Nails

Her back is perfectly straight, perched on a small black leather stool, her neck curved over the thin table in front of her. The fine bones of her shoulders are pinned back and her hands reach across the table, to hold a stranger’s hand in her own, working fast. She has a white surgical mask stretched across her nose and mouth, elastic bands keeping it taught, tucked behind her ears.

The salon is full, with customers milling around the counter and spilling out the door, impatiently waiting. It is Saturday afternoon, the busiest time of the week. The salon is thrumming with customers talking on their phones, a documentary about Taylor Swift playing silently on loop on a small flat screen TV in one corner, the music rumbling from the CD player in the opposite corner completely mismatched.

Her name tag says Sally, but her real name is Suong – like a fog. Her cousin’s friend who got her the job yells across the salon in Vietnamese, asking her how long she will be. She mutters behind her mask that she is nearly done, and the friend tries to engage her in gossip, she pretends she doesn’t hear.

Suong enjoys her time in the salon, the busy, monotonous work is numbing but she feels a small happiness at the end of every transaction when she sits back and looks at a set of perfectly shaped, shining nails on a stranger’s hands. She has done what was expected of her. Then she sees her own hands, small, dry and wrinkled from chemicals and sun, nails chewed down to the skin and she’s reminded of home. Before reality can creep in, the next customer has swooped into the chair across from her, a new pair of hands before her to clean, polish and shine. She doesn’t have to talk, and she seldom does. All she has to do is concentrate on ten nails at a time and that suits her perfectly.

Her night job is less satisfying, and she struggles to find moments of beauty. Five days a week when she finishes at the nail salon she changes uniforms and reports to the basement carpark of a tall black glass and grey cement office building, just a few blocks away from the food court where she spends her days in the nail salon. She has no name tag here. In fact, she’s not even sure if her colleagues know her name. There is a team of about 30 of them, and 52 floors to cover. By the time they’re assigned their floors for the night, they’ve collected their trolleys and scattered through the building, the offices are deserted. The halls are silent, the air-conditioner off. A few remaining lights leak their glow out into the dark night. There is no noise to fill her head and she leaves each room much as she found it. The desks are still scattered with the debris of a day’s work, left behind by its occupant to return home, to their lives outside of this cylinder of grey. Suong likes the offices scattered with photos. She likes to imagine what those families are doing – sitting around a table, talking about their day, or perhaps the children are already tucked into bed and their parents are reading them stories. Tonight, as she picks up a photo in a heavy silver frame, she stares at two boys standing with chests puffed, fists just peaking out from the arms of oversized blazers, pressed against their thighs, with toothy grins spreading across their faces. She catches herself thinking of her brothers. She hasn’t seen them for a year, she wishes she was reading them a story.

“Hey, you done? I’m going back down.” She’s startled by one of the other cleaners passing by the office door. She silently puts the photo back and pushes her trolley down the hall behind the man who had just spoken to her. She doesn’t know his name.

She silently returns her trolley, collects a pittance of cash, a third of which she has to spend to make the long journey home. She lives with her aunty and uncle in Bankstown. They own a small shop, and live in the apartment above it, with their three adult children. Suong sleeps on a fold out bed in the living area, which she folds up every morning when she wakes. Her own parents still live in Vietnam, she’s been living with her aunty for seven months now, since she stopped going to classes and her parents stopped sending her money. And speaking to her.

She likes it at her aunty’s house. It is small and cluttered, certainly much too small for five adults, but it reminds her of home. There is always a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, filling the apartment with a thick, sour smell.

“Suong, I spoke to David, he’s made an appointment for you tomorrow. He says the lawyer is good, she will help you”, her aunty announced, the second she stepped through the door, thrusting an envelope into her hand. The envelope had been on the kitchen table for a week, she had been avoiding it, she knew it could only be bad news inside.

David was her oldest cousin. He was in his first year of law school at Sydney Uni. He was a great source of pride to her uncle and aunty, and they were a great source of shame to him. His whole family were. But he dutifully helped his mother when asked.

“Aunty I can’t afford a lawyer.” Suong took the letter, which she could see had been opened, and jammed it into her back pocket, without looking at it. She could feel dread radiating from it.

Without saying anything her aunty passed her another envelope, thicker and more tattered.

“Where did you get this?”

“Our friends at the church want to help.” Suong stared at the weighty wad of 20 and 50 dollar notes in her hand and the dread pulsing from her back pocket rose up her body and started surging from her eyes. “It’s ok Suong. You go and see the lawyer tomorrow, 8 am.”

Suong thought to herself she would start going to church more, and she should do more around the house too. 

“Have you heard from my mum?” Suong blurted as though it had just occurred to her, but in fact it was all she had been trying not to think about for weeks. 

Her aunty was walking towards the kitchen, she paused and turned only her head so her response could tumble over her shoulder “no,” she sighed and shuffled on to the kitchen and out of sight. Suong stood paralysed in the doorway.

Suong woke before her alarm to the sound of the shower behind the thin wall next to her bed. Her uncle woke at 4.00 am each day to go to the markets. Suong normally didn’t start at the salon until midday, but this morning she woke from a fitful sleep when her uncle did and she sat in her bed, the two envelopes she had been given last night, resting next to her pillow, waiting for a break in the morning routine of the household so she could shower and get to her appointment. 

She chewed relentlessly on the small stubs of fingernails, and when she couldn’t get to them, on the red raw skin around them, as she waited, staring at the small kitchen table piled with newspapers and teacups, no more than two feet from the foot of her bed. Her uncle emerged from the bathroom, with his towel around his waist and a plume of steam following him. He reached his broad hand out and firmly squeezed her shoulder as he walked past clenching his face at the same time as his hand.

“Su-Su, you’re awake. You want shower?”

“Thanks Uncle.” 

It was raining outside, the thick grey cloud made it feel earlier than it was. The birds were silent, the pavement loudly receiving the rain and one dog in the distance yapped his displeasure. Suong rested her head against the bus window, it was hot in the bus and cold outside, so there was a thin film of dew between her skin and the glass. She watched the headlights of the cars flash by, through the waves of water sloshing all over the road.

When she arrived at the lawyer’s office she was made to wait in her wet clothes in the waiting area for 15 minutes. Suong wore her long black hair pulled back in a bun, and she could feel a thin stream of water trickling down the nape of her neck. She had nothing dry to mop it up with and she was too nervous to ask where the bathroom was. She watched as men and women in suits were spat out of the elevator, each with a coffee in one hand and an umbrella encased in a plastic sheath, in the other. She thought about her mother, how that was what she had hoped for Suong, she had hoped so strongly the weight of it nearly crushed her. And now here she was. This was not the first time a community had chipped in to help her. In Vietnam everyone thought she was so clever, and would do so well in Australia. She had let everyone down. She hoped this time it could be different. She hoped that the lawyer could help her get her visa back, so she could go back to uni and then she was sure her mum would talk to her again. Be proud of her again.

Finally a woman came through the glass door, wearing a navy skirt suit, with a perfectly pressed baby pink silk shirt tucked in to her skirt. She stuck out a perfectly manicured hand, in the same pink as her shirt, only shiny “Sew-ong?”

“You can call me Sally.”