Chapter 5
October was the mid-spring month in Australia, which was supposed to be the best of the year. But Friday was unusually warm and sultry, the air damp and stagnant. However, it didn’t last long. Mother Nature couldn’t tolerate any extremes of such condition, which was exactly what had happened on the late afternoon, when the wind started blowing at increasing speed, followed by a sprinkling of rain. A day’s fever that had scorched the earth was therefore eased, the weather returning to its healthy balance.
During the day, knowing that Serena regarded him barely as a friend, Bing had let his pride take over his fervent preoccupation with her. His passionate scheme intended to impress her, had apparently not worked well. So far, Serena had expressed little appreciation or opinion if any about him as a person, or about things he had done during last few days. She was tight-lipped, resisting from revealing herself even under his persistent sinuous probing for the purpose. The only comfort for him was that the channel of communication was still open, and that they seemed to be getting on well, from their QQ dialogue of last night, on the guidelines of mere friendship.
After his early supper which comprised rice and a dish of beef mixed with cabbage he had made himself, plus a cold beer, he felt himself listlessly bored. Inside the room, the heat was still swirling; at least one more hour was needed to cool it down. So Bing decided to take a walk outside.
Baulkham Hills, in Sydney’s hills district, about 40km west to the Sydney CBD, was the suburb wherein he had lived since he was divorced three years before and moved out from the house in nearby Seven Hills. As a renewed bachelor, he rent a room in a granny flat, a two-bedroom unit renovated originally from a spacious garage. The flat was separate from the main building, providing the privacy and independence he had so wished.
His last, actually the sixth roommate during his three years’ residence in the place, was a local Aussie called Jack, who had recently moved out. To speak more precisely he was kicked out by the landlord David Lee, who was an immigrant from Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese but little Mandarin. Jack, an alcoholic and also a possible occasional drug user as suspected by one of David’s friends, was troublesome. Although he worked for a respectful company, he seemed to be forever short of money, delaying the rent payment more often than David could tolerate. But the actual incident that triggered David’s determination to remove Jack from the flat was melodramatic.
One day, Jack reported to David that the flat had been robbed and that his rent $500 for the coming month was gone. David, shocked and alarmed, rushed to the flat and saw the two rooms turned in a complete mess. The drawers of bureaus and bedside tables were all pulled out, and papers and clothes and magazines and beer bottles were littering all over the place. But strangely the main door and windows were unbroken and unscathed. The burglar must have by some means got the key or used some special tools for the robbery. Jack claimed his money was hidden beneath his pillow, but now it was not there, and then he began to complain and blame Bing for leaving the key somewhere in the garden, and that he suspected the thief must have discovered it and used it for the theft.
When Bing came home and checked for any loss, he found his $300 hidden between the leaves of a book was still there. His laptop too was intact. Cleared of any loss, he went on arguing against the idea that the robbery was due to his careless manner. True he hid the key in the garden, but it was in the backyard, and there wouldn’t be any other people knowing it, apart from Jack and himself.
David proposed reporting to the police, but Jack simply said no, saying police involvement would only waste time and that he would rather swallow his loss himself so long as Bing wouldn’t leave his key in the lawn in the future.
During the night, suspicious as the case seemed to be, Bing and David were discussing this matter seriously.
‘Never ever has my house been robbed in my 13 years of living here,’ David told Bing, his anxiety vivid in his eyes. ‘The Hills District has always been safe and peaceful. There is no railway station in the suburb. Most of the residents are families, the law-abiding good citizens. How could this have happened?’
‘Do you believe Jack that someone took the key from under the lawn grass?’ Bing asked.
‘I don’t know. But that is very unlikely,’ David replied, frowning. ‘I didn’t even know you hid it there.’
‘Did you notice Jack behaving very strangely? I saw his eyes dilating as if intoxicated. I think he had been drinking since yesterday. There were so many empty bottles in his room.’
‘I have hated this guy since he last time brought some friends, quarrelling after drinking, disturbing the neighbours,’ David recalled, ‘But I thought of giving him a chance, although his long scraggy, evil looking face had always made me uncomfortable.’
‘Then why did you let him take the room in the first place?’ asked Bing, who had also found Jack very disagreeable and capricious during the three months of their sharing the flat.
‘Well, he was then almost begging me to rent it to him, to tide him over. And he worked for a good company, and his bright uniform was atoning for his ugly face. You know, the bus drivers, security guards, even those working in the bank like tellers, or stewards in planes, simply put, the sort of people wearing uniform, tend to impress me with their reliability and honesty. I thought I ought to be fair, and not to judge a person by his facial appearance.’
‘Haha, good on you, even bank tellers,’ Bing was amused by this uniform-based judgement of a character, and distracted a moment to Serena, a bank teller, wondering if she should be safe and reliable.
‘Well, but, never easy to know a person,’ David went on, ‘I even called his company, talked to one of his colleagues, a referee he had provided. He is only twenty something, but his face with sunken cheeks and ridged bones, if judged by Chinese Zodiac reading, is really indicating some evil element.’
David paused to drink his tea, and Bing was surmising a possible scenario. ‘Well, from the way he behaved, as well as the weird nature of the incident, I guess it was himself making the whole scene.’
‘I have suspected that too. But what was the motive?’
‘There were two possible motives, one is he was drinking and out of cash again, and tried to delay his rent; another was he might have known I had some cash in my room, the $300 for the fortnight rent, and under the influence of alcohol or even drugs, was trying to steal it. And so, in order to make it look like more a conduct of the indiscriminative thieves, he messed up everything.’
‘Ehm, very interesting,’ David grinned, in spite of his concern. ‘But he was not intelligent enough to make it more credible, if that had been the case.’
‘Well, he was influenced by substance. I even saw the utter disappointment in his eyes when I searched out my cash,’ Bing said, ‘and moreover, didn’t you notice he looked rather scared when you mentioned the police?’
The Sherlock-Holmes type of deduction went on into the night. But the more they talked about it, they more believed it was Jack fabricating the scene. Then David, a father of two, decided to take no more risks, giving both Jack and Bing two-weeks’ notice to move out. The reason given was the safety of his family, stating that he couldn’t tolerate such horrible scenes happening in his house.
At the notice, Jack, very tall more than 180cm, was booming and swearing furiously and extensively, protesting that how the innocent tenants should end up as the victims of a burglar’s crime. However, with his short body against many of Jack’s F-words and threats, David stayed firm and nonnegotiable. Part of his courage was due to his knowledge that Jack had a reason to fear the police, probably having a record either for drugs or other offences.
On last day of the leave notice, Bing moved out, and Jack, after finding no effect of his threatening, followed suit. Jack at first suspected that it was only him being kicked out, and frequently asked and checked with David when Bing was to move. His suspicion was not unfounded, for only two days later, Bing moved back in, restoring his things which had been temporarily stored in David’s living room.
Since the incident, David was reluctant to rent the other room to other people. Safety was first, money second, he had to make sure his two kids and his wife were not within vicinity of danger. And it was not easy to find good, trouble-free tenants in the suburbs where a train station was unavailable, for the potential tenants might be limited to those with work and car, excluding other candidates such as students.
So, with the drama closed, Bing had become the only beneficiary; he was in a two-bedroom flat, but paying rent for only one.
In a pair of slippers, Bing opened the thick and heavy door, and closed it heavily after him. He said ‘Hi’ to David, who, bending his back, was digging something in the garden. His two boys were cackling and running about the yard.
On the driveway, the bordering palm trees were flourishing, their foliage shuffling silently in the wind, and their fat and round and tapering trunks sitting on the ground were unbelievably like a woman’s thighs overturned.
In the front yard, the giant jacaranda tree was blooming. Its purple flowers, probably blown and stripped by the strong afternoon wind, were covering a large round surface like a thick velvety carpet, dazzling with its iridescent splendour. It was indeed the best time for this type of tree in the Hills. Bing, on his way to and from work, had been so fascinated by many of its violet magnificence along the street that he often pulled off his car to take some photos. However, sometime after its flowing season, it would drop off almost all of its leaves and little branches as well as the hard, winged seeds onto the ground, making a real mess, causing the lawn under its coverage to a near barrenness. To this, David had been complaining and threatening to cut the one in his front yard, but since tree-cutting had to been approved by the council, he had never put his words into action.
Bing had walked innumerable times towards the little park, a so called reserve just about three hundred metres around the corner. Most of the time he was alone on the neat and tidy path, but might also come across other people who took their evening leisure out of their home confinement. A single or couple, with or without pets, a mother with a toddler, or a kid on a bicycle were the typical outsiders at this hour. But this evening, the path was all clear. Residents were perhaps not recovered from the day’s unusual warmth, and preferred staying in their air-conditioned home. And the birds hidden in the dense leaves of trees and the crickets imprisoned in the grass paradise were singing, or arguing as if about the boredom of their lives in the havens. The house roofs, of red or grey tiles, some of them overlaid with shimmering spreads of solar panels, looked languid and sleepy in the approaching dusk.
Feeling an expansive ownership of the space, he sauntered on, now and then touching the little white flowers that peered out from the side growth, or patting the rough surface of the wooden electric poles that always awed him with their diligent quiet service throughout the good or bad seasons.
Turning left, he was officially in the park, where a greenish lawn spread out like an immense blanket. And in its middle was a circle of a children’s playground. The facility, with its coloured plastic slides, castles, and swings seemed to him more like an alien intrusion into the greenery; and, scarcely occupied by the kids, most of the time it just stood there alone and desolate, like a friend used and then deserted by his friends.
Beside the playground, a big tree was towering majestically, claiming a substantial space of sky. Over one of its outstretched branches a sizable, dry and dead twig was there hanging. It must have been there for a long time and whenever Bing walked in the park, he would check to see if it was still there, to see if its position remained unchanged.
And always, it was there; its position had never changed since he first time noticed it three years before. Sometimes, there was a tiny bird perching in its dangling middle. In the evening dusk, its small figure looked so feeble, vulnerable and melancholy that his pessimistic view of general life would suddenly chill his mood, stirring his sentimental thread that was nothing but sadness.
The twig, he sighed, would stay there hanging so long as the whole tree was still alive and whatever time it may be it ought to be much longer than his own remaining years on the earth.
Today there was no bird resting on it.
He ambled on, towards the little wooden bridge over a ditch. Then, raising his eyes, he saw a girl or a lady or a woman, of which he couldn’t credibly tell, coming over from the other end of the track, alone. He recognized her and had always been puzzled by her. He had met her many times in the park or on the footpaths, but he had never seen her face, because, either sunny or sunless, rainy or rainless, day or night, she would invariably wear a broad-brimmed hat that pulled well over her face, and it seemed to him her eyes could only watch the inches of road on which she was treading. Occasionally she would take an umbrella to shield herself from the sun or rain, but her hat was forever on. He had a couple of times seen her in the late dark evening, still wearing her pathetic hat, walking alone.
But he knew she was of Chinese origin, not by her face, but by her voice. He once ventured to say ‘Hi’ to her, and she replied in Mandarin without any accent ‘Nihao’ back to him, but she didn’t even raise her covered head, before getting hastily around as if he were a villain who had an interest in her. And, although her eyes were so much shaded by the hat, she seemed able to detect from afar an oncoming object, and managed to avert an upcoming encounter in advance, by either stepping off onto the side road or changing to another route if possible.
Bing was as curious as a cat. But after failing so many times in his attempt to see her face and greet her as a passer-by’s courtesy, he gave her up for good.
So odd and queer was she that she was no less than an absolute hermit.
‘Why should she cover her face even at night? If she has to be so much shielded, how does she dare to wander at late hours?’ Bing asked himself, his eyes casting her direction.
Now she stopped on the little bridge and leant at the rail and contemplated over the little stream, like what he usually did every time he came to the park. Bing didn’t slow down his steps, then as expected, without raising her head, she seemed to be aware of him and began to move escaping, past the bridge, and stepped off the paved way to the lawn for a hasty evasion, lowering her head as if to kiss the ground.
Her figure was so small and fugitive like a phantom, or like the little bird on a twig, or, if he was not overly fanciful, like a womanish incarnation of a snake or a fox, as told in some Chinese ghost-folktales.
She might be beautiful, but what a strange, solitary Chinese here in Australia!
Then, another woman, the troublesome Serena stole into his mind.
Well, she said he could only be a friend to her. So what could he do from here? How could he change her mind so that he could be upgraded to be her boyfriend? She, in their tedious dialogue, had hinted to him that she didn’t have any feelings for him, and that if she went out often with him, they might enter into a difficult situation where he would grow more and more enraptured with her whilst she could only keep her cold indifference.
How proud and arrogant is she! She must have thought I have already fallen in love with her, but haven’t I? And given the right moment, don’t I have a desire to have her, to take her body, to conquer her difficult and impertinent nose?
Resting his elbows on the bridge rail and watching the water shimmering underneath, a sudden lustful fire seemed to lick his frame. His heart began to swell, a stream of energy was coursing his system.
In another moment, he thought he was properly aroused.
I must do something. I can’t just passively wait. I must design more tricks and means to drag her down, to penetrate her, to make a deep and angry love with her.
Straightening, he was embracing an urgency to make her contact. And with the new libido driving his steps, he was soon back in his room, sitting in front of his laptop, messaging.
‘It is very warm today, is your room air-conditioned?’ he sent. The time displayed was 7:03pm.
‘No.’ Her instant reply was surprising. Well, what else could she do? As she had mentioned before, she didn’t like reading, and when no appointment was to occupy her, QQ had to be the only method to kill time, if not herself.
‘You then better take a cold shower.’
‘I am in a phone call with my Mum.’ She was probably using the call function in the QQ program.
‘How often do you talk to your mum?’
‘Every day.’
‘Every day? Every day cooking the phone-porridge with her?’ Such frequency of phone contact was beyond his comprehension. He himself called his mother in China not even once in a month, and the duration was always brief and rapidly concluded.
‘Hehe.. She will miss me and worry if I don’t call.’
‘What do you have every day to talk about?’
‘Everything, but mainly about when I can get married, about my boyfriends, or prospects.’
‘Do you tell her about me?’ he was intrigued by the possibility.
‘Of course. I told her about you, a country-fellow from Tianjin,’ she admitted, frankly. ‘We discuss everyone I am dating. ‘
‘So what did you discuss about me?’
‘Hehe.. You know, we are just friends,’ she said, then as if an afterthought, added, ‘but you seemed to be an honest guy.’
‘Thank you for saying so,’ he sent it in a more cheerful mood.
For a while, no response was from her. He then continued, ‘I got a message on the website, from a girl with a doctor’s degree. I just checked her profile, she tagged herself Very Beautiful, 1.66cm. But, the photos on the website don’t seem to be Very, just average in my reckoning.’
‘So do you want to see her?’ she replied immediately.
‘Well, I just feel curious to find out how she could have produced such a high opinion of herself,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to believe her.’
‘How old is she?’
‘27’
‘Well, the doctor, to the contrary of many stereotyped impressions, may turn out to be a good wife,’ she said, ‘I think you should see her.’
‘OK, I will see her tomorrow. And then tell you about her afterwards.’
‘I am not interested in your telling me! Why should I bother myself with your appointment with another girl?!’ Her message came with a sound displeasure.
‘Well, if you don’t want to hear, then I don’t want to go.’
‘That is your own business.’
‘You know, I didn’t tell you that I had actually twice fallen into the crazy type of love.’
‘But you said you had never loved any one.’
‘I just don’t know if it was love or not.’ The dialogue was absolutely passionate and interactive, because the messages came back and forth without a slightest delay. ‘The first one was in Haerbin, China.’
‘Was she beautiful?’
‘Yes, especially when she lowered her head, thinking about something. Just like a nice figure in a picture.’
‘So?’
‘But, I couldn’t develop a feeling towards her. It was a sort of new experience to me that a girl’s external beauty didn’t automatically generate a feeling or passion.’
‘How old was she?’
‘26’
‘How did you know her?’
‘Through a Chinese matching site. We’d chatted for nearly three weeks, and I decided to fly over to see her. I stayed there for a month, but ended up with a fruitless adventure. You know, it was a typical net love, hopeless.’
‘You are really crazy. I never bother meeting people in places other than Sydney. Is your love like today’s hot weather?’
‘Well, like I said, rather than love, it was a net love. I fell in love with love, self-love.’
‘How about another one?’
Bing was about to compose a longer message, which took a longer time for it. But Serena was impatient.
‘Why did you take so long? Are you talking to the doctor-girl at the same time?’
‘We went to Singapore, and spent two weeks in a hotel. She was from Nanjing. But you know what; I found out later, only after I had come back to Sydney, that she was a married woman.’ He hit ‘Enter’ to sent, then seeing her last message, he added, ‘No, I am not talking to the doctor-girl. I was just writing a long message.’
‘So you told me you are going to see the girl tomorrow. What do you expect me to think about this, or what do you expect me to do?’ Her text sounded very diplomatic, yet it was the first time, as Bing understood, that she had expressed a genuine interest in what was really happening between them, either out of friendship, or more serious a relationship.
But Bing played safe and tactful, he only sent, ‘Tomorrow? I haven’t decided yet.’
‘I guess you are the type of person who would love and then unlove a girl rapidly,’ she sent. ‘So the best way to deal with a man like you is never to let you really capture the girl, because you can only maintain your interest and desire in what you have not yet won over.’
‘Hehe,’ he didn’t know how to make a comment on her quick judgement.
‘Then tomorrow, I will also see a doctor,’ she sent, with an obvious note of vengeance.
‘Really? That is challenging. A male-doctor is always more dangerous than a female one.’ He teased. ‘Please go and check if he really has a quality you admire, lest you be lured only by the skin-depth.’
‘En.’
‘Mankind is by nature a creature of illusion. One should see through it and touch the reality.’
‘En.’
‘So people need rich experience to understand what self-pride, egoism, ownership, love, lust or just a shallow liking is.’
‘Ok, you keep on your experiments.’
‘Well, I think I have had enough. I think I know a lot of things. I am confident of that.’
‘What things are you not confident of?’
‘When I am in front of you.’ He flattered her, to soothe her rising temper.
‘I thought you were still pure, a virgin, without much courting experience,’ she sent, ‘now you tell me you have had a couple of crazy loves. What an idiot am I, how silly and ignorant am I.’
‘Well, I said, that was not love. I had had no feeling of love.’ He tried to wash down her impression of him. ‘I had just loved my own illusion. That was all.’
The dialogue continued until very late. It later came out that Serena liked drawing, and there were a number of her works in her QQ space. Bing flattered her honestly, and she seemed to be very happy by his flattery. It was Friday night; Bing didn’t have to work tomorrow. But Serena, a teller in a bank, had to work on the Saturday morning.
Just before they ended the dialogue for the night, Serena sent, ‘By the way, I want to mention something to you, my age on the website is 29, which was registered two years ago, and for some reasons it had not been added up. I was born in 1981, so I am actually 31 now.’
‘That is all right to me,’ Bing sent immediately, thinking she was somehow in the same boat as he was in the vague water of morality, and taking the perceived advantage further on. ‘Age, and many other things don’t amount to so much in the area of love, especially after we have already met and seen each other in person. I will still be with you, so long as you are legally single, even if you were a single mother.’
‘Well, I don’t want others to think I am reducing my age on a purpose.’
But he was not so sure of her statement.
With a few more lines of the modern means of soul-to-soul communication, the dialogue concluded with two sweet ‘Good nights,’ and Bing felt himself an enormous winner.
The truth was that although the doctor-girl as a profile did exist in the website, he had neither received messages from her nor made any appointment with her. The little trick, in Bing’s judgment, had its expected effect of jealousy successfully inspired in Serena. The other two meeting stories had also been necessarily exaggerated.
At any rate, her telling him her real age, with her necessity for honesty, indicated to him that she was beginning to be serious, and the wheel of love was beginning to turn favourably for him.
-- End of Chapter 5--
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