Something in the World Called Love

by Sue Saliba

  a place in which to be loved.

  and so, one month in, maurice having left kara, kara nearing her first human dissection, simon showing off the t-shirts just printed for the band, mercy maidens, esma sat in her room and signed off in her diary:

  thursday 16th of april, 3.42 p.m,

  starling street. she says she wants to make it a home.

  and a home it became.

  kara stood one night at the white phone in the kitchen, telstra manual in hand. ‘i’m changing the message,’ she said. esma had crept downstairs, hopeful. it was eight minutes before midnight.

  ‘hello,’ kara said into the phone, ‘you’ve called the home of kara, simon and esma. we’re not in right now but please leave a message and we’ll get right back to you.’

  ‘does that sound okay, esma? i’ve erased the one you made for us. it sounded a bit formal and a bit nervous. i know you were only copying the one from before you moved in but i think “home” is better than “residence”, don’t you?’

  ‘of course it is,’ esma said, cold feet on the scrubbed lino. eleven fifty-two p.m. and then she remembered why she’d come downstairs. ‘i thought you were the possum.’ she giggled.

  ‘how could she have got in, unless simon left the toilet window open again?’

  ‘you’re right,’ esma said, biting her lip.

  kara didn’t like the possum since it was ‘unhygienic’ and she’d left notes on the kitchen table for simon, telling him to close the toilet window at night so that the possum didn’t get in and run across the kitchen counter in search of bread and nectarines which she’d been known to do on her nocturnal visits.

  kara was right. how could it have been the possum?

  but still, esma had hoped.

  she’d first heard the possum in the dark of night, waking from her nest of leaves. other possums lived in the holes of trees but this one lived on a ledge between the concrete wall and the leaves of ivy. esma heard the possum shifting beside her as she slept. a mother possum, alone once her baby had slipped to his death one thursday afternoon. too much light perhaps when he should have been sleeping. simon found him on the asphalt path and brought him in. esma dug a hole beside the vietnamese mint and simon and esma invented a prayer for him and each took a favourite thing – simon, a yellow guitar pick; esma, a curl of wool – and pressed it into the ground at the place where they’d laid his head.

  ‘i hope he comes back soon,’ esma said.

  simon nodded. ‘so do i.’

  and so esma was often checking and hoping that she’d see a bulge in the belly of mother possum, that she might not be lonely too long since esma knew what it was to be lonely, to have lost a bit of yourself that you’d thought was there forever. that’s how she’d felt when jen elizabeth left for alaska. it was a december afternoon. ‘i’ve got the research scholarship,’ jen said, closing a letter. esma was fourteen and still shared a bedroom with jen. she loved jen’s organisation, her folded underwear, the pleats in her skirts and her lace-up shoes that she polished every night, one positioned beside the other, a feeling of calm that let esma dream.

  for who can dream – except in fits and starts – without the security of love?

  and jen loved esma or so she said until she went away, and even after. letters arrived:

  dear esma,

  the snow here is as white as minou’s coat. he would get lost inside it and we’d never find him. does he still purr so loud you can’t sleep? it’s daytime here but for you it is night and i hope you are resting and the room is not too lonely without me. i miss you, esma, and i think of you often. i’d like to send you a special piece of ice since it sparkles in so many ways but i’m afraid it would melt inside the envelope and make everything smudged, and besides it wouldn’t be ice any more, would it? so, i guess you’ll just have to believe me and maybe use a bit of your imagination.

  please write back, esma. i miss you, and i worry about you too.

  love, jen

  and it was no surprise that jen would worry. esma believed that bit, because jen had been mother and sister, friend and mentor, hope and fear for esma all along. while esma’s mum slept or smoked or swallowed too many valium, jen ironed and washed and sewed the hems of esma’s skirts with perfect little stitches, so precise they were invisible. while ross edgar chanted, ‘c-a-t cat, o-u-t out,’ and hurled minou through the open back door, jen made a special bed of socks in their bedroom corner and helped esma find minou crouching in the backyard. together they’d carry him inside and calm him on the bed.

  so mother, sister, saviour and dread left that afternoon. december 16th. jen stood in the kitchen reading from the bedhead lamp attached to the cupboard door since the overhead fluorescent light had worn out long ago and no one had replaced it. ‘esma, they say i was chosen for the scholarship. i was the only one. there were fourteen hundred people. i can’t believe it.’

  but esma could believe it, because jen was smart and always had been. she was the mathematics champion of the entire school at fourteen and could hold every word of a page in her head after scanning a book once.

  esma was waiting, that was it. she’d always been waiting for jen to leave although she’d deny it if you asked her. ‘we’ll get a house together, one day, won’t we,’ esma had whispered, too soft for jen to hear. ‘we’ll have a room for minou and one for me, one for you as well with a door in the wall that leads to mine.’ and it was only later, when jen was collecting her papers to finalise her passport, that she came across the diagram: house to dream in, by esma mae alexander, aged eight-and-a-half years old.

  that was all a long time ago, and esma, now eighteen, knew home was not a thing of crayon and childhood dreams.

  she pressed her spine against the stained carpet floor. kara was sleeping on the other side of the bedroom wall. simon was finding his way back from a gig at the esplanade. jen was searching glaciers and sending letters to esma that esma never returned. and esma practised a foreign language inside her head. jai, ra, tameet; heart, ankle, bird. she heard the words of another place she thought might replace jen, might replace loss, emptiness and anger. ‘why did you go to live in thailand?’ david from bundoora first asked when he sat beside her in their tuesday night thai class. the board was filled with a foreign alphabet, an impenetrable script.

  ‘i went for love,’ she said, and he imagined her the tragic participant of an exotic love affair and said, sheepish, silly, already inferior, ‘i went to help my mum with her shopping.’ and esma kept to herself the memories of those endless family outings and boring staff-room conversations she’d had to endure the previous year in a dusty town too far east of Bangkok. she’d managed to turn most of it into fiction, but somehow certain facts remained certain facts.

  like prasit, the telephone technician with the broken teeth, pregnant girlfriend (who esma didn’t know about) and passion for foreign currency. even his perfect skin and soft language against her in the middle of the night couldn’t transform the truth.

  and the truth is a thing in need of transforming if love is to enter the world. that’s what esma thought when she came home from thailand the previous october and set to writing a novella. she called it ‘imago’ because it seemed to fit and began:

  returning, he is more beautiful than i remember or imagine. he smokes a cigarette and i watch; follow the pathway of his movements, and later can’t remember what we talk of, in those first moments, the moments of my return, when i had come back to a place and forgotten if time existed elsewhere or other or ever, outside these walls.

  throughout that summer prasit became a sophisticated, tortured lover and esma, an alluring, sensual, modern-day marguerite duras returning to an impossible affair. dusty chachoengsao with its prawn farms and too-loud motorbikes developed into an idyllic silk-making town. love was set to thrive and yet esma stopped. five pages from what she knew was the end, she put the novella aside. she should admit the truth: he was ugly, and he never loved her.

  so that was w
hen she saw the ad:

  one housemate required∗

  to share 3 bedroom house opposite carlton gardens. please call kara between 8.00 p.m. and 8.30 p.m. weeknights to possibly arrange an interview.

  Ph: 9347 9248 ∗only vegetarians welcome

  esma had just enrolled in poetry 104 in the english department at melbourne university. she was full of new hope and it was march, leaves falling all around her. for there is something beautiful about autumn, relief or the mere experience that everything does end, after all,

  only to begin.

  that’s what she told herself. pencil in hand, scratching the strange numbers onto the back of her metcard. 9347 9248. where would it be? carlton. and ‘only vegetarians welcome’. she ate meat now that marcello, her chinese doctor, had told her she needed more blood. he’d told her to boil three sheep’s hearts in salted water but she’d settled on a weekly packet of party pies instead. which, of course, meant that she would need somewhere to heat the frozen pastries since it was too expensive to buy pies anywhere but the supermarket. esma and her head of spinning possibilities. she’d bring them to the university and heat them in one of the union cafeteria microwaves. and the problem was solved, except it emerged in another form. what if some aspect of her meat-eating revealed itself to her housemates in another way? through the pores of her skin, for example. she’d overheard a conversation once when she’d gone to ‘vegetarian orgasm’ in gertrude street. ‘it was just foul the smell of him. you could tell he’d eaten a steak the night before.’

  esma looked and looked. there were twenty-five other notices for housemates, she counted each one. but they were promising other things: ‘a relaxed, fun house’, ‘an eco-friendly environment’, ‘a funky pad with two cool guys’, and they were asking for other things too. she knew that.

  and the lure of starling street pulled strong on her, unknown as it was, even when she arrived two days later for the interview kara had arranged for two forty-five. ‘i have a lecture at half past three so i’ll run through things quickly,’ she said. the white kitchen, the blue stairs. esma still couldn’t place it, but she knew this was where she would live,

  at least for the time being, at least until she became what she was meant to become,

  or grew into what she already was,

  or saw it, even for a moment, before turning away.

  but turning away wasn’t something that esma usually did, not forever anyway. she’d held her hands over her eyes when jen left. she’d stopped out the empty space of jen’s bed entering her head. but, bit by bit, she’d moved her hand, peeped out between fingers, and seen

  the empty bed, a vacant wardrobe, the white patch of wall where jen’s horse poster had been.

  her dad might have told her to imagine it otherwise, to see the presence within the absence, or simply to believe that jen was coming back, but esma couldn’t hear her dad by then. not in the way she once had, for he’d died on the other side of the country three months before jen got her scholarship. they’d thrown the burnt remains of him into williamstown beach on a windless day in september, and everything after that had gone silent, except for esma’s mum. ‘if jen gets that scholarship, it’ll just be the three of us. you, ross edgar and me.’

  and esma, right then, felt her choice was between silence and chaos,

  or numbness and madness,

  or shattering apart and staying so so still.

  which is where the germ of kara grew, although its seed was planted long before.

  ‘you can have the room if you give me your hairclip.’ she’d fed esma licorice tea and shown her the bedroom, told her simon was never home, and invited her to inspect the broom closet. and amongst it all was something that esma sniffed and couldn’t resist:

  flight and protection,

  that’s how she saw it.

  beauty and safety, transportation and absolute security,

  dependence.

  in the nest of kara, esma would grow wings.

  ‘you can have the room if you give me your hairclip.’ and esma was not surprised. she’d already glimpsed the red sheen of kara’s bedroom curtain, crushed silk inside the frame of the window, perfectly inside the frame.

  as if beauty could be contained and measured, after all, made to last,

  relied on to never fade,

  and kara would make sure of that.

  six weeks after esma moved in kara thanked her for the hairclip.

  ‘do you want to see where i’ve put it?’ she said. it was the first time esma had been invited to step into kara’s room, although, of course, there would be many times after that.

  ‘i keep it beside the feather maurice gave me,’ she said.

  it was inside a wooden box. esma saw it resting on black silk.

  ‘you’ve made it look beautiful,’ esma said.

  ‘it was beautiful when i saw it,’ kara said. ‘i just rescued it, that’s all.’

  and esma, in that minute, felt made of glass, like she could be seen right through and into, and she willed herself to be still, very still,

  and say no more.

  since kara, dark, perfect and intelligent, seemed to know her so much already.

  ‘tell me about your boy in thailand,’ kara said. ‘i bet he was beautiful.’

  esma remembered that she’d murmured something about prasit when kara had seen her unpacking the string bracelet from thailand.

  ‘i bet he was gorgeous,’ kara said.

  and there inside the silk and perfume of kara’s room, esma felt prasit transform once again. he was no longer the nondescript boy in his cheap shiny soccer top but instead the seductive lover of her fiction.

  ‘yes, he was beautiful,’ she said. ‘i really miss him. it was so tragic what happened to us. i mean that we couldn’t be together.’

  ‘that’s so awful,’ kara said, ‘when real love is stopped by the conventions of the world – culture, rules, people’s fears.’

  and sitting side by side on kara’s bed, kara took esma’s hand and held it in her own, pulled esma’s face towards hers and said very softly, ‘i can see why he loved you.’

  and later, in her room alone, esma could not stop going over the look in kara’s eyes, the touch of kara’s fingers around her hand, the words that kara had spoken to her.

  how wonderful and awful all at once. part of her wanted to open the window and float to the sky and part of her wanted to burrow beneath her mattress and hide away forever. every time she thought of the moments in kara’s bedroom she became happier and more terrified, excited and more fearful, until she was scared things had changed in a way from which they couldn’t be changed back. how frightening. perhaps, after all, she’d liked things the way they were in the past, when they were known within the boundaries of her aloneness.

  that was when she noticed the money book on the floor beside her bed. it was half buried by papers and she picked it up, pushed her back against the wall, and studied its contents.

  it was her budget book, really, but she called it ‘the money book’ because her mother had called her own mess of numbers and impossible necessities ‘the budget book’. in semi-darkness her mother would sit at the kitchen table, eyeing her scrubbed-out arrows and re-inked ones that spelled a world made safe. no, nine-year-old esma wouldn’t have to take a note to her teacher next week to explain that she couldn’t afford to pay the twelve dollars fifty for the trip to the zoo. instead, they’d get more credit at the milkbar and pay the initial part of the bill next pension day. ross edgar would have to go without the glue he wanted for his slug-gun, and jen could make do another fortnight before they bought new shoe polish. all could be rearranged, at least when her mother existed above the surface. but even then, even so, there was something frightening about the budget book, something that esma wished to escape.

  that’s why she’d covered hers in black satin and called it ‘the money book’. no arrows were allowed and she tried hard to make the contents conform to a rational order and, unlik
e her mother, not allow them to be pushed or pulled by emotional whims. like the desire for flowers, postcards of her favourite buddhist nun, or photocopies of pessoa’s poems or rumi’s declarations of love. she knew there was a pull towards all these things inside her, which made her lost and unseaworthy, and most of all completely afraid when she woke, for she always awoke with the world bright and fast and staring at her. and she was unprepared for it, adrift.

  the money book, esma thought, holding its sure black surface against her chest as she sat hard against the wall. the money book was the one place she could feel herself firm, anchored. she opened its most recent page.

  she was completely untouchable, lost in numbers and lines so she didn’t hear the knock on the door.

  ‘esma.’ simon was pushing the door open by the time she realised he was there. ‘esma, sorry to disturb you but i’ve brought home some pastizzi from my mum. i thought you might like to come and have some.’

  he was dressed in a suit and leather shoes. it seemed he hadn’t changed since coming back from the maltese community centre where he helped out in the legal service on a wednesday night.

  ‘okay, if…’

  ‘if what?’ he said.

  ‘nothing.’ esma was at the door now and looking towards kara’s bedroom.

  ‘kara’s gone out,’ he said.

  ‘oh, okay.’ esma was suddenly relaxed and followed simon downstairs. ‘i, ah, just didn’t want to disturb kara, you know, if she was studying and we were downstairs talking.’

  simon nodded. he seemed more interested in the pastizzi. ‘i think it should be on about two hundred degrees,’ he said, making his way to the oven door.

  ‘did you help your mum make them?’

  ‘no, no, they’re a gift to me from her and my dad.’

  ‘a gift?’

  ‘yeah. for getting my first high distinction at uni.’