by S. L. Lim
The mood of the audience, which had begun in open sycophancy, was rapidly turning against her. People were rustling and murmuring, buttocks twisting on their seats. It wasn’t that Andie was saying anything they hadn’t heard before: this was the kind of audience who heard ‘game-changing’ ideas roughly once a fortnight, who used words like ‘game-changing’ quite often in daily conversation. No, it was the intensity that put them off – the utter seriousness which lay just behind the obligatory self-deprecation. Listening to Andie, you could tell that here was a person who actually believed what she was saying. Indeed, she believed it enough to act: she saw no divide between belief and action. No wonder they were worried.
‘Now, what I am really talking about is aid, whether from government or private donors. I admit there are a lot of ambiguities and uncertainties surrounding aid. Of course there is wastage and inefficiency – you would be hard-pressed to find a single organisation in the world where there is not wastage and inefficiency. And yet there are people who are out there trying to estimate how much it costs to save a life, or to remarkably increase somebody’s quality of life. How much? Well, a conservative estimate at the moment is about three thousand dollars. If you donate that much, whether immediately or over time, to one of the groups listed here, you can be fairly confident that at least one person will have their wellbeing – their very being, in fact – preserved, thanks to your intervention.
‘How much can you afford to give? Well, clearly it doesn’t make sense to impoverish yourself. But most of us have a great many areas in which we could save, in order to help more people while still maintaining an excellent quality of life by any objective standard. Now, three thousand dollars is a lot of money, but let’s say you gave up coffee – or even have three fewer coffees per week, so you save about say twelve dollars. That’s more than five hundred dollars per year. And maybe let’s say you decide you’re going to see fewer movies. Maybe you’ll try to go on Tuesdays when it’s cheaper, maybe you don’t really feel the need to go to the latest reboot of the last reboot of Spider-Man. Do you realise the money you could save, the good you could accomplish in the world?
‘I repeat: no-one wants you to impoverish yourself. No-one wants you to deprive yourself of anything important. Healthy food, a home, high standards of medical care, even fun – no-one is so churlish as to try and deny you that. And no-one wants you to feel bad about yourself. Feeling guilty may be redemptive, in religious terms, but we don’t care, because guilt by itself does no good for anybody. If you feel bad – well, let’s say you live in Tanzania, and you’re dying of, say, tetanus because nobody gave you the vaccination when you were a child. Does it matter to you whether some rich person, some person on the other side of the world whom you’ve never even met, feels bad about herself? Of course not. You just don’t want to be sick. We want you to do things that really help, not useless hand-wringing.
‘Guilt is only useful insofar as it motivates practical change, practical action. What we at Real Difference want you to think is: could I do more? And we think that for pretty much all of us, the answer is emphatically yes. And not just could, should. Must. Because it really isn’t all that difficult. With a little care and thought, it’s perfectly possible to live a rewarding life while drastically increasing the contribution that you make towards these causes. I want to introduce you to some people who have done just that …’
Afterwards I had lunch with Andie - scrambled eggs and smoked salmon with an extraneous spear of asparagus balanced on top. She insisted on paying for both of us. It was as if she was trying to compensate, to show that she still enjoyed things like food and fun even after the talk she had just given. I could see that the mantle of public selflessness did not quite suit her. She wanted to prove to me she was still normal, that I didn’t have to worry she would judge me for holding on to my money and my kidneys for my sole personal use.
I couldn’t help teasing her a little. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to save that money for the starving children in Africa?’
I had meant it as a joke but it didn’t come out like that. Andie glared at me. ‘Oh, fuck off, Nick. Not you as well. Are you going to say that I’m a dirty hippie and to go take a shower? I’ve heard it all before, you know. Believe me, most people are a lot less original on this than they think they are.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and I meant it. She was right, I was being obnoxious. Apart from the speech itself, there had been no point at which she’d tried to rub in my face the fact that she was better than me. It reminded me of my brief stint of veganism during high school. I would go out of my way not to mention it, actively doing my best not to bring up my eating habits as part of the conversation, but there was a certain kind of person who couldn’t help getting offended at the sight of me eating a dinner that was different from his own. That person would then commence to scowl at his own meal and mutter darkly; he would launch into surreal, ill-connected monologues about Paleolithic times and woolly mammoths. In hindsight, though, I could empathise with how he must have felt. Andie didn’t annoy me because I disagreed with her; quite the opposite. The brute fact of her being more virtuous than me couldn’t help but be offensive.
‘How was London?’ she asked.
‘London was good.’ We had slipped into banality. ‘You know, Andie,’ I said, with some hesitation, ‘you’ll think it’s silly for me to be only realising this now, but having money is lots of fun. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I find that just being alive is less stimulating than I used to find it. I mean, I know there’s poor people in Kenya. I realise in a moral sense there’s no way to justify … all this.’ I waved my hand vaguely, encompassing my clothes, the restaurant, the scenery and Andie herself. ‘While the Congolese or whatever don’t even have running water. I’m not saying anything I experience is comparable to that. But if I lost these things, it would take a real bite out of my quality of life.’
Andie watched me inscrutably. She had got more difficult for me to read over the years. She stretched out her hand, wordlessly indicating that she wanted to touch my jacket. I watched with vicarious pleasure as she slid her hand against the inside lining, knowing the coolness it would leave on her cuticles. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said at last. ‘I hate getting older. It costs me more, both in time and money, to look as good right now as I did just wearing trackpants at uni. The other day I got carded walking into a bar, and it was the best thing that’s happened to me in weeks.’
I observed her critically. As far as I could tell time had been kind to her. She looked much the same as ever, hair dyed brown and cut bluntly at her shoulders, neatly if not beautifully presented.
Then, as if she regretted revealing too much, Andie’s expression slid back into a look of professional cheeriness. ‘Still, that’s a pretty minor impact, all things considered. It is genuinely rewarding, and I do believe we are tangibly improving the lives of other people!’
‘Yeah, yeah. Sorry for being a downer. It just – watching you give that speech made me feel inadequate. I wish I did work like that.’
‘You could, you know. If a position came up, of course I’d suggest you. And it probably will, actually - we’ve been expanding.’
‘Really? Me?’ Andie was still looking at me in a way which seemed a bit too intense. ‘It’s really kind of you to say so. I wouldn’t know where to start. I don’t have the experience. I mean, I don’t know anything about this stuff.’
‘What kind of qualifications do you think I have? There’s lots of skills, but there isn’t exactly a degree in “helping people”. Andie spread her hands to show that they were empty. “Honestly, Nick, if you think anybody in the world knows what they’re doing, you’re going to be disappointed. Everybody’s just making it up as they go along.’
‘Yeah. Like wine tasters.’
‘Interior designers.’
‘Aerospace engineers.’
She laughed, and I felt pleased to have made her laugh.
�
��Well, thanks for the offer, but I’m probably not going to take you up on it. I just don’t think that I’m a nice enough person. I like the idea of being a do-gooder, but there are other things I like even more. Actual money, for example. Pay rises, long service leave. I know I used to talk about fixing poverty and stuff, but I think I was more attracted to the idea than actually doing it. Real needy people kind of get on my nerves. They’re always being sad about their problems, and doing what they want to do with their lives, as opposed to what I think they should be doing. I just don’t have the patience.’
Andie rolled her eyes. ‘You say that, Nick, but I’ve seen you put a lot of effort into other people. Not that many guys would spend a whole evening watching high school debaters deal with their angst. And then talking to them about it afterwards.’ She cocked her head, and I got the sense she was about to deliver one of her potted character appraisals: always highly considered, and usually wrong. ‘This is what’s weird about you, Nick – you make yourself out to be worse than you actually are. Most people do things the other way round.’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Talking to her was frustrating: she saw what she wanted to see and pulled the blinds down over everything else. ‘How much of your income do you donate to your own good causes, anyway?’
I expected her to dodge the question, but she looked straight at me. ‘About ten per cent,’ she said. ‘Slightly less than what I preach, and significantly more than you do. Why, Nick? Does that validate or invalidate your theory?’
#
Tony was turning sixteen. It must have been about this time that he was introduced to Islam. His first point of contact was a Bangladeshi classmate called Hasan, one of the debaters on the Senior Bs, although everyone said it was bad luck he hadn’t made the As – he’d been sick that day. Born in Dhaka but raised in Sydney, Hasan was physically strong with a deceptively slender body. He was not only the pride of the debaters but also of the rowing team, the Chemistry Olympiad and the water polo squad. Even those who knew none of this found him to be a very striking person. He had remarkably beautiful eyes, with the most elongated eyelashes.
He was also a deeply committed and publicly active Muslim. Prior to his arrival, Islamic school life comprised a handful of boys who met at lunchtime to pray if and whenever they felt like it. Not all boys who were listed in school records as Muslim showed up; some of them showed no outward signs of piety, and one even drank alcohol, despite being clearly underage. The rest of the school mostly regarded them as a harmless curiosity. The school had historically been Christian but these days it was decidedly secular in character, although no-one could say whether this had come about through policy or apathy. Occasionally, in the aftermath of a high-profile terrorist event, some student would begin to make dark remarks about migration and integration – and even, on occasion, about ‘getting the fuck out of our country’. The other boys, while never physically intervening, would form a united wall of derision and contempt against such crudeness. Soon the slurs were reduced to isolated mutterings. It wasn’t that the children themselves were especially socially conscious – although most, being the offspring of migrants themselves, were fairly receptive to the concepts of tolerance and multiculturalism. Rather, they felt that such words were unbefitting of the atmosphere of intellectual refinement which ought to prevail at Eastern Boys’ Selective High School.
It had taken a charismatic figure like Hasan to round up the Muslim boys and knock some pride into them. Through his intelligence and charm, they had been moulded into a dedicated taskforce of proselytisers. They handed out pamphlets with titles like ‘What’s Allah got to do with it?’, and organised lunchtime seminars with guest speakers which were attended by over a hundred Muslims and non-Muslims every time. Generally speaking, the school administration was nonplussed but supportive. The chaplain, a sleepy and bewildered man of indeterminate age, said ‘Ah, yes’ and ‘Good, good’ whenever he was asked for anything; the feeling among the staff was that any show of extracurricular initiative should be encouraged.
But although he had assistants and collaborators, it was really Hasan who was at the heart of this revival. It was Hasan who booked rooms and made phone calls; Hasan who stayed up till four on a weeknight combing the Quran for a suitable passage to share. It was Hasan who would pause just long enough in unarticulated disappointment when somebody said that he was going to miss prayers, which more often than not caused the boy to shift guiltily on the spot and say that he had changed his mind. When anyone asked him why he poured so much effort into the project, he would smile gloriously and say: ‘Well, if you love something, don’t you want to share it with the world?’
Their latest talk went by the title ‘Islam: An Ideological Alternative’. Hasan had been hinting for weeks that he wanted Tony to show up. Tony feigned obtuseness; there was a limit to the time he was willing to devote to supportive friend duties. There were exams coming up – he had enough to do already. And then one day he and Hasan were commiserating about their respective parents. Tony had been feeling very sorry for himself. In the half-yearlies he had come fifth in the class in science, and had delayed giving his parents the report for weeks. When he finally mustered the courage to hand it over to Daisy and Arwin, they erupted with the fear, rage and contempt he’d expected. ‘I work all day, for what? Tell me, for what?’ Arwin shouted. ‘So I can raise a lazy son who is useless and only sits all day long on his backside?’
‘Too much food,’ Daisy interjected. ‘We are overfeeding him. Too much meat and too much sugar. Life is good.’ It struck Tony that Daisy only ever used this phrase in order to chastise him or disparage some behaviour of his. ‘Life is good’ was an insult, apparently – happiness was looked down on, the proper condition of existence being toil and distress.
‘Hey, that’s not fair,’ he said, defending himself. ‘I studied a lot. Other people were smarter than me, that’s all.’ But then they were off again, cataloguing his laziness and waste, the sacrifices they had made over the years to give Tony the best possible start in life. Now he had grown up into a complacent and ungrateful child who would abandon his parents to rot in a nursing home when they grew old. This last point exercised Daisy enormously. Her English could be highly expressive, in spite of her limited vocabulary; metaphors were dense with violence, bodily functions, and combinations of the two. (‘You make me so angry I will vomit blood!’) On this occasion, she applied her considerable skill to conjuring up an image of the squalor and loneliness she would face, all on her own, in her old age. How awful it would be once she had been abandoned by her only son, for whom she had done and sacrificed everything. She spoke so fluently that Tony could feel himself becoming swamped with guilt before he remembered that he hadn’t even done anything yet. His mother was emphatically not in a nursing home; on the contrary, she was standing outside his bedroom door berating him. She and his father were saying it was better to not have children if this was the misery they brought. The only revenge they could look forward to was to see him suffer in his turn, the way he made them suffer, once he had children of his own.
He described this episode to Hasan, carefully leavened with a casual eye roll to demonstrate that he was still cool, he knew how to deal with it. He was careful not to reveal the fist-sized ball of rage which clenched inside his stomach whenever he thought of his mother’s words.
Hasan nodded and laughed at appropriate points, humorous and compassionate. By the time Tony had finished, he could almost see the comedy of the situation.
Hasan said matter-of-factly, ‘I think my parents are organising someone for me to marry.’
‘What!’ Unconsciously, Tony shrank backwards, as if an arranged marriage might be contagious. In Tony’s mind, getting married was a momentous occasion, signifying one’s entrance into the ‘real’ world, where all decisions were irrevocable and carried enormous weight. Married people experienced life differently; they had thoughts and feelings which Tony himself was only dimly capable of imagining. Lots of teenagers, I
’ve found, seem to attach this significance to marriage. They’re more conservative than adults in that sense. It’s easy to believe in rules before they’ve been tested in your own life.
‘Yes,’ Hasan said calmly. ‘I’m pretty sure they want to marry me off. They haven’t told me who they’re looking at, but I can guess. She’s my dad’s friend’s daughter. My dad and his friend have known each other since they were five.’
‘Oh.’ Tony blushed. ‘Is she … pretty?’ The word he was thinking of was ‘hot’, but Tony had a puritanical streak. He regarded things like pussy and tits as necessary but unfortunate physical realities. His ideal imaginary woman had no body parts or smell, only a blur of ecstatic feeling. ‘I mean, does she look … nice?’
‘Yeah, I think she is pretty. Like, she isn’t ugly. She has nice features. She doesn’t talk much. I’ve only met her a couple of times.’ Hasan screwed up his forehead. ‘She came to our house, and they kept on praising her in front of me – how pretty and clever she was and all that. It made me feel bad – because I wasn’t joining in, because I didn’t have that much to say to her. We talked a bit about MasterChef. Like …’ He passed a hand across his forehead. ‘One in three Western-style marriages end in divorce, right? That’s what they’re always telling me. You know – love is fleeting, marriage is forever.’