Evelyn on the Verandah was orginally published in the One Book Many Brisbanes 2010 short story anthology.
Evelyn on the verandah
I come home from school and find Dad knocking down one of the walls in the back bedroom.
I say, Dad what are you doing?
And he says, I can’t work in there (downstairs, he meant, in his office), I need more space.
I say—because we have this really bad relationship at the moment, I don’t agree with a lot of things he’s doing, I’m being mean to him—I say, can’t you just throw all that shit out?
And he says no.
Every room in this house is dedicated to something he’s researched. He fills them with books and photos and other things he’s found or been given. It’s a filing system of sorts. Drawers within drawers. He kept extending and extending until the house is this crazy mix of rooms and hidey holes.
I’ve lived here all my life. Actually no, that’s a lie. I was born in East Brisbane. We moved here later. When we first went to look at the house, there were syringes in the garden. It was this crazy share house. All of downstairs was padded ‘cause there were musicians upstairs and junkies downstairs.
Dad ripped out the padding when we moved in to make his office. He’s a workaholic. Ever since I was little he’s been writing History. And he’s incapable of throwing anything out. His office was always overflowing with papers and pictures and all this other weird stuff. I used to play with them. Once I found this glass dome with what I thought was a tiny stuffed toy dog inside, which would have been pretty weird now that I think about it. But Dad said it was an actual dog, what he called a Chinese sleeve dog. You know how traditional Imperial robes have those long sleeves? They would keep these tiny dogs in their sleeves. Dad had talked to this woman whose Aunt had been a missionary in China. She gave him the dog because she thought she was dying and her sons were going to throw it out. The Aunt had bought it at an auction because she was obsessed with Chinese things. (I know what that’s like; it’s hard to leave China). She’d never actually seen anyone in China with the dogs in their sleeves, that was just what she’d been told, but they did have sleeves big enough to keep dogs in. And Dad said that when the British invaded the Imperial palace they found the bodies of these tiny dogs. The dogs were sacred; the Emperor hadn’t wanted the British to have them. But four were alive and one was given to Queen Victoria who bred it in England. So the dog mightn’t have been from China at all.
Our house once sailed up the Brisbane river. I forget the last name of the people that built it now; they must have been rich because one of them scratched her name into the glass of a window with her diamond ring. I was named after her: Evelyn. The family used to live in South Brisbane. They—probably it was the Father in those days, or maybe not—decided for some reason that they wanted to live in New Farm. I guess at the time the roads weren’t very good, it was easier to have the whole thing pulled by barge through the water.
There would have been sharks in the river. I read about this in a diary I found when I was interested in that kind of thing. This woman, the one who wrote the diary, was sitting on the grass in the park with her two little girls when a man ran up to her screaming that his son’s had an accident. She went with him to the river and there was a young boy, half in, half out of the water. She’s wearing these really high heeled boots and a dress with layers and layers of petticoats, ‘cause this is the eighteen-hundreds, right? She slipped on the pebbles at the edge; it must have been low tide, we’re getting close to the mouth of the river, to the sea, up here. She landed next to the boy and she could see there was blood swirling in the water around him.
This kid was swimming in the river when a shark bit one of his feet. He managed to fight it off and struggled towards the shore, but the shark swam back and attacked his other foot and swam off with it between his teeth. The woman sent the dad off for a doctor and dragged the boy further up the bank but, my god, he was so heavy for such a little thing. Then she noticed he had these stones in his pockets. He must have been diving and picking them up from the bottom. The water would have been clear enough it do that in those days, before they started dredging. She emptied the stones out of his pocket and left them in a little pile beside him.
The Dad came back with the doctor. Both the boy’s legs have to be amputated right there on the side of the river. His Dad kept saying, he’s not allowed to go into the water, he knew, he should know, it’s not allowed, in this continuous loop. He sat up with the boy all night but by morning he’d died.
At home that night the woman made her daughter cry. Her daughter was holding a stone in her hand like the ones from the boy’s pocket and her mother took it off her.
I don’t know if it happened exactly like that, I don’t think she used those exact words; I read it ages ago. I’ve never seen any sharks in the river, and I row. But once I saw this dead body. This was a bit before I found that diary and why I remember the diary at all is because they mustn’t have weighted the body properly. The chains had come loose or something. So it was the feet we saw floating past us.
I guess I’ve always been intrigued by these obscure things. The prostitutes on Kent Street always intrigued me as well. We’d be on our way to school and they’d be on their way home. One had these legs, they reminded me of this snake pickled in a jar I’d seen in the biology lab at school, kind of contained and preserved but bloated and exposed at the same time. Her legs fascinated me. Mum would always be like, don’t look, don’t look. And they’d be waving at us.
A few years ago I almost got picked up. This guy thought I was a prostitute. I was walking towards my house, I must have come back from work and a car slowed down in front of me and then stopped at the end of the street. The driver was like, what’s your price? For a while after that—you know what you’re like when you’re that age—I was worried that my legs were like the prostitute’s.
I leave Dad alone, walk out to the back verandah and watch an afternoon storm crawl towards us.
When the storm hits there is the scent of the paw-paw tree. The rain lashing on the tin roof.
Dad comes out and says, I finished part of the history today. Do you want to read it?
I say, aren’t you still going?
Yes.
I’ll read it when you’re finished. I don’t want it to be spoilt.
This is a pretty safe answer, one I’ve used pretty often over the years—I know he won’t ever be finished. At least not the part I want to read.
I walk back inside, leaving him on the verandah. The part he’s talking about is a corporate history, which was commissioned; these are the only ones he seems to finish. He is surrounded by boxes and boxes of things he will never write about because no one pays him to. Or someone pays him not to, which I hate. He gave me a vision, the first time I found him knocking down the walls of our house: I can see that almost everything is connected to everything else, that everything needs to be told, at the same time, if that’s possible.
I know I have this problem with wanting to say everything at once. I get convoluted, breathless. And anyway, how can I tell a story that isn’t really a story at all, but tiny moments strung across the years? But I don’t see that in these corporate histories he writes. The one I read, anyway.
Dad is very, what I’d call, ambitious. Or maybe not. He has high expectations. Of me anyway. That’s ok. It was just that, I guess, I went to New Farm state school, which I loved. Dad wanted me to go there. It was a very multi-cultural sort of mix. Lots of Chinese and Indigenous kids. The other school was the Holy Spirit, which was more like an Italian Catholic school. But I knew a lot of the girls there because I’d play soccer with them at New Farm park. Our coach was like the ‘famous Fabio.’
It must have been really bad for Fabio because back then we were these terrible twelve year old girls heckling him. He was nineteen and thought he was this really big adult but really he wasn’t, his father had just died and we were like, Fabio you suck.
In high school I went to this private girl’s school. I have this independent streak and I didn’t like the structure there. And there was a lot of money there as well. Opposite to my primary school. So I kind of went of the tracks. I guess what I’m saying is when I don’t like something I tend to do the opposite of what people want me to do.
I learnt Chinese from a very early age. At school and because of Min. I’ll talk about Min in a minute. I’ve lived in Hong Kong for six months, studying. When I left I was hating living here, sort of a small town thing—boring. New Farm is just a big village. I know all our neighbours. Some have chickens.
Down the road, there’s this boarding house but it used to be a hospital, a war hospital. My friend thinks she can feel a ghost there. She is the most practical, down-to-earth person I know. You’d never expect her to say anything like that but, I don’t know, it’s a bit weird.
Our next door neighbours (not the chicken neighbours) are these two gay men, Robert and Roger, kind of my god-parents. They told me that in the early 1900s there was a notorious boarding house in Newstead. Guys would take men they’d picked up from the Valley back to their rooms there. This boarding house—probably not the one near us, but maybe—got used regularly until the place was involved in a court case. What happened was that this guy was trying to crack on to one of the other boarders. The guy told the boarder he was leaving the next day, that the landlady had asked him to leave, because there were rumours that he’d bought men back before. I think this pretty weird pick up line was his way of letting the other bloke know he was gay. The guy must have misread the signals; the boarder pressed charges when he woke up to find the guy with his penis in his hand. One of their friends was doing his Masters on homosexual sub-culture in public and private spaces, so I think that’s where that story came from. That’s probably the best story Robert and Roger’ve told me. Mostly they just talk about their cat, which sometimes sucks its own nipples because it was taken away from its mother when it was too young and wedged between the railings of Roger and Robert’s verandah. Although once they got gay bashed in the Valley, yeah.
On the other side of us are two old people. I never see them but sometimes you can hear their typewriter. Clunk Clunk Clunk. Usually at night. I don’t know what they’re typing. Before them, there was this young couple in that house. My bedroom window faced their bedroom window. Sometimes she would lock him out. I woke up in the middle of the night to see him literally climbing up the walls. One night I heard them having a fight. We had to call the police. I heard him hit her, his hand, maybe his fist, making contact with her body. She was screaming—it’s kind of funny how you can only make out the swear words. I called to Mum, Mum, Mum, we have to do something. Mum was like, there’s nothing we can do about it, we don’t know what’s happening inside, go to sleep and I was like no.
I’d seen her, the girlfriend, the day before with her baby. She wasn’t really a baby: she could walk. My point is she wasn’t very old. I was standing in this aisle at Woolworths. I think Mum had sent me for a spice or something and I couldn’t find it. I must have been pretty absorbed in looking for it. I was standing there with my chin resting in my hands. I looked down and my neighbour’s little girl was next to me in exactly the same position I was. I moved my hand away from my face. She was copying me. She kept staring at me the whole time, not smiling but deliberately mimicking everything I did. In retrospect, I can see it was probably just playing a silly game but at the time I felt she was mocking me.
Then her mother and the boyfriend came around the corner and called her. The mother said, come here little shit and then laughed when she came, because of course she wouldn’t have understood what the words meant; she’d just seen her mother. Then two nights later we had to call the police on them. I made Dad call.
I wanted to stay up and make sure they came, but I sort of let myself doze for a bit because I expected them to have flashing lights and sirens that would wake me up, which of course they didn’t. The family moved out after that. I watched them, crouched on my bed just above the window sill. Moving involved a lot of swearing. The daughter was playing with the gravel in the driveway, stacking it into piles. The piles were still there in the morning when I went to look at the empty house. I kicked them over.
I guess I’m lucky to have a stable family life.
Min (she’s the chicken neighbour) told me yesterday about this girl I went to primary school with. Samantha—that’s the name of the girl—was like this little perfect thing in school. Our school was crazy though. Once this guy, I can’t remember his name, pretended to have a seizure. After convulsing for a bit he just lay there on the ground. He wouldn’t move. The teacher had to carry him down the stairs.
Min and my other friends, we were all terrible, boisterous girls, loud and independent. Samantha wasn’t like that. She was a bit of a dobber. Like once when I was carving my name into the window at school with a compass she threatened to get a teacher unless I stopped and when I didn’t, she pinched me. Not just once either, but continually until my arm was covered in welts. It mustn’t have stopped me though because I remember my name being there for ages, until someone broke the window when they threw a chair out of it.
Outside of school, it was like she was a different person. Across the road from the house, there’s no houses on that side, just bushes. They’ve cleaned it all up now but it used to be wild and fun. Although now that I think about it that’s where the prostitutes used to go. But only at night. We never played there at night. Min and I were building a dam in front of the gutter. I think we were waiting for it to rain: we had plans to flood the street. Our parents probably thought we were doing something lovely; I think they forget how much you want to destroy the world when you’re little. Not deliberately, but because you think you can. You loose the belief in your own power when you get older.
Samantha came up to us. We weren’t looking so she was able to sneak up. She didn’t ask to play or anything, she just sat down and starting making things with us. She pulled this long stick off the ground and was hitting, hitting the leaves and all the bushes. She hit a branch, which broke off. We all saw this wasps’ nest hanging from a branch inside. Min and Samantha thought it would be a fun to go in a throw some rocks at it. I guess I must have followed them in. There were all stinging nettles around the base of the tree. I remember being really itchy, grumpy because of it. Then I smelt something really bad, like a dead or dying thing and I said, I think there’s something dead in here.
Samantha said, No. Look.
We looked where she was pointing. We’d found a man lying in the bushes. We watched him for a while.
There were black flies crawling over his coat and across the striped Hong Kong shopper next to him. Min circled around, keeping a safe distance. I pulled my T-shirt up over my face. Samantha pinched her nose with her thumb and forefinger, the rest of her fingers splayed out around her mouth. She still had the stick in her hand. She held it above his body and waved it across him like a wand. Gingerly, she gave him a poke. A fly crawled onto the stick. Samantha turned that end towards her face to inspect the insect, but it flew away. Min squatted down about half a metre away, picked up two green gum leaves off the ground, crushed them into balls and inserted one in each nostril.
Isn’t he hot? I said.
Samantha slipped the stick under his jacket and lifted it up. Underneath, another jumper and a pink, black, green and purple crocheted vest, coming apart at the seams. Samantha inched her hand along the stick, pulling herself closer. She turned her head to the side, studying his face and clothes. I crept in too. There was a piece of wool from his vest dangling on the ground. I could see Samantha looking at it. She let go of her nose, dived in, grabbed the wool, ran backwards, keeping an eye on him at all times, the string unravelling.
We all watched the man but he didn’t move. Samantha looped the thread around the branch of a tree next to her, stood on her toes to tie the knot.
The man made a sound, a sort of hum that vibrated across his thick lips. Min screamed; I ran back up the bank; Samantha dropped to the ground. I watched them from the road. The man hadn’t woken up.
Samantha edged her way back towards him, keeping low to the ground, knees bent, legs splayed. She snatched her stick back from where it had fallen. She held it between her two hands, fingers interlocked and wrapped around the knuckles. She drew a circle around the body, flung the stick down and bolted up to where I was standing. Min was behind her.
He won’t get us now, Samantha said.
Min said, I thought you had to draw the magic circle around yourself?
Samantha said, You’re a bum hole, or something stupid like that.
We left.
The next day from the verandah I saw Samantha standing at the edge of the bush.
I yelled through the railings, What’re you doing?
Samantha didn’t turn around, just plunged through into the bush. I swung down through the gap in the railings and ran after her. The circle was still there, but empty. The wool was also still there, wound around the tree and leading out of the bushes, onto the other side of the road. Samantha reached up and untied the knot. She wrapped the thread around her hand, followed the trail, me behind her.
The string led down to wooden stairs to the boardwalk. We picked our way through the syringes (now I walk my fat dog along there and get overtaken by joggers). About two hundred metres down we found him again, passed out under a tree. Samantha re-tied her knot in another tree a little way away. We sat on the boardwalk and watched him for awhile, but he wasn’t doing anything so we left.
We followed him for days afterwards. Samantha had given up on the third day, but I followed him for almost a week. Once the string led into derelict Wool Store but I didn’t go inside. The Wool Stores used to be pretty barren. Tram tracks running across. I remember Paddy’s market being there, a menagerie of pet shops, antiques, op shops, I don’t know. Now they’re all residential, re-developed. Gentrified is the word I’d use.
I followed this guy pretty far down the river before the string broke, maybe the vest unravelled completely. Anyway I lost him.
After that, Samantha sort of dropped off the radar. We went to different high schools. I didn’t see her around. I didn’t hear anything about her until a few years ago when Min told me that she’d killed herself. She jumped off the storey bridge. Min and I went to her funeral. So did maybe three other people from primary school but apart from that we didn’t know anyone. I meet Jimmie at the wake. We went out for a while. He was in a band. His knuckles were hairy and at night his skin was clammy to touch. So I guess it wasn’t really going anywhere but that was ok.
I think Jimmie came over to our house like once. Dad didn’t offer Jimmie anything so I knew he hated him straight away. With all my other friends, he’d come up from his office and say, help yourself or, if it was Min, make her a cordial. (Dad felt sorry for her ever since I told him that Min had had to translate for her Mum and Dad at a parent-teacher interview, which must have been incredibly awkward). Now I kind of understand where he was coming from but I don’t forgive him.
Afterward Dad told me he didn’t
So Jimmie became his big like ‘fuck you’ to my Dad.
Jimmie had a habit of arranging everything into lists. You could sort of hear it in his conversations; when he spoke it was as though he was ticking things off in his head. Once he wrote me a love letter. Each point started with a number. It was also written on a piece a paper advertising a drug company. His Mum worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s surgery. It said:
1. I didn’t know I could play the harmonica but after I met you I picked one up and I could.
2. I’m sorry about that picture of me with the other girl.
3. Thank you for understanding.
In retrospect, I can see that this was not so much a love letter as a reason to leave.
I used to organise guerrilla show for his band. Everyone would meet at the Jubilee Hotel and then someone led them up to the location. We used to go to empty parking lots. By the time the cops came there was one guy left standing in the middle of the park.
Jimmie refused to talk to me during his performances. It wasn’t an obvious refusal; I don’t mean it like that. It was just he always had something in his mouth when I came up to him: chips, lollies, drink, once a screwdriver. I didn’t even notice for a long time. He spoke to me before and after. He was playing, so it wasn’t was though I was expecting to have a D and M. It wasn’t until someone asked me how he was going and the only response I could think of was ‘silent’ that I realised something was wrong.
He played at the Village Twin when the roof was starting to cave in. They took a generator in, which was incredibly unsafe. I didn’t go because we had broken up by that time—I found that this time, the thing he had in his mouth was another girl’s tongue.
Mum told me that when she was a teenager, they used to play The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Village Twin non-stop. She and her friends would go there on a regular basis. This was when she was a lot more wild. Once there was a couple having sex in the aisle. I remember thinking when she told me this that Jimmie and her probably had sex in the aisle too, which would also have been incredibly unsafe.
Dad comes back in and it’s as though he’s been struck by lighting. He’s wandering aimlessly. Dad is very vague. Sometimes, not very often, a bit more recently, he seems to forget like really simple little things. Maybe he’s forgotten where is room is. I turn his hand over so his palm is facing upwards. I’m aware this is the first time I’d touched him since Christmas, when I hugged him after he gave me an envelope with $200 in it. On his palm, as thought he’s blind, I trace the outline of our house, but it runs off the edges of his hand and down his wrist and out into the air.
He says, How do you know about my book?
I couldn’t make sense of this for a while. He used to be very well known. But he’s a bit of a shoddy historian in my opinion. Careless with fine detail, I’d say. How could he confuse a house with a book?
I think this was happening a long time before the accident, his falling. The edges were already blurring. In the process of making more space for his histories, he fell two metres off the verandah and hit his head. He spilt his head open. I didn’t see it. I was in my room. I just heard a lot of swearing. I came out and Dad was sitting up on the cement of our driveway. I could see his skull. It was disgusting. He had to get thirty stiches in his head. Since then things have taken a backtrack.
I feel like I need to reclaim some part of this story, because I’m almost certain Dad won’t have said anything about me or Mum in his history.
I’m going back to Hong Kong in a month. New Farm is no different from a village with goats and island roads. I need to get out.
Evelyn on the Verandah by Ariella Van Luyn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia License.
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