I opened to the page where I had drawn me and Isaac. It was him, on that page, with his widow’s peak and his long legs and his freckled face. But it wasn’t me. The girl I had drawn kissing him was thin and had smooth, straight hair that shimmied down her back like a bridal veil. She had skinny arms that reached out to Isaac, a delicate hand that touched the tips of his fingers. His greasy cheese-and-bacon fingers.
I shut the diary. The thought of ever opening it again made me retch.
MAMA
The question ‘where are you from’ is a curious one. Some people get offended by it. Some people need to know the answer to understand a family. I would like to ask my mother this question. Where are you from, Mama?
My mother has no accent. This became clear to me not long after we arrived in Australia, when I’d hear her speak with other mothers. Their voices were distinct – their consonants nasal, their vowels long. But my mother, her voice was neutral, her words flat and sharp. Her voice is from nowhere. It has no story.
‘What’s for tea?’ says the checkout lady at Woolworths. I’m loading the groceries onto the belt with my mother. I like shopping with her. It’s nice to spend time together, even if all we talk about is the price of grapes or which brand of frozen chips is better.
‘Sorry?’ says my mother. She couldn’t hear the woman over the store intercom announcing that Tim Tams were on special.
‘What’s for tea? You’ve got some interesting ingredients here.’
Australians speak in their own way. They have their own words. Tea means dinner. Ta means thanks. Tim Tam means chocolate biscuit.
If my mother did have an accent, it would be an amalgam of the places she’s lived. She was born in Egypt. When she was three, she moved to Melbourne. When she was ten, she returned to Egypt and went to a boarding school. When she was sixteen, she lived in America on exchange. When she was thirty-five, she moved to Brisbane. But none of this past is detectable in her voice.
‘Oh,’ says my mother. She hates these questions, because if she answers, it inevitably leads to more questions. We’re having messa’aa, but this would mean nothing to the checkout lady. So she says, ‘Eggplant … bake.’
Bake. Another Australian word. Everything that goes into the oven is a bake. This borrowed word sounds strange in my mother’s mouth.
We pack the bags into the trolley. The lady hands Mama the receipt. ‘Thanks,’ says my mother. She does not say ‘ta’.
I’ve gotten into the habit of double-booking myself. Not intentionally – I just don’t want to disappoint either of my parents, and my mother has a habit of thinking I will be at the house every night for dinner, even though she knows logically that sometimes I will have to visit Baba. It’s my fault, because sometimes I don’t have the heart to tell her I won’t be eating her food.
She doesn’t talk to Baba. She hasn’t since the divorce, but sometimes she talks about him. This is another word that stands out in her otherwise uninflected words. She says it like this: faaatha. As if she’s putting on a mock Australian accent. But that’s just how she says it. Faaatha. The word is unnatural in her mouth, just like bake.
She tells me that my father isn’t a bad man, they’re just different. This sounds like something someone in a movie would say: We just didn’t fit together. I want to know why they didn’t know that from the beginning. My father carries the place he is from in his voice. You can see it in his home. The woven carpet. The open Qur’an. The smell of kofta spices in his kitchen on Sunday afternoon. He doesn’t hide it. He would say messa’aa and expect people to figure it out. But my mother is different.
At home, she ties her hair up in a high bun. She does this when she cooks so her neck doesn’t get too hot. I understand, because we have similar hair. Nana likes to peer over Mama as she cooks. She often surveys in this way. Mama looks nothing like Nana, but everything like her father. I am told this over and over. This man I never met held the only evidence of where my mother is from, beyond city or country. He was the only lead to her story.
I have to go, because Baba is waiting for me.
‘Enjoy your time with your faaatha,’ she says. It doesn’t sound genuine.
BABA
I watch my father eat his dry chicken breast in Kofta Burger. We’ve developed a habit of coming here after his treatment because it is nearby and halal, and he has started to eat only halal meat again. He ordered the chicken despite the doctor telling him he needs to double his red-meat intake to replace his blood cell loss. My father says there’s no point in eating the meat at Kofta Burger because there’s no blood in it anyway.
Two kids are jumping on the seat in the booth behind us. My father’s mouth slides down. In Arabic, he says he wants to punch them. Their mother pretends not to sense his anger. I tell him to calm down.
We came in my car because he wasn’t sure if he could drive, but now he insists on driving. He hardly readjusts the driver’s seat, his puffer vest pushing up to his chin as he squeezes into the space I usually take. A prayer is muttered, a key is turned, and he backs out without looking.
Soon he is doing forty under the limit, in the middle of the road. A car edges past and honks.
‘Hey, you facking idiot,’ my father yells out the window. The driver flips him off. My father doesn’t see it, because if he did, I would have known. I tell him again to calm down.
My father never swore when my parents were together. It was only afterwards he started incorporating these new words into his vocabulary. It feels like an acknowledgement that I am now adult enough to handle it. To understand.
We stop at the petrol station because I’m almost on empty. He asks me why I’m always running the tank down, and I ignore him. I get out and fill up with ’95.
‘Eh, da? Why ’95? Ninety-eight is always better.’
‘Ninety-five is cheaper,’ I say.
He shakes his head. ‘Always about money, just like your facking mother.’
The driveway of his temporary accommodation is long, shared with a couple of other townhouses. The place is rented for the week, while he is here getting his chemo. I get out of the car and say goodbye.
He asks me if I want to come in for some tea, so I do.
He says it’s not him, it’s the chemicals. They muddy his blood and muddle his mind.
I boil the kettle, make us tea, and we sit together for a time.
RULE #4
NO MOVING OUT WITHOUT A HUSBAND
Mama got asthma because of Nana. It wasn’t hereditary; Nana didn’t give her asthma in that sense. But she definitely caused it.
When Mama was sixteen, she was staying at her mother’s house in Agami. She was there for the summer holidays, having just returned from a year-long exchange in America. Agami is a beachy place. With a beach comes heat, and with heat comes bugs. That summer, the bugs in the house had gotten so bad that Nana couldn’t take it. She closed all the windows and all the doors, and emptied a whole can of bug spray. And that’s when Mama had her first asthma attack. The spray filled her lungs and she was on the ground, struggling to breathe. Nana left Mama gagging and ran outside in a panic. She ran to the house of a doctor she knew, who lived on the other side of the town.
I often think about how Mama would have felt, alone in that house, while her mother ran through the streets to get help. There was no one to sit with her, to tell her that she wouldn’t suffocate. She just had to wait and see if her mother would come through. I wonder if she thought that was the end.
Eventually, Nana came back with the doctor, who had Ventolin, and Mama recovered in no time. It’s a funny story, and the punchline is chronic lung disease.
✾
In 2003, Nana got her own flat. At first I thought it was because she wanted her own space, and in a way that was true. She liked having her own kitchen, with her own small fridge. Her own living room, with her own two-seater couch. And her own balcony, from which we could see the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, even if they were so far away they looked like e
mbers on a neighbour’s cigarette. She had lived with us since we moved to Australia, more than a year before, but it was time for her to be on her own.
This sudden grab for independence was an inconvenience to Mama, who worked unsociable hours interning at the hospital and needed Nana’s help. So every morning, my siblings and I would wake up, teeth not brushed, breakfast not had, eyes not open, and tumble into the car. At Nana’s place, we would tumble out again, and be washed, brushed and fed. Mohamed and I were sent off to school, which was a short walk from the block of flats. Aisha was too young for school, so she and Nana would spend the whole day together. Oxford Street in Bulimba was their main hangout, where they both had babyccinos at Riverbend bookshop, followed by a walk to the park or the library. They’d be back at the apartment by the time Mohamed and I returned.
When we’d get home each evening, back to Mama and Baba, Aisha would tell our parents about her day with Nana. ‘When we were walking to the café,’ the three-year-old said once, ‘the pam cacked’ (the pram cracked) ‘and the man’ (in the shop they had broken down in front of) ‘said “I can fix it” – but he didn’t have a hammer!’ Classic man, making promises he can’t keep, Nana would add. ‘So, he gave us a new one!’
Baba found this story amusing. So amusing, he repeated it often. ‘When we were walking to the café, the pam cacked,’ he’d say, in mimic. The story of the cacked pam and the man with promises who saved the day became family folklore.
We spent more time at Nana’s flat than we did at our house. On the shared driveway, we drew chalk landscapes, we burst water balloons, we threw Halloween parties all year round. According to Nana, none of the other residents in the block cared as long as we were having fun.
On summer holidays, we could bring our friends to Nana’s house. Mohamed often played Xbox with boys on the tiny TV that was mounted to the wall, the air-conditioning blasting. Australia had strange weather – even when it was blistering hot, rain clouds sometimes hovered, threatening to let loose.
Because Nana didn’t drive, she walked, caught the bus or got lifts everywhere. It was for the best that she didn’t drive, because I couldn’t imagine Nana following road rules. I couldn’t, for example, see her stopping at a red light, or driving on the left side of the road, or respecting the boundaries of a footpath just because it was what you were supposed to do. She hated being told what to do. ‘I spent my whole marriage with your grandfather being told what to do. I will do whatever the bloody hell I please.’
Nana had had many men in her life. She was married more than once. I’m not sure exactly how many times, but they all ended. Her first marriage, to my grandfather, was the one I have heard most about. They met at university. They hadn’t known each other for very long before they got engaged. Pictures of their wedding show Nana in a gown adorned with lace, which had been handmade and imported from England. She still keeps these pictures in an album. Whenever we pull them out, she’s sure to remind us all of how ugly her ex-husband was. ‘My wedding dress, though,’ says Nana, ‘was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.’
Nana was born in Cambridge to an English mother and an Egyptian father. They had met at university too. Her mother converted to Islam, and they moved to Alexandria when Nana was two. There are pictures of her parents in the album as well. Her mother, white as a lily. Her father, the epitome of tall, dark and handsome. Her father died not long after Mama was born. She recounted their last meeting: ‘Darling. Sweetheart. Don’t you have any clothes?’ Nana mimicked the gesture he made with his glass towards her outfit. Whisky was in his glass, she reminded us. ‘Of course there was none of this backward “no alcohol” business back then,’ said Nana. ‘He asked if I had the money to buy something new. I don’t need new clothes. I’m comfortable enough, I said. But I wasn’t. Not at all. Never let your husband touch your money. Never let a man touch your money. You hear me? Never.’
One overcast day, Nana packed Aisha into the pram. Mohamed had friends over to play Xbox. On their way out, they crossed paths with one of Mohamed’s friends and his father, dropping him off.
‘It looks like it might rain,’ said the father.
‘I know. But I have to get out. Can’t stay in all day! Or I’ll suffocate,’ said Nana with a coquettish laugh.
Aisha let out a cough that sounded like she was getting a cold. The man looked concerned. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘well, how ’bout this. On my way to collect the boy this afternoon, I’ll pick you girls up from the park. That way, you get home before it starts.’
‘Oh, would you? That would be lovely.’
The air was so humid it was hard to breathe. The walk from the apartment to the café usually took half an hour, but Aisha was so overheated and restless they had to detour into shops every few minutes, for the air conditioning. The shopkeepers would look at Nana as she stood there, buying nothing, sticky hair drying, not even pretending to browse.
Once they reached the café, they ordered a babyccino for Aisha and, this time, a large mug of English breakfast for Nana. Two tea bags. No sugar. Milk on the side. She liked her tea brewed strong, extra strong. Nothing was worse than too-white tea.
Afterwards, they walked to the park. They kept their pace up because the man would be there to pick them up soon. They wouldn’t have much time to spend at the park, but at least they would have a ride home.
The clouds were dark when they arrived at the playground, and it was starting to spit. Nana sat on a platform, part of the play equipment, to shelter from the rain. Aisha sat in her pram, coughing the hot air from her lungs. The mesh canopy above started dripping.
Nana and Aisha were abandoned in the park during the torrential rainstorm. They were stuck standing under the canopy, waiting for the man who had made a promise. Nana could have walked to the shop nearby and called my father. He would have been home. It was the weekend, and he had a car. But she didn’t. She waited for the man.
He eventually showed up, two hours late.
‘How are we, girls? Bit wet out. Told you!’ said the man as he folded and packed the pram into the boot of his car, not acknowledging his tardiness.
‘There’s something about men,’ Nana has said to me, ‘that makes me hate them. They are bossy. They are controlling. They are rude. They say one thing and they do another. They make rules for you and then follow none of them. They are hypocrites. They take, they take, they take, and give you nothing but a headache. Men are pigs, all of them. Don’t get married, if you can help it.’
When Aisha came home spluttering, it was easy to make it seem like Nana’s fault. After all, she was the one who had insisted on going out. She was the one who went to the park instead of staying at the café. She was the one who relied on the man to pick them up on time instead of having her own car. It was all Nana’s fault.
✾
The truth is that Nana didn’t move out of our house because she wanted to. She moved out because Baba told her to.
‘We were in the car,’ said Nana, ‘going to the supermarket, and your father was going on and on and on about Islam. How Islam is the greatest religion, and everyone should be a Muslim. And I said, well, just hold on a minute. Not everyone has to be a Muslim. I’m a Muslim too, you know, and I don’t think everyone should be a Muslim. People can jolly well be whatever they like. And he didn’t like that. We had a big row.’
Despite only living the first two years of her life in England, Nana had a posh accent. As always, it was her word against his.
Baba blamed Nana for a lot of problems that were occurring in our household, and particularly for inspiring her daughter with ideas of the single life. She had somehow lodged the idea that marriage was suffocating. That not only could Mama live without him, but it was impossible to live with him. Nana convinced Mama that having a husband was killing her, and she had to get out.
‘Imagine,’ Baba says to me, ‘living with your mother-in-law your whole life as a married man. Not across the neighbourhood. Not across the street. Not as a next-do
or neighbour. Living with her. It’s not good for the marriage. It’s a nightmare.’
And now here is the real punchline. That man, that father of Mohamed’s friend who left Nana and Aisha out in the rain for two hours, went on to become a very senior Australian politician. Walahi, swear to god. It’s a funny story. That’s how we tell it.
BABA
I’m unpacking his bags. He has signed a lease on an apartment so he can have somewhere more permanent to stay when he comes for his treatments. A familiar place. With him is a shopping bag full of little clumps of spinach, left over from different meals on different days and packaged into individual bags. There is a ziplock of defrosting cooked meat.
‘You have ten boxes of figs,’ I say. ‘Why?’
‘Ten? I do not have ten.’
‘Look.’ I pile them up.
‘I bought seven because they were only one ninety-five each.’
‘Okay. But, I mean, there are a lot.’
‘But not ten.’ He takes a box and rinses the figs. ‘Come have some. They are lovely.’
I sit with my father on the couch.
‘The dark ones are better,’ he says, handing me the one he has just bitten and beckoning for the lighter one I am holding.
The house is plain and relatively empty. There is a box of fragiles on the floor. People say a strong man, a healthy man, can rip a telephone book in half. My father has carefully wrapped each of his cups and his plates in a single leaf from the Yellow Pages.
I take the cups out and place them in the cupboard. I push the plain ones to the back and keep the brightly coloured ones at the front.
‘I want to make this look nice,’ I say, adjusting a floral mug so the flowers show.
‘Thank you, habib.’
I turn the mugs so they are in couples, with the curved handles touching. I stack the plates, which are all white, in two piles. Once I’m done, I fill the box with the crumpled Yellow Pages.
Muddy People Page 5