The Rainy Season Read online

  ‘Yes,’ I say, sure for the first time. ‘It’s over.’

  I sit at the Smiling Café at dusk, with my solo noodles and beer – my first night alone after three in a row spent with Ariel – and I am thinking how a place changes when you look at it anew. The chair across from me is empty again but everything looks different, full of promise: the crappy pictures on the walls have taken on a new poignancy, I see the aspiration in them; the spinning blades of the standing fan are commanding and useful – they keep us cool; the cinnamon toothpick holders are beautifully rough to the touch.

  I love that Ariel sings ‘Ruby Tuesday’ in the shower, in his French bass. I love the rimless glasses he wears while he’s reading the paper, which make his eyes look enormous. I love the way he says ‘merde’ with such gusto and the trouble he has, sometimes, finding the word that he needs. Toes become the fingers of the feet; the sky, the roof of the world. I love the seriousness he falls back into, and then that I can make him laugh, make him smile. He has such a sexy smile. He smiles it just for me.

  I have no appetite so I push the noodles aside and take out the unopened letter that arrived today from Jess. I race through the four pages. She says she has consummated relations with the guitarist and is madly in love. Oh-oh, here we go again, she writes. I smile – what weird synchronicity, both of us falling at the same time for these arty Europeans. She says, yes, she might once have been jealous of Tim and me but she still thought he was a know-it-all and that he stifled me. She puts in some quotes from a book she’s reading about relationships and an article from a newspaper about the multiple benefits of rope skipping. She asks after my mother: How is she coping with you gone?

  I start a letter back. Then, when the café quietens, Chanh comes over with his homework. We work through some questions in his assignment but after a while he pushes the work aside and tells me about his new lover, an American called Tom. He is very handsome, Chanh says, but not as handsome as my boyfriend. Tom is a gardener and has always wanted to see Vietnam because his father died here during the war.

  My pulse quickens. ‘Really?’

  ‘He very sad. I give him lot of hugging.’

  I frown. ‘Right. That’s very sad … Do you think Allan’s ever been happy?’ I ask, compulsively.

  I haven’t seen Allan for a few days and it’s always a relief not to see him but then I wonder if he is okay.

  Chanh shrugs. ‘Maybe before, in his country. Now I think Mr Allan very lonely.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he go back home then?’

  ‘Allan say to me he has no homeland, this his home now.’

  ‘But is he happy here? He doesn’t look happy. Does his family even know where he is?’ I have, for a millisecond, the surreal notion that Allan might be listed MIA; he could be a walking discrepancy case.

  Chanh looks perplexed. ‘Miss El-la ask too many question! Do not worry! No problem!’

  ‘You’re right, handsome. That was too many questions. I’m sorry for Tom.’

  On Thursday morning, when I am out buying new sandals, Ariel leaves orchids at the hotel for me. Hien finds a vase and I put them on the coffee table in my room; they look out of place, so beautiful and full of life. I decide to wait one more day before going to him but it is hard.

  I meet Hugh for lunch and afterwards spend an hour waiting in a queue at the Vietcom Bank. I tap my feet and crack my knuckles. Time won’t go fast enough until I can be with Ariel again.

  In class, Minh reads torturously slowly about the economic conference between the State Committee of Cooperation and Investment and a bunch of foreign investors. I’ve started bringing photocopied articles into class: the students take turns reading aloud and then we work through new vocabulary and have an open-ended discussion on topics raised. They get to argue and laugh; it makes a good change from the red book.

  ‘When I came here some years ago, my hair was still black and now it has turned grey as I have gone through so many complicated procedures regarding your country’s investment environment,’ a British citizen working for a French company in Vietnam told the workshop.

  ‘I have brought my wife and five children to Vietnam as we all want to integrate into the Vietnamese society,’ he said. ‘So please help us be part of your community by abolishing as much as you can red tape and bureaucracy.’

  After he’s read the entire article – with frequent pauses and questions on pronunciation – Minh suggests the British citizen could get his hair coloured at the hot toc. Everyone laughs.

  Ngu, who works for Saigontourist, wants to know the meaning of a whole lot of words she’s neatly underlined on her copy. She hands it up to me. We go through them. I do my best to explain, drawing diagrams on the blackboard, coming up with examples, but a few times I throw up my hands and refer them to their dictionaries.

  Then Mr Trung asks why? Why do foreigners insist on everything changing?

  ‘Vietnam must change,’ says one of the women from the pea pod whose names I always mix up. ‘Vietnam must become like other country or our people will have nothing.’ There are several nods across the room.

  ‘If Vietnam become like other country then the people will have nothing,’ Mr Trung counters.

  The young woman blushes; Mr Trung is her senior. There is a tension in the room I haven’t felt before.

  ‘What do other people think? I think this is very complicated.’ I am out of my depth. What everyone is saying is true; there is no right answer. I look to Co Ngoc.

  ‘Everything is always changing,’ she says, calmly. ‘Some things will be lost, some things will be gained.’

  Tim loved me once: in the beginning, when everything was bright. He loved me. He said we would always find a way to make it work because we were made for each other, little babes of the universe. He liked to say I had turned him into a prince – he had this thing with fairytales.

  A few times I came home to the Willow Street unit and he’d set up a treasure hunt. A note taped to the front door, a trail of clues. Eventually it would lead me to him – crouching naked in the hall cupboard, the bath. He loved to play these games, to make me laugh. When he was feeling tender, and turned on, he called me his little girl.

  I once did a sketch of his back when he was working at the computer. There was something leonine about his posture, both majestic and dangerously contained. I could watch him for hours. I could have watched him forever. When he saw the drawing he said I saw him more clearly than anyone else ever had. He framed it and put it in his office, above his computer.

  And when I cried with a sadness that would bloom suddenly, like fever, he would hold me. We’d make love and I would no longer have a past, only a future.

  FIFTEEN

  Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, 19 May, and flags ripple, by decree, from each and every building and house. Any landlord found not flying the flag will incur a heavy fine – or worse. It seems a weird way to honour a man who fought so hard and courageously for his country’s freedom and independence. I think of the xich lo driver and his ongoing struggle to survive, the mangled beggars on the street abandoned by the state, the multitudes that fled in boats when the war ended, and realise nothing is simple. You want it to be but it’s not.

  I arrive at Suze and Dave’s just after dark with dragon fruit and cakes from the French patisserie on Hai Ba Trung, but my heart is not really in it. What would my father say if he could see me coming here to celebrate Ho Chi Minh’s birthday? But he can’t, I remind myself. He cannot see me.

  ‘Could this be considered disrespectful?’ Suze asks, lighting candles around the living room. ‘Sinh Nhat Bac Ho!!’ is scrawled in gold paint on a banner across the wall. There’s a bouquet of red balloons and, on the coffee table, a big bowl of sangria.

  ‘I’d say it was highly respectful.’ Dave is just out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his hips, rolling a joint. I sit down next to him on the couch. ‘Will Ariel be joining us?’ he asks.

  I shrug. ‘Dunno. He said he’d try to get away e
arly.’

  ‘You’re becoming quite the couple,’ Dave says, passing me the joint.

  I have a couple of drags. ‘Do you think so?’ I ask, earnestly.

  Dave furrows his brow, ‘Ahhh, yeeees,’ and takes off to his bedroom to dress.

  ‘I’ve got butterflies all the time,’ I confess to Suze, ‘from morning till night. I can’t eat. I hardly sleep.’

  ‘It’s called falling in love, baby doll.’

  I groan. It’s been almost three weeks now since the wedding and during this past week we spent only two nights apart. On Sunday I cooked him pasta with chilli and prawns at his apartment, and he read Marguerite Duras to me in bed. On Tuesday we went to the Australian-owned Norfolk Hotel to drink VB and watch the ABC news; he thrashed me at chess while I tried to explain Australian politics. On Wednesday morning we shampooed one another’s hair and then spent all afternoon wandering around his neighbourhood holding hands, talking on and on like we would never in this life have time to say it all, and everything we said to one another made sense. At other times we don’t talk at all, there is just this wordless, frantic desire; or we lie in his bed for hours gazing into each other’s eyes, reaching out to stroke a cheek, a shoulder, the feeling of connection so strong and lucid it’s like being on drugs.

  ‘It scares me to feel like this,’ I admit to Suze. ‘It seems dangerous.’

  She laughs and pours me a glass of sangria. ‘Chill, honey. He’s gorgeous, but at the end of the day, hey, he’s just another guy.’

  White Water John turns up first with his sister and her friend, who are visiting from Sydney, and at last I get to hear how he came by his name. He adopts a storytelling pose, sitting back on the couch, legs apart, fresh joint in hand.

  ‘So there I was, circa 1992, trying to set up these whitewater rafting tours, right? I’d found the river – up north, only two hours by minibus. It’s beautiful – wide and vicious. I’ve been waiting months to get the People’s Committee up there to get the official go-ahead but it’s all done, really. They’ve just got to do their thing, sign the papers. The brochures are already printed and waiting in boxes in every bloody travel agency in the southern hemisphere. It’s going to be the biggest Vietnam tour since 1968!’

  He grins. ‘So the big day arrives. I’ve got on my one suit and I’ve forgone the morning joint. The big guys arrive to pick me up in their brand-new Volvo. There are three of them, very chummy. We pass around 555s and crack a few jokes. We’re all feeling good about ourselves. It’s a beautiful day, couldn’t be more perfect. So we drive out there and I’m telling them how good it’s going to be, how it’s going to bring in the tourist dollars, then, at last, we pull up, and there’s this surreal moment – I think we must have taken a wrong turn – because it’s gone! We’ve driven for two fucking hours and the river has disappeared. There’s just this empty channel of dried red mud. Turns out it’s been dammed to provide a water supply twenty kilometres upstream but word didn’t get through. The same bureaucrats who signed off on the dam were still busy processing my application. All those brochures! My beautiful dreams – dashed on the dry river bed!’

  We all laugh and I think again how nice White Water John’s face is, so open and friendly. ‘It couldn’t happen anywhere else,’ he says. ‘That’s why I love this country so fucking much.’

  ‘Not to mention the cheap drugs and lawless roads,’ I say.

  He winks and smiles at me. I smile back.

  Martin turns up with his new girlfriend, Phuong. She is quiet and doesn’t look much over eighteen. She says no to a drink and carefully eats a rice paper roll. I try to talk with her but it seems to make her more uncomfortable. Martin has some new gripe about the People’s Committee and changing regulations – ‘the bloody country doesn’t know where it’s going’ – and it strikes me that all he does is complain about the Vietnamese, always puffing himself up, and I wonder if he would shrink back to size in England. Seeing him rest his chubby hand on Phuong’s thigh makes me a little squeamish.

  Kirsten brings Kate, a teacher with Australian Volunteers Abroad. She only arrived a few weeks ago and is still fresh and wide-eyed. A little later, Klaus arrives with a good-looking young French guy, Didier. I look over at Dave but he seems unperturbed and Didier soon zeroes in on Suze, obviously straight. I overhear him telling her that he exports dead GI paraphernalia to Japan – kit bags, lighters, dogtags. Oui, he makes a fortune! I keep my distance.

  Hoang, who promised to come early and stay the whole night, hasn’t turned up.

  We get pizzas delivered. The Doors play loudly. I keep looking at my watch and at the door, willing Ariel to appear. Already, no one else seems as interesting, as if the more vivid he becomes the more the background recedes, bleaches out.

  Suze sits down next to me. I put an arm around her. ‘How are you doing?’

  She smiles, sadly. ‘Yeah, pretty blue.’

  ‘Suze, he’s an arsehole.’

  ‘You know, he’s been saying he’s going to leave her because he loves me too much. Nhieu lam!’

  ‘Do you think he will?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you even want him to?’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m not going to wash his shirts and make mi xao bo. At the end of the day I’m just the American girl without any morals. What do I even want?’

  ‘Maybe you need a break. Even if you don’t want to end it, you could at least have some time out?’

  She sighs. ‘You’re right. I have to stop banging my head against the wall … and get on with my work – that’s what I’m here for, right?’

  The tape ends and, for some reason, everyone stops talking. It’s almost midnight.

  ‘I wonder,’ says Dave into the silence, ‘what Bac Ho would say if he were alive to know that a delegation of Hollywood movie makers have just been through, scouting for locations. One of the James Bond producers apparently noted – quite seriously – that the jungles and rivers in Vietnam would make a great backdrop for action films.’

  ‘Nooo!’ Kirsten says.

  ‘It would be eerie for the vets, wouldn’t it,’ says White Water John’s sister, Rachel, ‘seeing the real thing up there on the big screen.’

  Dave laughs. ‘Probably spark a whole new wave of suicides.’

  ‘That’s hilarious, Dave,’ I say, not smiling.

  ‘Well, it is the natural justice, non?’ Didier offers.

  I stand up and walk into the kitchen, start running water to wash dishes. I can hear Suze arguing with Didier, and then someone puts the music back on but my heart is thumping and I am fighting not to cry.

  Your father didn’t choose to go there, Tim would remind me. He wasn’t responsible for what happened. But he did go, and terrible things did happen.

  The Eighth Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment, 8RAR, toured Vietnam from November 1969 to November 1970; it included nashos from the 13th, 14th and 15th intakes. In one of these, my father’s birthday appeared on a little marble coughed up by the Tattersall’s machine on loan to the government; everyone called it the ‘lottery of death’. I know the official call-up notice came in a solid, brown envelope. My father had won himself a year’s training – twelve months of bastardisation by the army – plus a twelve-month tour of duty: 365 days plus a ‘wakey’ – the last day you wake up in Vietnam before going home. They all prayed for a wakey.

  I worked all this out early on, in my teens, just as I figured he would have done his initial training at Broadmeadows, the month’s intensive at the Jungle Training Centre at Canungra, finishing up with the entire battalion at Shoalwater Bay dressed up to look like Phuoc Tuy Province.

  I remember seeing, in books, pictures of young boys in slouch hats with brown smiling faces, heading off to war. The conscripts were promised cheap home loans when they got back from serving their country, and honour eternal for protecting us from the Communist plague.

  But we know now there were no home sweet homes. They thought they’d come back heroes bu
t instead they became our national shame: heartless and depraved, the papers said; raping, mutilating, village-torching baby killers. They were the bitter, bearded, skulking characters no one wanted to go near.

  Pop once said to me though, on the sly, that it was a blooming disgrace what happened to those boys. He said they sent them to war before they were old enough to vote then gave them no way to come home.

  Suze comes into the kitchen. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I am suddenly tired and heavy. ‘It’s just, somehow everything always comes back to the war.’

  She looks at me curiously – or do I imagine this? ‘Leave these,’ she says, indicating the dishes. ‘Come on. I need someone to drink with.’

  We go back in and Dave makes a toast to Ho Chi Minh’s birthday and to kicking American arse. I remember Mick’s toast in the Smiling Café. I wonder what Phuong makes of this celebration. I clink with the others but I am watching the door, waiting for my way out.

  At half past twelve, Ariel calls. Dave says he wants to speak to me. I go and pick up the phone.

  ‘Ella, I am so sorry for tonight. I have not been free to leave.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, pulse quickening at the sound of his voice.

  ‘Are you enjoying your night?’

  ‘Yeah … well, actually, I’m pretty tired.’

  ‘I am absolutely tired. It is not surprising, non? We do not share so much sleep.’

  We both laugh.

  ‘Maybe tonight you would like to go to your own bed?’ His tone is gentle but I feel myself tense.

  ‘I don’t know … what do you want to do?’

  ‘I want to see you again.’

  I exhale. ‘I want to see you too.’

  ‘I will come there soon.’

  When he arrives, I spring up from the couch like a Jack-in-the-box. He declines the offer of a drink. We smile at each other and everything seems to come back into focus.

  ‘You taking off already?’ White Water John asks me, looking disappointed. ‘I thought you were a stayer.’