Unpolished Gem by Alice Pung

Author:Alice Pung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, book
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2006-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

“IT’S drip-drip-dripping,” said my mother. “The light is dripping with water-spirits.” At least, that was what I heard her say. I looked up. The chandelier did droop with crystals. There must have been close to a hundred of them. I switched it on to see the full effect.

“Turn it off!” cried my mother. “What are you doing? Stupid, turning it on and off like that, wasting energy!” The chandelier was supposed to be saved for visitors. Just like the sitting room, with its cream leather sofas that were never used, and the glass dining table that had never seen a dinner on its surface.

I flicked off the switch because my mother’s eyes were sunken and the skin around her sockets was like crumpled parchment paper. She had just woken up from her sleep. “Aiyyyah,” she sighed, deep and slow. “Time to pick up the kids. Time to make dinner.”

No, I wanted to tell her, it was not time to pick up the kids. That was over forty-five minutes ago. And it was not time to make dinner. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, for crying out loud.

“What time is it?” she asked me.

I told her.

“Bloody hell! 4.37! Why didn’t you tell me? The kids are still at school waiting!”

“No, I picked them up on the way home.” It was a one-and-a-half kilometre walk for them back home, because no buses ran up the hills of Avondale Heights. When I arrived at the school, my sisters were the last ones there – waiting outside closed office doors. Bobbing down beneath the grey sky in their green uniforms and brown socks, they dug small sticks into the dirt of the curb.

My mother’s shoulders loosened, but they also slumped. Another failure on her part, she thought. Firstly she could no longer work, and secondly she could no longer look after her kids. All the things that my grandmother had predicted – or cursed – were coming true.

My mother had stopped working on the gold a few weeks ago. The chemicals were getting to her and making her cough, she told us. The coughs never seemed to get better. So no more familiar wax smells wafting from the other room to mingle with our toast and decaffeinated coffee in the morning. The room next to the kitchen, where my mother grew her wax trees, was dark. An old bedspread covered her work-table like a shroud.

*

“Your father told me to sell all my tools and machines, and live my life looking after the children and taking care of the house,” she would tell me, as I sat in the study which also doubled as my mother’s workroom. I was trying to write essays for my final-year high-school assessment. She sat slumped in her torn vinyl work-chair. “What do you think I should do?”

“It is so terrible,” she continued. “I feel like a useless useless person now. Should I sell all my machines? Should I?” She looked deep into my eyes, something that Asian parents never do to their children – but she was desperate.

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