‘Niki,’ Elham called. ‘Come say hello to khaleh.’
The little girl ignored her and continued to teeter around a nearby table where the Sri Lankan couple was laying out the food from the tiffin containers for their waiting family members. Aida offered a wave but Niki’s eyes were fixed on the food.
‘Niki!’ Elham repeated impatiently.
Noticing Niki, the woman reached over and handed her something from one of the tins. Niki clutched the fried triangle in her hand and dove under the table, devouring it greedily.
‘The food here is terrible,’ Elham sighed. ‘Not as bad as the island, or your cooking, but not good. She misses proper food. Always asking for fresh fruit. She misses kinder too.’
‘Has she made friends?’ Aida asked.
‘Some,’ Elham shrugged. ‘The ones who are like us, put back in detention. They’re okay. But the ones who have just come from offshore for medical treatment . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I worry about her being around them. They . . . their behaviour is not like children’s should be.’
‘I brought some toys,’ Aida said. ‘Books and things like that. Underwear.’
Elham took the bag from her. Seeing this, Niki darted over, wrenched the bag from her mother’s hands and began searching it.
‘Salam, Niki-joon,’ Aida said, and Niki looked at her shyly. ‘Forgetting me already?’
Niki shook her head. She considered Aida for a moment then offered her a small, sticky hug. Aida pulled her onto her lap as Niki picked through the shopping bag, discarding the underwear in a pile on the table. Aida and Elham watched her. Static erupted from the wireless in the corner, the guards leaning in intently. A voice drifted out across the room.
. . . and it’s all systems go as they head towards the finish in this, the penultimate race before the big one. It’s Turpentine and Island Sun fighting for the lead. Darwinian Theory’s behind and the bookies’ favourite Brilliant Mistake II. Island Sun is giving her all but can’t quite edge out Turpentine. Brilliant Mistake is falling behind. And it’s Turpentine by an inch – Turpentine has won by a nose! Island Sun in a close second, followed by Darwinian Theory, then Uncle Max. Brilliant Mistake II, the crowd favourite, finishing in fifth place, ending her racing career with this disappointing result. A tragedy, surely, for such a fine racer . . .
The guards shut off the radio and one of them handed the other a five-dollar note, patting his shoulder in congratulations. No one else had taken much notice. Niki seized a book from the bag then shimmied off Aida’s lap. She sat under the table, turning the pages. Elham rubbed her eyes.
‘You know what the hardest part is? I would do anything to see my family. For them to be able to meet Niki. I thirst for them, desperately. But I can’t go back. I can’t. You try so hard to forget everything, all the horrible things, but they make you relive them again and again. How many times have I told it? How many interviews? That horrible application form, page after page asking you who, how, why, why, why? Demanding you justify every little detail. Again and again, each time someone pressing you, challenging you, making you prove your memories are real. And you have to tell it a certain way. The way your mother’s heart broke when she kissed you goodbye, the way you breathed in, knowing you might never smell your country again; these aren’t the details they want.’
Elham stopped, her hands drawn to her face. She pressed her eyes then looked back at Aida.
‘After a while – after hearing all those other stories – I started to worry. I heard what others had been through and I thought maybe mine wasn’t so bad. Maybe it wasn’t enough for them to let me stay. You see all those other people – the horrific things they have been through – and I got scared. What if my story wasn’t enough? What if it wasn’t enough for Niki?’
Elham paused then leant forward.
‘I changed my story. Not the entire thing, but bits of it. Told them they’d got it wrong originally – that there were mistakes in the translation. And then it just got away from me. Too many details that didn’t match up. Sarah tried to warn me but I insisted it was the translation that was wrong, not me. The lawyers tell me it failed the merit review and now we have to ask the court for a judicial review. I don’t know. It’s so confusing. They tried to explain why I did it. Something about exceptional circumstances? But everyone says it is messy. And now what can I do?’
Elham wrapped her arms around herself, sitting back in the chair.
‘When I think about it I get so angry. I’ve never been lucky – it’s written on my forehead. All the omens were there: my scarf catching on my earring as I pulled it from my head when the plane took off. Nearly missing my connection at Doha, my luggage bursting open onto the tiles as I ran the length of Hamad Airport. Niki has always been cramped, even inside of me. I never thought this would be my life. I never got to study but you know what I would do? I would do a PhD in Anger.’
Aida watched her, that raw anger seething from her eyes. It was a weary anger, fed up with the cacophony of misfortune and struggle that wove itself into life. It was an anger she had seen so many times before, waiting to be processed at the police station in Tehran, standing futilely on an Indonesian shore as rickety boats were tossed about by the waves, slowly decaying while the world sought somewhere to store you. Elham hammered the table with her fists, then forced herself out of her rage.
‘But those are stories for sorrow and you don’t need any more of those. Tell me about you, Aida-joon. How are you? How is your father?’
At this, Aida could not reply. Her brothers were there, waiting now. All of them crowded around the inevitability that lay in that bed. Everyone was waiting now. There was the sound of scuttled breathing and Niki appeared from under the table. Aida felt Niki’s eyes boring into her own, capturing each tear and curiously drinking them in. She pulled herself to her feet, her hand shoved deep into her pocket.
‘Here, khaleh,’ she whispered.
She placed her last feather into Aida’s trembling hand.
*
When Aida eventually left the detention centre she found the sky heavy with dark clouds. She made it halfway to the train station before the clouds fractured and she was soaked within seconds. She continued her trudge, one hand buried in her pocket wrapped protectively around the feather, the other clutching her notebook to her chest. Cars raced along the road beside her, oblivious to the spray of muddied water shooting up from their tyres.
When she arrived home, the house screamed emptiness. The empty room she kept shut up, the empty bowls where the Cyruses no longer fed. The letterbox empty all week and the emptiness in her chest, awaiting the grief that would soon descend for the empty space in the hospital room where her father lay emptying of life. She grimaced as she caught her reflection in Elham’s gaudy mirror. Her face was wan and sunken in a way that would make her mother fuss. There were wrinkles now, well before their time, creased into her forehead from worry. She watched herself, each movement a disconnected jarring thing as if she were watching through a window rather than a mirror. I won the national essay-writing competition, she thought, and look at me now. The weight was unbearable, clawing and cawing inside her, exhausting her.
She changed into dry clothes then curled herself into a little ball on the couch, eyes heavy and willing. It was a brief sleep – restless and violent – her limbs flailing wildly as she spun through the madness of slumber. Poisoned grapes and pomegranate juice – that’s what had killed Imam Reza. But suddenly it wasn’t Imam Reza anymore, but a bedside in a hospital cluttered with downcast people. Amin and Alireza, faces taut with the effort of not weeping, their mother beside them pulling her flesh in disbelieving handfuls. Asadollah cradling his girth as tears tumbled down his whiskered cheeks. And the keening wail of bereavement echoing about the tiles though no one’s lips were moving. It was her, Aida realised, the source of all this noise. The walls, lined with tomes from her father’s own c
ollection, rattled a moment as if shaken by some distant geological disturbance, then they stepped forward, Amin and Alireza, to close their father’s eyes and begin the process of washing him. She could smell it, vibrant in her sleep, the camphor mixed with tears, the pure white of the cotton shroud that would bind him. A mullah drifted into the room, his black turban sullen on his head, to hover by the crumbling walls. And she pictured her father all those years ago – against my dead body – he’d always said, eyes shiny with his own wit. But when the man opened his mouth it was not the namaz-e meyet he called out but something different. It’s not what history makes of you that matters, but what you make of your history, he said, their mother mouthing along with him, and when he was finished, the books on the shelves exploded into fine white powder. She stuck out her tongue and tasted the flour, tart and sullen with the density of childhood.
Aida woke with a start from what had barely been sleep to begin with. Her heart was racing as she struggled to place herself. And in that moment she knew it was over, that her phone soon enough would bring to life a mourning sung across the oceans. And there was relief, too, in all that pain, as suddenly everything seemed clearer. Because there they all were – all those stories. The avalanche of everything that had weighed on her for these months and years, amassed and stored and none of them ever forgotten. Haunted by these stories, those collected and kept, their ghosts walking through her each day until they could wander no more. Hers and others, all jostling inside her. From the streets and the prisons, the protests and grieving homes. The mourning on the shorelines and the helpless waiting and waiting for letters or loved ones or boats that never arrived. For visas that were never granted. For hope that was never resuscitated. They all sat inside, clambering and crying to be told. There were too many stories to tell, but everyone wanted them told. Everyone, everywhere, wanted them to be told. Even she.
And in that moment, Aida knew she would write them. Not just her own, but others too. She would wrench them from within her and breathe them into the world. And not just write. She would take them, person by person, story by story, and set them free. And they would be all of the stories – the good and the bad. The wretched journeys from home to hopelessness told alongside those of beauty and laughter and life. All of the people – those real intricate people she had met – made faceless by reality. She thought of a woman she’d met on the island, tired and weak from the tropical heat, her grown-up daughter long settled in Sydney. She’d told Aida, laughing with pride, about the phone call she’d had with her youngest grandchild who had gone on a swing by himself for the first time that week. How it had taken her far away from that sorrowful island through the temporal jungle of life to her own childhood in a small Iraqi village when she’d raced her own sisters to the newly built playground and they’d competed to see who could swing higher and higher and higher until the clouds were their gardens. This story, and so many like it, including her own, ready to be poured out into the world so that they were real and heard and mattered. It might be a book or it might be a memory, but she would release them into the world.
Aida staggered to her bedroom, seizing the notebook from under her pillow, then moved towards the kitchen. She sat down, all the world before her, and she started to write the stories of all those precious ordinary people.
31
Nell
I would like to start by welcoming everyone here on this momentous day! (pause for applause) First, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the (TBC) people, and pay my respects to any elders past and present. (respectful pause) I would also like to acknowledge the Attorney-General for his attendance, and the Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, who sends her apologies, as well as extend my appreciation to our partners and commend them on their finery. It truly is the race that stops a nation if we’ve managed to get you lot here today and away from the office! (pause for applause and/or laughter)
As you all know, today is not just about the Cup, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was given the amount of bubbles already flowing. And may I take a moment to congratulate the ladies on their magnificent hats! Bravo! But before you get back to those delicious canapés and, of course, the punting, I’d like to touch on a slightly different topic. (ensure solemn tone)
Family violence is a scourge upon this nation – a national shame – and far too prevalent in our society. While Williams & Williams is primarily a commercial law firm, what really lies at our heart is people. And it was in this spirit that we launched our pilot pro bono venture some months ago, a program which we can now share with you has officially been rebadged ‘Williams & Williams for Women’ or ‘W4W’. (potential applause – read the room)
As many of you are aware, the program ran its first test case over the past few months, unburdening one of our hardworking local community legal centres of what proved to be a complex and challenging family violence case. I am delighted to report what could be considered the success of this case, for what could be more successful than a mother reunited with her children? (applause/tears? Photographer briefed to capture this moment) On that note, may I congratulate the two fine Williams & Williams lawyers who ran this case – our pro bono guinea pigs, if you will – Ben Arnolds and Helena Swansea. (BA and HS to acknowledge AW and audience) This case marks a new way forward for the firm and we are pleased to announce that the program will now be rolled out across our offices as an opt-in social corporate responsibility initiative for any employee wishing to take part (pause for applause. Check watch) Time is fast approaching for all you punters so I’ll leave it at that, but let’s conclude by raising a glass to the official launch of W4W. And best of luck for the day!
(End of official proceedings – photos to be taken with dignitaries etc)
‘What do you think?’
Nell glanced up from the printout. DB was shifting from foot to foot, his Stetson in hand. In his pinstriped suit and jaunty hat he looked like a High Street pimp as he danced about nervously. They hadn’t used any of what she’d sent them. None of it. Nell pressed her thumbs into the printout, creasing the margins, but didn’t say anything. DB seemed to take this as a sign of agreement and reached for it.
‘Better get back to the marquee – it’s almost time.’
He took the speech from her hands. She offered no resistance. Instead, she bent awkwardly in her spring frock to grab her clutch from where she’d wedged it between her ankles.
‘Off we go, then,’ DB sighed, and trudged towards the marquee like a man off to his own execution.
Williams & Williams hired the same marquee every year, engaging their events team to fashion it into a changing themed extravaganza. One year it had been Roaring Twenties and they all got about drinking cocktails in flappers’ frocks and tails, and another year it had been 1950s Hollywood Glamour resplendent with champagne fountain and photo booth. They always chose periods of affluence and excess; there had yet to be a Depression-era theme in which they wore mismatching shoes and drank gin from shared jars.
This year the theme was, inexplicably, Safari Days, and the marquee had been fashioned to look like a giant colonial safari tent complete with cane furnishings and caged parrots the events team had somehow managed to source. The parrots looked utterly unimpressed with the event, refusing to repeat any of the phrases jabbered at them, and instead emitting only drawn judgemental whistles whenever someone passed by in an outfit they didn’t like, causing the more sensitive attendees to avoid the cages altogether. The Partners were there, red-faced and merry as they congratulated each other in turn on their choice of costume, choice on the field, and choice of plus one. Mr Williams floated between them, outlandish in safari suit and hat that made him look like a cartoon big-game hunter come to life in inner-city Melbourne. Scuttling along after him in a borrowed hat was the Attorney-General, who had either forgotten or failed to acknowledge the theme and was in his usual all-purpose navy business sui
t. Staff were already tipsy in the slightly discomforting way that always happens when people with very serious jobs find themselves plied with alcohol and forced to socialise. HR in particular had gone all out – costumes and personalities – and were currently circulating the room with unconvincing English accents as they made jokes about the racetrack savannah and the thoroughbred game.
All in all, Nell felt utterly out of place. As she followed DB through the crowd, all elbows and apologies, she realised that while the event itself was embarrassing and excessive, it was the premise of the thing itself that sat so poorly with her. To start with, the coupling of the program launch with a day that encouraged inebriation and the discarding of large sums of money on the racing of animals seemed entirely inappropriate. Worse still, the speech was itself a fallacy. A disjuncture between words and deeds. For anyone to call what had happened a success was a complete misinterpretation of the word and demonstrated to Nell either a refusal or inability to truly understand the nature of things. It had gutted her, once the dust had settled – the whole thing leaving her racked with a sense of failure, of lacking, of impotence to do the one thing she thought herself trained to do. For this to be success in anyone’s eyes was truly frightening.
She stepped out of the way as the HR team conga-lined their way through, letting DB slip away from her. She watched him take his position at the front of the marquee, to the side of the small stage from where Mr Williams would be making his speech. The tapping of cutlery on champagne glass began, and while the rest of the marquee assembled before the stage, Nell edged towards the back of the crowd. Mr Williams surveyed the room, proud and regal, then unfolded the paper DB had handed him and leant towards the microphone stand.
‘I would like to start by welcoming everyone here on this momentous day!’
In the pause for applause, Nell slipped out of the marquee and into the piercing grey light. Rainclouds were gathering overhead and she thought that perhaps, if she ran fast enough, she might avoid them when they burst.
The Book of Ordinary People Page 34