and the fan blasting), Ava would lie on the bed and pore over house designs in Affordable Home Plans for Modest and Medium Budgets. ‘It is important to bear in mind,’ Francis would say, ‘that these are modest and medium American budgets, and out of our price range.’ ‘Yes, but just because animals don’t really talk doesn’t mean we should stop reading fairytales.’ ‘You’re too ambitious. You should have married a doctor, preferably an American one.’ Ava would roll towards the wall when Francis said this so she couldn’t see him. If he kept talking she would block her ears with a pillow. It is normal to want a house. Most people did, after all, buy themselves a house eventually, didn’t they? Or did they? Ava now wonders. Wouldn’t it be truer to say that most people in fact build themselves a house: Palestinians, Afghans

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and Sudanese fashioning walls out of dirt with their hands; Bangladeshis using a mixture of mud and grass; Mongolians and Siberians chipping ice, wrapping their heads in animal skins, and working with a baby on their back? The disturbing thing is Ava no longer knows such things, and ideas she took to be absolutes change all the time. Her concept, for instance, of who ‘most people’ are no longer refers exclusively to the people she knows personally, or to some nearby, invisible crowd of people exactly like herself. It has expanded to embrace the whole world. Ava therefore cannot say how most people who are lucky enough to have a house got it. What she can say is that most people she knows spend every spare cent they have, and a lot they don’t, renovating their house. Opening up verandahs, building in underneath, ripping out walls, polishing floors and adding second storeys. All this takes up a lot of time, and requires enormous amounts of discussion. This is where Ava comes in. It is as if people are pleased she is back purely because she is someone new to talk to. Ava has never thought about the motivation behind all of this activity before, but she can see that putting a lot of solid matter between yourself and the world must surely shield you from something. Francis has taken another job with the DPI, this time on a 2,000-acre research station an hour’s drive south-west of Brisbane. ‘Follow the highway to Ipswich and take the

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Warwick exit until you pass the Boonah/Yamanto turn-off. Take the next left into Middle Road and you’re nearly there. First left, next right and straight on to the blue letterbox.’ Ava gives people these directions. Everyone gets lost the first time. There is an empty house on the station and it is here that Ava and Francis are living. The move is to be a temporary one while they find their feet, while Ava decides what she wants to do next, and while they get their act together enough to buy a car. At present, they have the use of Martha’s. The research house stands in the middle of the farm and has no near neighbours. It is an owner-built, hideous two-storey brick construction with more arches than a McDonald’s restaurant. The concrete floor downstairs, the ceilings and walls, are all seriously cracked and, when Martha and Bill visit, they study these cracks as if they can read in them which side of the house is going to collapse first, and they choose their seats accordingly. Martha says, ‘It’s shabby, isn’t it? Do you think you’ll stay?’ ‘It’s big enough and cheap enough, and Elizabeth likes the internal stairs,’ Ava tells her. The stairs, though, are what concern Martha most. They are loose and bounce when she walks on them. Ava can no longer picture the type of house she wants despite the information collected in Thailand, the important notes and sketches. She has swapped the Modest and Medium book for country decorating magazines, and has

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devised a list of all the things she must have, including a pair of wing chairs (green velvet), a brass hat stand, a washstand, a hallstand, a chaise longue and an iron bed. This is Ava’s first list. When Francis tells her that owning so many things means they will need an even bigger house than the one they’re in, she revises it down: an enamel bucket, a set of Russian dolls, a leadlight lamp, some old pictures in wooden frames, an iron meat grinder. Ava is no longer sure she wants to own a house at all and she is fast losing patience with the decorating magazines. The last one she bought suggested using books with red covers as features to liven things up. There was a picture of a room, a library, in which red books were placed strategically along the shelves among the more boring, though no doubt still worthy, books. Prior to this Ava thought books in a house meant the owners liked reading. She wonders if the economically minded could paint the spines of books they already have to achieve the same effect. Ava finds there is something not quite right about the whole concept of owning a house: something stifling. This might be because the only time she feels completely free is when she is travelling, in motion between leaving and arriving, when even she is unsure of her exact location. Or when she is drunk. Ava thinks of this freedom as sublime and she imagines that being tied to a house, being weighed down by one, like having a millstone or a dead albatross

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around her neck, is not sublime, and that the things she is collecting — her portable property, her buckets and dolls — are enough to keep her anchored, to keep her from flying to pieces like a spaceman without a suit. These things tell her she exists at a time when everything around her remains silent on the subject. There is an old abandoned house just behind Francis and Ava’s brick one. This house has four outer walls, a couple of strategically placed inner walls — the rest have been pulled down and some of the boards used to line the inside of Ava’s linen cupboard — , a steep roof and a splendid hoop-pine floor, which is visible through holes in the patchy lino. Elizabeth calls it the Haunted House because trees grow against the windows making the interior gloomy. There is an impressive sandstone block that forms the first of the three remaining stairs leading inside. In its prime it would have been divided into four small rooms, and Ava sees it as representing just about as much house as she can be comfortable with. She wonders if they could have it moved to a block of land somewhere and do it up. She would paint it yellow, would enjoy doing so. When she suggests this to Francis he dismisses the idea with, ‘You’ve got to be joking. That old place. If you tried to move it the whole thing would come down.’ On weekends, Ava takes Elizabeth and her paint set to the Haunted House and they paint pictures on the walls and

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write their names under them. Ava says to Elizabeth, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to live in this house. I’ll keep a cat and a dog, and I’ll go to bed when the sun sets. What do you think of that?’ ‘Can I live with you, too?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘What about Daddy? Don’t you want to live with him?’ ‘He can come, can’t he?’ ‘No. I’m sorry, your father doesn’t think this house is good enough for him,’ Ava says. ‘He can stay over there in the big house.’ But Francis would like to buy a house. His idea is something affordable and structurally sound in a town nearby. They discuss such a house and Ava asks, ‘What about the grand plan? The mountain views? I thought you wanted to live in the country.’ ‘I do, but I refuse to drive to buy bread and milk. A country town is a good compromise.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Ava says. She imagines an ulcer in her stomach, imagines it erupting. ‘I have never wanted to live on Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100-acre farm. You know that,’ Francis says. ‘I could go so far as to say I despise people who do.’ ‘What? Who do what?’ ‘Looking after one cow, Ava, takes up as much time as looking after a whole herd. And 10 acres is as difficult to

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manage as a hundred and a hundred as difficult as a thousand. I have no desire to spend all my spare time pretending to be a farmer. Pretend farmers make it harder for real farmers, and they whinge more. We live in an industrial age and you need to remember that.’ ‘You remember it,’ Ava says. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you saying that you will only live in a house with a small yard?’ ‘I guess that is what I’m saying, yes.’ ‘Well, I’m not moving from here then. I don’t want to buy a house anyway, and I particularly don’t want to buy the one you want. I need space around me. And Winnie-thePooh lives in a 100-acre w-o-o-d, wood, not on a farm.’ Francis sighs. Their discussions used to be so reasonable. From their present house, magnificent mountains are visible in the distance. The research farm is dry and windy, and what trees there are grow close to the buildings as if they have survived only because it was too difficult to get a chain around them without causing other damage. But the mountains, Ava thinks, the mountains make it all worthwhile. Francis’s devoutly Christian and perhaps sexually deviant uncle moved Ava and her sticks of furniture from Brisbane to Toowoomba before she and Francis were married. This was his wedding present to them. Ava remembers it being dark when they set out, and the road to Toowoomba

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being unusually quiet. After a brief conversation about retirement, which Ava struggled to involve herself in, he started talking about Ava and Francis’s impending marriage. ‘It would be best if you kept right away from that young man of yours,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine the strain he is under, his body, you know, thinking about the wedding night and so on. If you were to touch him he might not be able to control himself.’ Ava looked across at the uncle to see if he was serious, reaching for the door handle at the same time. ‘There is a sexual energy you wouldn’t know about,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of.’ No, but you are, Ava thought. She told Francis later that his uncle was mad. He was also wrong. Ava has always known about sexual energy. She believes it manifests itself in beautiful mountains like those now seen from her house. ‘Do you think mountains are sexy?’ she asks Francis, who doesn’t know how to respond. ‘Well do you? Can you see the naked lady lying there along the range?’ ‘Where?’ Francis asks, and turns in the direction Ava is pointing. ‘To the left of Cunninghams Gap,’ she says. Francis looks and looks. He can see the rabbit on the moon, but he cannot for the life of him see that damn mountain woman. But she is there, visible and large, and beautiful. Ava describes her to Francis. ‘She lies on her back with her hair flowing to form valleys and ridges. Her chin is tilted upwards

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revealing a sensuous throat. Rising hills form swollen breasts, a rounded belly, and firm hips. Erect nipples jut toward the sky. Her legs are slightly apart.’ Francis will have to take Ava’s word for it. He has never been good at games, could never form pictures out of clouds or see faces in tree trunks. He asks Ava when they are in bed, ‘Who are you fantasising about this time? Which man?’ And Ava says, ‘Why does it always have to be a man?’ ‘Aha, which woman then?’ ‘What makes you think it is a woman?’ she says. In Saturday’s paper they read an ad for an old house on a large block of land in town. There is a picture of the house, an old Queenslander with two bedrooms, two sleepouts and a lot of fretwork. The house is cheap and comes with a quantity of antique furniture. The owner is apparently in a nursing home and wants a quick settlement, or his greedy relatives do. Ava reluctantly goes with Francis and Elizabeth to look at it. She is slightly interested in the furniture. She knows Francis is keen to put down roots and make friends, but she wants to take it slowly, wants to take more time before making a decision. The old man’s antiques amount to one wobbly table with turned legs, five lethal-looking chairs, upholstered in dirt-defying brown, and a painted kitchen hutch. While Ava looks at these, Francis inspects the house for structural damage, of which there is plenty, for white ants — he can see

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where they’ve been — and for tacky kitchen and bathroom renovations: there have been no renovations, tacky or otherwise. The kitchen looks like something Elizabeth might build and the bathroom is small with an oddly sloping floor and taps that won’t fully turn off. It doesn’t take Francis long to realise that if they bought the house he would be committing himself to a lifetime spent with a hammer in his hand and, in a worst-case scenario, a hard hat on his head. Meanwhile, Elizabeth studies the plastic concertinaed door on a bedroom. It is tied open with yellow bias binding and looks like a large accordion. She has never seen such a door before and thinks it is wonderful. She longs to undo the binding and have a go at opening and closing it, but knows this would be wrong and goes outside instead. The house is neither highset nor lowset, but is just right for her to walk underneath. She asks her mother if they are going to buy it. ‘I want to,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid not,’ Ava says. ‘Why not?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘Don’t worry,’ her mother says. But Elizabeth does worry. She worries all the way home about the way her mother seemed fed up with the furniture, her father angry at the house. She saw him kick the stumps, not once but many times. There are surprising gusts of wind that rock the car on the open road and ruffle the feathers of the butcher birds,

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who hold on to the overhead wires. They follow a ute with a huge pig tap-dancing to stay upright as he is bounced around corners. ‘Since it doesn’t look like we’ll be moving just yet,’ Ava says to Francis, ‘I’ll get those curtains out I was telling you about. The ones Caroline loaned us. Though I can’t imagine she will ever want them back. They should make our bedroom a bit darker. I’ll need your help to cut the rod shorter. We’ll have to measure it carefully because it’s only a bit too long.’ There is a brief silence before Ava adds, turning to the back seat, ‘Isn’t language funny? We’re going to hang our curtains, Lizzy. Wonder what they did to deserve that?’ No one responds. ‘Wouldn’t it be good,’ Ava says to Francis now, ‘if the people on death row were made to line up in our bedroom and have a curtain rod threaded through little silver rings inserted in their shoulder blades, instead of being hung the other way?’ ‘What colour are they?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘Mainly black.’ ‘The curtains?’ Elizabeth says, warming to the idea. ‘No, the people on death row, in America. The curtains are pink with little flowers. Not a nice pink, though.’ ‘I don’t know why we don’t have daylight saving,’ Francis says. ‘You wouldn’t need curtains if we had daylight saving.’

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‘I don’t know why we don’t have a lot of things,’ Ava says, then hopes Francis realises she is speaking in a broad sense: world peace, safe drinking water, a cure for cancer. She doesn’t want him to remind her that she does have a lot of things, that she is fast working her way down her list, ticking things off (she gave Francis a leadlight lamp for his birthday, has asked for a meat grinder for hers). She says, ‘I wonder if a study has been done to determine the standard of housing that would be available to every person if all money and resources were pooled. Do you think that would be a useful study?’ ‘It wouldn’t make any difference. It wouldn’t help, if that’s what you mean. Just because you know something doesn’t mean anyone cares. Besides, resources would never be pooled,’ Francis says. ‘I wouldn’t mind doing the study anyway,’ Ava says. ‘It does sound like a lot of maths, though, and I get so tired of thinking. Everything seems to require a lot more thought than it used to. I should give up and have that other baby. I might.’ Ava says this and then works silently at convincing herself that the motivation for having a second baby, for creating another being, who would require feeding and changing, cleaning and protecting, is different to the motivation behind buying a house. There is a huge difference, of course there is, but for the present Ava can’t see clearly what the difference is.

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The first option Nikkon tentatively tests as he walks his petrified tree into the future, arched foot over arched foot sliding forward as though on a tightrope, faltering every now and then when he loses concentration, is that of joining the army. His father was a soldier but refuses to talk about that time except to say, ‘Never forget, son, it is almost impossible to kill anyone if you shoot with your eyes shut. Then if you do happen to hit someone, you are not to blame because your action was unintentional.’ Nikkon cannot see the point of doing this. He cannot see the point of having a weapon if he is not going to use it properly. If he did get to shoot, would he choose to do it at another soldier? Another person, like himself? Nikkon wonders. He wonders, too, if he did make a success of being a soldier, if he won medals, earned promotions, got his picture in the paper, who would he be able to share his success with? Nikkon is sitting at the afternoon market where he came as a child to help his mother sell noodles. He can see the spot where she used to park her pushcart, can see the ruts and potholes they would continually trip in. He has bought a bowl of soup and he takes a spoonful. There would be nobody to tell things to, he thinks. Not a single body. And most likely I would get shot. Nikkon swal-

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lows. He doesn’t really want to be shot, but if not the army then what? Over the years a number of people from Toong Siow have travelled to Bangkok in search of work. Nimichai, the handsome chief milker, is one such person. Nikkon considers this. Considers leaving his village to seek his fortune. Others, who also have never been, say that Bangkok is where the big money is. Nikkon visualises piles of money sitting on street corners. He imagines people shovelling it into carts, which they push along, a trail of baht following in their wake. They don’t have to beat thieves and beggars off with sticks as there is enough for everyone. Realistically though, few have ever returned home looking any more than adequately nourished. No real success stories, true or fabricated, have filtered through to Nikkon. There have been no crowing letters home. Those who go away seem to disappear completely, like Nimichai did, into the throngs, the noise and pollution, the light and darkness that is Bangkok, or they slink home at night and take up their old position in their family, re-establish themselves in their old job if they can. When asked about Bangkok, they simply smile and shrug their shoulders. ‘It is so far away,’ they say. ‘So very far away.’

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And if there is one thing Nikkon does not want — Nikkon, who has been cut adrift already, who floats and falls against his will despite feeling trapped in psychological quicksand — it is to be far away. He will not be leaving for Bangkok any time soon. Of this he is certain. Nikkon considers travel, like the army, to be a non-starter in his options’ race. He buys kow niow to dip into his soup and it comes in a sweaty plastic bag. He doesn’t want to go home, doesn’t want the kow niow either, but he doesn’t want to go home more, so he buys it to justify taking up a stool. As he opens the bag, a line of monks, wearing brown robes, catches his eye. They are on the opposite side of the road, empty begging bowls clutched to their chests. Nikkon’s own robes were white then orange when he was a novice. The monks look satisfied, despite the empty bowls. Their flat faces are benign. And Nikkon considers the possibility of rejoining the monkhood as if the facial expression might come with the robes. He suspects that his father has hoped for a long time now that this might happen. But Nikkon knows he couldn’t do it. He would like to for his father, but he would be living a lie. He would be party to an act of duplicity, which would defeat his purpose. The tree beneath his feet is becoming a twig, with about as much rigidity as a piece of rope.

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Burm told Nikkon that the sleeping quarters of many temples have airconditioning. ‘You get your own room, too,’ he said. ‘And a television set.’ Nikkon does not want his own room. He has that now. Nor does he want a television set. ‘If men want sex they go to a brothel,’ Burm continued. ‘If women want sex they go to the temple. Think about it.’ But Nikkon didn’t need to think about it because, unfortunately, he also knew that he could live without sex. It is beginning to dawn on Nikkon (as his twig regresses, becoming a bud on which there is no toehold), that there is nothing he cannot live without.

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his is what Francis knows. It has to be less than 10,000 dollars, less than 10 years of age, and definitely not a four-wheel drive. Ava would like it to be yellow but that might narrow the field too much. Ava has never bought a car but figures that for 10,000 they should get something reasonably appropriate. She is full of advice — she would buy from a car yard, it seems safer somehow — but doesn’t help Francis look because the thought never crosses her mind. It was always her father who bought the family car and she and her mother would be as surprised as anyone when Bill turned up with a newer model. ‘You never told me you were buying a car,’ her mother would say, admiring Bill’s cleverness while trying out the passenger seat for size. ‘I don’t tell you everything,’ Bill would say, winking over Martha’s head at Ava.

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This car-buying lark is not easy, despite what Bill would have people believe. Francis, like a dog chasing its tail, finds himself madly visiting and revisiting car yards and answering ads in the Trading Post. After nine days of frantic activity, he comes close to taking a rusty red Gemini off the hands of two brothers who need the money to return home to Chile. He goes so far as to discuss the idea with Ava, who tells him not to be ridiculous. ‘That’s as stupid as my idea to move the Haunted House,’ she says. This response is reasonable, Francis acknowledges, renewing the pressure on himself to come up with something else. The pressure becomes so great, however, that he finds himself caving in and buying a lemon (though not a yellow one). The car Francis finally picks is a 10-year-old Commodore station wagon. It costs 9,500 dollars, has done hundreds of thousands of kilometres and the airconditioner doesn’t work. There is also an odd, rattling noise that Francis discovers as soon as he hands over the money and turns out of the previous owner’s driveway. When he gets the car home, Francis is convinced he could not have picked a bigger lemon if he had been spun around wearing a blindfold at the wrecker’s. He cannot work out when it was exactly that he turned into a dickhead who could no longer make a sensible decision. He has never cared about the car he drove before so these feelings he is experiencing are alien to him, and potent. Francis believes he has lumbered his family with a car that is

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most likely not safe and he feels guilty that he wasted so much money doing it. He suspects, too, that the waste is not yet over. There will be more bills surely, from mechanics, auto-electricians and tyre-mart people. He pictures himself hiding these bills from Ava, in the pocket of an old coat hanging behind a door, or at the bottom of the flour bin. There will be no money for a house, not now or ever, if this keeps up. Francis also feels vengeful. He wants to kill the man who sold him the car, who plied him with plunger coffee and seduced him with what was most likely a false interest in Thailand while he held up the tailgate and bonnet so Francis couldn’t see that they were faulty. And he feels hurt that another human being should want to deliberately rip him off, should want to put him in a situation he can’t escape from. It is not, after all, as if he can hide the car under the bed or stow it in a cupboard, like a pair of elephant underpants or a naked-lady tie. He can’t just forget about it. The car is in his face, in his garage. It is something he has to see every day. He wishes he could run away. He wishes they could make do with just a motorbike to get around on, like they had in Thailand, despite the danger, the high chance of becoming road kill. This idea that each person needs a seat of their own seems excessive; the idea of having room for a dog seems obscene.

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Soon Francis can’t sleep for thinking about the car. ‘Get over it,’ he tells himself, and then, ‘Get the fuck over it’, but he ignores this advice and buys car magazines instead. He becomes well versed in the language of damage: heavy duty abuse, rust and water leaks, faulty automatic transmission, overdue camshaft belt, rattly steering rack, noisy hydraulic lifters, cracked cylinder head, worn front struts and leaky power steering. He wonders if he should cut his losses, sell this car, and buy another. When he suggests this, Ava says, ‘Over my dead body. I don’t care if the paint is faded just so long as it gets us from A to B.’ But that’s just it. I can’t promise it will, Francis thinks, adding faded paintwork to his mental list of car faults, while Ava keeps talking. ‘What makes you so sure you’d do a better job the second time?’ she asks, not knowing about the acquired knowledge gained from the magazines. ‘You wouldn’t be able to sell this car if it’s as bad as you say and pretty soon we’d have two cars, then three. Besides, Francis, I like this one.’ ‘Why do you like it?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know,’ Ava lies, not game to tell him that the way it drops back a gear and takes off when she floors it is a bit of a thrill. She is not game because she knows Francis will lecture her about the stress this action puts on the car’s engine and his own. ‘Because I feel bloody sorry for it,’ she suggests.

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Ava also doesn’t know, and probably wouldn’t understand if she did, that when they are driving along, Francis feels as conspicuous as he would travelling in a poorly designed float in a parade. People notice, he thinks. Male people mostly, who say things like, ‘So this is the new car’, and ‘You managed to get what you wanted’, which prompts Francis to point out the car’s problems in detail. He gets them to listen to odd noises, to open and close doors and windows. He can’t imagine what he wants from these people, why he does this. Is it their sympathy he is after? Or does he want them to say, ‘Hang on, I think I’ve got a spare car inside you can have. I’ll pop in and get it. Won’t be a sec.’ Part of Francis believes this last is just what he does want. He thinks back to Thailand, to the bags of apples on the doorstep, the rambutans, and he wishes this simplicity, this spirit of generosity, existed here. When letters arrive from Op, the English teacher in Thailand, Francis wonders why he and Ava never entertained the thought of staying away longer. It seems that he was at least appreciated there. The workers all love and miss you forms a significant part of every letter (Op’s knowledge of English seems, if anything, to be diminishing), while here there are too many pressing matters to deal with: a new location, a new job, both of which are right up there with death of a spouse on the stress scale. And Ava is at her wit’s end

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with him. She says, ‘Pull yourself together. How can you spend so much time, so many months, thinking about a stupid car? We were looking forward to the future but now you seem to want to bury yourself in the first bit of unimportant detail that comes along.’ And, ‘Don’t ever discuss that bloody car with me again or I’ll take an axe to it.’ And to you, she adds in her head. Later, it’s, ‘What are you doing to me? Can’t you see I’ve got enough to deal with already? A new area, a new school, no close-by friends and no chance of making any while you carry on like an idiot?’ And, ‘What the fuck is wrong?’ And, ‘I hate you. I wish you were dead. I can’t stand the sighing, the moroseness, the silence any more.’ With this last, Ava will storm off to the bedroom where she can be heard crying and yelling, ‘This is not how I pictured it. You’re ruining everything.’ She throws things. Books and cushions. Things that cannot break. Nikkon

At night, lying on his bed roll, Nikkon finds himself again musing about the future. There is nothing else to do in the darkness, mice dancing overhead, whisky bottle by his side, so Nikkon thinks about taking a minor wife, and doubling his trouble.

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Or, he could write a letter to Khun Francis — Hello, my name Nikkon. I no longer eight, nine, ten, eleven years age — and ask for information on emigrating to Australia. But Nikkon’s knowledge of geography has grown to include the fact that Australia is further away than Bangkok. And besides, he has no illusions about their friendship. Even though Francis did choose to sit with Nikkon and his friends at every college party instead of with the director — his rightful place — and, even though he gave Nikkon’s son Raak Elizabeth’s bike when they left, Nikkon can’t imagine Francis giving him too much thought now that he is back in Australia. He would be too busy — doing laps of his pool, driving his cars around, and visiting the gym. He would be too busy shopping for things Nikkon doesn’t even know exist, surely. Khun Francis was kind to me, Nikkon thinks, but he would have done the same for anyone. Nikkon is getting sidetracked here. He is losing his train of thought. What next? He could take up kickboxing, he tells the inky night, and become a champion. (This is just plain silly now — it is the drink — plain foolish; Nikkon is obviously clutching at invisible straws. He is pulling his own pale leg.) He knows he is too old, too out of condition, too

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uninterested: sport ceasing to be his thing when his fighting cock died, killed before it ever won a fight. He could murder his parents and inherit the farm, which would turn him into something he has never aspired to be, a dumb farmer. He could start using opium, and adopt the look of the Hmong, without the pockmarks, could end up in jail, could end up in front of a firing squad. He could. He could. He could.

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alf of Francis’s time involves conducting farm trials on the Darling Downs. He works in partnership with farmers to minimise erosion and overcome declining soil fertility. This partnership idea is problematic. Respecting the farmer’s knowledge is problematic. Applying postmodernist theory that no one has superior knowledge, that there is no real objective truth, is problematic. Francis’s farmers expect to grow crops on soils that have been farmed continually for generations and when production declines they want a natural solution. Francis itches to say: ‘But farming isn’t natural. You want a natural solution, get off the land.’ Instead, he suggests spreading manure or revisiting ley pastures, popular in Thomas Hardy’s day, where a lucerne and grass mix is planted and the land left unploughed for three or four years or, alternatively, not ploughing the land at all. But manure is messy, ley pastures unproductive, and farmers are in love with their tractors.

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Francis has the use of a government car to drive to the Downs, but he is becoming less and less able to concentrate long enough to get there. He is so incredibly tired that often he will pull over as soon as he hits the highway running west. He parks in the same place each time. There is a white cross marking the spot where someone was killed in 1978, and Francis parks next to it. The cross reminds him of the spirit houses in Thailand that are erected at the site of every catastrophe. They look like elaborate bird-houses, though ones with wooden elephants or china horses standing on their decks instead of birds. Some had little dolls outfitted in silk clothes peering through the windows. Francis was surprised these ornaments remained intact. Even Elizabeth suggested that taking just one home couldn’t hurt. People driving by the spirit houses clasped their hands together and bowed their heads hoping the resident ghost would see fit to grant them a safe journey. Francis wondered how many accidents this action alone caused. He pushes his seat back and leans against the headrest. In 1978, Francis was 17, a good, killable age for a male. He thinks about the person who must have died here. He conjures up a picture, brings the deceased back to life, and sees that it is a man slightly older than he is. This man struggles with his weight, not to mention hair loss, and is married with two children. Francis embellishes the story further and gives him a three-bedroom brick house with a separate

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lounge and dining room. No one ever eats in the dining room — there is a breakfast bar in the kitchen — so a model train has taken over the fake mahogany table. A double garage forms part of the house and palms and woodchips feature in the front garden. The man has a job that requires him to wear a shirt and tie. His wife buys these pre-matched from Target, where she works so the children can go to an Anglican school and have braces on their teeth. Francis imagines the children in detail — what pets they keep, the friends they make, the patterns on their bedspreads. After a while, he knows them better than he knows Penny and Ed’s children, or Caroline and Owen’s. Then he works on the wife, picturing the varicose vein in her left calf, the stretch marks on her stomach, the grey hairs at the back of her head that even she is not aware of. Francis kills time, kills hours, concentrating, visualising, making changes, mourning losses, before he turns the car around and drives back home. His absence from the Downs does not go unnoticed for long and he is called in for a meeting with his boss, who asks probing questions. An image of himself in a cardigan buttoned up wrong, with a stubbly chin, yellowing loose teeth, and little else — no job, no family and no home — comes readily to Francis’s mind as he apologises to his boss for being slack. ‘It’s not me who suffers,’ his boss says nobly. ‘It’s the farmers.’

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Wrong, Francis thinks. The whole department could keel over tomorrow and the bloody farmers wouldn’t notice. I am suffering, and I need to stop. But how? When Francis gets home he asks Ava for the name of the doctor who did their medicals before they went overseas. After spending an hour flicking through magazines, and reading stories such as My Leather Pants Came With a Wife and A Drunk Driver Robbed Me of My Leg in an aubergine waiting room chock-full of sprightly looking people, it is Francis’s turn to have his blood pressure checked, his pulse counted and his heart listened to. The doctor also looks down his throat and asks a couple of questions. He is a man of few words and lots of hums, but he seems interested, looking over his glasses, drawing his eyebrows together when Francis describes his car obsession and his inability to work. When Francis stops talking, the doctor reaches for a pen and writes a prescription for sleeping tablets, which he folds neatly in half and slides across the desk top. It is as if they are negotiating a price. Francis is tempted to write something himself and slide the paper back. Five days later Francis returns, more sleep deprived than ever. ‘That’s a shame,’ the doctor says when Francis tells him he feels worse. He asks no questions this time, but scrabbles around in the back of a drawer, coming up with what looks like a travelling salesman’s sample pack of

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antidepressants. ‘Hmmm,’ the doctor says, reading the directions. ‘Take one of these each morning and see if they do the trick.’ Francis is at the stage where he would strap a live cane toad to his forehead if someone told him it would help. He takes the medication and functions for six more days before he becomes so agitated and restless, so jumpy and pumped, that, to hell with the car, he feels sure he could run to the Darling Downs, his legs a blur of action. His eyes are starting out of his head: any larger and they would crash into his glasses. On day six Ava comes in from shopping and is greeted by the sight of Francis staggering down the hall arms outstretched like the walking dead. ‘I think I’ve lost it,’ he says, stating the bleeding obvious, and before he has time to come careening around the corner, before he can crash and bang his way into the lounge room, Ava is on the phone to that damn doctor. At Dorothy’s funeral it crossed Ava’s mind that she was taking part in an event that gave her the right to have hysterics if she wanted to. Everybody knew Dorothy was her favourite aunt. She could have demanded their sympathy, acted irrationally, or dramatically, but she didn’t. Instead, she sat upright beside Francis, dry-eyed and composed, looking only half-interested. This surprised Ava, because at other times she finds herself bursting into tears if she can’t get the lid off a jar.

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Again, she is dead calm, listening carefully as the doctor says, ‘Hmmm, look, he’ll need to be watched. How about I book him into hospital? No private cover, hmmm, Toowoomba Base then, hmmm. It’ll be in the psychiatric ward. Just for a couple of days. He could eat the whole boxful, you know, and they wouldn’t kill him.’ This last he tells Ava as if it will cheer her up. It is late by the time they get going and Ava drives into the night in more ways than one. Elizabeth, who is still using a booster seat, eats Twisties and asks what every sign says. Francis sits with his head turned to the window, his fingers drumming loudly on the dashboard, his foot tapping madly on the floor. There is no moon and Ava can feel the darkness part as they drive through it. She can’t understand what they are doing. She can only do it. A little situation takes place at the receptionist’s desk. When Ava has finished filling in all the necessary forms and says goodbye, Francis suggests he walk her back to the car. Alarm bells go off in the receptionist’s head: Alert! Alert! Prisoner on the loose, and she says, ‘You can’t go. You just got here.’ Francis makes a feeble attempt to say he has no intention of escaping, but his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and suddenly neither he nor Ava, who finds herself in unchartered waters here, has the desire to explain anything. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ Ava says. ‘It might be after lunch, though.’

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Francis is taken to a room where he is told a psychiatrist is waiting. The place is eerily quiet and the psychiatrist is black. At first, Francis thinks she is Aboriginal and he is pleased, but after a while he is not so sure. He can detect an accent when the woman asks about his family history. Francis thinks she means Ava. Nothing wrong there, he reports, while concentrating on his hands. He has to sit on them to stop them from flying into the air. He doesn’t know what they would do then: a magic trick, juggle, attempt to strangle the doctor. And he wonders why on earth this conversation has to take place now, why it can’t wait until morning. He needs to rests his eyes, stop them from staring and drying out, but he finds himself talking about the car again, about work. It is all so bizarre. Francis’s bag is inspected but nothing is removed and he sees that Ava has managed to find him some pyjamas. He is shown to a room where three men are in narrow beds. Two are talking softly while the third lies still, the sheet pulled over his head, like a corpse. Francis lies down. He does not expect to sleep. For a start, there is the distinct possibility he could fall out of the tiny bed. He reaches underneath, one hand either side, and entwines his fingers through the wire base. This works for a while until his arms begin to ache, and he lets go. He listens to the others, but it is like listening to mice talk, so he turns his attention inwards. Who would have thought I’d end up

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here, he thinks. What must Ava be making of all this? She probably wonders why she was the one who landed the prize idiot. Francis wishes he could take Ava away again. For now, he thinks of ‘away’ as being above the Earth on a cloud, or beneath the sea in a cave with a hidden entrance. How do people with problems and no support cope? Francis visualises all the things that can go wrong: Ava dying; Elizabeth dying; Ava or Elizabeth missing presumed dead; murder; rape; becoming a vegetable; your house burning down; accidentally killing someone. Not surprisingly, buying the wrong car is not high on this list. He wonders what sort of an impostor he is lying here trembling, taking up so much space. Francis sees the sun come up through an east window. He has an almost mystical experience watching the watery light seep into the room. Not far from here, he held Elizabeth, unwashed and unnamed, a little purple bundle just born. The same sun rose through a similar hospital window back then, bars and all. Tears trickle down each side of his face into his ears. Francis believed that the three of them — he, Ava, and Elizabeth — were taking part in a miracle that night. He still believes it, though he is not religious. Perhaps he should be. It seems to help others, other cultures. Francis is sure no Thai would ever get themselves into the mess he is in. They seem more adept at accepting what life throws at them. A brief smile transforms Francis’s

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face as he remembers watching Nikkon and Burm take two calves from their enraged mothers. It was like watching an amateur rodeo. Nikkon and Burm climbed a gate into the paddock where the cows stood like a pair of vigilantes, shielding their offspring. The men then tore around the enclosure yelling and waving their arms in the air like lunatics, before grabbing a calf each and running for the fence, and their uninsured lives. Though this is not quite how Francis would have advised them to do it, he couldn’t help but admire their fearless approach. Both men would cheerfully undertake anything Francis asked them to do. And they didn’t work themselves into a lather worrying beforehand. They would just do it, and then at night they would return alone to their separate, empty houses. It couldn’t be easy, but somehow, something, some belief system, kept them going. In the morning, the patients are locked out of their rooms. They eat breakfast together downstairs. For the first two days, Francis paces the floor, still watching through a window, and focusing his mind on empty space. When that fails, he imagines shimmery letters of the alphabet appearing and disappearing, one after the other, in his head. He does this to stop himself thinking, and it works, sometimes. When Ava arrives they walk some more in the garden, which, if circumstances were different, if Ava walked a little slower, could be quite romantic. The grounds are well kept

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and paths meander in different directions. There are seats and attractive arbours, but Ava has the idea that exercise and perspiration will more quickly remove the drugs from Francis’s body. Francis could tell her he has been on the move since breakfast, but he doesn’t want to alarm her. On the third day, when the fog is lifting in his brain and he is less energised, Francis takes notice of his fellow inmates. A number of very thin young women have tubes up their noses. Francis thinks they are anorexic, another of life’s calamities. These women sit huddled together under blankets, though it is not cold. A man tells Francis he hopes to be going home soon and another man interrupts. ‘He’s said that before and look at him, look at all of us, we’re still here.’ He breaks into a fit of laughter that nearly chokes him. Francis watches as the man changes colour. Then the police arrive with a younger man, a teenager, in handcuffs, who is yelling, ‘You didn’t let me get my toothbrush, you mongrels.’ This prompts a patient wearing a badge that says ‘Hi! I’m Helen’ to go over and offer the use of some of her things. The boy tells her to piss off. The next incident is the arrival of a middle-aged woman, who is also escorted in by the police, though not in handcuffs. She has a wispy beard and her gripe seems to be that she has left a casserole on the back seat of her car at home, and she’d like to know who is going to rescue it. She

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has a toothbrush, as she carries an extra in her purse, but no change of clothes. The badge-wearing Helen tries again and pushes a plastic bag at the casserole woman, who opens it and looks inside like she is peering into a sample bag at the show. She then looks at Helen and smiles before she is led away, holding the bag tightly against her chest. Francis does not see any of these people again. He is encouraged by Trish, the visiting social worker, to sign up for the Christmas play though it is not yet November (will he have to come back?) and he learns how to play the party game Celebrity Heads. He is Slim Dusty. He will remember this game for future group meetings. ‘It’s a good ice-breaker,’ he tells Ava when she visits. Ava smiles, though she looks tired. ‘Have you spoken to anyone?’ she asks. ‘No. Apart from that woman on the first night, who was really only booking me in, no one seems particularly concerned. Mostly the doctors play computer games while everyone, except me, sits around waiting for their medication to work. I can’t think what would be worth saying anyway when I look at the other people here. No one could possibly be getting better. They seem to come for a while, then go home for a bit, before returning again. Like boarding school. It’s not the same as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest though. It would be interesting if it was,’ Francis says. It’s more like bad TV.

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He tells Ava about the staff. ‘They wear normal clothes to put you at your ease, but I find myself wondering how much is the correct amount of pool to play. I tried to make conversation with the occupational therapist. I thought we might know some of the same people from uni. It took me a while to realise she didn’t want to talk to me if I didn’t need her professionally.’ Ava looks at her lap, at her nails, bitten and bloody. This all sounds hopeless. She has the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach that maybe Francis will be one of those people who keep returning. She is angry at the doctor for putting them in this position. His doesn’t seem to feel responsible for any of it. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Francis says. ‘Perhaps we should have another baby. Then we’d really know we’re alive.’ Ava pats Francis’s hand the way her mother used to pat her own when she was tucked up in bed sick, little arms resting on the quilt. ‘I’ve got to be back before school finishes.’ ‘How’s Lizzy going?’ Francis asks. ‘She’s fine. She keeps taking her shoes off before she enters the classroom and can’t understand why the other kids don’t.’ ‘What did you tell her? About me?’ ‘She knows you’re here. What it’s all about. But I told her not to tell anyone. I’ll bring her with me when we take you home.’

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Another round of medication and those due for shock therapy are wheeled away while the rest attend a group meeting held in the common room. A nominated patient leads the discussion. The young anorexic women crawl right under their blankets and disappear. Francis asks about the activities listed on the whiteboard at one end of the room. There are different counselling opportunities and courses listed: pottery, macramé and card making. Francis could make a sympathy card for Ava, a get well card for himself. The chairperson turns to the whiteboard, takes off his glasses to study it. ‘You must be new,’ he says. ‘No one ever asks about that board.’ ‘So I can’t do macramé, then?’ Francis asks. ‘Wouldn’t think so,’ the chairperson replies. There is little other discussion. On his last day, when the effect of the antidepressant has worn off, Francis goes for a guided walk, nurses strategically placed front and back, around the hospital grounds, out the gate, and along into town. He feels like a convict in a road gang. He overhears a conversation between two women. One is describing a garden she had, or has: is she a nurse or a patient? The lettuces are magnificent, the zucchinis and broccoli likewise. ‘And the butterflies, you wouldn’t believe how many different coloured butterflies come to my garden,’ she says.

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Francis finds himself wishing for a garden like that, wishing he could make things grow, that he had the ability to create beautiful things. But I can, he thinks. I will. In such a garden Francis pictures himself in worn trousers held up with string. He tries to peer more deeply into his mind to see what type of plants he is growing. Flowers or vegetables? He remembers a Hindu proverb that Ava copied out in red felt pen and stuck on the wall of their first house: ‘If you have two coats give one to the poor and sell the other to buy hyacinths to feed the soul.’ It could be that easy. Suddenly, the disturbing thought enters Francis’s head that someone he knows might see him shuffling along here in broad daylight, surrounded by guards and mental patients. He used to live and work in this town not that long ago. He knows a lot of people. Why did Ava pick Toowoomba? Francis’s first reaction is to make a run for it, but that would be an obvious mistake. Instead, he turns his face from the street and sighs with relief when they enter a small private art gallery. The proprietor looks wary, as if patients have visited from the hospital before and it was not a pleasant experience. ‘Don’t worry,’ Francis tells him, ‘we won’t poke your paintings.’ The next day Francis leaves the acute psychiatric care unit with a new hospital story to tell, to entertain people

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with, like his hepatitis story. But he will not tell it. As far as anyone knows, he, Ava and Elizabeth have gone to the Gold Coast for a holiday. ‘So many holidays,’ Penny and Ed say to Caroline and Owen as they briefly exchange news in the personal hygiene aisle of their supermarket. ‘Haven’t they just returned from a two-year-long one? Some people have all the luck.’ Nikkon

It was there all the time, tucked away in some dark corner of his brain, partially obscured by doctrine and reason, and when Nikkon recognises it for what it is, he feels more alive than he has for a long time. Now he just has to figure out the details. His father’s friend waited for his children to go to school. For his wife to go to the market and for his mother-in-law to go downstairs. And then he shot himself in the head. A science teacher hanged himself from a beam in a classroom with a piece of nylon rope. Others, Nikkon has heard, crashed into trees, drowned themselves in dams or drank poison. Nikkon prefers the last option and, as if already preparing himself for this moment, has made a hobby of reading the back of insecticide bottles and

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the information sheets Khun Francis handed out before taking them on his workplace dangers tour. With its impressive skull and crossbones, Lannate — used for killing aphids — seems a likely choice. According to the literature, when ingested, Lannate targets the eyes, the respiratory system, the central nervous system, the cardiovascular system, the liver, the kidneys and the blood. Nikkon can’t think what would be left after that, especially of an aphid, and he takes an almost full bottle of it from the horticulture shed. He spends his last day sitting on a fence post watching the Brahmans feed. He writes while he watches. Dear Paw and Maa, Do not worry. As you know I have not been a very good person. Not really, not like Kanjana, who never caused any trouble. Please forgive me for this, and see that Lukett and Raak are OK. Give my love to Kanjana, and her family. Take care of yourselves, and I hope life is good for you. Love, Nikkon. Nikkon folds the piece of paper and places it in his shirt pocket. He writes another letter to Burm.

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Dear Burm, I am sorry I am not here to meet you, but I have killed myself by the funeral pyre. Please make sure someone is with Lukett when she finds out. I know she and Raak will be taken care of. Don’t go alone to find my body. Thank you. You are a good friend. Nikkon. PS This is all the money I have. Please give it to Lukett.

Nikkon folds this letter and puts it and a handful of notes into an envelope. He writes ‘BURM’ on the front. After work, Nikkon drops in to have a drink with Burm at the pigpen. Nikkon invites him over to play checkers. ‘Come at seven. I will be home by then. I’ve got a few things to do first.’ ‘Good. I’ll bring the rest of this,’ Burm says, holding up a half-full bottle of Mekong whisky. ‘See you then.’ Nikkon rides off. ‘You dirty bastard scumbag, Burm,’ he says under his breath. ‘I will miss you.’ Nikkon pins the envelope for Burm to his front door. He takes a quick look around before he slips a bag over his shoulder and rides to the funeral pyre

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located in the middle of a large tract of vacant land. It is so quiet, so unreal, and Nikkon feels wired, as if all his senses are desperate to experience something one last time. There is little chance of being disturbed. No one visits this place unless they have to. It is full of ghosts, but Nikkon is unafraid. He rests his motorbike under one of the few trees beside a heap of logs waiting to be fuel for a fire, and he spreads out the beautiful piece of purple material that he always felt, from the moment he bought it from the old man by the river, was destined for greatness. Rows of stars woven in gold thread glisten around the edges, and Nikkon takes time to smooth out the creases. He stands and looks at the cloth, at the contrast between it and the stubby grass, the bleached earth. Nikkon crawls onto it carefully so that his feet initially do not make contact with it. He arranges himself cross-legged in the middle and looks at the pyre before he turns his eyes away. He feels the warmth of the ground as it penetrates the material and he wills it to fill him with peace. He unscrews the plastic lid of the Lannate bottle and then does it up again as if he is practising. He watches the hand that is screwing and unscrewing the lid. It is such a

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pity. It is a fine hand. Nikkon looks at it as if it is detached from him and he has come across it in a forest like a spectacular blue mushroom, or a magenta bird. The hand is so full of life. He traces the vein that forks out across the back of it and then looks at his wrist, thin and pale underneath. He wishes it did not have to be this way, but like his father says, having choices is good fortune. He is aware that his father will view what he is about to do as destruction, as waste. He will be angry. But for Nikkon there is no doubt. His own conviction, that not doing it would be to live a lie, is enough. He unscrews the lid a final time and pours a little liquid into a white tin cup. The smell is not pleasant. Like sulphur. He leans back and looks at the moon, already visible, though it is not late. The moon is orange, large and luminous. And Nikkon drinks the poison down. There is no waiting. No second thoughts. No lounging around contemplating his action, his past good deeds. Instead, Nikkon’s body goes into damage control. It cramps, convulses, salivates, vomits, struggles to breathe, twitches, urinates, defecates, and then, battle weary and spent, it shuts down. A lifetime ago, it took Nikkon 23 hours to

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enter the world, and now it takes mere minutes to leave it. Curled in foetal position, his milky eyes half open, his tongue protruding slightly and making him look like a poor impression of himself, Nikkon is dead.

14

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he story goes something like this: I am a bunny. My name is Nicholas. I live in a hollow tree. In the spring, I like to pick flowers and chase butterflies. In the summer, I lie in the sun and watch the birds and the frogs in the pond. When it rains, I keep dry under a toadstool blowing dandelion seeds into the air. In autumn, I like to watch the animals getting ready for the winter. And, when the winter comes, I curl up in my hollow tree and dream about spring. Francis has been reading this story to Elizabeth since she was born. The book has thick cardboard pages so little children cannot tear them. Francis’s copy has mangled corners and puncture wounds where Elizabeth sharpened her teeth as a baby. Nicholas the bunny is cute. He wears the same smile throughout the book, except for when he blows the dandelions. Then he has an O-shaped mouth. Occasionally,

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a couple of little teeth and a little pink tongue are visible. Francis knows these pictures like the back of his hand. He has imagined himself relaxing on several of the book’s pages. At times, he has wished that entering a book fell within the realms of possibility. Nicholas wears the same clothes through spring, summer and autumn — a blue long-sleeved shirt under red button-up overalls. In winter, a yellow coat is added as well as knitted mittens and a beanie. When dreaming about spring, he curls up under a rug and his clothes hang on a nearby handy nail. The mittens and beanie are nowhere to be seen. Also nowhere to be seen are brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Someone to tuck him in for the winter and bring glasses of water when he calls for them at night. In the expanded version that Francis makes up, if he has time, all of these secondary characters are featured. Sometimes Francis substitutes Elizabeth’s name for Nicholas’s. ‘I am a bunny. My name is Elizabeth. I am a Lizzy bunny. Sometimes a busy bunny.’ Here, for some reason, Francis pictures a blonde Playboy bunny, with a big fluffy tail, fish-net stockings and lots of cleavage. She is selling cigarettes. When this happens, he makes sure he switches straight back to the Disney Channel in his head. ‘I have a room all to myself,’ he pretends to read. ‘I have two doting parents. I sometimes throw tantrums when I don’t get my own way.’

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At other times, Francis puts in Ava’s name to make Elizabeth laugh. ‘I am a bunny. My name is Ava. Throughout the year, come rain or come shine, I boss the big papa rabbit about. The big papa rabbit slaves away at work, day in and day out, and when he gets home, at a time when the sun has begun to sink into the horizon, he wants his slippers and pipe, his paper and a stiff drink, not a lecture, not the third degree, not a cold dinner. Is this too much to ask?’ Nicholas, the real rabbit, is self-sufficient and in the peak of health. There is nothing for him to fear, no foxes or dingoes to bite him, no cars to dazzle him with their headlights then squash him, no calicivirus or poachers, and no pet shop owners prowling, just off the page, nets in hand. Last night, Elizabeth tucked her father into the elaborately carved silky oak bed they inherited from Aunt Dorothy and began to read I am a Bunny to him. Her little finger slid along underneath the words as she read. While Francis listened, it occurred to him that his wish had almost come true. His life was like Nicholas’s, though with less colour and only a touch more action. I am a man, Francis thinks. My name is Francis. I live … Let me see. I live in a country, more like a wasteland, a desert, something out of Mad Max, in a house devoid of style. I allowed myself to be nearly driven mental by something so stupid I cannot bring myself to think about it and I have one smallish daughter and a wife, who is sticking by me for now, but I have not

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met any interesting people since I returned from Thailand. I have not had one interesting conversation in nearly a year, and I’m buggered if I know why. But were the conversations in Thailand that interesting? Or, for that matter, was life that interesting? Francis gives this some thought. Listening to Radio Australia for the few minutes that they could pick it up was interesting (Ivan Milat, the slaughter of the Hutus, was big news), as was catching a lift on Saturday morning with the man who took the milk into the city. They did this once a month sitting squashed into the back of a ute with a large metal, unsecured and lethal milk can, which Francis found himself hugging to keep under control. They would have breakfast at a restaurant overrun with backpackers and the conversations they heard there were in French and German. The restaurant was airconditioned, clean, and the menus were in English. A fight broke out once on the footpath across the road from the restaurant. A group of Thai men was kicking the shit out of another man, who lay on the ground. Ava said, ‘Do something, quick’, and pushed Francis in the direction of the door. But what could he do? There were half a dozen of them, all pissed, and no one else was making a move to help. Ava seemed to think Francis just had to go out and shoo them away like dogs, or flies. She didn’t seem to consider that he could get himself killed. Ava refused to eat her pancakes then and wouldn’t talk for the rest of the

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morning, except to say, when the victim dragged himself to his feet and limped off, ‘See! He’s really hurt’, in a tone that implied it was Francis’s fault. The night after this incident there was a knock at the door of their house. It was late and Francis opened it to find a man with a shotgun standing there. The man pointed the gun first at Francis and then out into the darkness towards a nearby forest. They had been warned about this sort of break and enter thing; though neither breaking nor entering had come into the equation yet. Francis began to think on his feet. Slamming and locking the door was out because, firstly, the door didn’t lock and, secondly, the noise would wake Ava and Elizabeth, who would then also be in danger. Francis had little choice but to follow orders and hope an opportunity arose for him to wrestle the gun from the man. Francis walked in front. He could almost feel the barrel of the gun pressing into his spine. Alert and full of adrenalin, not to mention testosterone, he headed for a copse of trees where a small bicycle was lying. Francis focused on the bike, taking in its shape and colour, as if it were the last thing he was going to see. When they got closer, he realised it was Elizabeth’s bike, which made the moment more poignant. Francis could picture Elizabeth trying to ride it, falling off, getting back on, determined, and he turned to the man, who kept gesturing towards the bicycle — if it were a car, Francis might think he was meant to get in. Francis then saw the

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uniform that the man was wearing, dark blue like a policeman’s. When he stopped playing cops and robbers, he realised that the man, a security guard, was trying to tell him that the bike would be stolen if it stayed out all night. Francis, shaking like a leaf, and honking like a goose, wheeled the bike back home. When he relayed this story to Ava in bed that night she couldn’t stop laughing. Then for the next week she would shove hairbrushes, the handle of the duster and the tongs into his back when he least expected it. ‘Stick ‘em up and don’t turn around,’ she’d hiss before cracking up again. It has been a long time since Francis made Ava laugh like that. It has been a long time since he himself has laughed. Francis knows that if Ava heard him going on like this she would say, Stop, and get scared that he was starting to dwell again, that he was setting himself on a course that would see him back in hospital. Though, on the other hand, it is just as possible she would pretend to play a violin, or begin describing the horror the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda faced. While Elizabeth is reading, Francis draws her attention to a few things on a summer page. Not the one where Nicholas admires the frogs in the pond or shelters under a large toadstool, but the one where he lies in the sun. Nicholas is on a hill. He has one arm behind his furry head and one leg bent at the knee with the other casually crossed

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over it. Two birds are perched on the same fragile-looking twig while another hovers in the sky. It is this bird that captures Francis’s attention. He has never noticed before that it is in swoop mode. It looks poised to peck Nicholas, which would surely wipe the smile off his face. Elizabeth goes to turn the page but Francis stops her. ‘Hang on a tick. I want to look at something,’ he says. There is a raised patch of ground beside one of Nicholas’s arms. Francis holds the book up close to his face. ‘What are you doing?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘Pass me my glasses. I’ve discovered something,’ he says. ‘You’ve got them on,’ she says. ‘So I have,’ Francis says, adjusting them. ‘See that bump? Have you ever seen it before, Lizzy?’ he asks. ‘Course I have. It’s always been there. It’s the same book.’ ‘What do you think it is?’ ‘It looks like a rock,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Probably it’s a mistake,’ she adds, sounding unsure. ‘Like a slip of the brush you mean? But what if it isn’t? There’re no other mistakes. What if they meant to put that lump there, and I never noticed it before?’ ‘That wouldn’t matter, would it?’ ‘Well, that depends what’s under the lump. Do you know what’s under it?’

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Elizabeth turns the page to where the frogs are jumping but it wouldn’t be them. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Well, I think I do. It’s a beetle, and I believe his name is Bertie. Do you want to hear about Bertie Beetle?’ ‘Can we finish this first?’ ‘No, because I’m getting a little tired of Nicholas. He’s a bit of a goody-two-shoes, don’t you think?’ Elizabeth stares at Francis. She holds the book, but has allowed it to close with her finger inside marking the place. She doesn’t answer. ‘Lizzy,’ Francis begins, ‘remember in Thailand how some of the people were poor? Poorer than us? Not like Nicholas?’ Elizabeth was going to say she does remember until her father mentioned Nicholas who is, after all, a rabbit and not a person. He’s not even a real rabbit. ‘What?’ she says, instead. ‘Well, people aren’t all like us, are they? You are lucky, really. I mean, really, really lucky. You don’t have to work and you have enough food and clothing and parents. But that’s the luck of your birth, isn’t it? You didn’t earn that luck. You didn’t pick who you were going to live with. But people act as if they deserve what they’ve got. Don’t do that, will you?’ Elizabeth has large blue eyes like her father. They are staring now with a glaze that could be tears.

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‘I’m sorry for going on, Liz. You’re too little to understand.’ ‘I’m not little,’ she says. ‘I can read.’ She blinks and opens the book again. Rubs one eye with her palm. ‘Hang on. I’m still going to tell you about Bert,’ Francis says, clearing his throat. ‘I am a beetle,’ he says. ‘I’ll be really quick, okay? I am a beetle. My name is Bert, or Bertie, if you’re my friend. I live underground and the mound you can barely see, yes point to it, Lizzy, so I know you have the right one, good girl, this mound is where I hide. Spring is a dangerous time. Baby animals are born, eggs hatch, and hatchlings need to be fed. Birds with sharp beaks peck at the ground, peck, peck, peck, digging for worms and beetles. As for summer, well, I don’t know about summer, the sun doesn’t reach me here and I am blind and spend all of my time searching for food. Autumn and winter see me move deeper and deeper down. I have never known another like me. I am invisible and foreign. When I move the earth with my snout I cough up black muck from my lungs where tiny cancers have begun to attach themselves like barnacles to a ship. My fate is to be eaten by the swooping bird if I ever break through to the sunshine. Life is not fair.’ Elizabeth keeps her eyes on her father’s face to see if there is more. When it becomes apparent that there isn’t, she flattens the book out, rearranges her legs and says, ‘Now it’s

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my turn, Daddy. Listen. And I like to watch the frogs in the pond. When it rains, I keep dry under a toadstool. Can you get toadstools that big, Daddy? Big enough for a rabbit to stand under?’ she asks. ‘In books you can get whatever you want, darling.’ ‘But not in real life,’ Elizabeth says. ‘No, unfortunately, not in real life.’ Later, Francis goes into the kitchen. He makes Ava jump when he speaks. ‘Do you know what’s missing in our life?’ he says. ‘It’s danger. It’s a swooping bird. Everything is too cosy.’ Ava looks at Francis. If she remembers correctly, at dinner it was green vegetables that were missing, now it is a swooping bird. ‘I thought it was a house and a dog,’ she says, turning a page of the paper she is reading. ‘We’re too cautious,’ he says. ‘We need to take some risks and to hell with the consequences.’ ‘Francis, you can’t cope with too much protein. I have enough complications in my life without adding to them. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough that one of us is dying,’ Ava says. ‘Can you wait for that?’ Francis ignores her. He is not talking about lion taming, or the French Foreign Legion. He is talking about doing things, making marks, being unafraid. He thinks of writing a list detailing the steps he could follow to achieve this, but list-making is exactly the sort of cautious activity he

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wants to avoid. Gerry Adams wouldn’t make a list, would he? Pick up bulletproof vest, organise peace talks, write a book. Xanana Gusmao wouldn’t make a list: get out of jail, enter/exit presidential race, lunch with Ramos. No, they wouldn’t, and so neither will I, Francis decides, ducking ever so slightly as an imaginary bird swoops down, landing gear fully extended, and takes up residence on his shoulder.

15

I

t is Ava’s job to feed the chooks. To get to them she dons a pair of gumboots, traipses across a paddock of spear grass, circumnavigating the Haunted House, and climbs through two barbed-wire fences. The boots protect against grass spikes and snakes. They are Francis’s, and too big, and Ava’s feet move back and forth in them like she is cross-country skiing. They cause problems when she is trying to climb through the fences, particularly on the way back when she has eggs to deal with. Two border collies, Jody and Weiser, keep Ava company and they jump through the grass, now here, now there, like kangaroos. Ava imagines that in the old days she would have sold the eggs for pin money and would have bought unnecessary items such as pretty ribbons, embroidery cotton and paper lampshades. The border collies belonged originally to Elaine and Neville. When they moved from their house on acreage to

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an inner city house in West End, the dogs went into decline. They would not eat, showed no interest in going for a walk and spent their time instead moping around under the house letting out the occasional howl. Ava tells Elaine that she would have done the same thing if they had made her move to West End, and she suggests the dogs come to live on the farm. Jody and Weiser are good for Francis, who takes them jogging and says he has never felt better, and for Ava, who hates jogging, but enjoys having someone to talk to. Ava has had exactly one incidental visitor since moving here (the Jehovah’s Witnesses have yet to find her) and that was an odd little man, who was looking for Harrison’s Farm. He knocked at the back door and when Ava opened it he was standing there in a Bundaberg Rum cap and big glasses. He was shorter than Ava, about 80 years old, and, to complement the cap, he was wearing a Bridge to Bay marathon T-shirt tucked into synthetic trousers that strained around his stomach. He had a pair of grey runners with velcro fastenings on his feet. It took no time for all of this to register with Ava, who listened as the man said, speaking softly and hesitantly, ‘Sorry to interrupt you. I hope I haven’t given you a fright knocking like that, but you don’t seem to have a front entrance. My name is Augie Bennett, by the way.’ With this he did a little nod, a little bow with his head, which must have reminded him that he still had his cap on. He whipped it off, revealing thick jet-black hair.

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Ava said, ‘Not at all, come in’, but the old man didn’t move. ‘No, thank you, no. My friend’s in the car. I don’t drive myself, so I must hurry. We seem to have got lost. I’m on the mail run now, you see. I used to have to get someone to get the mail for me in town, but not any more, and well, I don’t have a letterbox.’ Ava wondered, not unreasonably, where all this was heading. At first, she thinks that Australia Post has employed Augie to deliver the mail, despite his great age and inability to drive. ‘I recall seeing letterboxes for sale on a footpath around here,’ Augie adds apologetically. ‘They were lined up on a fence. I could get one from the hardware I know, that’s what my friend tells me, but I’ve always admired the ones that look like little houses.’ A lightbulb comes on in Ava’s head, an exclamation mark. ‘I know where you mean,’ she says, pleased to be able to help. ‘It’s not far from here, Mr Bennett. You’re hardly lost at all.’ ‘Augie, Augie. Call me Augie, please.’ ‘Okay,’ Ava agrees. ‘Follow this road, and when you get to the end there is a bend. Directly across the bend is Harrison’s Farm, and that’s where the letterboxes are. I drive past them every day on the way to my daughter’s school.’

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Augie watches Ava closely, as if English is his second language. Ava asks if she should talk to his driver. ‘No, no,’ he says and turns towards the stairs, his lips moving, repeating what he has been told. He grips the railing and rests both feet on each step as he goes down. There are pot plants near the bottom, and Ava watches, hoping he will successfully navigate them. She would like to run ahead and move them, but feels this might cause unnecessary alarm. Later, when Ava tells Francis about him, she is annoyed that she can’t remember his first name. Teddie keeps coming to mind, but she knows it’s not that. She hopes he got his letterbox, and takes particular note when she next drives past Harrison’s to see if any are missing. Again though, she can’t remember how many were there before. Ava likes the idea of being a farmer’s wife, of keeping dogs and chooks. The chooks are also hand-me-downs, having been left behind by the previous tenants. There are seven of them in a henhouse large enough to keep 50 comfortably, with good ventilation and light, and roosts sturdy enough to hold an elephant. The chooks have their own fenced yard with pepperina and peach trees and good views, yet they insist on lurking in the dark corners of their house as if trying to blend in with the woodwork. Ava wonders at this timidity, at this lack of a pecking order. There is a row of nesting boxes along one wall but they cram

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together in the same one as if they know there is safety in numbers. Francis says they are just quiet. He calls them ‘the girls’. ‘How are the girls today?’ he’ll ask. Or, if they haven’t laid any eggs, he’ll say, ‘The girls are being lazy again, Elizabeth. Off with their heads.’ Ava wonders if it is freedom they want. To sleep in trees and be torn apart by foxes. She sits on the second-lowest roost as she thinks this. The dogs run around under the trees snapping at flies. The chooks eat their mash. The dogs seem happy; the chooks, unhappy. ‘Unfortunately,’ Ava says out loud, though she is alone, ‘I know it is not possible to be good and happy, only good and unhappy. You see, if you are good, you will notice the predicament of the rest of the world, which will, in turn, make you unhappy. I’m not sure if this translates to the animal world.’ She looks at the chooks, ‘You’re probably not depressed because you know about factory farming,’ she says. ‘And you dogs, who knows what makes you so happy?’ ‘And me. Well, I’m going mad,’ Ava says, and slides off the roost. She props the door of the henhouse open with a rock so that the chooks can move in and out at their leisure, should they ever muster up the courage to do so. When Ava studied history she was interested in the everyday clutter of people’s lives: what they wore, the type of utensils they used, the mats they stood on, et cetera. This interest was never more obvious than when a friend

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described the escape of his mother from Afghanistan to Pakistan and added, as an afterthought, that all she managed to take with her was a cooking pot. Ava badly wanted to be interested in the mother, in her journey from Kabul to Islamabad, the dangers she faced, but her mind kept returning to that pot. Was it black? Was it big? With a handle? What was it used for? Did she still have it? Why a cooking pot? Apparently, the old lady didn’t own a suitcase and had intended to fill the pot with other possessions but time ran out. Ava knows this interest is because it is far easier to think about a pot that can make no demands than it is to think about a terrified old lady who represents a million or more just like her. These others might not have escaped yet, or could already be mid-flight, tiptoeing through minefields, burqas flapping. Either way, they need help. With history, with the past, it is easier. No one can expect Ava to do anything about World War II; for that it is too late. By the same token, Ava would prefer it if she could say, ‘It was great, wasn’t it, Francis, when we had chooks? Remember them? Those silly girls who kept us in eggs for years.’ There would be nothing to worry about, Ava is convinced, if all of life could be lived in the past tense. At home alone on weekdays, Ava watches the Rikki Lake Show. Rikki Lake is another strange phenomenon that reared its ugly head while Ava and Francis were away. Today,

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while Ava watches, she writes a list of things she needs to organise for an afternoon tea she has somehow been roped into. It is to be at her house with their old friends. Rikki’s show is about family reunions and tears are flooding the set as more and more large Americans are being reunited with carbon copies of themselves. One could get the impression from Rikki that she is personally responsible for cheering up the whole world. The newsbreak, however, tells Ava that in Sudan an 18-year-old boy, a mere black skeleton, has managed to stagger into a food camp for children. War is raging all around — where the hell is Rikki — and the boy is near death, yet he still feels the need to point to his concave stomach to assure the doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières that despite being over the age limit he does indeed need help. They motion for him to sit in the searing heat with a group of smaller children, and he does so with a smile. If Ava were the woman who escaped from Kabul she would weep and scream, preferably in the street, in sympathy with the starving boy. Instead, she bites her nails and looks at the list she is making. So far she has come up with scones, with hommus, with cheese, and corn chips. The world is hurtling towards disaster at an unprecedented pace and Rikki Lake, despite what she would have us believe, and her emotional families, are doing nothing about it. Ava is doing nothing. She should, at the very least, put her hand

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through the television screen and bring the Sudanese boy out, should tuck him into a spare bed and set up a fluid drip. But, thinks Ava, I am not moving. I am thinking about an afternoon tea I don’t want to have, sitting on a couch putting the finishing touches on the letter s. Look at me, I am not getting up. The Rikki Lake Show draws to a close. Rikki looks into the camera in a meaningful way, and says something that meets with much approval. The guests all shake her hand and say goodbye. The audience leaps to its feet and begins to dance. Ava remains seated. She is suspicious that after the initial emotionalism, the heart thumping and backslapping, there will be recriminations and accusations. These hostilities will take place out back, on the plane home, on the telephone, at Christmas and Easter, in memoirs, documentaries and novels. They will continue for years, popping up unexpectedly like guerrilla warfare. Ava dismisses the Rikki Lake Show from her mind, but the Sudanese boy is not so easily forgotten. Despite her lack of action, he has managed to sneak up onto Ava’s back where he remains, arms wound round her neck, holding on tight. Without speaking, he is able to convey how pointless are the things that Ava does. Dusting, for instance, and bed making, drying the dishes, and washing the floor, jobs Ava completes without fail, every single day.

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The first week, when Ava and the boy go shopping together, he eyes each item with a combination of suspicion and desire. Under such a gaze, Ava cannot bring herself to buy toilet spray, or Exit Mould, or Ajax, or ice-cream, or cordial, or instant noodles, or bottled spaghetti sauce, or tomato sauce, or tissues. She cannot buy them the week after, or the week after that. In fact, they remain taboo until the boy begins to fade, until his grip round her neck weakens, and he becomes no more influential than a tickle in Ava’s throat, or a cobweb on her skin. No matter how distressing or important a thing is, it will fade eventually. Ava finds this newspaper under a piece of old lino in the Haunted House. She and Elizabeth were taking bits of furniture there — the baby cot and highchair. On November 20, 1934, The Courier Mail reported, under the heading of ‘Ipswich’, Miss A. Bourke of Waghorn Street, and Miss Handley of Murphy’s Creek, have returned from several weeks holiday in Melbourne. Mr and Mrs P. J. Keenan are spending a holiday in Yangan. Mr A. Wright and Miss Mabel Wright, who have been spending a holiday at Southport, returned to Tivoli today. Mrs Wright and Misses Connie, Sheila and Stella Wright will remain a few weeks longer. Mrs F. Hefferman is spending a holiday at The Ripples, Surfers Paradise. Miss T. Hasenkamp is her guest. Mrs T. J. Finimore, sen., has returned to her home in Thorn Street, after four months’ holiday in Brisbane as a guest of her sister, Mrs Evans.

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‘Is this where we’re going to put the next baby?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘No, of course not. If we have another one we’ll just move it all back,’ Ava tells her. There is also an old mattress, which the dogs have claimed for themselves, and a bookcase. Ava has been toying with the idea of doing an education degree so she can be more useful, and if she does decide to study, she plans to put her desk in this house. She will stand it against the wall where Elizabeth has painted her idea of heaven: a lemon tree, a swing and some really green grass. Ava has done everything she can be bothered doing to their other house. ‘Its bones are rotten,’ she tells Francis. ‘A house needs to have good bones to begin with, and this one doesn’t.’ So now she has turned her attention to the Haunted House. The lino is to be the first job, but as Ava has to read each tattered page, originally placed underneath to keep out drafts, the progress is slow. Ava can’t help but wish the papers today were filled with the small stories they featured in ‘34. Just that morning she read that when astronomers make contact with aliens they will do so in scientific language. ‘We cannot expect other life forms to speak English, or French, or Chinese,’ the article said. ‘We believe it is imperative to explain our genetic make-up so they can understand what it is in us that makes us more likely to lay down our lives for a brother than a cousin.’

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If Ava didn’t know better she would think they were joking. She reads the article to Elizabeth and asks, ‘What would be the first thing you would say to an alien if you saw one, Lizzy?’ Elizabeth doesn’t need to think. She says, ‘I’d ask if they were friendly. Then I’d ask if they had any children with them. Or some pets.’ ‘That sounds good to me. Do you know what I’d say? I’d have to yell, though not too loudly — I wouldn’t want to scare them — help! You’ve got to help me. I want to go home with you. This planet I’m living on is too crazy.’ Elizabeth laughs. She thinks it is a good joke. Nikkon

Lukett is putting eggs into a bowl. When her father tells her about Nikkon she clutches the eggs to her chest and runs out of the house. She throws some at the passing traffic, but stops when she sees Raak sitting on a windowsill threading a piece of string through his fingers to make a pattern. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong? Is it Paw?’ Raak asks when he sees his mother. He pushes the string up onto his wrist and begins to cry before she has answered. ‘Your father is dead, Raak. Go inside.’

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Lukett stays where she is. She crouches down, ankledeep in fine dust, and rocks to and fro. She sobs silently. There is a broken egg at her feet and Lukett stares through her tears at the red membrane in the yolk, at the blood worm, and for one mad moment she thinks that if she can somehow mend the shell and get the egg back inside, everything will be all right. The worm would branch out, grow feathers, and a chicken would hatch. But what if this is a faulty egg, not meant to last, with hairline cracks from the beginning? What then? Lukett renews her sobbing. Pornchai and Jirapun take turns holding Nikkon’s note. They unfold it, smooth it out and read it before they fold it up again. They are pleased Nikkon had the sense to tell them something. They will take the note to the funeral so others can read it, too. For Burm, the question of why is not an issue. He is amazed that Nikkon could. That he would take the risk. Burm’s own path is destined to be long and tedious and there is nothing he can see himself doing to change this. A little house has been placed beside the coffin in Pornchai’s yard, and inside the house are Nikkon’s possessions: his stove, his wok, his bowls and cups,

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spoons and forks, his mattress and blankets, his comics and books, his clothes and brush. On the stairs, a pair of battered thongs sit between two bottles. One bottle is full of cooking oil, the other fish sauce. And, inside the front door, just visible behind a red curtain, is a bag of rice. These things are for Nikkon, while he waits. People peer into the little house through the windows. They look at the objects. In the gloom, their faces are indistinct, rippling like silk in a breeze. The things are all tainted. Nobody, not a beggar, nor an insane person, would want anything that belonged to the dead. It is as if Nikkon’s whole existence has been shattered, as if his books are dead, his utensils, his clothes, and though they are clearly there it is a false thereness like the empty shell of a cicada, or a cobra skin perfectly coiled. For three days, Nikkon’s blackening, bloated body lies in a coffin on a wheeled platform protected from the blazing sun by an elaborately painted canopy. Nikkon’s connection to this body is tenuous. With time and with ceremony, it will be broken. Mourners arrive, dressed in dark blue and black. Lukett is leaning heavily on her mother and sister.

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It appears she has been given too many sedatives and is barely conscious. She is staggering and blubbering like an unhappy drunk. Nikkon’s parents have hired a Master of Ceremonies for the funeral. This man talks into the microphone as if he is practising to be an American disc jockey. He reads a list indicating the amounts of money people have donated to help Nikkon’s family. He plays scratchy music when he is not talking. Another man has been hired to videotape the event. He points his camera at each person when they arrive and films them as they line up to have their photo taken next to Nikkon’s flower-covered coffin, or beside his suicide note, which has been framed. Raak points at the coffin and tells anyone who cares to listen, ‘My Paw’s in there.’ But only some of him is. Lunch is served and 12 monks appear to attach a white rope at the front of the platform. They chant and pour water on the ground before slowly stretching the rope so as many people as possible can take hold and help pull. Those who can’t fall in behind and follow the coffin along the village streets to the funeral pyre.

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It is a beautiful, clear day, the last before the weather changes and people feel the sunshine penetrate their skin like an X-ray. When they arrive they look at the fields about them before separating, men near the pyre, women further away. The pyre is made of grey bricks. It is rectangular in shape, with an opening at one end. It is about five feet high, one and a half times the length of a coffin, and twice as wide. Unlit candles and important prayers have been tucked between the pieces of petrol-saturated wood. A magnificent trail of firecrackers hangs over one wall of the pyre, and a fuse snakes along the ground to where a monk stands flicking a lighter, giving the impression he is about to blow Nikkon up. The coffin and canopy are placed on top of the logs. The coffin teeters, causing the crowd to gasp before it settles down again. The fuse is lit and, when the fire takes hold, when it grows in size and intensity, Nikkon begins to sizzle and melt. Strange smells and black smoke billow to the sky as Nikkon’s scanty possessions are thrown onto the fire with him. Soon there is nothing of him left.

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The mourners begin the journey home as the Chinese flash-crackers erupt, piercing the silence like a hundred machine-guns firing. It is the sign. The final sign that any remaining thread has been broken and Nikkon is gone from this life forever. People will sleep with the light on to keep his ghost away. For several nights after the funeral, the tiny rural village of Toong Siow is lit up like a Bangkok brothel.

16

F

rancis has taken an interest in psychology and props himself up in bed at night to read the thick books he has borrowed from the library. He has bought a manual that explains the uses of different drugs and a medical encyclopedia, but he has yet to study these in any great depth. His own brush with insanity was the catalyst for the interest, but it is Ava who keeps the interest alive. It is the day after the afternoon tea and the postmortem of the event has begun. ‘At least they didn’t all get lost,’ Francis says. He gave each couple a map before they left. He imagines they will lose it before their next visit. ‘And the kids had a ball in the hay shed, and your scones were great, weren’t they?’ he adds. ‘I never ate any. I was too busy drinking. I’m glad no one was bitten by a snake. I did drink quite a bit. I can tell by my head. It seems to be the thing to do, though.’

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‘Everyone drank quite a bit. I’m not sure alcohol featured at afternoon teas in my mother’s day,’ Francis says. ‘No, back then they took tranquillisers, and had rest cures in hospital.’ ‘Just to get through afternoon tea?’ Francis smiles. ‘To get over afternoon tea, and having to spend time with people they don’t like. Were you there when Neville started talking about using pig body parts in transplants?’ ‘No.’ ‘He wanted to know, so he says — I think he just wanted a fight — if you were a person or a pig if you had a pig’s heart. I said, think about it, Neville. If you get an artificial leg, does that make you a robot?’ ‘Was he joking?’ ‘No, he bloody well wasn’t. Then he started on about people who ignore their healthy children to spend all their time looking after a sick one. I said I didn’t think he was the right person to comment since he doesn’t have children, doesn’t even have dogs now, and what was he suggesting, that they let the sick child die? And he said, yes.’ Ava is surprised by the quaver in her voice. Francis looks at her. ‘And Elaine had to stick her nose in and tell me that it is very difficult for the healthy children. I wouldn’t know how difficult, she says, and I started to wonder whether stupid conversations were all we were capable of having now. I mean, we haven’t seen these people for how long, and no one can say anything worth saying.’

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Ava and Francis are leaning against their brown laminated kitchen cupboards drinking coffee. Francis likes this room, despite the cupboards. Ava has put Elizabeth’s artwork on the walls, and has little collections of pastel-coloured china and enamelware on a set of open shelves. A round table, which makes up for the lack of bench space, stands in the middle of the room. Ava finishes her coffee and puts the cup on this table. ‘Well, Owen and Ed did ask me how the car was going,’ Francis ventures. ‘I managed to tell them it was fine without breaking down.’ He laughs. He wants Ava to recognise he is making a joke, to recognise that he can talk about the car now and feel completely neutral. She is too preoccupied to notice. ‘Did anyone ask about me? How I’m going? I wish someone had asked me. I would’ve loved to tell them how I really feel.’ ‘Which is?’ ‘Okay, then. I’ve been thinking about this. I feel as if a door to a room in my brain has been unlocked and now I’ve lost the key. Actually, it’s worse than that. I feel as if the door is hanging by one hinge and is about to fall off and I’ll be left to spend the rest of my life gazing into a room in my head that I never wanted to see in the first place. Does that make sense?’ ‘Well, not to me. But it might to someone else.’

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Ava keeps talking. ‘I also spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about really odd things,’ she says, ‘like Pandora’s Box, for instance. I torture myself wondering if the things that were in it — disease, famine, pestilence, fever, envy, greediness, gluttony, hatred and intolerance — see, that’s how mad I’m getting, I know the names. I want someone to tell me whether people suffering from the first four — disease, famine, pestilence and fever — also suffer from the last five? It seems to me that poor countries get the first lot of evils, and wealthy ones the second. Do you ever think about such stuff?’ ‘Not Pandora’s Box, no. But I don’t think you’re mad. You should talk to someone else. It might help,’ Francis suggests again. He wants Ava to see someone. He has many questions himself. If he could get Ava to go he’d slip in a few questions of his own for her to ask, nothing too left field, just a few things he’s wondered about. ‘I’m so angry,’ Ava says, ‘but it’s at myself. No one cares about anything. No one does anything. I don’t know what to do.’ Ava has never seen herself as a leader but if you place yourself in the follower camp you need someone to follow. Ava looks at Francis. ‘You think I should see someone. Like a doctor? What good could that do?’ ‘A psychiatrist might be able to help you understand yourself a bit better.’

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‘A psychiatrist. I thought you hated them. They were useless at the hospital.’ ‘That’s true, but a private one might be better, and you can’t say all psychiatrists are useless. Your sample size is too small.’ Francis is off on a tangent. ‘Actually, I wonder, what would you need? How many psychiatrists are there in Queensland? You’d need to speak with at least …’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Francis. If I saw anyone, I wouldn’t know what to say.’ ‘You’ve never been stuck before.’ Which is true. Ava could talk under wet cement but is fearful she is becoming boring. Last week at the post office she found herself talking to, berating really, a defenceless old woman, who had complained to no one in particular that when people say ‘How are you?’ they don’t really want to know how you are, they’re just saying that. Ava spoke up, ‘You’re right, actually. It’s really How are you full stop, not How are you question mark.’ She smiled at the woman, who looked blankly back at her. Ava was not put off and continued, ‘When people used to say How do you do, the correct response was not I’m sick as a dog or Fit as a fiddle, but, funnily enough, it was How do you do. How are you and how do you do are just ways of saying hello.

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The woman, who was looking anywhere now but at Ava, said, ‘Well, I don’t know why people ask if they don’t care. Do you?’ she directed her question to the man behind the counter, as far from Ava as possible. That Ava should have such a conversation was sad enough, that she should repeat it to Francis as if it accounted for her day was sadder still. ‘I’m sure the doctor asks the questions and you answer them. You wouldn’t be expected to run the show,’ Francis assures her. ‘I wouldn’t mind going, in a way, though it scares me that the next step might be having my fillings removed, or my irises read. I couldn’t see anyone younger than myself. I couldn’t see anyone called Josi with an i or, heaven forbid, Kylie. I know of a woman who is seeing a psychologist named Adolf. That would inspire confidence, wouldn’t it? I’m beginning to sound like Holden Caulfield, like I could hate everyone who looks like they might have played football at college, or has a silly name. Mind you, Holden is pretty silly itself, don’t you think?’ Francis hasn’t a clue who Holden Caulfield is. ‘You know, Catcher in the Rye. High school,’ Ava says. ‘Never read it. Now listen,’ Francis says, steering the conversation back on track. ‘I read an article recently about a doctor, a psychiatrist, who has been running a clinic for people, I think most of them suffer from panic attacks, but

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I imagine he takes on people with other problems. He’s attached to the university, which should give him some credibility. He seemed intelligent. Would you go to someone like that?’ ‘Ummm. I still don’t know what I’d say. I wish you could come with me. I could go once, I suppose. What’s his name?’ ‘Dr Brain. It’s Jim, I think. ‘ ‘You’re kidding,’ Ava gives Francis a shove. ‘That’s nearly as bad as Adolf,’ she says. ‘But not quite. And before you start I’ve thought of all the jokes. At least his first name isn’t Iva, or Dwayne, or begin with P. I can show you the article.’ Francis goes to the bedroom and his stash of books. The paper is folded inside Too Much Anger, Too Many Tears. He has been using it as a bookmark. Dr Brain’s clinic is in Brisbane with views of the river. Francis drives Ava to the appointment. He says he will meet her in the car park when she is finished. Ava is early and fills in time reading pamphlets about agoraphobia, social anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and, oddly enough, breast cancer. Dr Brain wanders out of his office. He is middle-aged and large, which accounts for the fact that despite the airconditioning sweat marks are visible under his arms and down the centre of his back. He has untidy hair and glasses

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that slide down his damp nose. Ava follows him back into his office, where she is offered a chair. The doctor sits opposite her, resting his stomach on his lap. As he speaks, he reads a piece of paper, like a drama script. ‘And what can I do for you?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ Ava says, cursing Francis. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. ‘Well, everything was fine until we went to live in Thailand,’ she says. ‘You didn’t like Thailand?’ Dr Brain asks, still reading, and scratching his leg. ‘No, I loved it. Well, not really loved it. It was difficult, but I would go again. My problems started when we came back. I’ve felt so unsettled since. I don’t see things the way I used to.’ Ava is hoping the doctor will give the conversation a little direction. ‘I seem to think too much now.’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ ‘No, except it’s driving me crazy. Everything seems pointless. The TV. And our friends — well, I can’t talk to them any more. And the newspaper, it’s full of rubbish. For instance, so much is happening in the world, and the letters to the editor revolve around the council’s plan to line the city streets with trees. Nobody wants trees any more. It’s like saying nobody wants children. They take up parking space, apparently — trees do, not children. People get as heated about trees as they do about refugees. I never noticed this before.’

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The doctor scribbles on his paper. ‘I don’t know what to do next. If we go away again I might feel worse when we come back.’ Dr Brain says, ‘You don’t work?’ ‘No, I look after my daughter. I can’t think about working while I’m like this.’ Ava hopes this doesn’t compel the doctor to send a social worker around to pick up Elizabeth. ‘I’m not sure this will be of benefit to you,’ he says, ‘but we do offer weekends of intensive group therapy here at the clinic.’ He gives Ava a brochure and her heart sinks. She reads that the therapy will cost 2,000 dollars and her heart sinks further. Dr Brain spends the rest of the session explaining intensive group therapy. Ava tells it like this on the drive home: ‘Apparently, they all sit in a circle and describe how they feel about spiders — or neighbours or heights or elevators or shopping centres or gay people — and, after a while, when they feel they can just about cope with it, they are shown a picture of a spider, or a blah, blah, blah, and when they’ve grown used to looking at the picture and don’t faint or perspire too much, they have a break and a stroll in the park, if they’re not agoraphobic. Next they are confronted with a plastic spider, which, when they are brave enough and have stopped hyperventilating, they hold. Various different kinds of exercises take place with this plastic model — the mind boggles

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— until on Sunday evening, ta da — this is the climax — a real live spider is dragged out. I imagine the person screams loudly and wets their pants as the spider crawls on their hand. But, rest assured, they are cured. Does it sound like a good investment?’ Francis smiles. He is sorry for Ava. ‘Hang on,’ she says. ‘I didn’t leave empty-handed. He gave me a prescription. It’s for something called beta-blockers.’ At home, Francis reads to Ava from his manual, Used to inhibit the action of adrenalin and similar compounds especially in those with high blood pressure. He takes the prescription and puts it in the bin. ‘You didn’t think of Dick Brain,’ Ava tells him. ‘You know, you said you’d covered all the jokes, about his first name. But I thought of Dick Brain as soon as I saw him. Anyway, our sample group is getting bigger, Francis. We are almost qualified to make an announcement.’ ‘Actually, it’s hard to know how big your sample size should be. It depends on how variable the population is, but how do we know that? It can be a bit of a guess,’ Francis says. ‘Well, you can stop guessing. Psychiatrists are useless. I’m better off talking to you.’ Francis is flattered. The bird on his shoulder, however, the invisible one that swoops, is not so easily duped. It digs its claws in, prodding, suggesting with its piercing toenails

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that Francis is destined for bigger things than being Ava’s confidant, her mentor, for which, realistically, few qualifications are required. Surely, the bird prods, surely (claw, claw), there is more.

17

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va is beginning to doubt Francis’s capabilities as a comforter. For instance, when she questions the point of life being so long, whether it is not better, after all, to go out in your prime like Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley, Francis enthusiastically agrees, though he backs up his argument with what he considers to be a nobler example. ‘Look at Dietrich Bonhoeffer,’ he says, and then has to explain who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is because Ava hasn’t heard of him. ‘Look at Jesus Christ, then, or Van Gogh, both dead in their thirties. Both moving on before the downhill slide.’ ‘Remind me not to come to you for counselling,’ Ava says. ‘And, don’t forget that you, Francis, are in your thirties. That I am.’ Ava finds there is no escape, ever. Her dreams have begun to trouble her. Last night, she dreamed she was in a unit at Noosa, one with a balcony and a view. Instead of

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enjoying herself on the beach, however, or in the shops on Hastings Street — where she handles as many items as she can and buys none — she spent the night watching herself pack when the holiday was over. The new tenants, arriving early, piled suitcases and plastic shopping bags full of food against the door. They peered menacingly in at Ava, who had somehow managed to allow every room to be filled with stuff. Elizabeth’s two guinea pigs could be seen climbing over and tunnelling through the rubble. The family at the door grew larger, multiplying on the step, and they kept looking at each other then down at the shopping bags, which were beginning to ooze onto the floor. Ava, in a fluster, ran to and fro achieving nothing until she woke up exhausted. The night before, she dreamed she was carrying a silky oak wardrobe from her childhood home to her present one. She was bent double with the wardrobe on her back. It was uphill work. And it is not just her dreams. In the Ipswich Mall, Ava read a sign that said, ‘Salman Rushdie here today’. The sign was outside a café. When Ava looked inside there was another sign: ‘For Easter Service Queue to the Left.’ What they really said, of course, was, ‘Salmon Rissoles here today’ and ‘For Faster Service Queue to the Left’. When Ava told Francis about them he said she probably needed glasses. ‘But why didn’t I question what someone like Rushdie, a man with a fatwa, no less, on his head, was doing

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in the Ipswich Mall? Or why I should think people might celebrate Easter in July?’ ‘Does it matter? It doesn’t matter, does it? Neither situation is worth losing sleep over.’ Ava doesn’t tell him about the dreams she has when she does sleep, that losing sleep wouldn’t hurt at all. Andrew is a trainee psychologist from Manchester. He is 23 and studying for a Masters degree at the University of Queensland. As part of his study, he sees a number of clients. Ava is one of the least difficult because she seems to expect so little. Ava has been seeing Andrew for just over three months and wonders if this is the beginning of an addiction. She found him in a brochure under ‘Student Services’ when she was looking up the different courses she could take, some day, if she ever makes a decision. She says to Francis, ‘You’ve been so busy lately, which is good.’ Francis is now the community representative on the local catchment association. He is a worthy member of the revitalisation taskforce for the region and, as well as being president of the school P and C, he belongs to the volunteer bush fire brigade. ‘In the past,’ Ava says, ‘I would have talked to a girlfriend, but since I seem to be driving them away in droves, I will pay Andrew to listen. For now.’ Francis is still a fan of thick books and manuals and propping himself up in bed, but he views this decision of

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Ava’s with relief. He no longer feels a need to slip in questions of his own. He is interested in the why and the wherefore, but not that interested. Today, Ava and Andrew are going over old ground. Ava is telling him for the second time that when she returned from Thailand all she wanted to do was hang the washing out, colour coordinating each pair of pegs, and watch Agatha Christie videos (Aunt Dorothy left her an enviable stash). ‘Then I imagined I’d be busy getting a house in order and helping out at my daughter’s school and I’ve done nothing.’ Ava has thought and thought about this. It is not as if she wanted to stay in Thailand and was dragged home kicking and screaming. She wanted to be here but has forgotten why. ‘Do you have a plan?’ is Andrew’s radically different response. Ava is sure that last time he said, ‘let’s explore why you have done nothing, and we’ll write your answers down, shall we, which I always find helpful.’ Andrew is a huge fan of writing things down. He has encouraged Ava to keep a pen and paper handy at all times so that when she is met with a problem she can write it out of her system and in so doing see what the solution is. ‘No one else need read what you write,’ he tells her and she assures him that a pen, like a finger, is now a permanent part of her structure. It takes Ava some time to realise where the present conversation is headed and it dawns on her that Andrew has

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been guilty in the past of trying to weave certain issues into their sessions. She wonders if these issues form part of his assessment and he hasn’t been able to cover them with any of his other clients. She recollects now a lengthy discussion they had about her drinking habits and drug use. When she got home she had the mad desire to pop all her cold tablets and drink everything in sight. This week the theme appears to be suicide. ‘Do I have a plan?’ Ava repeats. She wonders if a plan is a necessary step: a whiteboard and marker, a dotted trail leading to a destination marked with an X, surrounded by water, the surface broken by fins. ‘No, not really.’ She frowns slightly and focuses on the floor near Andrew’s feet. ‘Though I imagine I would crash the car,’ she says, and then remembers a story Francis told her. ‘There was a panel van found halfway up a tree a while back,’ Ava says. ‘The heads of a young man and woman were in the back while their torsos were in the front. In the newspaper it said that there were no suspicious circumstances, which seemed a little incongruous to me. But Francis said the couple had tied ropes around their necks and then the ropes to a tree. Next they revved the engine, hit the accelerator and hurtled forward at such a speed that when the ropes tightened the force was great enough to pull their heads off and topple them into the back of the car.’ Andrew shifts uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Let me assure you that this is exactly the sort of drama that does not appeal to me,’ Ava says. ‘For one thing,

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it requires too much preparation. Distances may need to be measured. It wouldn’t do to have the rope the wrong length, would it, if the tree’s hit while the rope is slack. Though are two trees really necessary? You’d need the one to tie the rope to but the other … see I’m already confused. Or if the rope snaps before the job is done, well, where would that leave me? It’d be embarrassing to be rescued and have to explain the rope around my neck like a leash. Also a location would have to be found, as well as, I imagine, an equally suicidal partner and, most difficult of all, a reliable car. Ours would stall at a crucial point. I wonder what the couple’s last words were. Hopefully not “Stop! Let me out”, while they fumbled for the door handle. I picture it being “Geronimo” or something equally as spirited.’ Andrew stares at Ava. She can tell he is having trouble deciding what to say next. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything,’ she says. He doesn’t realise that his naive optimism makes Ava want to protect him. She is impressed by Andrew’s confidence, his belief that he can in fact help, that life is controllable. He says things like, There is no reason why you should not be happy every day for the rest of your life, and such enthusiasm encourages Ava to think about trading in Francis for Andrew and his uncorrupted view of life. Andrew is a little out of his depth, but what can he do? He wants to work in a developing country. He fancies himself in Nepal and has already bought expensive hiking

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boots and taught himself useful phrases — Malai sancho chhaina (I do not feel well), Daktar bolaidinus (Please send for a doctor). But first things first. He studies Ava’s body language, which is an important first sign. She is sitting forward, on the edge of her chair, as if to make a quick getaway but that could be the chair as much as anything. They are in a room designed for children. Cartoon characters in bright colours clamber over the walls and ceiling. The chairs are low and uncomfortable. If you sit in them properly it is possible you might get stuck. Ava in turn stares at Andrew’s shirt. It is white and beneath the white is a dark shadow, a hint of fur, like a bear’s. Ava wonders what Andrew thinks about this. His top button is always done up so probably he doesn’t like it. ‘In Thailand I saw many caged bears,’ Ava says. ‘Most were outside Buddhist temples. They were gifts to the monks from poor people hoping for a better reincarnation. The cages were small and the bears unable to stand upright. They would pace back and forth on all fours rearing up on two legs only to whack their heads on the bars and be knocked back down. It was like watching a grotesque parody of a barn dance, forward two three, now back two three. The bears’ heads swivelled from side to side. Their eyes were unfocused, evidence, I thought, that a long time ago these bears had lost their minds.’ Andrew clears his throat. ‘Life is like a waiting room,’ he says, ‘in which we are all waiting for something. It could

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be death or rebirth, like your people in Thailand, maybe heaven, or annihilation or some other thing. Nirvana.’ With this last, Andrew’s face lights up as if he is pleased to be drawing their conversations together. He pauses to give Ava time to mentally catch up. ‘We have choices,’ he says. ‘We can choose to leave early,’ Andrew avoids using words such as suicide and kill, ‘we can choose to worry about what is happening, or we can choose to enjoy our time here as much as possible. Do you agree?’ The words choose and choice have registered in Ava’s brain. ‘Why is it assumed that by choosing to enjoy my time here I am responding correctly?’ she asks. ‘I neither understand nor agree. I’m seeing you because leaving early or worrying seems the only sensible way to live. Yet I don’t want that to be how Elizabeth lives. I’m confused.’ ‘But you’re not leaving early?’ Andrew says. ‘No, but I’m tempted to.’ ‘You said you wouldn’t.’ ‘Just because I say something doesn’t mean it’s true. Maybe I would, but that’s neither here nor there really. I’m saying I’m tempted to because I don’t know if I have the energy to go on and on the way I am. You know, get up, live your life, go to bed. But I would be more tempted to kill myself, in fact, would have to do it, if my life were get up, go to a great job, make lots of money, have a party, go to bed with a celebrity. Do you understand? I’m not making much sense but the whole problem is not that I am unhappy

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because I don’t have a great life, but because I do. Other people don’t and I know they don’t. The only choice for me is to choose to ignore what I know. And what I know is, that there is no choice. It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes. He had none on but to fit in and to be considered smart everyone pretended he did. Well, I refuse to pretend. Why should I be happy when others aren’t? It would be barbaric, uncivilised — I suppose those two words mean the same thing.’ She glances down at her watch. ‘Look, time must be up. I’ve got to go.’ Ava is full of regret. She has no desire to take any prisoners on her journey. ‘I’m sorry for raving on. I’ll think about what you said. Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong.’ Ava watches as Andrew scrambles to his feet. He pats her shoulder and follows her through the door. ‘I’ll see you next week, won’t I? Take care,’ he says. ‘Yes, next week,’ Ava says, knowing her addiction has passed, that there will be no next week. Waiting room, my eye, she thinks as the lift doors close. What a load of shit. Imagine trying to tell a disabled bear that life is like a waiting room. Life is like nothing. Life is a cage and no matter what colour you paint the bars or how much tulle is hung from the rafters, a cage is a cage is a cage.

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Death is unlike everything. It is unlike blackness, loneliness, emptiness. It is unlike being buried, being born, being comatose, sleeping, floating, flying, falling. It is unlike dreaming and drowning, sinking and soaring. Death is unlike a slug or a butterfly. It is unlike wetness, aridness, fallowness and coldness. Death is unlike anything. It is nothing, and nothing lasts forever.

18

Dear Andrew [Ava writes], This might surprise you a little, but I bought a calender the other day. I don’t think the buying of the calendar is the surprise, but the fact I am writing to you about it should be. It cost me two dollars at Silly Solly’s, I think, though it may have been Crazy Clark’s. Silly Solly’s, Crazy Clark’s. I can barely bring myself to write these words. I know I struggle to say them. They stick in my throat like dry Weetbix. I remember when we first came back from Thailand, we went to church with my parents in the city, and the number of people milling around there pleased me. At least I was pleased until I realised they weren’t thinking about their spiritual life, or for that matter taking the opportunity to feed pigeons in a park, but were actually heading for Wally’s Warehouse across the road. It isn’t really called

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Wally’s Warehouse, I made that up. But it was something similar. What on earth were they hoping to buy? All those people? I was going to use the calendar like other people use a birthday book. You know, put everyone’s names on their birth date so you remember to send cards? I was going to try to remember significant events in future, not just birthdays, but anniversaries, weddings and deaths, and by so doing create some form of tradition, of connectedness, in my life. Something I could hand on to Elizabeth. I was going to hang this birthday calendar with the one I am expecting to get free at the post office. There will be a picture, no doubt, of rocks and crashing waves, or worse, a group shot of grinning children with a brass band in the background. Possibly your English calendars feature thatch-roofed cottages and lots of false sunshine. Am I right? At that stage, Andrew, I was not without hope. I wrote my own name in November and Francis and Elizabeth’s in August and I was going to take the calender with me at Christmas and get everyone I saw to add their names to our own. It suddenly seemed important to make contact with a group of people who are alive and know that I am, too. I was planning to begin the New Year, as I never have.

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I also saw some red, green and white material with pictures of reindeers and bells on it. It was library day and the material was in a box on the footpath outside a shop. On impulse and full of something closely resembling good cheer, I went into the shop and bought two metres. I had the idea of making Elizabeth a dress to wear to the Christmas parties we will no doubt be invited to. I am not, however, very proficient at sewing and before I knew it Elizabeth’s dress had been reduced to a festive tablecloth. I could just about imagine sewing two straight lines though the bother of setting the machine up might rule this out — particularly if I have succumbed to the inertia brought on by the post office’s rocks and crashing waves. I went to the library next and borrowed two of Iris Murdoch’s books, The Sea, The Sea and The Green Knight. The fact that she is dead now, and won’t be writing any more, caused me to burst into tears. It was embarrassing, as you would imagine. There I was sobbing away in the public library surrounded by men and women who busily studied the shelves and the rows of books ever more closely. A law exists against drinking in a public place, but surely crying isn’t a crime. I wish you had been there. I could have picked you off the shelf where you would be sitting, cramped and uncomfortable, under P for psychologist, near N for naive. I could have taken you back to my place. Apparently, it is beneficial to meet with

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the parents of one’s pupils in their own home if you are a teacher, so I guess the same might be true of psychologists and ‘clients’. This might help you to help me. I am not sure what would happen though. My house is sadly predictable but I have a new wool rug and we could lie on that and stare at the off-white ceiling, inspecting it for clues, for signs of a future, as my mother and father do when they visit. As a child, I used to lie on my parent’s bed and stare at the light bulb imagining that a whole different world existed within its glass. I particularly remember there being a little hospital where miniature operations took place, and a playground with a bright merry-go-round. As you can see, I am experienced at ceiling gazing so I am fully qualified to lead the discussion. But Andrew, really, the truth is, the buying of the calender is just another ploy. I would look at it next year, you see, and say, it’s Caroline’s birthday today. It’s too late to send a cheap, nasty card but it’s not too late to ring her, and I’d ring and Caroline’d feel good and I’d feel good that she felt good and a day with a purpose would have passed, unlike the ones I am living now. Andrew, you must understand, you must picture me. I am in my room, at a little table with a copy of a painting by Albert Namatjira in front of me. The painting is propped up against the wall, as Francis does not want to put too many more holes in the rented plaster. I think he is afraid one more knock and

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the whole house will come down. Anyway, I sit here thinking about Elizabeth, who is at school. During the night it rained and there is water running across a floodway on the road. The floodway is between my house and the school. I drove Elizabeth this morning but when I came home there was even more water and the brakes got wet. I nearly ran into the back of a truck. We were both travelling slowly so the only danger was to my plastic bumper but I am worried that there will be more water when I go to pick her up. Enough to wash the car off the road, or to render it unstoppable so that I sail right on past the school and over the hills and on and on until I run out of petrol. Either way, Elizabeth will have no one to collect her. Francis is at a conference so I am solely responsible for our daughter’s welfare. Do I sound like I have been drinking? Well, perhaps I have, and why not? Politicians talk about mutual obligation, they talk of people doing something in return for a piddling amount of money a mouse couldn’t live on. I don’t remember signing a paper when I was born saying I would follow stupid rules made up by a person I don’t know. There is no such thing as freedom. I am not free to drink without people making assumptions about my ability as a mother. I am not free to replace the government we have with one I might really want. I am not free to take from the rich and give to the poor. I used to think,

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you know, I still do, that there should be a law stopping rich people, doctors and lawyers and those who inherit a bundle, from marrying each other. All doctors should marry typists from Ipswich, all lawyers should marry shop assistants and those who benefit through inheritance should marry those who don’t. What do you think? But I digress, back to Elizabeth and my fear of water. In between the last sentence and this I picked Elizabeth up and, surprisingly, the floodway was little more than damp, hardly enough water there to wet all four tyres. At the school I gathered together the Christmas decorations Elizabeth made, the presents she received and anything else that was hers as today is the last day. Other mothers were discussing what they plan to do on the holidays, how they will cope. It was enough to make a cat laugh. You see, I am not coping that well now and I can’t imagine the holidays will make any difference. What I want to say, Andrew, the reason I write, is to tell you that I have listened to you and I am not convinced. I feel like you have shown me glossy colour photos of food when I am starving and, in the beginning, I took these meagre offerings of yours with the same gushing gratitude I display when Elizabeth gives me a new painting to stick on the wall. But I will not do it any more. I believe I’ve got bats in the belfry and if you tell me one more time that perhaps they are not bats but are doves, or more

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interestingly, pelicans like the ones I watch flocking to our dam to have their babies, I will no longer be listening. Just because you say it is so, Andrew, doesn’t make it so, and besides, it’s my belfry and that surely gives me the edge. I have always suspected that there would be no answers, and where would I go from there? I also always suspected that when we spoke your mind was on what you would have for dinner or what time you were meeting your girlfriend and I didn’t want to hold you up. (This is maybe an area of your work you need to consider.) Anyway, Andrew, despite the calendar, the Christmas accoutrements (what an interesting word that is, French I imagine, but I’m forgetting, you probably hate the French) and the stunning books, I cannot fool myself. I cannot go on with such small symbols of a tomorrow, and a tomorrow, and a tomorrow. I am too aware. You may be able to go on, the rest of the world may be able to go on, but I cannot. Regards, Ava. Ava reads through what she has written. If she sent this to Andrew he would wonder why he was singled out, would wonder if she were in love with him. He would feel compelled to reach for a trusty textbook about lovesick patients and before you could say Jack Robinson he would

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have all the answers. But it was his idea. ‘Write your feelings down,’ he said. ‘It always works for me,’ he said. ‘You can learn a lot about yourself,’ he said. Was Ava thinking of killing herself then? Was she? ‘Am I?’ Ava asks. She remembers when her grandmother died of bone cancer. Martha sat with her and held her hand. Martha told Ava that twice Grandma seemed to pass away before her eyes flew open and she said, looking terrified, ‘I thought I died then.’ After the second time she did die. Virginia Woolf, Ava read in her Oxford Companion to English Literature, was prompted to kill herself because she could not face the prospect of another world war. And what about all of those single, middle-aged men who blow their brains out or, under stricter gun laws, hang themselves? What about them? Dying of loneliness in their forties, unable to continue existing in a half-light that can only grow dimmer. If Ava dies it will be because she no longer fits into a way of life she always believed natural. Bloom where you are planted, she read once. Bloom where you are planted. But what if you are planted in shallow soil? What if your roots are rotten or your purpose is to give other, more fragile plants a chance to flourish in your shade, and you can’t get started because you find yourself floundering in the garden unable to lift your head above sea level?

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Ava’s thoughts are random … Grandma … Virginia Woolf … herself … and Francis and Elizabeth, who, Ava imagines, will be all right leading a sad, romantic kind of life, wrapped up in each other. Francis could justify Ava’s actions, should she ever take any, to Elizabeth. He could confidently justify them to the world. ‘Look at Bonhoeffer,’ he’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, Van Gogh. Look at my wife, Ava. All dead in their thirties. All dead technically in their prime.’ Nikkon

Burm loses one of his shoes on his way home from Nikkon’s funeral. It is just his luck to direct himself into the only bog hole for miles around. People did offer him lifts, in pick-ups and on motorbikes, but Burm couldn’t even acknowledge their kindness. The numbness he is feeling paralysed his tongue. He would hardly know he was in the bog now except that it has trapped him, by degrees, first one foot then the other, and it is an effort to move. The mud is cool, and as reassuring as a pair of thick socks. The temptation is strong for Burm to lie down and let it swallow him. Not that lying down is possible; the bog hole is barely three feet across. Why couldn’t this have happened to Nikkon when he was on his way to kill himself? Burm questions. Why couldn’t something funny, like falling in the bog, have happened? Or something not funny like falling off

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his bike? Or something miraculous like finding the Lannate was water, or the bottle was empty? Would it have made a difference? Burm hauls himself onto solid ground. One shoe clings to his foot like a limpet. The other has disappeared and Burm can’t see that now is the time to be giving a damn about such a thing. Losing his shoe he sees as ironic because the one item he had that Nikkon didn’t was a proper pair of shoes. Now he has a proper shoe, and he hobbles home on it. He wrestles with the door when he gets there. It opens, but then refuses to shut properly, a blessing as the pig smell is rancid. The director has offered Burm Nikkon’s college house, and he will have to give some serious thought to moving there. But not yet. Burm sits in his room on an upturned bucket. So that’s what happens, he thinks. That’s what I have to look forward to; being set alight by the clergy, going up in smoke to the mellifluous strains of a multitude of chanting monks. As an orphan Burm realises his could be a lonely ceremony, and he can’t think of one person now who would organise it for him. He looks around. He owns two shirts, besides the one he is wearing, and they hang from a nail in front of him. A pair of trousers lies folded neatly in a

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corner. He has a spirit shelf on which sit a candle, a small glass of water and the note Nikkon wrote to him. And this is the sum total of his life: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, one shoe and a spirit shelf. He has no money. Everything he had he gave to Lukett at the funeral so that when the Master of Ceremonies called out his name, and the size of his donation, Burm would not have to feel ashamed. Burm does have a job, true, and his health, but he has just lost the best friend he has ever had, and who will he be without Nikkon? Burm puts his hands to his face and leans hard against the wall. What if Nikkon was going about his own business and someone said something horrible to him? Or they failed to acknowledge his greeting? Or they ignored him completely? What if that happened? What if this was the final insult, and after that there was nothing more to live for? Wouldn’t that person be guilty? Of something? These questions reverberate silently, gaining in significance until Burm can almost see them. They connect together to form an unbroken chain of uncertainty and sorrow, and Burm begins to cry.

19

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va sits on the verandah. A glass of port rests on the arm of her chair. Her feet are on the railing. Before her lies the whole world and her whole life. The landscape is barren. ‘It’s bloody desolate here,’ Francis said a couple of weeks ago, angrily, as he walked in the back door. It was hot and he had spent the day on a farm in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, where just occasionally it has been known to rain. Unlike here. Ava pictured him face down, nuzzling the soft coolness of the grass like a puppy, resting beneath huge shade trees whose limbs reached the ground. Francis’s own limbs would be spread wide. He has done it before. He would be immersing himself in the landscape only to return to the brownness, the harshness of home and reality. ‘Don’t blame the land. It’s not its fault,’ Ava said. ‘We do live on the driest continent. Even Elizabeth knows that.’

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‘What?’ Francis said, reaching for the paper. He had quickly moved on and forgotten his anger. As soon as he was inside he immersed himself in the smell of his dinner, and the comfort of reading. ‘You said it is desolate here, like you hate it, and that makes me sad.’ Francis nodded. Now, today, amid that same ebb and flow of nothingness, in view of the mountains that mean so much and so little, Ava curls her toes. She looks at them, at her nails. When she is 60 she will need to soak in a hot tub to soften them before they can be cut. Like everyone, in time, her feet will splay. Her bones will be more prominent; other parts will sag, or ache. This is life. Ava remembers watching a kookaburra circle above her head before it landed on the clothesline. Stuck sideways in its beak was a green budgerigar. The budgerigar was still alive and looked at Ava. The kookaburra was holding onto it like one holds onto a venomous snake or a vicious dog, not daring to let go for fear it will turn on you. At the time, Ava wondered why the budgie didn’t speak up for itself, didn’t try to reason with its captor or plead for freedom. What is the point of knowing how to talk if you don’t? Ava wondered why the birds couldn’t be friends. Why it was necessary to see each other as different? She now realises that both birds were acting on instinct, accepting but not understanding

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their fate: the smaller one choosing to die now instead of later, ending a life fraught with danger, and the impossible question of kill or be killed. Perhaps the budgie did speak, euphemistically. ‘You win. I give in.’ Ava ran at the birds waving her arms as if to say, not in my backyard you don’t, thereby editing out another bit of life that she didn’t want to deal with. Other bits, the bits that prove her own points, she places under floodlights. During the autopsy of the afternoon tea with the old friends and the alcohol, Ava neglected to tell Francis that using animal parts in transplants was not the only topic up for discussion. As well as an odd exchange with Penny and Caroline, who offered to recommend Ava to all their friends should she ever open a bed and breakfast, she had a conversation with Owen. Ava told Owen of her latest, and she now realises, most harebrained scheme to doorknock the houses on Middle Road and suggest to the residents that if they planted trees on their footpath they could transform this long, undeniably boring road into a thing of beauty. ‘They would have to agree, wouldn’t they?’ Ava said. ‘Especially if I offered to help with the planting, or to pay for the trees if necessary?’ ‘No,’ Owen said, shaking his head. He looked at Ava as if he couldn’t believe she was this dumb. ‘Why would they agree? I know for certain they would disagree. People wouldn’t want to be told their street is ugly, and you know trees are problematic.’

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‘Why are they problematic?’ ‘I don’t think they are,’ Owen said, ‘but others do. You’ve read the papers. We’ve had this discussion before. You said you didn’t know what people had against the trees the council wanted to plant in the city, and then you proceeded to tell me what it was they did have against them. Trees make a place look like scrub, you said. Paper and other rubbish gets caught in branches, you said. Trees drop leaves, lose limbs, squash people, stop the breeze getting through, and use up too much water, you said. And what’s more, for home-owners, there is the added problem that robbers have been known to hide behind trees. Am I ringing a few bells here, Ava?’ Ava had a picture in her mind of the Beagle Boys with empty sacks over their shoulders and sandbags in their hands peering out from behind tree trunks. She wanted to laugh but wasn’t feeling generous enough to. ‘I know I said that, but I was talking about city people. I thought the people on Middle Road might be different.’ ‘Why? They are just city people on acreage. I think you like setting yourself up to fail. I think you like making life more difficult for yourself than is really necessary. You should relax.’ Owen handed Ava a drink. ‘Here, get that into you,’ he said as a bell did start to faintly tinkle and alert Ava to the

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amazing length she was willing to go to prove the world was a truly wretched place. She would make a good zealot, standing on a street corner: See, the day of the LORD is coming a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger. She could see herself waving a fist at God, and at those who passed by. It would serve her right if a sniper shot her. It occurred to Ava that there was no real difference between what she planned to do and what the Jehovah’s Witnesses actually did. In each case, if the unsuspecting audience didn’t accept what they were told, they would be rejected forever. Ava thinks about this as she sips her port. She smiles. She can see her one and only garden from where she is sitting and it is pathetic. Who is she to talk about beautifying the landscape? Her own garden is full of weeds and dead zinnias. And trees, she knows nothing about trees. Every time she suggests a tree to Francis as a possibility for their yard, or the wider community — Chinese elm, jacaranda, cassia, pepperina, camphor laurel, pine trees, mulberry trees and, in desperation, umbrella trees — Francis says, ‘Well-known noxious weeds. You can’t have them.’ A flock of birds flies down and perches on a fence wire, attracting Ava’s attention. Pink galahs, Ava thinks, but

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she is not sure. She will have to ask Francis, who also knows his birds and has the binoculars to prove it. These birds are not hunting for food, rearing young, trying to make ends meet, struggling. There is no bird with a disability or a harried expression. There is just a row of birds swaying tranquilly, gazing up to where Ava is. A sudden breeze picks up. It ruffles the pink feathers, it rustles leaves as well, and it is obvious that for a very brief moment, for one day in the sun, all assembled here have attained some sense of contentment. Ava breathes in this thought until it permeates her whole body. She finishes the port and shifts her gaze to the mountains in the distance. They are still there, her mountain woman still enticing. She will be there when Ava is gone. The simple fact that Ava will not live forever, that she is indeed finite, is enough. This knowledge becomes her mantra. There is a low rumble of thunder. Ava has the desire to throw her wineglass at the fence, at the birds and at the purple horizon. She will not do this though. The glass is one of a set, a wedding present. Instead, she holds the glass and waits. I am in tune with nature, I am becoming more in tune with the world, she thinks. Then the rain begins and she rushes downstairs to where the washing is hung. She tugs at the clothes and sends the pegs flying into the air. Ava does laugh out loud this time. She says, ‘Whoever said it never rains around here?’

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Jirapun’s tears are internal, are in fact terminal. Her body is heavy with them. Like a sponge, she has soaked up the sadness of the world and she treads carefully to keep the tears from spilling out. If they escaped they would flow from every pore. Her arms and legs would cry, her stomach and back, and this cannot happen. Each morning and each evening Jirapun places rice, water and a small piece of fresh fruit on a shelf for Nikkon. She does it silently and then walks away as if not convinced of her action. Jirapun fills her days sweeping the floor, rinsing bowls, shopping, preparing meals, and tending the garden. She visits Raak and Kanjana. It is a life, though obviously not enough of a life for her son. If only she could have turned the brown and the grey of his birthright into prismatic and brilliant sunshine. But there is only so much a mother can do. Pornchai works the land, bent double. The fields are damaged by weeds, he thinks. Mankind is damaged by passion. He digs his work-worn fingers into the earth, pulling out a milk thistle, roots and all. The fields are damaged by weeds. Mankind is damaged by passion. He recites the parable silently. Recites it over and over until it has entered the rhythm of his breathing, the beat of his heart. But there is no comfort. The fields are

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damaged by weeds — bom bom. Mankind is damaged by passion — puff puff. Pornchai moves along the rows. He doesn’t need to do this, there are no weeds other than that lone thistle, and what is a weed anyway? Nikkon used to say that it’s just a plant growing in the wrong place, which could be a rose growing in a field of poppies or an apple tree in a mango orchard. The fields are damaged by plants growing in the wrong place — bom bom. Mankind is damaged by passion — puff puff. And what is passion? Doesn’t passion make life livable? Pornchai quickly erases this last thought from his mind. Stop! Soon he will be asking what is life. What the point of life is. It is not good, all this thinking, all this questioning and doubting. Mankind is damaged by passion, whether Pornchai wants to acknowledge it or not. And his son, his beloved Nikkon, was possibly more damaged than most.

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F

rancis slams the phone down. ‘Bugger. The fire has jumped Parcell’s Road. I’ve got to go.’ He runs down the stairs pulling on standard-issue orange overalls. Ava listens as the car disappears down the drive. She and Elizabeth watch from the window. There is smoke in all directions and flames can be seen climbing a distant mountain. The only sound now is of the controlling wind. Everything looks depressingly dead, except the fire, which looks depressingly alive. Ava sits Elizabeth on her lap and wonders out loud about the animals being driven from their homes, how madly they would chase each other, creating baffling crop circles. This is what Ava would do. She hopes animals know to run in the one direction. Augie Bennett fought the Japs in New Guinea. One night he and some mates came across a hut in a small clearing. As they approached they heard sounds coming

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from inside the hut. They hit the ground as one and, with Augie in the lead, dragged themselves on their bellies through long wet grass toward the single opening. Closer and closer they inched, not daring to breathe, then crouching, waiting, the butt of a rifle poised to ram the flimsy door. One, two, three. Go. Torch on, gun firing, how many of them are there? How many? Hands up! How many? None? Hang on. No. There’s one. Yes. But just one, and that a terrified cat, hair on end, and eyes blazing. The only danger to Augie was of being shot in the back by friendly fire. Augie wasn’t scared. How long ago was it? More than 50 years and the memories so vivid. And he isn’t scared now. If Augie had any neighbours they would know his daily routine. Get up, read a chapter of the Bible, take a little bit in if lucky, eat bread and jam, drink a pot of tea, go to the toilet, go to the toilet again just in case, then downstairs like a good soldier to battle weeds. Against all sides of his little prefabricated house are straggly geranium bushes. Augie uses a pair of rusty scissors to lop off the dead flowers. He needs to peer closely to determine which ones are dead. He digs the weeds in the garden with a set of cutlery — a fork, spoon and knife. These he keeps in a threadbare workman’s apron tied high around his waist. The old man lives on a quarter-acre block cut from his original farm. The prefab house was built when the farmhouse threatened to cave in on Augie’s head. He had thought

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of retiring to the Gold Coast but has never been one for the beach. All that sand and sea, all those unfamiliar faces would give him a migraine. Augie and his wife Edna kept jersey cows on their farm and grew sorghum in summer and oats in winter to feed them. When this was no longer possible, after Edna died and Augie developed chest pains of his own, the farm was sold and beef cattle took over the paddocks while the old house fell apart. Francis arrives at the designated meeting point. Everyone waits in the shade of the inadequate water truck to be given instructions. The truck with its rounded fenders looks like a grown-up version of one Francis played with as a boy. The fire is moving in a south-easterly direction and a number of houses lie in its path. Francis looks at the truck, then he looks at the pump, and doesn’t hold much hope. ‘There is an elderly man on Obum Obum Road. He lives alone, no phone, can’t drive. You,’ an officious-looking man holding maps and papers says, pointing at Francis, ‘get him and take him to the church hall opposite the Coronation. He’s a bit deaf.’ Francis takes in the directions, writing them down so he doesn’t forget. Augie waits on his verandah. His permanent-press trousers sit above his little strawberry-jam paunch and are held in place by a shiny leather belt. His light-blue shirt is tucked in and is see-through. Large singlet holes are visible in places. Augie has a lot of hair, quite dark and slicked back.

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This hair, coupled with his big glasses, makes him look like a Chinese diplomat. Francis shakes Augie’s hand and pats Murphy, his grey-whiskered dog. He takes in the sad-looking garden, the shiny new letterbox, and the plastic airline bag — a relic from the Seventies — that sits just inside the front door. The room is bare apart from a chair, a coffee table and a few photos on the wall. ‘You’re all ready, then,’ Francis says. ‘How did you know I was coming?’ ‘Someone always comes eventually,’ Augie says, and he smiles, narrowing his eyes so that he resembles Jiang Zemin more than ever. ‘I’m Augie Bennett, by the way.’ He puts out his hand and Francis shakes it, looking at him, memorising his features. He knows Ava will want a full description. ‘Would you like a drink?’ Augie asks. They go inside, past the chair and table, to the kitchen with its knotted curtain and rusty sink. There are two glasses covered in greasy fingerprints on the draining board, and Augie takes one of these and pours water from a jug out of the fridge. The water tastes like leftovers and Francis takes a few polite sips before tipping the rest out. ‘You live here alone?’ he asks. ‘Mmmm,’ Augie answers. ‘You can take some more things if you want, like your photos. The fire is pretty serious,’ Francis tells him.

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Augie shrugs his shoulders. ‘I got everything I need up here,’ he says, tapping his head. In the car, Augie says, ‘I was born in that house.’ He points at what is left of it. Francis peers through the smoke. ‘Do you have any family?’ he asks. ‘Nope, just me and the dog.’ He motions to the back seat where Murphy sits. Francis wonders about the photos on the wall. Old and brown. Hallway people. Ava would have liked the frames. ‘No children?’ ‘Not that I know of,’ he laughs. ‘Did you marry?’ ‘Yep. Got married in the same house I was born in. Wife died there, too. You?’ ‘One wife, one daughter.’ Francis is almost ashamed to admit this. He sees himself surrounded by kids, but that must be someone else who looks just like him. The road narrows, the smoke thickens and the wind blows stronger. The fire is one paddock away and Francis is tempted to stop and watch the drama unfold. The beauty of the flames, like molten lava, like liquid marigolds, mesmerises him. Augie, however, is not so easily sidetracked. He sits up straight, peering over the dashboard, leaning forward like a child trying to make the car go faster. Francis half expects him to ask, ‘Are we there yet?’

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The flames run rapidly across the grass. Those out front are tall and menacing, leaving the earth to smoulder in their wake. Francis sees the fire as good, nature’s helper, cracking open seeds and such. And bad. If only trees could run. Augie is talking and Francis can’t imagine how they got onto the topic of the war. He doesn’t know how much he has missed, or whether he in fact started the conversation. ‘A lot of blokes found it hard to settle down when they came back. You know, farming and working and family. It was difficult for some. Me, I couldn’t wait to get home. Edna and I had only been married a few months, you see. I’ve never been to an Anzac Day parade, not a one.’ Francis remembers watching a parade years ago. He stood beside two sisters whose grandfather was marching. ‘It’s a shame, he never did get over it,’ one said to the other. Francis felt for the old man marching. Sometimes a thing can be so profound it is difficult to move on. Sometimes everything that comes after is tainted by it. Francis, like the sisters, has no desire for time to stand still. He has no desire for his life to be defined by one event, but is there always a choice? ‘It was a good life,’ Augie says, ‘except no children, and Edna really wanted some. To fill up the house, you see. You want more? Or does your wife work?’ He turns to Francis. They have hit the bitumen and Francis thinks, the

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Coronation Hotel is up ahead, the fire behind. He holds tight to the steering wheel. ‘No, she doesn’t work so I guess we could have more,’ he says. ‘I’ll talk her into having one for Edna, shall I?’ Augie laughs at this and Francis looks away. Augie keeps laughing. He turns to his dog. ‘Did you hear that, Murph?’ he says, patting the air. ‘Might be a grandpa yet.’ The dog barely moves. His eyes are shut and his head hangs over the seat, pointing at the floor. Unlike his owner, it takes a lot to get Murphy excited these days.

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‘I

’ll wait here,’ Martha says, puffing through bloodless lips. ‘Sit in the shade. Do you want me to stay with you?’ Ava asks. ‘Francis can take Elizabeth up.’ ‘No, I should have stayed in the car with your father.’ ‘Nonsense. You’ve done really well, and we won’t tell Poppy, will we, Lizzy, that Grandma didn’t make it to the top?’ Elizabeth shakes her head. ‘I haven’t done as well as you, though, and you’re pregnant. How do you feel?’ ‘A bit tired, but I know as soon as the baby is born I won’t be able to do this for a while. I’d better keep going. If I sit down I won’t get up again.’ They are walking along the arm of the mountain woman. For so long Ava has watched her lying there, in the

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distance, and now she is about to be conquered. Ava is not sure it is worth all the effort. Francis whistles as he walks. ‘What’s that?’ Ava asks, following along behind, no longer with the stamina to stomp ahead. ‘I’m not sure,’ Francis says. ‘It sounds like Sara, Bob Dylan’s Sara.’ ‘I don’t know it.’ ‘Yes you do. Sara, Sara, Scorpio sphinx with an arrow and bow. Sara, Sara, don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go. ‘Remember? I wanted someone, you I think, to write a song like that for me.’ ‘I’m trying, but it isn’t coming back.’ ‘You said it didn’t seem to have helped Bob and Sara. They still split up. Did you know her real name was Shirley? Shirley, Shirley, don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go. Not quite the same, is it? I’m sure if I’d been in love with Bob I would have been jealous of Sara, but I’m not sure I could be jealous of a Shirley. If we have another girl, what will we call her? What goes with Elizabeth?’ Ava is starting to puff like her mother. Francis thinks if she stopped talking she might find the going a bit easier. And the dress she is wearing. Why a dress? Every time she climbs up she stands on the front of it. ‘I can’t tell which part of the mountain woman we’re on,’ Ava continues. ‘If we were on the moon we wouldn’t be able to see the rabbit either, I suppose. How much further?’ ‘Are you all right? We must be nearly there.’ Francis helps Ava up a rocky outcrop. He looks at her as he does and

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has one of those flashes of Who am I? What am I doing? Whose hand is this I’m holding? Usually, they come in the night as he is falling asleep, or first thing in the morning when he has just woken up. Wind roars up the escarpment and drowns out the whine of the trucks passing through Cunninghams Gap. There are wild flowers, orange, purple and white, among the rocks and eucalypts, growing at odd angles wherever they can get a foothold. Elizabeth stoops to pick up a rhinoceros beetle. She turns it over a couple of times. ‘I nearly stood on him,’ she says. ‘If I’d put my other foot down I could have squashed him.’ ‘How do you know you didn’t squash something with the foot you did put down?’ Francis says. ‘Give us a look at him. If it is a him.’ Francis points out the forked horns on the beetle’s head and thorax. ‘This is a male. The female is unarmed.’ ‘Can I keep him?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘It might be Bert. Bertie Beetle, mightn’t it?’ ‘Well, of course it might be. But no, I think he’d be happier here, don’t you, where he belongs? He might have a wife and family.’ ‘I guess so, though they weren’t in the story.’ Elizabeth tosses the beetle aside, not quite where she found him, so he lands what in beetle terms could be miles from home.

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And what does Francis mean by saying the beetle belongs here? He thinks back to his insect collection for entomology. Bugs suck, beetles chomp. The rhinoceros beetle chomps the soft bark of the poinciana tree of which there are none around here. Therefore it couldn’t possibly belong. But doesn’t everything just adapt? And if not adapt, then die? Boat people are sent back to where they belong even if it is a mined field, or has been blown up, or dammed. What if the place you belong to doesn’t exist any more? The beetle might have dropped from the trousers of the last person who came this way, or fallen from the beak of an eagle. Francis stops himself. If he follows this train of thought to its obvious conclusion he will be rummaging in the bushes looking to rescue a beetle without knowing for sure it needs rescuing. It is three hours since they first set out, half an hour since they left Martha at the armpit, and they have made it. If Francis’s directions are correct, they are on top of a breast. Ava asks Francis which way their house is. ‘Is it possible to see it from here?’ ‘It’s that way, but you can’t see it.’ Francis himself is looking for the scars left by the bushfires. For what is left of Augie’s house. He expects there to be huge tracts of charred land. But the Earth has healed itself, and new growth covers old wounds.

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‘This reminds me of sitting on the verandah at our first house,’ Ava says. ‘Making all those plans. That seems like a lifetime ago.’ Francis moves closer, holds tight to Elizabeth’s hand: this is not the time for a diversion, an unexpected tumble over the edge. He sits with Ava and looks at the world spread below, colourful and divided into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. None are missing. Francis studies Ava’s face and her dress the colour of a rock. This is who I am, he thinks. Who I’m with. He takes Ava’s arm and hauls her and Elizabeth to their feet. ‘We better go,’ he says. ‘Martha will think we’re lost.’ Nikkon

Ava sits up in bed. Warm fluid leaks from between her legs. She reaches over and shakes Francis. ‘My waters just broke,’ she whispers. ‘Elizabeth was the same.’ Membranes have ruptured, Francis thinks as he struggles to wake, his eyes straining to see in the dark. ‘Turn on the lamp, could you? Where are my glasses?’ he says. He must admit he is not good at this sort of thing. He can’t imagine why Ava would want to go through it again. Elsewhere bird-wing butterflies are breaking free from the confines of their too-tight chrysalises and tentatively unfolding rice-paper wings for a test

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flight. Baby hermit crabs try on abandoned welksnail shells for size and security. Mottled and pearly eggs in nests of hair, grass and baling twine hatch: the finch, the starling, the frogmouth and the falcon. And the fruiting bodies on a myriad fungi release spores into the forest, while Ava rubs a hand over her bare stomach so like the laughing Buddha’s in its roundness. She wonders whether it is her body or her baby’s that is in control. Swamped by both pain and elation, she wishes that she could lie back again on her own pillow in her own bed and give birth right now, with Francis and Elizabeth as the only witnesses. She has heard of women who orgasm during labour and, although she knows this is not likely to happen, she nevertheless can see the possibility … … There is no air yet, no wider reality, but Nikkon is focused and knowledgeable. After so long, the time has come for him, too. He stops swallowing fluid, pissing it out again, clenching and unclenching baby fingers, sucking thumbs and toes. He ceases hiccupping, ceases blinking and smiling, ceases being dependent. And instead, concentrates his effort on freedom. Upside down, cocooned in a no-man’s-land of suspended animation, Nikkon begins again. Sleek

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and seal-like, his blind head butts at the dark. Bones mould to muscle. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and, although the illumination, the imminent revelation, may prove agreeable or may prove adverse, Nikkon works his way towards it and screams himself into existence … … And when it is over Ava lies back in the full glare of the hospital fluorescents. Never again, she thinks. Never, ever, a-bloody-gain. While Francis, his arm caught awkwardly under her shoulders, gives into a sensation that sees him soar while still fixed firmly to the ground. He announces hoarsely, ‘Another girl. Another little Elizabeth.’ ‘So it is,’ Ava whispers. She hopes to name the baby Thomasina after the cat she read about in Thailand, the one that was buried alive, that had lived before, but Francis may take some convincing. ‘I’m pleased it’s a girl,’ she says before concentrating on the insides of her eyelids and the beauty of the fireworks erupting there. ‘I’m pleased we’re sticking with what we know.’

PANDANUS BOOKS Pandanus Books was established in 2001 within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) at The Australian National University. Concentrating on Asia and the Pacific, Pandanus Books embraces a variety of genres and has particular strength in the areas of biography, memoir, fiction and poetry. As a result of Pandanus’ position within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, the list includes highquality scholarly texts, several of which are aimed at a general readership. Since its inception, Pandanus Books has developed into an editorially independent publishing enterprise with an imaginative list of titles and high-quality production values.

THE SULLIVAN’S CREEK SERIES The Sullivan’s Creek Series is a developing initiative of Pandanus Books seeking to explore Australia through the work of new writers. Publishing history, biography, memoir, scholarly texts, fiction and poetry, the imprint complements the Asia and Pacific focus of Pandanus Books.