Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  It was not easy to live through such moments.

  Once upon a time she had felt safe. She’d thought that life was predictable – that what happened today was a good guide to what was going to happen tomorrow. Time had disabused her of this notion. She no longer expected such things as fairness. She no longer expected anything at all.

  Daisy closed her eyes, pressing her face against the cool plane of the window. In the space inside her skull, unidentified objects were bursting into flames and raining from the sky in pieces. In the distance she could see a range of hills unfurling. ‘We have to live,’ she said slowly to herself. ‘We have to.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the period just after the divorce, Andie insisted to anyone who would listen that she was fine. A marriage, after all, was just a piece of paper, and if you ended it, how were you any worse off than you were before? She and Ben were happier apart and they both knew it. Things had great while they lasted and had come to an end through a combination of fault on both sides. There were no heroes and no villains. It was just another retelling of an old, old story.

  The bit about it not being anyone’s fault was true enough. She harboured no bitterness towards Ben and did not regret in any way the years they’d spent together. Even towards the end, the kinked unhappiness had been underlit by a surprising beauty. Though she was not in contact with him now, she did not doubt that his life had been illuminated by their time together, as hers had been.

  To say that they were not in contact, however, was misleading. Getting rid of an actual husband was easy – it was the phantom husband who was being intransigent. When she thought of herself, she thought of Benjamin. It was that simple and impossible to dislodge. She would be wandering through the city, reordering her mental list of all the grudges she held against him, yet when she saw a new restaurant she would stop to examine the menu, thinking that she must bring him there, since there were so many things that he would like. So many futures they had envisaged together: when he grew old, she would not be the one who looked after him, helping him with medicines and taking him to the hospital. Somebody else would have that privilege, that burden. When she grew old … but she was already growing old. She shrank back from the mirror’s accumulating truth. When she had first met Ben she was twenty-two, and as long as they’d stayed together she remained so. Now she was in her mid-thirties – there was not an infinite number of opportunities spread forth for her to take. Her whole life no longer lay in front of her.

  All of which was to say she felt sad in theory about the end of her marriage. And as the weeks passed, she waited for this sadness to seep out into her everyday life, until it finally dawned on her that she wasn’t going to be sad, only relieved. And this, oddly enough, was its own source of regret. A connection that had seemed genuine and substantive, dropped so very easily on both sides. If the loss caused no distress in the present it must stretch back into the past, hollowing out the narrative of her life so that in retrospect what had once been profound seemed only trivial and crude. Stories of how they met, a straitlaced boy and a shaven-head girl in a politics tutorial - she’d been on the lookout for a boyfriend et voilà, there he was. Ben, for his part, had always wanted a wife and had auditioned a succession of women till he found one. That was how they came to be together. There he was, and there she was, and there they were, until they weren’t.

  Human life, Andie reflected, is pretty fucking bleak. This is what’s wrong with me: my fundamental thin-skinnedness, an inability to accept the utilitarian nature of most relationships. This acquiescence to good enough – don’t miss the boat, don’t get left on the shelf. Why can I not reach a truce with these obvious facts? There is something weak and sentimental in my make-up: personally, philosophically. This is why I am a divorcee at thirty-five.

  The bare facts of the matter, the biographical details arranged side by side, told her that she used to feel something for Ben. But she could no longer locate that feeling.

  So she was glad when Daisy rang. Andie had barely said hello when Daisy launched into a speech which was equal parts tirade and lament. ‘I don’t know where he is, he could be anywhere, and then he comes home and he won’t say anything. He buys things off the internet, God knows what they are for. I ask him again and again, even my husband asks, and he says “Ha! None of your business.”’

  Even over the phone, Andie could tell that this wasn’t a case of her aunt’s habitual histrionics. Daisy sounded unstable; the rising note in her voice was one of genuine dismay.

  ‘I’ll come over,’ she said quickly. She was pleased Daisy had called her. It was a relief to know that other people had problems bigger than her own.

  When she arrived, the front door was already open. A young white girl with a veil over her hair was standing there.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ Andie said, arranging her face into the pained, patronising look people reserve for white female converts. Katherine nodded briefly and said she had to go. Just as she was passing through the gate, Daisy burst into the hallway and shouted, ‘Stupid bitch!’ This was followed by a string of insults in a mix of English and Bahasa.

  Andie grabbed Daisy by the shoulders, manoeuvring her inside and pushing her down onto the couch. ‘What was that about?’

  Daisy burst into a torrent of weeping. ‘That bitch has stolen my son,’ she said. ‘The bloody, useless bitch. He wants to kill me. Why have I been cursed like this? What have I done to deserve such a child? What have we denied him? We gave him everything! Life is shit.’ There followed more weeping and a series of increasingly violent curses, interspersed with incomprehensible sentences.

  Andie was wary of asking her to repeat herself. She knew how easily Daisy could flip from grief into white hot rage. ‘Hey, it’ll be all right,’ she said, putting a hand on her aunt’s shoulder. ‘Let me go and speak to him.’

  She found Tony sitting on the edge of the bed, looking shifty. She still couldn’t get used to the beard. It somehow made him look even younger than he really was, like a child playing dress-ups for his birthday.

  ‘Hey, man,’ she said, sitting down next to him. ‘Who are you texting?’

  Tony looked up. His phone was in his hand, and she saw it was an extremely old Nokia without internet access. ‘Hey there, Andie,’ he said, as though she were someone he’d only known briefly, and very long ago. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Pretty well, thanks. Nice weather,’ she added sarcastically. ‘And you?’

  It was alarming how easily the words ‘pretty good’ had slipped out of her mouth. When she examined them, though, they turned out to be surprisingly accurate. Actually, the platitude was justified: it really was a beautiful day. The wind was moving again and the air had cleared, no longer wrapping a smothering blanket of humidity around her flesh. There was a smell of new possibilities in the air, a way she hadn’t felt since she was a child, when she knew that she didn’t have all the answers.

  ‘Now then, young man,’ she said, emphasising the words to let him know it was lighthearted. ‘What did you do to make your mother so upset?’

  Tony shrugged stiffly, an imitation of levity. For the first time she noticed how tense his body was. ‘I don’t know – I think it was something to do with Katherine. It’s hard to tell. My mother doesn’t like her. Anyway, I don’t really want to talk about it now, you know?’ He looked at her flintily. ‘You know, I don’t want you to be in here.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ Andie drew back sarcastically. ‘It’s your personal space, is it? Well, fair enough. But don’t you think that while you’re still living under your parents’ roof, you should try not to antagonise them? If only because it makes everybody’s lives easier?’ I sound like a Roman paterfamilias, she thought. Or, infinitely worse, an angry Asian parent. Already I’ve reverted to my mother’s type. How did that happen?

  She thought she saw Tony steal a judgemental glance at her shirt, which had made a few too many rounds through the wash and was turning see-through. ‘Oh, you can see my
bra strap, is that it? But I’m your cousin! Anyway, how come you’re allowed to talk to Katherine then? She’s a woman, isn’t she?’

  ‘Why do you even care? What’s it to you, aside from trying to get one up on me? You’re not even a Muslimah.’

  ‘And I guess that makes me a dirty infidel, then? Or whatever you call them – kafirs?’

  Tony glared. ‘Stop putting words into my mouth, why don’t you? I didn’t ask you here. I didn’t ask you to get involved in this.’

  ‘But I am involved. I can’t help it. If nothing that I say matters, why are you listening to me then? Why do you care? Because you obviously –’

  ‘Oh, yeah? And it has nothing to do with you coming, I mean, pushing in here with no warning –’ Tony’s voice rose unsteadily. He seemed to be more upset than the situation warranted.

  She said gently, ‘Well, I don’t know, but it smells like hypocrisy to me,’ and watched him blanch, an exaggerated movement as if from an internal wound. She noticed how stiffly his feet were perched upon the floorboards. There was an odour in the room she couldn’t quite identify. ‘Hey, what’s going on? Why do you have a rice cooker under your bed? Have you been making overly complicated midnight snacks?’

  Tony looked at her with an expression she found, to her surprise, to be entirely inscrutable. ‘Get out,’ he said simply. He said it so firmly she found it difficult not to obey; he had reversed the distribution of power between them. She left chastened, feeling like she’d just violated a rule she didn’t know about.

  She found Daisy slumped on the sofa, hands covering her face. Gingerly she put her hand on her aunt’s shoulder. They had never been a physically affectionate family. ‘It’ll be OK, you know. It’s just a phase he’s going through.’ She made this assertion even though she had no means of verifying whether it was true. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she found herself feeling giddily optimistic. Daisy would be all right. Tony was all right. Everything was going to be all right.

  Daisy shook her off with an impatient, derisive gesture. ‘Well, how do you know about my family?’ she said. ‘You don’t have children. How are you going to advise me? You can’t even keep your own husband.’

  Andie shrank back, offended. They sat side by side, not looking at each other. Daisy folded her hands in her lap, possibly regretting being rude. ‘Are you hungry? Have you eaten?’ she asked abruptly. ‘Stay here. I will cut you some fruit. We have mangosteens.’

  The noise was immediate and deafening. For a wild instant Daisy thought there must be fireworks going off. There was a confusion of shapes and falling fragments of darkness, so rapid that it seemed to happen outside time. For a moment, Daisy was not conscious of pain or fear, or her own existence; she was not conscious of being a woman, or that she had been born. With some detachment, she noticed that the sun was shining overhead. She deduced the reason she could see this was because her house had just collapsed. She stood amid a wreck of beams and floorboards, jutting upwards like the exposed bones of an elephants’ graveyard. Then, slowly, awareness came creeping back. It occurred to her that she had always been expecting this to happen. Everything was broken – or rather, everything was as it had always been; she had just contrived not to see it for a while. ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  Tony, at the point of oblivion, had two thoughts. Or rather, responses. The first was a kind of exhausted weariness. It was always like this: the tiny mistake which casts a defining mark against perfection; the impossibility of constructing lasting value out of anything. It reminded him of the emotion he used to feel at the end of a grand final debate, when the opposing team had just unveiled some devastating and uncounterable argument. All his life he had tried to be diligent, conscientious and good, according to one metric or another. Now at the final hurdle, he had unmasked himself as a failure. He had procured himself detailed instructions but had failed to follow through with sufficient assiduity: the document said that you ought to be careful, but he obviously hadn’t been careful enough. What kind of an engineer would do that? He should have listened more closely in class.

  It seemed so pointless, humiliating even, that the final gesture with which he had intended to inscribe meaning on the world turned out to be a pathetic anticlimax. You aspire to do good – or to do something, anyway; to be somebody, more than your parents were. You say there has to be more to this life than eating and shitting and accumulating, the mediocrity offered as your only viable destiny. You want to live right; you want to live as though there really are such things as beauty and freedom and truth. And yet after all of that, you still end up here: straining to be an adult but falling short, with a child’s dirty fingers. A child’s blank eyes and dirt-smeared face; a child’s way of not seeing things, not knowing.

  He did not feel guilt – there was no time for that. But he did feel an overwhelming sense of loss. Life, which had been so futile before, now seemed like too glorious a thing to give up: food was good, and sunlight warm. Music and sex and guiltless laziness, all of the pleasures he had long since renounced. Now he had sacrificed it all for a forgotten cause. Yes, forgotten – on the cusp of his mortality, he could barely remember what he had been trying to achieve. He still believed in Allah, but He seemed distant and hardly animate at all, a great eternal presence whose only function was to be present. Beyond responsibility or engagement, far removed from praise or condemnation: he simply was. Why would such a being care about the doings of someone as trivial as Tony? With seven billion humans on this planet, what is one fewer or more? Any tears shed for his life would be entirely his own.

  This was what was most excruciating: the utter waste of it all. If only you could draw some parable, some final moral, but no – it was chaotic, without coherence; the predominance, ultimately, of pure and random chance. In another era, under different circumstances, Tony might have been a Marxist. A public servant, a theoretical chemist, an Asian hip-hop dancer: such was the arbitrariness with which passions blew in and out of people’s lives. So many paths he might have taken, which deserved to be mourned just as much as his actual existence. But at the point of detonation there was just one destination left, the house he grew up in falling in splinters all around him. As the wave of darkness hit, the final thought which glanced through his mind was one of sorrow for his parents, who would never see him graduate.

  Andie heard a sound, and then consciousness was yanked out from beneath her as quickly as a Persian rug. It happened so fast, there was no time for fear or even knowledge. Then there was silence, and a vast landscape of unknowingness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  After Andie died I went away for a while. It’s not that I was so devastated – it hardly registered with me that she was gone at all. How could her consciousness, so real and vital, have been removed permanently from this world? The loss of her body I understood: the compact torso so familiar to me, bent over the laundry basket in the apartment we shared during first-year uni. This was a simple physical proposition. But thinking, feeling, reacting – these were made of entirely different substances from flesh and bone. They occurred in a different realm and had different properties. It seemed illogical, impossible even, that an event taking place in the material world could have anything to do with them.

  Ever since I was a child, I’ve been convinced that information is power. I thought that if I could learn about every facet of the story, every possible angle on what had happened, then it would be under my control. So I spent hours online, reading every article about the explosion, even though most of them were just retellings of reports from other media outlets, posted on a hundred different pages in slightly different iterations. I watched the news and learned that Katherine had done far better than Tony at implementing their mutual scheme. She had constructed a similar device, also using a pressure cooker, and had set it up on one side of a zebra crossing. Detonating it remotely, she claimed the lives of two pedestrians. Her case was taken up by two up-and-coming human rights lawyers, humane and intelligent, who subsequently recei
ved quite a number of death threats. A lot of fan mail was addressed to her in prison.

  I quit my job – they weren’t even going to fire me. I thought that if I looked for one second more at state infrastructure strategy documents, I would have to throw someone into the ocean. Sydney, too, began to infuriate me, so I got out of the city and went backpacking round regional New South Wales. I had no trouble getting jobs. I was just young enough for manual work, but just old enough to look steadier than the other working travellers. I went at each job with manic intensity, even if it was just standing on the street selling paintball vouchers. I sold more of these in one week than the company had ever recorded, and they were so impressed they offered to promote me to manager.

  But I couldn’t stay. I picked fruit and pruned trees at a small organic orchard. I picked zucchinis at a farm where I slept in a tent and was paid for each bucket of vegetables I delivered. The sun did violence to my flesh and my back was painfully warped from bending over, but the owner assured me it was easy work since zucchinis have no thorns. I worked with four other backpackers, two young women and a couple from England. We went drinking in the evenings, and when they asked me what I was doing there I said my father had died. I felt bad about lying to them but I couldn’t bear to explain the whole story. When I told them, their eyes grew wide and serious. One of them nervously patted me on the shoulder, as if bereavement might be catching. But I appreciated the thought.

  I overheard them talking about me later. They were feeling sorry for me, formulating plans to cheer me up. I was moved by their naivety – their belief that through goodwill and ingenuity, any problem could be fixed, even death. Still, their pity was no use to me. Andie was dead. There was no beauty, no kindness, no intelligence that could make sense of what had happened. Faced with this knowledge, the very concepts of beauty, kindness and intelligence seemed to shrivel in my hands.