Peripheral Vision (8 page)

I told her I would find a place of my own next week. I told her she was a stain on the family. First she brings me here, then she throws me out. What kind of sister would do such a thing?

She reached up and patted both my cheeks, as if I was a child. She patted them with more strength than I expected.

‘Always, Rico, always everything was for you, the boy.' She patted me again, harder. My cheeks began to tingle. ‘All the money I sent home from Hong Kong, all the toys and the food and the nice clothes. All for you. The special boy.' She was not patting now. Her slaps stung my cheeks. ‘Your other sisters cleaning and sewing and working. All for you. And you do nothing except for yourself.'

‘What do you mean? Didn't I go to work in the filthy Manila slums for my wife and children?'

She opened her mouth, then she closed it again without saying anything.

Now I sit here alone, looking at the withered Alan-head balloons on the ceiling, the sound of a laugh track coming from the television, and I wonder whether I should stay in this country or go home. I think of Estrella and Alan at the cinema, him pawing at her like she is a prostitute. I think of my wife, who asked me last year not to visit anymore, as if I am an annoying salesman rather than the father of her children. I think of that time long ago when Estrella was first in Hong Kong and I was allowed to talk to her on the telephone. I held the handset away from my ear, afraid that her voice would travel inside my head and get stuck there.

‘Are you being a good little boy for Bibby?' she asked me, her voice all tinny and distant on the line.

Being good was simple then. I listened to my mother. I did my chores. I knew my place and what was expected of me.

So I told Estrella I was a good boy and she said that was all she wanted to hear.

The Word

A smelly old man in a greatcoat steers down the tram aisle toward Anna. She curls her fingers around her school uniform to edge the cloth closer and pull herself in tight, like an acorn with a hard shell. A tiny, unnoticed acorn next to the window. Something a smelly old man would pass by.

‘Hey, sister,' he says in a thick voice.

She looks down. If she ignores him he might move on.

‘I am the Lord Jesus Christ, come to bless you.'

The seats have plastic moulded rests but Jesus' bottom is bigger than his seat. When he thumps down he ends up jammed against her. He smells like urine and hamburger with fried onion. He has grey hair, greasy and long, and jagged nicotine-stained fingernails.

‘Have you been saved?' he asks.

She keeps staring at her lap. Her heart pounds harder than usual.

The man's callused hand moves to her knee. She watches as if the knee belongs to someone else. Everything her mother has warned her about is stained on that big dirt-encrusted hand. She pictures it creeping up her leg. The other passengers turn away and concentrate on texting their friends and studying the newspaper. She half expects Jesus to grab her between her thighs, where Marco sticks his finger when they're at parties. Jesus won't put in one finger and moan like Marco does, his other hand busy in his own pants. Jesus will push his whole hand up her and she'll bleed and shriek and cry and no one will look at her because no one cares about anyone anymore, her mother says. The other passengers will pretend nothing is happening and hurry home to the television while Anna bleeds to death on the road.

But he doesn't squeeze her knee or knead it. He pats her kneecap, withdraws his hand and puts it back in the pocket of his greatcoat.

‘Would you like to hear a story that happened to me?'

She shakes her head, meaning
no thank you
but unable to say it. ‘Don't speak to them,' she imagines her mother saying. ‘God, I should never have let you take the tram. I just wanted to save the environment.'

Jesus pulls both hands from his greatcoat and stands up. When the tram brakes he lurches forward, his arms flailing for something to hold on to. He staggers a few paces past Anna until the tram has stopped completely. If she squints at the window she can see in the reflection what Jesus is doing. She can't turn around and look in case he speaks to her again. He has caught hold of a strap with his left hand. His right hand is gesturing to the tram audience.

‘I am the Lord Jesus Christ!' he roars.

Like everyone else she bows her head and pretends she hasn't heard. In school, the lesson about Jesus Christ was on a day when the teacher was in a stinking mood. Mrs Blacklock told the kids that Jesus was a good man who preached kindness. ‘Do unto others as you want them to do to you,' she had said, or something like that. ‘And read the Christianity chapter in your textbook by next week because you'll be tested on the Ten Commandments.'

Jesus lands beside her again. She's not afraid he will hurt her. She can see he's mad but he doesn't seem violent. He's just a mad smelly old man. ‘Why didn't they leave them all locked up?' her father says whenever he sees a mad person out on the street. ‘You call this social justice?'

Jesus starts up again as if he and Anna have never met.

‘Girl, I am the Lord Jesus Christ. Have you been saved?'

This time she nods. It's another fifteen minutes to her stop. The stink is making her gag but the other passengers can't seem to smell him. She thinks longingly of the half-tab of E in her pocket. If she took it now, by the time she got home she'd be gone. Her mother would take one look at her eyes and start to cry. ‘Good God, where did we go wrong? It's heroin, isn't it.' Whenever Anna comes home with cigarette smoke in her clothes her mother slumps on the couch and mutes the TV so she can moan louder. ‘We've sheltered you too much, you know. We've overprotected you. You'll end up in the gutter—' ‘Shut up, Mum,' Anna always says.

‘When I went to the House of Prayer, they turned me away.' Jesus is so close to Anna she can feel his damp breath against her cheek. She's holding her own breath, trying not to take in the reek from his open mouth with its fleshy lips and stumps of blackened teeth.

‘They turned away their saviour.'

Jesus rolls his eyes toward the roof of the tram.

‘Cunts,' he says.

A shock jolts her. He said the word like it was any old word. Sometimes she whispers it to herself, in her bedroom. It's an incredible word for her. A word like a fist.

Once her father said it in front of her mother.

‘Don't you ever say that word in the presence of our daughter,' she hissed, and spit flew out of her mouth. Anna ran upstairs and shut her bedroom door and muttered it all night.

‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.' She put her hands between her legs and said it under the bedclothes. ‘Marco loves my cunt.'

The tram's now so crowded that there's nowhere to go. She'd rather walk than sit next to stinky Jesus. She lifts herself half off the seat to pull the cord but Jesus takes hold of her other arm and pulls her back down.

‘Are you getting off?'

She nods. She doesn't feel afraid but she still can't speak. She doesn't have any words for this situation. She doesn't even know what to think.

‘Will you take me with you?'

She shakes her head. The lady opposite has music buds in her ears and is gazing at an advertisement for holidays on pink and orange tropical islands. Anna reaches down for her schoolbag tucked between her feet. She edges past Jesus and threads her way through the crowd to the door, where she stands so close that her breath makes rapid patterns on the glass. Her house is still a long way away so she'll walk a stop or two and get on the next tram. A tram without a stinking Jesus.

It's only when she's crossed from the median strip to the footpath that she realises Jesus has followed her off the tram. Cars honk as he stumbles across the road against the red light.

‘Hey, sister,' he calls. He moves fast for a man with flapping shoes. It's five o'clock, dusk, cold. The lights are glowing in the strange bright way they do at twilight. Soon her mobile will ring and her mother will whine at her. ‘Why aren't you home? Are you out with that boy?'

‘Sister!'

‘I'm going home now,' she shouts back at him. ‘My parents are waiting for me,'

‘I was walking to the mount,' Jesus calls. His voice is burred with phlegm. ‘A crowd gathered to hear me speak. Are you listening to me, girl?' He coughs then shouts again. ‘I have things to teach you!'

Another tram sways past, glowing with light. Anna breaks into a trot. Behind her she can hear Jesus' laboured breathing and the
slap slap
of his broken shoe hitting the footpath. The cars on the road brake at the intersection up ahead and their red tail-lights are like alarm signals. His stink has got into her nostrils – she can smell it with each in-breath.

She could try to get into one of the cars, but there might be a murderer or a rapist inside. Her mother imagines Anna's brutal murder on a daily basis. She talks about all the ways Anna could be lured away by a stranger and killed as if all those TV shows she watches with murders and rapes and twisted plots are real.

Jesus is grunting with the effort of keeping up. He calls in a breathy voice, ‘Sister, can you give me a dollar?'

‘Yes, yes.' Of course, he wants money. Jesus catches up with her and waits as she drops her heavy schoolbag onto the ground and bends to search for her purse inside.

‘You are the Samaritan,' he says. He touches her head with his hand and she wants to shake it off but she keeps on rummaging through the schoolbag. The smell of bruised banana drifts up from the open bag. Her books are lying on the footpath. Jesus leans close to her. What she at first thinks is a drop of rain drips onto her cheek, then she realises it is dribble from Jesus' mouth. Tears sting her eyes.

‘Sorry, sister, sorry.' The hard skin of his hand scrapes once across her cheek, trying to brush away his spit.

A car pulls up beside them. A woman gets out of the passenger side. She leans back in and kisses the driver on the cheek, locks the door button and slams the door. As the car drives away she waves and adjusts her handbag on her shoulder. When she turns around Anna calls to her.

‘Excuse me, I …'

The woman stares. Anna looks across at Jesus standing on the other side of her schoolbag and thinks of children at assembly.

‘Are you okay?' the woman says.

‘Yes, but …'

‘I am the Lord Jesus Christ,' Jesus roars.

‘Yeah, sure you are, mate,' the woman says. She is older than Anna first thought. ‘Come and walk with me, love.' She stretches out her hand.

Anna stands there with Jesus making soft grunting sounds beside her and her books scattered on the footpath and all she can hear banging on in her head is her mother's voice. ‘It's not that I think people who call you “love” are common, like
my
mother used to say.' And her father commenting from the lounge room chair as usual. ‘That's your mother, the champagne socialist. As long as they're not in her backyard.'

She rubs her face with both hands trying to wipe the images of home from her mind. As if he has been waiting for her eyes to be covered, Jesus clamps his hand around her arm, crushing her school blazer with whatever he has on his filthy hands.

‘Begone, Satan!' he shouts at the woman and breaks into a coughing fit. His hand stays welded to Anna's arm. His whole body shakes from the coughing and Anna begins to shake too.

‘Oh shit,' the woman says. Cars stop and start in a jerky stream behind her as the intersection lights change.

‘I was going to give him a dollar,' Anna whispers, even though Jesus can hear everything.

The woman nods. ‘Listen,' she says in a gentle voice to Jesus. ‘I've got ten dollars.'

‘Thy money perish with thee!' Jesus thunders, his other hand grasping the air as if he's trying to pull down the sky. ‘The gift of God cannot be purchased with money.'

Anna's notebook has blown open and Jesus' foot is grinding into the page where she's written her night's homework. She needs to go to the toilet. It's dark and the three of them stand in a pool of yellow light from the streetlight above. Spit glistens on Jesus' lips.

In the distance the windows of another tram appear like a magic lantern. Jesus bends down and pulls the chemistry textbook from her bag. He brandishes the fat book at the woman before he lets go of Anna's arm and throws back his head.

‘Father, why have you forsaken me?' he wails to the sky.

He draws back his arm and hurls the book into the traffic. It slams onto the road in front of a taxi, which brakes and skids. The car behind honks long and loud until both accelerate away, the one behind still honking and the sound receding like a siren. Jesus begins to mutter what sound like verses from the Bible.

She remembers the E in her blazer pocket and wishes she'd taken it before. It would be kicking in now. She'd be feeling warmer, and her teeth would be starting to clench with that delicious sensation of tightness. The gold of the lights would be more golden. A wash of happiness would spread through her body. If the E had already warmed her body, she would reach over and take Jesus' hand and say, ‘It's all right, Jesus.
We care about you.' She would love this woman who's stopped to help her, and she would love Jesus, even though he stinks. She would twirl around on the black footpath and sniff a great breath of the sour night air like it was scented with summer jasmine.

‘Come on,' the woman says.

Anna bends down to push her books back into her schoolbag. On the roadway the chemistry textbook has been torn apart under car wheels. A few pages of formulae drift along the footpath in the wake of passing cars.

‘Leave the books,' the woman says.

But she can't. ‘Do you have any idea how much it costs to pay for your schooling and the uniform and the books?' her mother says whenever she complains about school. ‘Just thank your lucky stars we didn't send you to the local high school.'

She scoops the books into the bag. Tucked inside is her Hello Kitty purse. Before she lifts the bag, she empties the coins from the purse and holds them out to Jesus on the flat of her palm.

‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,' he calls, his arms wide, waiting to embrace her.

‘I'm sorry,' she says. She slips the coins into his pocket, then steps back and heaves the schoolbag to her shoulder.

The tram rocks toward them with its familiar whine.

‘Go! Catch this one,' the woman says. She gives a push and Anna takes off at a run, pounding along the footpath, her bag banging against her back. She makes the next stop just in time to swing up on the tram and looks back to see the woman walking quickly away. The Lord Jesus Christ stands alone, arms at his sides, hair hanging over his face, greatcoat trailing on the ground. He lifts his hand to her one last time and she presses her palm against the glass in reply.

When she gets home her mother follows her up the stairs, demanding to know why she's late. Anna slams the bedroom door behind her and hides the E for tomorrow night. Marco's sent her a text but she doesn't want to read it yet. She plugs her music player into the speakers with the volume as loud as it can go, and she lies flat on her back on the bed, still in her school uniform. Her breathing is shallow and her heart skips fast, then slow, then fast. Music roars around her like a hurricane. There might be some sounds outside her door, a mother shouting or a phone ringing, but that doesn't matter.

‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt,' she shouts, flying with the music. ‘Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt.'