Begin End Begin: A #LoveOzYa Anthology Read online

  I wait for Mum to leave for ‘long brunch’, and allow ten minutes for her to return having forgotten something. When she doesn’t, I grab a fresh stack of sticky notes and every pen in the house in case a dozen inexplicably fail. I lie back on my doona.

  I’m going to control my ability, no big deal. Mum did it in a car, under pressure. I’m on a bed, with no time constraints. Easy. And if I discover something I don’t like, that’s just a part of it. I’ve just got to spread that shock thin.

  Besides, it’s not as if I can find out Dad’s leaving again.

  I take a breath and shut my eyes. Right.

  The thought of Nina sparks a patchwork of memories. I hug her goodbye on the porch. I lie beside her. She offers Sophia a block of chocolate. I … reverse the flow. I lie beside her. I hug her goodbye on the porch. I strain to remember forwards, past the present and into the future … Nothing. I open my eyes.

  Yeah, the odds of what works for Mum working for me were slim, but I lived in hope. Maybe it skips a generation.

  I shut my eyes.

  The thought of Nina sparks my memory again. I hug her goodbye on the porch. I follow Gran’s example and force myself to feel it like my futures. I step into my past self’s skin. I can taste the strawberry on her lips. She’s pressed into me. I can smell her, touch the streak in her hair. We pull apart, I take control.

  ‘Will we have good times?’ I ask her.

  She smirks. Holy shit, it’s happening. The memory’s changing.

  ‘I’m not telling you that,’ Memory Nina says.

  I open my eyes and curse a fuckload. I was close. I was close. I changed the memory. Related memories are linked, I just need to find a way to get from one to the next. And it’s not as if I can walk …

  Wait. Am I sure I can’t? I mean, if related memories are linked, then all I need to do is find the edge of a memory and pop over into the next one. It could be walking around the block. It could be opening a door.

  I lean back, eyes closed.

  The thought of Nina sparks my memory again … again. I hug her goodbye on the porch. I can taste strawberry, it’s sweet. I take control and pull away abruptly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Memory Nina asks.

  I make for the door. I open it and step through, into my future self, slow dancing with Nina under fairy lights. She tosses her head back and laughs. She looks so damn beautiful.

  I snap back into my body and open my eyes. Holy shit.

  Nina suggests the night markets. I’m game, and game enough to get there twenty minutes early. I wait by the Lebanese food truck on the outskirts. When she arrives, she’s disappointed by the fairy lights. It’s a bit too indie-movie pretty for her liking.

  I tell her I don’t mind them.

  We wander through the stalls, collecting cardboard plates and splitting meals the other just has to try. We mix hot meats with ice-creams; Nina believes in concurrent dessert, and I’m a convert. We end up in the fenced-off seating area, nursing expanded waists. They’re clearing the plastic tables and chairs around us.

  ‘Should we move?’ I ask.

  ‘I don’t think I can.’

  The first thing I did after adding a Dancing with Nina sticky note, was YouTube how to do the foxtrot. Attempting the dance with an invisible Nina, I thought about what Mum said about needing to live with purpose. That has to be about more than simply preparing for it. The future might be inescapable, but I can control how I arrive there.

  ‘So, I need to tell you something, and I’m aware of how bonkers it’s going to sound,’ I warn her.

  Nina shifts in her seat. ‘I’m always down for bonkers.’

  I expect tests of the ‘Guess which number I just keyed into my phone’ variety, but, turns out, convincing her is as easy as convincing a pre-teen Sophia. Like, she just accepts it. It’s kind of unnerving.

  ‘Seriously?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, it’s totally bonkers,’ she says. ‘If it’s true, I could be down with it. If not, I want to see your endgame.’

  ‘This isn’t a joke.’

  ‘And that’s exactly what someone who’s playing an elaborate prank would say.’

  She asks how it all works, and I try to explain. Her eyes glaze over, like she’s bored, fascinated and a little terrified.

  ‘My mum never told my dad,’ I say, ‘and I wanted to date differently.’

  ‘You’re not making this up, are you?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Bonkers,’ she repeats.

  A guy leans into the front window of a nearby food truck and turns up the radio. I recognise the song from the future. Nina nods in time with the beat.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’ I ask.

  She’s firm. ‘I don’t dance.’ And then something occurs to her. Her brow bunches. ‘Do I really have a choice?’

  I stand. ‘Yeah, but I’ve already seen you make it.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘That. I’ve seen you get up, so I assume Future Nina dances with you, so I don’t really have a choice.’

  ‘Were you not going to dance?’

  ‘No, but … it’s the principle.’ She stands and takes my hands. ‘You’re lucky I like this song.’

  I’m a little over-prepared. We don’t so much dance as shift our weight from foot to foot. With each step, she gets closer until we’re almost touching.

  ‘So, the first time we kissed,’ I start.

  ‘Before you ran away.’

  ‘Yeah, before that. I saw our future and it freaked me out.’

  ‘What was it?’

  I hesitate, as if not naming it might keep it from happening. But it won’t. It is inescapable. It’s amazing how far into the future you can get by leaping through doors and windows. ‘We get divorced.’

  ‘Wicked. Was I throwing a plate? I’ve always pictured myself as a throwing-plates kind of wife.’

  ‘You threw the ring at me.’

  ‘Choice.’ She rests her head on my chest. ‘How long do we last?’

  ‘A while.’

  Nina goes quiet. ‘I’m gonna take you to the cleaners.’

  ‘My lawyer is going to be a misogynistic arsehole.’

  ‘I’m going to turn all the kids against you.’

  ‘I’ll make new ones.’

  Nina tosses her head back and laughs. Fuck, I really love that laugh. It evolves into her humming along with the chorus.

  ‘This song isn’t bad. Who sings it?’

  Nina answers, ‘Brandy.’

  The first thing I want you to know is that none of this is your fault. Ha, you can legitimately have the last word in every argument, you can use the excuse we’ve all been using with our parents since we were thirteen: ‘I didn’t ask to be born!’ In your case, you don’t know how true that is. It feels weird, writing to something that exists but doesn’t yet, if you know what I mean. At the moment, I am just creeped out by the fact that I have two heartbeats. That’s what the doctor told me when he put the stethoscope on my stomach. He said, ‘Can you hear that, Kim, you have another heartbeat down there, listen, can you hear it?’ his eyes shining dopily with awe over the miracle of life. Hell yeah I could hear it, it was going a million miles an hour, like my own heart when I found out the news. Shit, I thought, this baby’s going to have skyrocket-high levels of anxiety at the rate its heart is pumping, and then I wondered whether it was genetic, whether I had already passed on my own hang-ups and sink-downs, and I said to the doctor, ‘It must be really stressed out,’ and you know what he did? He laughed at me, the bastard, and patted me on the belly like I was the baby, and said to me, ‘That’s its normal heartrate. Their hearts beat faster because they are just so much smaller.’

  Your grandma, sitting in the chair next to me, wasn’t laughing, wasn’t infused with the miracle of life, even though she was supposed to be. She just stared at the ultrasound screen with a face that was like, well, at least it’s got arms and legs and a head in the right place;
and then every time she looked at the doctor it was with a face that was like, Doctor I had nothing to do with this. And then driving home, she’s at me.

  ‘Why couldn’t you have kept hanging around with those smart Asian girls at school? Nancy would never have got herself into this mess.’

  Yeah, Nancy Lim. Your grandma always told me Nancy was fugly. Mum said God had spared Nancy with looks but had knocked himself out giving her brains, which was why her head was so massive. ‘Such a strange big head on that small body,’ Mum used to comment, and I would see-saw from malicious conspiring glee to being resentful of my mother for her pettiness. I looked at Mum from the corner of my eye. Her hands were tight on the steering wheel, like she was manoeuvring a tractor instead of our old Camry that Dad left behind, and I could feel the rays of her anger even before she began speaking.

  ‘So stupid,’ she spluttered, ‘throwing away your future like that. Do you think you will now have happy ending with the boy?’

  I almost laughed out loud. Your grandma’s accent made her ‘happy ending’ sound more dodgy than it was. She kept yelling at me. I had learned long ago not to interrupt one of Mum’s tirades; it was no use. It was like going underwater with waves above you. Sometimes you just had to let the waves pass before you could rear your head again, otherwise you’d just be hopelessly fighting a force beyond your control. ‘You think he’s going to stay around? No, he’s the sort who never want something like this to happen. He’s the sort to marry a Nancy.’

  I didn’t say anything ’cause I knew your grandma was so obviously, blindly wrong. As if Luis would get with, let alone marry, Nancy! Aside from the fact that she looked like a walking cranium with her body only there to carry that cerebral matter from class to class, she was the first one I told about you ’cause I could trust her not to turn this into even more of a show than it already was. The others — Cassie, Nhi and Michelle — they were pathetic. I knew they’d be all squealy and OMG, OMG, OMG ’cause this would be the most exciting, terrible thing to have happened to them since Michelle’s parents took her to Vietnam to get that secret cosmetic eyelid surgery ’cause she was underage for the operation here, and then she came back with one eyelid smaller than the other. Yeah, those girls were great at commiserating in misery, but this was not their terrible thing. It was mine, and I knew Nancy would not try to take ownership of my issue and be all drama queen about it.

  So I gave her seventeen bucks and she walked into Chemist Warehouse and came out with the test, and we did it in the toilets at Footscray Library, and the test came out with strong traces of you you you in the two blue lines, and I said, ‘Oh shit.’ And Nancy didn’t say, ‘Don’t worry it will all be all right,’ or, ‘Maybe it’s wrong,’ and she didn’t pat me and she didn’t make me feel better. I hated her a little bit then and wished I had told the others, because I knew that at least they would have surrounded me with the bullshit reassurances that a girl sometimes just needs to hear.

  And you know what Nancy finally said when she decided to open her mouth? ‘Abortion is legal in Victoria until up to twenty-four weeks.’ WTF?! If I didn’t believe she was seriously aspergic I would have whacked her one. But because since Year 7 I’d convinced myself Nancy had undiagnosed Asperger’s (you know, Asian parents don’t believe in that sort of stuff, so they never got her checked out), I knew she was just trying to be helpful. ‘Nancy, we’re Catholic,’ I managed to say before the toilet door swung open and I shoved the pregnancy stick in the paper-towel bin.

  We walked out of the library loos, and of course Nancy didn’t understand me ’cause she was one of those ‘fake’ Catholics — her father only got her baptised so she could go to St Dominica’s. The first day she rocked up to school, hanging around her neck outside her school-uniform jumper was a massive brown rosary with a swinging cross at the bottom. Her dad probably made her wear it. ‘Hey yo, pimping for Christ!’ I called out, and she turned as red as the sacred heart, bless.

  Who knew that we’d end up hanging around after school at the library together — she was there to study, I was there mostly to kill time until Mum finished at Diamond Rose Fashions, where she worked selling nylon jumpers and viscose bridesmaid’s dresses to Vietnamese women who all looked a little like variations of LaToya Jackson. Soon we formed a group with the other three girls from our school and my mum was real pleased that I was spending time in the library instead of loitering in Highpoint Shopping Centre with the boys from St Andrews.

  Little did your grandma know, hell little did I know, that Nancy had a cousin, Luis, who was hot as. Looked like the lovechild of a Korean boy-band singer and Disney’s Aladdin. First time he came up to Nancy and asked, ‘Whatcha doing?’ I felt a stab of envy — come on, he was approaching Nancy? Why would he hit on her when, come on, yours truly was there, helllooo.

  Mum, still driving, interrupted my meanderings down memory lane. She was still going on about how Luis was going to abandon me for Nancy and her ilk, yadda yadda yadda.

  ‘They’re related, Mum,’ I retorted. ‘That’s sick.’

  ‘Those Chinese,’ your grandma replied, ‘it’s nothing new, they all marry their cousins anyway, it’s their way of keeping money in the family.’ My mum, so racist.

  It wasn’t like Nancy was rich or anything, it was just that she wasn’t so povvo like us. Your grandma made interesting choices: instead of spending $2000 on tutoring fees for me like the rest of the good Asian parents, she spent $2000 on my orthodontist. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I wasn’t grateful for straight-as teeth, but priorities, you know. Mum was also always going on about me eating her out of house and home with my appetite, about me gaining weight and being ‘unwanted’, about me looking sloppy when I went out. Everyone wore hoodies, but she expected me to wear the sort of shit she sold at the shop, like, a lime-green blazer suit with a maroon sequinned top beneath, for crying out loud!

  I swear, I’d been disappointing your grandma ever since I was a baby and didn’t make it into the Bonds Baby contest. She was so sure I would win because she thought I would be the only ‘mixed’ Filipina-Australian baby. Poor Mum, little did she know about the Eurasian Invasion, all those other charming mixed-race babies who probably stood a better chance because their mums knew how to do tasteful and didn’t enhance their onesies with hand-sewn sequins spelling out ‘BEAUTYFACE’.

  Well, turns out I didn’t need the sequins, that I’d walk out in public and people would see the obvious. Not trying to be up myself or anything, but kindly old men in parks would say, ‘Bless your eyes,’ which I didn’t find creepy, and men in business suits would stare at me on the train after school, which I did. Creepy as. And of course, the St Andrews boys, they loved me. You’d think a face like mine would be able to make it into the popular crowd at my school, but those girls were all stuck-up bitches. You know, the types to only shop in places where you’d come out with a cardboard bag with ribbon handles and lots of tissue paper on top, for one frickin’ T-shirt. I couldn’t imagine what they’d think of Diamond Rose Fashions. Ha! They were all wusses with colour, in every sort of way, even the token Vietnamese and the Sri Lankan girl in their group. They didn’t dare dress in bright brights, and they didn’t dare date in any shade darker than white.

  Anyhow, once I established that Luis and Nancy were related, and I got talking to him, that was that. He was so smitten! He was so shy! Truth is, he’d probably been a dweeby kid, probably only come into his hotness in the last six months or so, and with no other girl to reflect his true image back to him except for cousin Nancy, he had absolutely no idea. At first we spent the afternoons in the library just talking crap, you know. ‘Oh you’re from St Andrews, do you know Edwin Patamisi?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah in Year 8 that arsehole squeezed a whole tube of wasabi in my Coke can when I went to the loo. Why?’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘Did you used to go out with him?’

  I didn’t know why I brought up Edwin Patamisi, except that perhaps maybe once or twice I might have kissed
him. He was cute, in an Italian-Bieber kind of way, but he was dumb as. ‘No!’ I protested. ‘I have better taste than that. Come on.’

  ‘Anyhow,’ he continued, ‘I brought a water balloon filled with fish sauce to school the next day and put it on his seat before he sat down.’

  I had to admit, that was pretty funny. I opened up my schoolbag because I usually got hungry at around this time after school. Brought out my illicit stash of Milky Ways, and handed one to Nancy. ‘Do you want one?’ I asked him. And suddenly, we were having this spontaneous little party at the back of the library, such sad losers. He unwrapped one after the other, eating five in less than five minutes, before he looked at a wrapper and commented: ‘Hmm, “Fun Size”. How can anything this small be considered fun?’ And I had no idea where Nancy got this cool, hilarious cousin from, but suddenly after-school study sessions at the library didn’t seem so boring anymore.

  Although Luis was really, really smart, the thing that made me fall for him was that he could recognise that I was, too. He laughed at my jokes, and he listened to what I had to say about stuff. We pretended to study together for about three weeks, then gave up. Out of the goodness of our hearts we decided not to distract Nancy from her schoolwork anymore and nicked off to Footscray Park to — well, let’s just say, engage in some self-selected extracurricular activities. Your grandma and his parents were the sort that were so strict that we spent the first month together behind the native flora section, just lying there on top of one another, in our school uniforms, like slugs, breathing, barely even moving, trying to meld ourselves into one person. So calming, so comforting. One whole month! See, your dad and I weren’t making the beast with two backs, as Shakespeare calls it, right away. Give us credit. We had some class.

  Then I figured out I was ready, or as ready as I’d ever be, and finally looked forward to going home to our flat after school, having the two whole hours before Mum got home to ourselves. Before Luis, I hated that place, it was the place where I felt Dad gone most deeply. When he pissed off, Mum just left all his stuff back at our old rental, and only took what we owned. Turns out, according to her, we owned stuff like the knives and spoons and forks in the drawers and even the half-opened packet of Toilet Duck flushables. Ha! To be honest, it didn’t feel as good as it did in the park, which was all gentle and dreamy. I was worried my mum would unexpectedly come back. Anxiety kills libido, you know. We rushed it the first time, and afterwards we felt kind of spent. The sort of emotional low you’d get if you’d just scoffed down a litre of ice-cream ’cause someone was going to yank it away from you in twenty minutes.