Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  The trouble with Ben, Andie reflected, was also what had attracted her to him in the first place: his capacity for loyalty. Once he was on your side, you knew he was on your side forever. This was nice when the loyalty belonged to you, and less nice when it belonged to someone else. Take his best friend, Matty. They’d known each other since preschool. Andie, who had no childhood friends, could only dimly imagine how it was: the joint remembering; how the strength of the past operated like an affirmation of the future. As with all ancient friendships, the dynamic between the two of them was both particular to their relationship and instantly recognisable.

  As if in affirmation of this point, Matty said ‘Remember Father Cummins?’ and Ben responded, ‘Man of Steel!’ And then they both shook their heads, smiling knowingly.

  ‘You know,’ Matty said, ‘at my work, we’ve just got these two new interns. Two of them - well, just stating the facts - their background is Chinese. And I’m very open minded, but it’s just what I see - all the studying takes away their personalities. They can solve an equation, but can they actually think, is what I want to know.’

  Andie raised her eyebrows. She sensed the others were not so much looking at her as delicately aware, but trying not to be, of her presence. She did her best to keep her voice level. ‘Would you care to unpack that for me?’ she asked.

  Matty looked embarrassed but determined. ‘Well, look, you see …I’m not a racist at all. My best friend growing up was Indian. But, you know, there’s IQ, and there’s also EQ - emotional intelligence. You can do as well as you like with the books, but that will only go so far … and you have to admit, Chinese people are not friendly. All they care about is money. The Australian born ones are OK,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

  Andie turned to Benjamin, silently demanding with her eyes that he bring Matty into line. But he was quite silent, smiling awkwardly at the table. He and his friends, she saw, understood without dwelling on it that she might not like it when they voiced such beliefs, but they trusted that by inviting her to drinks, speaking these open secrets in her presence, they were cancelling out any application of the words to her.

  Instead she looked at Ewan. He too was silent, until he saw her expression and said hurriedly, in a conciliatory tone: ‘Well, that’s a bit of a generalisation, don’t you think? It’s a little bit un-PC.’

  ‘I’m going to get another drink,’ she said brusquely. Benjamin followed her to the bar.

  ‘What are you pissed off about now?’ he demanded; and when she raised her eyebrows, ‘Oh, come on, he didn’t mean it like that. He wasn’t talking about you.’ He appeared to be genuinely surprised that she had taken Matty’s comments badly. Asians were an abstract category of people, and Andie was Andie. How could she be so malicious as to pervert Matty’s words like this? In Benjamin’s mind, a racist was someone who went round burning crosses on black people’s front lawns. It seemed disingenuous for Andie to conflate this with a couple of thoughtless remarks from a well-meaning person who surely did not intend her any personal injury. Quite the opposite: Matty, God knows why, rather liked her.

  Andie shrugged him off and took her drink out to the courtyard, fuming.

  That was what Andie just didn’t understand, Benjamin thought. (Watching her in profile through the window, he could tell she was still brooding on it from the way her jaw muscles tightened – how she loved to be offended, clinging on to each insult like a precious object …) Matty’s remark, while inappropriate, was not the worst thing anyone had ever said. It was unpleasant, certainly, but not as much as this stance of professional victimhood. Put plainly, he had a hard time seeing Andie as any kind of victim. If she was really, properly Asian, if she spent her hours wiping tables and cleaning floors the way those other poor immigrants did – well, that would be a different case. He had real sympathy for such people. But Andie was not one of them. She had a good job, earning more than he did; she was clearly and obviously middle class, which was more than you could say for a great many white people, so why didn’t she go and feel sorry for them? It seemed rather gratuitous for her to complain about others not being racially sensitive enough. And the intense, irrational dislike she had taken to Matty …

  His wife’s chief problem was this: she added people up. She devoted an extraordinary amount of effort to judging other people, performing complex calculations regarding their virtues and deficiencies. She never held back: if there was a choice between someone’s feelings and what she regarded as the truth, she always chose the latter. And it was never enough for her to just disagree with you – she had to grind you down, show you how emphatically wrong you were and how right she was, her scathing dislike for almost everything outside herself.

  But the trouble with Ben, Andie thought, was that this niceness which everyone remarked on was really weakness. He wanted to be friends with everybody. His natural relation with the rest of the world was friendship. He did not see that in some cases there were choices to be made; everybody could not always get along, and nor should they have to. You had to pick a side, and to make pretty fucking sure that you selected the right one. She understood Ben’s primal urge of loyalty to Matty; she just thought that as her husband, he ought to have more loyalty to her.

  At such times, she had no desire to work on the relationship, mending differences and making compromises, or work on finding time and being attracted to each other. And, flying out of herself to see her life from the outside for a moment, it struck her that heterosexuals as a class were incredibly ruthless, even nominally progressive ones who claimed they shared the housework and gave out pins to support gay marriage. They decided on the roles a partner should fulfil and then auditioned various candidates. They worked diligently, conscientiously, towards this predetermined goal just as if it were an accounting certification. They had a rule for every situation, how much or how little you should feel, measuring out their emotions in carefully titrated form, like intravenous paracetamol. And if your emotions showed an over- or undersupply, there were ways you could work on that.

  I don’t even like my actual job, Andie thought. For once in my life let me be free from work!

  Benjamin joined her in the courtyard. ‘What Matty said back there about Chinese people – he wasn’t trying to be racist,’ he said, sounding like he was almost pleading. ‘That’s just the truth. That’s just the way things are.’

  At times such as these, she wanted to wound him as she herself was wounded. She wanted to humiliate him as she had been humiliated. But even as she reached through her toolbox of rage, she knew this was not an option. He did not need her opinion to know that he and the people he loved were individual human beings, not drones; indeed, nobody in his history had ever thought to suggest otherwise. That was how he was able to wear his power so lightly: he did not even realise it was power. If he had known, surely he would not have wielded it so shamelessly. At such times she thought there was nothing she would not do to hurt him. She hoped that his business would collapse, that he would cause some awful injury to his clients, that everything he set out to accomplish would end in ruin, failure and disgrace. She longed for this with a viciousness that frightened her. If thoughts could move objects, her husband would long since have been ripped to pieces.

  And then there were times – at the peak of his anger with her self-centredness, intransigence and snobbery – when guilt would come upon him. He would find himself paralysed, incapacitated, without knowing why he should feel guilty, only certain that he had done something terrible and stupid, but that he was too terrible and stupid to know what it was. He was too dumb to understand Andie, to identify the kinks of hurt running through her mind and body. But what (the resentment began to rise again) should he have done about Matty? What action could possibly have satisfied her? Was he supposed to jettison his oldest friendship just because of one politically off-colour remark? It wasn’t about her being Asian – he didn’t even think of her like that. The trouble was, she had no sense of humour. She didn’
t know how to laugh at herself, that was the problem.

  But here was the strange part: when he saw other people laughing at her, it made him furious. Not that they did it to his face. But still he knew when they did it, the sudden smile behind a beer glass; he knew who they were laughing at and why. It didn’t help that she made herself objectively ridiculous. Her need to have a ‘cause’. Her inability to stop talking, even when it was clear everybody was exhausted by the effort of listening to her. But though he knew just how often his wife despised him, he could not bring himself to feel the same towards her. All he wanted was to love her and for her to love him back. The simplicity of the request along with the impossibility of seeing it fulfilled almost brought him to tears.

  When Andie thought about the present it seemed tolerable, mostly. There was the next stage in her career, meals to eat and friends to catch up with. But when she thought about the future, it always seemed to be unbearably bleak. The gradual attrition of all that she valued in herself and others. Her parents … She felt an impossible tenderness towards her father’s hands which steered the taxi, beginning to get liver spots. Once she’d lived in terror of his rages; now she only felt sorry for his frailty and frequent confusion. Old Man Shouts At Cloud. And at the end of it all, her own cessation into non-existence – strange how this most predictable of biological events seemed like the final phenomenon of nature. Without speaking she left Benjamin and went back inside.

  When she got back to the table Ewan was chatting away cordially with Matty. Seeing her murderous expression, he shot her a censorious look. She knew how much he prided himself on the ability to be friends with anyone, no matter their opinions. This was what he called being ‘rational’, being ‘fair’. They were so comfortable together, Matty and Benjamin and Ewan, it came to them so naturally – this social ease, a lack of surface conflict. She was the problem, apparently. White people, whatever their differences, could get on just fine when she wasn’t around …

  Her earlier affection for Ewan sprang back like a branch to strike her in the face.

  This she knew: that she and Ben had once been very much in love. Whether they were anymore was beyond her ability to analyse. They had started off with clean waves of emotion, and then there were the thousand little hurts, none of which were disabling in themselves, but which accreted until the surface was occluded by scar tissue. Those were the facts. You couldn’t reverse them and nor would you want to: it would be like unliving your own life. Although actually, it was dishonest to describe it in these terms, as though the dissolution in feeling was mutual. She knew that Ben still loved her, a lot - enough to transcend his opinions and values on a lot of matters. Loyalty, strength of attachment – this meant more to her than being right. It was what you could count on at the fulcrum of feeling, it was enough. Until it wasn’t. Until the person’s loyalty to you, real as it was, was transcended by their loyalty to someone else.

  But you could always start over, Benjamin thought. It was at these times that he prayed, in a wild agnostic fashion, not entirely sure who he was praying to. Probably it was the God he’d been brought up with, a distant, non-denominational, mostly but not exclusively Christian figure. He didn’t move mountains or anything like that. Benjamin prayed, not because he expected to be answered, but because when you were helpless, it helped to feel like you were doing something. He had never had much time for organised religion, not being particularly concerned with the Church’s teachings on divorce, premarital sex, hellfire and so on. God for him was just there, less a power than a presence, and not even a particularly benevolent one. Yet to Benjamin this presence was as necessary as breathing. He could not conceive of a world without God, any more than he could conceive of a life without oxygen.

  Andie was an atheist. In her teens, after a talk by the school chaplain, she had briefly been engulfed by the terror of hellfire, which seemed far more plausible to her than heaven. She always felt guilty, as if she were on the verge of being found out. If a God existed, she was sure she would be doomed: all of her weaknesses, her petty cruelties and unkindness. As she grew into adulthood this guilt receded. She began to approach her own flaws more tolerantly, and to come at religion as a factual proposition rather than a moral one. The world as she saw it did not seem to operate according to any moral logic. Good things happened to bad people and vice versa. There was no scheme of reward and punishment, only cause and effect. And she found she could be good without God – at least, no better or worse than she would otherwise have been.

  In a dying relationship, the forms of life go on, but the feeling behind them is different. To an external observer, everything looks the same. They still had sex, they still slept in the same bed every night and breathed the air that had been cycled in and out of each other’s bodies. But something had changed. Like their home were a simulation of home, their lives a simulation of life. Mirrors and smoke. Special effects.

  It’s said that there are two kinds of people: those who can conceive of their own non-existence with a cheerful shrug, or at least a degree of equanimity, and those who can’t. Andie belonged to the latter category. She was scared of death, both for herself and for those around her. The idea that a person could simply cease was the most frightening thing imaginable. When she lost her grandparents, more shocking than their suffering was the fact that they had been there, and then they weren’t anymore. And losing a feeling for which there was no objective physical evidence was even worse than that. She was afraid that she and Benjamin would split up, but even worse, she was afraid of losing the emotion that had joined them together in the first place. Reaching into her emotional pockets, so to speak, and finding nothing. The inevitability of loss pressed in on her like the four sides of a metal cube.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  My grandfather, a man for whom the word ‘crusty’ might have been invented, came to visit me one day. Somehow my family had found out that I had lost my job. ‘You have to keep on looking,’ he informed me, shaking his head with disapproval at my generation’s lack of fortitude. ‘For self-respect, it’s important to keep yourself occupied.’

  I saw his eyes travel round the room, lingering on the dining table, where the remains of my breakfast were apparent (it was about twelve). For someone who’d been living off the power of compound interest for over a decade – though technologically illiterate, my grandfather had bought some lucky shares during the dotcom boom – he was remarkably devoted to the concept of work as the origin of human value. I marvelled inwardly at how my years of fourteen-hour days, waking up at four for the seven a.m. flight, had been so easily sloughed off other people’s perception of my character. I had been diligent, driven and successful for more than a decade since uni – surely that counted in my favour. But no: far from reminding people that I hadn’t always been a worthless bum, my fall from the corporate heights seemed to confirm for them that I had never deserved my success in the first place. What a relief that must have been.

  Apart from the hypocrisy, though, my grandfather was right. I really did need to get out of myself. I updated my CV and my LinkedIn profile, and soon I was fielding calls from prospective employers, slipping on my professional telephone manner like a slightly battered suit. At the interview stage, I was repeatedly turned down on the grounds that I was over-qualified. I wondered if this was true, or just a tactful way of saying that they just didn’t want me.

  At last I took a job at a small consultancy. It was much smaller than the one I had been fired from; my role, believe it or not, was to advocate for the construction of new highways from a sociological perspective. I was reminded of an ad I had seen once for a professional water slide designer. No other structures, not playground equipment or emergency slides for planes or other furnishings for a water park, just water slides. No matter how specific the position, there was someone out there who had made it their career. It struck me that this was a marvellous fact about the modern economy.

  The first organisation I presented to was a Concerne
d Local Residents’ group. They were trying to choose if they should vote yay or nay in a council survey on a new toll road running through the park. Two avuncular old guys eyed me with suspicion as I went through my banal, obvious-stating routine, looking overdressed in front of a Powerpoint much less polished than the ones I was used to. When you work for a large company, you forget how much of the shine on your work is borrowed, not actually yours.

  The two old guys asked lots of questions, shaking their heads whenever the perversity of the state government was alluded to. One of them had a cold and kept sniffling and taking tissues from a box that had been left on the table. At the end of the meeting, he stood there pulling out handfuls of extra tissues and shoving them in his pocket. Well, fair enough, I thought. You can never get enough tissues in this life.

  It wasn’t terrible, this new job. I told myself I was lucky – lots of people worked much harder and for less cash. Still, I always felt depressed in shallow fashion. Always that vague oppressive guilt that I should be doing something more productive, although there was honestly nothing to do. And even if there had been, it would have been a report that went into another report subdivided into argued-over pieces that would finally be subsumed, unrecognisable, into yet another document. So on and on ad infinitum, splitting and self-replicating right down to a molecular level, like the world’s most boring fractal.

  Since I had lots of downtime, I thought I would try writing a book at my desk. But something about the work environment, people constantly walking past, made this psychologically impossible. This was before my big humiliation – I will never forget the smug caught you out smirk of the comms lady who found one of my manuscripts in the photocopier. Thankfully she didn’t tell anyone.

  ‘Maybe I have a novel in me,’ my boss said periodically as a joke. It was as if writing a novel were a self-evidently ridiculous thing to do. Office life, I thought. This is how it’s going to be, from now on.