The Rainy Season Read online

  It’s just after siesta time when I arrive at the Saigon General Post Office to call Mum. I’m the first customer through the doors when they reopen. One woman behind the counter is doing tai chi-like stretches, another is reapplying lipstick. I stand at the counter for a while but they studiously ignore me. It’s hot and stuffy and the longer I wait, the more agitated I feel. I’ve been dreading making this call for days.

  After fifteen minutes I ask someone if I can put a call through to Australia. The woman who was stretching grudgingly hands me the forms. When I’ve filled them in, she tells me to take a seat.

  I sit and wait some more, fanning myself with my new map. I realise I am humming the Hawaii Five-O theme song again – da da dada daa daa … I grimace. I try to think of things I might say to her, but I keep coming back to her appalled face when I first told her I was going to Vietnam. Why? she asked, as if I had proposed something patently distasteful. I thought you wanted to go to New Zealand. I told her I’d heard Vietnam was beautiful, and very interesting, and cheap, and the conversation ended, as I knew it would, with no mention of my father or the war.

  When I’m finally called to the phone, I have nothing prepared. ‘Hi!’ I say, with faux brightness.

  ‘Ella?’ She clears her throat. ‘Where are you?’ It’s early evening in Melbourne and I imagine her dim, narrow hallway, the dusty dragonfly lamp already switched on.

  ‘I’m still here obviously. I’m actually ringing to let you know I’m going to be staying a bit longer. I got offered a job! Teaching English!’

  She doesn’t respond.

  ‘And I figure I might as well make the most of being here, you know, while I don’t have anything to hurry back for … Are you there?’ I say this though I can hear her breathing and I can feel it in my own body, in my own lungs. I wind the cord of the phone around my finger till it is bleached white.

  ‘But you’d already extended your trip,’ she says, finally.

  ‘I know. But then I got offered this job. Just for six months. I think it could be a really amazing experience. There’s so much happening here at the moment. The whole country is in a state of flux.’

  ‘But what about your job here?’

  I laugh. ‘Mum, it’s a crappy job. I’ve already faxed them. Tim is looking after Book.’ I hear her exhale. I hurry on, ‘By the way, thanks for transferring that money for me. How are things with you?’ I can’t wait to hang up.

  ‘I wish you would come home.’

  ‘I know. I’ll write soon. Take care, okay?’

  We hang up and I go next door and send off a parcel to Jess with photos of my squalid room, the local kids playing on the street and Hien reading a newspaper. I stand at the counter and pen a quick note, telling her I have a job, and that I miss her very much.

  I print my name on the blackboard with a piece of yellow chalk. Thirty faces, open and waiting. Miss Jenny up the back with her scalding smile, standing out like a grinning rubber shark in a children’s pantomime.

  They wait for more, so I point to the board and say, ‘That’s my name,’ and smile. They all smile back. ‘I thought I’d tell you a bit about myself and then you can tell me about you.’ I’m not sure if that’s proper English. ‘Right, so, I’m from Australia.’ Pause. ‘I worked in a bookshop before I came to Vietnam, and I have an arts degree.’ A lot of furrowed brows. Do I explain the arts degree? Do I slow down? Speed up? What else do I say? ‘I’m really looking forward to helping you with your English and I’d also like to learn some Vietnamese, so maybe you can help me too.’ Everyone laughs then, as if I’ve told a joke, so I chuckle too.

  We go around the room and the students introduce themselves, one by one, and explain why they want to learn English. There is a roughly equal mix of men and women ranging in age from a boy in his late teens to a bespectacled man who looks sixtyish. Most of them need English for jobs with foreign companies or in tourism, a few seem just to have the time and money, but there is one who stands out, a Buddhist nun, sitting up the back. She is plump and her shaved head is round as the moon. Even without speaking, she radiates something, some sort of stillness. She says she needs to improve her English to teach the homeless boys she cares for. I want to ask her more but can’t single her out.

  For the rest of the class we study contractions from the red textbook. I set them a couple of exercises and then sit and squeeze the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. I can smell my own sweat.

  Afterwards, Miss Jenny tells me I did very well.

  At the end of my first week of teaching, I call Suze at the newspaper. Her voice is even deeper, more gravelly, over the phone. I tell her about my job and she offers to take me to a couple of expat bars to celebrate, show me what I’m in for.

  We meet at the Apocalypse, because it’s the only place I know, then get on her Minsk and go to a place called the River Bar, that isn’t on the river. The Beatles are playing and the large, well-lit room is full of bamboo furniture and potted palms, western businessmen in white slacks and pressed, patterned shirts. ‘Run by a French guy,’ Suze explains, ‘hence the music.’

  We get drinks. Suze introduces me to a woman called Kirsten with a fuzz of red hair and a smirk, and Martin, a middle-aged English guy who reminds me of Humpty Dumpty. They work together in the garment industry. A short man in a suit and spotted tie, sitting further along the bar, winks at me. He is having his shoes shined. I feel like I have wandered onto the wrong set; Suze, with her scruffy hair and fag hanging out of her mouth, is the only thing even vaguely familiar.

  We go and play pool. ‘So tell me about this job,’ Suze says.

  I describe my first week, how I bluffed it all the way. ‘It’s weird because I always swore I wouldn’t be a teacher. My mother’s a teacher.’ I have a shot and miss the white ball altogether. ‘How was your week?’

  ‘This afternoon I spent two hours playing Scrabble with the editor in chief. He’s an old NVA captain. Apparently, he once fought alongside Uncle Ho. He loves to talk, but he never really says anything. You know what I’m saying?’

  I nod slowly; a captain of the North Vietnamese Army. Does he have the popular wartime tattoo hidden under his shirt? I wonder. Born in the north to die in the south. Or was that just the foot soldiers? I drink my beer.

  ‘Did you get your article finished?’ I ask Suze.

  ‘Uh-huh. I had a friend flying out the next day.’ She explains that the pieces she writes for papers back home are done under a pseudonym and have to be carried out by hand, to avoid the censors. There is, she tells me, an Office of Propaganda in Hanoi. ‘Not that I write anything earth-shattering,’ she laughs. ‘Really, I wouldn’t have a clue what’s going on here most of the time. We only see what they let us see.’

  I notice the guy with the spotted tie looking over again and ask Suze if she knows him.

  ‘Manager of Cathay Pacific, captain of the expat rugby team. I’ve got to tell you now, honey, most of these jocks you wouldn’t wipe your arse with.’

  We go next to the Q Bar, a dim, cool space beneath the Opera House, with bouncers and twisted wrought-iron candelabras. We get drinks and join one-eyed Dave at a table full of people. Suze introduces me to everyone: a German dealer in automotive parts, a visiting CNN reporter, an Australian electrical engineer, and Kirsten and Martin again, who must have come on ahead of us. Saigon nightlife, Suze explains, is all about bar-hopping, trying to find the elusive action.

  They’ve been talking, at the table, about a couple of expats who died last week on the road just outside Vung Tau. Their motorbike ran into a truck and apparently they lay in the dirt for three hours, in 32-degree heat, before help came. The guy was already dead by then from loss of blood – he’d been sawn almost in half – but his girlfriend was conscious and didn’t die until later that night, in a small rural hospital. The guy played on the rugby team.

  ‘This country is a shit hole,’ the engineer splutters, in a broad Aussie accent. ‘An absolute bloody shit hole.’

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sp; ‘What keeps you here then?’ the CNN woman asks, pointedly.

  ‘Money,’ he says, as if this was a stupid question.

  Dave looks up from rolling a joint to roll his eyes.

  ‘They have to pay well because just living here is a full-time job,’ the engineer continues. ‘Any work you do is extra.’

  ‘So how do you manage the stress?’ the reporter asks.

  The engineer smirks. ‘You want to find a tank and an M-16 and take to the streets. You drink ten beers, you feel okay.’

  The German laughs.

  I stare at them all, bug-eyed.

  Dave lights the joint and it goes around the table.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Kirsten says to me, coolly.

  I smile and shrug. ‘Just trying to take it all in.’

  ‘Not your average Aussie sheila then,’ laughs the engineer.

  ‘Ella, I have a feeling you and Ariel are going to hit it off,’ Dave says.

  ‘Who’s Ariel?’ I ask.

  ‘My chess partner – handsome, French, pitifully straight,’ replies Dave.

  Suze nudges me. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Dave asks, standing up too.

  ‘Back to the Apocalypse.’

  NINE

  There’s a big stain above the bedside table, as if moisture has seeped out from inside the wall. I’ve been studying it now for weeks. I imagine it as a faded geographical map for some mythical land, like you’d find in a bottle at sea. I lie beneath the whirring fan and gaze up and down its coasts, its rivers and hills. In this country, families live in log cabins built from trees felled in a sweet, damp wood; Pa, Ma and the children – smoking meat, churning butter, telling stories by an open and blazing fire. I had the whole set of Little House on the Prairie books when I was young, wedged into a battered, yellow box. I must have read my way through them a dozen times. Pa Ingalls, with his black hair and habit of disappearing into the woods, was the figure of my missing father.

  I reach out and sweep the used condom from the bedside table onto the floor where it lands like a shed skin – shrivelled, redundant, vaguely beseeching. How did it end up on the table right next to my father’s wooden spoon? My head is pounding and everything in me is aching and hollow. ‘What am I doing?’ I groan aloud. ‘Fuuuuck!’

  He wasn’t wearing the spotted tie this time; he was wearing white slacks and a dark blue polo shirt. Said he was the MD of Cathay Pacific Vietnam. I said, What, Milo Drinker? and Suze cackled. Short and solid; hair the colour and shape of caramel swirls; London accent, creamy and rich.

  I’d finished my second week at Speak Easy and was surviving and so went out with Suze and Dave to celebrate again. He approached us at the Q Bar with a bottle of whisky and a few glasses. We all accepted a drink. He asked me how long I’d been in town and told me I had intense eyes. I laughed. I didn’t even find him attractive.

  Earlier, there’d been the hideous incident with the French businessman, the owner of a fleet of airbuses. I was standing at the bar when this man, at least sixty, slapped a young Vietnamese woman’s arse as she walked by. I saw her turn and mouth the words fuck off. His face twisted – he had lots of black, wiry nose hair – and he grabbed her by the shoulders and smashed his forehead into hers. She stumbled and nearly fell. He called her a farking whore. You could see the oily saliva spraying from his mouth. I expected the guy to be thrown out but instead a bouncer escorted the woman onto the street. When I went to protest the bartender shrugged and told me, She shouldn’t have been in here. This is a quality bar. We can’t afford to lose good business. Suze said, Get used to it. Expats are the most misogynistic fuckers on earth.

  It wasn’t until the early hours, at the Apocalypse, that I kissed the MD. Why did I do it? I was drunk. I’d been dancing and I came back to the bar where he was sitting. Without saying anything at all I put my hand behind his head and pulled him towards me. His mouth opened, his arms slid around me. Just like that, I moved on. Embargo lifted.

  I try not to think about how foreign his body felt when we were having sex, or his kitten-like whimpers. Or the way he got up and dressed in the dark and didn’t even touch me, just said, Babe, I have to go.

  I moan. I roll onto my side, my stomach, my back again. My head hurts so much I can’t keep still. I can hear the rooster crowing and, in the distance, the old man wailing. Then I start thinking about the last time I made love to Tim, before I knew what was going to happen, in our cosy bed in our peaceful room, and the remembering and the pain in my head makes my heart start up, that horrible pounding, and I know I’m going to be sick.

  I lurch into the bathroom and kneel on the cool tiles over the toilet hole. I hold my head in my hands as the nausea builds, unstoppable, until I’m vomiting up bitter brown bile.

  When it’s over, I wash out my mouth and brush my teeth and stare at my face in the mirror above the basin. I look like I’ve been through an exorcism: dead-white skin and my dark, staring eyes – my father’s eyes – all red and weepy. I try to smile at myself, make light of it, but I am unconvincing: I have just slept with a man I don’t like and now I am vomiting my guts up. There’s no doubt I am in a bad way.

  I stick my hand outside the door to the corridor and pull the thermos inside. Hien only brings hot water now so that I can brew my own tea. I brew a pot of artichoke – tra atiso; like the rau ma, it’s supposed to cleanse the liver. While I’m waiting for the tea, I pick the condom up with a tissue and throw it in the bin, then slump naked in the armchair and look around the sparse room. It’s been two months since I arrived and still the only signs of habitation are the dregs of food under the net cover and a stick of incense planted in a black banana. I light it. This afternoon, after class, I will buy fresh fruit and flowers. I will try to make it nice in here; I used to be good at that.

  After three cups of artichoke tea, I lie back down but I can feel my father’s face watching me from the bedside table and it makes me wince.

  When I was a little girl I used to imagine he was omnipresent, that he could see me even though he wasn’t there. If something really good happened I would bask in his proud and loving gaze. It might be an ‘A’ on a school project or the first time I rode down the hill near our house with no hands. I would feel him close by, looking on. And, just sometimes, I would even see him – like a ghost – sitting on a park bench outside the school gates, watching and smiling. Sometimes, I would sneak a small smile back.

  What would he think if he could see me now? I wonder. What would he think of his grubby, down-and-out daughter?

  I turn the photos face-down on the table. Up on the ceiling, the beige gecko sleeps. It’s a lonely life. I decide to call him Bones.

  In class, I keep a bottle of Coke at my side and sip at it constantly, taking comfort from its rusty chemical sweetness. For the first half-hour we role-play a visit to the zoo then we run through some zoological vocabulary and make up descriptive sentences about animals native to Vietnam and Australia. We finish this and there’s still forty minutes to go – and it’s only Monday, a whole week of this to get through. I set a comprehension exercise from the red book and doodle on a piece of paper.

  At the end of class, the nun, Co Ngoc, approaches my desk. ‘Excuse me, Miss Ella. We have a celebration tonight at my pagoda for the full moon. Can you join us?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I say, quickly, ‘but I don’t think I can tonight. I’m not feeling very well.’ For some reason I feel cornered. I don’t want her to see my bloodshot eyes, smell the stale alcohol.

  ‘No problem. Maybe next time.’ Her expression doesn’t change and something about her stillness is hypnotic.

  She turns to go. ‘Co Ngoc?’ I have her attention but I’m not sure what I want to say. ‘Would you like to have coffee after class one day next week?’

  She nods, her round face tipped slightly to one side. We smile at one another. Then she waves and disappears into the corridor, grey robes billowing around her.

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bsp; Miss Jenny is waiting for me in the foyer with a stack of business cards. ‘Wow! For me,’ I say, shaking my head with disbelief. I trace my fingers over the embossed words: Ella Morton: English Language Teacher. How did this happen? It seems so farfetched and yet the cards in my hand are solid, sharp at the edges. ‘Thank you. I’m not sure who I’m going to give them to but …’

  She doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Every person that you meet. And, Miss Ella, please wait. I have your new visa.’

  Just as she heads off down the corridor, her boyfriend arrives. I guess who he is because one of the other teachers – an English guy with a real qualification – described him to me. He’s wearing wraparound mirror glasses above a blue nylon suit and strutting in so exaggerated a manner that, for a second, I think he must be kidding around. Apparently he owns a snake restaurant downtown and buys the gold bracelets Miss Jenny wears, yellow as yolk.

  He comes to rest some metres from me. Oanh has left for the day so we are alone. We smile at one another and he pulls a pack of 555s from his breast pocket and offers me one. 555s were Ho Chi Minh’s cigarette of choice.

  I take it. ‘Thanks.’

  He flicks open a brass Zippo. ‘I think you are Miss Ella, the new teacher.’ I nod, blow out smoke. ‘My name is Anh. I am please to meet you.’ A business card appears in his hand, with a picture of two blue snakes dancing over a cooking pot.

  ‘Thanks.’ I slip the card into my pocket. ‘Oh, and here is one of mine.’

  I am thinking how funny he is, what a character, but then Miss Jenny appears and undergoes the most amazing transformation. She sees him and her hard face becomes pliant, like dough. Her hand moves to her belly. Her beehive shines. I can’t take my eyes off her, off him, the warmth between them. I wonder if I will ever feel this again. I want it so much it takes my breath away.

  I thank Miss Jenny for the visa and go outside. The smell of warm, rotting meat wafts up from the fly-blown butcher’s stall two doors down. A small boy is squatting on the corner, methodically husking his way through a heaped basket of corn. He is always there, in that spot, in his scraps of clothes. He works slowly, with care and precision; awe-inspiring patience. I watch him until a xich lo pulls over and then I go straight to the Smiling Café, not stopping for fruit or flowers.