Pink Mountain on Locust Island

ONE

PANTHER

On television a panther slicking its black limbs through paradise trees. Holy moly, look at this fur.

The third story of a Chinatown flat, and here the timber walls tighten around the fat Chinese man with a noodle moustache. A muddy bottle in his hand.

The bowl of cereal on the bench is a gelatine fantasy, rotten milk shivering like Anna Pavlova. And Dad doesn’t throw it out and he doesn’t ask me to throw it out but asks my mother to and nobody comes. We take a cab to the yellow store and pick up a Hawaiian pizza which is the only one he’ll eat. He’ll shut the front door so that the timber panels become perfect again and then he’ll pick off the pineapple chunks until the pizza is just a pink mound. He’ll change the channel on our television because watching these animals crawl around everywhere reminds him that the weather outside is good enough for it. He’ll change it to a game show and call out the answers before they do. His voice swells, fattening the timber.

FANCY CHINATOWN IN THE BIG CITY

The gutters bulge with sesame oil here. A curb exploding from the lion dance drumming and the peak of a Chinese opera playing on a stereo from the herbal shop. An old Shanghainese man whips his bongos in front of the Japanese photo shop, pukira. Wipes his hands on greasy newspaper, mumbles about rain that’s coming.

It’s an overripe swallow. A tart drunkenness. A type of porridge and century-old eggs for breakfast, a slow shuffle with wooliness and Cantonese spoken on the south side. The language is made of elastic.

In all the apartments of this fat building the televisions don’t turn off. Playing anime or east coast, a rhythm of words against flax walls, and the orange juice is always pulpy on the bench. The kind of Chinatown like late morning reruns on school holidays.

PLASTIC

My name is plastic. She used to call me Mo Mo. He calls me Monk. This is white-tile boredom.

I was raised on David Attenborough’s gentle coo and Aunty Linda’s yams which are getting better to eat each time. Mostly-shut blinds now and watching episodes of Outlaw Star by peering inside our neighbour’s flat. Listening to Phife Diggy through the walls as leftovers from a thirty-four-year-old living with his parents.

SUPERMARKET

He tells me: it cramps up your hands if you touch the frozen fish fingers. Don’t touch anything, it’s a risky dance in here. You slip, you have to pay for it. I’ve liked these supermarkets a long time.

Stop looking at me with those contaminated stares. A pale man who has a beard forming from the skin on his chin. And you really can’t tell where his skin stops and where his hair begins. He picks up a carton of milk and sits it in the canned vegetable shelf. Points at it with a strict wagging finger. Squinting one eye shut, screwing the edge of his lip over, he starts to scream at it. He walks out with a can of snow peas under his armpit.

A pack of dried noodles, crispy. We buy a slab of fat and cartons of black juice that keep his eyes open to stare at the television for longer. I used to say televisions stained my eyes. Now I think the dark around it does.

The frozen boxes of pink ice-cream freeze your fingers. Don’t touch unless you have to. Everything’s a fat pink.

This taxi will burst from the sound of plastic bags squelching. The driver looks at me in the rear-view mirror with cowling eyes, but I’m just looking in his mirror at myself. Behind me are slum flats. Me and a panorama of this wild part of the city, and an electric scooter glides alongside us, the rider a cowboy the way his hands grip the reins.

BIRTHDAY

A fish restaurant on the south side: whirlpool and red lobster, hard shell of plastic and ropes. Premium choice: Coffin Bay King Oysters, black-lipped abalone with winter melon, smoked eel with single cream.

I don’t like fish, I tell him, and he says I can order a salad. This is my fifteenth birthday and I order just a garden salad.

The ads of a radio station play and we sit in booths so that my thighs stick to the couch.

Someday maybe a dreamy scuba dive.

He tells me to make sure I remove the little black slither inside every shrimp.

Someday maybe a dreamy swim in the ocean. Everything in here is red or blue like sailors. A birthday song being delivered to a man with no one with him except a family.

A fish tank of decorative fish, not to eat. We don’t eat the beautiful fish, the manager tells me.

SUPREME SOFT

Drums. I’m listening to a Japanese funk fusion band in an internet café in the basement of a Chinese grocery mart.

The screens here are all the same, lined in perfect rows of black, of thickness. LifeChat Microsoft headsets and a hum through the room. I know everything.

A mezzanine, and a boy in a beanie standing in the corner of the room chewing a disposable chopstick. His head is twiggy empty scrub fuzz, beady, exhausted eyes, a dome beanie. Folded arms and a cotton bag in the form of a rectangle. When I look at him he walks over. He walks like he’s with drums.

COMPUTER

He has just graduated from the twelfth grade so he gives me his portable computer. A slouching rectangle of a bag. The computer sliding back and forth, yanking the cotton. He rolls a chair up to my station and in low whispers he tells me about how he wants the latest model. He’ll tell his ma this one got stolen so that she’ll offer to buy him a new one. I tell him computers cost a lot of money, and he says yes. Starts to chew the end of the chopstick again.

My eyelids are fat babies. In my bedroom I’m looking through his computer files. He hasn’t deleted any of it. Paint files of almost familiar faces and disordered Asian characters with hieroglyphics. Notepad documents, some of them with lists that say: a nice gouache the colour of baby skin, a pastel that is rounded on the edges to create swelling, the red of a woman who is about to give birth. One Notepad document that just reads: Radiohead album cover of Amnesiac from 2001 is a nice album cover. And that is the only thing in the document.

I buy him Amnesiac and he says he already had it once before, but he threw the disc out to prove how much he liked just the cover, and now he wishes he hadn’t done that because he’s been wondering what it sounds like. He takes it from me and says: great, thanks.

We’re eating in this burger place with a bathroom that has undefined genders on the door and there’s pee on the lid and either someone has bad aim or someone sits on the toilet backwards. When I come back to the table our meals are there. This boy doesn’t like the burger patty, just the onions. His beef patty on his napkin.

He tells me his mother is refusing to buy him a new computer but that he’ll still let me keep his old one. He says he’ll become a nomad because it’s fashionable. He gives me his email address and says if he ever gets a new machine, I should send him a line. [email protected].

This is good, this is working.

BIRTHDAY PRESENT

In this taxi there’s a videotape lounging in my lap. A 1986 VHS on how to make the perfect fluffy vanilla rose cake. The cab driver talks to me in five-minute intervals. Tells me about how his son wants a bike, could I recommend a brand? I tell him a red one, and he considers it. A smell wastes in the fabric of his seats.

My sister is the brunch restaurant’s head chef and her home is a meshed season of seventies French Nouvelle and baroque Hong Kong: off-yellow carpets and wall dividers and curtains with the rings up the top.

In the corner of the kitchen there’s a video playing about how to cook clams. She makes clams because her husband likes them, but when she asks me at the table I say I’ve only tried them once before and that I didn’t really like them that much, and she gets up and leaves. She brings back a box of cereal and slams it on the table. Then eat cereal, she says. You’ve got to grow up some time. In a tribal accent: a concentration on yanking sounds. Her husband doesn’t listen to any of this. He slurps fleshy glops from hard shells.

Later, sitting in front of her television she tells me she’s sorry, that she didn’t know I didn’t like clams. I tell her it’s okay, that not many people know this about me. Then we sit and watch the VHS tape on how to make the perfectly fluffy vanilla rose cake. The man in the video is old with bleached hair curling behind his small ears. He wears a faded turquoise jumper with half the collar popping out. He folds the cake batter, unfolds it. The wrinkles in his cheeks fold and unfold again like they’re made of plasticine. He’s in a batter lovemaking session. The camera zooms on the way his wooden spoon moves.

My sister and me make a fluffed cake. It’s burnt except for the bit in the middle. We decorate it with celery sticks, making a bamboo forest. We take a photo on her Olympus and then remove the celeries so that we can eat it without gagging.

Her husband is a pale crescent slumped on the couch watching a reality TV program about a bunch of people stuck in a house together. They have to live there for eighteen months with no escape. When I ask him who he’d hate to be stuck in a house with, he looks around and shrugs. He says: anyone.

I look at my sister and she’s sitting at the table with the burnt shell of her cake on a napkin. She laughs once, why don’t you leave then.

MOVIE DAY

This is a scuba dive for me in here.

A shrubbery of black and lamps that you have to imagine because they’re sunken in.

I’m seeing this movie with my friend from the eighth grade whose name is Yuya. Yuya’s been fifteen for a long time and her mother is a thirty-year-old that looks forty named Honey. Honey’s always got this one twangy braid long down her spine. She waits outside, smiling as we walk into the cinema.

Later we eat noodles at the place Honey likes. Noodles which resemble slugs that’ve been stretched and batted. We like to eat buckwheat noodles and nothing else, Yuya tells me. She smiles when she says this. Honey says that the devil can come in the form of certain foods.

We walk past the computer store and inside is the boy from twelfth grade, Santa Coy’s Hot Sauce. I don’t say hi because he doesn’t see me but I want to go inside and step on his toes—not deliberately, just accidentally.

He comes out, stands in the parking lot with a box under his arm. He’s wearing thick, dirty sneakers. When he sees me, he doesn’t look both ways before crossing the road. It’s a computer, I point. Lucky, he tells me, because he needs it if he wants to keep doing art. He told his ma that he refused to do his art if he couldn’t research or anything. I grin. He thanks me again for taking his old computer. I tell him it’s the least I could do.

In the car Yuya leans over and asks who he was. In my ear her whisper is a world.

We go back to Yuya’s apartment. She doesn’t live in Chinatown, but in the middle of the city, over a road where buses squish together in lanes. It’s a tall building you have to ride an elevator up and it smells like white ointments. Cold slates under our feet and in the kitchen is a rice cooker on for dinner. Honey turns the news up to its highest volume. She’s wearing a see-through dress so that you can see the folds