by S. L. Lim
Sometimes I would wake up with a disconnected feeling and wonder what the fuss was all about. Terrorists exist, bombs go off sometimes – this we know. Distressing as such events may be for the survivors, from a rational perspective, it’s not so much. All of us were dead for millions of years before we were born; millions die for want of calories, or cleanliness, or preventable diseases. On the whole, most of their lives were less fulfilling and enjoyable than Andie’s, so in that sense she was lucky. But it did not console me to think that other people were worse off than me. It made me furious.
Once, feeling less lonely than bored, I called my sister. ‘What the hell are you doing over there?’ she asked, when I told her which town I was in.
‘Oh, travelling,’ I said. I could have done more explaining, but she sounded tense, as if her well-calibrated social nous had failed her in this instance. It wasn’t part of her etiquette, how to respond to a call from a distant but not officially estranged older brother. For the first time, I was sorry that we weren’t close. It was an opportunistic kind of sadness. I knew that once the spell had passed, I wouldn’t try to contact her again.
‘Hold on,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll get my husband.’ I wondered why she did this; how she imagined the two of us would have anything to say to each other. I hung up, hoping they would assume it was because the reception was poor where I was staying. They would probably believe this. As far as my sister was concerned, any town which didn’t have a Westfield in it was there-be-dragons territory.
Another Friday evening, less drunk than I pretended to be, I called Linda. ‘Oh, hello, Nick,’ she said, with a fine attempt at carelessness. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. Where have you been?’
She sounded wary, and no wonder. I tried to count the months which had elapsed since I stopped calling. Over this period, she had barely crossed my mind.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said lamely. ‘I’ve been busy. Personal stuff …’ Right after I said it I knew how insulting it must sound. I could see it so clearly: her pale, appraising look as she worked out how best to insulate herself from the wave of unwelcome feeling.
‘Well, see you round some time,’ she said, and hung up. I didn’t care. Nothing Linda did ever had the power to truly move me.
This I could not accept: Andie’s face no longer existed in the world. That particular organisation of atoms and molecules would never again, in the history of the universe, be. Tony’s face, on the other hand, had still been recognisable to police, and to his family. I could not tell why this, after everything else, was the part which struck me as most unfair.
#
I took yet another job tutoring economics at my former university. The material itself was disappointing, overly mathematical without enough concession to reality. The students, by and large, were diligent but unexceptional: all reliably clever but none of them brilliant, no tablespoon of magic that made you feel like they would answer the question their forerunners had been too dumb to ask. I felt affectionate towards them, but not eager to know what the future held in store. They worked hard, but it seemed to me they had no clear idea what they were working towards. Against all evidence, they trusted the university administration, believing people in power really cared for them and made decisions in their best interest. I watched the rows of dark heads as they bent over their papers and experienced an unbearable tenderness towards them.
Students, I reflected, are pretty much the same everywhere. They have their faults: they care too much about their marks and their sexual and romantic lives, and not enough about the world around them. Or they care a great deal about distant problems they have no ability to solve but are indifferent to the abundance of beauty and knowledge lying just within their reach. There’s no point in getting too worked up about these faults, which are born out of their circumstances rather than their characters. In a few years they will shake them off and get different ones. And then the cycle continues: mothers and fathers and fathers and mothers and children and grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, on and on, the human race reproducing itself ad nauseum. ‘Life is a marathon, not a sprint’ – who said that? Life is a very, very long walk to the shops, and when you get there all the stores are closed, or they don’t have the product that you want. And I have searched so hard to find the right arrangement, listened to so much music and read hundreds of books and watched so, so much TV – looking for the string of words which would finally put things into the right order. And I am tired of people packaging up their disappointment as wisdom, even if they are correct, and I will not acquiesce to this, not yet.
#
I tried calling Linda again. This time her attitude towards me seemed to have mellowed. She seemed embarrassed about the anger she had shown before. It was as though she felt she had put herself at a disadvantage, allowing me to extract such an emotion from her.
‘You know, I’m surprised you even bothered coming out to see me,’ I said, over coffee. ‘But I’m glad you came. Honestly, I’m really glad you did.’
She was very patient, listening with interest to my backpacking monologue, although it went on way too long. She was still as sweet as ever but I thought I could sense a subtle shift in her demeanour; that the lurking scepticism I had always detected had moved a little closer to the surface.
‘I know how self-centred this will sound,’ I said, ‘but I keep on thinking maybe I have no right to mourn for Andie. That there is something vulgar and self-indulgent about letting myself mourn. In a way, Andie represented for me the idea that I, too, could be good. Sometimes I think that losing her feels less like grief than a loss of faith. There are friends I love and respect, who are close to me, but at my lowest point I would happily sacrifice them to have Andie back.’
Linda sighed. ‘I know your type,’ she said. ‘There’s always this one moment, one girl from back when you were nineteen. The crossroads where you missed your chance, and since then everything’s been messed up, or whatever. It’s such a perfect alibi. You can treat your actual existing life like it’s beneath you, and not do anything to fix it. Because hey, it was all broken years ago, right?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s always men who do this, always.’
‘That’s sexist!’
Wisely, she ignored that remark. ‘You want too much,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry your friend Andie has passed –’ even in the moment, I was annoyed with her for the euphemism passed – ‘but I bet she was like that too. People like you are always asking: what is the best possible decision? How can I have the greatest possible life, the maximum happiness, make my biggest impact on the world? You let all of these chances go by while you were agonising over which was the perfect one. In the end, if you’re not careful, you get left with nothing at all. Why …’
She clamped her mouth shut, looking defiantly out the window. Linda never liked to reveal much of herself, except in small doses. Idly, I wondered what it would be like to spend my life with her. The prospect filled me with neither joy nor trepidation. True, grand pianos didn’t exactly crash together for me when she was walking down the street. But then, I couldn’t imagine I inspired much music in other people, either. There had already been so many compromises: what was one more? So many acquiescences, laid end to end on my imperfect flesh. My deficiencies thus covered, I thought I could be tolerable, even likeable.
Linda wasn’t in love with me, nor I with her. But she was alive, wasn’t she? She would finish her milkshake and pay exactly her half of the bill, and not a dollar more. She would tramp back to my house, where we could roll in bed while our shoes lay in a tangle on the floor. She would never, ever, put my interests ahead of her own – but I was OK with that, so long as I didn’t look too closely. A certain fuzziness of mind would be necessary if we were to live together. She would haul herself out of bed to get dressed in the morning, smelling of milk and sweat and sleep, and go on living.
#
One day, about a year after I moved in with Linda, a young Turkish boy came to visit. He said his name
was Can, and that he’d been university friends with Tony. I don’t know how he got hold of my details. Wary but curious, I invited him to my house. He showed up fifteen minutes early and I watched him hovering on the front step, wondering whether to ring the doorbell again and if it worked and whether it would be rude to tap his fingers on the window. I led him to the living room, where he sat with his long legs tucked uncomfortably beneath the chair. We talked about every subject except the one thing we had to talk about.
‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he said at last. I nodded stiffly, resenting the implied passivity. Andie’s death had not just happened, like unseasonable weather, or the floods in Europe.
‘Oddly enough, I’m sorry too,’ I said, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t his fault, after all. It was brave of him to come and see me. Can looked mortified. I engineered a distraction by going to the kitchen to get some biscuits.
‘Isn’t it crazy what’s going on with Katherine,’ he added when I got back, and I could not help but agree with him. Katherine had given herself up when it became clear the police were onto her. ‘I did it because I had to,’ she told the cameras, eyes glowing with intelligence and without a hint of lunacy. ‘It’s sad when people die. I don’t enjoy that. But you have to understand – if you’re feeling sorry for these people, you should ask yourself why you don’t feel sorry for the families in Afghanistan, in Chechnya, in Iraq.’ The salivating media loved every bit of it. They designated her the White Widow, which I found odd, since there was no suggestion that she and Tony had ever even dated, let alone got married.
‘It’s pretty insane,’ I agreed. ‘Every female bomber has to be a colour-coded widow of some sort. Black Widow, White Widow – what is even going on here?’ Once, long ago before I graduated, I had worked for a newspaper as an editorial assistant, which meant in practice that I answered the phones and cleaned out people’s stuff when they were made redundant from the fact-checking department. ‘Did you know that there’ve been men asking her to marry them from jail? I mean, they say a good girl is hard to find, but this is ridiculous.’ For a moment Can looked at me awkwardly, and then we both burst out laughing. There was something great about the thought of Katherine choosing between suitors like the heroine of some Victorian novel. It was as if this were the credulity-straining part of it, and not the acts of murder committed by twenty-year-olds.
We went quiet again for a bit. I stared out the window. Can shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘You know …’ he began, and from the slight gap between this phrase and the beginning of the next one, I could tell that he was trying to talk about Tony. ‘I get that people are furious. And, well, they should be. I’m angry too. I can’t believe that he would do this to us – like, his friends and stuff. I know it’s worse for the families of the ones who … died, but still, I can’t believe it. It just doesn’t seem real. You have to understand, he wasn’t really – I mean, he was still thinking this stuff through. He and I used to talk about some pretty intense stuff. Not that,’ he added hastily, ‘I ever advocated violence.’ I wondered if he was worried that ASIO were listening in on us. Maybe they were.
‘What do you think is going to happen now?’ I asked.
Can looked away. ‘I still believe, I guess,’ he said irrelevantly. ‘But I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty shaken up. Not that I’m defending him, but … I think it’s a stage lots of people go through. Only, most people get over it –’
‘– and some don’t.’ I finished the sentence. ‘Look, Can, thank you for coming.’ Can took the hint. He flexed his capable limbs, relieved that the interview was over. He was dressed quite beautifully, the angles of his suit neatly encasing the contours of his body. He didn’t seem like the type to spend up on clothes just for the sake of it. ‘By the way, Can, I’m not trying to pry, but you’re looking very sharp today. Are you going somewhere afterwards?’
Can perked up immediately. ‘I have an internship,’ he said. From the way he said it, you would think no-one had ever done such a thing before.
‘Oh, congratulations,’ I said. ‘May I ask where you’re working?’
‘At Lister Henrickson. The merchant bankers.’ He inclined his head modestly, stealing a glance at my reaction from beneath his prodigious eyelashes. ‘I work in the arbitrage division. Lister Henrickson is the largest firm of its kind operating in the entire southern hemisphere,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.
‘That’s a remarkable achievement,’ I said. Can blushed even more and started fiddling with his lapels.
‘Well, good luck with it,’ I added, grasping his hand as I walked him to the door. Can squeezed back limply at first, then with great force. On the threshold he paused, as if recalling some last thought that he wanted to share. Then he thought better of it and went off, with an apologetic half-shrug. I watched him meander down the empty street, scarf draped over his shoulder, stealing glances left and right at the houses as he passed. What a life lay before him, I thought. All that he set out to do, he would eventually achieve. Money, wealth and health; adorable children, love, security and pride. Everything you would choose for yourself, if you could do it all again.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the following:
David Ong for critical discernment, commentary on early drafts, and deeply humane and insightful personal support.
Bart James for early reading and editing, and for generosity in granting permission.
Peter Bishop for commentary and generous moral support
Barry Scott, Tess Rice and Penelope Goodes at Transit Lounge, for the effort and integrity it takes to work in independent publishing, and for their kindness in supporting my book in particular.
Andie for loan of her name and for friendship.
My parents, in spite of everything.
S L Lim was born in Singapore, moved to Sydney at the age of one, and has spent a good part of her life toggling back and forth between the two places. At university she edited the undergraduate magazine ‘Tharunka’, igniting blood feuds and running exposes of dodgy student societies. After dropping out of law school she graduated with an economics degree and lived the life of a suit for a while before going freelance. Her manuscript ‘Revenge’ to be published by Transit Lounge in 2020 was longlisted for the 2017 Epigram Fiction Prize. She lived for a period in the Slovak Republic, hates injustice, compulsory heterosexuality and the state, and has two pet birds almost as old as she is.