The Healing Party Read Free

the “smartness”’ – he spat that word out – ‘and the fashion of ideology and … just believe!’
    I had anticipated this, but still my whole body prickled with humiliation and anger. I longed to say something that would show how I despised what he had to say. In my teens I had never known how to reply, but at least I would do something surly – roll my eyes, smirk, make a scoffing sound, or pretend I hadn’t heard.
    Dad looked at me expectantly. Mum said, ‘Praise the Lord,’ and smiled in silent appeal to me. When I didn’t react, Dad started rolling up his prints.
    â€˜Now I must make some important phone calls,’ he said, and walked up the stairs to his studio. I gathered the cups and took them into the kitchen, washing up slowly to steady my breathing and still my shaking.
    As so often happened when I saw my father angry, I thought of that other face – so different and yet so closely aligned with his. Though I tried to suppress the image, it appeared as I had seen it as a ten-year-old in my grandmother’s tall, thin terrace house on Rowling Road in Hong Kong, where my father and his twelve brothers and sisters had grown up.
    We were not allowed up on the third floor, but once on a visit I had sneaked up the staircase that grew narrower and steeper the higher you got. The door at the top of the landing was not locked. I turned the knob and peered inside. A barely clad man sat on a mattress in a cage almost the size of the small room. When he saw me he lurched over, put two fingers in a V to his mouth, which was covered in sores, and asked me for a cigarette.
    The next time I saw him, some cousins and I were playing on the concrete in front of the house. A cousin, laughing, pointed her finger at the top floor. He had escaped from his cage and squatted naked on the window railing. Perched up there like a great ugly eagle, he took in his surrounds. Stretching his thin arms to the sky, he leapt. The sound as he landed was no louder than a coconut falling to earth. His face, which looked so strangely like my father’s, lay smashed and seeping into the pavement.
    *
    When I returned to Mum she was tired, so I supported her while she shifted to the couch. She smelt of powder and soap and something slightly bitter. I helped her rest her head on the armrest and spread a blanket over her. Between bouts of silence, we talked about members of their Christian community or my sisters, until she dozed off and her mouth grew slack.
    Dad walked into the lounge room wearing his coat and beret. Seeing Mum asleep, he told me in a quiet voice that he was going out for two or three hours to see Father Lachlan and Geoff Atkins from his ministry team. He explained that they would be doing God’s work by witnessing to a woman who wanted an abortion. I asked him which bedroom I should sleep in and he told me to take my pick.
    I entered the corridor leading to the three bedrooms and glanced behind me to make sure the door did not swing shut. When the door to the corridor and all the bedroom doors were closed, the corridor became a pitch-black vault.
    The first room had belonged to Anita and Maria before Anita moved out, the second room had been shared by Patsy and me, and the bedroom with the ensuite bathroom at the end was my parents’. Thinking I would take the first room, since it was further from Mum and Dad’s room than my old bedroom, I opened the door but saw that it was crammed with old furniture and Dad’s photos and equipment. I went to the bedroom that Patsy and I had shared. Mostly unchanged, it had two single beds with their own bedside tables, separated by a chipboard wardrobe that we had painted pink to match the walls.
    Our room had looked like the bedrooms of our schoolfriends, or so we’d hoped, with its pastel colours and posters of cute animals. No pictures of pop stars had been allowed by Dad, though, and suddenly remembering, I swung