fiction | Tim Richards

Club Selection

Even the sight of Norichi’s name beside his on the roster sends Hizu’s pulse racing, and now, with Nori at his elbow, and the transit coach pulling into the loading bay, Hizu finds himself searching for the correct phrase. ‘Welcome’ comes to mind, but it sounds too formal. Though his tutor thinks that most Australians aren’t fussed about the odd word out of place, Hizu is fussed. He needs to be more Australian.
    The door opens with a hydraulic vroosh, and the first guests greet him with outstretched hands.
    “Nice place,” one says.
    Seizing this hand and shaking it vigorously, Hizu opts for the all-purpose, “No worries.”
    “Didn’t think there would be, mate,” a huge man in baggy shorts replies. “Not after what it cost to get here.”
    When another stupendously obese man emerges, Hizu, now more sure of himself, grasps his hand, “No worries, mate.”
    Only after greeting twenty men and women does he see Nori squatting beside the driver, regarding him with rising disdain. Still six months away from qualifying to become a supervisor, Norichi is determined to behave like one.
    “Just say ‘G’day’, dickhead. Save ‘No worries’ for when they ask to sleep with your missus.”
    “I’m not married,” Hizu replies.
    “Mate, you don’t know shit. You’ll never pass.”
    Several weeks earlier, Hizu would have apologised, but now he tells Nori to “put a fuckin’ sock in it”.

•

He keeps meticulous notebooks. Most entries rehash instructions Missy has given at Language and Culture classes but, more recently, they have been dominated by his thoughts about what guests have told him, and what he’s seen at the resort. Often they take the form of personal reminders.

Eliminate all sense of superiority, pity, or judgement. Your personality must adapt to each individual guest.

    Nothing troubles Hizu more than piss-taking, and the expectation that one responds to a piss-take in kind. Australian culture is so nuanced, and reading nuance and irony doesn’t come easily to him. Hizu flicks back to an early note, one of Missy’s favourite jokes.

Never confuse taking the piss with taking a shit. Rarely is the latter so pleasurable as the former.

    Below this, he has yellow-highlighted Missy’s observation that Australians love the illusion of social equality: first names, casual dress, jokes and unexpected intimacies. Only recently has he begun to understand the tension between this illusion and the complex underlying realities. After some reflection, he makes a new note.

As one becomes more Australian, it is possible that one might like Australians less. Why not set myself the task of becoming a better Australian than those I meet?

•

As Hizu lugs Ray’s bag down Newton’s third fairway, the old man tells him that he’s visited the resort three times a year since it opened. Before the Shark withdrew his endorsement, it was known as Shark Resort.
    Keen to avoid these ancient disputes, Hizu tells Ray that MacArthur Pleasure Resort is a better name, the General having done so much to bring their nations together.
    “Australia’s not worth shit,” Ray says. “This resort might be the best patch of Australia we have left. Did you hear what the terrorists did to Royal Melbourne? It’s not safe to play in Australia these days.”
    “No worries about safety here. And the greens have never looked better.”
    Ray’s not so easy to distract. He’s different to most guests, who usually love to put the bad stuff behind them.
    “Golfers are an easy target, Hizzy. You want to blame someone for Australia going to shit, blame us. Or blame the pioneers who only tried to make something from a useless patch of dirt and scrub. The courses they’re tearing up are a symbol of everything we achieved.”
    “It’s a beautiful day, Ray. Not so windy as yesterday.”
    “Yeah, one out of the box.”
    Seeing the old man cheering up, Hizu gives him a play-punch to the biceps.
    “Days like these, you wouldn’t be dead for quids.”

•

With the shower running cold, Hizu drapes a towel around his waist and knocks on his neighbour’s door, hoping Tom knows if the problem extends through the annexe. When there is no answer, he phones the superintendent.
    “It’ll be back on this arvo. Had to replace the tank,” Jet says.
    “Seen Tom or Miuki about?” Hizu asks, momentarily forgetting his distaste for Jet’s gossip.
    “Admin gave them the flick.”
    “Bullshit!”
    “Too many complaints. The boss’d had a gutful.”
    “They’re good people,” Hizu says, remembering how Miuki comforted him in the first weeks. It was she who’d said that a young man could have no greater ambition than to become a good Australian.
    “Sure, they’re good guys, but they forgot themselves.”
    That was the one thing always said of the staff told to leave: they’d forgotten themselves.
    “They were more Australian than anyone here,” Hizu says, which is close as he’d come to issuing a protest.
    “Might’ve been the problem. You can be too Australian.”

•

Some things aren’t meant to be fathomed. Reiko dies, and that death sends you into the path of a woman who might have been her twin. Miuki knew me from somewhere outside time. For her, it was no accident that fate brought me here. I was like Tom, whose dad worked with my dad at the old reactor before these fairways were dredged from the sea, when men and women made the two-hour commute from Hoshi six days a week. She said we were here in search of our dreaming.
    When Miuki delivered her second dead child, the obstetrician from Fukuoka told Tom that the resort’s water was contaminated. Neither man dared raise it with the bosses. “Time to get Bolshie,” Miuki said. “That’s what an Australian woman would do. There’s no-one more daring than an Australian woman.”
    She was certain I’d make it, that fate had been astute when it sent me here. So why does fate treat people like her and Tom like shit? Despite everything that’s gone down in Australia, they intended to live there as soon as they’d saved enough to retire. “Guests have their reasons for escaping to a place like this, but we think we can give something back.”

•

Born in Stockholm to Australian parents, Missy looks the part, a statuesque blonde with an accent that could slice raw steak. Her great gift is making all her students think they’re her favourite. For this session she’s asked Hizu to instigate a role-play.
    In an unspoken nod to his friend Miuki, Hizu casts Shingo as the worker who requests three days leave to visit a dying parent in Perth. As the boss, Kobe will be expected to choose this moment to question Shingo’s dedication. When Kobe refuses the request, Shingo is nonplussed.
    “That was excellent,” Missy tells them, “but you left out the most important part. Should the boss have the last word?”
    The class mulls this over for a moment before Hizu suggests that Shingo would give his boss the bird.
    “Absolutely! When the boss turns his back, the worker makes a one-fingered salute … You try that, Shingo.”
    Shingo jolts his index finger upwards.
    “It might be more expressive to use the middle finger.”
    “Wouldn’t it be better to do it to the boss’s face?” Kobe asks.
    “Possibly.”
    Missy then turns to Nobuko, who always has an answer, along with a deep, relaxed laugh that any Australian woman would kill for. “Why wouldn’t Shingo make his gesture to the boss’s face?”
    “That would be un-Australian.”

•

After class, Nobuko seeks Hizu out to ask why he never attends the Sunday evening staff parties.
    “It’s a good turn,” she tells him. “Cheap grog. Drink till you chuck … With norgs like yours, you should win the wet T-shirt comp.”
    Nobuko is slim and pretty, and Hizu knows that his only hope of meeting a woman and making a family is to pair off with a staff member, as Tom and Miuki had, but grog’s the one thing he can’t get on top of. All his worst errors have followed a night on the piss.
He tells her that after caddying fifty-four holes he’s knackered most Sunday nights. Truth is, he’d prefer to study and write.
    Nobuko doesn’t conceal her disappointment.
    “Maybe you’d like me if my tits were big as Missy’s?”
    “Maybe,” Hizu tells her, and feels the wind of her raised finger the moment he turns his back.

•

For the first three months, his mother wrote twice-weekly; now he’s lucky to hear from her once a fortnight. Her attitude has changed. To begin with, she was proud that her son had a job where he earned the same as a top surgeon. After losing Reiko, it was important to make a fresh start. Now, she says he’s rejected her and her culture. He’s so tainted he can’t see how offensive his thinking’s become.
    She misses him, as he knew she would. It was too much to expect her to understand the dedication this work would involve when he hadn’t fully understood it himself until recently. You only see the point of no return after it’s passed.
    “Your father never would have let this happen.”
    That might be true. He can’t say. He has few memories of his father. The most prominent has his father being summoned to school to approve their chosen punishment after Hizu, a gifted mimic, entered the principal’s office and delivered a bogus speech over the public address system, complete with trademark tics and slurs.
    “Do you want to go on the stage, is that it?” his father shrieked, his complexion already hinting at the cancers that would kill him the following year. “Your friends will be lawyers and you’ll have no arse in your pants.”
    An Australian dad would have asked him to repeat the routine, and praised the accuracy of his impression. In the final analysis, it wasn’t about what his own father thought, but about the kind of dad a decent Australian could choose to be.

•

While setting himself to blast out of the greenside bunker on Crampton’s fifteenth, Craig asks his caddy if it’s true that the cancer rate among resort staff is ten times the national average.
    “That’s bullshit,” Norichi tells him. “Wouldn’t be enough money to pay a bloke if that was true.”
    Fifteen metres away on the green, Craig’s playing partner, Ben, has overheard this exchange and looks Hizu in the eye.
    “Sure, that’s the company line. Let me ask you something, man to man. It’ll go no further than us four here. There’s a story doing the rounds in Melbourne. Two big blokes came up here, one of them a top investment banker. After drinking a skinful, they decided to have a swimming race on the ornamental lake. Two-thirds of the way across, the banker’s mate had a massive coronary. The banker notices, pulls him to shore, does CPR, and saves his life. Two weeks later, both men were dead. The doctor signed off on meningitis, though he knew it was radiation poisoning. I’ve heard that story from three sources. Is it true?”
    Hizu doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t been asked in the way that a wealthy man asks a servant, but in the way an Australian asks his mate. He could tell Ben that his story’s untrue with an easy conscience. He’d been there. It was Hizu who’d given CPR to the banker’s big mate. Last time he’d seen the two men, they were alive. What happened after that was rumour. If he said that, Nori, listening nearby, could have no reason to complain to their supervisor. But this situation was entirely new. It was a question of honour.
    “It’s bullshit,” Hizu tells Ben.
    “Didn’t happen?”
    “Nah, they both drowned.”
    “Then why would the doctor lie?”
    “The bar staff had seen them getting legless and did nothing to stop them.”
    Ben and Craig were impressed. “Fuck, that’s great arse-covering. This place couldn’t be more Australian if it tried.”
    Later, having shared drinks with their new mates, Norichi was furious. “If I told admin what you said, you’d be out of this place in an hour.”
    “What choice did I have? They wanted a story with a credible ending.”
    “That man could be a private eye or ASIS … You’d threaten everything to give someone a yarn to tell his mates.”
    “Better that than the truth.”
    “Truth’s got nothing to do with it. If truth mattered, this place would still be wasteland.”
    “Nori, if you’ve got a problem, put it on paper and shove it up your clacker … You think you wouldn’t go down with me? Do you really think your willingness to lie would count for anything?”

•

While studying for his final exam and the Permanency interview, Hizu begins to question some of Missy’s balder assertions.

Even if a guest asks about your family, or where you went to school, don’t imagine that they’re doing anything more than satisfying their desire to seem friendly. As likely as not, the facts won’t interest them. They’ll be just as happy with bullshit that sounds like bullshit.

    Whenever he told tall stories about his childhood – the kamikaze grandfather and the aunt who was kidnapped by the North Koreans – the guests had a good laugh, and responded with yarns of their own, but the genuine types were really touched by his tales of a mother who struggled to give him a chance after his father died. When he’s told guests that staff are only free to leave the resort for six weeks every three years, and that admin encourages them to take pay in lieu, they’ve been shocked into speechlessness.

No-one understands what it is to be Australian until they fully grasp the terms of Australian friendliness. For Australians, friendliness is a superstition: a way of allaying the fear of being considered selfish or mean-spirited. To refuse friendliness is much worse than refusing a gift, since refusal is likely to activate the tensions implicit in ‘the friendliness paradox’. The more you try to be sincere, the further you are from true sincerity. If inscrutability is the cliché one attaches to Asians, one ought to approach Australians with an appreciation of their paradoxicality.

    Hizu chooses to see this paradoxicality as a quality worth nurturing. What better than to be someone whose candour generates a sense of mystery?

•

He is in the canteen, reading The Recollections of Ludowyck B., when seized by an appealing fragrance. A hand descends to clasp his own. With her fine hair caressing his cheek, Nobuko whispers into his ear.
“I worked late shift at the casino with Nori last night. What did you do? He’s after your balls.”
“He thinks you can stay Japanese and wear Australianness like a mask. And he says that’s what admin expects from us.”
“He might be right.”
“In terms of head office, I’m sure he is. But only a cretin would be in this for show. One day, he’ll triple-guess himself.”
Gently squeezing his arm, Nobuko warns him to watch his back.

•

Probationary staff are attending their final Culture class when the general manager arrives to ask them to help search for two female singers who’ve managed to leave the entertainers’ annexe and enter the casino. Hizu finds himself pairing off with Missy, who treats the matter as a grave emergency.
    “Entertainers don’t always maintain a good-faith relationship with the resort and its clientele. Some of them have history with our guests.”
    “They just want to rub shoulders with celebrities in the gaming room,” Hizu suggests, trying to sound as laconic as possible.
    “Well, the guests pay top dollar to make sure their shoulders are only rubbed on request … One bad incident, and all this could vanish like it never happened.”
    If it vanished, would she return to Sweden, or try her luck in Australia?
    “Australia’s not an option. This is Australia now. All that’s worth keeping.”
    He wants to ask, worth keeping for whom?, but, even in an intimate moment like this, it’s more than his job’s worth.

•

In the year he’s been at the resort, there wouldn’t have been more than thirty unaccompanied female guests, and willowy Suzette is by some distance the youngest, no more than forty or forty-one. She travels with a black and white border collie named Max.
    As he pulls back the curtains to show that the casino complex can be seen from her living room, she says that she has no interest in gambling. She expects to play thirty-six holes each of the ten days she’s at the resort.
    “You’ll enjoy Von Nida then. Plays long this time of year, but that adds to the challenge.”
    “Do you like golf?”
    No-one asks obvious questions like that, and he’s unsure how to answer. Though a competent caddy, he’s only played two rounds in his life.
    “I’m interested in what the game represents to people,” he tells Suzette.
    While Hizu answers her request to pour two whiskies, she tells him she was just about to turn pro when the transitional government outlawed pro tournaments. During the past two decades, she’s played in the States, India, China, Scotland and Siberia, but even for the well-connected it’s too dangerous to play in Australia now. A Green Brigade mine took her ex-father-in-law’s leg. But she’s always dreamt of playing an Australian course, and striding down eucalypt-lined fairways.
    Meeting so few young guests, this kind of intense sentimental yearning is new to Hizu. After one glass of alcohol, he should be angling to leave, but when Suzette invites him to refill their glasses, he does so without protest. Returning to the living room, he finds that she has removed her jacket. There is a pile of American notes where he’d been sitting next to her on the sofa.
    “Tips aren’t necessary. Best to treat the resort as part of Australia.”
    “Is it too little?”
    “Oh, I see … I’ll ask the activities director to send a folio of available escorts.”
    “And what if I double that wad of notes?”
    Though there seems no inoffensive way to tell Suzette that such exchanges are forbidden, his downcast expression does the trick.
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t be … You’re a very attractive woman.”
    “No, I insulted you … What I should have done was ask you to do me a favour … Between mates.”
    “Ah … A mate thing. That’s different.”
    While removing his trousers, Hizu watches Suzette peel the black leather from her long legs, and recalls the strife given to female staff who’d been accused of servicing men. A guest only needed to hint that you’d acted inappropriately, and you were gone. But once Suzette’s muscular thighs clench his, these concerns evaporate. Her cries of “Oh shit!” and “Oh Jesus!” soon alternate with the dog’s low growls as it watches them from a futon in the corner of the room.

•

Although he has few problems with the written exam, Hizu barely sleeps the night before the Permanency interview. When he finally gets out of bed, he feels dizzy, and sore in the joints. Believing these to be anxiety symptoms, he takes a sedative and does some breathing exercises before carefully re-ironing his shirt and trousers.
    He might have saved himself the trouble. By the time he is escorted into a small room to face three previously unseen administrators, his shirt is soaked with perspiration. Two of the inquisitors are of Japanese descent, while the huge man with the rough, red beard is quite obviously Australian.
    “You look pale, Hizu,” the one tagged Ken observes. “Are you sick?”
    “No, I’m fine.”
    Ken asks his assistant to get Hizu a glass of water, before inviting him to sit down. For several minutes, the three panellists sift through various documents, waiting for the water to arrive before the short man named Jacko leads off.
    “The feedback from guests is excellent. You should be pleased.”
    He does his best to smile laconically before the bearded man, Hendo, asks if he considers himself to be ambitious. This is the type of question Hizu has dreaded. Every company wants employees who are hungry to take on additional responsibilities, but seeming too ambitious might be considered un-Australian.
    “I’m keen to do whatever I can to further the interests of the resort.”
    “If we said that supervisors consider you to be highly ambitious, would that surprise you?”
    This second loaded question sends him reaching for the glass of water. As he does so, he sees that he is trembling. What’s more, the interviewers are slipping in and out of focus.
    “I’m more interested in how they assess my capabilities,” he tells them.
    Hendo says that Hizu is believed to be highly capable, before asking if he sees himself wanting to move into administration.
    “I’d like to gain a wide range of experience before considering that possibility.”
    “If gaining experience meant spending time at the Sydney office, how would you feel about that?”
    Hizu says that he’s happy to perform any duties that will broaden his education.
    “Are you aware of the recent suicide attack on our Sydney office?”
    “No, I’m not,” Hizu answers, fighting hard to suppress a need to swallow.
    A longish pause follows, with the trio shuffling their documents before Jacko asks if anyone has ever tried to recruit him to work for an organisation that might be adverse to the resort’s interests.
    “Other than guests, I’ve only known staff. If a guest spoke of that, I’d report it.”
    “What’s your opinion of Norichi?” Ken asks.
    The question is impossibly loaded. Even to attempt an answer carries danger. Hizu would like more water, but his glass is empty. Sweat is trickling down his chest.
    “Norichi’s very dedicated.”
    “Have you ever seen him use a guest’s mobile, or act in a way that was unusual?” Hendo asks.
    “Unusual?”
    “Taking photographs, or collecting water in jars?”
    “No.”
    “Naturally, this is in the strictest confidence,” Ken reminds him.
    Hizu nods.
    “When is your medical?”
    “Monday.”
    “I’ll get Billie to take you to the clinic now,” Jacko tells him. “You look awful.”
    Hizu can do no more than nod at the three blurs.
    “Relax, you’ve done well,” Hendo confides.

•

At the clinic, with his temperature tipping thirty-nine, doctors test for meningitis. Hizu will remember little of the two days that follow, just the sharp pull of the drip, and drifting in and out of consciousness.
    By the third morning, his temperature is close to normal, and he feels well enough to eat. A nurse echoes the doctor’s belief that he’s had a virus.
    “I’ve got my medical on Monday. If I’m not fit, I’m up shit creek.”
    “Don’t worry.”
    Hizu would like to believe that he has no worries, but it’s difficult to sort the effects of the illness from the usual flood of anxieties.
    “There was a woman here to visit you.”
    “A woman?”
    “Very pretty. Noboku. She was worried about you.”
    By that afternoon, the doctors were satisfied Hizu was fit for release provided he took things quietly and stayed off duty till after his medical. A nurse tried to persuade him to take a cart back to his apartment but, after seventy-two hours in bed, Hizu liked the idea of a twenty-minute stroll in the sun.
    Nearing the guest blocks, he sees Suzette walking Max not far ahead, and has to consider whether to raise his pace to catch them, or to drop back to make sure he won’t. Just at that moment, the dog takes off after a pelican.
    The big bird swoops and turns, goading the barking dog, before shifting course to fly low over the ornamental lake. Though he sees the looming danger, Hizu is powerless to intervene. Suzette screams for Max to come back, but the dog gallops into the water and swims after the bird, yelping for all it’s worth. It’s then, with Hizu hurrying to the scene, that Norichi appears from nowhere to rip off his shoes and tie.
    Without hesitating, Nori throws himself into the lake, and begins to swim strongly as he can while keeping his head above the surface. He covers fifty metres soon enough but, with the bird still hovering above him, Max is reluctant to be dragged to the bank. As Nori struggles to loop his hand through the dog’s collar, his head bobs below the surface, as it will twice more before he hauls the hound back to its distressed owner.
    “My god, you were so brave. That bird wanted to drown Max.”
    After helping the exhausted Nori to his feet, Hizu prevents Suzette from kissing him.
    “I’m going to shout you barramundi and Grange,” Suzette tells Norichi, but her thoroughly drenched hero cannot share her joy. He knows that it’s all been for show, and that Max will be dead soon enough.
    “Fuckin’ dog’s fucked everything,” he whispers to Hizu.

•

The evening before the medical, Hizu receives a text from Missy to say that he’s finished fourth from the thirty-two who sat the written exam. He will be awarded a high distinction.
    Thrilled with this news, Hizu takes a glass of Barossa white out onto the balcony. This being an unusually clear night, he has no trouble locating the major constellations. And he remembers the long journeys he used to make to get the best possible observations. One of the few things his father left him was an old telescope passed on from his own father, and even now, having travelled so far, it is the stars that remind him who he is, and where he is.
    Eager not to lose sleep, he swallows a tablet before bed, and no sooner does his cheek hit the pillow than he finds himself leaving a drunken party with the delicately pretty Nobuko. If he wants, she will travel to Australia with him. Hizu tells her that he wants that more than anything. Yet no matter how tenderly she kisses and strokes him, he’s unable to get hard. Finally, her desire gives way to tears, and there is nothing he can do to stem this flood of grief.
    So it’s a relieved Hizu who wakes to sunlight streaming through the narrow gap between curtains. It’s all fine. Once Permanent, he’ll convince himself that he has what it takes to satisfy Nobuko. Everything in its own time. It’s only when switching on the bed lamp that he sees the crimson ring on his pillow. Dragging one hand across his lips, Hizu reaches into his mouth to locate a tooth that comes loose in his fingers. He’s tempted to pinch himself, but he knows the truth. All the dreams the future held now sit bloody-rooted on his trembling palm.

© Tim Richards

Overland 191–winter 2008, pp. 40–47

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