The Sister and the Visitor

The weather changed without a warning. It would have been around the time when the possums were out fossicking for fruits in the garden. The old man was not awakened by the stinging cold air that had enveloped his bedroom. He was already wide awake, checking on the Bitcoin price when he noticed the sudden chill in the room. The thin, ragged blanket, which just a week earlier was so warm that he had to kick it away from his sweaty legs was proving to be as useless as a bedsheet to ward off the cold. He grabbed his fat pillow that had rolled to the side of his inflatable mattress and hugged it like it was a fat woman. For extra heat, he started to gyrate his hips slowly and at a constant tempo. He would be up the next morning doing his rounds in the garden rueing his moment of laziness to pluck the ripening persimmons the day before. Let them ripen a bit more, he had told his Mrs who absolutely loved the crunchiness and astringency of half-ripen persimmons. He, on the other hand, didn’t fancy persimmons; whether they were soft and sweet or crunchy and dry, he tended to leave them in the fruit basket.

“Was that perhaps the true reason why you left them on the tree?” his neighbour asked.

The weather had changed but there were plenty of signs the garden had signalled to the old man, except he wasn’t paying attention. The days were getting shorter and he ought to have registered in his mind that it was just the previous week that he had reset the timer to shut the chicken coop’s door an hour earlier to 7 pm. The sakura sapling next door had already started to drop its dead brown leaves leaving a casual observation that it was a casualty of summer neglect. The Japanese maple trees were so sickly-looking that they lost their grand moment in autumn to flash their red and golden colours; one had actually withered and died leaving a grey and haunting shadow of its former glory. When an old chook died of diarrhoea, the old man dug up the dead tree after having decided it was the perfect spot to bury the chook. Replace the dead with the dead. Parched by the fierce Adelaide sun, the Santa Barbara daisies, so fecund and aggressive with their white to pinkish petals in spring and summer, had turned brown and scraggly, their once-green thick undergrowth now dry and wiry, too noisy to be useful hiding places for the blue-tongued lizard and brown snakes.

As the daisies withered, so did the grape vines and the grafted jujube sapling. Bought for $90 in mid 2019 with a promise of sweet and succulent jujube within three years, it was obviously a brash sales pitch by the vivacious blonde chick at the nursery that fooled the old man. All she did was smile and after sampling a handful of the dried fruit, he nodded to accept the deal. Throughout spring and summer, it sprouted only seven leaves and grew an inch taller. It was still fighting to survive the final days of summer when the old man’s sister and her hubby arrived from the U.K. Fair-skinned and tall, her once permanently black hair had turned hoary. A roundish tummy that her loose black pants worn high above her bellybutton could not hide provided evidence of her life-long love for puddings and cakes. The long trip to Adelaide would be her last, she had announced. It made no sense to the old man but all he said to himself was that she had become too westernised for him to understand. After living in the U.K. for all her seventy years bar the first seventeen, perhaps she had already replayed many many times in her mind the inevitable moment of receiving news of her mother’s demise. Many scenarios had been played out. What would she be doing? Where would she be? Would she be awoken by a phone call? The dreaded phone call in the middle of the night about a parent’s death was a scenario that plagued a lot of overseas students who left home in their teens. Now that their mother had turned a hundred, that inevitable day could come anytime, she reasoned silently.

The old man threw a welcome dinner for his U.K. sister and her hubby on the day they arrived. It was a thirty-hour journey they took to reach Adelaide and by the time they arrived, they were jet-lagged and in desperate need of a good rest. But, rest would not be availed to them yet. They quickly refreshed themselves and swapped their thick winter clothes for tee shirts and shorts. An hour later, they were seated in a restaurant, waiting for their matriarch to arrive. They yawned frequently and apologised frequently. The frail old mother refused to leave the car despite having already considerably delayed the dinner party. The old man suggested that she who must be obeyed must be personally welcomed into the restaurant by the daughter whose homecoming was delayed by three years due to Covid. When the restaurant manager asked if they could begin to serve the Yin Yang seafood soup, it was obvious to all at the table that the daughter who had failed to coax the old mother inside needed help.

“C’mon, Mike. Let’s go out and welcome her inside,” the old man said to his brother-in-law whom he had not seen for many years.

Mike, a Welshman, twitched his button nose and chortled. He appeared shorter or smaller this time, either from age-related shrinkage or from losing pounds due to a regimented diet. But, he had lost none of his jovial demeanour and dry sense of humour. His hair, once upon a time brownish and thick, had turned mostly white and sparse and showed a failed struggle to fight back the receding hairline. His right eye, dragged down by heavy wrinkles on the side of it, looked smaller than the other as he squinted in the afternoon sun. Most of his double chin had disappeared, and he was once again, a man with a neck. For a white man with a pinkish hue in his late sixties, he was blessed with a face without dark age spots. In recent years, he had become a champion in lawn bowls and had busied himself in the presidency of their club in Reading. The white shortish man waddled busily to the carpark, the smile on his face permanent and bright. It did not fade away despite the caustic words that greeted him as he swung the car door open wider.

“You bad man! You stole my daughter,” his wife’s mother said to him, thrusting her pointy finger into the air in front of her.

“You stole my daughter,” she repeated and let her anger hang in the dry air.

The old man, alarmed that Mike might feel aggrieved at the accusations, softly rubbed his mother’s arm to calm her down. This was the one time that he wished his mother was illiterate in the English language.

“She was still so young and she didn’t return home after she graduated,” she said, but this time in her native Ningbo dialect. She rambled on about how young her daughter was; still a teenager, she mistakenly remembered, when she sent an aerogramme to tell them she had decided to marry Mike and move to Glasgow where a job awaited her. And that she had a close Indian friend from Penang and how they helped each other cope in that faraway land.

“She’s happy, ma. She has her own family now, two sons, remember, ma? And her two lovely grand-daughters,” the old man said but failed to placate his old mother who pushed him aside to look at the white man. Her voice still full and resonating, there was no hint of her being etiolated like a plant without sunlight and water. Her one hundred years on earth had slowed her actions and rendered her unsteady on her feet, but she still had a vigour for dinner parties and fine wine and the strength to berate her son-in-law.

“You bad man!” she said again, before allowing Mike to ease her out of the car.