Something Special, Something Rare

by Black Inc.

  He sighs and looks at me.

  ‘See?’ I say, showing him the discount pillowslips, the tiny children’s T-shirts. ‘Please.’

  ‘Get going then,’ he says shortly, deleting something on his machine and walking off. Angry with himself for giving in to me. He’d be a boy off the estate, himself. I bet thirty years ago he came with his parents from Lebanon and grew up on those stairwells and in that glass-strewn park. I bet he could still tell me the number of his flat, if I asked him. The number, the smell, the noise outside, the silent resolution of his parents to get out.

  ‘Thanks!’ I call out, but he’s already at the next car up the road, already disappearing in a gritty shimmer of peak-hour monoxide.

  *

  ‘What do you think of the mural?’ I say to the women later as they bend over their paintings. ‘The big picture, in the gym?’

  They smile shyly. ‘Good.’

  ‘Do you think you’d like to go in and help them, just do a little bit of painting in there?’

  I catch their quick, hidden glances of consternation.

  ‘No, no.’ They’re all smiling hard. ‘Is very nice, but no.’

  ‘You don’t want to paint, though?’

  ‘With the girl with the … um, this?’ Nahir gestures fleetingly to her tongue, where Mandy has a stud, and all the women giggle uncomfortably.

  I smile back, and shrug. I thought they’d like it, a mural that showed their community’s diversity. We can all reel the figures off, the workers here, with a sort of proprietary pride: fourteen distinct cultural groups! Nine different languages! We shake our heads in bemusement at the multicultural, multilingual, multi-tasking jobs we’ve landed in, where every newsletter and flier has to be in five different translations, where if we’re not running to put up the nets for Vietnamese boys’ volleyball we’re busy setting up the cooking class for the East Timorese mothers’ group.

  Maybe there wasn’t enough consultation, after all. It’s hard, finding something everyone’s happy with. Or maybe the artists’ hair and big boots, their thumping music, has scared them off.

  ‘You’ll come on Friday, though? To the opening?’ I cringe at the eager insistence in my voice. They smile, confer among themselves in low voices, and nod obligingly at me.

  ‘Yes. We all come.’

  ‘Because, you know, you can wear national costume, if you like. Your traditional dresses? That would be wonderful. The minister would love to see that.’ Their faces grow wary and apologetic with unsayable things. The room is stiff with a charged awkwardness, with languages I can’t speak.

  ‘No. But we come.’ They go back to their painting, murmuring and sorting through the photocopied pages of designs. I should get a photo of this, I think absently; this pile of embroidery patterns they’ve all brought from Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq, all shared around and used as stencils. If I mentioned it to the centre manager, he’d want a photo for our annual general report. Still, at least they’re all coming along to the same class, and God knows that took me a while. Maybe one day I’ll convince them to share tables.

  Here in Australia, the women don’t embroider the designs, though. They paint them straight onto fabric instead, finishing several pillowcases or table napkins in one afternoon. Out in the gym, the mural artists are carefully painting their figures in traditional embroidered dresses copied from a library book; in here, in the craft room, the real women are outfitted in pastel windcheaters, some of them decorated with flowery borders of quick-drying fabric paint. I heat up the iron and press their pillow-cases flat to make the dyes permanent and washable. Steam billows up in my face; the hot, comforting smell of clean, pressed cotton, the same the world over.

  *

  Wednesday afternoon, and Mandy and Jake are still not finished. There’s a couple of faces still just sketched in at the front, likenesses they’re working on from the health centre’s photo album of snapshots from last year’s barbecue. It’s a rainbow of faces now, the mural, a melting pot. A few Anglo faces are placed judiciously next to Laotian and Eritrean, Vietnamese alongside El Salvadorian and Iraqi and Aboriginal, all standing ‘We Are the World’ style with arms round each other, grinning as if the photographer’s somehow cracked a joke they all find mutually hilarious, something that in real life would involve several simultaneous translators and a fair whack of fairy dust.

  The centre director is thrilled, the minister’s going to love it, the artists have a jaunty spring in their step because the mural itself, it must be said, is stunning. It’s a multicultural vision to be proud of. Community workers from other centres and other estates are invited to the Friday opening to marvel and envy, and apply for their own grants.

  ‘You look a bit flat,’ says Mandy, raising her eyes from the photo album to glance my way.

  ‘No, I’m great. It looks wonderful, it really does.’

  ‘We’ve left that bit there for the kids to work on this afternoon,’ she says, pointing to a blank section of sky.

  ‘OK, good.’ I’ll have to choose five or six kids, I think, bribe them with chocolate not to wreck it, just paint the blue like they’re told.

  ‘Someone here to see you in the office,’ a workmate tells me, putting her head round the door. The music’s off, briefly, and her voice echoes in the big, empty space.

  It’s a guy in a suit. He steps forward to shake my hand.

  ‘You phoned me,’ he says, ‘about the anti-graffiti sealant? I’m here from Pro-Guard, just to inspect the wall surface to make sure you purchase the right product.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, we want to treat a mural to protect it against graffiti.’

  He nods. ‘That’s a real asset-management issue now. Our products give years of repeat protection, whether you choose the impregnation-style pore blocking penetrative sealer or something with a sacrificial surface …’

  He keeps going like this until my head is swimming with compounds, polycarbons, two-packs and one-pot formulations. I keep nodding as he inspects the wall in the gym and talks about polysiloxane coatings versus silicone rubber, and finally I say, ‘Look, I need something we can apply ourselves which is quick-drying. And if someone graffitis it, I want to be able to clean it off without too much fuss.’

  ‘They won’t graffiti it,’ interjects Mandy, who’s listening. She’s walking along past each big smiling face, painstakingly adding a dot of white in each eye, so that they jump to life with a realistic twinkle. ‘Nobody will graffiti anything they feel a sense of owner-ship and inclusion about.’

  ‘Right,’ says the sealant salesman, eyeing her briefly before turning back to me. ‘Like I said, we’re in the business of helping you maintain the value of your asset and protecting it from senseless defacing. So for your requirements, I’d recommend Armour-All.’

  ‘Great!’ I respond with a smile. I’m tired now.

  ‘It’s a urethane product. You mix in the solvent and apply two coats twelve hours apart; using masks and gloves and adequate ventilation there’s no reason why you can’t apply it yourself. And it has terrific anti-stick. You can just remove any graffiti with white spirit.’

  ‘Wonderful. We’ll take it.’

  He says he can deliver it that afternoon and names a figure. I nod, toting up the remainder of the grant money in the account. Just enough left over for snacks at the opening, catered for by the Vietnamese social group. Everyone likes spring rolls, as long as we don’t make them with pork. We’re having bread and dips too, so the Turkish cooking-class members don’t get their noses out of joint. And maybe I should get the East Timorese to sing something …

  ‘I’ll go and get the after-school club kids,’ I tell the artists. ‘We’ve got to get this done by tonight so we can make sure the sealant’s dry by Friday afternoon. The Armour-All.’

  Jake and Mandy say they’ll help me apply it. They’re nice people, really. I don’t understand why this whole process hasn’t worked out like I thought, like I said it would on my grant project description.

 
*

  It’s got to cure properly, the sealant. So we end up applying the second coat at midnight on Thursday, the three of us slapping our fat brushes into the wall corners, wiping up drops with a turps-soaked rag, seeing it go on shiny and slick and impenetrable. I’m light-headed and starry from the fumes, so that the Nick Cave CD they’re playing tonight beats in my skull like a racing, roaring pulse.

  I’ve never been here on the estate this late at night. As I splash the sealant on I listen to cars revving and residents shouting, doors slamming, a quick blooping siren as the police pull someone over, the thumping woofers of passing car stereos. And through it all, I hear a babel of voices; every language group we’re so proud of, calling and greeting, arguing and yelling, nearly 2000 people I couldn’t name and who have no use for me. Who glance at me, leaving in my car every afternoon, and look away again, busy with the demands of getting by.

  I dip my brush and grimly slop on the Armour-All, over the big smiles and laughing eyes and joined hands, sealing them all in behind a clear surface which promises to dry diamond-hard.

  *

  ‘What a great event,’ says the minister, and surveying the gymnasium I can see that, yes, this is just the minister’s kind of thing – authentic ethnic food on the trestle tables, a welcoming song by the East Timorese choir, real grassroots community development in the shape of 130 or so attendees. In an estate of 1800, that’s hardly a throng, but the minister’s delighted. And behind it all, towering across the long wall, the mural.

  ‘Such a positive message,’ the minister is saying, ‘and I understand the community itself had a hand in creating it. Marvellous.’

  A group of adolescents goes up to inspect the mural, pointing something out. These guys wanted pool tables with the grant money, and who can blame them? The two artists step up to engage them in some kind of conversation, Mandy passing a self-conscious hand through her outlandish hair as the boys look to the floor, sullen and cowed, and I think there must still be residual acetylene fumes in the air, because I’m feeling a faint itching behind the eyes, a crawling tight constriction in my throat.

  ‘You’ve certainly acquitted your grant,’ the minister says, as I fiddle with my drink and watch the Vietnamese women serving the spring rolls, wondering if they see their faces in the mural, or something approximating them. Then I turn my eyes away from his charcoal lapel to catch the wondrous sight of my fabric-painting class filing into the room self-consciously and stopping the show in a blaze of embroidered hijabs and fringed shawls and gathered layered skirts, seeing me there and smiling the faint

  V5

  encouraging smiles of the truly dutiful, the truly kind. Yes, it’s a grant acquittal to be proud of, a culturally diverse photographic wet dream, and I’m blaming the Armour-All for the pricking sting now in the corners of my eyes, for the way everyone here, all of these estate residents, seem to have formed themselves, for once, into one homogenous whole; one discreet and circumspect crowd carefully distancing themselves, with subtle and infinite dignity, from the huge sprawling image which blares at them from the wall, bright and simplistic as a colouring book.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say to the minister. ‘I wonder if you’ll excuse me.’

  *

  I’m on my way over to the women when the centre manager grabs my arm, flushed and expansive. ‘Great!’ he says, handing me the camera. He’s beckoning to the minister, grinning, glancing up at the mural to find a good place to stand in front of.

  ‘I noticed those empty solvent tins out by the bins,’ he says distractedly. ‘Can you dispose of them somewhere else, where the kids from round here won’t find them and sniff them? Ta.’

  Another thought strikes him. ‘And can you get some of the ladies in your Turkish group to come over here for a photo too? In front of the mural?’

  Local colour, is what he wants. A multicultural coup. Boxes ticked. Oh, here’s our vision all right, sealed and impervious and safeguarded. And no matter what gets scrawled there, whatever message or denial or contradiction, you can just wipe it away. With white spirit.

  I weave through the crowd, away from him. Over to Nahir and Mawiya and Jameela.

  ‘Here,’ I say, handing the camera, against all office equipment policy, to a surprised Jameela. ‘I have to go soon, so you take this.’

  Her eyes widen uncertainly. ‘To take … what?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Just point and press.’

  I turn to go, heavy-footed across the gymnasium floor. To collect those empty cans from the skip and then drive home, head out the window, car full of dizzying, flammable solvent vapours. To sling them into my own bin, in my own less desperate suburb.

  I’m at the door before I hear Jameela calling my name. She’s suddenly behind me, reaching to take my arm firmly, steering me determinedly back into the waiting group of the painting class, who have assembled themselves excitedly in a quiet corner. I stand there in the middle in my jeans and black top, a dowdy, sad sparrow among peacocks. Then as Jameela raises the camera carefully I feel two arms on either side of me, stretching tentatively round my waist, drawing me tighter, and in spite of everything, I smile.

  LETTER TO A

  ALICE PUNG

  You ripped down the wallpaper one day when you were fourteen, ripped it right off the walls all four of them and then stuck up posters all over the room to hide the scabby paint. One day it will get painted over, you told yourself. One day the broken window will get fixed. One day the carpets will get changed. One day the ceiling will not fall down. One day the cracks will not be there, one day the smell will not be there, and when that day comes you will be out. Out of there. You will not be there to see it all. One day you will be out of there and one day you will live a freshly whitewashed life. Yes you will, and the ceiling will no longer peel and fall on top of you and these four walls will no longer close in on you, and you will have cauterised your wants.

  There is a depression in the wall. These depressions come about when your knuckles itch and your upper deltoids ache to exert themselves and your mind is nothing but a blank black hole screaming to see red, that is when you strike and don’t think of the consequences. This is when your inarticulate rage causes you to bunch up your fist and punch the wall so hard that the clock falls down on the other side, since there is no one to listen to your choked half-finished sentences about a cousin, a cousin who was once like a brother but is now nothing more than crap for all you care, a cousin so far gone that you don’t think of the money he has borrowed from you or the money he owes you, the money to get out, you do not think about it at all because you do not want to think about him. To think about him is to stumble down the path of despair and once you are on that path, you have to keep running, keep running or else if you stop and pause to see what direction you are going, you will sink to your knees and realise how much you need water, water like the water bottles they carry down the streets of Richmond and you can always tell which ones are the ones on the habit because of these water bottles.

  We were powerpoints, powerpoints with the three holes, two that slanted upwards and one that was a straight stroke down, straight and narrow and sad, like the prospect of some of us spending the rest of our lives doing PowerPoint presentations because our names are Andrew Chan and we wear glasses and sit in front of our PCs after school each evening because our parents want us to study hard and become successful, because this is a land of great opportunity and we must not waste it, it is a land of great fairness where even Ah Chan selling BanCao at the market in Saigon can raise a son who can decipher strange symbols in front of a screen merely by pressing many buttons in different combinations on a black pad, and it assures him to hear the clackity clack noise like an old abacus coming from his son’s room, because then he knows that his son knows more than he does. Old Ah Chan doesn’t have a clue about what the information superhighway is, all he knows is that there are no casualties, none at all, and that it can only go up from here. And so he buys his son the magic machine w
ith the clopclop buttons and with a few clackity clacks and clicks he can transport himself to a nice office and a house in the suburbs and a shiny new blue Mazda.

  Chink is an insult, but chink is also the sound that money makes as it rattles in your father’s pockets, it is also the sound that those machines at the casino make when he hits the jackpot, so chink is not necessarily too bad a word. Chink is the only word that governs the life of your father, chink chink chink of the coins in the gaming machine, chink chink chink one at a time and not all at once, and so he sits there to wait for the sound of all-at-once chinks, meanwhile at home the boy and the mother and the kid brother sit together for a dinner of rice and vegetables and bits of beef before parting to play computer games or watch Chinese serials in separate rooms. You go off to your room and turn up the music, real loud music, and you look at the white wall which you had determined to paint a mural on, ’cause your art teacher says that you have real talent, but what the hell, what now? What is determination now, when the father won’t come back and when the father won’t stop spending the money and won’t stop believing in the glorious sound of the chinkchinkchink of the machine.

  A steady beat of chinks from the coins in his pocket, waiting for the rapid succession of chinkchinkchinks like the quickening of a heartbeat until the glorious rushing sound cannot be separated into its individual tinkles but all pours forth like a mad gold rush.

  This is a different gold rush from the gold rush of the nineteenth century when we men had to carry heavy buckets and sift away to find the little pieces, and we needed strong stomachs to swallow the pieces and keen eyes to sift through the processes of our digestive tracts to find that little hard lump.

  Meanwhile, swallow that lump in your throat you big sook, ’cause big boys aren’t sooks goddam it, and look at your comic books and pictures of Dragonball Z and pick up the phone to call the number of that little pale-faced girl with the dark eyes and the black hair, even if she makes you write her letters instead of wanting to talk in person. Let the phone ring and ring and goddam is there anyone home? Keep your finger on the little soft grey ‘off’ button on the cordless phone in case her parents pick up and interrogate you worse than those Mao guards during the bloody cultural revolution that would not leave your family alone, that sent them to Vietnam, and then to this new land where little white-faced girls with black hair laugh at your stories of killing chickens in the Guangzhou countryside, and all your history becomes a funny after-dinner anecdote. Others would see your acts as barbaric, and squeeze their clean faces into squished looks of shudder-shake – ‘eww, how gross’ – even as they are seated opposite you eating a McChicken burger or severing the joints of the skinny bones of KFC chicken-wings with shiny fingers.