The Family Law (14 page)

That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I overheard Aunty Clara and Mum gossiping outside on the sofa, talking about hard times, how women their age had become invisible, how each of them had coped over the years. ‘You know how I remained strong?' Aunty Clara asked in Cantonese. ‘I turned to God. When my father was assassinated by that crazy man, when my sister died of cancer, who was there for me? No one. No one but God.' She went in for the kill. ‘You know what? You should come to church with me sometime.'

But it became clear that Mum had no intention of converting. When Aunty Clara spoke about church life at home, Mum's eyes glazed over. When Aunty Clara spoke about God in the car, Mum fell asleep. She couldn't help it. But it worked both ways. When Mum spoke about her children's achievements, Aunty Clara trumped her with stories about her godchildren, who were lawyers, accountants and surgeons. A distance started to grow between them.

As we made our way through Ipoh, there were disappointments. Those renowned mangosteens were limp and slightly sour. We didn't see one rambutan, and the orangutans were on another Malaysian island completely. The legendary apartment where Mum grew up had been gutted and transformed into a Sony appliances store. ‘She used to live here,' I explained to the annoyed staff, when Mum started taking photos of the shop's interior. At Ave Maria Convent School, Mum and Aunty Clara posed for photos until a stout, moustachioed female security guard came out and shooed us off.

Another day we went to a giant shopping mall, a multi-layered maze of glass, white concrete and chrome, the type of never-ending, sprawling complex that looks like an M.C. Escher and Joan Collins collaboration in hell. After a few minutes, we lost Mum.

‘How could you have been so irresponsible?' Aunty Clara said when we returned without her. ‘You always go shopping separately from your mother? Now she could be
anywhere
.'

‘But she knows to meet us back here,' I said. ‘We said if we lost each other, if there was an emergency—'

‘It's an emergency now!' she said. ‘Your mother! She's nowhere to be seen! How do you expect her to find her way around a place like this, huh?'

I was about to protest when Uncle Wayne interjected.

‘
Ai-ya
, you don't know Malaysia,' he said, shaking his head. ‘
Anything
could happen. She could be
dead
.'

We searched the mall for ages. Eventually, Mum appeared with dozens of shopping bags, giggling and giddy, showing us photos she'd taken of all the store clerks who'd served her. When I told her it had been nearly an hour, she was dismissive.

‘I lose track when I'm SKI-ing!' she said. ‘Why keep track of the time when you can SKI?' SKI was her new favourite phrase.

It stood for ‘Spending the Kids' Inheritance.'

We walked to the carpark together, Mum leading the way with her shopping bags while we sulked and trailed behind her.

‘Tell me,' Aunty Clara said, pulling me aside and whispering under her breath. ‘Does your mother always spend money like this?' She tsked disapprovingly. ‘She reminds me of my sister, always buying this and that. So many
things
, isn't it?'

Driving back to their house in Ipoh, I decided that I didn't much like Aunty Clara anymore. When Mum and I were left to ourselves, I started telling Mum about Aunty Clara's bitchiness, hoping she'd finally see her for what she was. To my surprise, Mum defended her. ‘You don't know anything about this woman. She might not be perfect, but what friend is?' I blinked at her, not knowing what to say, then immediately felt like a brat. Who was I to criticise this couple who had invited us into their home and driven us halfway across the country? What was I doing, running down one of Mum's few good friends? What did I hope to achieve?

When they drove us to the airport, Aunty Clara and Uncle Wayne compounded my shame by forcing each of us to take a traditional red money-packet stuffed with cash. As we waited for the traffic to subside, Aunty Clara said out of nowhere, ‘I have so many friends, you know. So, so many good friends. It doesn't matter who you are, if you're rich or poor, what race you are. Anyone with a good personality, who has a nice heart, Aunty Clara will be your friend. So many friends.' She turned in her seat and smiled at Mum, showing all her teeth. ‘As long as you are a Christian, I'll be your friend.'

Christmas was only a few weeks away, and I noticed that none of the shopping centres or restaurants we'd visited had decorated their interiors for the season. I had almost forgotten we were in a Muslim country. Maybe we'd been living with Aunty Clara and Uncle Wayne for too long. As we drove towards the airport, I wondered how many Christmas cards each of us would receive that year, and from whom.

God Camp

At seven years old, I already knew I was headed straight for hell. None of my primary-school teachers ever said so directly – never pointed an accusatory finger at me and said, ‘You're going to hell, Benjamin' – but all our Bible lessons pointed to the same conclusion. If you hadn't been baptised, if you didn't take Holy Communion, if you didn't go to church on Sunday, it was simple: you'd end up burning in Satan's furnaces for the rest of eternity. Eternity. It seemed like a pretty long time.

At school, we had celebrated Baptism Certificate Day, when all the Year
3
students were asked to bring copies of their christening documents; our teacher hung them around the room, like tinsel. I was the only student who didn't have one. The other kids looked at me, concerned.

‘Mum,' I said after school. ‘I need to get baptised or I'm going to hell. We all are.'

‘You don't need to be baptised,' she said.

‘You're not listening to me. We
all
need to be baptised. We
all
need to go to church. Because it won't be nice when I'm the only one in heaven and I have to think about the rest of you burning in hell's fiery lakes forever.'

She told me to wait until I was twelve years old; then I would be in a better position to make up my own mind about religion.

‘But what if I
die
before then? Have you thought of that?

What if I'm eleven years old and get run over by a car and end up rotting in hell because you didn't baptise me?'

‘Well, you wouldn't go to hell. You're only a kid,' she said. Then, sensing my worry, she added, ‘And even if you did, I'm sure they would treat you better down there. Because you're so
cute
!'

Every morning before class, we filed into our daily worship session. Devotions covered a broad range of topics: forgiveness; receiving compliments gracefully; documented Satanic possessions. Music came courtesy of the school band, a misfit hodge-podge of whichever musically inclined students were available that week: recorder, baritone clarinet, piccolo, French horn, bongos. One of my favourite songs was ‘The Blind Man,' a participation-based hymn made up of verses featuring men suffering various afflictions – blindness, deafness, paralysis – searching for Christ to show them the way.

‘The blind man sat by the road and he cried!' we sang. ‘The blind man sat by the road and he cried!' The final verse simply involved shouting ‘The Blind Man!' followed by frenzied, rhythmic clapping to fill in the gaps. Years later, singing the same song in high school, it struck me as undignified and mean, implying the blind man was not only vision-impaired, but also had some form of palsy that made him clap in a wild, uncontrollable fashion. But as a Christian-hearted seven-year-old, I dug the clapping as much as I dug Jesus.

 

*

 

Our school prided itself on its discipline and tradition, and like all Christian schools, it was built on the fundamental tenet of original sin. Young people could not be trusted, and had to be reformed. The centrepiece of this was the Year
10
camping program, in which students were shipped out into the bush for a month. They called it ‘survival camp'; returning to your parents alive was the goal. It was located in a cluster of cabins owned by the school and christened Mount Kilmore, set in the ominously named region of Blackbutt, a winding two-hour bus ride away from the school. People vomited going up that mountain. Parts of the incline were so steep that buses and cars snaked around the roads in sickening U-turns, dangerously close to the lip of the cliffs.

I was still a devout ten-year-old when my eldest sister, Candy, went to Mount Kilmore. We visited her on Parents' Day, the halfway point of the camp, when family members were invited to check up on their children. It was the only time campers were allowed junk food, brought in by family members. When our red Ford Cortina finally found the campground gate, we searched the horizon for Candy. Fourteen-year-olds in flannelette and denim cut-offs slouched towards the car in slow motion, arms stretched out in front of them, gaunt. ‘Do you have anything to eat?' they droned. ‘Did you bring snacks?' We wound up our windows, slowly and carefully, until they walked away weakly, their arms still outstretched and their eyes vacant.

When we finally found Candy, she was two shades darker, suntanned and dirt-stained. Although she seemed happy enough, some things about the camp horrified us.

‘So,' she said. ‘Do you want to see the furnace where we incinerate our used pads?'

My faith was shaken when she showed us the thing. Between the starving youth and half-charred tampons – all black and red like badly burnt steak chunks – there clearly wasn't any god.

 

*

 

By the time I was in Year
10
, there were roughly
150
of us, and we went to camp in four groups. As I was in the last group to leave, I'd accumulated a lot of correspondence from friends who'd gone first. ‘There is nothing out here,' they wrote. ‘Nothing.' They'd plead for us to send lollies or chips, warning us to conceal the contraband in boxes of tissues or tampons. All parcels had to be opened in front of the camp staff, they told us, and if banned items were discovered, the student would be ‘punished.' They wrote the word with quotation marks – ‘punished' – as if it meant something different out there.

Some letters contained horror stories: how Betty rolled off a cliff and was air-lifted to hospital; how Selena reportedly had sex with a camp counsellor who looked like Chopper Read; how Callum almost died from an asthma attack; how three girls had swum in a seemingly pristine creek, only to find a dead cow in the water; how Darren had chased Taylor around with an axe, prompting the staff to lock all cabin doors while Darren prowled outside, brooding.

While my friends were going insane out in the woods, back at home I was going insane in my own modest way. I had begun to have acute anxiety attacks. These were like nothing I'd ever experienced before: paralysing sessions of irrational panic that left me unable to breathe or think. My siblings and I share a history of bizarre and transformative puberties, and between us we had an impressive repertoire of adolescent illnesses: deep depression, spontaneous hairloss, stomach ulcers. Some nights I'd find myself pinned to the mattress, sweating and dizzy with fear that I'd be possessed by the Devil and hurt myself or a family member. I kept away from all sharp objects. When my mother served me steak, I ate it with a blunt butter knife. When she used a cleaver in the kitchen to hack up pork bones, I'd lock myself in my room and put on my headphones, blocking out the thunks of metal slamming against bone. For me, survival camp was a horrifying prospect: one of the mandatory items we had to take was a freshly sharpened Swiss Army knife. My friends had also told me that one of the first things they gave you upon arrival was a machete.

 

*

 

We headed out in the dead of winter. Once there, we filed off the bus, shivering, and unloaded our bags. The camp staff stood in an unmoving line, watching us silently, the way sergeants inspect new military grunts. We'd heard so much about these people over the last few months that they'd assumed a mythic quality. Each was instantly recognisable from our friends' descriptions. Moustachioed Pastor Foster carried a rifle over his shoulder and was constantly followed by a pair of huskies, who would growl at newcomers. He spoke with his hands on his hips, and was known for enforcing a Reich-like discipline. ‘Welcome to survival camp, folks,' he said. ‘Leave your bags here. First things first. Everyone into the Devotion Room.'

The Devotion Room was an old stable, and it smelled like leather, straw and pony shit. ‘If God is on our side,' we sang, examining the gigantic old knives pinned to the wall, ‘if God is on our side, who can be against us?' As we sang tunelessly, we checked out the remaining staff members.

True to our friends' accounts, twenty-something Mr Dane had the biggest nose we'd ever seen; it looked prosthetic: rubbery and removable. Although it was the middle of an unforgiving winter, Mr Dane would wear skin-tight stubbies every day without fail; whenever he lifted his legs, we flinched. Miss Phillips was clearly in love with Mr Dane, and wore her hair in a daring, come-hither bowl-cut. With her meaty, androgynous face and farm-hardened, utilitarian breasts, she was probably considered a catch in Blackbutt. She smiled
constantly
, a tic that was meant to be welcoming, but took on a sinister quality as the camp progressed.

Mr and Mrs Barry were the elders of Mount Kilmore. They owned a property nearby, and were the most devout Christians of them all. My sister Candy had told me that Mrs Barry had declared the Joan Osborne song ‘One of Us' blasphemous. Later, I would find myself discussing horoscopes, fortune telling and Nostradamus with some girls at camp. Overhearing us, Mrs Barry screamed and decried Nostradamus as a Satan worshipper. She had a lazy eye that became irritable when the weather turned cold: you could never tell whether she was giving you a conspiratorial wink or just needed some eyedrops. These people would be our guardians for the next month.