The End of the World Read online

  But when Narelle talks to me her words are soft and reasonable.

  ‘They’re lovely people, aren’t they,’ she says. ‘How hard it must be for them here. We all try to help of course. Just small things–helping them with the bins and whatnot.’

  My parents-in-law didn’t come to our wedding. Instead, they spent the money on our honeymoon, paying for us to travel to Kuala Lumpur and stay in a five-star hotel that they visited in their uncomfortable best clothes.

  On our first meeting we sat in the coffee shop of the hotel, surrounded by brown and cream and tan upholstery. The silver coffee service squatted like a trophy on the table between us, obscuring my father-in-law’s head from my view. A waiter came by regularly to top up our coffee cups. Outside the hotel window I could see the heat shimmer, like a damp hot hand pressing against the window.

  ‘My mother wants to know if you like the food here,’ Dan said to me.

  ‘Very much.’

  ‘She wants to know if all Australian girls are as beautiful as you.’

  I smiled. The waiter poured more coffee and we watched the thin brown stream sluice into the china cup in front of my new mother-in-law. Even though Dan had warned me that his parents had moved to Kuala Lumpur from a remote village in Sarawak, I expected his mother to be polite and quiet and elegant like the Malaysian women I’d seen on the plane. But she was sweating and she slurped her coffee so loudly that the other customers kept glancing at us. And she stared at me.

  ‘What did she really say?’ I asked.

  Dan laughed. ‘No, really!’ he protested.

  I suspected his mother was making fun of me. I am not ugly, but I’m hardly a movie star. I frowned.

  ‘It’s the kind of thing people say here. She’s trying to please you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  He laughed again. ‘Don’t worry, you’re family now. That won’t last.’

  My husband arrives home and Ma brings him slippers, as if we are playing out a 1950s American sitcom. She massages his feet when we sit in front of the television at night, and she cuts his toenails.

  At first I found this too disturbing to watch. I wandered out to the kitchen where Ma had arranged the pots on the stove for the evening meal, into the study where Ma had tidied Dan’s papers into neat piles, back into the lounge room where Papa was polishing shoes on a carefully laid carpet of newspaper.

  ‘Doh,’ Ma would shout, ‘Sean need food now.’ Or ‘Doh, where tea?’

  I gritted my teeth and slammed utensils around the kitchen and brought a tray back into the room. I secretly named her ‘the poison nut’.

  I did stupid things. I bought newspapers from her country to make her homesick. I made sausages and rich casseroles and other foods distasteful to her, night after night, until even Sean asked for a salad. I found myself trying to hoard Sean’s affection.

  ‘Where’s Ma?’ he asked me one day when we were on a shopping trip. I told him not to worry about it. ‘I wish she was here,’ he said.

  When we got home, he ran to her and hugged her and babbled on about the trip, and as I trembled with rage, like a jealous child, I heard her say, ‘That nice. You have nice time with Mum. That good.’

  These days I sit in the front seat of the car next to Papa on our monthly drives, leaving Ma jammed happily between my husband and my son in the back seat, worrying at Papa about something in words I cannot understand. We coast up to the flat plains of the Western Highway and stop to wander through a display home, or pick a weed by the roadside that we will later eat, or marvel at a caravan park.

  For a long time Papa and Ma, still shy after their arrival, were uncomfortable in their spacious bedroom with ensuite on the second floor of our house. They discovered caravans on their first Western Highway trips, when Dan was teaching his father to drive.

  ‘Doh,’ Ma shouted at me when they got back one day. She always travelled with them during the driving lessons, issuing loud instructions to Papa from the back seat as he crept nervously along the left lane of the highway at sixty kilometres an hour, the car rocking in the wind wake of speeding trucks.

  ‘Doh,’ she shouted. ‘We like caravan. We sleep caravan here.’ She stomped over to a corner of the backyard and pointed at the dirt. ‘Here.’ She kept looking at the ground. ‘Better for you,’ she said in a voice so soft it shamed me.

  It took me months to dissuade her. Only when I bought a rocking chair and placed it near the window did she accept the bedroom as her home. She sits there now in the late afternoon and stares at the sky. I wonder if she is remembering or wishing. Or regretting.

  It’s not only the neighbours who complain. Now that I have learned to live with my mother-in-law, Dan wants his parents to go home.

  ‘She’s smothering me,’ he says. He tells me this in whispers at night after we have made love and lie wound around each other under the bedclothes. ‘She doesn’t belong here. She’s too much.’

  I can’t imagine how much they sacrificed to send him here when he was sixteen. He went to boarding school, learnt the manners of the privileged classes, gained the confidence of a boy who knows he will succeed simply because of the school he has come from. Even though he arrived speaking broken English and feeling like a refugee, he has cast all that aside and built a career on telling millionaires to smarten up their systems.

  ‘She doesn’t belong here,’ he says each time he sees Ma shimmying up a tree or trying to haggle in the supermarket or rocking in her chair and staring at the sky, a different sky to the one she used to know. She is starting to show her age. He takes her to the doctor and interprets for her, but he has no language for words like aorta or osteoporosis because he left off speaking the language at sixteen. I ask him what he is saying to her. He blushes, so I know he is lying.

  ‘I’ve told her she should take it easy,’ he says.

  I wonder what he is really telling her.

  Last week she said to me, ‘I no want go home, Doh.’

  ‘You’re happy here?’ I asked.

  ‘My son here, my grandson. My village, gone. I no like city.’

  Before they sent Dan to Australia, Ma and Papa had been forced off their land by a clearing program and re-housed in a large block of flats in Kuala Lumpur. Papa went to work in a factory producing tyres and Ma cleaned houses for wealthy people in a suburb an hour’s bus trip away.

  Here, Ma doesn’t believe she lives in a city. There are too many trees and lawns, the skyscrapers can’t be seen from our backyard. She has made her own village of our street. She treats the supermarket like the market at home. She picks up fruit and sniffs it loudly, shakes melons to hear their ripeness, pushes her thumbs into cuts of meat. When she hangs at the top of the tree in our yard, surveying the gardens beyond, she is home. Perhaps this is not the home she loves the best, but it is her home now.

  ‘I no want go back,’ she repeats, like a child. After a morning in the garden she sits in her rocking chair, swinging back and forth. She is thin now, her wrinkled face floppy with spare skin. Sean runs in when he comes home from school and flings himself onto her frail body and she holds him close then scolds him in her language. He laughs. At six o’clock she gathers herself and comes downstairs to welcome Dan home. These days he frowns and tells her, or at least I think he tells her, to go back and sit down. But she wants to see him settled next to Papa in the lounge room, Sean at their feet.

  ‘My son need me, Doh,’ she shouts. ‘You lazy girl. No good cook, no good clean. I make good house.’

  The worst thing is that it’s true. Slowly, over the last two years, I have let her take over the running of the house and we eat better than anyone I know. Still, when she makes remarks like this the old anger surges and I turn my face away, my cheeks reddening. She hits me affectionately in the arm. ‘No, no, Doh. You good girl.’ She shakes her head vigorously. ‘I no mean
bad feeling. You good girl, Doh.’

  Last night, for the first time in months, I saw her up the tree. She only ever picks off a few nuts at a time, as if she is measuring out the life of the fruit. Sean came and stood beside me. ‘Poison nut curry!’ he squealed.

  I sent him back to his room while I kept watching. She has taught me to cook many dishes from her country but not this. She is the only one who knows how to draw the poison from the nut and make it palatable.

  Her climb down was slow and arduous. She concentrated on each foothold and when she reached the bottom, she patted the tree trunk and grunted. I stepped back behind the curtain of the lounge room.

  I thought she would not like me to see the difficulty of the climb. I only kept watching because I am hoping for the return of the shimmy.

  The End of the World

  I’m driving along in this tank of a car and I’ve been sweating on the road so long that the car feels like part of my skin. I can sense the air flowing over my blue metal shoulders, the grit under my wheels. My head was shorn in a number-two haircut at the barber yesterday and I can see better without that long hair whipping into my eyes. Ahead the road is straight and black. Shadows of gum trees monster the roadside. They rear up like bogeymen then fade away as I pass.

  There’s a car behind that has been following me for five hours. Its headlights are dimmed because I’ve flipped up the rear-vision mirror. Now the cars behind me look like dull ghosts. Sometimes, when another car screams out of the darkness behind the car following me, I flick the rear-vision mirror back to normal and I watch the silhouette of the driver behind me. His hair has got mussed. It’s standing up in matted spikes and as I stare at the silhouette I remember running my hands through that hair before I got in the car to drive.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I told him.

  Anton said, ‘I’ll be right behind you. We’ll be a road train, the road train of love.’

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘You won’t be able to keep up. I’m driving away, I’m driving till the road ends, and I’m not dragging any road train along with me. That’s the whole point, Anton.’

  He laughed. ‘You’ll get to Thomastown and change your mind. I know you. And when you’re ready to turn around I’ll be there. The road train of love–they should write a song about us.’

  It might be past midnight now. The radio is broken and my clock is packed into one of the boxes piled up on the back seat. When the rear-vision mirror is down, I see the dark shapes of my hairbrush and four fingers of a glove sticking up over the seat. I don’t know whether the fingers are waving hello or goodbye. Everything is behind me but I’m towing it like my whole past is caught in a net. It’s making me tired, hauling this road train. It’s making me drive faster and faster, hoping there’ll be a point at which I’ll be going so fast everything will break off and fly apart like the discarded tail of a rocketship. Then I’ll really be moving.

  Every so often I try the radio again. Once, a few hours back, a voice came through. For a moment I thought it was happening. Alien spaceships, or the voice of God. I’m in the right mood for an alien abduction. I’ve watched it so many times on TV I think I’d know what to do. But of course they only ever arrive in America, I know that from TV too. So that rules me out. Anyway, the voice on the radio turned out to be a local station announcer advertising tractor parts.

  Anton watches all the science-fiction shows. He likes disaster movies and psycho horror and end-of-the-world scenarios. When we are curled up together on the couch in front of the TV he makes little grunting noises of amazement each time he hears the next crazy theory about how we’re all going to die. He’s counting down to the great catastrophe, certain the world is going to crack in ways we cannot imagine.

  He keeps asking me, ‘What would you do if you knew we only had a few days to live?’

  The last few months I’ve been telling him I’d get in the car and drive. Maybe that’s got him worried. Maybe he’s hanging on to that steering wheel in the car behind me and wondering if I know something he doesn’t.

  Last week I saw a show on TV where weird things started happening to signal the end of the world. Ghoulies came up out of the sewers and priests had spooky dreams. Anton was sitting on the couch beside me. He reached over for my hand and cradled it between his thighs.

  I told him, ‘I have plenty of spooky dreams, but they have nothing to do with the end of the world.’

  A few kilometres back Anton and I and all my other baggage came to a Shell roadhouse. I pulled into the carpark and got out to stretch my legs. When I touched the bonnet of the car my fingers burned. Seven bays along Anton pulled in and idled while I walked around and bent over to touch my toes. I went into the family restaurant and bought a bag of soggy warm chips from the bain-marie. The woman at the counter looked so trim and taut she might have been a Roadhouse Barbie made out of moulded plastic.

  The engine of the idling car in the carpark stopped, coughed once and sighed. Anton came in and ordered a hamburger with the lot. He didn’t look at me. I ate my chips as I leaned against the window of the roadhouse, gazing at the trucks lined up outside, their snub noses snarling at the tarmac. When I glanced back at the counter, Roadhouse Barbie was dropping a flat meat pattie on the grill. I turned and walked quickly back to my Holden, got in and drove off. I wondered whether he would wait for his hamburger.

  Our trouble all began with food.

  ‘I’m a vegetarian because I don’t like meat,’ I’d always say, but he wouldn’t believe me.

  ‘You can’t know if you don’t try it again.’

  ‘But why should I try it again if I know I don’t like it?’

  It was one of those arguments that spin around and around like a top, finally whirling so fast you can’t see the argument itself anymore, only the blur of fury around it. He thought I was taking a moral stand and wouldn’t admit to it.

  ‘Stand up for your beliefs if you have them,’ he’d say.

  ‘OK, I firmly believe that I don’t like the taste of meat.’

  I was twenty kilometres down the road with the cold chips lying in a sodden lump beside me on the front seat before he caught up. In my rear-vision mirror I could still see the bright lights from the roadhouse making a glowing arc on the horizon. He sped up behind me and settled his rackety old Toyota into the slipstream of my wide-bodied Holden and we kept on driving into the night.

  When I first learned to drive I was afraid of every other object on the road. I felt like cars were nagging at me, pushing me to drive faster or to change lanes or to turn off into a sidestreet, and so I would panic–accelerate and put on my indicator and weave across the road all at once. Not now though.

  Now I’m queen of the road. Every road belongs to me. Every highway, every white line, every oil slick on the bitumen. Driving makes me strong. I learned the power of the road from all the times I stormed out of the house, away from his stifling love, and raced away in the car. Now I’m a menace in the traffic. He can stick as close as he likes to my bumper bar. I’m in control of this road train.

  My only trouble is that I keep looking in the rear-vision mirror.

  At first the food thing was like a teasing game. He’d cook up a few steaks and sausages on the barbeque in the backyard and bring them into the kitchen piled up high and black-charred on a plate. The smell of firelighter bricks would follow him, clinging to his clothes and his hair. I’d be sitting on a chair at the laminex table picking at my vegetable curry or my stir-fried tempeh.

  ‘See?’ he’d say. ‘Look at you, you don’t even like what you’re eating. You’re skinny and you’re pale and you’ve got no energy.’

  I laughed at the beginning. ‘Let’s see who lasts the longest in bed,’ I’d say. ‘Let’s see who’s got the stamina there.’

  His face would tighten. ‘That’s a woman thing–they take longer,’ he’d mutter through a mouthful
of gristly burnt meat. ‘Anyway, women don’t really like sex. Love, that’s all they fucking want. Love and attention.’

  He wasn’t too bad in bed. I’d had worse. But he was afraid that he was bad. And when he started to pick on me about little things I knew how to get at him.

  Now when I look at that mussed-up hair in the car behind and I feel the sweat pooling between my legs and the seat, I think about how I’d like to cradle his head between my thighs. But I turn my attention back to the black road in front of me and remember why I am here, and my foot presses a little harder on the accelerator.

  Not long ago we passed a mob of kangaroos standing stagestruck by the side of the road. Their eyes glowed green in the darkness as we approached. He’s so close behind me that if I hit one of them we’d all go bouncing off the road in a great mangled pile of fur and metal and blood. At the hospital, the first time, they asked me if I had been in an accident.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, cradling my broken wrist in my good hand. ‘We had a crash.’

  He kissed me on my left temple. He asked the nurse to bring us sweet tea because I might be in shock. Afterwards we went home and turned on the TV and he made me fried tofu and we sat on the couch eating the tasteless white cubes and watching the late-night sci-fi show and when I laughed at the characters with rubber heads he laughed with me, and I thought it would never happen again.

  I have to turn the rear-vision mirror up to the roof. No matter how faint those headlights are they still distract me from my mission. I look at the dimmed lights and they seem so soft and warm. That’s what happens when you look back–you see all the things you wanted to happen mixed in with reality. I picture him holding me like he did at first, his hands open and gentle, his lips brushing against mine as we stood in the queue for our tickets to Deep Impact.