Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  While I was overseas I lost my job. A right-wing government had come into power and the obligatory bloodletting was taking place, with mass redundancies across the public service. Everyone was outraged – my Facebook feed was spewing with it – but I couldn’t bring myself to get worked up. Remonstrating with a conservative government for firing people is like yelling at the clouds for raining. There is no point in criticising an object for acting according to the dictates of its nature.

  I should have been more worried, in a financial sense, but I had savings, and as it happened I managed to get a working visa and a contract to stay in London for a while. I ended up living there for two years.

  One day Ben came to see me. He was visiting London for the first time, for his grandmother’s funeral. He had barely known her so he wasn’t exactly consumed with grief. The trip doubled as an opportunity to attend the buck’s party of one of his high school friends, and he invited me along. ‘I won’t know anyone,’ I protested, but Benjamin said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Half the guys there haven’t seen each other in years. There’ll be a tab, and anyway, Matty wants lots of people there. It will make him look popular.’

  So I put on my blazer and my not-work shoes and headed out.

  The bar where we started off was large and self-consciously rustic. There were things on the menu like ploughman’s lunch, and several metal shovels and a stuffed pig’s head hung from the wall. Most of the clientele were office workers, sedentary men with dimpled flesh I had an urge to sink my finger into; others wore muscles that had been carefully designed at the gym rather than wrung out of the soil. On one set of couches was a group of men in polo shirts. They were Australians, all of them. There were a lot of Australians in London.

  ‘Who is the greatest actor of all time?’ one of them kept saying.

  ‘Daniel Day-Lewis, no competition!’

  ‘No way! He plays the same guy in every movie. Johnny Depp, that’s who I vote. Have you seen Edward Scissorhands?’

  ‘Of course I have. But come on. Top ten: Johnny Depp, Daniel Day-Lewis, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Willis, Dustin Hoffman, Humphrey Bogart, Morgan Freeman, and … Jack Nicholson.’

  ‘What about Meryl Streep?’ said some girl we didn’t know. ‘Like, why aren’t any of these people women?’

  ‘Ah, yeah, Meryl Streep! She’s really good, I’ll pay that. But she’s no Jack Nicholson. Think of The Shining – there’s no female version of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.’

  ‘There’s a difference,’ someone else said, ‘between actors that are actually honest, and, like, those who are just intense.’

  It was like that. At first I didn’t feel any great desire to participate. Once or twice Benjamin nudged me on the shoulder, grinning apologetically, as if seeking my approval. For some reason this touched me greatly and undid my feeling of being separate from these people. Over the next few hours I had four beers, laughed more, and went to the toilet often. I met Matty there, sniggered when his zip got stuck at the urinal, and then had to hastily deflect a dangerous misunderstanding with a stranger who thought I was laughing at him.

  ‘Hey, let’s go to Sliders. Come on, get a move on!’

  Sliders – or Sliding Doors, as it was officially called – was a club where there were platforms you could dance on if you thought you looked good enough, the sort of thing I did and then recounted to myself later to prove that I was saying yes to life. I danced for a while, very badly, and people laughed at me. I went off in a huff and sat on a couch in the corner to play with my profile on Bumble. There were two messages, both from women five years older than me who had said some version of ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Then I switched to Tinder and spent a good fifteen minutes messaging every woman who liked me with ‘Sup, Bro’.

  Matty came over to join me. ‘You should have gone along with it,’ he said. I had no idea what he was talking about but nodded anyway. Under the light his face looked sweaty, pink and gross. ‘You need to have confidence. Lisa doesn’t have much confidence, either. No self-esteem. Puts up with all my shit – keeps on saying I’m too good for her. I told her, she’s just as smart as me. She could be a model if she tried. She could have anyone she wanted.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t have much confidence if I was her,’ said one of Matty’s friends sitting behind us. ‘Waking up next to this bloke every morning? Probably thinks, “Is this the best I can do?”’ Everybody laughed, including Matty.

  ‘My wife doesn’t put up with any shit from me,’ Benjamin interjected. ‘I wish she did.’

  ‘That must be hard on you,’ I said. I meant it flippantly, but Ben looked at me seriously and said, ‘Thanks, man.’ I felt bad for deceiving him.

  ‘We’re the Wolfpack!’ one of Matty’s friends kept saying. I found this annoying, even more so when I found out he hadn’t even thought of it himself. It was a catchphrase from a movie.

  Outside Sliders it had suddenly become very cold. There was an argument; apparently, we had accidentally cut in on an unofficial taxi queue on the corner. A small brown man called out, ‘Excuse me, I am in the first position.’ Matty yelled back, ‘No, we were here first, why don’t you fuck off!’ He said the last part in a fake Indian accent.

  Someone else, also standing on the pavement, interjected: ‘Cunts!’

  ‘No, you’re the fucking cunts!’ Matty shouted back, waving a fist in a way which suggested generalised disorder rather than any specific threat of violence.

  ‘Cut it out, man,’ Benjamin said, and miraculously he did. It was just how Ben was. You knew instinctively that what he said was for your own good, and not for his ego: he would protect you if you could be protected, control you while you needed to be controlled, and forgive you once you deserved to be forgiven.

  We hustled into the taxi and asked the disapproving driver to take us away as quickly as possible.

  Then suddenly the whole scene became distasteful to me. I was feeling cold and sweaty at the same time; I thought I could smell my own feet. I tried to tell myself that it was all a valuable experience, part of being (still, mostly) young; I could get an anecdote out of it, maybe. As with most anecdotes, though, I suspected it would end up being reducible to ‘and then we all got drunk’.

  We wound up at Fernando’s, an all-night cafe which also did board games. Adrian was all set on playing Monopoly but no-one else was in the mood, so he pouted for a while and fell asleep, chin drooping onto his chest. His head looked comically small against the solidity of his torso. We all looked gross, too big for the faux-leather seats. I was also falling asleep, and now feeling slightly nauseous. Some of Matty’s friends were yawning and glancing at their watches, but I didn’t want to go home. I felt a sense of deep connection with my companions, which I knew would seem stupid once I sobered up: that mystical, life-is-one, all-are-connected feeling which sometimes comes on you towards the end of a night out.

  ‘Having a good time?’ asked Ben sleepily.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  He smiled at me. He was humming softly, very relaxed, drumming his fingers against the table. It occurred to me I’d never seen him looking so calm when he was with Andie. The word ‘gentleman’ occurred to me. Whenever Benjamin was around I seemed to draw on words that had previously been lying in the disused section of my vocabulary.

  Ben observed me with no change in his expression. After a while, he said, ‘Sorry about before.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘Before, with the cab. I saw you felt weird about it. You can’t judge these guys by what you saw just there. The thing you have to understand is, they’re un-PC, but they’re good guys. Matty’s best friend is Indian. I bet he’ll be pretty embarrassed about it in the morning.’

  We sat together in companionable silence. Then Matty’s face, pink and moist, loomed up in front of my eyeballs. ‘What’s your problem with me, eh?’

  I felt myself going red. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Matty,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t have a problem with yo
u at all.’

  ‘Stop bullshitting! Looking down on me from your fucking throne. What is your problem? You can’t stand the sight of me, can you?’

  ‘I never said –’

  ‘Matty, you’ve had enough,’ Ben said sternly. Matty mumbled something both defiant and apologetic, and then shortly went back to sleep.

  My exhaustion was beginning to catch up with me. I dozed in and out of the remaining conversation, which in my semiconscious state seemed to be expressive of some undefined truth about human nature.

  ‘I wanna do it right, do things differently this time …’

  ‘… is she going to take your name? Confusing, once kids come along …’

  ‘… really love this girl, that’s all it takes …’

  Around five in the morning, I saw Benjamin leaning forward to pull Matty’s glasses off his face. Slumped forward in exhaustion, he was in danger of crushing them. This touched me very much. I found myself wishing for a friend who would notice when the glasses fell off my head, even though I didn’t wear any.

  Then it was morning, and greyish light was creeping through the windows. The woman at the counter came to tap me on the shoulder. When I asked for the bill, she shrugged and said that Ben had already paid. I slept some more in the cab, then stumbled up the stairs to my apartment, aware but too tired to care that my clothes were drenched with the odour of secondhand smoke. Then I passed out, blissfully and completely, for the third and final time, in my own bed with the indent in the middle.

  #

  London should have changed me, I know, being the first extended period that I had spent away from home. The opening months had felt revelatory. For the first time, I understood why travellers’ eyes light up when they bore you with boring details about the six months they spent in Latin America. It was all quite exciting and iconic, the double-decker buses and museum tea shops where slender white women dressed like autumn leaves read books with titles like, ‘And Nietzsche Wept’. It felt more real than Australia did, because I had seen it on TV and read about it in books. London, I decided, would be the catalyst for me to be a new and better person. While overseas, I would listen to new music rather than endlessly rehashing songs from the late nineties and early two thousands. I would spend my weekends socialising with actual human beings, rather than weighing in on comment threads on Reddit.

  One thing I like to do in a foreign city is wander through the giant malls. I know this makes no sense, since they’re practically the same whatever country you’re in. I enjoyed the many escalators, the people combing through the racks of polo shirts with far more serious faces than the activity actually warranted. I felt alienated but in a feel-good way, like when you listen to The Smiths to be sad on purpose.

  At least twice a week I set up Skype dates with my friends back home. I described the weather, the great Indian food, and the vast superiority of the TV here. Probably nobody cared – in the middle distance, all travel stories are the same – but they listened in a tolerant, affirmative way. I enjoyed these conversations and did my best to be honest, but after disconnecting I always felt a sense of unease, as if in spite of my best intentions I had just inadvertently defrauded them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I got back from London a lot richer than when I had left. I had taken a position in a firm which specialised in corporate restructuring, a euphemism for wiping the blood off the floor after a corporate collapse. This firm had experienced an unexpected boom after Lehman Brothers collapsed.

  ‘You’re the Grim Reaper,’ my boss explained. ‘So go forth and reap.’

  I did feel sorry for the people who had just been fired. Still, there was definitely a sick pleasure to it, watching the best and brightest of the City encounter failure for the first time in their lives. They were ferociously ambitious, educated to the hilt and possessed of intelligence which was limited but acute. You could see the bewilderment in their eyes as circumstances got the better of them for the very first time. They let their hands fall limply across their laps, examining their fingers as if they’d never seen them before; they stared blankly at the window glass, at the reflection of their lovely clothes. Never before had I connected the jagged fluctuations of graphs with human lives.

  And so I came back, my triumphant homecoming, only to find that the crisis had passed most Australians by. People were quarrelling in heated and partisan fashion about whether the country was in a recession or not, which to me was a sure sign that it wasn’t. With my new international connections, I applied for one of those big-name management consultancies which had rejected me straight out of university. This time they grovelled and oozed round my feet, which felt good. The work was interesting and I enjoyed it. It was compelling in the manner of sudoku: you couldn’t tell why you were doing it, exactly, but it was challenging enough. There were deadlines, and training, everybody in a state of controlled, continual panic: so many urgent things to do, it was easy to forget that not one was particularly important.

  Then there were the incidental pleasures. It’s said that money changes people; I don’t believe that – I think you just have greater scope to become what you were before. My friends and my hobbies remained similar, but there was a subterranean shift in my expectations. Things I had previously regarded as minor inevitable discomforts, like occasionally being squashed against people on public transport, rapidly became unbearable: soon I was catching taxis every day and regarding this expenditure as a necessity, like power or clean water. Minor malfunctions became intolerable: when the wireless started dropping out on my laptop, it seemed inevitable and logical that I buy another one straight away. Twenty, thirty dollars became an appropriate amount to spend on lunch; and then one day, before the annual company dinner, I laughed with pleasure as I slipped my arms into the sleeves of my first Gaultier jacket. My reflection in the mirror laughed back, as handsome and mysterious as Gatsby on his balcony.

  While I was piling up cash, Andie was losing friends. She was still working for Real Difference, the evidence-based charity people. I did some reading, and what I learned both intrigued me and made me mildly resentful of their existence. Young, highly educated, secular in their outlook if not outright atheist; they were idealistic, yes, but they were also curiously technocratic in their approach. Their philosophy of charity was explicitly utilitarian: they wanted to find the most cost-effective ways of ending hunger, malaria, and other kinds of suffering in the world. In professional terms, they were mostly economists, coders, engineers, Silicon Valley types – agile minds with a liking for technical solutions. They were used to solving problems with a mix of technical know-how and raw intellect, and didn’t see why something like human suffering should be any different.

  Right now they were working on an especially quixotic campaign, convincing as many people as possible to donate a minimum of fifteen per cent of their income to charity. I turned up to one of their talks, which was hosted, rather incongruously, in the conference hall of the Graduate School of Management, where both Andie and I had gone to uni.

  Andie was speaking. She looked very small up there on the podium, her voice going higher because she was nervous. If you didn’t listen to the words, you could have mistaken her for an earnest high school debating captain.

  ‘Now, I am going to describe an analogy first presented by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer. You are walking to work, passing by a swimming pool – let’s imagine it’s that beautiful outdoor pool which has just opened up near Central. You’re in a hurry, because it’s a very important meeting that you’re going to – maybe you know that you’re in line for a promotion. You happen to notice that in the pool a little child is drowning. Now, it could just as easily be an adult, but some people believe that an adult’s life is worth less than that of a child. I don’t believe that idea myself, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the nature of my argument. So for the moment, let’s imagine it’s a little child.

  ‘What do you do in that situation? Well, I can see you laughing, I
can see that you’re shocked – there’s some disbelief in the room that I would even think to ask the question. You run. Of course – you stop and run to the poolside and pull that child out. You save her life. Of course there are some costs: you’ll get yourself wet, it’ll be inconvenient. You might even end up missing out on that big promotion. But in the scheme of things, those aren’t really very big sacrifices to make when you could save a human life.

  ‘But let’s imagine a different response. After all, it’s not your fault that the child is drowning. You didn’t personally put her there. You might say, “Shouldn’t her parents be looking after her?” Or “What about the lifeguard, why isn’t she doing something? It’s not my business to be saving drowning children – don’t you know I have a meeting to go to?” So you might walk on by. And I don’t think – I mean, I can’t imagine the average person would judge you very kindly for doing that. Certain TV shows, certain radio talkback audiences might have a lot to say about that. They might even start to throw around words like ‘‘monster’’.’

  (At this point, a picture of King Kong appeared on the screen. People laughed, less out of amusement than an odd sort of self-regard. We are academics, self-identified nerds, the laughter seemed to say, yet we still have a sense of humour. The joke is the fact that we are capable of jokes, not the actual content thereof.)

  ‘What I am trying to show you is that on some level we are all in that situation. The world is full of problems – we know that – terrible problems, which cause a lot of people to suffer or to lose their lives. Lots of these problems are intractable: things like war, things like cancer, things like corrupt governments – if you ever work in aid, doing any kind of fundraising, I can say that you’ll hear plenty about corrupt governments. But one of the great surprises for us at Real Differences, when we first sat down and started studying these issues, was how many of these problems are really quite fixable. We spend all of this time throwing our hands up in despair, saying how hard it is, how terrible the world is. And yet there are a lot of problems for which we already know the answer. Things like oral rehydration salts for curing dehydration. Things like bed nets to protect people from being bitten by mosquitoes, from developing malaria. We just can’t be bothered – we haven’t got round to implementing them yet. And it seems to me – actually, it would be bad enough if we just didn’t know what to do, if we were sitting around wringing our hands while people were getting these diseases which we had no treatment for. But it seems to me to be worse if we acknowledge we can help but we don’t have the will or the energy to actually do anything.’