Peripheral Vision (7 page)

Family Reunion

There was a party when I first came to this country. The table was heavy with plates of pizza and chicken balls and Turkish dips with sticks of celery that no one touched. Balloons clustered on the ceiling, trying to escape the heat of the room. A badly lit fire in the fireplace sent out curls of woody smoke, and a heater with two red coils sat burning in the opposite corner.

‘This is my Filipino brother-in-law, Enrico,' Alan said each time he introduced me. At that point, the person I was meeting would clap my shoulder. ‘Welcome to Australia!' As if they had all rehearsed this gesture in preparation for my arrival.

‘I told everyone all about you,' my sister said the first
night, before the party, before the bad feeling entered the house and hung around like the shrivelled party balloons that her husband keeps forgetting to take down. She said this in English, loudly, so that he would hear from the next room.

‘I told them how you used to call me Bibby, and how sad you were when I had to go to another country to find work. You cried on the phone and begged me, “Bibby, please come home.” And I had to tell you to get off the phone and put Mama on the line, that Mr Kelly was paying for me to call from Hong Kong and he would be angry at a little boy in the Philippines wasting his money.'

My sister, grown old now, with creases between her breasts when she presses her hands together in the prayerful gesture of joy I remember so well, turned her head away from me and called out, ‘That's what I told them, didn't I, Alan?'

He harrumphed like an old man then called back, ‘That's what you said, darling.'

I may be Bibby's little brother, but I am now forty-six years old. I have been married and I have two boys, young men now, who live with their mother in the small town where she and I met and married and lived happily for the twelve years I worked in the mine. When the mine closed and I moved away, like the other men, to find work in Manila, my wife and I lost the closeness we had found through shared meals and worry for our children. I would go back to visit and find her distant. Polite, always. Kind. But distant. When I tried to be a husband to her she lay stiff and silent with her legs straight like a wooden doll in the bed. I am nothing more to her now than the provider of money. And that is all right. We lost too many years apart. How can I expect love from her when she doesn't even know how many teeth I have left in my mouth?

My sister, Estrella, told me to come to Australia because I can make a great deal of money.

‘Alan makes sixty thousand a year and we get a car as well,' she told me. ‘He has no trade, but he makes plenty of money with no trouble. It's a good life here.'

She sponsored me to come to live in Melbourne. Her husband signed an agreement promising the government he would support me if something happened and I could not work.

‘Don't worry about that,' Estrella said. ‘You'll find work straight away.'

How sure she has always been of everything. We believed whatever she told us when we were young. Even my mother obeyed Estrella. Estrella called from Hong Kong, where she cleaned floors and cared for her employer's huge empty apartment, and she told my mother to send all the money she had.

‘I will make it double,' Estrella said. ‘My boss is a stockbroker here in Hong Kong. He knows the Hang Seng. Send me everything.'

She made us some money. But at what cost? When Estrella was a young woman, before she left for Hong Kong to work as a maid, my mother would boast about how
pakipot
she was, always playing hard to get. She was a shy and modest Filipina. When she came back from Hong Kong the first time, she was no longer a virgin. She never said a word but we knew. She had to go back to Hong Kong because no one in our town would marry a girl who had
been spoiled. For years she worked in Hong Kong as a maid
until finally she met a tourist in a bar and they married. Mr and Mrs Alan Beasley.

I cannot say for certain what happened to Estrella in Hong Kong, but she changed. She learned the Chinese way of talking loudly and arguing. Now, she nags me, her brother only newly arrived here. She wants to know every detail of my day. I am a man, not a child! When she nags me like this I feel like I do not know her at all. She is no longer the loving sister I used to adore.

In Manila, I worked for a man who owned seventeen gambling parlours. My employment began at dusk when the stink of the streets grew stronger and men and women began to hurry home. Only the gamblers and the drinkers stayed out late in the parts of town where my employer's machines and tables could be found. I finished at dawn, usually exhausted, and I slept till late afternoon, when I would wash and iron my clothes, clean my apartment, maybe meet a friend for coffee before work. A simple, hardworking life.

I was not dissatisfied with my life in Manila, but I knew I could do better. And Estrella insisted that if Alan could make so much money, so could I. Then I arrived here and met the famous Alan. After our first meal together, Estrella sent us away from the kitchen. We settled side by side in front of the television, facing the screen, the bottles of beer in our hands growing warm and flat as we watched young men and women joke with each other and throw bags of cement about and pose and cavort in front of the cameras. We barely spoke. I was shy. Alan, I found out as we sat this way night after night, was being Alan.

Now, while Estrella is washing the dishes or tidying up after dinner and Alan and I are planted in front of another program on gardening or current affairs, we pretend to chat. I ask Alan a question, he answers to the television. He never looks me in the face. Estrella says it is the way of the Australian man. I think it is something else. It is only a month since I arrived and already my brother-in-law treats me like I am nothing. I wonder what Estrella has told him about me.

Alan works for the council. When I ask how his day has been he waves his hands in the air and complains about the people he supervises.

‘I can't get them to do anything,' he says. ‘They're lazy sods. Every report has mistakes. Half of them can't put a sentence together. They're always slipping out of the building for a fag and not coming back for twenty minutes.'

Alan is balding and has a small paunch that sags over the belt of his dark grey suit. As soon as he arrives home from work he hurries to the bedroom, then reappears in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Estrella brings beer to the back verandah, where we sit on green plastic chairs until dinner time, watching the magpies and blackbirds hopping around in the garden.

Three days ago, as we sat on the verandah in the chilly autumn air, Alan told Estrella that he would be getting a pay rise next month, an extra eight dollars in each week's pay packet.

‘A promotion!' she cried. She jumped out of her plastic chair so quickly it tipped over and bounced along the verandah, and she rushed over and hugged Alan. He tilted his head back and she kissed him on the lips. To my horror, I thought I saw her tongue slip into his mouth. I turned my head away, feeling sick, imagining the mingling of their beery spit. I wondered, as I looked in the other direction at the next-door neighbour picking tomatoes from his garden, whether Alan was cupping her breast again, like he had done the other evening when she leaned over the table to pick up his dirty plate.

After what seemed like minutes they pulled apart. Alan patted Estrella's large bottom, bound in one of her colourful skirts, and she picked up her chair and sat down again.

‘Sorry, mate,' Alan said to me. He rested his hand on Estrella's knee. ‘We've got to respect your brother's feelings, sweetie. You know he doesn't like us having a cuddle in front of him.'

‘
Sabali nga ili, sabali nga ugali
,' Estrella muttered to me before she lifted her glass of beer to her mouth.

Estrella always liked to spout proverbs at us when we were young. As the oldest child of a fatherless family she thought she had to educate us. Now I am a forty-six-year-old man and she is still trying to tell me what to do. She doesn't need to tell me that people of different countries have different customs. I know that perfectly well. But it does not mean we have to demean ourselves by behaving like them. Sexual relations between a man and his wife should be a private thing.

My mother told me many times when I was growing up that I must respect a woman's purity and innocence. She taught my sisters to be shy and modest. On the streets of Manila I knew plenty of women who thought modesty meant nothing. They made their money with their bodies. Now here was my oldest sister, flaunting herself like one of them.

Once Estrella had sat down, Alan gave her the bad news. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, Stell, but it's not a promotion. It's just an indexed pay rise from the last negotiation.'

So this man, this weak man who watches his juniors wander away when they should be working, will get a pay rise. I saw this in Manila as well. Men earning more and more money in their jobs for no reason, drifting higher and higher like balloons.

Always I come back to the balloons. The balloons from my welcome party, still there in the lounge room, sticky with smoke from the fire made with green spring wood and floating on the bad breath of the three of us watching television night after night, are haunting me.

Every time I look up at their bald wrinkly heads stuck to the ceiling, I think of Alan. It is very difficult for me to believe he is only four years older than me. Like so many of the men I have met here, he is strangely soft. Not in his body, but in his manner. Always snuffling and coughing like an old man with catarrh. Always sitting.

Tonight we are not watching television together. I am here alone in the lounge room staring up at the multicoloured balloon heads on the ceiling. Estrella and Alan have gone to the movies to see a romantic comedy like teenagers on a date. I think their problem is that they have no children. Estrella had almost given up on finding a husband before she met Alan in the bar in Hong Kong. She had written to me and my sisters that she would continue to work as a maid and send us money as long as her body held out, but that she was becoming older now. She said that the change had happened, which meant she could no longer have children.

I asked my other sisters what she meant and they told me that in our family the women's childbearing years end early. My sisters wept for Estrella that she would never feel the love for a baby of her own. I told them to stop their crying. Haven't we produced enough children for one family? I said to them. With eleven children between us, we should be happy that Estrella has only our children to spend her money on.

I have been working since the second week I arrived here at my sister's house. My first job was at a local bakery. I rose at two in the morning to bake the bread. I walked to work through dark streets where cats and dogs sniffed the damp grass and garbage trucks screeched and clanked along the kerb. The smell of the bread in the clean morning air was good. The pay was poor, though. I complained to Estrella because she had told me that her husband earned sixty thousand dollars per year and my salary was thirty-five thousand. She said I would have to wait a little while to earn more money.

I knew she was wrong. After a week at the bakery, I took the train to the centre of the city and I looked for the people I knew could use my skills. In Manila, I worked for a man who needed a helper with a level head. In Melbourne, such men were easy to find. Most businesses can use someone to explain to their clients why they must pay their bills. It is all a matter of attitude and I am composed and persuasive. If the clients do not understand my message, other people are sent who can persuade with more than words.

Estrella never asked why I stopped getting up at two in the morning. Two weeks later I handed her my board money and she looked at the notes in her hand.

‘This is too much, Rico,' she said. ‘We agreed one hundred dollars a week so you can save for your own house and bring your boys out here.'

‘I am earning more than your husband now,' I told her. ‘Keep the money.'

Estrella shook her head. ‘You think this is a competition?' she asked. She rubbed her eyes with her fists and her mascara came off her lashes and lay in black sprinkles on her cheeks. ‘So what are you doing that you can earn so much money so fast?'

‘I looked up my old friend from Manila,' I told her, a little white lie but close to the truth. ‘I am helping him with his business.'

‘And his business is what?'

I was giving her the money, more than she had asked for. But was she grateful? No, not Estrella.

‘His business is none of your business.'

‘Of course it is my business. We are your visa sponsors!'

I refused to have that conversation. I knew Estrella was trying to make me feel guilty, to bring me back under her control, like when I was a boy and used to hang on to her dress so she couldn't get away from me. I shrugged and turned away.

‘Don't ignore me!' she shouted.

Just like the old Estrella. I was sure that next she would start begging, like our mother used to do. First the shouting, then the begging. Hysterical female behaviour over nothing.

I was surprised when I felt her tap my shoulder.

‘I thought you had changed,' she said to me, her voice back to normal.

‘I know that you have,' I replied. It is not only Estrella. The way of being a woman has changed, I know that. Changed more than I can understand. And I know that I am supposed to change too, as a man. But why should I change? Why do things have to change and change?

‘You must tell me where you are working, Enrico. It is for the government. We have to know.'

I started to walk away but she grabbed my shirtsleeve.

‘Please, Rico. Tell me.'

I shook my arm but she was holding on too tightly. She began to cry and I told her to stop her stupid crying.

‘I don't want you here,' she said. ‘I don't want to be your older sister anymore. I am tired of this.'