Aida watched her, uncertain, a lifetime of avoiding small children rendering her ill-equipped for this situation. Elham simply sighed, grasping a naked pillow and a pale blue cover. In response to this, Niki’s howl increased threefold, her little legs beating at the floor with indignation. They sounded out a steady beat, a miniscule army preparing for battle. Aida hesitated, then reached for the second pillow. As the tantrum progressed, Aida racked her brain for something to say.
‘How old is she?’ Aida asked finally, watching as Elham carefully smoothed out the sheets.
‘Three,’ Elham replied, holding out her hand for the pillow.
‘Not three, FOUR,’ Niki shrieked, her head popping up momentarily like a scandalised mongoose before burying itself in the carpet again.
‘Three,’ Elham repeated, pronouncing the word carefully in both English and Persian. ‘Nearly four. Three and confused.’
And Aida had nodded her head, unsure of what else to say. She’d left then, in search of painkillers as the tantrum continued, leaving Elham to unpack their two little worlds into the bedroom built for one. In the weeks since, they’d spent little time together. Like many others Aida knew, Elham’s bridging visa had expired and Immigration didn’t seem to be issuing new ones to the thousands like Elham waiting to hear the decision on their protection claims. This meant that unlike Aida, even if Elham were able to find work, it wouldn’t be legal to take it. A further divide between the already divided. Still, between taking Niki to kindergarten a couple of days a week, her own weekly English classes at the community centre, and seeking out the food truck to buy discounted produce, Elham was rarely home. When she was, Aida was out searching for work, long days spent walking the streets of Melbourne’s outer north handing out résumés to bored hospitality workers half her age who promised to hand them on to their managers. They passed each other in the hallway, exiting the bathroom or out by the temperamental second-hand washing machine with an armload of clothing. Elham ate early, she and Niki huddled around the small table as Elham patiently cut up Niki’s food and ignored her protests. Often when Aida entered the kitchen hours later she would find the collateral from their meal – upended bowls and rice trampled into the linoleum – and like a domestic detective would link it to the protestations and clamour heard earlier. As far as she could see, Niki did not approve of anyone and took issue with everything. She was an activist, stubborn and forceful, at war with the trials of life at three (nearly four). Aida had taken to avoiding her, gently nudging her bedroom door shut as the patter of angry little feet approached, and carefully stepping over discarded toys so as not to invoke her wrath.
The waiting room thundered with anticipation and boredom. It was always full now, since the sea of letters had started instructing them they had a month to submit their applications for temporary protection. They’d come in trickles then waves, some people gripping their letters, others still waiting to receive them. Sixty-odd pages, one hundred and one questions, twenty-eight days of panic, then do it all again in three to five years’ time. Not to mention the interviews and the Freedom of Information applications for copies of interviews they’d given years ago when they’d first arrived, and the terror of getting it wrong because their right to appeal had been severely diminished simply because they’d got on a boat.
Another ten minutes passed before Sarah finally appeared in the doorway, ushering out an elderly couple clutching folders full of paperwork. The woman, her face set with deep lines, held the files to her chest, the end of her headscarf draped protectively over them as the man guided her towards the door. Sarah motioned cheerfully to Aida. As she settled herself inside the consulting room, Aida placed her phone on the desk. There were several more messages from her mother, who by this time would be setting out the plates for breakfast, spooning soft cheese onto her father’s plate and placing the sugar bowl alongside their teacups, all the while maintaining a steady stream of wandering updates to her only daughter across the sea. No appetite anymore, Aida-joon . . . Sarah placed Aida’s dense file on the desk, balancing a pen along its top edge.
‘Sorry for the hold-up. We’re just so busy right now. It’s been worse since they cut funding again. I’m back to four days. It’s crazy. Anyway, how are you? Did you get stuck in that traffic out there? I hear it’s chaos.’
Sarah leant her elbows against the desk, casually resting her chin on her knuckles. She looked tired, her eyes rimmed with dark crescents, and for a moment Aida forgot herself and thought to offer her some tea. Instead, she raised her eyebrows expectantly.
‘Nothing,’ Sarah responded. ‘You?’
‘Nothing,’ Aida replied, drawing her lips tight.
‘It’ll come in the mail,’ Sarah assured her, and Aida nodded obligingly, for this was their act.
‘Has anyone else heard?’
‘Not that we know of. I hear people have, but no one we work with, yet.’ Sarah emphasised the ‘yet’ as if this could reassure any of the feelings swirling through Aida’s gut.
‘What about you?’ Sarah asked, though they both knew Aida knew no one any more.
Sarah changed the topic.
‘How is Elham? And Niki?’
Aida shrugged. She didn’t mention the cuts she’d seen carefully lining Elham’s arms like notches on a tree trunk. They’d looked old, healed now, so she didn’t bring them up. Nor did she mention Niki’s night terrors, her tantrums, or her endless fascination with casting Aida’s toiletries into the toilet bowl. She did not say: Elham is embarrassed to speak in front of me and subservient to her child. Or: Niki’s tantrums are like a shrieking unstoppable fireworks display. Or: sometimes I think to leave the front door open just a little so Niki might run away for just a few hours until a well-meaning neighbour brings her back.
‘They’re all right.’
Sarah nodded encouragingly. Her fingers drummed the top of the heavy file.
‘Have you talked with her much? About her application? Because I’m a little worried . . .’ Sarah caught herself.
Aida folded her hands in her lap. You didn’t ask people’s stories. Sarah should know this by now.
‘We don’t talk about things like that.’
Sarah straightened her shoulders.
‘Never mind. Forget I said anything. I have something for you,’ she announced, reaching for a bag by the desk.
Aida eyed it warily. ‘Donations?’
‘Yep.’
‘What have we got, then?’ Aida asked, making a show of opening the bag.
She peered into it, fishing around dramatically before seizing something from the bottom.
‘A worn shoe! Adidas, I think. Yes. And does it have a partner?’
She rifled through the bag some more.
‘No, no partner!’ she announced. ‘There’s always a single worn shoe with no partner. Who would donate such a thing?’
Sarah grinned. ‘So there’s nothing you want there?’
Aida shook her head, handing back the bag. This had become a running joke between them – the well-intentioned yet utterly useless items that found their way into donation bins. Holey sheets, jeans with busted zippers, toys so deformed by love that they looked as if they might come alive at night to roam and maim. She sometimes suspected Sarah purposefully collated the worst of the lot in order to present them at Aida’s next visit like a carnival of the misguided and bizarre. It made her laugh, amid the constant no-news drudgery. Aida smiled then rose from the desk.
‘I’ll let you know if I hear anything,’ Sarah said, her forced optimism a mask against the uncertainty of their meetings.
‘Of course,’ Aida replied as she took her phone from the desk. ‘Me too.’
And she left as she’d left so many times before, waiting, as always.
It was a fair walk home from the train station but Aida enjoyed it, particularly on these warm afternoons when the leftove
r summer sun clung to the mid-autumn days as if winter were implausible. When mild northerlies collected the leaves from where they’d fallen and sent them tumbling all about the place. It was a kind heat – comforting and cleansing – so unlike the heat of the island that smothered its detainees, stifling and unrelenting, seeping them from themselves day by day. The narrow streets of the outer north seemed speckled with a hodgepodge placement of brick houses, exhausted factories and empty, fenced-off subdivided blocks waist-high with weeds. The clutter of homes pressed alongside each other like stock on a shelf, so unlike the lonely houses of the east adrift in their spacious yards. She’d journeyed out there once, via train then bus, and had been surprised by what she had seen. The ease of the houses sprawling lazily across those giant blocks, all neat lawns, solid fences and pronounced ambitions. She imagined them – the old Iranians – Baha’is and monarchists who came after the ’79 Revolution, and each night dreamed of an Iran that no longer existed. Sitting inside these houses, their lives reassembled in this foreign country that now felt like home. She wondered if she should knock on the doors, unannounced and unexpected, peddling her face from house to house in search of her country people. She’d offer a cheerful ‘Salam’ and wait for the eager hands to drag her inside, insisting she drink tea and take pistachios and fruit. Plying her with Persian-language books and newspapers and tales of lives unshackled by the drudgery and terror of temporary visas. She’d entertain them, cracking jokes and juggling witticisms the way she’d done as a child whenever bedtime drew near, building face by face her new collection of friends, confidantes and allies. In reality, Aida knew it was far more likely that most of those doors would never open, not for her anyway. Not for the new wave of Iranians who got on boats and left behind the country many of the settled diaspora thought they deserved.
Here, though, here in the north the buildings and factories coughed and spluttered together like patients crammed into an emergency room. She crossed the street then wandered past the small collection of shops that loosely defined the suburb’s centre. The streets were busy. People bustled, laden with shopping bags, dragging their children along the pavement. A cluster of paunch-bellied men sat around one of the tables outside the coffee shop, stroking their moustaches in contemplation before slamming their backgammon pieces down and slapping their thighs in victory. At the end of the shops stood a large McDonald’s, incongruous amid the clutter of small businesses. Aida inhaled as she passed, the oily pungent smell catching in the back of her throat and pricking her eyes. All her life she had longed for McDonald’s, the images, the ads, the fantasy of it hoisted high above all else in her childhood dreams like a beacon of hope and culinary virtue. She remembered the first time she’d eaten it, not long after her release in Australia, her hands clawing at the wrapping like a waylaid hiker recently rescued from the desert. Fumbling and salivating with a two-decade-long expectation. It was a slap in the face. She’d looked forlornly at the service counter, the be-hatted teenagers too busy with new orders to aid her. Perhaps there’d been a mistake? A key ingredient left out or a rogue batch of off patties? A uniformed young man passed by, his arms wrangling a bloated rubbish bag like a stubborn debutante. She’d reached out, her arm urgently pressing his.
‘There’s something wrong with my burger,’ she said, holding it out for inspection.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ he asked, distracted.
Aida considered the exhibit in her hand. ‘Everything,’ she replied softly.
The young man had observed her briefly, his fingers tugging impatiently at the stretched polyethylene of the rubbish bag. He held it open for her, the gaping mouth expectant, and she’d thrown the burger in.
At first, after all those months behind wire, she’d savoured every moment, every opportunity to do and smell and touch things. The sharp pain of hot water splashing on her naked nape, the exhilaration of eating at times of her choosing. Of strangers, each meeting brief and fleeting, whose stories she would never know when before on the island she’d known every horrible story because at night the sky sung with them. But eventually the tedium had set in. And then the limitlessness and newness of it all had faded beneath the oppressive coat of waiting. Endless waiting. She felt it now, the coat tightening sharply around her chest, binding her body as her breaths staccato-ed and stabbed. She felt it now, in the fire travelling her cheeks, the murmuring yelps swirling in her belly, clawing for release. White-knuckled, Aida clenched her eyes shut, forcing her breaths to lengthen. Three things, she thought, blocking out the clamouring and the panic. Three things different and three things the same. This was something her father had taught her, a private trick for fighting off the terror of the unknown: the night before exams or wandering the halls at the start of each school year. Three things different and three things the same.
Three things different:
The driver’s side of the car
Footballs aren’t round
Sugar doesn’t come in cubes
Three things the same:
The sun that rises first on me then on my family
Politicians mostly lie
My stinky breath in the morning
She smiled at this last one. She’d been awoken that morning by Niki erupting out of nowhere, imperiously demanding she help find Cyrus. She’d just as swiftly backtracked, one pudgy accusing finger pointing at Aida’s mouth in shock.
‘Stinky breath,’ Niki had whispered, eyes like affronted dinner plates, before she’d repeated it again with gusto.
At this point Cyrus had slunk out from under Aida’s bed, arching his skinny back and flicking his tail in irritation at this vulgar wake-up call. He padded towards the door, Niki following him. Aida had watched, equally mortified and bothered by the fact she had successfully been heckled by someone who had clearly wet herself during the recent night’s sleep. Niki had sashayed out, her backside still haloed with telltale damp, repeating ‘stinky breath’ in a mocking voice until she was out of earshot.
Turning onto her street, Aida checked her breath again. The familiar houses greeted her from behind their roller-shuttered windows. Her small brick house stood squat in its concrete yard, a carport to one side with an uneven steel roof sloping so far down it made it unusable. The letterbox, detached from its post, rested precariously on the uneven brick fence. Aida paused before it, sucking in her breath, then lifted the lid tentatively. Its emptiness stunned her, the way it repeatedly stunned her five days out of every seven, although relief mingled with this reservation. She lifted the gate so it wouldn’t scrape across the ground as she opened it, then approached the house. As she stepped through the entry the cats bolted past, their little black bodies lithe and determined. Niki was home, then, Aida thought to herself. The cats had been a constant since Aida had first moved in, mewing and begging outside the back door each night. It was only after Elham arrived that they’d been allowed inside, enticed by the leftovers she set down for them. They’d named them then. Elham had insisted Aida do the honours, so she’d decided on Shahrzad for the smaller one because she kept them up all night and Cyrus for the larger one because he swiftly claimed a majority of the house as his own. This suited Niki well enough, though she struggled to tell the difference between them and simply referred to them both as Cyrus. Sometimes Aida wondered if Niki even realised there were two cats, her arrival usually sending both skittering off in separate directions as she lunged after one with a joyful lack of awareness.
Inside, the house was cold despite the warmth of the day. She could hear Elham pottering about the kitchen, the smell of cooking rice and spices wafting through the dark hallway and tickling her empty stomach. Elham’s soft voice wandered the corridor, singing in dialect. Niki was nearby too, destroying something by the sound of it. Aida slipped off her shoes then wandered towards the kitchen. Her phone buzzed as she did so, a new message from her mother. Have you heard anything yet? Baba sends his regards. He’s taken to bed with
his cough again – this cold weather we’re having is doing no one any good. She hesitated, texting a simple nothing, then pocketed her phone as she entered the kitchen. Elham looked up from the pot she was fussing over, her brows knotted in concern.
‘Salam. Any luck?’
Aida shook her head.
‘I don’t know how you get about so easily,’ Elham sighed. ‘I’ve barely left the suburb. This city is so big.’
‘Tehran’s bigger,’ Aida reminded her.
‘And I didn’t see too much of that either,’ Elham replied.
She turned back to the stovetop. Aida could smell onions and coriander. Her stomach grumbled expectantly. She knew nothing of cooking.
‘You want some when this is done?’ Elham asked, giving the bubbling green stew an experimental stir.
‘I’ve eaten,’ Aida lied.
‘There’s plenty for everyone,’ Elham insisted, but Aida shook her head.
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
Elham frowned, her taarof failed. But Aida couldn’t bring herself to eat Elham’s food, knowing how little money she and Niki received each fortnight. For Aida, she could make the money stretch, limiting herself and rationing when additional expenses made things tight. But Niki was too young to possess such self-control, her appetite tremendous and demanding as for the first time in her short life she had access to foods unimaginable on the island. The house was often a wasteland of the discarded indulgences Elham showered upon Niki. Half-shrunk lollipops sunk head first into the couch cushions, spat-out jubes cemented across the Cyruses’ coats. Aida had once found a trail of crushed chips leading to the bathroom, where Niki sat splayed across the empty bath like a Bacchanalian emperor amid a sea of gutted plastic packets after finding her mother’s secret hiding spot. Denying her resulted in an avalanche of tantrums, one spilling into the next, terrifying both Aida and Elham that someone nearby might call Child Protection or a tactical response team. Besides, how could Elham deny a child who had been born into a world of denial? Where bland, over-boiled foods and unidentifiable meats were the standard daily fare, and fruit as rare as diamonds?
The Book of Ordinary People Page 2