The Family Law Read online




  The Family Law

  The FAMILY LAW

  BENJAMIN LAW

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  37-39 Langridge Street

  Collingwood Victoria 3066 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © 2011 Benjamin Law

  Reprinted 2012

  Some names of people and locations have been changed.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Law, Benjamin, 1982-

  The family law / Benjamin Law.

  ISBN for eBook: 9781921870354

  ISBN for print edition: 9781863955317 (pbk)

  Law, Benjamin, 1982---Family--Humor.

  Australian wit and humor. Families--Humor.

  Cover design by Peter Long

  For my family:

  Mum, Dad, Candy, Andrew, Tammy & Michelle.

  CONTENTS

  The Family Dictionary

  Baby Love

  The Family Business

  Scenes from a Family Christmas

  Holes

  Tourism

  Sleep Cancer

  Heat! Vermin! Pestilence!

  Tone Deaf

  A Room of One’s Own

  On Nudity

  Like a Hole in the Head

  Towards Manhood

  You’ve Got a Friend

  God Camp

  The Pretenders

  Skeletons

  We Have the Technology

  Oceans Apart

  Amongst the Living Dead

  In the Mood

  So, You Are a Homo

  Wrecking Ball

  *

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away. —ZADIE SMITH, On Beauty

  The Family Dictionary

  Lately, I’ve been stitching together a zine for my family that gets passed around over Christmas. It’s called The Family Dictionary. Designed to resemble a language reference book, it compiles all the new in-house phrases, terminology and punchlines we’ve developed over the year, alongside helpful illustrations and diagrams. Some entries are universally suggestive and you wouldn’t need to be a family member to understand them. No one needs to stretch their imagination to figure out what a slitoris might be. Heurgh – uttered as if you’re dry-retching – denotes disgust and horror at something. Flahs is a bouquet of fancy flowers, and scrongtrum still sounds funny, even if you haven’t seen the difficulty my mother has in pronouncing ‘scrotum.’ (She’s Chinese, and the placing of the ‘r’ makes it difficult, she says.)

  Most entries, though, are more esoteric. Some are hard to explain without the aid of accents. For reasons we’ve long forgotten, commence seduction has to be said mechanically with robot-arm movements; yeh fookin’ pig-nosed slag – developed during a car-trip competition to find the most crass insult imaginable towards women – has to be Scottish. Other entries demand complex body movements and choreography. The Pardamonté is a dance style my sister Michelle has developed, which complements something I do called the Dance of Despair. Both resemble rhythmic gymnastics, but instead of using ribbons and clubs in a sports stadium, we use fitted sheets and plastic bags in the living room. It’s really something; you should see us in action.

  Over the years, though, we’ve lost too many entries. We were watching home videos of a family trip to London when I rediscovered a backlog of phrases and private jokes I’d forgotten, voices and characters we’d nearly lost. Who could forget Betty, John and Frank, the trio of confused, hearing-impaired seniors who verbally abused each other? And whatever happened to that skit with the incestuous father, where I’d surprise my sisters by violently banging on the bathroom door while they were taking a shower, telling them to let their father in? Oh, the memories. My family always joked that my memory was like a sieve, but watching those old videos made me feel as though I had an open drain. Realising I hadn’t remembered those moments made me sad and anxious. What else had we lost?

  Making The Family Dictionary has become an exercise in not forgetting. The zine provides trigger points, reminding me of the childhood fashion parades in 1993, the strange weekends we spent with my dad in 1997, or the family trip we took to Japan in 2008. All of the entries in The Family Dictionary have stories behind them, although some are starting to fade.

  *

  Here’s one of them. When our maternal grandmother – my Poh-Poh – died some years ago, my younger sisters Tammy and Michelle and I flew back to Hong Kong with Mum to collect her ashes. Now an orphan, Mum had been devastated by every aspect of her mother’s death: how she’d been forced into a cramped Hong Kong nursing home; the clinical way the funeral had been conducted; the impossibility of her joining us in Australia in those final years; the fact she hadn’t made it to her mother’s bedside in time. Knowing the trip would be depressing, we all tried to buoy the mood by calling the trip the Ashes Tour and making cricket-related jokes.

  Once in Hong Kong, the four of us went to a grim, administrative-looking building that could have been a post office. After Mum signed some forms in Chinese script, the staff members fetched the urn from the back room. It was sealed with so much tape that it resembled a parcel from overseas that had been lost in customs and redirected a hundred times over. Mum took it in her hands, looking lost.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’

  For a moment, I thought she was going to collapse with grief. Instead, she passed the urn to me and fumbled around in her handbag.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Tammy asked.

  Michelle looked worried. ‘Mum?’

  ‘Take a photo,’ she said. ‘I want to remember this moment.’

  Clearly, my family has a thing for documentation.

  The days that followed were punctuated by Mum’s spontaneous crying sessions. These were difficult to predict and even harder to help ease. There were variations in the quality of the sobbing, depending on the time of day. In the afternoon, we’d hear sudden gulps of air in our room, thinking it was a broken hotel vacuum cleaner until we realised it was Mum weeping next door. Her crying was gaspy and staccato for her evening shower, completely different from the late-night weeping when she thought we were asleep. In the stark light of day, the weeping would be dignified and silent: single streams of tears trickling underneath dark sunglasses.

  At night, after watching Hong Kong television in my hotel room, Tammy, Michelle and I would go back to Mum’s room. She’d be propped up in her bed, speaking to her mother’s urn as though Poh-Poh were right beside her. We’d watch her talk for a while in secret; then, taking my lead, we’d all walk in, assuming she’d stop. Mum just looked at us and smiled with red eyes.

  ‘Would you like to say something to Poh-Poh too?’

  We all took turns, taking the urn in our hands and talking to it as if our grandmother was still alive. It was a little creepy, knowing these were only some of Poh-Poh’s remains; we knew the rest were held at Tseung Kwan O Chinese Permanent Cemetery in a marble box somewhere. We sat there, trying to start a conversation with the ashes, unsure whether we’d gotten elbows or knuckle, calves or hair.

  ‘So … Poh-Poh,’ I said, scratching the back of my head. ‘You okay in there?’

  *

  By the end of that week, all the crying, tension, urn-talking and relative-visiting had taken us to the edge, and we started to argue. To cheer ourselves up, we ventured to the recently opened Hong Kong Disneyland, figuring that if anything could unite us, it’d be a theme park. But the heightened emotions of the trip had chipped away at our stamina, and the endless array of spinning rides made us nauseous and fragile. By sunset, we wanted to go home. Crowds from every corner of Disneyland converged on the massive castle where the twilight fireworks spectacular was due to begin. After two hours of standing there waiting, cramped and unmoving, we wondered why it was taking so goddamned long.

  ‘This is going to be crap,’ I said. ‘Does anyone else’s legs hurt?’

  ‘Speaking of crap,’ Michelle said, rubbing her stomach, ‘I really need to take a shit.’

  ‘Can’t you wait?’ Mum scolded. ‘We didn’t fly all the way to Hong Kong just to miss this. Plus you’ll never get back through the crowds this way.’

  Michelle bent over a little in pain.

  ‘So, what is this show?’ Tammy asked, flicking through the pamphlet. ‘Is it just fireworks and Disney characters dancing?’ She sounded unimpressed.

  Mum’s face darkened and we knew not to press her. We’d learnt not to overstep the mark. Anything could set her off and it would end in tears. After we had stood there in silence for a while, someone eventually spoke up.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ they asked, ‘if Minnie Mouse came out of the castle right now? But instead of smiling and dancing, she just put her hands on her cheeks and screamed to the crowd, “I was raaaaped!”’

  For some reason, we all doubled up laughing. It wasn’t long before we started taking turns scripting out the scenario: Minnie Mouse would come out of the closed doors, her dress shredded, pleading for help, before one of Snow White’s seven dwarves dragged her back into the
castle and slammed the door shut. The crowd – holding showbags and dressed in Mickey Mouse ears – would hear muffled screams, but would clap softly, thinking it was part of the show. The screaming would continue as the fireworks were lit, exploding all around us, silencing Minnie’s pleas for help, while the crowd stood there, baffled and confused. God it felt good to laugh.

  ‘What’s wrong with us?’ I said, wiping tears from my eyes. ‘Why are we laughing at this?’

  ‘We’re going to hell,’ Tammy said. ‘It won’t be funny any more when one of us actually is raped.’

  ‘We probably deserve to be raped now,’ I said.

  ‘But until that day,’ Michelle pointed out, ‘we’ll be laughing.’

  With that, the lights around the park dimmed and all the tourists started whispering and clapping. A booming timpani and brass section made way for a medley of theme songs, and moving images from Disney’s vaults were projected onto the castle. Mum grabbed my hand tightly, the way she does when she’s overwhelmed and knows she’s going to cry.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘It’s just that Poh-Poh would have liked this,’ she said.

  The fireworks were beautiful. I never thought I’d be the type to get emotional watching a grown man in a dog suit doe-si-doe with Pluto to the soundtrack of Fantasia. And perhaps it was the pent-up emotions of that trip, or because I missed my grandmother, but I started crying a little too.

  Since then, the phrases I was raped! and Until that day, we’ll be laughing! have ended up in The Family Dictionary. They come up every time we’ve chuckled at something tasteless and horrible that might one day actually happen to us – having a stillborn child; limb amputation; brain damage; going on life support; being forced into sex. And every time someone says it, I smile to myself, thinking how strange it is that such hideous jokes can remind me of how I miss my grandmother.

  *

  Right now, I’m putting together the latest edition of The Family Dictionary. This year’s edition will have ninety-six entries. It’s not a universally loved thing. Inevitably, over Christmas, someone is bound to be offended or confused, or feel left out. Sometimes I get the entries wrong. ‘It didn’t happen that way,’ my mother will say, correcting details or giving me facts I couldn’t possibly have known. Or Michelle will interject gravely: ‘That’s not actually what slitoris is.’

  ‘Then what does slitoris mean?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s a fancy word for vagina.’ She brightened up. ‘Because it’s a slit with a clit!’

  To most people, The Family Dictionary is a collection of stupid and indecipherable phrases, stories that don’t make sense. Friends have picked it up, flicked through it, only to say, ‘What is this?’ or ‘I don’t get it.’ Sometimes, it’s more pointed: ‘Usually you’re funny, Ben, but this is just shit.’

  When my boyfriend saw the first edition of The Family Dictionary, he’d smile or break into laughter when he recognised a joke. Then he’d ask me to explain certain entries. ‘What is three generations of mud?’ he asked. ‘Or wing-toong-boong-tar-len?’

  I’d explain what the entries meant, correcting his pronunciation along the way, adopting the accents, putting on the voices.

  ‘Right,’ he said, slowly. ‘But some of these …’ He didn’t have to say it. They were lame and weird, nonsensical and not funny. For a moment, I was offended and we had a small argument. I took The Family Dictionary out of his hands, stomped around and closed doors. But a few hours later, to relieve the tension, I broke into a dance wearing a red helmet and suspenders, something that made us both laugh for reasons that don’t make sense, and neither of us completely remembers. I’d probably remember if I’d written about it at the time, but it’s gone now.

  No one else is obsessive-compulsive enough to document all this, so I’m the one responsible for the mistakes I make in putting the thing together. Inevitably, I’ll get stuff wrong. There are some things about my family I think I know, some things that are impossible to understand, and some things I don’t really get. And every year, when I go to compile The Family Dictionary, I’m reminded how flawed my memory is, and how impossible it is to remember things in detail. I know that years from now, we’ll pick the dictionary up and come to the conclusion that we were childish and stupid and relied a lot on non-sequiturs and foul jokes for laughs. But until that day, we’ll be laughing.

  Baby Love

  It’s a small miracle that more mothers don’t kill their children. My mother said that although she’d never experienced post-natal depression, she’d read about it in magazines and instinctively understood where it came from. ‘You know, it’s those mothers who want to kill their baby,’ she said. ‘Like that woman from Blue Lagoon, the one with the eyebrows. It’s natural with all those hormones, I think. Some animals have it too, like those kangaroos that don’t want their babies in their pouch anymore. Oh, and that movie about camels, The Story of the Something-something. Did you see it? Very touching.’

  Still, my siblings and I weren’t put off by her negativity. When we were old enough to have children of our own, we discussed our options at the dining table. Were we going to adopt? How many would we have? Would we prefer an older boy or an older girl? Was it okay to have an only child? What would we call them? In the middle of our discussion, Mum snickered from across the kitchen and warned us off the idea. ‘Ha, you want to have kids?’ she asked in Cantonese. ‘Don’t even bother. No one should have to have kids. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t have had them.’

  It was hard not to take this personally. We stared at her, open-mouthed and offended, before mobilising as a unit and howling her down in protest: ‘What are you saying? You wish we were never born?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, no, you don’t get it. I enjoyed motherhood. Having five kids, being a full-time mum, all of that. What I’m talking about is if I were born now, as a completely different person. I’d get my degree or career first, then maybe have two kids only: no more. Definitely not five.’

  Tammy, Michelle and I – the three youngest kids – glared at Candy and Andrew hatefully. If history had been rewritten, the three of us would have been the abortions.

  To be fair, we also needed to consider what childbirth did to a woman’s body. Over the course of twenty years, my mother’s body underwent a remarkable and cruel transformation, from a petite, small-waisted Chinese-Malaysian beauty to a pumping, sweating baby machine that spat out five children in quick, bloody, semi-automatic succession. In some mammals, I think, this many children is referred to as a litter.

  Mum also said childbirth was unbearably, gratuitously painful. When I once asked her to compare and rate each of our births – which was easier, which was faster – she balked. ‘No birth is easy!’ she exclaimed. ‘Of course a man would ask that question. Men can’t even begin to imagine. Can you imagine squeezing a lemon coming out of your penis-hole? Yes, yes! That’s what it’s like! I’d like to see a man squeeze lemons out of his penis-hole. OUT OF YOUR PENIS-HOLE, BENJAMIN. You can’t even imagine, can you? A whole lemon – with the points on each end and everything, except this lemon has limbs. Out of your penis-hole. PENIS. HOLE.’

  She delved into the more graphic details of childbirth for my sisters: how children robbed you of calcium while in the womb and weakened your teeth; how pregnancy made you want to hurl at the slightest smell; how for weeks after giving birth, you walked around uncontrollably leaking blood and milk all over the place, like you’d been shot. I usually had a strong stomach for gore, but her frank descriptions left me feeling light-headed.

  ‘Plus, every woman’s vagina tears when they have their first child,’ she continued. ‘With your first-born, you’re bound to get stitches.’ When she was in labour with Candy, she underwent an induced labour before her doctor said words no woman should ever have to hear. ‘Jenny,’ he said gravely, holding a syringe to the light, flicking it with his fingers. ‘What I’m going to do now is put a needle in your vagina, then I’m going to cut it with a scalpel.’

  In retrospect, Mum said, she was glad he sliced her open. Nowadays, she said, some doctors let your vagina split open naturally, insisting it was better than cutting you with a blade and stitching you up. ‘No way,’ Mum told my sisters. ‘Letting it tear will make you look like you have third-degree burns down there. My only advice to you is this: If you have children, don’t let your vagina tear. Tell your doctor: stitch.’ Still, she suspected that after five children, none of it really made a difference. ‘After that many childbirths, your vagina meat goes all f loppy,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Not so stretchy. Dingly-dangly.’