by Liam Pieper
As they ride to the airport, Sasha feels a sudden wave of nausea, thinks she’s going to throw up, but it passes. Still, she is falling to pieces – the pins and needles shooting up and down her limbs are so intense that she has to keep checking the body parts to see she has not dropped them like a panicked lizard. Her fingertips graze her knee, her bicep, her belly, just to check they’re still there.
She catches the driver watching her in the mirror and forces herself to stop, doesn’t want to draw any more attention to herself than necessary. She is convinced that if she looks in a mirror she will find a broken mess of a women, hair astray, bullets of sweat running down her cheeks, but when she climbs out of the car and checks her reflection she appears cool and impeccable behind her shades. Next to her, Velli plays with her doll, absorbed. She pays no attention to the world around her and doesn’t seem to notice as Sasha reaches over her to take Connor’s hand. He smiles; she smiles. They wear their goofy, stupid grins all the way to the security checkpoint.
‘Airport tax.’ The guard says, straight faced, and she almost laughs, this bold-faced request for a bribe, one last little theft before she escapes this place, but she hands over everything she has in her bag, regretting nothing until seconds afterwards, when it occurs to her she might have to pay a bribe on the other side. She dismisses the thought. A wonderful sense of velocity is sweeping her along – whatever happens is out of her hands now, and there’s no sense in worrying about it.
Sure enough, the customs officer barely glances at her passport, or at Velli’s, doesn’t seem curious why a white woman is travelling with a brown child.
Once they are safely through customs, Sasha kneels to talk to Velli. ‘Do you understand where we are going?’ The girl shakes her head. ‘We are going to a new home.’
On impulse, Sasha takes Velli’s hand, squeezes it. Connor reaches out and ruffles the little girl’s hair, rests his hand on Sasha’s shoulder. On Velli’s lap is the Hello Kitty backpack that he bought her, that they packed with her few belongings and then filled with candy bars and picture books for the journey.
Watching Connor help to fill her backpack with treats, Sasha realised she’d been wrong about him, that under all his rough edges there is still something pure at the heart of him.
Late at night, when he thought she was asleep, she’d heard him zipping up her suitcase. When she investigated the next morning, she found he’d lined the bottom of both of their bags with candy bars, Velli’s favourite, each wrapped in foil, and placed a battered copy of On the Road inside hers. He had scribbled out ‘Kerouac’ on the front cover and neatly printed ‘Keroosh’.
She smiles at the memory, reaches for the book in her handbag like prayer beads, runs a hand down its spine and feels a sudden thump of gladness for the life about to begin. And, of course, a new life for Velli. Somewhere clean and bright, with hospitals and classrooms and swimming pools and weekend soccer games.
In her own way the guru was right all along, or half right, because suffering did make the world a better place. To endure the slings and arrows of fickle, vindictive fate gives you a chance to rise above it, to become kinder. You take on a little bit of the total suffering yourself and, at the end of the day, you can make life better for someone else. We suffer not for ourselves but for the greater good. One foot in front of the other – you punch out on the cosmos and leave the place a little bit better than you found it.
When they land in Indonesia, the passport control line moves at a brisk clip, almost bewilderingly fast after the grinding chaos of everything she’s experienced in India. They split up – she’s travelling on her American passport and because she’s overstayed her visa in India, Connor reckons it’ll draw less attention if she goes through on her own, rather than going through with him and his fake papers. She can see Connor tense up as he approaches the desk with the fake passports, but the clerk barely looks at him and Velli, just stamps the pages and waves the two of them through.
Sasha’s line is barely moving. The woman ahead of her has some sort of problem with her visa and is arguing loudly with the clerk. Her accent – loud, middle-American and outraged – rings through the hall like an echo of Sasha’s old life. She smiles to herself, feeling nostalgic and free from all that forever. When she reaches the head of the line she speaks softly, politely, and the clerk seems grateful, stamping her passport without a word.
Velli and Connor are well ahead of her, swept up in the sea of people in customs. With no checked baggage they are being guided past the customs desks and Velli is tugging impatiently at his hand, anxious to get out into the open air.
As Sasha rolls her own bag through, a woman in a neat green uniform and hijab calls her over to open it. Sasha’s thoughts are elsewhere as she does so; she feels her stomach rumbling, hopes there is a McDonald’s on the other side of the sliding doors – she would die for a cheeseburger right about now. Her craving is so fierce she scarcely pays attention to the woman rifling through her luggage, pulling out the candy bars, ripping open their foil wrapping.
‘Hey!’ protests Sasha and then, when she sees what’s hidden there, the jumble of pills wrapped in foil, her breath catches in her throat. She looks up and sees Connor and Velli hand in hand as they walk towards the automatic doors of the arrivals hall. He stops, kneels down, and gently takes her backpack off her, lets it dangle loosely from his fingers. He glances back over his shoulder as police start to surround Sasha, crowding around, screaming, and he catches her eye, for just a second, as the doors slide shut.
Acknowledgements
Nadia Bailey, Lucy Ballantyne, Antonia Baum, Cate Blake, Rei Cheetham, Nikki Christer, Gayatri Dhumatkar, Elizabeth Flux, Paul Garland, Michelle Garnaut, Letitia Gregory, Miriam Gregory, Grace Heifetz, Nikhil Hemrajani, Fiona Inglis, Johannes Jakob, Justyna Jochym, Maciej Jochym, Nikki Lusk, McCOOOO!, Shane Pieper, Louise Ryan, Dr Arshia Sattar, Pascal Seiger, Pallavi Sharda, Rahul Soni, Sofija Stefanovic, Shubhangi Swarup, Laura Thomas, Nadia Toukhsati.
All the Random Penguins – without the tireless support of the whole team, Australian literature would be moribund as.
It was conceived at Sangam House, under the kind hospitality of Nrityagram in Hessaraghatta.
Thank you.
Liam Pieper is an author and journalist. His first book was a memoir, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, shortlisted for the National Biography Award and the Ned Kelly Best True Crime award. His second was the Penguin Special Mistakes Were Made, a volume of humorous essays. He was co-recipient of the 2014 M Literary Award, winner of the 2015 Geoff Dean Short Story Prize, the inaugural creative resident of the UNESCO City of Literature of Prague, and the 2018 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow for Australian Writing. His first novel, The Toymaker, received the 2016 Christina Stead Fiction Award from the Fellowship of Australian Writers.
ALSO BY LIAM PIEPER
The Feel-Good Hit of the Year
Mistakes Were Made
The Toymaker
HAMISH HAMILTON
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa | China
Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Hamish Hamilton, 2020
Text copyright © Liam Pieper, 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
Cover design by Laura Thomas © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd.
Cover photo by Avspream/Dreamstime.
ISBN: 9781760144883
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
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