by S. L. Lim
‘But I didn’t.’ Tony shrugged. ‘I landed here. I was fine.’ Holding out his palms, skidded and pink, as if he wanted her to admire them.
‘Next time?’ She laid a plaster on his knee, and clenched her hands to control them. ‘No more, Tony. No more climbing the monkey bars for you.’
Tony stared. ‘Come on, Ma.’ He looked up at her, disbelieving, trying to determine if she really meant it. Realising she did, his face turned sour, and he pushed her away. ‘Get over it, why don’t you?’ he said to her in English. ‘Don’t you know you’re just being totally paranoid?’
Her love for him sprang back into her face, like a rubber band snapped against her flesh. She slapped him hard around the jaw – once, twice, three times. When she looked up again, panting, he was kneeling on the floor, blood coming from his nose.
‘Get up,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘Go and wash and get changed. Get out of my sight.’
There was the sound of his feet scuffling against the floorboards, and he was gone. She leaned back against the bathroom door. Blood and asphalt, blood and anger, rage and flesh. Truly she could have murdered him; she knew that she might have, if there had been some easy weapon to hand. A heavy stone, a kitchen knife. No punishment sufficient for the contempt in his childish voice. She pressed her fist against her eyes, sucking her breath against her teeth.
After that, she did not hit him again for several years.
She could not remember the point at which she’d decided to have children. Back then it wasn’t something you decided, really. You got married, and then it just happened sooner or later. Up till that point, she had never taken much of an interest in babies. Most of them seemed interchangeable: a chore that you tried to avoid, but which tended to be foisted on you anyway; a vague assortment of crying and sucking noises. It seemed bizarre to her when she heard parents say that they were proud of their offspring. Who your children were, she believed, had nothing much to do with you. It was like being proud of hair growing, or of developing an especially large and debilitating hernia: yours insofar as it came from your body, but not connected to your conscious mind at all.
To her surprise, however, the first time she saw Tony – watched this tiny consciousness unfurl itself to the elements, yawn, stretch and sneeze – she was overcome with a profound sense of accomplishment. Up till then, she had thought herself quite an ordinary, nay, sub-ordinary person: inessential, replaceable, bound to no-one in this world. But from the very moment that she and Tony met – for she felt, seeing him for the first time, that she was being introduced to him, just like a stranger – it was unmistakable how entirely unlike other human beings he was. The fact of love hit her full in the body like an SUV.
Most of the time, however, she did not experience love in Tony’s presence. Most of the time he made her furious. She preferred to blame Islam, which had taken him over, filled him up with perverse ideas and incomprehensible ambitions. If she was honest, though, this vein of rage in her preceded his conversion. Even when he was a little child, she was infuriated by his very helplessness and dependency. She hated his trustfulness with strangers: accepting their gifts, returning their smiles, a childish weakness indistinguishable from stupidity. She had learned – it had taken her a lifetime to learn – that this world was immeasurably perilous. One careless step, one wrong decision, and you were out. (Or even one good decision, if combined with cruel circumstances.) And now here she was, charged with taking care of this pathetically gullible weakling, wandering round the world with an expression of stupid trustfulness.
It was funny how small things could wound you. These days he prayed every day, multiple times per evening. She had bought him a rug to save his knees from the hard tiled floor, but he did not use it. Perhaps the pain was a necessary part of the bargain with Allah, or whoever. He would not say. He prayed with his door closed, and when she tapped on it to ask if he wanted something to eat, if he was feeling cold, if she should open up the window just a crack for ventilation, he would say, ‘No, thank you, Ma. It’s fine how it is.’ Whatever she offered – food, comfort, convenience – the answer was the same. These days it seemed that ‘No, thank you’ was all she ever heard from him. Not that he was rude about it – on the contrary, he had grown almost pathologically polite. He used to snap when she came into his room without asking, but now he fixed her with a look of tolerant weariness and said, ‘Excuse me, Ma, can I finish what I’m doing?’
Though she used to slap him for disrespect, his politeness wounded her. She knew he wasn’t doing it for her. It would have meant something else entirely if he had spoken this way out of love – for their family, for her. But she knew that he hadn’t. She was a prop that he used to supplicate himself before his imaginary Allah.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked him once, as he picked up the keys to his father’s car.
‘Oh, nowhere special. I’m just heading out to pick up some stuff.’
‘Going out – out where? When will you come back?’
‘Oh, in a couple of hours. Definitely before ten p.m. I’ll let you know.’
And he was off. She heard the crunch of wheels on gravel, the car reversing down the driveway. He must have known she wouldn’t sleep till he got back. She asked her husband to do something, but Arwin said that there was nothing they could do. Let him behave however he likes, he said. We can’t control him – we’re his parents, not monkey keepers. He is an adult now, and has to make his own way.
His defeatist attitude enraged her. She could not stand the hypocrisy of it, this pose of lofty disengagement. Arwin could say that because he knew she would never give up, not ever. She would never stop fighting, hectoring, making herself contemptible, ridiculous – not if there was the faintest chance that Tony would come back to them.
Sometimes Arwin said cruel things, just to provoke her. He would say he should have married someone different. A woman who could have given him an ordinary Christian son - not some crazy fanatic who didn’t even know his own religion. She knew that Arwin didn’t really believe it was her fault. Her husband was just taking it out on her because he could, because she was there. But regardless of intent, the words themselves were brutalising enough. ‘Oh, genes, is it?’ she shouted. ‘Genes? Where are your bloody genes? Huh? Huh?’ He had no answer.
This was what was excruciating: that they’d been so close to being happy. They had lost so much, and then built it up again: they’d paid off the house, the car, even recently acquired an investment property. Now, at last, there was some pocket money left over. Daisy was overcoming the frugality she’d learned in childhood and was starting to treat herself. No more bargain-basement dishwashing liquid, but a special formulation that was gentle on your hands; perfumed bath soap which smelled like pomegranates and honey. Scraped vanilla bean ice-cream from the freezer section at Coles. She had started to wear dresses again: loose-fitting, conservative outfits, but dresses nonetheless. (‘What are you, mutton dressed as lamb?’ she heard her mother say scornfully in her ear.)
These things were solid, quantifiable pleasures. Daisy had never thought to ask for any other kind. She had always been contemptuous of vaporous concepts like ecstasy, transcendence, fulfilment, which she regarded as pointless and self-indulgent. Why now, at the tail of her middle age, had her son become a religious fanatic, so that even her pleasure in these small things was denied?
She hated her friends, who had turned smug all of a sudden. She despised their children, who had grown up raucous, indifferent and Westernised. Not a single one of them was as gifted and diligent as Tony. They were wasting their lives, drinking and partying their university years away, while their parents paid for electricity, rent and food. She hated how even this would be preferable to what she was experiencing now.
She despised the world, which had raised her hopes before destroying them so cruelly. She missed her own parents, long gone from this world: father dead of a heart attack when she had just turned seven; mother killed by metastatic lung can
cer, though she was never a smoker. If I were lucky like Tony, if my parents were alive, I would not be as stupid as he is. I would cherish the days that I had with them, and I would tell them I loved them. (This was obviously untrue. Daisy had never told anyone she loved them in her life.)
‘Who is this Katherine?’ she asked Tony. ‘Where have all your friends gone to? Why are the two of you always talking together? You always look so serious. What are you so serious about?’
‘She’s just my friend, Ma. We talk together about our religion.’ She hated the way he used the word ‘religion’, as if he had intuited that simply saying ‘Islam’ was enough to send her over the edge.
‘But why so much?’ she asked. ‘I like to say: everything in moderation, even friends.’ (Daisy had in fact never said anything of the sort but felt convinced in the moment that she had.) ‘Even if you are very close, it’s not good to have so much feeling, or you become dependent on them. Best to do everything yourself.’
Katherine came over to visit two, perhaps three afternoons per week. She was always clad in that extraordinary get-up, the stupid tudung. Really, such a thing on a Caucasian girl was totally ridiculous. Even just looking at her, Daisy felt her blood pressure go through the roof. Katherine and Tony would retreat to his room and talk and talk, as though there was nothing else to do all evening. No uni work, no TV, not even food. Everyone said it was normal for boys his age, but she could tell – although she could not prove – that it wasn’t like that. It just wasn’t like that at all.
‘I’m his mother,’ she insisted. ‘I know.’
She complained to her sister, but May just laughed and said not to worry about it. It was just mother’s jealousy. May had gone through it too, when Andie moved out of home. It was a pitched and eternal battle, older women against younger ones – you had to take sides, and Daisy could tell that no-one would be taking hers. They smiled over her shoulder at each other, amused by her descent into senility, which, they thought, was taking place ahead of schedule. How pathetic she must seem from the outside: a clingy, ridiculous (was there any other kind?) middle-aged woman.
‘I’m his mother,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t understand what I see. I know.’
It was not that there was anything concretely disturbing about how Tony and Katherine behaved. It was the way he looked when they were together: posture rigid yet deferential, hands clasped, eyes overly intense. Strange objects began to accumulate around the house. Maps, for example. Tony had procured a detailed diagram of the train system, and she did not dare ask him what it was for, lest he bite off her head. (She had learned from bitter experience that the Islamic injunction to be kind to one’s parents only went so far.)
On one occasion, he ordered a dozen smoke detectors; on another, an electric alarm clock. This was strange, since he could just use the app on his mobile phone. Her mind inched towards one possible explanation. But whenever she started to frame it for herself her brain would retreat, as if pulling away from an electric fence. No, not Tony. It couldn’t be that. It simply couldn’t.
‘What do you hope to happen?’ May asked her once. ‘What do you hope for the future? What do you want to do?’
Daisy turned the question over by herself, and found she had no answer. Hope? What role did hope play in any of their lives? She had not wanted anything for herself, not since she was young, not really. She had long since given up the idea of herself as bound for some especial and loving destiny. As a teenager, she had dreamed of being beautiful, brilliant and beloved. She would not have recognised this dream today if you’d held it in front of her face.
She loved her family, but they were remote from her; she wanted nothing for them apart from safety and money, which she regarded as synonymous. Her one indulgence was her pride in Tony’s academic prowess. How cruel it was that the danger could emerge from her son’s own mind, the very brain she was so proud of!
She wondered if it could all be explained by karma: what you give is what you get. As a Christian she was not meant to believe in such things; nevertheless, the concept struck her as instinctively plausible. God punishes people in the afterlife, so why not now? But she couldn’t believe that she had done something to earn what had befallen her. She was a good person. She had been a dutiful, obedient child, and later, a conscientious mother. What had Tony ever been denied? When had he ever gone without something he wanted? Yet this belief coexisted with another underlying certainty: namely, that everything was her fault. After all, Tony had come from her body; whatever went wrong with him must have its roots in her somehow. She had lived under the threat of violence and the fear had passed into her bloodstream, and from there into Tony’s DNA. It had warped his sense of self, turning him morally deformed.
She put this theory to her sister, but May only laughed at her. ‘Everyone has their damage,’ she said, putting a hand on Daisy’s shoulder in a rare show of sisterly solidarity. ‘So many bad things have happened before in this world. Like the First World War, also the famine in Ukraine, also the Holocaust.’ (During Andie’s final year of high school May had helped her revise for modern history.) ‘But most people are OK, you know. Things turn out well after some time. Otherwise the human race would not survive so long.’
Daisy could appreciate the logic. Still, she could not believe that they did not exist out there, somewhere: human beings who were free from dysfunction and damage and pain. She had met them before, some of the other parents at Tony’s school. They wore competent, unclouded smiles, which they deployed at anyone in their vicinity. Their children loved them, and if they answered back or fought occasionally, this was only natural, since children were children. If you asked them about their own parents (who of course were still alive; death did not visit such families outside of the appropriate timetable), they would be affectionate, humorous – above all they respected other people’s needs, but were firm in their ‘boundaries’. Their family unit was their own, recently constituted, and it functioned as perfectly as such careful design allowed. They did not bear the scars of earlier eras, when fathers raged and screamed and mothers struck their daughters in the face. When wrongs were committed and not rectified, but allowed to go on being wrong indefinitely, until they turned into kinked hurts which could not be unburdened to lover or therapist, and just went on hurting for years.
One evening she said to Tony, ‘I miss your GongGong and PoPo. I wish you got to see them before they died.’
Tony looked at her quizzically. ‘But you’ll see them eventually, won’t you?’
It took her a moment to work out what he was talking about. ‘You mean in the afterlife?’ She looked up and laughed. She realised she did not believe in such a thing, and that she never had.
‘You are lucky, you know,’ she said. She stared at him, hoping the intensity of her meaning would be conveyed just through her eyes.
‘I know,’ Tony responded.
And in that moment she felt closer to him than she had ever felt to anyone before: not her husband, not her sister, not anyone. ‘I am glad that you are here,’ she said. She would have gone further but found herself incapable of doing so. It was the most that her reserved nature would allow.
She came up with hypotheses for Tony’s strange behaviour. The strange internet purchases – perhaps he was smuggling something illegal into the country; avoiding taxes, importation duties. Stolen parts, intellectual property maybe. She had heard of a girl who used the family home to sell crystal meth. Given the kinds of people Tony associated with these days, this seemed like a distinct possibility. She did not stop to elucidate any actual or theoretical link between Islam and drug dealing. For Daisy, it was so obvious as to be beyond logic that Muslims must be associated with any and every kind of criminal transgression. There did not need to be evidence for this belief, merely an overwhelming sense that ‘these people’, as she invariably called them, carried loss and destruction wherever they went.
‘Tony,’ she pleaded, ‘please tell me what’s going on. I know
you are getting involved in some funny business.’
But he brushed her off. ‘What are you talking about? What’s funny about it, Ma?’ There was nothing funny. There was nothing funny about it at all.
‘You have to stop picking on him,’ Andie said. ‘Of course he’s going to fight back if you treat him badly. Of course there’s going to be some kind of backlash.’ When her niece talked like this, Daisy would stare at her in frank disbelief. There was no reasoning with these people. Evil did not exist in their moral universe. When harmful acts occurred, they must be in response to some previous trauma. So that there could be no originating wrong at all, just an infinite cycle of reversion - turtles all the way down.
She could hardly bring herself to admit that she was afraid of her son. Though the fear subsided at times, it never went away entirely: it was always there, nibbling incessantly at her consciousness. Now dulled, now increasingly acute. And then there were times when the whole universe would roll into a giant ball of terror, and she would be overcome with panic. On such occasions, she felt like some external force was squeezing her very blood supply, constricting her capillaries. She felt certain that she was about to die right where she stood, with no time to say goodbye, or even scream. At such moments her suffering was so great she would happily have died, just to put an end to it.
At the same time, she was vigorous and mobile; death was not on her horizon, not now, not yet. She would have to continue to exist, just because there was no obvious alternative. And all the while the others went about their ordinary lives, while Tony’s future slipped through their hands. She wanted to seize them by their necks, shake them from head to toe like dishcloths. Shake them out of their idiot sleep, until they, too, were consumed by a fear that ran deeper than words. Until, maddened with horror, they lost control of their powers of reason, began to weep uncontrollably, tore off all their clothes and ran shrieking down the street.