Begin End Begin: A #LoveOzYa Anthology Read online

  But the more time Luis spent at my place, and the more I realised Mum wasn’t suddenly just going to come home from the shop and pounce on us, the more relaxed we became. We became more experimental. Suddenly, a kiss would make me feel as if I were going down a roller-coaster with popcorn in my stomach. I mean this in a good way. I am saying it got better and better. Anyhow, we were pretty smart, we used protection and all that. Most of the time.

  And that’s how you came to be.

  At this point in my story, you’re probably thinking ewww. You may also be wondering why your dumb-arse mum didn’t get the morning-after pill. Well, why question your miraculous existence arising from my deep-seated sense of embarrassment? Truth was, even though I googled the shit out of how to obtain it, there was no way I could show my face around all those Footscray pharmacists to ask for it. They all knew all the other traders, and news was bound to reach your grandma. I thought of catching a train to go to a pharmacy in a different suburb, or even the city. But you know what? I didn’t end up doing it. I convinced myself that certain things would never happen to me.

  And at first, nothing was actually happening. I wasn’t getting any fatter, I didn’t feel like having a vom every morning, I felt fine. The only difference was that I hadn’t got my period in a month, then two. Turns out I was two and a half months along when Nancy bought me that test. Then I let a few more weeks slip by because still nothing physical seemed to be happening, and you know, the whole denial and fear thing, it’s very powerful. It paralyses you. Also, some secret deadly curious part of me wanted to see what would happen next — you were a bunch of cells, and then an idea of life to me, and I wanted to see whether this idea was real — and some shit-scared part of me didn’t want to do anything or make any decision, hoping it would all go away.

  But no, now I have two heartbeats. Creepy as.

  I was scared of telling your grandma most of all. When I did tell her, man, did the proverbial excrement hit the fan in such a massive dump that I’m still scraping it from my hair and fingernails (and when the metaphor wears off, you will have arrived, and then it will be literal! Fun!).

  Mum went ballistic. She ranted and hollered and cried and took off her Homyped flat shoe, the shoe she had been standing in for eight hours that day at work, and threw it at me. I ducked. She took off the other one and chucked that at me, too. ‘After all I have done for you!’ she wailed. ‘You do this to me! What a waste! What a waste!’

  I had had enough. I calmly picked up my bag, my public transport card, and nicked off to Nancy’s. Nancy’s mum was sewing a whole stack of little light-blue shorts when Nancy let me in and we walked through the living room, which was filled with half-opened cardboard boxes and cardboard fashion labels. She gave me a shifty sideways glance, like I was evil incarnate come to corrupt her daughter. I looked down at the carpet and saw all the snipped-off threads, light blue against the dirty tan carpet. All those masses of swirls, loops and lines, rising to fill my eyes like artificial worms, like the floor was warm and alive with a million tiny veins. For some reason, they grossed me out. Really grossed me out. ‘I’m going to vom,’ I croaked to Nancy, and she dashed me to the bathroom, and for the first time in this pregnancy, I had a big, long vomit and cry. ‘They won’t let Luis anywhere near me!’ I wailed to Nancy. ‘They won’t let him near me ’cause they didn’t want us to keep it, those fuckers!’

  Of course I knew those fuckers were his parents, the folks I had never met because they didn’t want to meet me, not unless I followed their course of action. They took away his mobile, but he still found ways of getting in touch. The last time I had heard from Luis, he had texted me, R U OK?

  Ya. R U?

  Yes. I want to C U.

  OK. Where & when?

  Ftscry Lib. Wed 4 p.m.

  I showed Nancy the texts and asked her to be my decoy, in case Mum wanted to interrogate me. When I left Nancy’s and got home it was quite late. Mum had left dinner on a cold stove for me; she was already in bed. I was relieved. I didn’t want to see her. I avoided her most of the week by staying behind at the library.

  Wednesday arrived, and I rocked up at the library in my school uniform. I wasn’t a mindless moron, but I had secretly been pinning my hopes on Luis. He was smart, I was smart, we could pull through. I could support him through school and vice versa. Also, Luis was nothing like my dad. He wasn’t going to piss off on me.

  So, your dad also rocked up in his school uniform. Saw me and his eyes widened a little. I think he was surprised that I still looked the same, that I wasn’t already a massive heifer in a mumu. After the exchange of babe-I-miss-yous, he launched straight into it. No fingers gently touching, no crying together, no hands-on-the-tummy-prelude-to-intimacy shit that you read about in those pregnant-teen books with symbolic birds on the cover.

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know sooner?’ he asked. His eyes seemed different. Harder. His parents had put him through some serious degree of hell.

  ‘Why? So you could tell me to get rid of it?’ I retorted. Oops. Who knew I was raging beneath? This wasn’t going well, but I pushed on. ‘I’m not getting rid of it.’

  ‘I’m seventeen, Kim. This is my last year of school. I’m really stressed out. My parents are saying I’m never going to get into optometry now. What about the other options?’

  We’d been through this already. All the bloody adults counselling me, asking me if this is what I really wanted, did I understand the responsibilities of having a child, yadda yadda yadda. Of course I did, which was why I was so depressed and miserable. There was no movie or book about this for me — it was either some newspaper tragedy about yellow girls who looked like me who were molested by their basket-eyed uncles, or Juno. As much as I wanted to be a wisecracking, smarmy sweetheart about this, I was not.

  We had both sat together at the sexual health clinic, having this discussion after I told him the news, and when it was over and I refused to budge, his parents decided he couldn’t see me again. They’d never even met me, didn’t want to meet me, probably just imagined me as some cigarette-sucking skank loitering around Footscray Station in a Supre outfit, out to lure their glory boy.

  This was the first time your dad and I had been alone since I found out about you, but we were fully clothed, no longer funny to each other, but suddenly too familiar in that terrible sick-to-death-of-you way.

  ‘Why do you want this baby so much anyway?’ he asked me, almost accusingly, as if I were the sole person responsible not only for having one in the oven, but for baking that cake, too. I looked into his stony eyes and immediately, with a vicious force that was almost visceral, wished it was anyone else’s but his. At least that dumb arse Edwin Patamisi would have been more loyal.

  It wasn’t so much that I wanted a baby; it was the thought of getting rid of the baby that filled me with more fear and anxiety and guilt than anything else in my life. Maybe the childhood fear of the wrath of God. I used to roll my eyes at those precocious girls with braces who did serious school reports on issues such as being pro-life or pro-choice, those moralistic morons who never had to make such a decision ’cause they weren’t getting any action until they were twenty-five.

  But having two heartbeats, the thought of getting rid of one was horrible as.

  It seemed now that having made a choice, everyone was treating me like some kind of naive imbecile. I knew I could not deliver you, like a pizza, to Jennifer Garner to take away to a cheesecake-coloured room. It was then that I realised — when bad shit happened, Luis lost all backbone. I could see the cogs behind his eyes, calculating, turning, working out the best way to minimise damage to his precious future. He was going to force me to do what his parents wanted. He was scared of them that bad. Whereas Mum, well, I wasn’t scared of her, had never been scared of her.

  Don’t get me wrong, we were never the Gilmore Girls. But at least she stood by my decision. Once she stopped being pissed off at me and giving me the silent treatment for a week, she started yelli
ng at me non-stop and telling me how stupid I was. She was kind of transparent, your grandma, doing Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief to the book. That was two months ago.

  And now she was in the car, still going through the stage of anger, driving me home from my ultrasound. ‘Do you want to know if you are having a boy or a girl?’ the doctor had asked, and just as Mum was about to open her mouth I quickly said, ‘NO THANKS,’ and the doctor asked, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘YES, and please don’t tell my mum either.’ My mother was incredibly mad, of course, said she had a right to know, and got all huffy and left the room, just as I thought she would. So predictable. Then I turned to the doctor and said, ‘Yeah, I wanna know. Tell me now.’ After I found out, I left the appointment and thought I’d find Mum outside in the waiting room, but she was actually in the car, sitting there, livid. I got into the passenger seat and could feel gales of anger radiating from her, hot enough to perm hair, which was probably the secret reason her hair always looked like Ronald McDonald’s.

  As Mum drove, she went on and on about that no-good Luis, all he cared about was his own self, asking me to get rid of it. ‘Those Chinese, they’re used to doing this sort of thing because of the one-child policy in China. Nothing to interrupt Luis’s grades, oh no!’

  Then she sighed. ‘But life is life, no matter how hard it may be. You’d rather have it than not have it.’

  Some days I looked at my mother like she was an illiterate third-worlder who couldn’t adapt to a new country.

  This was not one of those days.

  Sometimes, my mum got things.

  ‘You don’t need Luis anyway,’ she conceded.

  This is your dad she was talking about. I thought about how after my dad left with the other woman, Mum decided she could not let us live in his house anymore, even if he had abandoned it to move interstate with the younger version of her, ‘the fresh-off-the-boat version’, as she bitterly put it. I remembered how she made us move, then she went out and found a job, even though after having me she’d never worked outside the home. I thought that after Dad left, her entire personality had changed from being the sweet, indulgent mother who was always there after school with maruya and ice-cream, to this nasty, bad-tempered grump without a good word for anyone. I had been so stuck on this idea of her that I barely noticed that every time I came home after school — even when I snuck Luis into the house — she’d always left a snack out on the kitchen counter for me: tamarind balls, leche puto, those American Hershey’s lollies she always bought from the Filipino store that tasted a bit like brown crayons.

  And then I thought about your dad — cowardly bastard — and realised that at least my dad stuck around until I was in my early teens. At least my dad had his priorities straight. Sure, he prioritised another woman over us, but at least that was a human being and not his frigging ‘career’. I hoped to God that Luis would not get into optometry, but I knew he would.

  I knew how your dad’s career would pan out — he’d work long and hard and then in his mid-twenties his parents would suggest a docile, career-oriented dentist to him and they’d get married and make lots of money and take their kids on holidays in Europe. They’d do the shit we were meant to do together, the three of us. Every once in a while they’d write us a cheque — the two of us — for child support, the bare legal minimum. Oh yes, his parents would make sure of that — he had told me his dad was an accountant.

  ‘We’ll raise this baby together. You can stay in school. It’s only one more year to go.’ We were almost home and my mum was now looking more exhausted than angry. I guess all her ranting wore her out. ‘There’s no way you gonna be a drop-out like me.’

  I didn’t think anyone would want me back at school, but Mum told me that she had spoken to the principal, Mrs Avery, and she was going to help me finish my high schooling no matter what. I had no idea that Mum thought or cared that I was smart. I’d always presumed she saw my looks as my currency through life.

  I looked at Mum in her glittery rayon shirt and black slacks, her fake pearl earrings and diamante brooch. She wore everything carefully and treated her clothes better than those businesswomen on trains treated their designer coats and handbags. Her hair was still as black as her pupils, and it dawned on me that she was still only forty.

  This was crazy as, but I began to imagine a future where I would be one of those single college mothers you always see in brochures, balancing a baby on one hip and a latte in the other, with a swag of books in a neat leather case across one shoulder. I would be the campus MILF, ha-ha.

  ‘It’s not that easy, you know,’ Mum said, as if she could read my mind. ‘But believe me, studying is so much better than working. You wanna study for as long as you can.’

  ‘But what about your job?’ I asked her.

  ‘I can work part-time. If I look after your kid, I can claim carer’s allowance. It’s not as much as I am making at Diamond Rose, but I am getting crap pay there anyway.’ I had no idea your grandma had been thinking so much about this, planning out practical things already. I wasn’t so sure about Mum raising you part-time. I didn’t want her to do shit like enter you in beauty pageants. But then again, she was gonna help me stay in school, so maybe those days of vicarious glory were over for her, too.

  I knew one thing there and then — that neither me nor your grandma wanted the kind of future for you where you’d see us working crappy retail jobs and looking for people like your dad or my dad to save us. We’d show you that your dreams are boundless, whether you have straight teeth or not.

  We arrived home, and I unbuckled my seatbelt. Stared straight ahead, and right after she turned off the engine, I said to Mum, ‘It’s a girl.’

  I was going to tell her anyway. I just didn’t want her to control everything.

  Mum also stared straight ahead, not saying anything, but out of the corner of my eye, I thought I noticed a small twitch of a smile.

  Someone had replied to my ad. Win.

  The trouble with advertising was that a million other bozos were also advertising for people to share costs on the traditional post-graduation planet-hopping tour — schoolies time, right? — and they had more to offer than I did. I got sick of seeing words like ‘luxury’, ‘carefree’ and ‘classy’ in their ads. If my ad had been honest it would’ve had descriptions like ‘almost trouble-free’, ‘comes with plenty of hard work’ and ‘probably safe’.

  So, someone answering was a double-win, really.

  I met her on the space dock, as far away from the Port Vila as I could manage. She was taller than me, and she had a really good, really white smile with none of that distracting tooth art. A tiny, tiny animated tattoo was on one ear lobe, but I couldn’t make it out. She was wearing sensible space-going gear — shorts, T-shirt and bare feet — which was a good sign, and she had a canvas bag slung over one shoulder. It wasn’t too big, either. If she’d rolled up with a couple of suitcases, some hat boxes and a bunch of garment bags, I would have known to back away.

  ‘Is that you, Tekura?’ I held out my hand.

  She dropped her canvas bag on the deck and we shook. Her grip was firm enough without trying to make a point. ‘And you’re Damien Heong. When do we leave?’

  ‘You don’t want to see the ship first?’

  ‘I’ve checked it out on the Stream.’ She tilted her head. ‘I’ve checked you out, too.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You’ll do.’

  There’s nothing like being tagged ‘adequate’ to get your day off to a good start. ‘There’s still work to be done before we can ship out. I warned you about that.’

  She picked up her bag. ‘I’m not staying on this station longer than I have to. Show me this deathtrap and we can get to work.’

  She marched off. I stared after her, open-mouthed. Deathtrap? She was calling my spaceship a deathtrap? How dare she!

  Uncle Jayden had lent me the Port Vila. It was a mini-freighter, one of dozens he had chugging their way around the solar system p
icking up and delivering whatever could make a profit. I’d spent some happy times with him and his crews, and that’s where I learned to pilot, starting when I was fifteen, and soloing a year later. Not that there’s a lot of real work to do these days, with the tame AI-running ships. Piloting between planets isn’t hard, but I still remember the jeebies the first time Uncle Jayden let me dock at a space station. Everything you’ve learned about the way things move, change directions and stop has to be thrown out the window and a whole new set of skills learned. Mess it up and it’s a few billion bucks and/or lives, including yours, at stake.

  Pricey.

  I caught up with Tekura in the airlock. Because it was the Port Vila, the airlock was cheapskate, supposedly licensed for two people, but it was really only comfy for about one and a half. It meant we stood face-to-face, far too close for strangers, trying not to do anything awkward with our hands.

  Tekura sniffed. ‘Smells.’

  ‘All spaceships smell.’

  ‘You should do something about it, you know.’

  I whipped my doodad out of my pocket, expanded the display and poked away at it. ‘There. It’s added to the list.’

  Tekura stared at me — or rather, at my doodad. When she saw me looking at her, she put a hand to her mouth. ‘Sorry. I was being rude.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m used to it.’

  ‘It’s just … You don’t see many of those things, is all.’