[Blue Jacaranda] 蓝花楹 - Chapter 11 何木屋语2021-10-23 10:01:11

Chapter 11

澳洲：何木

 

Peter moved into a shared apartment at Burwood. At his new place, he had a sense of freedom. He didn’t have to consider Melody’s taste for every meal, nor did he have to do the cleaning every now and then. Not that he had been unhappy doing the chore, but the change of lifestyle back to a bachelor gave him a fresh start. 

As days went by, the solitary way of living had lost its appeal. The longer he lived alone, the more he felt lonely, and the more he began to miss Melody. He missed her skin, that had either cooled or warmed him during the nights.

He had attempted to contact her, starting with ‘Hi’. But this simplest message was the most complicated. He typed it, then deleted it, then typed it again, then deleted it again. Melody had not sent him anything, so why must he take the first step towards any possible reconciliation? 

And how was Lotus? Buried in his troubles with Melody, he had not contacted her since their ‘spontaneous’ incident. Had she felt guilty, as much as he did? 

Ah, women are so troublesome… Then, just as he felt his desperation was about to explode, he got a "Hi...", yes, it was from Lotus.

He keyed quickly, “Hi, Melody, how are you?”  

“Peter, I am okay, just going through the routine of treatment,” then came another line, “Peter, Jason told me you had moved out of Rhodes?”

“Yes...”

“What happened, I mean you and Melody?”

“Well, … we just wanted to have a space to think.” 

“Peter, I am sorry, I hope it was not because of me?”

“No, of course not…” Peter told the necessary lie, and decided to change the topic, “By the way, are you sure everything is alright with you?”

“Yes, and we are going back to China next week.”

“Next week?!..” 

“Yes, surprising, isn't it? But we all agreed I should take the trip earlier...when I am more capable of traveling.”

“Oh, I understand,” Peter replied, “So when can I see you before you go, today?” 

“Perhaps tomorrow? but can I ... can I ask you a favour?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I want to go to my favourite beach and have a last look before I leave…”

“I see.”

“And, I want...only you, and my mum.”

Peter caught her undertone and thought for a moment. “Okay, no problem.”

The Mona Vale beach was about 50 km away from Parramatta. Without a railway line over there, transport was an issue as Melody’s car was now out of the question. Plus Lotus had a wheelchair that needed to be carried along. So in the end, Peter booked a rental car, with the cost even less than calling a taxi. He would be the driver, for which he should thank Melody who had insisted on his getting a driver license when he stayed with her.  

It was a beautiful sunny day. The sky was blue, as pure as the computer screens. In the trees and on the top of the electric poles, a flock of angry cockatoos were screeching, and the beautiful yellow flowers, on the middle road beds, waved their heads in unison in a gust of wind. 

Lotus, in a one-piece white skirt with an exquisite pattern, and with a violet scarf wrapped around her head, was remarkably beautiful. She must have especially considered her dress for today’s excursion, Peter thought, turning on the car stereo which was connected to his phone.

“Peter, the songs are beautiful,” Lotus commented, “But do you have Chinese songs for my mum?”

“Yes, take my phone and check it out,” Peter replied, “go through my YouTube music library and choose what you like...”

In a minute, Lotus was laughing, “Peter, you have 2002 第一场雪, the first snow in 2002, this is my father’s favorite, I have heard it countless time as a child.”

“Well, good music is to be liked by people of all ages, isn’t it, Aunt?”

“Yes, yes,” her mum replied, “as the saying goes, the older the music, the better.”

The singer Dao Lang’s low and husky voice was adding depth to the atmosphere. Soon they either hummed or sang together with him. 

 

The first snow in 2002 came a little late 

The No.2 bus, parked at Ba Lou

had carried the last fallen leaf away.

The first snow in 2002

is our love left in Wulumuqi

You are like a butterfly

Flying in and out of my tearful eye

……..

But with their joyful moments came slowly their sentiments, bitter or sweet. One after another they stopped singing, and became quiet and thoughtful, and as the song reached its highs, Peter felt he was going to cry.

Half an hour later they arrived at the beach. As soon as they got out of the car, Lotus’ mum, who was her first time visiting an Australian beach, let out a cry, “oh, the sea is blue and beautiful!” 

They helped Lotus sit on the wheelchair. Peter took off his shoes, pushed the wheelchair down the slope. The sun was dancing on the waves, above which seagulls were gliding along, breaking the air with their harsh cries, as if they were flying dinosaurs. Children were having fun, under their parents' watch. Crazy water made them crazy. There was a boy digging a grave deep enough to bury him. 

Lotus, not listening to her mum’s advice, began to take off her shoes and socks. She put down her feet into the sand, and gasped, “Oh, so tickling… Ah, how much I miss this!” She then dug and kicked it, cheerfully as a little girl, and she said, “Peter, can you also dig me a grave?”

Her mum shushed her immediately. But she was not to be denied. Peter was entertaining the idea. He admired that boy who had dug a deep grave. But he needed a tool, a shovel. Using bare hands for this type of job would be difficult. So he walked to the boy who had nearly completed his grave, and after exchanging a few words with him, the boy agreed to lend him his shovel.

Peter chose a high and dry dune, away from other beach goers, and began to toil for a high quality grave. He dug for nearly half an hour, until the depth had almost reached his shoulder. Then carefully, with heavy sweat soaking his eyebrows, he climbed out. 

Lotus was so thin and light. He carried her and laid her carefully down into the grave. Her mum was very concerned that Lotus might catch a cold. But Lotus, very excited, was giggling, “Mum, it is okay, don’t worry, the sand is dry and the sun is so big, I am not cold at all.”

Peter slowly filled up the sand for her. As soon as the sand reached her ankle, Peter decided not to continue, in case she really caught a cold. “Now close your eyes and imagine you are all naked, and the sand buries you up to your neck,” he whispered. But Lotus was demanding, “Peter, come down, I want us buried together!”

So, Peter climbed back in. They had to ask her mum to complete the burying job. Her mum was still very concerned, but was at last persuaded and managed to get it done. She watched the two heads funnily sticking out of the sand, laughing helplessly, shaking her head, then she placed the umbrella over the grave, and walked away to leave them alone. 

The heavy sand joined their body seamlessly. They breathed to each other. “Are you cold?” he whispered, “See, your beautiful skirt is now spoiled by the sand.” He waded his arms in the sand to cover her as much as he could. 

“Not at all, the sand is warm, and you may say the beautiful sand is spoiled by my skirt,” said Lotus, laughing, her face turning pink, her hand fumbling about his waist. 

“Peter, I am so happy, and how much I love you… Oh, Peter, if only we could be like this forever!”

A flood of feelings, like the last time in her bedroom, came to him. He began to kiss her, moving his hands out to cup her face. The umbrella dimmed the air, her violet scarf gleaming purple. He spoke gently, “Lotus, promise you will get well soon and next time we come back here, with your dark and long hair, we would be buried here again, without our clothes on, and …” 

Lotus’ face was gaining colour. “Yes, I will…”

They stayed buried until her mum came back. After they had got out of the grave, three of them destroyed it together, with their manners resembling those of kids.  

Peter returned the shovel to the boy and thanked him. Then they began strolling on the lower sandbed, which was washed fine and smooth by the tide, only marked by the track of the wheelchair as well as their footprints. Along the way Lotus had resisted her temptation to put her feet into the sea. Then Peter found a medium-sized seashell horn, half broken. He put it close to his ear, and heard the echo of the wind. “Beautiful,” he said, placing it on Lotus' ear. “Can you hear it?” 

“Yes, I can, how wonderful,” Lotus said, delighted, “I want it.”

“Yes, a keepsake for you. Every time you miss Australia, and me, you can call through it, and you will hear my reply.”

----

A few weeks later, which was Saturday, the Lotus Lamp-Skewer BBQ was opened. And Peter, who had carefully learnt the cooking ‘skills’ from the internet, became the master chef. And thanks to Jason’s smart marketing campaign that would offer half price to all university students Australia wide for two days, patrons had been queuing all day long since 9 am. Peter and two other chefs were sweating to fulfill the orders. Students were excited, waiting patiently in the long queue, and as soon as they reached the counter, they would show their students ID. Surely the cashier had never seen so many student IDs in her life. Most of them were from the University of Sydney, but quite a number from UTS, UNSW, Wollongong University, and even a few from Melbourne University and Deakin University in Victoria. 

Melody, as one of the shop owners, was very excited. For the first week or two she came to the shop nearly every day, eating the sticks happily while at the same time whining about her weight gaining. Her sheer appearance in the shop was a great delight to Peter, making him forget her sore arms and back and long-standing legs, even though Melody was behaving no more than as one of his good friends, as if there had been nothing serious between them. Every time she said bye bye to him, she was like taking away a piece of him, and all he could do was wait for her return. 

And the naughy Jason never forgot to take the chance to joke about them. “Hey, Melody,” he would say, “Look at your dearest lover Peter, how professional and competent he is there jostling those giant BBQ tongs.”

“Yes, he certainly is,” Melody would laugh, “My Peter is the greatest cook, and how I miss his cooking skills at Rhodes!”

“Melody, don’t be sad,” Jason kept on, “Peter is now serving our customers. He is kind of a public figure, and became very famous after his photo appeared in the local newspaper. Look, I am going to put out more ads.”

Melody, biting the juicy stick, replied, “Excellent, you are doing very well, Jason. It looks like we are not going to lose money.”

“Of course not, the return is going to be double, triple and even quadruple, I promise, by the time of our graduation ceremony.”

“When is that?”

“In October.”

“Beautiful, Jason, you are really a good business man. You are a true entrepreneur, instead of an IT man.”

“But an IT man can also be an entrepreneur, like Alibaba, Tiktok, PingDuoDuo, and many others.”

“Yeah you do need a lot of IT skills in a BBQ shop, hahaha,” Melody said sarcastically. 

“Well, this is just a trial. By the way, Melody, if in the future I want to set up an IT business, I hope you will put money in?”

“It will depend on the outcome of this business, if it is making a lot of money as you said, then well, I will surely consider it, so you must work harder and smarter,” said Melody, finishing the last piece of the stick. “I must go, I have a catch up at Rocks tonight. Bye Jason, by my love Peter…”

Peter wished he could learn from Melody her ways of forgetting the past, never attaching too much sentiment to what had become a history. But he knew Melody could still be very sentimental when she was alone, belying her cool surface presented in the society. 

Then, on another day, while Peter was cooking, with his eyes irritated by the smoke, Melody came in, not alone. The guy with her was very tall, with a confident and nonchalant deportment, whom Peter immediately recognised as Cooper. 

“Hi, Peter,” Melody spoke cheerfully as usual, “My master chef, is Jason in?”

“No, he had gone out to see suppliers,” Peter answered, feeling ill at ease from head to toe.

“Peter,” Melody seemed determined to make him suffer, “this is Cooper, I don’t think you have met before.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Cooper said friendly, waving his hand against the glass shield of the kitchen.

Peter forced himself to be calm, “Hi Cooper, nice to meet you,” he paused a second and added, “Please let me know what taste and spice level you want, I will make the best for you.”

He made a dozen sticks ready for them. They took them and went out to sit on a little table on the sidewalk, eating the things Peter had prepared so diligently. Peter’s jealousy, the first heartfelt bitterness in his life, was so strong that he felt the world had sunk, and he was like an ant being trampled, bleeding, and crushed... Oh my god, what a sick feeling this is, seeing Melody, whose face had so many days and nights snuggled in him, now smiling that lovely to another man, and the man was no other but Cooper!

Lost in his internal turmoil, he had overcooked the bunch of sticks on hand. He dumped them into the bin, left his stove, and went to the toilet where, feeling dizzy and nauseous, he began to vomit.

When he came out, the culprit couple had gone. 

“Are you okay?” his fellow chef asked him, “You look pale.”

“Okay, I am okay,” said Peter weakly, and thanked him for fulfilling the orders for him while he was away.

A few days later, Jason further confirmed that Melody was together again with Cooper who had moved into her apartment. Peter tried to shrug it off, restraining a feeling of disgust and impotent sadness.

He began to frequent the bar. The alcohol helped him cope with his pain, even if it was temporary and he would feel worse afterwards. Yes, Lotus had gone, and now Melody went permanently, in a tragic and hideous manner, and in this lonely city there was no other soul from whom he might seek comfort. 

One late night, he sat on the seat, half dazed, drenched in misery, eyes on the glass. Then he heard someone call him. 

Peter raised his head, to confront the face of a ‘foreign’ lady standing across his table. “Yes?” he said, rather confused. 

“I said I know you, you are the skewer man at that Lotus BBQ...” she smiled graciously, obviously not intending to leave him this second, “I like your lamb sticks, very stimulating indeed, hot and delicious, aren’t they?” 

“Oh, thank you,” Peter said, finally coming to his senses, “Do you often visit our shop?”

“Yes, almost every time I come here at Burwood,” she replied, and without asking him she threw herself down on the empty seat and put her cocktail on the table. “I am waiting for my friends. How are you going anyway?”

Her name was Sarah. At age 3 she came to Sydney from Germany with her parents. She was a graphic designer. Peter watched her introduce herself, and realized she was extraordinarily pretty, reminding him of the actress ‘Molly’ in the movie Ghost. In a turquoise wide-shouldered suit, she appeared tall and slender, almost towering over him. Her small and narrow face was especially attractive. And what was particularly peculiar about her was that she liked to stick out her tongue a little each time her lips came to contact her drink. This made her look very childish in general. She must have kept her licking and sucking habit as a baby. 

Some time later her friends had arrived so she left Peter and joined them noisily. 

Next time he saw her was in the shop. She was ‘Hello-ing’ him loudly like an old friend. Peter, glad and excited at seeing her again, asked the cashier to charge her purchase on him. And his generosity was making her very grateful, “really, really, are you sure? Oh Peter you are so kind and lovely…”, as if it were a favour of 1000 dollars instead of 20, and kept asking him to go to the bar after work. 

So, from then on, everytime she came to the shop, he paid for her sticks, and when he was at the bar with her, he would pay for her drink as well, sometimes also for her friends, who seemed very “poor” and always ready to thank him heartily.

Her easy going smiles indulged him. It was indeed uncommon for pretty Anglo-Saxons girls like Sarah to like someone as plain as him. One day, Sarah invited him to attend a party at her place. She said she hoped he could cook the sticks for the party. He accepted her invitation. He bought the meat with his money, and used the shop facility to BBQ dozens of sticks and carried them to her apartment at Strathfield. 

It was a group of five, including him, and to his surprise, a couple of Koreans, and Matthrew whom Peter had met once or twice at the bar. But Peter didn’t think Matthrew was Sarah’s ‘boyfriend’. 

They drank and drank, and not long before all of them were fairly intoxicated. Then Sarah grabbed Peter by his arm, and dragged him into her bedroom. 

They began to make love. 

It was a vague experience. He appreciated her sparse yellow hair, and her way of sucking him, which was ever more patient and more sophisticated than Melody. Their motions were going smooth and efficient, except that there was little intimacy beyond the physical act. And like all the ‘love-makings’ without ‘love’, Peter felt very hollow after he had finished. 

And what was more, he then saw Matthrew going with her to her bedroom. A wave of disgust overwhelmed him. Perhaps, the next was that Korean man? He thought awfully, drinking his beer quietly, like a half dead person.

After the night, he suddenly lost interest in Sarah. It was as if Sarah had seen him more as an ‘object’ than a ‘person’. Peter was reminded of the girls in the Massage shop, where there was nothing but sex involving the monertary trasactions. Perhaps, Sarah was just paying him back for what he had paid for her drinks and lamb sticks.

The female body, as sexy and exotic as Sarah’s, was apparently not a solution to his troubles, because there was no ‘love’. His miserable thoughts, therefore, went back again to Melody, and immediately he felt a pain burning in his stomach. 

A feel of desperation seized him. He hated himself, hated this place, hated his face, hated his penis, hated Melody, and most of all, he loathed the image of Cooper f--king on top of her.  

Oh, this is so very unbearable!

He called his parents and told them he was going home.

His mother was at once happy, “Yes, my son, come back to China, why stay in that remote place, strange people, and poor food...”

His father’s voice was in the background, “See, I know he could not find a proper job, could not survive in a foreight country,” but Peter couldn’t be more careless of whatever his father might scorn of him. 

Okay, he is a useless person. So what, at least he could cook lamb sticks.

On the eve of his departure, Melody was wise enough not to bring Cooper to the farewell party, held as a Karaoke. She had heard the news from Jason, and was very upset that Peter had not told her of his decision by himself.  

“Peter,” she began, drunk and loose-mouthed, “Peter, do you hate me? Why didn't you tell me you are leaving? Why don't you wait until the graduation ceremony? If Jason had not told me I wouldn’t have a chance to see you the last time. Oh, Peter, you are so cruel!”

Peter made a smile, and spoke bitterly, “Melody, please don’t say such things!”

Melody was not yielding, “Peter, just answer me, is it true that you hate me because of me and Cooper?”

Peter thought for a while and said, “Why should I hate you? Melody? You have never loved me, nor have I ever loved you. So where does the hate come from? In your heart, that man had always been there living and lurking,” Then his pent up anger found its way out, “Every time you f--ked me in bed, were you taking me as Him?”

Melody was stunned. He saw her body writhing, her shame vivid on her face. Then, she slapped him, and as if not hard enough, she poured her glass of cocktail at him, “You sick man, you scoundrel!! Oh my god, oh my god, how had I been so blind and stupid to be with you in the first place…”

Other guys were coming to the rescue, “what happened, what happened, well, well don’t be angry, take it easy, tomorrow is another day.”

Melody was crying in a corner. Peter wiped his face. He was relieved, immensely, by hurting Melody, by dumping his shit on her. He took the glass from Jason, and poured it into his throat. 

Jason, wiping his oily mouth, said, “Now, everybody please calm down, let’s toast for our love and friendship, or even hate, and for our great motherland China. I am so sad, I have lost my best employee, who had to leave me so early, even if I promised to double his pay.”

“Thank you, Jason, my friend and my boss,” Peter stood straight up, “from now on, I will always be able to find a job, I won't starve myself, now that I have the skills of how to cook delicious lamb-stick. Please, my friend, next time when you see me, I will be on the street of Chengdu, as a street hawker selling my sticks,” then seeing Melody was still curved in the corner, going to her, and said, “Sorry, Melody, please forgive me. I admit I am a scoundrel, an extremely, extremely bad egg, can you please forgive me?” 

Melody got up, and all of sudden, she pulled him down, and began to kiss him, or more precisely, bite him. “Bad egg, this bleeding kiss is the price you pay for your badness,” then she kissed him again, this time she was licking his blood, “Now you will never forget me, and I beg you to hate me all your life!”

Peter, tasting the salty blood on his lips, couldn’t help but laugh out loud, followed by an immediate chorus around the table.