Where There's Smoke Read Online Free PDF Page A

– but of course she’d never have discussed any of that with me.
    The dining table, predictably and yet astonishingly, is covered with food. Mum comes out of the kitchen with a jug full of mint leaves and cut lemon halves. She pours our drinks, enquires after my herb garden, brings out a colander brimming over with fresh basil and purple mint and coriander. She’ll send some cuttings home with me, she says; the residents picked the community garden clean due to the drought. Every now and then, as she speaks, she’ll stop to look at my brother.
    â€˜You’ve been in the sun,’ she says. She wets a cloth under the kitchen tap and lays it across the back of his neck.
    We eat with courteous gusto. These are all our favourite dishes: spring rolls, shredded chicken coleslaw, a plain winter melon soup offset by caramelised salty pork. My brother doesn’t talk, so neither do I. The silence becomes the outside wind: up here on the eighteenth floor it’s a constant commotion, driving dust and sound through the metal window jambs, shaking the very light. Every so often I see smallish cockroaches stopping, as though disoriented, in the middle of their skitterings. Oblivious, we eat, and before we’re done with any given dish Mum carts it off – brings forth a new one. For a moment it’s as though we’ve ducked out from our nearer past; we’re back in our St Albans kitchen, nothing to say, waiting for Mum to finish up. Not knowing it would chase us all down – this past still in front of us. Then, she cooked and we ate. Later, she sat down and couldn’t stand up again in a Victorian Supreme Court public toilet, her eldest son counted push-ups in his cell, body wet with heft and speed, I stood in front of strangers and spoke them both down into small dots of sense. Later, she sat with her back straight and head bent, I stood in front of people and delivered up her dead husband.
    In cold weather you find the dead roaches behind the radiators, under the electric kettle, microwave, fridge, where they group for warmth. When it’s this hot where do they go?
    â€˜Child is well?’ Finally she’s seated, facing Thuan. The dishes are cleared and there’s a platter of fruit on the table.
    â€˜I’m fine,’ he says.
    She starts to respond, then stops. Her fingers reach out to test the lacquer of a cut lemon face, left open to the air.
    â€˜Really,’ he says. He sounds like he means it.
    â€˜It’s so sad what happened to Baby,’ she says. She, too, is thinking about death. ‘I didn’t even know she was sick like that.’
    â€˜Baby? What happened?’
    â€˜Thank you for coming to see me. I know you’re very busy.’
    â€˜You don’t know about Baby?’ I ask despite myself.
    Thuan frowns, then reaches over and squeezes our mother’s shoulder. ‘Ma. Guess what.’
    â€˜Where you’ve been, or what you’ve been doing, is your own business,’ she continues. She says this shyly and forthrightly, a settlement of fact. ‘I don’t need you to look after me.’
    â€˜I know, Ma.’
    â€˜And Lan, he is very good. He can look after himself.’
    â€˜He is very good,’ repeats Thuan, completely deadpan.
    â€˜I hear about Lan speaking at universities, at the community centre, and it makes me very happy.’ My brother throws me an offhand smile, and in a ritual manner she follows up his smile, almost too sweetly. Turning her attention to me: ‘He has become a brave and caring man.’
    I get up, go to the window. There has always been a touch of formal drama about my mother, and a situation like this – her prodigal son’s return after three long years – is bound to draw it out. Through the wind-rattled window I watch some seagulls, hovering in the air the way seagulls do. The air is runny with heat and bleaches the blue sky.
    Mum’s speaking again.