Behind the Moon Read Online Free Page B

Beyond the rain. Somewhere over the rainbow . . .’
    Tien Ho had arrived in Australia from a refugee camp in the Philippines in 1982. She was nearly eight. For nine months she stayed in a refugee hostel in East Hills with her relations who had escaped with her from Vietnam. There was her grandfather Ong Ngoai, Uncle Duong, Auntie Ai-Van and their three daughers: a dactylic triplet of pretty, hair-tossing girls who came to be known collectively as Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie. They were much older than she was. They did not play with her. They rolled their eyes and giggled when they looked at her, and they linked themselves with secrets breathed behind cupped hands. Then there was Uncle Duc, Auntie Phi- Phuong and their two sons, Van and Thuy, who were too bitterly engaged in their own intense rivalry to pretend any interest in her.
    Her mother Ly-Linh, Tien was brusquely told, had not escaped from Vietnam. When she asked why not, the adults refused to discuss the matter further. It was left to Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie to tell her that her mother had given up her place in the boat for Ong Ngoai.
    ‘He begged her to escape,’ Tiffany volunteered. ‘He said you needed her to look after you.’
    ‘She didn’t want to, I suppose.’
    ‘She didn’t look after you very much even when we were in Vietnam.’
    ‘She left you with our mother and went out to work.’
    ‘As a bar-girl. She knew lots of American men.’
    ‘Maybe she had a boyfriend waiting for her. That’s why she didn’t want to get on the boat and come with you.’
    ‘She had many boyfriends in Saigon.’
    ‘Even black American ones. Like your father. They were not married when they had you, you know.’
    ‘She did not behave well during the war.’
    The girls giggled. They were not deliberately cruel; they were at an age when the sexual exploits of adults provoked avid curiosity and half-mocking, half-uneasy laughter.
    Tien did not say anything, but she felt the stirrings of shame for her mother. Later, she asked Auntie Ai-Van what had happened to Ly-Linh.
    ‘Duong wrote to our neighbours in Cholon, but we never heard from her. The communists came and got her, I suppose,’ Auntie Ai-Van said in Vietnamese. ‘Better not talk about her, Tien. You just be a good girl. Life is hard enough without fighting ghosts as well.’
    Eventually, Uncle Duong’s family moved into a small, red-brick, white-trimmed 1960s apartment block in Auburn along a fissured bitumen street near the train station. Further down the road, halal butchers and kebab eateries nestled next to Chinese poultry shops, Vietnamese grocery stores and narrow doorways where bright-coloured bolts of cheap synthetic cloth angled out of cardboard boxes. The Hos were invisible in the multicultural mix. They felt safe.
    The family argued long and hard over who should be responsible for bringing up Tien: Duong, with his three girls, or Duc, with his two sons. In the end, Duong got Tien, and Ong Ngoai went to live with his younger son, Duc.
    ‘You can come stay with us, Tien,’ Auntie Ai-Van said kindly, and Tien said thank you politely.
    She knew that she had debts to repay, but she was only eight. There was nothing she could give this family which was almost-but-not-quite hers. There was nothing she could lay down at their feet like a puppy plopping down a wellchewed bone, mouth open and tongue lolling in the hope of eliciting a laugh and a pat. She tried to keep out of Stephanie-Tiffany-Melanie’s way whenever she could. When she could not, she sucked in her stomach, tucked her things tightly around her and tried to take up as little space as possible in their shared bedroom. She never lost her temper and she never showed her hurt. She kept her feelings to herself and tried to efface herself from their lives. They did not mean to be unkind, but there was a shortage of mothers, and not enough of Auntie Ai-Van to go around.
    Then Tien had to repeat Year 3 and, because of that, she met Nigel Gibson