Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  I helped Andie move out of the apartment we had shared up to that point. I put things in boxes and taped them into bubble wrap and stacked them in the back of the van which Ben had hired for the occasion. They went to get a coffee before driving off. It was obvious, though not actually said, that I wasn’t invited. I watched them from behind, her wrapped up in his enormous coat, and thought how little that detail meant to me, and how much. They brought with them a giant bag of glass for recycling. Andie was the kind of person who remembered to exchange old containers at the depot, so that you could collect the fifteen cents per bottle. I wasn’t, really. There weren’t many things in life that fifteen cents could motivate me to do.

  #

  Four years after the wedding I got an email from Andie, saying that she missed me and would love for me to come and visit her and Ben at their new place. We hadn’t spoken in a while. I was dubious about the word ‘love’, which sounded overly effusive. Andie, as I had known her, had never hidden or exaggerated her feelings about anything. But maybe married life had changed her. Like me, she must have learned to impersonate affection where it was required.

  I drove to their new property – somehow it didn’t feel right yet to call it a ‘home’. The outside of the complex was ugly, with a high barred gate and an intercom system. Inside was more human: curling vines creeping over the balcony, tomato plants and a vertical garden. The building itself, all steel and brick, was as durable and sturdy as I imagined monogamy must be. Ben stood in the front garden, a metal fork dangling from one hand.

  ‘Well, Nick, it’s good to see you,’ he said without a trace of enthusiasm. ‘Come inside.’

  I followed him down a hallway, which was hung with a series of prints, abstract shapes in black and white. ‘Andie chose those,’ Ben said, with a faint air of disclaiming himself. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘I think I like them. They’re pretty interesting,’ I added, as politely and unspecifically as I could manage.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Ben looked disappointed. ‘You know, I can’t really handle this kind of picture. I like pictures where you can actually tell what they are.’

  Silence descended. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think they’re really good.’

  ‘Do you?’ Ben asked, and then, not waiting for my answer, ‘She’s inside.’

  I met Andie in the dining room, where she was arranging some coasters on the table. (‘What even are coasters?’ I remembered her saying when we lived together. ‘What do they do?’) Her eyes slid past her husband and onto me. ‘Nick!’ she cried. ‘It’s been too long.’ We hugged, stiffly at first, and then with real feeling, Ben smiling vaguely over our shoulders. We went to sit on the striped green sofa, which I recognised as one she had owned while we were still living together. This made me happy for no good reason. I’m sentimental about ‘stuff’, and it makes me less embarrassed when others are too.

  I told her about my work, and she did a good job of acting like she was interested. I said I was the ‘Powerpoint behind the throne’, which wasn’t even funny the first time I said it. Andie listened intently, head tilted slightly to one side. I had always liked this about her, the way she made you feel like whatever you were saying was incredibly significant – although if she didn’t agree, she would let you feel the full force of it later. This, too, I appreciated. It made you feel important, that the contents of your heart and mind were worth such close inspection.

  ‘What are you up to these days?’ I asked.

  Andie paused, arranging her words. Her husband cut in. ‘Andie,’ Ben said, ‘works for some very charitable causes. Right now she’s saving women from their horrible, brutal, violent, oppressive husbands.’

  There was something faintly sardonic in the way he said ‘brutal’ and ‘violent’. A flash of irritation passed across Andie’s face.

  ‘I work for a group called Real Difference,’ she explained. ‘We believe that charitable donation should be based in evidence, not just instinct and hearsay. We do some work on the ground, review the research, and encourage the public to divert their donations accordingly.’ Her tone was full of fervour, but also blunted by repetition. You could tell that she had used these exact same words before.

  Ben shrugged his powerful shoulders. ‘Yeah, Andie and them do a lot of good,’ he said. ‘But there must be lots of rorting going on. Things like this, foreign aid … you don’t know what goes on in these places. I bet lots of cash ends up going to, you know, a corrupt dictator.’ From the way he said the phrase, I could tell he did not use the word ‘dictator’ very often, nor the word ‘corrupt’, and that for him these two words occurred together and never apart. ‘But Andie is a very caring woman. Trusts other people. Well, I used to be like that, when I was a kid.’

  ‘I had an interesting experience recently,’ Andie went on, as if her husband hadn’t spoken, ‘visiting one of the projects we sponsor right here in Sydney. We organised some lawyers to work pro bono for women who are mail-order brides, being abused by the husbands who brought them over. I have to ask: “Have you experienced violence?” And they look at me like this, like, “Are you serious?”’ She mimed incredulity. ‘Anyway, this girl I saw on Friday, we looked into her options. She was scared she’d be deported since the relationship wasn’t genuine. But in the end, we found we could jettison the husband and get the permanent residency anyway.’

  ‘Jettison the husband, ha-ha,’ said Ben.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  There was a peremptory viciousness in her tone I had never heard before. Ben seemed neither angry nor surprised. Another silence fell between us, broken only by the grinding from the coffee machine.

  ‘What’s the pay like?’ I asked feebly.

  ‘It’s not bad.’

  We talked on and off like this, in sad little spurts. I stole a glance at Benjamin, whose expression was quite blank, not a trace of anger or resentment from seconds earlier. This was just life now, apparently. Andie continued talking in unhurried tones, about how rewarding she found her work, what the benefits were like. It was as if her husband had been abolished from existence.

  We ate crackers and dips, which Andie said were homemade the day before. ‘I’ll help clean up,’ Ben said at one point. He went to the kitchen and moved his hands stiffly in the vicinity of the countertop, like a robot, as though surprised his wife had not left the dishes unattended in anticipation of this moment.

  At last the visit was over. I asked Andie if she would like to go for a drink, but she declined. They walked me to the door, where I shook hands with Ben.

  ‘Take care of yourself,’ he said, grasping my fingers forcefully. I looked at him and was surprised by the real warmth in his expression. Andie was standing behind him. ‘You know, Nick, we should meet up some time,’ she said in a generic way, which made me think she was just saying it out of courtesy. But then she added: ‘Come tomorrow night – I’m going to watch my cousin Tony. Do you remember Tony? He’s reached the finals of his high school debating – you used to do that, didn’t you? We can get dinner afterwards.’

  ‘Yeah, we should,’ I said. I waited for Andie to supply some further enthusiasm, but she was squinting past my shoulder at the trees along the side of the block. I fumbled with the latch of the gate, feeling clumsy and conspicuous. I hate goodbyes. When I finally got out, I turned back for one last look. Benjamin and Andie were waiting at the door together. They were standing in alignment, his large arm draped over her shoulder, and the word I would have used to describe the scene was ‘yearning’.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was a public school that wanted to be a private one. The main hall was decked with names in golden letters on mahogany plaques; there were trophies in cabinets, historic rugby jerseys mounted on the walls, and portraits of alumni looking cross-eyed and startled by their own achievements in the fields of mathematics and geography. In the audience were a smattering of parents as well as the teams’ respective coaches: two uni students wearing very s
erious expressions, who had latterly been high school debaters themselves. They glared at their charges with a mixture of zeal and condescension, vicariously reliving the irrecoverable glories of their youth. They occasionally smirked at the sillier arguments made, meeting eyes across the room, shaking their heads in mock bewilderment that these children they’d been hired to teach knew less about the world than they did.

  Still, none of this managed to conceal the fact that the school wasn’t quite as wealthy as it wanted to be. In spite of the best efforts of the cleaning staff, there was an odour of old sandwiches in the break room, not traceable to any specific instance of lunch, but rather to the ghostly accretion of the imprints of a thousand lunches past. The post-debate supper featured a selection of Home Brand biscuits, arranged on paper plates in desultory artistic fashion. In the bathroom, a laminated sign read: PLEASE WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE YOU LEAVE. In contrast to the illustrious alumni who had owned the rugby jerseys, virtually all of the current students came from what are euphemistically known as ‘diverse backgrounds’. Caucasian children in the area were far too well rounded to be forced to study for the entrance exam; their parents, muttering darkly about ‘social skills’, had withdrawn them long ago to lovely schools on the harbour surrounded by great knotted fig trees, where sunlight sparkled with unreasonable beauty off the surface of the sea.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the affirmative team has missed the basic point. They want freedom of choice, without the state making a judgement about which choices are better than others. Taking this to its logical conclusion, all drugs should be legalised, not just the “soft” ones. Legalise marijuana. Legalise heroin! That doesn’t make drugs safer, ladies and gentlemen. That just makes it impossible for the state to mitigate the harms …’

  It was a window-shakingly good speech. I thought about my own debating days and wondered how I would do if someone pushed a palm card into my hand and stood me up before the crowd. Probably very badly. I had been almost as smart as Tony once, aged fourteen or fifteen, but since then I’d lost the knack. I couldn’t do it anymore, what Tony had said, ‘taking things to their logical conclusion’. Kids are better at this kind of clarity; adults get lost, wanting to satisfy all things and all people, becoming tangled up in spirals of their own equivocation. Even Einstein did his best work before he was thirty.

  Tony had reached the peroration. He spoke with confidence and verve. Behind him, his teammates scribbled furious notes, although it was probably unnecessary. At this stage it was Tony first and daylight second. His coach radiated grim exultation; his mother, Daisy, uttered an audible ‘Ha!’ and turned to leer triumphantly at the rest of the audience. One of the fathers from the opposing team gave her a filthy look. Andie tried to gesture ‘Shush!’ without actually saying so.

  Outside, Tony’s mother was ecstatic. ‘Ha-ha! So good. I knew you had won! The other team were saying things to make no sense, so silly, like little children talk about things they don’t understand. Who is that girl? She looks familiar. But it’s difficult to tell – she has a very forgettable face.’

  The parents of the opposing team were shooting death at us out of their eyes. Tony cringed. ‘Mum, that’s Nola. You remember Nola, she’s my friend. She’s really good. She was in Nationals last year.’

  ‘Is that her? I didn’t recognise. Ee-uh, she’s putting on so much weight. Getting thick around the waist. That uniform is so ugly! Yellow and brown, such terrible colours. Let me go and speak to Mr MacPherson …’ Still expounding on the topic of Nola’s physical and intellectual deficiencies, Daisy steered her son towards the supper table, where a group of English teachers were descending on the squares of banana bread.

  Tony’s parents were obnoxious people. Ten years earlier, they had lost everything in anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia. The two-storey colonial-era shophouse maintained across three generations had been, in the space of hours, smashed and set alight. Fragments of glass had cast shards of fire-coloured light across the walls, the incandescent evidence of ‘the people’s’ incandescent rage. Upstairs, Daisy had quaked beneath the faux-English white lace tablecloth, which was really made of plastic; downstairs, the rioters, enraged by the recession and the relative wealth of the minority Chinese, had smashed and stamped upon and set fire to their fastidious cornershop inventory: international calling cards, bags of flour, brinjals, assorted other vegetables and fruit – and, of course, the ubiquitous cans of Milo, consumed all over South-East Asia, as I discovered to my surprise when I met up with Andie in Kelantan once and found that you could even get it at McDonald’s. One of the men had rampaged up the stairs, kicking away the furniture to look directly at Daisy, who was still cowering beneath the table. Their eyes had met, and she saw – what? The banality of evil? Actually, he’d looked like quite an ordinary person, the kind of man who might have nodded in the street as he rode past on his motorbike. She’d hardly been able to believe he was going to hurt her, and in fact he hadn’t – just swept away the remaining items, and kicked and stamped on them with his foot. One of these happened to be a tube of condensed milk, another acquired taste left behind by the colonials, and this, for Daisy, became the defining image of the riots: the plastic tube punctured and oozing its white liquid on the floor. It was this, more than anything else, that Daisy was unable to understand. If they had wanted to steal things, or even eat them – but not this, this rampant impulse of gleeful and meaningless destruction.

  An idealist might imagine that the experience of suffering would make a person more compassionate. While this may occasionally be true, it certainly wasn’t for Daisy (who was named, incidentally, after the song about the bicycle). After the riots she and her husband, Arwin, were left with two abiding certainties. Firstly, that the native Indonesians were stupid, evil and subhuman. They were ugly, vulgar, coarse and unpleasant to be around; their language was crude and incapable of expressing subtle concepts; their religion was intrinsically violent; their facial features visually offensive. If you asked Daisy, as Andie sometimes did, when she’d last interacted with an Indonesian, she would say she didn’t need to: you don’t have to pat a rabid dog to know that it will bite. The other lesson they imbibed was that nowhere and never again would they be safe. They put deadlocks on every door; they sat up in bed, expectant and curiously fatalistic, when they heard even the shadow of a bump in the night. Any wealth, health or happiness they managed to accumulate they clutched jealously to their chests, as if it was bound to be broken or filched away. They distrusted everybody outside their immediate family, and sometimes not even them, and they resolved that no-one, and especially no Indonesian, would ever get the better of them again. One day, when the eight-year-old child of the neighbours appeared on her doorstep seeking a lost tennis ball, Daisy became convinced he had been sent by a gang to spy on their property and had steel bars installed on all the windows.

  And everything with them was always money, money, money. Arwin worked as a power engineer and earned a decent salary. Daisy was a part-time accountant and full-time scrutineer of the household budget. Not a dollar went in or out without her knowing it, and if Tony’s public school dared to add a voluntary building fund to the end of the term account, she crossed it off in red pen with an imperious hand. When out in public with her so-called friends she would consume conspicuously, ordering the most expensive dish on the menu just to show she could afford it. At home she and her husband lived off yesterday’s vegetables and tasteless generic-brand snacks. These were not the generic brands which were actually good quality, either. Andie, disbelieving, once introduced me to a Chin family staple: Teddy Bears, modelled off the eponymous Tiny Teddies. They tasted like cardboard and had sinister, distorted little faces, their bear-like features grotesquely blurred compared to the picture on the side of the box.

  Still, their miserliness paid off. In fourteen years they more than doubled their net worth, and that wasn’t even including the appreciating value of their house. They were now solidly middle class, in terms of asset
s if not in outlook; they still talked and ate too loudly and had a habit of walking as a family in single file, as if a military-style formation was necessary to ward off external threats. This, combined with their small stature and mismatched though expensive clothing, made them the target of much hilarity. One day in primary school, Tony overheard a teacher saying: ‘Look at the mother duck and the father duck and the baby duck all in a row.’ He was aware that it wasn’t a compliment.

  Tony, of course, was given the best of everything: electronics, excursions, and extracurricular activities. All of his parents’ latent capacity for affection and joy was lavished on his head. They fed him Chinese medicines and roasted pork and fruit that was rich in antioxidants, and steamed fish with ginger and shallots, because fish was rich in omega-3, which was said to improve one’s brainpower. He had tutors for maths and English and science, and even Japanese; his parents told him daily that he was going to be – nay, that he wanted to be – a doctor. Whenever he failed to meet their academic standards they berated him with a viciousness of phrase which would have shocked outsiders. Even he could tell that their rage was just the flipside of their love. He was the fragment they had shored against their ruins. Watching him now, tactfully deflecting his mother away from the defeated team, I thought how strange it was that Tony had turned out as he had: eloquent, gentle, full of grace.

  ‘How’s school?’ I asked. We were in Andie’s car, driving off to get dinner. We had left Daisy engrossed in conversation with one of Tony’s teachers, promising to catch up with the three of us later.

  ‘Yes, how is school?’ Andie chimed in. ‘There’s no need to censor your answers in front of Nick, by the way. He’s one of the few trustworthy adults on this planet.’

  Tony smiled politely. ‘Well, it’s pretty good. I’ve got decent teachers – Mr MacPherson is really cool. Mrs Hartcher is kind of lazy, though. It’s week five, and we still haven’t started on our Term Four area of study. The other class is two topics ahead of us. My mum says she’s gonna complain because she thinks we’ll be disadvantaged in the exam.’