As I pulled up my wet skort, squeezed it tight to remove the excess and buttoned it over my stomach, I decided that there was no point in pretending. I wiped up what I could. I opened the door.
On the way home, a cane toad sat in the middle of the road, where it had been soaking up the rain. Its eyes glowed an almost pretty yellow. I watched as headlights approached and a car came into view, leaving a splatter of guts in its wake.
The rain had stopped. There was nothing to explain away why I was wet.
BABA
Baba says there is a nice boy he wants me to meet. He brings it up when he knows he has got me: as we enter the supermarket. I can’t make a scene, and we came in one car, so I can’t escape. He brings a picture up on his phone. He’s already friended the boy on Facebook. This is the third he has found. I walk ahead of him because I don’t want to talk about it.
My father cleans the trolley handle with an alcohol wipe. His reduced immunity concerns him most when he sees snotty-nosed kids in public spaces. He doesn’t try to catch up to me because he knows I will wait for him, always.
‘He works at a chemist,’ he says, when we are in Fresh Produce. He asks me to find a good avocado. I squeeze until one gives a little under my thumb. It is in its prime.
I am careful not to say anything that will entertain the idea of me getting to know a complete stranger just because he is Muslim. ‘Baba, I don’t think I would get along with a pharmacist. I’m not into that sort of thing.’
‘No, no. He is not a pharmacist. He works at a chemist.’
We avoid the brown bananas. My father is picky enough to pass over the yellow bananas too. He likes green bananas, because they will keep in his house as long as possible. This is despite the fact that he leaves them to go brown anyway. He saves them with the intent of making banana bread, even though he lacks a recipe.
‘Just get to know him, just as friends,’ says my father.
I want to ask when it became okay to be friends with boys, but I know the answer to that. ‘Where do you find these people?’ I ask instead.
‘He lives in Sydney. He is my friend.’
‘Is he?’
‘His father is my friend.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. My Facebook friend. Just get to know the boy. Okay? As a friend. That’s it.’
‘I already have enough friends.’
My father is unhappy with the bananas I’ve picked out. He removes them from the trolley and chooses a bunch that looks almost identical. He pulls out an alcohol wipe and cleans his hands. He says he wants a grandchild before he dies. He’s been saying this for years, but I don’t find it funny anymore.
RULE #10
NO FIGHTING WITH YOUR BROTHER
I first learned the word fuck from Mohamed. We had only just arrived in Australia, and I was watching Hi-5, counting down using different combinations of my stubby little fingers. One, two, three, four … Hi-5. One combination left, my middle finger last in the air. Mohamed told me that meant something rude.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Don’t say it,’ said Mama to Mohamed, watching from the couch.
Mohamed came close to me, leant over and whispered, ‘It starts with f and rhymes with duck.’ I said it out loud and Mama smacked him hard on the back of his curly black head.
‘Ibn el kelb,’ she muttered.
Another word you were not supposed to say out loud was the c-word. They called it the c-word at school because it was the dirtiest word imaginable. They said things like dick and cock and knob all the time, but apparently they were not as dirty as the c-word.
I don’t remember when I learned the word in English. I do remember, though, learning it in Arabic. We hardly ever had cous cous at our house. When Mama made it for dinner, I said, ‘Thanks for the cous, Mama,’ and she hit me in the back of the head. Mohamed leant over and whispered what cous meant in Arabic. Mama came back to wallop his head too.
When Mohamed was thirteen, he punched his first hole in the wall. The wall, in the hallway of our house, was an olive colour. It was worse than the blush pink it covered.
Mohamed punched the wall after fighting with Baba, and he left afterward. I figured Mohamed had wanted to punch Baba but was too scared. When Mohamed punched the wall, he must have had a lot of words he wasn’t supposed to say in his head.
Mohamed had a guitar on his bedroom wall. This wall also had a hole in it, from opening his bedroom door with too much gusto. The guitar was an acoustic that my parents had bought for him. He had defaced it with a Sharpie: drawn flowers and, in big curvy letters, the word breathe. Of all the words he could have written, he chose breathe.
When Mohamed was fourteen, he took his first punch to the nose. It was spring 2007 and I was standing up on my bike, riding as fast as I could, and screaming. A magpie, an angry one, was tailing me. She wanted me dead. I rode across the street, not looking where I was going. My shoelace had come untied and was the hitting the wheel with a clang clang clang that let me know that at any moment it could get caught in the gears. I was shouting for someone to help me. People drove by but they didn’t stop. One man slowed, only to flash a smile and then drive on. I started to cry. I didn’t know where Mohamed was; he had sped ahead. The blows to my helmet, the screeching so close to my ear, were too much to bear. The magpie swooped, clicking and squawking as it clawed at me.
My bike was new, a present from Nana. It was black with orange and red flames, and graffiti-style writing on the frame that read SPEED. I had picked it to impress boys. Which boys, I wasn’t so sure. The only boys I hung out with were my brother and his friend Nick. I was only allowed to hang out with Nick when Mohamed was there. Nick was a haemophiliac and his mother didn’t let him ride bikes, so it was just me and Mohamed out on the two-wheelers.
I didn’t like Nick very much. He had a crewcut that showed the sweat pimples on his neck, and would ask me if I had a boyfriend every time he’d see me.
‘Hey. Mohamed’s sister. Come here,’ he’d said the last time he was over at our house. He always called me ‘Mohamed’s sister’, as if it would have been uncool to actually learn my name.
‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ I said.
‘No, come here. I have a secret to tell you.’ He leant over and cupped my ear with one hand. Then, in a quick movement, he slurped on one of his fingers and stuck it in my ear. For a boy whose blood didn’t clot, he had a lot of nerve.
I’d heard that magpies swooped people to protect their babies. They see humans with shiny things as a threat. That magpie was determined to see me go down. I was scared, and I was mad that not a single person stopped to help me. The bird followed me, screeching, hitting my helmet with its beak with every swoop. The sound reverberated in my head. I ducked, too scared to look at it for fear it would take my eye out.
I looked ahead and saw Mohamed standing on the footpath ahead of me. His bike was lying on the ground, and he was staring at the fence of a stranger’s house.
‘It’s going to kill me!’ I yelled. ‘Help!’
As I got closer, I could see that Mohamed wasn’t looking at the fence, but what was sitting on it. A magpie sat still on the wooden planks, staring back at my brother.
‘Kill it!’ I yelled.
‘I stopped and it left me alone,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the bird. He was still. Just staring at it, making eye contact in a moment of calm that betrayed the difference between us. I barrelled past, my assailant bashing my head in the whole way home.
There was no more riding bikes after that. This meant I had to walk to school.
Carly – who remained my friend despite my mishap – would walk home with me. Aisha, in Grade Two, would trail us, sucking on a warm apple Pop Top like a teat. Carly’s favourite thing to talk about was the sealed section in Dolly called Dolly Doctor. Opened by a thin strip of perforated paper, it was filled with secret confessions. She’d read the letters to me as we walked.
‘This one is called “Wormy Problem”,
she said. ‘For the past two years or so, I have noticed that when I poo there are little white things in there that move. Does this mean I have worms?’
‘Ew.’
‘Okay. What about this one? Is it possible to catch A-I-D-S from a public swimming pool?’ She stopped and looked at me. ‘What is A-I-D-S?’
I shrugged.
She shrugged too, and continued. ‘My mum won’t let me go to the local pool because she says she is certain I will catch A-I-D-S, but I don’t think she is right. Is she?’
‘Next,’ I said.
Nana was cooking when Aisha and I got home. I grabbed a Zooper Dooper from the freezer and sat outside. On summer days it was too hot to sit anywhere else. Our yard consisted of a large concrete slab that covered half the lawn. This was intended to be a future patio, but the patio part never happened, so we just had half a yard of concrete. The house would provide enough shade on the concrete in the afternoons to make it habitable. The Zooper Dooper wrapper cut into the edges of my mouth.
Nana called out that there was someone on the phone for me.
It was Carly. ‘Hey, is your brother okay?’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘My brother said he was in a fight.’
‘What? With who?’
‘I don’t know. He just said there was a big fight at school.’
The knob clicked and the front door opened. Mohamed came in, dropped his school bag and headed to the kitchen. His back was sweaty.
‘He just got home,’ I said into the phone.
‘Who are you talking to?’ Mohamed said. I heard the freezer open and shut.
‘Carly.’
‘Who’s Carly?’
‘My friend.’
‘Did you eat the last Zooper Dooper?’
‘I have to go,’ I said to Carly, and hung up the phone. I stuffed the wrapper into my skort pocket.
Mohamed was leaning on the kitchen bench, chewing loudly as he ate a banana. He had a way of clamping his teeth together when he chewed that really pissed me off.
‘Stop,’ I said.
‘Stop what?’ he said.
‘The chewing.’
‘I’m eating. There’s nothing in the house and you took the last Zooper Dooper.’
‘Stop arguing,’ said Nana, peeling potatoes over the sink.
‘You can eat without chewing so loudly. And I didn’t take the last Zooper Dooper.’ As a kind of karmic punishment for the lie, I felt the last bits of syrup in the wrapper drip into my pocket.
He threw the banana skin in the bin. There was a reddish-brown line running down the front of his school shirt. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Bird poo,’ he said, without looking down. A little was crusted on his upper lip.
‘Did you eat it, too?’
Mohamed wiped at his nose. He left the kitchen, heading for his room.
I pulled the Zooper Dooper wrapper from my pocket and stuck it in the bin, flicking Mohamed’s discarded banana skin over it to hide the evidence. Underneath the skin I saw a piece of scrunched yellow paper that looked like a permission slip. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands.
‘Hey.’ Mohamed appeared again, wearing a fresh t-shirt.
‘What?’
‘Do you know how to use the washing machine?’ He was holding his school shirt, crumpled into a ball, in his hand.
The next day I waited until I knew Carly had left before I started walking home. I didn’t want to talk about what had happened.
The walk home seemed longer without Dolly Doctor in my ear. Aisha and I reached the intersection where our road met the school road, and I saw a magpie, dead on the grass near the gutter. There were often dead possums here – the exposed wire that ran along the telephone line above got them. As soon as one possum corpse disintegrated into dust, a fresh, plump corpse would appear on top of it. It was the circle of life. This, however, was the first time I had seen a magpie here. Aisha winced at the sight of it and hid behind me as we walked past.
The phone was ringing again when we got home, and I ignored it.
‘Can you answer that, Soosy?’ called Nana from the kitchen. I ignored her too.
Aisha picked up the receiver. She listened for a moment. I already knew who it was. ‘I don’t want to talk,’ I mimed.
‘She doesn’t want to talk,’ said Aisha into the phone, then said to me, ‘Carly says why?’
‘Tell her because I feel sick,’ I said.
‘She said she feels sick. Okay. Bye.’ Aisha hung up.
Mohamed was unusually late. He didn’t get home until almost five o’clock. He dumped his bag and went to the kitchen, and I followed him. His shirt was clean this time.
‘Where were you?’ I asked. I didn’t expect a straight answer.
‘At school,’ he said into the fridge.
‘All this time?’
‘Yah.’
‘Were you in detention?’
He didn’t look at me. The fridge started to beep. It had been open too long. ‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Cuz I was standing near a fight and got hit by accident. Why do you care?’
‘Can you close the fridge? That sound is annoying.’
I tried to imagine what it would look like, Mohamed fighting someone. I’d never seen him hurt anything but a wall. Mama had told me that when I was a baby and Mohamed was two, I was crying and Mohamed grabbed me by the scruff and held me under his arm. While I was still screaming, he dragged me by my neck across the house. He stopped at Mama’s feet. ‘Baby cy-ing,’ he said.
Mama lost it, thinking he had hurt me. But he had been gentle. He just wanted to let her know that I was upset.
Mohamed and I didn’t speak for the rest of the evening. He went to his room and I could hear him fire up his Xbox.
I wasn’t sure if Mama and Baba knew about the detention. They did not bring it up when they got home, but we were not the type of family to discuss these things. Not when it came to my brother.
I decided not to say anything. We ate Nana’s food, and everyone except Mohamed returned to the living room. We watched the first five minutes of The Simpsons before Baba changed the channel to the Arabic news.
The phone rang again.
‘Soos, go get it,’ said Baba.
I reluctantly got up. ‘Hello?’
‘Hey. Are you okay?’
Carly. Again.
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Aisha said you were sick.’
‘Yeah. I am sick.’
‘What kind of sick?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you head sick? Tummy sick? Too sick to come in to school tomorrow sick?’
‘I don’t —’
‘Period sick?’
‘What? No.’
‘Diarrhoea sick? Are you shitting yourself?’
‘Jesus, Carly, shut up.’
‘Aeeb ya, Soos. Don’t speak like that,’ said Mama from the living room.
‘I’m just sick, okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Carly. ‘How is your brother? Did he do his detention?’
‘How did you know he had detention?’
‘My brother told me.’
‘Your brother is nosy.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Being nosy is better than being aggressive.’
‘Who is aggressive? I’m not aggressive.’
‘Your brother is. He was in a fight.’
‘He was watching the fight and he got hit accidentally. That’s different.’
‘Well, my brother said your brother punched someone because they called him a bad word, and then they punched him back.’
‘What did they call him?’ I wondered if I would need Mohamed to translate this bad word, as with cous.
I could hear Carly cup the phone as she whispered, ‘They called him a Muslim.’
I laughed. ‘That’s not a bad word. Do you mean a terrorist?’
‘Yeah, sorry. Terrorist. They called him a terror
ist. My bad.’
For just a second, I wished I could reach through the phone and punch that girl right in the nose.
BABA
My father asks me what I think the problem is with Mama. I am sitting in his La-Z-Boy. It is stuck and won’t recline, but it rocks, and that is comfortable enough for me. Each rock is a little squeaky, which I am sure gets on his nerves, but I keep doing it.
I tell him there is no problem anymore. My mother asked for the divorce years ago. We were all there, we all saw it. And it is done. It is time to move on.
He says he never understood what went wrong. He has said this before.
‘Does it matter?’ I say. ‘Does it really matter? Aren’t you happy now?’
I ask because I know, in a way, he is. But he looks tired. Despite his condition, he wakes up at four every morning to pray, and does not sleep until midnight.
‘Will you ask her for me?’ he says.
‘I don’t know what you want me to ask. It’s been a long time.’
‘And can you imagine I still don’t know?’ I have irritated him. ‘Stop rocking.’
I realise I have been rocking pretty fast. It is easy to lose myself in the comfort of the rhythm. I move over to a static dining chair. This is where my father sits every morning to pray. On the table in front of me is a pillbox that looks full of Skittles; a sibha, prayer beads; and a plate with a digestive on it. I was, for a time, obsessed with digestives, the chocolate-coated ones. I’d go through boxes. Now I can’t stand the sight of them.
I don’t have to look at my father to feel sorry for him. His sadness is in this chair. There is a collage on the wall that Aisha made him for his birthday. It is carefully curated with old family photos that do not include my mother, in a hope that they will not remind my father of who was behind the camera. We hope he can accept that now there is only him and us. At times, he can.
My father says he’s asked a friend of his, a doctor, what he thinks of the situation.
‘There is no situation,’ I say.
‘He said she must have some mental health.’ He means mental illness. ‘Maybe something is wrong, you know, in her brain. That is what he thinks, and he is a doctor. Because no one would act like this for no reason. For what reason? I am only saying this because I am worried. So you need to ask her.’
Muddy People Page 10