by S. L. Lim
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Benjamin and his sister Amanda were putting up shelves. Good ones, not the flatpack kind from IKEA. Benjamin’s family liked to use ‘good’ shelves and ‘good’ crockery, to stay in a ‘nice’ suburb and eat in ‘nice restaurants’. They always said ‘good’ and ‘nice’ - they didn’t like to refer to money by its name. This was considered, though not stated outright, to be vulgar – almost as vulgar, indeed, as not having enough of it.
Amanda had just moved to Sydney, having recently remarried. Her second husband was ten years older than her, an accountant. Though Benjamin was careful not to show it, this choice had surprised him: there was something not entirely masculine about sitting indoors all day, counting numbers. “Bean counters”, their grandfather had said, or quipped – at some point in the seventies it was determined as part of their family lore that their grandfather was a wit, and so everything he said henceforth must be a quip, not just a remark. Yet here Amanda was, all coupled up with this smiling little guy who laughed too much, who wore sunblock even in the winter, holding a magazine up before his eyes to block the light. Amanda was blonde, strong-limbed and caustic. The thought of her and her husband in bed together filled Ben with distinct, mild revulsion. And yet the two of them were happy together, there was no doubt about that.
Amanda had rung him and said she needed help, which he had found annoying. Really, he thought, it was easy enough – she could have done the whole job in an evening if she’d only put the effort in. But he knew it wasn’t really about the furniture. The shelves were an alibi: she wanted to see him and she needed some excuse. All of Benjamin’s family were like that – quick to argue but thrifty with emotions, reluctant to perform any act which ran the risk of being interpreted as a confession of need.
When he was younger he had found this emotional dryness infuriating. When he’d first met Andie he had gravitated towards her and her loudmouthed, passionate crowd. They warmed him like a hot hand wrapped around a cold one. They always talked about themselves and their feelings, as though it were self-evident that these were important to other people too. For a while it had been liberating; he had sat with them in a circle and yielded up some of his secrets, feeling a little thrill on relinquishing each one. It seemed he’d never been so honest or so happy and he’d felt a great glow of love for the people around him, now beginning to yawn and fish for cigarettes. He’d loved them all and loved Andie most, for she had given him this world.
These days, though, he was starting to miss his family’s way of doing things. There was a dignity in their reserve, the deeply felt but unarticulated emotions. His mother would say, ‘You know your Dad,’ and everybody would nod and smile wryly to show their understanding, though they never said exactly what it was they understood. They did not see each other often, these days. The siblings had dispersed to different cities; it had happened incrementally, without them really noticing. Meanwhile, their parents learned to use Skype; they called to talk at length about milk prices, while their city-minded offspring strained to concentrate. Once a year at Christmas, the extended family would gather for an even more extended lunch, which always ended with somebody knocking a glass off the table. Someone would yell ‘Taxi!’ while a confusion of women descended to clean things up, in the process dispersing shards of glass ever more widely across the floor. Though they were stressful at the time, in hindsight he always found these lunches oddly comforting.
‘Well?’ Amanda asked. She always started conversations like this, as if resuming a sentence interrupted in the middle. ‘How’s business going?’
‘Business?’ said Benjamin stupidly. He did not want to talk about business. He worked at an inner-city gym and had a feeling his family did not wholly approve. Exercise, in their view, was a by-product of something else. Doing it for its own sake was effeminate and unnecessary. ‘Yeah, life’s been treating me pretty well. Business definitely expanding. Picking up a few more regular customers.’ He saw from the slyness in her smile she was making fun of him, and hated her for it. There was no getting round it – it was effeminate, watching people run on a treadmill just for the sake of it.
Brusquely he asked, ‘When did you last see James? ’
Amanda shrugged. The mention of her ex-husband’s name did not seem to disturb her in the least. ‘Oh, my God. There’s been so much talk – I swear, some of those people need to take a good hard look in the mirror.’ She bent her head away from him. When she turned back, he was impressed to see her eyes were quite dry. She and James had met when they were both fifteen, at church, after the Sunday morning service Benjamin had already stopped attending. They were married in the same church four years later, and then divorced four years after that. Everybody had been fond of James. He was laconic – which their parents respected – told passable jokes, brought generous presents, and was on the verge of being considered an intrinsic part of the family. But when the couple split up, the family rallied atavistically to Amanda’s side. Divorce was a failure, it needed to be somebody’s fault – ergo, it must be his. It made Benjamin nauseous, how easily they’d turned on James, cataloguing with increasing spitefulness his many faults, which they’d heroically kept to themselves until now. Just months before they had eaten next to him at that very table, his parents dropping hints about how they were expecting grandchildren.
He felt ashamed for bringing it up now, knowing it would hurt her feelings. ‘How are Mum and Dad getting on?’ he asked. ‘I should go back some time. Stuff feels a bit more real back at their place.’
Amanda’s face lit up – she loved to gossip. He tuned out while she listed in detail the latest developments in their family. A longstanding feud with the neighbours had flared up, something to do with contaminated water. The neighbours thought their uncle, Fred, was to blame for polluted run-off in the creek, while Fred insisted that it was the neighbours’ own cows that were shitting in the water. In the end, their father had had to intervene to get it sorted.
There was a reassuring sameness to all of Benjamin’s childhood memories. ‘Well, at least someone’s working around here!’ Fred would say every time he came by the house and found Benjamin doing his homework, and his father would smile at the ground and say, ‘If you worked half as hard as you talked, we’d all be millionaires.’ They owned the dairy together. His father was pragmatic and shrewd; Fred, not so much. Innumerable people had warned them against going into business as a team. ‘Never lend money to a relative if you want to see either the money or the relative again.’
But his father had said, ‘You have to stick with family. They might not be the brightest, but at least you know what’s under the lid.’ And remarkably, he turned out to be right. Fred was silly, there was no doubt about that; he had married a silly woman, and together they produced a brood of daughters named Arlynne, Argentinah, Indiah and Sid, none of whom appeared to have achieved much in life apart from further reproduction and inheritance of property. But under the discipline of Benjamin’s exacting father, Fred had grown into an excellent though unqualified agronomist. He had a real gift for identifying which techniques would work and which were just trends hyped up with no real foundation. Even more remarkably, the relationship between the brothers had never soured. There had never been a serious quarrel, even when they brought in outsiders, extra workers for jobs the family couldn’t quite manage on their own. Probably it was because even these were a known quantity. Most of them had gone to school with one of Benjamin’s parents; all had been born and raised in the same eight-thousand-person town. Disputes, where they arose, were managed according to implicitly agreed-on codes which did not need to be negotiated: you never said out loud that a man had screwed up, or not to his face, but the information percolated through the community. More often than not the culprit would eventually adjust their behaviour. And if he didn’t there was always an invisible blanket, a reassuring cocoon of inherited money that unobtrusively rounded off the sharper edges off the problem.
Almost whimsically, the thoug
ht occurred to Benjamin that it would be nice to move back home to live near his parents. It would be boring, yes (he was realistic enough to concede this), but it was also somewhere you could trust. You lived in a place where you knew all the people, where it made sense to speak of ‘a’ people. Men were men and women were women; there was not this continuous squabble of families negotiating their shape. You loved where you came from; you did not just hop up and go to London when someone waved a fistful of dollars in your face. And you could share silence together, husbands, wives and children – you could marinate in silence, no need for all this talk, talk, talk – and the silence would be congenial, not gapped with misunderstandings in which anger could pool and breed.
Amanda wiped her hand across her brow. ‘Let’s take a break,’ she said. Without waiting for his answer, she turned and walked into the kitchen, returning moments later with a pitcher of water garnished with lemon slices. It was an odd touch for someone as non-domestic as Amanda. Maybe her accountant husband was a new influence.
‘It’s really changed a lot, back home,’ she said suddenly. ‘There’s all these foreign investors coming in. People who’ve never set foot in the place before – Indians, Chinese. They’re buying it all up; the locals can’t compete. I don’t know what the politicians are thinking. It’s because their government gets behind them, unlike ours. Dad got an offer,’ she added, vaguely.
Benjamin sipped his water. He did not enjoy the lemony aftertaste though he appreciated the effort. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, does it? You can’t keep things the same forever. If people want to sell, why can’t they? Like you say, they must be getting a pretty good deal if Dad would even consider it.’
Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘I knew you’d say that. It’s not just about selling the properties.’ She cast him a furtive look, gauging his reaction. ‘It’s who they’re selling them to.’
‘Well, what’s the problem with that? Dad’s been working long enough. Maybe it’s time he retired.’
‘Yeah, well, maybe you should think about …’ Amanda glowered. She took the empty glass from his hand.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I said it was nothing.’
In spite of himself he found he was getting angry. ‘No, you can’t just put something like that out there and run away from it. If you’re not gonna follow through, you shouldn’t start saying it in the first place.’
Amanda looked away. ‘You don’t get it. I mean you try to – even coming to Sydney … everything looks different. I can’t recognise the place. There’s all these signs up on the shops, I don’t even know what language …’ She raised her hand, gesturing outwards, as if trying to hold on to a meaning which slipped from her grasp. ‘I can’t even remember their names, some of these people. They all have names like Su-Su or Wa-Wa, stuff like that. I don’t have anything against them, but why do they have to live here? Shouldn’t they just fix things up in their own country. And the house prices, and trains …’ Her voice trailed off.
He sensed she wanted to be comforted. He said gently, ‘It’s not that bad. They don’t just let them. They have to learn to speak English and pass a test and stuff.’ These were words he had spoken to his family a dozen times, possibly more. But as he repeated them, he realised the meaning had been eroded. He wondered if he even believed them anymore. Once he had prided himself on open-mindedness, nodding with sage friendliness at new migrants who dropped their eyes shyly when he passed them in the street. But it seemed there had been a shift in tone - now they looked straight at him or even ignored him, like they just took it for granted that they were meant to be there. This left him feeling strangely cheated, as if a gift had been snatched from his hands before he’d had a chance to proffer it.
Amanda was silent for so long he wondered if the conversation was over. At last she said, ‘Did you know Julian is going on exchange? He’s going to Japan. He’s planning to stay there for a year.’
Benjamin was momentarily confused. Julian, their youngest brother, had started primary school around the same time he and Andie started university. He was in Benjamin’s memory weepy, small and blonde, bursting into tears at the smallest provocation. ‘Wow. Good for Julian. Does he even speak Japanese?’
Amanda smirked. ‘Kind of. He said some words – well, he said that it was Japanese. For all I know, he could have just have been making sounds out of his mouth. Oh, hey, look at this! It’s the WhatsApp group for me and Elise and – you know, my girls’ night group.’ She held up her phone, obviously pleased with herself. The group icon was three Japanese schoolgirls in their uniforms. ‘“Konichiwa!” Ha ha ha ha. Mum said Julian had better watch out. Or else he’ll come home with a bunch of little yellow babies.’
She eyed him sideways, teasing out his reaction. Then the two of them collapsed into laughter, vulgar and delicious. It had been a while since he’d laughed like that without inhibition.
Benjamin sobered up first. Amanda pressed a fist against her mouth, cramming the giggles back inside.
‘You should go back and visit them soon,’ she said at last. ‘I should as well.’
‘What do you think Dad’s gonna do about the property?’
‘I dunno. You’re the one who should ask – he never tells me what’s going on.’
‘Me either.’
‘Well, you know Dad.’
But in fact they didn’t, not in the slightest. Both of them were older than their father had been when his first child was born, and still his workings were mysterious to them. ‘Anyway, come on, no more bludging. Let’s get back to work.’
Now they were rested, the components of the furniture were markedly easier to decipher and manipulate. They worked without speaking for a while, communicating with only periodic noises of yes and no and ‘Not there’ or ‘Over here’. Finally Amanda sighed and said, ‘I think we’re pretty much done.’
Once complete, it really did seem to add to the room, although he wondered what she planned to use the bookshelves for. Amanda did not, to his knowledge, read. She preferred to save her shrewdness, her laconic intelligence, for human beings. Real people, like the ones they knew. Not theoretical others on the other side of the planet. Benjamin knew in principle there must be others who did not feel like this, who lived and thought differently, in pursuit of foreign, incomprehensible priorities. But he could not believe that he had ever met one of them in the flesh. There was Andie, there were her friends and co-workers, but surely they did not mean it, the things they said about poverty and open borders and the rest. On some level, everybody must want what he, his parents and Amanda wanted: home, a family, a place where you could stay. Over time Andie would drop her pretensions. No-one really lived like that - floating from place to place, subsisting on your ideas only. Ideas were not substantial. You could not eat them. You could not tuck them in at night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was so strange being back in Sydney. It was strange saying ‘back’; it sounded like her parents’ lingo. Everything was so expensive. At the cafe below work, Andie blanched as she handed over three dollars eighty for a takeaway can of Coke. Three dollars eighty: the cost of production was minimal, so what the hell was she paying for? She handed the money over, wondering what marvels of skilled production she was about to witness. Was someone going to squeeze the coca from the leaf with his bare hands? Serve it to her in a silver goblet?
It certainly wasn’t the service, a tall boy in a T-shirt who seemed to be offended by the effort of opening the fridge behind the counter. He examined her coins at arm’s length, as if he could not quite believe in so small an amount.
‘That’s four dollars, please,’ he said, tapping his fingers on his palm and looking out at the space just next to Andie’s shoulder. He dropped the coins into the cash register with a crash which managed to exaggerate both the extent of the transaction and the effort he had been forced to put into it.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge these curmudgeonly thoughts. It was not like Indonesia – this was what people’s time was worth here; every second was precious to them, and they expected to be compensated accordingly. And so they should be, she reminded herself. It must be an incredibly boring job. Whatever the young man was being paid, it was probably no less than he deserved for handing over a portion of his consciousness to pouring drinks and taking orders for different types of milk in other people’s coffee.
On the way out of the café, she saw that someone had pasted a Confederate flag sticker on the side of the building. Underneath they had written with a sharpie: ‘FUCK OFF WE’RE FULL’. She grimaced slightly and kept walking. It was just a poster, she told herself. She would not allow it to disrupt her mood.
Andie had done her own stint working menial jobs. She’d never done retail, but she had once worked for several months as a telemarketer, when she was nineteen and fresh out of home, a move which was strongly discouraged by her parents. After she left, they didn’t speak to her for months. ‘Why are you doing this?’ May had asked. ‘Why will you live in a dirty place without any proper meals? How will you study? How will you look after your health?’
But Andie had longed to be a grown-up. Living with her parents, she’d felt she was missing out on something intangible but incredibly important. She found it obscurely humiliating when she saw her friends walk past, the ones who looked after themselves, arms wrapped round canvas bags spilling over with groceries. Their eyes slid away from hers, hiding sly humour and seductive adult secrets. She heard her classmates say, ‘I can’t believe his parents haven’t kicked him out yet’, or, ‘Mum and Dad are great, God love ’em, but I can’t spend more than forty-eight hours at home without going insane.’ She felt herself deficient, harbouring an inadequacy so enormous she could not even see its full extent. No doubt to them she looked helpless, childish, silly and naive. She had lived such a sheltered life – she didn’t even know what she didn’t know.