Dark Roots (10 page)

Waiting for him to unlock the car to leave, don't, whatever you do, look at your silhouette in the reflection of the car window. It will show you nothing but hard contrast. In the solarised shadow and light, you will see lines on your forehead, and those ones etched between your nose and mouth, the awful twist of discontent. Old harridan lines.

Just get in the car. Put your sunglasses on, and get in the car.

And later, when he's not watching, feel disgusted scorn for yourself as you try to covertly open your bag and get out the factor-fifteen moisturiser, and put it on. Neck as well as face. Think of all the mornings when you get up and your neck and chest are creased like an old sheet. Jowls. Crepey skin. Turkey neck. Spinster aunt skin. Wonder if he wakes before you, and looks at those creases as you're asleep, exposed, in the bright morning light.

The ever-relentless sun, inescapable, beats down on you through the windscreen.

All those hours you mindlessly lay on your towel in your twenties, and tilted your face up into it, heedless. You look across at his face, and of course he doesn't care, he doesn't need to. He's got years.

Inexorable, this spiral down. Tell him later that no, really, you want the light off. Don't say a word about turning forty. When he says he loves you, some reflex from those side-effects will mean you won't let yourself believe it. Censor everything. Swallow the pill. Remember this: let the smallest reference to babies slip, and you can kiss this guy goodbye.

Funny how the dye seems to have missed the odd grey hair, which seem stronger and wirier than the others. And the way you only notice them when you can't really lean forward and do anything about them — when you're looking in the mirror of a change room, for example, in a fairly expensive department store on your afternoon off, and the sight of your own cellulite (all those chips!) so disgusts you and saps your energy that you doubt whether you can actually get dressed again and drag yourself out of there, away from that ridiculous lingerie or the jeans you've chosen. Why are you even wasting your time with this guy? Why don't you find someone your own age who might actually be interested in a late bid for last-minute parenthood, someone who might be in for the long haul? You're too pathetic to believe yourself. And just as you grab your hairbrush after changing back into your stupid frump clothes, just as you think for a minute you'll at least brush your hair, you notice in these unforgiving overhead lights those dark roots coming through again already — any fool could see your colour's not natural. Your hair sits lank and dried-out against your head.

You've got to stop this. But you can't help yourself. While you're in the hair salon buying shampoo for colour-treated hair, you find yourself making an appointment for a leg wax. You will be hairless. Forty is the new thirty. You will be smooth, controlled, gym-toned, with the body of a woman in her late twenties, lushly in her prime and way ahead of the game.

And the voice you hear now as you sit in the salon leafing through the magazines before your appointment will be a whiny, accusing one, nitpicking and obsessive, poking you on the shoulder saying:
Look, Goldie Hawn, nearly sixty. Look, Sharon Stone, slim and elegant, had a baby at forty-four
.

The receptionist says, ‘This your first visit?' Her fingernails are curved like talons, alternately purple and yellow, and you see they are fake and stuck on with superglue. They are so long she can hardly write — but she can hardly write anyway, breathing laboriously as she prints your details in big Grade Five letters. Then into the back room and up onto the crackling paper sheet. Butcher's paper for a slab of meat. You make nervous small talk.

‘Do you wax guys?' you blurt.

‘All the time.' The girl stirs wax implacably, arranges things on the counter like a dental nurse. ‘You'd be surprised.' You lie back. She chats on.

‘Guys come in here, want their backs waxed, their arses.'

‘You're kidding.'

‘Nope. I do everything. You wouldn't believe it. A week before Mardi Gras, or when there's a bike race or the City to Surf, I'm booked out.'

Suddenly there is a hot stroke of wax on your shin, a pause, then blinding pain.

‘
Ow
. Jesus.'

‘Haven't had them done for a while, that's why it hurts more.'

‘Actually this is my first time ever.'

‘Really? Oh well, it won't take long.'

Another rip that brings tears to your eyes.

‘Brazilians are all the go now,' she says. ‘You want pain, boy …'

‘Don't tell me.'

She tilts your leg, ices on some more wax, rips it away.

‘Yep, everything. Completely hairless. Like a Barbie doll.'

You shudder and lie back, willing it to be over. Like having a cavity drilled, you try to take your thoughts away. Paul, and what he would say if he could see you now. Think then about your first argument, the other night. ‘Don't tell me what I'm going to do next,' he'd finally fumed. ‘And Jesus, will you just relax and stop worrying about your weight? How much reassurance do you need?'

‘I don't need reassurance.'

‘Yes, you do. It's so bloody tiring. It's like you've already decided to end it and you're just waiting for me to slip up so you can blame me.'

You'd opened and closed your mouth like a stunned fish. A wave of nausea. You'd clenched your jaw, saying nothing.
Don't cry
, you'd ordered yourself,
don't you dare. Mascara running. Haggard. Lines. Ugly. Old.

‘Let's just light a candle then, if you don't want the lamp on,' he'd said later in bed, at his place. And you'd shaken your head, taken the matches from him.

‘No,' you'd answered. ‘Let's not. Really. I like the dark.'

She's up to your groin and you feel the wax getting daubed around your undies line. She holds the skin taut and pulls. It's excruciating.

‘Bloody hell!' you gasp.

‘Yeah, the pubic hairs always hurt more — deeper roots.'

‘And people have the whole lot ripped out?'

‘All the time.'

You look down at the reddened patch and see tiny prick marks of blood appearing where the hairs have been yanked out. It feels like you've had a layer of skin torn off. Like you've been peeled.

‘God, how could they stand it?'

She considers, moving her chewing gum around her mouth. ‘They reckon it looks clean.'

‘Clean?'

‘Sexy. Their boyfriends ask 'em to do it, they say.'

Rip. She's on the other ankle.
Clean
, you think. Prepubescent, more like it. Like pink latex, like a blow-up fantasy doll, that sickly plastic smell of Barbie. The rip across the knee works like a quick, stinging, sobering slap to the face, finally waking you up.

‘That'll do,' you hear yourself say.

‘But we're only halfway through.' She stops, staring, rotating a glob of slipping yellow wax slowly on the hovering spatula.

‘That's okay, I'll pay for the whole thing. I just … that's it.'

‘It's not hurting that much, is it?'

You swing your tingling legs off the table and reach for your jeans.

She's looking at you, moving the chewy around in her lip-glossed mouth.

‘Okay, then,' she says with a shrug. And, half-finished, like someone released from custody, you're out of there.

Later that night, there'll be tiny dark patches on your bare legs when you take your jeans off, where wax has stuck spots of lint to the skin, but you will pull a sheet over your legs instead of jumping up instantly and washing it off in the shower. Your energy for subterfuge seems spent now; like the tank's empty. In the dark, all other senses are more acute; the brush of skin on skin, the scent of hair, a whisper blooming next to you on the pillow; risky secrets that cannot be taken back. You will feel things coast to a stop, sharpened into wakefulness, and steady yourself. You open your mouth and set whatever's coming next in motion.

‘I'll be forty in a fortnight,' you say.

Impossible to gauge his real, unadorned reaction to that news. You'll have to turn the light on for that.

Angel

‘You don't say much, do ya?' said the lady in the shop on the ground floor of the flats when I first came here. I shook my head and smiled. The tone in her voice was one I had grown to recognise. In Vietnamese, a slight inflection can change the meaning of a word entirely, in English this can apply to a whole phrase. As she scooped up my change her voice maintained that it was just being friendly, but there was an inflection in there meant only for me. In Australia many people take silence for rudeness, for not enough gratitude. If I were really grateful for being here, I would talk endlessly. Thank you, thank you, thank you for having me. That is what the feeling is, in the flats and in English class: an expressionless resentment at my failure to play my part.

‘Talk about your new country,' my tutor would say, reading that suggestion out of a book on how to teach people like us.

‘I like the trees,' the students would say, flat and careful. ‘I like the sea.'

I don't like the sea
, I would think to myself. I spent two months on the sea, waiting for my turn to sip the water, knowing as people vomited that they would be the ones to die.

‘Let's hear from Mai,' the tutor would say, and everyone would turn, ready to watch my difficulties. Wanting to get the language themselves, this barely comprehensible thing that would allow them their driving licences and jobs in the T-shirt factory in Smith Street or Champion Dimsims in Ascot Vale.

‘I like the sea, too,' I would say, the obedient student. My father used to say I was the best student at the school in my town, the family scholar. I learned by keeping quiet, but this is not the way you learned in Australia. When I passed very well in my English class, my tutor looked at me with the same expression as the lady in the shop.

‘You don't say much, but you take it all in, don't you?' she said, an accusing finger on my diploma. Why is silence so worthy of suspicion? You can choose to talk or choose to not talk. But take it all in: yes, that part is true. I take everything in, and in bed at night I lie rocking on a tide of it, whole scenes and conversations, faces I will not forget, even if I wanted to. After the boat, there was a child I went on caring for at the camp who didn't speak for a whole five months. I worried that the authorities would think she was a slow learner. That was not the problem. The problem was she was a fast learner; she took it all in. When we got into the harbour we were news, not because of our plight so much as something unusual that had occurred on our boat.

‘They want to ask you about the shark attack,' said the interpreter, nervous, and the people with the camera equipment had made a movement, a hopeful, craning movement, towards this child. Whether she spoke or not, I could tell she would be the one they made the story about.

She hadn't spoken since this thing happened, and she didn't speak now. She didn't say a word till three months later, when other authorities came to the camp and news spread around, a whispered, desperate rumour, that they were going to give preference to all the children under six. This child, who was eight, was with me and she suddenly wrenched away and rushed to the table where the men were sitting with their papers and slapped her hand down. She spoke to them in perfect English, the first two words she'd uttered for five months.

‘I'm five,' she said.

I, too, broke my silence that day with a lie.

‘I am her mother,' I said.

She is a chatterbox now, my daughter. My father, if he were alive, would be proudly calling her the family scholar now. But at night-time when I go into her room, I find myself looking at her small head and thinking:
Inside there is the boat and the shark and the slipping over the side of bodies, the watching for pirates and chewing on bleeding teeth.
And I think:
That is enough to take in
.

Scenes, conversations, faces. Sometimes just a picture — the stillness of my father's shoulders as he got up from the table to be taken away, waiting while they turned over everything in the house. I went to speak and he shook his head just once at me. His hands waiting, still, on the table. A chicken came in watchfully in the quiet and pecked very carefully at some grain the soldiers had tipped out.

I saw one of those soldiers again, only two or three months ago. I was at the Footscray market and I saw him crossing the street in a big crowd of people. He looked just the same except he had a leather jacket on now.

‘There is so much evil in the world.' That is what the lady downstairs says. I go to a different market now, with her and some other ladies on the Community Centre bus. She invites me down to her flat to drink coffee and talks very fast about her relatives in her country, too fast for me. She gets out photograph albums, shows me pictures, gets her two noisy daughters to dress up in their national clothes to show me. ‘English,' says Gabriella, ‘who can understand it? In Spanish, the language has rules, and they are sensible, every tense matches every verb, every letter is pronounced correctly. The war,' she tells me, ‘has given Central American Spanish a new verb: to disappear.'