Scattered Pearls

  Prime Law Brokers was at its peak at this time so I could afford to stay in nice hotels and eat in good restaurants. And I started to dress very well – well enough to get noticed. I didn’t buy a lot of clothes, perhaps six or seven outfits all up, but the ones I bought were of good quality and timeless style. I have always believed the saying that ‘fashion comes and goes but style remains’. Many of the dresses I bought around this time I still wear today.

  On a trip to Queensland I dressed in an elegant Boston-green velvet dress and wore a diamond and gold necklace that my parents (demonstrating my father’s greater willingness to draw on some of his wealth in his later years) had brought from Iran. I asked the concierge to direct me to the best seafood restaurant, and when I got there noticed how very polite all the waiters were and how I seemed to attract stares as I crossed the room. I was given a complimentary glass of wine.

  In Adelaide on another trip I booked to eat at the famous Parlamento Restaurant. I entered the room wearing a rich red, beautifully fitted Georgette dress with high heels and a matching handbag. I wore no makeup except for lipstick to match the dress. Again I felt as if the room was watching me, and again I was offered a glass of wine on the house. Now my accent was a positive: I was asked whether it was French or Spanish or Italian. (I assured them it was none of these.) On that same trip I was at the Adelaide airport wearing an off-the-shoulder blue Chanel dress. I was running late for my flight and as I climbed the stairs from the tarmac up to the plane the pilots waved to me from the cockpit. When I took my seat in Business Class, a flight attendant brought me a glass of sparkling wine, courtesy of the captain, and again I was asked if I was French.

  At the Chanterelle at Jessica’s restaurant in Perth on another business trip the owner greeted me effusively. When I ordered the bouillabaisse, he personally helped me put a bib on so that I wouldn’t splash my clothes. After the meal I took the bib off myself; he came past and said, ‘Oh, I was hoping to undress you.’ He later offered to drive me to my hotel, which he did with the utmost respect.

  It was impossible not to reflect on the contrast in the way I was being treated now compared with when I was clumsily making my way around Frankston with my four children, in tracksuit pants and with my hair barely brushed. It seemed that when I dressed smartly, racism and prejudice melted away. Instead of ‘one of them’ I became something exotic. There was something disconcerting about this.

  There was something else I started reflecting on during these trips. It first occurred to me one evening in Sydney. I had dined at a restaurant overlooking the harbour with its iconic bridge and the Opera House, then gone to the foyer of the Sheraton Hotel where I knew there was a piano bar. I sat at a small table enjoying a drink, the music and the overall atmosphere until I found myself staring at the empty chair opposite me. I realised that there was always that empty chair. At every restaurant or café, in every hotel lobby. It had been that way for years.

  I started seeing empty chairs everywhere. Elderly men and women alone on a train or in an aeroplane. Unconnected people. For so many years I had been so busy just keeping up that my being alone had never entered my mind. I now realised that the twins were 14 years old and I had not had a meaningful adult relationship since they were born – in truth, not for many years before that.

  I had no memory of what love was – no knowledge of what it could be other than what I had seen in the movies. I was as naive – perhaps more so – than my own daughters! I started to allow myself to dream. To dream of standing naked in front of a man and him telling me how beautiful I was. Of being touched. Kissed. Made love to. At other times my dreams were more mundane but just as romantic. Of my man walking with me hand-in-hand, dancing with me . . . even just hugging me while I did the dishes.

  A diary entry from this time, written on the train on the way into Melbourne, summarises my situation. It was written at five o’clock in the morning.

  It is years now and I am waiting to find a good friend. Nobody is in my heart. It has been years – 44 years – and I am still alone. God I feel I am sick, my soul is sick. I feel I am old, bad tempered, nervous, sad. My memories continue to take me to a past that I want to run away from.

  Yesterday I came out of the bathroom and started to dress in the hallway. Ali said he wanted to come out of his room. I shouted, ‘No! I want some privacy! I have nowhere to change.’ Ali asked why I was shouting and I said I don’t know. It is just work, morning to night. I don’t like weekends. I taxi the children, do the shopping, then talk to clients. I talk to hundreds, thousands of clients but I never see a single one.

  Prime Law Brokers. How may I help you?

  Prime Law Brokers. How may I help you?

  Prime Law Brokers. How may I help you?. . . Prime Law Brokers. How may I help you?. . . Prime Law Brokers. How may I help you?

  I realise that I have done this so often that now I know where people are calling from even before they tell me!

  I dream that one day a man loves me and I love him back. But I know this will not happen to me.

  15

  Love and loss, part one

  Would I find the man I wanted? ‘I will . . . I won’t . . . I will . . . I won’t.’

  As a break during one of my business trips I had taken a bus trip to Hahndorf, a popular tourist destination outside Adelaide. The weather was sublime: sunny, warm and still. I wore a simple, navy and white Country Road polka dot dress with sandals, and my light brown hair fell down my back. I loved this outfit and as I walked through the town I felt sparkling. I passed a shrub of daisies, picked one off and started detaching its petals one by one.

  ‘I will . . . I won’t . . . I will . . . I won’t.’

  I passed a restaurant a little further along, where three men were sitting at a table on the footpath.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said one of them. ‘Does he love you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We noticed you pulling that daisy apart. I was wondering what it had told you.’

  I laughed. ‘It said “No”.’

  Another of the men asked me where I was from and when I told him he said, ‘Are all Iranian women so beautiful?’

  ‘A thousand times more,’ I said.

  He told me I was very humble then asked what I planned to do that night.

  ‘I will eat in a restaurant in Adelaide then perhaps find some music and go dancing.’

  He smiled. I said goodbye and went on my way.

  On the flight back to Melbourne I was cursing my stupidity. Why hadn’t I told the truth? Why hadn’t I simply said that I had nothing to do that night? Who knows? He may have been nice. He was good looking enough and certainly met my specification of being tall.

  A few weeks later I was in Brisbane, sitting near the window of the bar in the Sheraton Hotel. Once again there was an empty chair on the other side of my table. However, a band was playing jazz and I’d had a good day so I was feeling very satisfied with myself. A man approached me. He was slightly balding but tall and smartly dressed in black pants and a neat shirt.

  ‘I’m Scott,’ he introduced himself. ‘I’m 38 years old and I have no relationship with anyone. May I sit with you?’

  I said yes.

  We chatted. I told him about my business and my family – he couldn’t believe I was the mother of four children. He told me he was also in Brisbane on business, working with a telephone company. He kept looking at me and occasionally, ever so slightly, brushed his hand on my hair. I looked into his blue eyes and for a fleeting moment thought, I could love this man.

  After a couple of hours we agreed to meet again on Friday night. He walked me back to the hotel where I was staying and respectfully said good night. I kissed his cheek. I couldn’t believe that I had a date. When Friday arrived I wore my red Georgette dress and let my hair down. Scott took me to one of Brisbane’s best restaurants and afterwards we walked hand-in-hand along the river. My dream was coming true! When he kissed me I felt like a teenager for the first time in my
life. The next day we had a lovely time as he showed me around Brisbane in his car.

  I returned to Melbourne and soon after received a text message from Scott’s phone . . . only it wasn’t from him. It was from his wife, who asked if I knew he was married, which of course I didn’t. I felt stupid. And that was the end of that.

  ~

  Our family routines changed after my children, my parents and I moved into the house in Mount Eliza in 2002. As we were no longer living next to the girls’ high school I needed to drive them there each morning. At least I had a good car. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had died in 1996 but by then I had saved enough – thanks to listening to my father’s repeated advice – to buy a brand new Camry from Frankston Toyota.

  As I was no longer travelling into a city office each day, I now had some time to do some exercise in the mornings. I took to stopping at Frankston beach on the way home from dropping the girls off. I would run along the sand, perhaps a couple of kilometres, enjoying the empty, open space and crisp morning light. There were only ever one or two other people walking their dogs at that time. I would do star jumps and dance, throwing my arms to the sky like a ballerina, with the seagulls as my audience. The fresh air and the sounds of the sea helped clear my head. Years later one of Ali’s friends told me that his family could see me from their house on Olivers Hill, which sits behind Frankston overlooking the beach; they couldn’t believe how lightly I danced. Another time, while the beachfront was being upgraded, a workman spoke to me as I passed. ‘You look bloody good to me,’ he said, as if I didn’t need to be exercising.

  Things were changing with my father too. With the girls at school and Ali at college, he would spend the days alone at the Mount Eliza house. Mum was around sometimes, but she spent a lot of time walking or cooking or reading outside. As had always been the case, there was not much conversation between them. I would come home from my Frankston office and find Dad sitting in his cane chair. The television would be on but he wouldn’t be watching it; he’d just be staring at the carpet. He was still healthy physically but it seemed his mind was going. Our conversations became shorter and shorter.

  ‘Salam, Baba.’

  ‘Salam, Baba jan. How are you?’ he would reply.

  ‘I am well. How are you?’

  ‘Good.’ He’d give me a calm smile.

  That was it.

  He would sit at the table for dinner with the rest of us, then have a cup of tea and go straight to his bed, which at that time was a mattress on the living room floor. (My house has three bedrooms so my parents and I slept in the lounge. I put my mattress against the floor-to-ceiling windows so that I could see the stars.)

  Dad still knew very little English so I thought it would be good to help him learn. Every morning at breakfast I would teach him the words for each item on the table: sugar, tea, flowers and so on. He repeated the words back to me enthusiastically. We did the same with other items around the house. He loved that we were able to talk together in English. I would also write practical English words at the top of a piece of paper and teach him how to say them. Then he would write them out over and over in a column, reading the words out loud as he went. He used to say ‘John Howard’ a lot because he was hearing it all the time on the television, so I wrote that into his notebook too.

  The only thing that made his eyes shine was one of his grandchildren returning home. As they came in, he would stand up and shake their hand, welcoming them back. ‘Hello, Ali gha (Mr Ali). Hello Shirin khanum (Miss Shirin).’ He did the same with Sima and Mina.

  ~

  I used to take my Toyota back to the dealer every six months for its regular service. It was convenient but also friendly. The same service manager would greet me each time. He was always polite and very professional. On one occasion while I was still working in the city, I was running very late. It was winter and had become dark early. When I rang the dealership the service manager insisted on picking me up from Frankston train station. It was very kind of him. He told me his name was James. When I got into the car with him I looked at his profile as he drove and noticed for the first time that there was a deep sadness in this man.

  The next time I took my car in James was there again. We chatted a little bit and I mentioned that I was going to be taking my daughters down to Lorne for a few days during the school holidays. He said he was doing the same thing with his daughter and son who, it turned out, were a little younger than the twins. In the end we both changed our plans, neither of us making our trip, but I did receive a text from James a little later asking how our holiday had gone. Ali was working with me at the Frankston office by now (while still also studying) and asked who was sending messages to me. ‘The Toyota guy,’ I said.

  The next message I got from James was an invitation to lunch. I was shocked and probably would have turned him down except that Shirin, Sima and Mina told me I should go. I still felt awkward and needed them to help me compose a response. I decided I had nothing to lose and accepted the invitation.

  James suggested the Morning Star Estate restaurant (obviously completely unaware that ‘morning star’ is the meaning of my name) and we agreed to meet there. I dressed in a tight brown sleeveless dress with a high neck, wearing light brown high-heeled shoes. As usual, I wore no makeup. James was also wearing brown but was less dressy in corduroy pants, sports shoes and a casual shirt with a small floral design. To be honest, I wasn’t impressed. (Why did men always have to meet me dressed in brown?) Nevertheless, we had a nice lunch and afterwards went for a walk in the surrounding rose garden.

  I drove myself home and my mother immediately asked me what he’d been like.

  ‘No, not good,’ I said. ‘He is not for me and I am not for him. I will tell him that is the end.’

  James was lovely but I just felt there was no strong attraction there. Yes, he was tall, but his sense of fashion was not a good sign. And he had very crooked teeth – something I could not come to terms with. (I think I had become obsessed with teeth after my own bad experience in Kermanshah all those years earlier.)

  Soon afterwards, I asked James to meet me at the Mornington Hotel. We walked on the beach for over an hour and talked about everything. At the end I told him that I liked him very much but that unfortunately I didn’t feel any more than that. ‘It doesn’t seem to me that we are for each other,’ I told him.

  We returned to the carpark. When he looked into my eyes he was clearly unhappy but he was very respectful. He politely kissed my hand and quietly said goodbye.

  So that was the end for us.

  ~

  Around this time Dad started taking walks. He would walk to the Mount Eliza shops or sometimes catch a bus to Frankston. One day he arrived, unannounced, at my Frankston office, clicking his heels and jumping into a salute after walking through the door. Normally this was a funny gesture but this day I was not happy. Not only were there lawyers visiting the office and I was worried about maintaining professionalism, but it was also impossible to concentrate on my work while also fretting about my father. After he repeated this a number of times I trained him to sit in the nearby shopping centre and wait until I came to pick him up. That would sometimes work for up to two hours but eventually he would come back, forcing me to divert the phones, close the office and take him back to the house.

  At home he started to get restless. He would stand up, go to the laundry, put his wallet somewhere then sit down again. Then he’d repeat the whole process a while later. Not understanding why he did this I found it, at times, incredibly frustrating. I started tapping him on the shoulders with a wooden back-scratcher when he went to stand up, to which he would respond, ‘Don’t hit me!’ And then he would stand up and go to the laundry anyway.

  He would also count the money in his wallet over and over. One time he came home from Mount Eliza and told me that while sitting on a bench a lady had showed him a stack of money and asked him if it was his. At least with his limited English that was what he understood.

  �
��No, no, no,’ he had said, shaking his head. ‘No money, no money.’

  He told me that she had kept saying, ‘You . . . you . . . money . . . you.’ I calculated that he must have been doing as she said and absentmindedly put the wad of notes on the bench beside him, from where the lady had picked it and tried to return it. But he had insisted.

  ‘No, no. No money.’

  He had refused to take the money – probably about $2000 – back and simply walked away without it. What happened after that we never knew. The woman had no way of contacting my father or any of us, so I guess she had a windfall that day.

  I didn’t know what was going on with Asghar. At first I thought it was just old age and a bit of memory loss, but it seemed to be more than that now. I took him to see our GP, Dr Thompson, who checked him over and told me he was fine physically. My dad really loved Dr Thompson and said he felt at home in his office. I had taken Mum and Dad to see him many times over the years. Dad sat opposite the doctor, flexed his arms like a bodybuilder, smiled and said, ‘See, Dr Thompson. Good . . . good.’

  He moved his arms around with pride. The doctor, who had been our family GP since Ali was born, explained dementia to me. Before that I had been completely ignorant of the condition so I left his surgery that day with at least a little more awareness. I don’t think I yet understood the gravity of the situation, but I did feel guilty about hitting my father with the back-scratcher now that I knew there was actually something wrong with him.

  Things became steadily worse. Dad would boil the kettle and leave the gas on, put his shoes somewhere obscure so that none of us was able to find them. He started a fire in the backyard which could have spread to the house if my mother had not noticed the smoke. He began showing signs of incontinence. He started talking repeatedly of returning to Iran, eventually carrying a suitcase around the house saying, ‘I want to go to Iran. I want to go to my damn house. Berim . . . berim.’ Shahin would tell him to go and sit next to the mailbox, assuring him that the plane would come – and so he would, sitting on a chair on the nature strip for hours waiting for an aircraft to arrive in our Mount Eliza street. For a while my brother Hossein took Asghar out for breakfast every Saturday morning, but he stopped this after my father found a tin of dark blue paint in our shed, took it to Hossein’s and started painting Hossein’s house with it.