Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © S.L. Lim 2019

  First published 2019

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: www.kipscottphoto.com

  Author image: Sean Ellwood

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A pre-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-28-6

  ‘The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals...’

  George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi

  CHAPTER ONE

  When I grow up, I wrote when I was twelve, I would like to save the world and live forever.

  It seemed like a reasonable ambition at the time. I’d known for as long as I could remember that I was special: my mother told me I was ‘one in a thousand’, and since I was the only one in my class who could read words with sch in them, this sounded plausible enough. My parents, a doctor and a lawyer, were always gently anxious about something, like whether my arms were the right length, and if my motor skills were advancing fast enough for a boy my age. They were very well educated, with the grace to be embarrassed about how much money they had. They’d been happy as a couple but had determined, in their mid-to late thirties, that their lives would be depleted in some intangible way if they did not produce a child. They told me I could be anything I wanted, which was supposed to be reassuring but had the opposite effect. As I grew older, the question of what I was going to ‘be’ picked up its own disturbing momentum and intensity.

  I graduated from high school with all the trimmings and followed this up with an enjoyable gap year building houses in Malawi. We were meant to teach a group of widows and orphans how to weave baskets out of straw, but the widows and orphans turned out to be better at this than we were, so building houses it had to be. I carried bricks, and felt pleasingly, redemptively tired, and at the end of each day savoured a sunset so perfect it was as though it had been made especially for me. After such profound and alien loveliness uni could only be an anticlimax, at least initially. I hated my classes. I was disappointed by my fellow students, who were either poorly read or so effortlessly brilliant that they shamed me. There was no-one on my level. I was studying Arts, of course, and Law, which was what you did when you had some cleverness and no clear idea of where to put it.

  Then I met Andie. I think we took a class together, although I couldn’t name the subject now. We met in a lift, and her eyes travelled up and down my body with healthy unerotic curiosity. ‘So, Nick,’ she said. ‘I noticed you drew forty-five smiley faces in your notebook last week.’

  We became best friends without needing to talk about it, in the way that first years can. We lived together for two years, and though we’ve both had peaks of joy and accomplishment since, I hope it’s not too much to say neither of us has since approached the uncomplicated happiness of that period. We edited each other’s OkCupid profiles, and invented foods like ‘Salmon Rushdie’ and ‘Smoked Salman’, and developed an ecosystem of jokes which must have rendered us obnoxious or at least impermeable to outsiders. Sometimes we told anecdotes in tandem – not at a sentence-finishing level, but close. She brought the detail and observancy, I added the poeticals and literary merit. It was a great recipe that made the both of us look very deep.

  Then we got older. Aged twenty-one or twenty-two there was an appealing lack of definiteness to our plans; we were keen to do ‘something in human rights’, but when that something failed to manifest we found ourselves creeping closer to McKinsey and the corporations we’d disdained during our idealistic phase. Andie got a boyfriend, a proper one this time. A screen fell between us, the invisible barrier which divides couples off from the rest of the world. I got the sense she was disappointed in me. Goodness knows I was disappointed in myself. Far from saving the world, I’d taken a job in a minor department of the public service. It felt entirely unreal, coming back to the office after even a day or two outside. My colleagues seemed to have sprung from another, much more awful planet. Through some optical illusion they always looked like they were out of proportion, with massive heads and squashed, misshapen bodies, as though they had been hacked from stone or cheese. They smiled kindly at me, like friendly Godzillas. And yet after just a few days it felt like there was no outside world at all, just the office stretching on through time and space so that all which came before it was a dream, and all after just a semiconscious daze, temperature-controlled, where nothing important could happen and the milk was labelled just in case the paralegals drank So Good that was meant for the Economic Group, or something equally dire.

  By day I talked about ‘disbenefits’ and ‘deliverables’; by night I roamed the mediocre alleys of the internet. My friends and I discussed intellectual topics, like the socio-political ramifications of casting in the Harry Potter movies. It was as though having progressive thoughts about pop culture was a substitute for doing literally anything at all. And then even this devolved further into suburban self-regard, so that we talked about careers, spouses and holidays, and whether banning late-night alcohol sales was an infringement on our civil liberties. We did not talk about how to do right in the world. We did not talk about ideas.

  I wasn’t happy but I was scared to move because the slightest change on my part might topple everything, though if you asked me, I could hardly have said what ‘everything’ was.

  Andie and I stayed friends until she died. Towards the end, though, I think we were starting to drift apart. You mythologise people – you remember them for what they meant to you, rather than how they actually were. Too much time had passed; the relationship could not be reconstructed from first principles. I thought I hadn’t changed but she had, and she would probably have said the same about me. What is our story? We were friends, then she was gone and I drifted, then she came back and told me things which I wrote down before the final disappearance. And now she’s gone for good and here I am, putting words into order; and the more I think the more ridiculous it seems, curating these events for a beginning and end, conflict and catharsis and all the rest. Pimping out my own trauma for effect. So you must keep an eye on me, you must not let me get away with anything. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that other people exist - something I didn’t quite know back then, and am only intermittently conscious of now. They are just themselves, not examples or morals. They are not a backdrop for me to develop my sense of self. But I did care for Andie. I really did.

  Andie was not a perfect person. She could be petty, she could be boring, she could be mean. But when she had an idea of what was right she would follow through. She did not see a distinction between thought and action – if you believed in an ideal, you would just naturally do whatever you could to bring it into being. She always assumed that other people lived like that too, even though she must have realised eventually that they didn’t. In particular, that I didn’t. But she never acted like she was disappointed.

  #

  One evening when Andie was reaching the tail end of university, Benjamin called her to organise dinner. To her surprise, Andie found hersel
f as delighted as if she had been waiting for the call all day. It was not that she was so obsessed about hearing from Ben. When he wasn’t around, she often went whole days without reflecting on his existence. Today, though, the sound of his voice suffused her with a kind of universal warmth with no definite source. It was like one of those infrared bulbs which emitted heat but no visible light, a sensation she could not recall having experienced before. She said that she would meet him at the station.

  Andie and Ben had for two years maintained a cheerful, stable arrangement, premised around mutual study sessions, sleepovers and sex. On Saturday nights, they stayed at each other’s houses; during the week, they met on campus and held hands, and made out in lecture theatres to the titillation of the people sitting next to them. Andie’s boyfriend was white and she was Chinese, though she felt uncomfortable saying it out loud. Sometimes she said she was ‘ethnically’ Chinese, or ‘biologically’. She felt like the qualifier was important, even though she had no obvious reason for saying it. It felt quite limiting to particularise herself like that. It felt like a withdrawal from the broader claims of being human.

  They sat in a Thai restaurant and ordered some kind of fried entree, which was indistinguishable from all other fried substances in the world. Out of some duty to be cheerful, she remarked that it was really good. As they ate, it struck her that Ben was being unusually quiet. ‘Is something wrong?’ she asked. ‘Do you have something you want to say to me?’

  Immediately Ben’s facial muscles constricted. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘There is something. But if you like we can save it for later.’

  On holiday, at work, in casual conversation and in bed, Andie and Benjamin enjoyed an easy, natural rapport. When it came to politics, however, they were different in every possible way. At the age of fourteen and a half, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, Andie had shaved her scalp. She then used an electric razor to carve the word ‘Peace’ into the fuzzy regrowth. She couldn’t remember the exact reasons she’d had for doing it. What she did recall was a strangled feeling. She looked at her own life, at home and at school, where rules were followed and obvious lies were punished, and thought: They should not be allowed to do it. Her gesture had no discernible impact on the Bush administration’s plans for war. It did, however, render her extremely attractive to a certain sector of the population. For the rest of her life, she was never propositioned as much as she had been during those twelve weeks before her hair grew back. She was leered at on buses and groped on trains, and some guy down the road suggested apropos of nothing that she move into his flat. This deeply disconcerted teenage Andie. She was a serious, studious child, a writer of essays so intense they sometimes scared her teachers. Later, as an adult, she would share the story as an anecdote of token teenage stupidity.

  Ben, though, was about as pro-establishment as you can be while studying Arts at university. His parents came from old agricultural money; they were wealthy but unostentatiously so. They owned a dairy which sold premium milk to major supermarkets. He seemed guileless and sincere, which I admired in principle, but in practice it got on my nerves – and sometimes Andie’s, too. He instinctively trusted people in authority, believing that whatever they did must be good, even if the reason was temporarily concealed from him. Everybody liked him and treated him well, and if others didn’t experience life in the same way, there must be some explanatory defect in their behaviour. ‘My bosses have always been decent to me,’ he said once, while explaining why it was unfair that it should be so hard to fire one’s employees. ‘Yes, but Ben, you’re a rich white guy,’ Andie said. And for a second he stared at both of us, eyes wide and startled, as if he’d been running down a corridor and come across a barrier he couldn’t quite see, much less identify – which inhibited his passage without preventing it, and which he could, without conscious effort, avoid without allowing it to encroach on his field of vision.

  One time some friend of Andie’s, a Lebanese kid called Aybak, was having trouble finding movers for his stuff when he was leaving his house because the lease was terminated. ‘Just leave it there,’ Ben suggested, hearty and jovial. His face took on a belligerent expression, directed at the imaginary landlord. ‘Just leave it for another week. My uncle stayed in his place, like, an extra three weeks at his place after he was meant to get evicted. What are they going to do? They can’t do anything.’

  Andie had looked at him curiously. The idea of, say, having your possessions thrown out on the street simply did not exist in Ben’s mental universe. Nor did the prospect that somebody wielding coercive force – say, the police – might be moved to lay their hands on his person or his property. As far as Ben was concerned, he was untouchable. That was how it had always been in his life.

  Yet the thing everyone said about Ben back then was that he was nice. He possessed near infinite reserves of patience. He would share a drink with the most annoying and time-consuming people in our circle, including a very frustrating teenager who followed the Liberal Party the way most people cheer for football teams. He gave people the benefit of the doubt, even and especially those who blatantly showed that this benefit was not something they deserved, such as when he lent an expensive book to a classmate notorious for absconding with other people’s stuff. ‘Well, this time could have been different’ was all he said when the book was retrieved, battered and creased in angles impossible to attribute to ordinary use. His faults were mostly political in nature. He thought that ‘ethnics’ in general were defective in comparison to whites: this wasn’t racist, just a simple observation of reality. Asians, for instance, lacked social skills – ‘robots’ was the word he used – but if properly trained, there was no reason they couldn’t partake in all the benefits of mainstream society. Andie, through deft sleight of mind, was expropriated from her skin and thus excluded from this category.

  Andie, of course, disagreed with Ben on just about everything. So did all of our friends; we may have made a show of sticking up for minorities, but we were merciless towards the conservatives in our midst. Sometimes I got the sense that Andie was even a bit proud of her relationship for this reason. That she and Ben had fallen for each other was proof of her highest creed: that creeds were worth less than individuals. And they seemed to go so well together, cuddling on the library lawn, splitting friands down the middle, that it seemed churlish to point out that she had never, not once, considered the possibility that Ben might be right and that she might be wrong.

  Across the table, Ben looked like he was going to throw up on her shoes. Ridiculously, for a moment, Andie thought he was about to say that he was pregnant and he wanted her to pay for the abortion. Which she would be more than willing to do. She laid her fork on the table. Ben said: ‘I was thinking … I want us to move in together.’

  Initially, Andie was flooded with relief. She hadn’t been dumped, cheated on or exposed to HIV. Her boyfriend simply wanted to take the next logical step in their relationship. Why pay two sets of rent and electricity bills, when you were always in and out of each other’s homes? She told herself the suggestion was entirely pragmatic, and comforted herself by focusing on that aspect. Then her relief washed cold. She knew what Benjamin really wanted. If she moved in with him she would, in effect, be agreeing to share his life. That was the extent of what he was willing to offer. They would end up getting married – he was that kind of person – and their relationship, so weightless up until now, would become heavy and bankable, love as a thing you did, just as if it were a job, a verb instead of just a feeling. She sat very still. She was hyperconscious of her body, the slow clench and unclenching of her heart.

  Andie had never explicitly considered the kind of person she wanted to end up with. She had deliberately avoided posing such a question, believing lists of this kind were juvenile and vulgar. Still, much in the way that her high school friends use to fetishise ‘tall, dark and stoopid’, Andie used to imagine the all-night conversations, the passionate arguments which she and her future life partner woul
d have. They might differ on all sorts of things, but in the end his ethical vision would be fundamentally in consonance with her own. It wasn’t just an intellectual matter. Other people thought about justice, but Andie felt it; her dress flamed, her body was on fire. Once I accused her of caring about people in the abstract more than actual people, and she replied. ‘Yeah, and what’s so bad about that? Isn’t it better than you, Nick? Isn’t it better than not caring about anything at all?’

  Benjamin across the table seemed smaller than life, though I begrudgingly admitted that he was both tall and handsome, if not especially dark. He was hunched over, as if in expectation of a blow across the skull. All of a sudden Andie was assaulted by shame – because Ben had never judged her. She had been catastrophically wrong about all sorts of things in life, but it made no difference to the way he loved her. She doled out love in conditional increments, withdrawing it when others failed to meet her standards, as they inevitably did, being people; it was an ugly, ungenerous way to live. There was so much to appreciate about Ben, who was hardworking, stolidly intelligent and kind. Even her mother said so – ‘He’s a nice man!’ – and her mother liked nothing and no-one. So long as Ben’s actions were good, what did it matter if his ideas were malign? She told him yes.

  It didn’t sink in at first. But in the coming weeks she noticed changes, subtle adjustments in how she looked at her future. Time seemed longer now, and less forbidding; it seemed like a proposition that could be managed now that there were two of them, co-conspirators against the world. Up till then, she had always kept me up to date with her evolving relationship, but from then on she only shared generic and trivial details, mostly logistical in nature, like what suburb they were planning to live in. She had been brought up to believe that marriage was a serious and therefore secret business. No words could do justice to its complex ebb and flow, and so the inner life had to be hidden, to stop its intimate profundity from leaking out.