Melange Magazine

Creative Non-fiction

The girl talks to her uncle about love, among other things. This is the uncle who introduced her to Affogato and encourages her to take her coffee strong and black, without sugar, as befits a woman of tragedy. The uncle is visiting from abroad, and he is gay. These days the girl winces when she hears her younger brothers insult one another - You are so gay, they say, using the word as a synonym for stupid, their careless emphasis drawing attention to their youthful scorn. She wonders what her uncle feels when he hears them, if he ever wants to rise up and defend himself and his boyfriend, if he feels ensnared by how this word defines him. But he must put it down as meaningless banter, and anyway, no one else knows, she doesn’t think. But they must.

The girl feels stupid when she realises how short a time it has been that she has recognized her uncle’s sexual orientation. When she was a child, the extended family would bundle up in three cars and drive up the winding roads to holiday for a week or so, at one of his company’s bungalows. The cook and her family and there were always two little boys, no matter who was the cook slept crammed in one room near the kitchen. Her mum and dad would take one room and sleep on the double bed, with the two younger boys fighting and playing on a mattress on the floor. She always had to share a room with her first brother. They both complained. Her mother’s older brother, not this uncle but another one, had a wife no one in the family liked, who had bore him three girls.

The first one is cunning, exactly like her mother, her uncle tells her. You can see it from her face. The second child is intellectually disabled and still dribbles, even though she is already ten years old. She is taller and stockier than her older sister, who scorns her. When the girl was younger she didn’t understand either, and would play pinching games with the impaired one, taking advantage of her. Now she looks back and is ashamed, and is thankful that the second girl does not retain any memory of her wrongdoing.

And her uncle - her uncle stays in a room of his own, with his friend, his boyfriend. Every time they went on these holidays he would bring a friend, and the friend would be male. Not that the friend changed, not until the girl was grown-up.

Now the girl laughs when she thinks of Sean as her uncle’s boyfriend, the new man, she calls him, even though they have been going out for almost three years. Sean is ten years younger and a little camp, even her uncle says so. Sean wears his hair gelled, with the soft kind of gel so it is still nice to touch, and he has a gentle, moist voice, and a soft wide nose; snubby is the word for it. The girl wants to laugh even harder when she remembers that her uncle’s old steady had given her an Enid Blyton book for Christmas, one of the series with the boy Snubby in it. For the cleverest girl in the family, the fly-leaf read. Underneath that she had wryly written her own comment - The only girl in the family. She wonders what her uncle sees in Sean. To her Sean is placid rather than stimulating. How did you meet, she wants to know. Maybe if she gets round to asking that, she will also ask “And was it solely a physical attraction, at first?”

The word boyfriend is inherently odd, the girl says to her uncle, brave she thinks, to broach this subject, a little too loudly in her nervousness, choosing her words carefully, picking them out from over the muted strains of jazz music. Her uncle likes to bring her to these more expensive restaurants, where she worries about using the correct cutlery and pronouncing the names of the entrees without sounding gauche and can never make up her mind what to order before the maitre’d comes around. Her uncle, he is introducing her to merlot and dessert wine and cocktails. Secretly the girl knows that she doesn’t like Frangelico from the one time she’s tried it, but allows her uncle to order her a Grand Affair again, and even though she watches Sex and the City she hasn’t tried a Cosmopolitan. Midori is really nice, the girl says to him, although she has never tasted it. It’s a girl’s drink.

Ever since she was thirteen she has wanted to impress him, because he is the first one who called her an adolescent. Adolescent, the word is prickly on her tongue. How come you are still like an airport? Her uncle had teased.

I don’t know, it’s my mum’s fault, the girl replies, surprised at her candour. With anyone else she would be vexed and sorely hurt. Now she thinks of herself as a woman, or almost, even though her chest is still painfully flat. When she sits across from him, holding the thin flute of the glass, occasionally sipping airily, she feels the glances of the other patrons. They must think I’m a dirty old man, her uncle laughs salaciously. Her cheeks glow hot. She feels like biting the wide sloping rim of the cocktail glass, but sets it down gently, like the piece of prized china he brought her from his travels in Shanghai.

So what happened to Uncle Swee Hing, she asks, using her spoon to nick at the smooth mound of vanilla ice-cream, which is melting at its edges into the bitterly brown coffee. How come it didn’t work out?

Oh Swee Hing, he was a slut, her uncle says dismissively, complete with hand actions, as if he is intentionally trying to be comical, but she notes a touch of self-deprecation. Chasing everything. At the end of the day, it’s quite sad. It doesn’t end up being about the physicality of it, it’s more about companionship.

The girl nods in assent. She feels the same way, about her boyfriend. I don’t think I love him anymore, she confides in her uncle.

Before he leaves the whole family goes out for dinner at a restaurant that trains Hospitality students studying how to serve for fine-dining. The three-course meal is ten dollars per head, and you are supposed to give the students feedback. They deliberate animatedly over which entrees to savour, the sardines stuffed with cous-cous or the seared duck liver with condiments? Her father turns to her uncle, who he is sitting next to at the round table, and says, You order the fish and I’ll order the duck, and we’ll eat half and half, and share. The girl smiles, thinking, this is what family is about, even though she knows she will cringe when she observes the bemused looks on the waiting staffs’ faces, at this Asian family lifting the heavy plates up and switching them round, like they are playing a childish game of pass the parcel. They will think we’re here because its cheap, the girl wants to say, and even though that is the reason everyone is here, they’ll think that about us more.

Your father and I can go out together anytime you know, her uncle directs his comment to her. We both love to drink and we both love to eat. Perfect.

The girl feels rather queer as she sees them, the two men in her life, sitting next to one another, the shoulders almost touching. Her uncle is her mother’s younger brother. They get along capitally, but they were not very close when they were young, because when he was two he was sent away to live with a wet nurse. On the long way to the restaurant, her uncle sat in the passenger seat, and her mum drove, even though she rarely did so.

Ha, I picked up my cheque just before leaving. Twelve thousand dollars. Even more than what my own mother gave me. Her uncle’s tone is cool and hard, but like in everything he does, the girl knows she could peel off the top layer, the visible one, like the crisp, tawny caramelized surface of creme brulee, to expose the stark white softness below. Her mother does not say anything in response and the girl is curious, so she feigns that she needs to look for a piece of paper in her handbag and turns on the light in the car, all so she can see her mother’s face. When she does she sees the hunted, sorrowful look in her mother’s eyes, and is sorry.

As her uncle and her father debate Chinese politics and savage John Howard, the girl has a thought if my mother were not married to my father, maybe my uncle and my father could have been lovers. Then the perversity of the thought hits her, and she is alarmed at her own foolishness. Anyhow, her father is too much a red-blooded male to ever entertain such follies.