The Pause (3 page)

I follow Lisa's directions to her leafy address in the burbs. The house is imposing, with huge skeletal gum trees looming up behind it like something out of a Maurice Sendak book. Actually, the house itself is quite ordinary; it's what I've heard goes on beyond the front door that is imposing. And I'm not about to be disappointed.

I take a deep breath and ring the doorbell. When I hear no
ding
ing or
dong
ing coming from inside, I knock on the glass panel. Nothing. I try again, harder this time. It would be just my luck to temporarily turn into my dad at this point and put my fist through the glass and sever an artery. Fortunately both glass and arteries hold.

I hear clomping down the hallway and if it's Lisa, she's not exactly light of foot. But I know it's not. Seeing how tense and nervous Lisa becomes when she talks about her mother, she probably doesn't have door-answering privileges. I think my being here might be the biggest risk she's taken in a long time. Our daily phone calls over the last week were big enough, our Ciao Latte get-togethers huge, but this … this is taking things to a whole other level.

The front door swings open and I have no option other than to immediately nickname Lisa's mother The Kraken. It's the look she's directing at me. It's not exactly hatred, more a glare of total contempt, the sort of look she might reserve for her husband if she found him in a compromising situation with a chicken. It reminds me of the way my mother once glared at a cockroach that was doing the backstroke in her bowl of cornflakes.

She's a lot older than I thought she would be. She must be at least sixty. I do the maths in my head and it doesn't make a lot of sense.

‘
Lei ho ma
,' I say, having googled a Cantonese greeting before I left home.

Lisa's mother looks at me as if I've just informed her that her pet goat is on fire and that I've sold her tennis racquet into slavery, and, I suppose, given that Cantonese is a tonal language, there is a very real chance I have.

‘I'm Lisa's friend,' I offer. ‘From school.' And as soon as I say it I realise it's a mistake.

‘Lisa goes to a girls' school. You're a boy.'

There's no fooling The Kraken.

‘We catch the train together. We're friends …' Oh, Lisa. Where the hell are you? Save me from this … this thing. Lisa certainly wasn't exaggerating when she told me about her mother. In fact, now I can see that far from exaggerating, she was actually holding back. ‘We talk about English.'

‘Of course you talk in English. Do you speak Cantonese?'

Evidently not. At least as far as goats and tennis racquets are concerned. ‘I mean the subject, not the language.' For eff's sake, Lisa, get out here and rescue me.

And then I hear her padding down the hallway. A gentle hypnotic glide across the earth like a cat, not the steady, heavy, pre-lunch stomp of a Komodo dragon.

‘Oh, hi, Declan,' she says, all sweetness, but we both know she's going to be in big trouble for this. ‘I see you've met Mummy.'

‘Mummy'? Seriously? Hearing Lisa call this woman ‘Mummy' just brings out the difference between them even more. This thing gave birth to a child? A human child? And an angelic one at
that. Jeez! Evolution works fast around here. From Morlock to Eloi in one generation.

‘Mummy, this is Declan. Declan – Mum.'

Lacking any high-calibre firearms with which to shoot me – and with an almost breathtaking show of magnanimity – The Kraken proffers a talon, which I tentatively take hold of. It has all the warmth and texture of a three-day-old dead fish. I don't know whether to shake it or batter it and serve it with chips.

‘Come in, Declan,' says Lisa. Well, of course it was Lisa. These were not words that were about to spring forth from The Kraken's spittle-flecked lips anytime soon.

Now that Lisa has invited me in, The Kraken has to step aside or put on a scene. And if she puts on a scene she will lose face. And from what I've heard from Lisa, face is paramount to The Kraken.

The three of us stand there in the entrance. You could cut the tension with a chainsaw.

‘I'll just grab my books,' says Lisa. She heads off towards her bedroom.

Oh no. Left alone in the vestibule with The Kraken, my heart rate begins to quicken. This is what it must feel like when you're alone at sea, being circled by a shark. I smile at her. A sort of well-isn't-this-nice smile, but she just glares at and through me, as if I'm the spawn of the
devil. For a moment I'm sure I can see flames dancing in her eyes. She continues to look me up and down.

‘Have you been here long?' I ask, breaking the silence. Lisa told me that her family had bought this house a few years ago, so I latch on to the fact to make conversation.

‘About twenty years.' She thinks I mean how long since she moved here from Hong Kong. ‘You?'

‘I was born here, like Lisa.'

‘Lisa was born in Hong Kong.'

Again I do the maths. Lisa was born in Hong Kong but they've been here twenty years. It's not quite adding up. ‘Oh, but I thought you said that you'd been here …'

‘Doesn't matter,' snaps The Kraken, and I wonder if I've inadvertently stumbled onto something.

‘My parents are from overseas,' I add in some sort of bizarre hope that being the child of a fellow immigrant will make me appear slightly more acceptable.

‘Where from?'

‘My dad's from Ireland and Mum's Italian. Well, her parents are.'

‘You speak Italian?'

‘I understand some, but when they all get together for Christmas and stuff they speak
too quickly.' Arms flailing around like those bendy-balloon guys outside car yards.

‘What do you want to do, after the HSC?'

I'm going to go out with my mates and get completely shit-faced. ‘Go to uni and study English.'

‘Why English? You already speak English.'

‘To teach. I want to be a high school English teacher, or else work overseas teaching English, in Shanghai or Beijing perhaps.' I throw in this last bit hoping that my altruism towards her countrymen (women, persons …) might change her initial opinion of me.

‘Teachers don't make much money,' says The Kraken.

Oh, please hurry up, Lisa.

‘But Lisa wants to be a teacher, too.'

‘Lisa is a girl. It doesn't matter too much what she does. It matters what her husband does.'

‘My mum's a barrister,' I say, brimming with pride.

The Kraken glares at me as if having a barrister for a mother is all types of wrong.

Did the last forty years not happen? But luckily, just as I'm wishing I had a bra and some kindling for a fire, Lisa returns with her books. She gives me a look. We both know what she was doing: she wanted to leave me alone with The Kraken
to see how well I would cope. Had she left it any longer she might have returned to find me nothing more than a pile of spat-out bones and a couple of blinking eyeballs on the floor.

The Kraken gives me one last look and then stalks off towards the kitchen. When she gets there she calls back, ‘
Lisa! Fai-di yup lei choo fong!
'

Lisa gives me a smile, rolls her eyes and beckons me to stay where I am.

Of course, I've no idea what The Kraken just said, but judging by what happens next, it was probably something like, ‘Lisa! Get your butt in the kitchen pronto!'

The kitchen is obviously the hub of the house. The aroma is intoxicating. Over the years the culinary odours have seeped into the walls, giving the house a strange yet delicious essence. Cooking clearly plays a significant role in the Leong home.

Adopting what seems to be the custom, I kick off my shoes and place them with the thirty or so pairs already in the vestibule. From where I am I can see into the lounge room. I notice there's a jade Chinese dragon on top of the piano. There's also the ubiquitous bare-bellied Buddha smiling at me like someone's just told him the one about the priest, the rabbi and the lawyer who walk into a bar and the barman looks at them and says, ‘Is this some sort of joke?' Man, that is one rotund
enlightened being. For a guy who started the movement in abject poverty, he certainly stacked on the kilos once it got going.

Chris and Maaaate's homes look nothing like this, their parents having embraced Freedom and Ikea. My dad emigrated to Sydney from Dublin when he was in his early twenties and yet the only Irish thing in the house, apart from him, is a shillelagh, which is kind of like an Irish nunchucka. It's a heavily polished, short wooden stick which Mum lets him keep on display for no other reason than it could possibly be used to beat a spider into compliance.

There's a bamboo cane leaning against the wall near the piano and a single chopstick next to the Buddha, which seems a bit out of place. There's also a family portrait on top of the piano which, judging from Lisa's age and the stupid hat that her father is wearing, was taken last Christmas. Lisa's brother and sister look to be well into their thirties. Lisa must have been some sort of accident. A happy accident. Though looking at her beautiful face in the photo, she doesn't appear too happy. But the weird thing is, as I look at all the other photos on the walls and cupboards and so on, I notice that the Christmas photo is the only one that contains Lisa, and even in that one it looks like her sister is holding onto her, trying to
keep her in the shot. Maybe she's kind of like the Harry Potter of the Leong family.

The whispered debate wafts in from the kitchen along with the smells. They speak in English: it's The Kraken's way of telling me that she knows what I'm up to. Lisa
had
told Mummy that her friend was coming over to study. The same friend who has been helping her with her English studies on the phone. Mummy acknowledges that this was indeed the case, however Lisa neglected to mention that this particular friend was in possession of a penis. All Lisa's friends have boyfriends! But Lisa shouldn't have boyfriends. When Lisa's mother was a girl,
she
never had any boyfriends. Lisa counters with the slightly heartbreaking chestnut that I'm not a boyfriend but a boy-space-friend. Mummy replies that Lisa shouldn't have either a boyfriend or a boy-space-friend. Lisa tries to shush Mummy and this escalates an already tense argument. Mummy argues that she is in her own home and will not be shushed by anyone, particularly her selfish, ungrateful, horrible, shameful, good-for-nothing daughter who doesn't give a damn about her own mother. The same shameful, disgusting, ungrateful, good-for-nothing daughter who has no respect at all. At this point I'm forced to lose interest in the debate when it switches to Cantonese. I keep an ear out
for
gweilo
(white devil) which, apart from
yum cha
and my goat-tennis-racquet greeting, is the only other Cantonese word I know. I don't hear it. But I guess I don't need to.

Eventually some sort of compromise is reached and Lisa and I are allowed to study at the kitchen table, which is where I expected us to be located anyway. Hell, if I'd been The Kraken (and it's the sort of thought that could wake me up screaming at night) I wouldn't let me study in Lisa's bedroom either.

The Kraken makes herself scarce (though unfortunately not extinct) for a while and Lisa and I get down to deconstructing
To Kill a Mockingbird
. We decide that Atticus Finch was a precursor to Clark Kent/Superman, choosing to ignore the fact that Superman actually appeared first. We discuss the Deep South, we discuss slavery, we discuss what's happening now – the demonising of boat people for political gain – and we arrive at insights into racial issues that no one in the world has ever thought of before. We are so clever we can hardly contain ourselves. We determine that as the races continue to interbreed (though we hate the term ‘interbreeding'), eventually there will be no such thing as racial purity (another term we loathe) but one big, happy race, so humanity will have to find other things to go to war over – borders, religion,
oil, wealth. It's at this point we look at each other and go ‘Duh', though mine comes out more like Homer's ‘Doh'.

Occasionally I attempt a couple of sneak attacks to brush the back of Lisa's hand, but she's too quick. She pulls away and stares at the doorway in case The Kraken has suddenly materialised. I notice the faint red welt marks on the back of Lisa's hand and now I think I know why there's a single chopstick on the piano, lying next to the gag-cracking Buddha.

The Kraken keeps suddenly materialising but she's not using the irregularity of Chinese water torture. You could set your watch by her: two minutes between security sweeps. Maybe she's working off some sort of ancient astrological chart that's informed her that it is impossible for a man, even a red-blooded, depraved
gweilo
, to get her daughter pregnant in the space of two minutes.

On The Kraken's third passing, I finally hit paydirt and manage to stroke the back of Lisa's hand. Clearly Lisa has also calculated the timing of The Kraken's orbits and doesn't pull away this time. Her skin is all soft and silky smooth. She gives me the sort of coy look that only Michelangelo or that guy who was really into painting angels (Botticelli?) could come close to capturing. And on The Kraken's eighth passing I lean across
and kiss Lisa on her cheek. She turns to me and gives me a stunned expression but then, risking life, limb and possible dismemberment, she –
she
– reaches over and kisses
me
on the mouth. I have never experienced anything like it, in heaven or on earth. Our lips melt into one and the tingling sensation throughout my entire body makes me feel as though I'm simply going to float away. And when, with The Kraken inbound, we finally pull apart and look at each other, I know, I just know with every ounce of my being, that I am going to love this angel forever.

I was right. I
did
love her forever. What I didn't expect was that forever was going to be over in less than six months.