Tiger Daughter Read online

  If it’s Henry, or even his dad, mentioning Miss Spencer will get their attention.

  But the dark shape says nothing, and begins to close the front door. ‘Wait! Please!’ I say, but the door clicks shut and I’m still standing there, holding the envelope.

  From behind me, Mum says firmly, ‘Henry is his father’s responsibility, not ours. You are embarrassing them. It is not our business. Let them grieve in peace.’

  Ignoring her, I pull a pen out of the pocket of my tracksuit pants and scribble a maths problem and answer onto the envelope, not even deliberately mucking up the answer because I still don’t get long division. Just about all the numbers are in the wrong columns.

  I say fiercely, ‘If that doesn’t get your attention, Henry Xiao, nothing will.’ Then I bend and stuff the envelope through the gap under the wire door and it’s so overfull that it tears a little as I keep shoving it through under the wooden door behind until nothing can be seen from the outside.

  Mum has to take little running steps all the way home to keep up with me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mum exclaims, as I get a colourful plastic lunchbox out of the bottom drawer beneath the cutlery drawer and the tea towel drawer, and bring it to the table. Our simple dinner of a whole steamed fish, rice and beans fried with a little minced pork and pickled vegetables, is sitting on it. I shovel rice, a handful of fried beans and a long piece of fish from near the spine into the box, and shut it tight.

  ‘As soon as we eat, I’m taking it to Henry’s,’ I reply firmly. ‘I bet he’s not even eating. I couldn’t smell any food being cooked when I was at the door before.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Mum snaps, snatching up the lunchbox and ripping off the lid before tipping the food into the empty bowl in front of me. ‘There’s only enough food here for two people. It’s terrible what happened to that … what that woman did, but it’s not up to us to raise her son when she couldn’t do that herself ! It’s not our business. She obviously wasn’t properly taught. Now, it’s a great shame, but her son will not be either. And you’re not taking food out of your mouth to put into his! He’s not one of our people.’

  As calmly as I can, I pull the lunchbox back towards me and dump the uneaten contents of my bowl into it again and close the lid, placing the box on the seat beside me so that Mum can’t reach it. I pick up my chopsticks and start serving my mother some of the remaining beans and fish while she stares at me in disbelief.

  ‘He is my good friend,’ I reply quietly in Chinese, ‘and he still needs to eat. If it had happened to me –’ Mum inhales loudly at the highly unlucky suggestion, unluckily spoken aloud, ‘– you would want me to be taken care of because Dad would not be capable, he would not be willing. You know this. How many times have you heard him say, Raising children is not a job for a man! It’s the least we can do. Henry can’t study if he’s hungry.’

  I don’t remind Mum how often Confucius himself banged on about how important it was to be a benevolent man, because I can see how stricken she is at my words. There is not much time for benevolence in our house, but now is one such time. Underneath the fear, Mum’s a good person. She’s kind, and softly spoken, and so very desperate to please. Without the fear, I know she would be a different person, a braver one. She might even have already cooked the Xiaos a proper meal and taken it over herself on a tray, while it was still hot. But she’s been conditioned to stay in her box, so she does. She can’t see over the sides of it, wouldn’t even think of testing its edges and dimensions, and it’s both sad and terrifying to me.

  We don’t really talk as we put on our coats after cleaning up the dinner dishes. Mum trails behind me, looking around anxiously as if Dad might somehow pop out of the bushes, roaring and pointing accusingly, as I walk back to Henry’s house holding the lunchbox balanced across my palms like an offering.

  When we reach the Xiaos’ place, the whole house is as dark as the night outside. If they are in there, they’re at the very back of the house, or they’re pretending to be asleep in their separate, tiny bedrooms. When I ring the doorbell, three times firmly with a decent pause between each ring, no one comes to the door, and no lights turn on.

  ‘Wen,’ Mum says quietly, ‘just leave it now.’

  When Dad gets home that night, near midnight, like always when he’s working, I listen hard to what they say to each other, but Mum doesn’t mention stopping at Henry’s house at all.

  And I think to myself, It’s a step.

  CHAPTER 4

  COMMON PEOPLE

  In the morning, on the way to school, even Mum is looking out anxiously for Henry’s house. I can feel her tension through her hand on my elbow as we cross the concrete pedestrian bridge to Henry’s side of the road, the traffic already slow and heavy beneath us.

  ‘Look,’ she says in Chinese, ‘it’s there. And the papers.’

  We both rush forward to retrieve the things on the front doorstep; the envelope with the lunchbox neatly placed on top, everything at perfect right angles. Mum lifts the box, opening it to find that it’s empty, and sniffs at it. We both catch the faint smell of fake lemons from the water it’s been washed in. ‘Do you think Henry ate it?’ she says cautiously. ‘Or did he just throw it away? It looked terrible, the food we gave him. Not even like food.’

  ‘That was your fault,’ I mutter. ‘At least it looked like food when I first put it in the box!’

  I peer into the torn envelope still stuffed full of papers and draw one of the worksheets out. I never realised I was holding my breath until I let it out now with a whoosh. It’s a maths worksheet covered in Henry’s precise script – lines and lines of working-out. Rifling through the remaining papers in the envelope, I also see Henry’s responses to short-answer English comprehension questions, to multiple-choice science questions, pages and pages of work.

  I don’t think Miss Spencer expected him to do all this stuff in one night, but Henry has. Maybe he didn’t even sleep. Maybe he couldn’t, and this helped him to pass the time.

  Seeing this, Mum murmurs, ‘Poor boy,’ and we keep walking towards school, Mum holding the empty lunchbox and me holding the papers. Before she leaves me at the gate, Mum says tentatively, ‘I think I’ll make a healthy soup tonight. With gǒu qǐ, lotus root, carrots, mushrooms, dried longan, chicken.’

  I can’t help the smile that breaks across my face. ‘Could you just make more?’ I reply. ‘Make lots?’

  Sounding distracted, Mum isn’t really speaking to me as she turns away, muttering, ‘And noodles. Something hearty and good for the mind, the eyes, the circulation. To relieve the stress.’

  I catch Miss Spencer just before we both walk into the classroom and hand her the torn envelope. ‘He did all of it,’ I tell her quietly, and Miss Spencer’s eyes widen in amazement.

  Billy Raum notices us talking on his way to his seat at the back of the classroom. He mouths swot in my direction, and I give him my best murderous look out of my slant-eyes-that-don’t-slant that says, So what if I am?

  Billy’s eyes widen too, and he looks down.

  Miss Spencer’s eyebrows almost touch her hairline as she takes the papers out, sifting through them quickly. ‘Can you take him more worksheets after school?’ she replies, sounding just as distracted as Mum was at the school gates. ‘I called again – Henry’s dad says he’s refusing to leave home, to even step outside his bedroom. Won’t go with his dad to the market, won’t talk to him, or to anyone else. And put this in the bin,’ she says, handing me the ripped envelope she’s holding. ‘It’s wrecked.’

  ‘I couldn’t fit it under the door,’ I say apologetically.

  Miss Spencer’s smile is a bit sad. ‘But never say die, right, Wen? Keep pushing till you can push no more – that’s the way. I’ll find another envelope to put the new batch in. And I won’t give him as much work or he’ll kill himself …’ We look at each other quickly, horrified, before Miss Spencer adds, ‘… trying to do it all in one day. See you inside.’

  She continues flicking through Henry’s sheaf of completed worksheets in wonder as I take the torn envelope towards the recycling bin at the back. ‘There’s a note on the front, Wen,’ Nikki Kuol points out helpfully as I pass her desk, ‘in red.’ And I see that Henry has painstakingly corrected the long division maths problem I hastily scribbled on the envelope before I shoved it under the door. He’s moved all the numbers into the correct columns and highlighted the number I hadn’t known what to do with and just left hanging there.

  Nikki and I both laugh as we read the outraged message printed neatly in capitals across the bottom.

  ‘I do that, too, all the time,’ Nikki says ruefully, as I post the envelope through the slot on the bin lid.

  Just before art class, the last period of the day, Miss Spencer hands me a new envelope for Henry as she passes me in the hallway. ‘I’ve already put yours on your desk,’ she adds. ‘Remember to take it home with you. Just don’t, whatever you do, forget to drop this work to Henry. If he’s happy to communicate with the world this way, and only this way, I’ll take it.’

  During art class, instead of working on my design for a convict ship like I’m supposed to be doing, I doodle on Henry’s homework envelope to cheer him up. His message in capitals looked kind of angry, which is the last thing I want to make him feel right now. I just need him to focus.

  When Mum greets me at the school gates – still formally dressed in the red suit jacket and pencil skirt over a frilly black blouse with a black bag and shiny black high heels that she dropped me in this morning – she actually takes the envelope for Henry out of my hand and carries it all the way to his house for me. I see her studying the picture that I’ve drawn on the front, frowning a little as I take the envelope back from her at the Xiaos’ house.

/>   I ring the doorbell once, before crouching and pushing the envelope under the security door and the front door behind it. The packet of papers is not so fat today, and fits through the gap nicely.

  All Mum says as we walk away is, ‘That was quite good, Wen, that picture you did. I used to like to draw too.’

  I’m still surprised by that, as we cross the pedestrian bridge in silence, heading up the main road and past the local shops. Mum never talks much about herself. I have no idea what she was like when she was little, can’t even imagine her, or Dad, being children. There’s just a blank cloudy space where the concept of my parents as children should be. And I’ve never seen Mum doodle anything in her life. If she ever holds a pen or a pencil, it’s usually to write a shopping list with, or to remind herself to pay a bill, in neat standard Chinese characters.

  Just before we reach the end of the strip of shops where we have to turn right for home, we hear a single faint scream, followed by Mrs Xenakis yelling out the doorway of her pharmacy, ‘Mrs Zhou! Wen! Help me!’ She sounds desperate, not at all like her usual calm self.

  Shocked, Mum and I exchange glances then run inside to find Mrs Xenakis kneeling on the floor next to an elderly Chinese woman with short, thin grey hair, in a baggy floral blouse and straight brown pants, flat shoes. The old lady is lying on her back on the floor with her eyes closed, and she is clearly struggling to breathe.

  ‘I can’t understand what she’s saying!’ Mrs Xenakis says anxiously. ‘Can you just sit with her while I call an ambulance?’

  Mum kneels awkwardly in her skirt suit and heels, placing her black handbag down on the floor beside her before hesitantly reaching out and taking the old woman’s hand. I do the same on the other side and catch a whiff of fried fish, hairspray and the same musty odour of mould, or damp, that hangs around inside the cupboards of our house.

  The bones of the old woman’s hands are as light as a bird’s, and the loose skin feels papery, as if it’s no longer really properly attached to her body. She’s whispering something in a Chinese dialect I don’t know – it could be a name, or a place, I’m not sure, it’s just a jumble of familiar-sounding but incomprehensible noises. But Mum understands, because her face lights up. She starts talking to the old woman in a soothing voice that instantly smooths the sharp crease out of the old woman’s forehead. When the ambulance comes to take her away, Mrs Xenakis directing the paramedics anxiously all the while to be careful, please, she’s very frail, the old woman doesn’t want to let go of Mum’s hand.

  ‘Look, love,’ says a female paramedic to Mum after trying and failing to break the old woman’s grip on Mum’s hand, ‘do you think you could accompany us to the hospital just to get her details down? Help admit her? You’d be doing us a huge favour.’

  Mum and I exchange anxious looks, suddenly remembering. No stops!

  This has to be the longest stop on the way home ever. And if Mum goes to the hospital, what will happen if Dad calls and she’s not there?

  My voice is anxious as I say, ‘She can’t drive, my mum, she doesn’t speak much English herself.’

  ‘Someone will run her back, darl,’ the female ambo says firmly. ‘I’ll make sure of that.’

  Mum replies, in English, as I stare in surprise, ‘I speak enough. I can go with you. It’s no problem.’ She digs around with her free hand in her bag and hands me the house keys, which sit cold and heavy in my palm. I’ve never held them before because no one has ever trusted me to do that.

  And I watch, open-mouthed, as Mum – still holding the hand of the old woman, who’s now lying on a gurney – is led away from me, saying over her shoulder in Mandarin, ‘Put the soup on a very low flame and don’t add the noodles yet, whatever you do – they’ll be too soft. Leave that to me when I get back. And deal with your father. You’re clever – you’ll know what to say.’

  Then the paramedics are lifting the gurney into the back of the ambulance, and helping Mum and her handbag up into it and the doors close, and they’re all gone.

  Mrs Xenakis and I stand there for a moment in the silent pharmacy, just looking at the empty car spots outside where the ambulance was.

  ‘Well,’ she says, turning and looking at me, ‘thank goodness you and your mum turned up, Wen, I was in a terrible state. I had no idea what to do! You’ll be okay to walk home?’ She hands me an orange lollipop – the kind she usually gives to little kids who’ve just had a flu injection – and I nod, still feeling a bit shocked.

  Mum’s voice was strong, and certain. And she called me clever.

  In our house not bad is the highest praise I think I’ve ever heard. It’s a day for firsts.

  Still holding the house keys, and the orange lollipop, I turn the corner past the shops into the street that our street runs off, feeling weird that Mum isn’t right here with me, my faithful shadow.

  There’s new graffiti on the side of the pharmacy that proclaims loudly in fluorescent green and pink letters:

  And I think, Yeah, that’s what we are. And that’s okay.

  CHAPTER 5

  ONE STEP, ONE FOOTPRINT

  Yībù yīgè jiǎoyìn

  The home phone is already ringing as I unlock the front door, and my heart sinks. I run towards the kitchen where the phone is, placing the unopened lollipop and the house keys hurriedly down on the kitchen table.

  Maybe it’s because I don’t answer with Mum’s tentative ‘Wéi?’ that Dad snaps immediately, ‘Where is your mother? Where is she?’ Instantly suspicious that there is something not right in our little world, something is different. Mum knows to answer the telephone, every day at four o’clock except on Tuesdays, which is Dad’s one day off a week. On Tuesdays he’s always home, and the house always feels heavier.

  I think quickly, answering in Mandarin, ‘She’s not feeling well. She’s in the bathroom. Food poisoning, something not fresh, that she ate.’

  I’m on high alert, the words just tumbling out. This phone call has the same treacherous feeling as the impromptu debate Miss Spencer sprang on us today – on why reading is better than TV – the feeling that things could descend into chaos and shouting at any moment, without warning.

  I was on the side of TV, and our side crushed the reading side because TV has more people like Nikki Kuol and me and even horrible Billy Raum in it. We pointed out that there are Aboriginal people on TV (whose land this was, is and always will be – I mean, how stupid do you have to be to think being here a few decades, or even a couple of centuries, gives you more right to this place than the people who’ve been here for thousands of years?) while there aren’t many Aboriginal people in books, at least not the books we have in the school library. My team said all that, to general cheering.

  Everyone agreed that books without real people in them were dumb (their word, not mine – I would have said, possibly, boring or rather far-fetched) and even Miss Spencer was laughing by the end, although she pretended to be outraged that TV had won hands down over reading.

  ‘Philistines!’ she laughed.

  ‘But are we?’ Gabriella Amato called out. ‘Are we really, if the medium itself is refusing to move with the times?’ And we all laughed harder, feeling clever and a bit wicked.

  Miss Spencer had replied with a huge smile, ‘I actually have great hope for this world yet, thanks to you people.’

  ‘Your mother is so unwell that she can’t come to the phone?’ Dad asks now, incredulously, and I say in English, as cheerfully as I can manage, ‘Better out than in, Dad. That’s what the school nurse always says.’

  In his usual way, Dad doesn’t say goodbye, he just makes a snorting noise then hangs up.