The Family Law (7 page)

When we unwrapped the clock and tested the alarm, the resulting noise wasn't friendly at all. It was the sound of nightmares: a horror-movie scream of a chicken having its wings slowly broken and torn off, crying out for its mother. Even though our place was large and made of solid brick, the ringing alarm clock could be heard from the other side of the house, and the tortured pleas of poultry bled into our dreams.

The rooster was only one part of a symphony of noises that made up the morning soundtrack of our home. Andrew would begin by urinating loudly in the hallway toilet, a sound similar to someone pouring a large pitcher of water into a pond. Candy would greet the morning by dry retching as she brushed and flossed her teeth, the result of an abnormally weak gag reflex. Mum would harmonise by clearing her itchy throat with a steady drone that sounded like
Kaaaaaaaah.
As the last one to wake up, my contribution would be the terrible rooster. When I finally silenced it by pressing the ‘Off' button, a perky automated voice would chirrup: ‘Good morning!'

After my parents separated, I did an audit of all the things in my life that caused me unnecessary stress. This included the rooster alarm clock, which was slowly driving me insane. But because it had been a present from my mother, I knew I wouldn't be able to throw it out; instead, I gave it back to her.

Dad had now left home, and the anxiety and stress of those months saw Mum's sleeping patterns become wild and unpredictable. When she did sleep, it was like a coma – a bear-like hibernation far more insidious and flattening than anything any other family member had ever experienced. Once I had slept for fourteen straight hours when I had chicken-pox, but Mum's sleeping sessions outdid even that. If she wasn't sleeping for most of the day, she would remain awake for hours on end, watching late-night movies on SBS until the after-hours broadcasting signal kicked in, at which point she'd tune in to infomercials for the exercise and julienne machines. It was as if my mother had narcolepsy, insomnia and chronic fatigue syndrome all rolled into one. In the middle of the night, I could hear her, still awake, with the TV murmuring softly in the background. Later, I'd hear her slippered feet skulking around the house, my mother reduced to a tired zombie shuffle.

When school started, the rooster alarm clock once again began releasing its bone-chilling cries into the morning air, but this time from Mum's room. The alarm would continue for minutes on end, and in my sleep I'd wrap a pillow around my head, convincing myself that at any moment Mum would turn it off, which never happened. I always had to march down the hallway to do it for her.

‘Good morning!' the rooster said.

In the morning silence, I looked at Mum in the king-sized bed where she now slept by herself. It looked strange without Dad there on his usual side. Because Mum had lost weight since the separation, the bed looked enormous, as though it was threatening to swallow her up. She hadn't budged for the entire time the alarm had been on.

‘Mum?' I asked, touching her shoulder. ‘Mum? The alarm has been going for ages. Can't you hear it?'

Andrew and Tammy joined me, rubbing their eyes.

‘Seriously, someone needs to get rid of that clock,' Andrew said.

Tammy looked at Mum, concerned. ‘Is she okay?' she asked.

Mum didn't move as I nudged her shoulder again.

‘Mum?'

I leaned over Mum's face to make sure I could hear her breathe. At that moment, to our relief, she opened her mouth and smacked her lips. I put my head close to her, knowing she was about to say something. We all waited in silence for her to speak.

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh
.

Some mornings, after switching off her alarm clock, I'd head straight back to bed, tired and grumpy. When one of us would eventually wake up properly, we'd do laps around the house waking up the rest of the siblings, informing them of the emergency at hand.

‘All of us slept in!' we'd scream. ‘And we've only got eight minutes to get dressed and drive to school! Get the
fuck
up!' It was an awful way to start the morning. Once in the car, we'd pick fights with Mum for the entire trip, all of us desperately knotting neckties and pulling up socks as she sped along the main road, only half-awake, her nerves frayed, still wearing last night's pyjamas.

‘Why didn't you wake me up?' she asked. ‘You know rushing makes me nervous on the road.'

‘You're the
mother
,' I said. ‘Isn't it your responsibility?'

‘I've been traumatised by a bad marriage! It has affected my health! All the stress has made me very, very tired! Do you know what it's like to be this tired?'

When we reached the school, the final bells would have rung, and I'd file into the worship hall for daily devotion, an unshowered, unkempt mess. Teachers and friends would notice my hair moulded into the form of my mattress, and they'd shake their heads.
Did we know what it was like to be this tired?
Mum had asked.

‘Sleep cancer,' my mother said when she picked us up that afternoon. ‘I have sleep cancer.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘It's like an illness,' she's explained, one hand on the wheel. ‘I go to sleep, but when I do, it's so hard to wake up. It's like cancer.'

‘You do
not
have cancer,' I said. ‘That's a tasteless thing to say.'

‘I didn't say I had
cancer
,' she said. ‘Sometimes it just feels like I'm dying, that's all.'

 

*

 

Having diagnosed herself, Mum went about concocting remedies. Whenever there was illness in the family, Mum's knowledge of Chinese herbs and soups was as important as any prescription a GP might administer. One particular soup would help with her moods and sleeping patterns, but it was complicated: it needed to be simmered for hours, left overnight, then boiled up again in the morning. Since the evening was going to be a television-packed all-nighter anyway, she let the soup simmer while she sat and stared at the screen. That night, reruns of
Family Ties
were playing. A wholesome show about a family that stuck together no matter what, it had long been shunted from daytime schedules. Eventually, she started to lose consciousness, and with her eyes half-open she switched off the lights and shuffled off to bed.

We were woken up by alarms we'd never heard before, intense, pulsating flashes of noise that sounded like someone taking an ice-pick to our ears. In my dream, I had been naked, riding down neon-lit waterslides in the middle of the jungle, but now people were telling me to wake the hell up. We were in an underground bunker, and emergency lights were flashing. ‘Wake up!' they said. ‘
Wake up
.'

When I opened my eyes, I saw smoke: the fire alarm had been set off. The first thing I thought was not that we were in danger, but that we were disturbing the neighbours with all this noise.
What will they think?
Sometimes, shame and embarrassment are strong enough to override all other emotions. Mum was already in the hallway, using a bath towel to beat the smoke away from her face as she tried to get to the source of the fumes in the kitchen.

‘Cover your noses,' she yelled. ‘Switch on the fans and open the windows.' The sirens continued to scream into the dark. Coughing, everyone started turning on lights, and we saw there was no fire, but that the herb soup had boiled right down to the base of the pot. The charred remains were smoking and wheezing: a black, dried-up mess of herbs. Andrew grabbed two placemats and waved smoke away from the alarm while Candy opened the windows and turned on the ceiling fans. Tammy and Michelle grabbed onto me as I used my pillow to wave the smoke away.

When the alarm stopped, we stood in a circle, no one saying anything.

‘The soup,' Mum eventually said. ‘It was the soup for my sleep cancer.'

Everyone looked at the clock on the wall. By its count, the sun would be up soon enough. In a few hours, it would be time for school. We'd have to shake ourselves out of our nightmares, and a rooster would be calling us out of bed.

Heat! Vermin! Pestilence!

In Queensland, the humidity could just about kill you. Unlike in other Australian states, where people talk about experiencing a ‘dry heat,' the heat up north is like a steam room, a wet blanket of air that hangs like a drunken fug and smothers your brain. It's what you'd call equatorial weather, the kind of climate where the pores on your face spontaneously open up, and primary schools send pupils home when classrooms transform into furnaces, which is more often than you'd think. All over the state, old men's noses swell up and mutate into red, tumorous cankers from sun exposure, and young boys develop inflamed, peeling shoulders that look like textbook cases of leprosy. You can tell the women who wear sunscreen from the ones who don't. The ones who skip sunscreen have skin like their grandmothers. Their grandmothers don't have skin at all, but a rich, tan, saddle-quality leather draped over their faces.

Where I lived, no one's houses were designed for the heat. Builders and architects were in denial, and our living room gave priority to decoration over ventilation, with heavy ground-to-ceiling windows that didn't open, but magnified the heat before trapping it in like an oven. In summer, you could bake a cake in the ensuite, make pudding in the sinks.

On Christmas school holidays, my siblings and I would lie in front of a rotating fan, rubbing ice cubes on our temples, waiting for the moment the fan's blades would incline in our direction to offer us sweet relief.

‘Mum,' the five of us would groan. ‘
Muuuuum
.'

We didn't even know what we were asking for; the five of us sounded drunk. All we knew was that we wanted the pain to stop. As we moaned, Candy, Andrew and I sprayed ourselves with a dispenser filled with water, while Tammy and Michelle lay down on bed sheets on the floor, wearing nothing but underpants saturated in sweat.

‘
Muuuum
,' we'd say.

Mum would come out, sweating and wearing rubber dishwashing gloves covered in suds. She hated when we complained.

‘You think
this
is hot?' she'd ask. ‘You don't
know
hot. In Malaysia, it'd get so hot you'd want to rip your skin off, but we'd still have to wear a full school uniform. Three layers.
Three
.' She held three gloved fingers up accusingly, all of them moist and dripping. The way she did it made it look vulgar. At her school, she added, there were nuns in full habits who stoically walked through the searing Malaysian heat without ever flinching or complaining. Could we imagine what those nuns' bodies must've looked like at the end of the day – all shrivelled and hot, their boobs poached in their own sweat like half-cooked pork fillets?
Well
? Could we?

There was supposed to be a moral to her story, an answer to her question, but the heat made it difficult for us to concentrate.

‘What?' we asked.

Mum shook her head. ‘Do something outside,' she said. ‘Get out of the house.'

But even she knew that our options were limited. We were afraid of the beach and terrible at swimming. Sometimes we'd have a ‘wet day,' where we'd spend hours with the hose on in the garden, pouring bubble-bath liquid onto a plastic slide stretched out over the lawn. Inevitably, someone would get hurt or we'd get into a fight, and one of us would shred our knees or bruise our face. Wet days were strictly an occasional activity. Other times, we'd stand in front of the freezer until Mum told us we were wasting electricity. Most of the time, though, we were content to stay and whinge, which was something we all did really, really well.

 

*

 

Though we might have felt deathly, other things thrived in this heat. Mosquitoes, drunk on sweat and blood, would bite us without fear or shame. Sleeping through summer in the room I shared with Andrew, we'd wake up with welts on our feet, palms and face; the next morning, we'd walk around like we'd been shot by rubber bullets.

But the thing I hated the most was the cockroaches, which bred uncontrollably in our kitchen. I didn't have any problem with spiders or silverfish, and mice almost seemed cute. Friends who had snake issues struck me as exciting and adventurous. But cockroaches were the pest for people who lived in dumpsters. There was something shameful about it.

It was our kitchen's fault. Cockroaches loved breeding in and behind the broken, derelict dishwasher, and after we'd turn off the lights, they'd hold revolting orgies underneath the warm coils of the hotplates. The oven had never been installed properly, and there were gaps between the cabinets and the walls where grease built up like a black tarry plaque. We lost cutlery and chopsticks in those gaps. For cockroaches, it was a warm, sticky, disgusting heaven.

At least twice a day, massive cockroaches would crawl out from their corner and into open display in the living room. There was something so outrageously shameless about the way they did this that we'd bay for blood straightaway. Andrew was always the first to launch into action.

‘Die!' he'd scream, chasing one with a shoe. The rest of us would jump onto sofas, hopping from foot to foot, pointing and shrieking as Andrew gave chase.

‘Kill it! Kill it!' we yelled, watching it zigzag across the living-room floor.

‘Where'd it go?'

‘Over there! Over there!' we said, pointing to the pile of board games under the coffee table.

‘Don't use that,' Candy screamed at Andrew. ‘It's my good shoe!'

‘Screw your good shoe!'

The cockroach would climb up the wall.

‘Over there, over
there
—'

‘It's getting
away
!'

Andrew took aim.

‘My shooeeee,' Candy moaned.

‘I see it!' I said, pointing at the wall.

‘Got it,' Andrew said.