During the darkest hours of the Annabel White fiasco, Fawzy had called George in a fit of desperation. Over time, George regaled him with stories of success and opportunity in Melbourne, and of a large community of Greek Egyptians. Fawzy had left Sydney to get away from such a busybody society. But now, the idea of a community that identified with him—if not the other way around—held some appeal to him. He no longer thought of this community as repugnant. In many ways, the very existence of this community, his community, offered him comfort. He could stay on its fringes and paddle in and out, when and if he pleased. The Annabel White fiasco had changed him. He was the new pharmacist at the St Kilda pharmacy. It was his new beginning.
He stepped towards her; she felt the warmth of his body, tasted his salty tear as it mixed with her own, their incomplete love for each other forgotten in this final embrace as their bodies pressed together in a language of heartbeats and breath and choking chests. Felt the graze of his chin against her cheek one last time. He pulled himself away gently and adjusted his sunglasses. He saluted her as he stepped into the car. Checked the mirrors, revved the engine, slowly retreated down the driveway and onto the road at Hungerford Place. She watched him sneer ever so slightly, in a vague direction at the kerb. He was done with this place.
* * *
Kicking back on a floppy couch in the sunroom, sprawled full length with his feet rubbing up against the box seat, he felt the keen sting of the sun through the full-height window. With the back of his hand he swatted his forehead. It was going to be a flipping hot afternoon. He rose to his feet to close the blinds for shade. From the elevated position of his sunroom, he could see at least half of the houses on the small cul-de-sac. He held his gaze on the Ikrams’ driveway where Fred’s new car was parked. It was a beauty alright.
The boot of the car was open. From behind the boot emerged a figure. Tom angled the blind for cover and peeped through one of the horizontal slats. Fred was lifting something heavy. What was that? A suitcase? Tom caught only a flash before the raised lid of the boot obscured his vision.
Neema was standing at the top of the driveway. Her arms were hugging her waist. She wore sunglasses and although Tom could only see her side profile, her lips seemed to be closed grimly. There was a bang as Fred closed the car boot. Neema was just standing there, motionless. Fred’s body seemed wooden and heavy, with none of his usual nimbleness and energy. Neema picked up a plastic bag by her feet and handed it to him. Tom held his breath, enthralled by this strange interplay between them.
Fred’s lips were moving. He shook his head. He smiled. They embraced. She took off her sunglasses and held them in her hand. She burrowed her head against his shoulder. He kissed her on the forehead. Then he took a step back. He looked up at their house. He raised his hand in salute.
This was the most peculiar of departures. Tom figured Fred was going away for the weekend. The suitcase, although it appeared heavy, was quite small. They were such an odd couple.
Geez almighty, the whole street had stopped to admire Fred’s car when he’d bought it last week. They’d all figured it was some kind of celebratory splurge to mark the reappearance of Annabel White. What a path of destruction that young girl had wreaked. Tom figured that most people felt pretty foolish about the way they’d treated Fred, after Annabel had shown her face again. They tried to make up for it through shamelessly weak gestures. It was pretty pathetic.
Since Annabel’s reappearance, Tom had ushered in a merry Christmas, which was not very merry, and a new year. The start of another year was usually an anniversary of his failings. God almighty, he hated making resolutions at the start of the year. But this year it felt right to believe in something, to stick to his guns. There would be no self-sabotage. He was determined that 1975 would be his year and until the moment that he stuffed things up or someone else stuffed things up for him, he’d just keep on believing it was true.
His Horizon project at Serpentine Heights was on budget and on track for completion in three months’ time. Industrial action was a receding concern. The construction company was quaking in its boots for fear of missing the final deliverable phase, which would allow him to withhold the last payment. If all went to plan, in April 1975, the Horizon would open its doors for business. There was plenty to be happy about.
He was selling off the last of the residential property that, for two decades, no one had wanted to buy. The value of the commercial property he owned on Main Street had skyrocketed, thank you very much, and he had been able to raise rents for the first time in years. Oh, he could be doing much worse. Then there was the floating cafe. That little beauty on the bay had made him more money than he’d ever thought was possible. He’d keep the houseboat afloat for as long as Nayeema wanted to run it. The houseboat was always about her.
Self-conscious and slightly disgusted with himself for spying, Tom retreated from the window and returned to his lazy position on the sofa. Now that the blinds were closed, the room felt instantly serene and cool. He closed his eyes. His legs twitched. His body went heavy. He felt his weight press deeper against the sofa. There were no perils to face, no demons to fight, no dominions to protect. He could let down his guard. In the darkened room, he could forget about time, just for a while.
* * *
Nayeema raised her legs against the wooden rail of the back verandah and let her feet dangle over the edge. With closed eyes she listened to the joyful trill of the butcherbird. It was unusual for the butcherbird to be singing so early in the afternoon, while the air was thick with humidity and heat.
The sweetness of the butcherbird’s pitch made her forget, for a moment, her own heaviness, and she felt herself soar above the treetops, where the sound seemed to drift. When the song of the butcherbird stopped she opened her eyes. She didn’t flinch when she saw the bird standing inquisitively beside her foot on the railing. A male, she guessed, from its size. There was a flourish of blue on his collar. He looked her directly in the eyes with his head slightly cocked to the side.
The butcherbird was the most assertive, the noisiest of the birds. Except for the kookaburra, the other native birds, all of them exquisite, were almost inaudible. The brightly coloured lorikeets and rosellas and galahs, blue wrens, silvereyes and finches were seen in hushed whirrs above.
She and the butcherbird held their gazes on one another. The bird’s feathers were ruffled, giving him a slightly dishevelled appearance, like a man who hadn’t shaved in a few days. The bird swayed but kept staring at her. Nayeema stared back at the bird but her mind was far away.
She tried to imagine where Fawzy might be right now. She imagined that his window was rolled all the way down, and that his elbow was nudging out of the car. Perhaps he had passed someone he knew on the exit road from Burraboo, and instead of cowering with shame, perhaps he offered a friendly beep of the horn and a wave. Perhaps he was playing the cassette she had given him, with her beloved Carpenters on one side and her equally loved Abdel Halim Hafez on the other side. Grey-green trees rushed by him. The glimmer of hope in his eyes grew stronger. His car seat was upright and his spine straight.
She imagined that Fawzy was contemplative for a moment. She saw his face turn grave. A small wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. He stared at the road ahead with his hands gripped around the steering wheel; and as the sound of the engine soothed him, his mouth relaxed into a smile. He pressed his lips together and his cheeks dimpled. There was a chance for him to be happy again.
Nayeema blinked. The butcherbird had flown away. She didn’t know how long she had been sitting on the verandah and she looked up at the sky, towards the sun, as if this might tell her. She stood, dragged a chair from the verandah, took it down the stairs and into the garden. When she sat back down she flicked off her sandals. She analysed the way her feet rested on the earth. She pressed her feet against the grass. Who would mow the lawn now that Fawzy had left?
People would talk about her, when they found out about her and Fawzy. There would be whispe
rs and mutters. She was prepared for that.
A sudden feeling of breathlessness came over her at the prospect of being alone. When she tried to locate that precise feeling of desolation, her chest tightened further so instead, she watched her toes wriggle obediently. She separated them and let them come back together, paying childlike attention to the natural gaps between her toes. She made her toes rise and fall on the grass, aware of the silent and powerful grace of this motion. Every time she felt the touch of grass and dirt against her toes, she felt a little more calmness claim her.
A letter arrived yesterday. Forwarded to Hungerford Place, courtesy of Jehan in the Paprika Triangle. It was from her youngest brother in Alexandria, on behalf of all four brothers. She’d read the letter briefly, just once, skimming over whole sections. The words resembled an apology, though weren’t quite, not by her reckoning. They missed her and wanted her to return to them. How could she, when she hadn’t yet forgiven them?
She pulled the crushed letter from her back pocket and thumbed the top of the papers with her fingertips. She drew them to her nose with the hope of smelling something from her old life. Nothing.
She was ready to read the letter now, from the position of understanding and not anger. Her fury had dissipated, and when she thought of her brothers, a kind of emptiness came over her. Good, it was better to feel emptiness than rage.
It was rage that had spurred her to run hard and fast away from her brothers, rage that had taken her to a foreign land. But she still wasn’t rid of them. Her hands trembled as she fingered the pages with longing. She didn’t want to forget about them. She didn’t want to forget them any more than she wanted to forget who sold the best henna in Alexandria, or made the best sweets or cooked the sweetest grilled corn on the Corniche. She wanted to remember these things, always, and not just in her dreams when her recollections were sharper than a filleting blade. She still dreamt about her father running away from her and she knew she would always chase after him, cry out for him, for fear of forgetting.
She sighed and straightened the creased pages and lined them up. Slowly, so slowly, she began to read, noticing the stroke of each letter, the form of every word. She read as far as the end of the first line, when the urgent trill of the butcherbird demanded that she look away from the letter. There he was, the butcherbird. It kept coming back to her, this bird, with his wise and shrewd black eyes. He kept coming back to trill to her his ancient song; a song that thrummed this earth and sky, before settling deep inside her.
She touched her birthmark lightly with her fingertips and was flooded with calm. The prick and prickle had disappeared. The angry welts were dissolved, coalesced without seams or scars into her skin. The birthmark was entirely unremarkable now, and even its colour had faded from pomegranate to a few shades darker than her skin.
All her life, from the day that her chest was marked, her birthmark bewildered her. Not anymore. She now grasped the second secret story of her birthmark, the one her mother and grandmother had never told her about, the story from folklore that was too awful to be spoken of. For the strange stain was surely a marking of the lost ones, of those who wander and never belong in any place until, if they are lucky, they find the place that connects their own body’s heat with the earth’s blood and bone. She’d spent so much energy resisting the wind, instead of moving with it. The wind had always been pulling her closer to the inlet on the bay. It wasn’t Fawzy that had brought her to Burraboo. It was the inlet. The wet hump of rocks that looked like seals, the dance of clouds that made shadows on the water was a daily embrace.
How utterly foolish she had been. Her friendship with Goldie had been all dazzle and light. Goldie was cruel. She’d let Fawzy suffer when Annabel had always been safe at the Rainbow Lily farm. Goldie and Jayney, they could both go to the hell. Still, Goldie had given Nayeema a gift: the belief she could make a go of anything.
She knew things now. How longing for the past or an idea fades reluctantly, like the ebbing light of dusk before the dark seizes it. Even within the dark, there are stubborn hues of light. There is the shallow dark and the deeper dark. Within darkness, every yearning can be reimagined, can reemerge in another guise. Her yearning for a piercing parlour had faded gently like streaks on the horizon at dusk. Yet her love of the ear was undiminished.
She pulled on her left ear, flicked it, though she knew it would hurt. Ouch. Still tender. It throbbed slightly. She didn’t mind. She liked the way the heat radiated down her ear. This was a fresh piercing, barely an hour old. The first piercing she had made away from the lobe, on the helix, at the top of the ear. She’d heard three thrilling pops as the hollow needle went through two layers of skin and the cartilage in between. A gold stud now glinted there. It was killer cool. She planned another piercing, slightly beneath it. Her heart roared as she’d placed a new dot on her ear. Her intention was there. When she was ready, she would make another piercing. Not yet.
Tom understood her yearning. In his confused and messy core was a type of tenderness that went straight to the heart of her; she could smell and feel it, but had no capacity to explain this strange tenderness. Neither Arabic nor English would do. Not without sounding too grandiose or too flimsy. And when she tried to find the words, they flitted briefly on her tongue before dissolving. Only in those brief moments could she attempt to bring that subtle understanding of Tom into something palpable.
Even after everything that had happened, she still wanted to partner with Tom in a new floating cafe. Now, with Fawzy gone … With Fawzy gone, she had space and air to think without guilt that her own happiness might surpass his.
Very unbelievable to think that here, in Burraboo, she was excited about all that was ahead of her. In this terrain, there were no known coordinates. She knew only that the sun would rise and the sun would fall.
Her understanding of Burraboo’s colours and rhythms was growing rapidly inside her. The memory of this land could be heard and seen in the crumpled folds of earth and jagged cliffs, as visible and obvious as the wrinkles on the face of an old person. She had sudden monumental breaths of awareness where her mind’s picture of herself in this place was complete.
Everyone who had preceded her in Burraboo was embedded here, the living and the dead. They were all here.
RECIPES
To remember the perils of night talk
Ful medammis
Fava bean stew
Ingredients
•1kg dried fava beans
•½ cup rice
•Salt, pepper, cumin and paprika, to taste
•Oil, for frying
•1 garlic clove
•Butter, for frying
•Accompaniments of your choosing, such as tomatoes, feta cheese, red onion, pickled turnips.
•Bread, to serve
Method
1Soak the beans in water for 2–3 hours. Drain the water and place the beans in a deep pan. Completely cover the beans with water, add the rice and slow cook on low heat for 20 hours; add water when needed. It’s cooked when the beans are soft.
2Fill a serving bowl with the beans and rice. Add the seasoning, be liberal with the cumin and salt especially, and mix into the bean stew.
3In a separate pan, place a chunk of butter over medium heat and add a finely chopped clove of garlic, stirring constantly. When the garlic is cooked, remove from heat and pour the garlic butter over the ful medammis in the serving bowl.
4Accompany with a side salad of chopped tomatoes, crumbled feta cheese, diced red onion, oil and salt. Pickled turnips are also an excellent accompaniment.
5Use bread as your spoon. Be sure to get a little bit of everything on the bread.
To arouse passion and poetry
Kousa mahshi
Stuffed zucchini
Ingredients
Zucchini stuffing:
•4 zucchinis
•1 cup uncooked rice
•Oil, for frying
•1 onion, finely diced
•150g
beef or lamb mince
•A handful each of parsley, coriander, and mint, chopped
•2 chopped tomatoes
Tomato sauce:
•2 chopped tomatoes and a spoon of tomato paste
•1 cup chicken stock, more if needed
•salt and pepper
Method
1Remove the seeds of the zucchini to create a hollow tube.
2Wash rice, drain and set aside.
3In a deep pan, add oil. When oil is warm, add onion and cook until it is brown. Add the meat and stir until it is cooked.
4Transfer the cooked meat mixture into a bowl. Add rice, herbs and chopped tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Combine.
5Stuff the mixture into the zucchini tubes using your hands. It will be messy and will spill over the sides. Be patient. If you must, let your mind contemplate as your hands take over.
6Into a large pan, add the tomatoes, tomato paste, stock. Season with salt and pepper, and bring the sauce to a gentle simmer. Place the stuffed zucchinis into the tomato sauce and be sure to stand the zucchinis upright, like candles.
7Gradually lower the heat after 15 minutes, and allow to cook slowly, for another 10 minutes or until the rice is cooked through.
8Accompany with a side dish of beef sautéed in onion, garlic and butter.
To soothe the heart
Bamya
Okra and lamb casserole
Ingredients
•1kg of bamya, Egyptian okra (Tip: Egyptian okra is shorter than other varieties)
•1 onion, diced
•4 cloves garlic, chopped finely
•400g cubed lamb
Fava Beans For Breakfast Page 30