Attila spent most of his time with his cousin Orsun, another teen boy. From my seat at the men’s table, I only caught glimpses of him flitting through the crowded house like a dream. After a while sitting amongst the older men, who wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to me except to say, ‘Masha’Allah, you have his face, you are him exactly,’ I disentangled myself and went upstairs. It was dark out, dinner was done, it was just tea and muted talk which I could do without now, but I still felt a twinge of guilt beneath the exhaustion.
You are him exactly.
None of them knew the last time I’d spoken to my dad had been months ago — to tell him I am bisexual. None of them knew that we’d argued, that he said my sexuality was a lie, a Western conspiracy, that I was lost and just needed guidance, that of course he still loved me, ‘but son, it’s a short step away from bestiality or even paedophilia’. Not the same, but too close for comfort. None of them knew a part of me was convinced I had been the very last thing my father’s ailing heart could handle, and that it had killed him.
Attila’s room was at the end of a short hallway. There was a handwritten note on the door, but I can’t remember what it said. His double bed was perfectly made, not a wrinkle in sight, his blankets and pillows cream coloured, with the Eiffel Tower emblazoned across the former and Paris flowing in italics over the latter. A soccer jersey hung on the wall, along with a torn out page from a notebook which had his training schedule on it. Fifty push ups on Monday, he’d written. I tried to picture him doing it tomorrow, but couldn’t. I was sure his body would be too heavy. A large chest of drawers was next to his bed, a small flat-screen TV on top with an Xbox, as well as a number of blue and red glass bottles of cologne and a fat wallet.
I remembered the night before, arriving at Babbanne’s flat in Mascot, straight from the airport. Outside, a thousand pairs of shoes were piled on top of each other and inside, the owners of those shoes were crammed shoulder to shoulder in the tiny space to witness an old woman’s grieving, or perhaps share their own — it wasn’t clear. I staggered through them to get to her, my grieving grandmother, her face a withered peach left out in the sun for too long, everything red and cracked. I can’t even begin to describe the volume of shrieking when she saw me, in part because I have his face, and in part because I was the boy who’d got away. The boy she never saw until too late, and therefore loved more than the others, because it was a love delayed, a love accumulated but never spent.
‘You, my heart,’ she would tell me over and over whenever I saw her. ‘You, my heart. Attila, too. Orsun, too. But you, oh my god.’ And her eyes would become suns. I know it sounds dumb but you’ve never seen a woman incandescent like this, and she would lean over and grab and kiss me, smelling faintly of cinnamon. Whenever my uncle Sedat, a forty-something security guard who looked like a soft sad Stallone, heard her say this, he would get crazy-eyed and shout, ‘You can’t say that, Mum! I’m right here. What about me? What about me?’ As the last of her children, the third boy, he always felt left out. And she would shrug, murmuring ‘I dunno’ in her broken English.
That night, there were no suns in Babbanne’s eyes, her son was gone. Sedat was there, looking as ever like a lost boy, his face and eyes clear as a child’s, unable to process anything. ‘Your sisters were here,’ he said. ‘They took your dad’s things. Look.’ And he showed me the bed my dad died in, perfectly made, not a wrinkle to be seen, and his bedside drawers, all of it empty of him and his things.
Six days after the funeral, I attended another. My friend of more than ten years, a woman only a few years younger than my dad, had also died of a heart attack. Inside the chapel at the crematorium in North Ryde, her daughters and friends told heartfelt stories, sang songs, and played a video montage of her that left most of us in tears. At the end of the service, I stood outside in the bright light of the day, dizzied by the stark differences that separated me and the largely white, Anglo crowd of mourners. I thought of the funeral house where Dad’s body had been cleaned, then wheeled out on a gurney cocooned in white cloth like a grey un-butterfly, something that would never bloom. How we’d gathered around it; how Attila’s head snapped to the side he’d looked away so quick, blinking away tears; how we all touched the cocoon; how I’d leaned over and kissed Baba’s cool forehead, seeing bits of cotton stuffing peeking out of his nostrils. I had been around dead bodies before, but I’d wanted to gag at that detail, the wrongness of it; a blockage where air should be.
He was whisked away into the waiting hearse, placed in a temporary metal coffin, and taken to the mosque in Auburn. We prayed there; first inside with the community, then outside alone as a family, a row of men and some boys, bowing in front of a tin box wrapped in a green tapestry. We moved in concert to the Mufti’s calls, washing it with our silent prayers. It, not him. I had the mad urge to drag my dad out of there so it felt real; so he could hear the prayers and see us all. It was a short drive from there to Rookwood cemetery where a freshly dug hole waited. The lumpy cocoon was picked up by a group of men including Sedat, then awkwardly lowered into the dirt. There was — from start to finish — a sense of brisk efficiency, even urgency to it. The sooner he was buried, the better.
There was no song, no series of anecdotes or speeches, the brutal reality of the body was before us the entire time, and it had to be lifted, then lowered, then covered by a mound of red clay chunks. I can still feel the roughness of that earth in my hand as I scattered a handful into the open grave and said goodbye.
A month passed before I could return to Sydney and see Attila again. I’d had to leave for work, and he’d been on my mind the whole time. The one week we had in June was the worst and best of my life; a chance to see him and be part of his world, even though it meant occupying his room and him having to sleep in Sumi’s bed. The one thing I wanted the most that week was to see him play soccer, which everyone said he was a star at, and which the trophies in his room affirmed. It didn’t happen, of course; though he’d been so ready first to train, and then to play. We were both disappointed in that, for different reasons. Dad had died in his sleep the same morning he was supposed to take Attila to a match. I keep thinking of him in his long shorts and jersey, his boots on, waiting to be picked up. Waiting for Dad that day the way I waited for a lifetime, or at least a childhood, which feels like the same thing.
Now that I was back, I was determined to see him play. I was staying at a friend’s place this time, so I had to get up at 6.30 am, shivering in the cold, and get across the huge sprawl of Sydney. I got to the house at 8 am, and was welcomed in by his mother, who I shyly kissed hello. I still felt new and strange around her. Attila wasn’t ready yet, and both Sumi and his mum took turns yelling at him to change into his team uniform, and get his boots, while he groaned that it was still early, way too early, they had plenty of time. I sat in the background, simply happy to be there. But smiling too, because Atti — I can call him Atti now, like everyone else — clearly hadn’t figured out that Middle Eastern women operate on a schedule half an hour to one hour faster than everyone else and if they tell you to be ready by 8, they’ll be in the car by 7.40.
There was a minor catastrophe when Atti realised his jersey had been washed that morning and wasn’t dry yet, and suddenly there wasn’t any time, we had to be on the road, so Sumi draped the wet jersey over the car window, lodging it there firmly before speeding off, the plum-coloured flag of it rippling in the wind as we drove. It took most of an hour to get there, which is true of any place in Sydney, but seems especially so for suburban sports grounds, which are always in out-of-the-way places surrounded by hills. I had never been the sporty kind, that was the province of my older brother and cousins, but I was still familiar with the shining green fields, the smell of snags grilled outside the cafeteria, the blur of kids in bright colours milling around and, most of all, with the chain-link fence that kept me from the action, forever a spectator.
We had gotten there just in time. I watched Atti greet his teammates, the boy
s slapping hands, saying, ‘What took you so long, bro?’. He rushed off to finish changing into his now-dry jersey. He came out a minute later, and they began a few warm-up exercises on the field, a row of boys in purple trotting up to a line of traffic cones, then kicking their legs to the side in a slow arc before starting the pattern again. It could have been a chorus line, and it was as mesmerising as a dance. Were they limbering up their ankles? I had no idea. I’ve never had a reason to pay attention to soccer before, and this was the last match of the season, but I was prepared now to make it my new obsession.
My sister Gulsah arrived with her husband and kids in tow. We sat on the sidelines as the game started, my brother-in-law shouting out encouragement to Attila. I ignored everyone, taking about a hundred photos, trying to burn the image of the boy, my brother, the other son, into my mind: his not-yet graceful tallness, his gawky build, the way he seemed to float not run, a little bit aloof from the whole thing. My heart was beating too fast, my mouth dry. It was happening, I was here now, and I wasn’t. I kept seeing him at the funeral house, crumpled against the wall crying as the hearse slowly drove away, his sisters and mother crowded around him; how I’d pushed through them, grabbing his stupid puffy jacket to crush him against me; how he’d clutched at me, thin body shaking, tears wetting my cheek; and how strange it was that I had known from the second I saw him through the doorway that I loved him completely and with every cell in my body, this boy I had never really met before.
A whistle pierced the air. There was a smattering of yells from parents, the sun bearing down, there was my nephew holding up a toy plane against the blue sky, and a whole field of sons kicking out at something — a ball, a patch of grass, each other. And just like that, it was over.
AMRA PAJALIC
Amra Pajalic, Melbourne-based writer, editor and educator, was born in Australia of Bosnian migrant parents. She returned to Bosnia to live for four years during her childhood before relocating to Melbourne. This story is a memoir piece about returning to Australia after that time and struggling to acclimate as a high school student in a very monocultural high school. Amra writes, ‘It deals with the trials of being bullied against the context of missing out on the usual primary school milestones that would prepare me for the Australian high school experience.’
School of Hard Knocks
The students carried the boy spread-eagled and slammed his genitals against a pole. He dropped on the concrete like a sack of potatoes, holding his crotch, squirming in pain. Sounds that I didn’t think a human could produce came out of his throat.
‘Bastard just got knackered.’ Kayla laughed, noticing my horror. ‘Every school tour starts like this.’
Kayla was my new schoolmate and she was giving me a tour of my new school, The Tech, under orders from our year seven homeroom teacher. Her friend Sharon was tagging along and she sniggered too.
Feeling nauseous, I wondered what I would see next as we continued around the school grounds.
‘He’ll be walking like a cowboy tomorrow,’ Sharon said beside us, shaking her brown curly hair. My eyes caught on her Barbra Streisand honker, and it was only when I really focused on her other features that I noticed she had pretty hazel eyes and a full mouth.
‘Don’t ever wear tracksuit pants to school,’ Kayla said. She was the archetypal Anglo girl, tall and skinny, with white blonde hair and freckles.
‘Why?’ I asked. My new school had a uniform and Mum had bought me tracksuit pants with it.
‘Because you’ll get dacked.’ Sharon said. They pull down your trackies and expose your underwear for everyone to see.’
‘Or if you wear tracksuit pants, at least wear pretty undies.’ Kayla pulled up her dress and showed me her striped blue and white underpants with a white bow in front.
I looked away from Kayla’s underwear, feeling my cheeks go hot. While I blended into the very Anglo school with my blonde hair and green eyes, I had an accent. I spoke Bosnian as my first language for four years of my life and always over-corrected my vowels. People often asked me if I was British or South African. My accent proclaimed me an exotic species and I was a hot commodity — the new girl who had arrived in the middle of the school term. Kayla and Sharon had an apostle.
‘Oh, my God, she’s blushing,’ Sharon exclaimed, peering at my face.
‘She’s so cute,’ Kayla said to Sharon as she put her hand through mine.
‘Like a little puppy,’ Sharon said.
‘But you’ll have to toughen up,’ Kayla said. ‘The Tech is not for the faint-hearted.’
The Tech was not our first choice of school. My mother had taken my brother and me back to Bosnia for a holiday that became a four-year stay. When we returned to St Albans, a suburb in the western suburbs of Melbourne, I was twelve-years-old. My mother tried to enroll me in the high school on the other side of the train tracks — it was perceived as the ‘good’ high school because the punch ups took place off school grounds in the nearby park — but we were told there were no openings. The teachers there suggested that I enrol in grade six and then start year seven the year after. But I refused to go backwards. The education system in Bosnia was much more rigorous and I knew I’d have no trouble keeping up, so Mum enrolled me in a school that was closer to home.
The school was named after the street it faced, but no one ever called it that. Instead they called it The Tech after its previous incarnation as a technical college for boys. Most of the classes were orientated towards the trades: sheet metal, woodwork, auto workshop. Then, along with the new female cohort, other subjects were added: typing, home economics and sewing.
There were punch-ons nearly every week, some on the grounds and some after school in the adjoining streets and park. Even teachers weren’t immune to being clocked on the job by a belligerent student. Teachers survived by developing a thick skin and ingenious classroom management. Our woodwork teacher got our attention by taking out his glass eye and placing it on the desk. ‘I’m keeping an eye on you,’ he’d say, to the delight of the kids.
A few days later after I started at The Tech we were in the toilets during recess. ‘Shit, I got my rags,’ Kayla said from inside the cubicle.
‘What are rags?’ I asked Sharon who was standing next to me, looking at herself in the mirror.
‘Period,’ Sharon said. She was used to my naivety and constant questions as I adapted to being in Australia once again.
‘I need a tampon,’ Kayla called out.
Sharon reached into her backpack and took out a slim, white capsule, passing it to Kayla under the cubicle door. ‘You don’t know what a tampon is?’ Sharon asked, seeing my face.
I shook my head. I didn’t even really know what a period was. I had gone to Bosnia as an eight-year-old and had lived with my grandparents for four years while my mother was in and out of hospital. My grandparents were old-fashioned and had sheltered me from adult matters — whenever there was a kissing scene on TV my brother and I had been sent out of the living room to wait in the hallway until it was safe to return. Now I was thrust into the rough and tumble world of adolescence and I was not well prepared.
‘You put a tampon inside to collect the blood.’ Sharon mimed the insertion of a tampon.
I did my best not to audibly gulp. That sounded incredibly painful. A few minutes later, Kayla came out of the toilet and washed her hands. We walked out of the toilets and down the corridor. We passed by the year nine locker bays and a boy turned and smiled at me. I’d noticed him smiling my way a few times before and I always smiled back.
‘I think Jeremy likes you,’ Kayla said as she noticed our exchange.
‘He’s still looking,’ Sharon said after she turned to look over her shoulder.
‘Do you like him?’ Kayla asked.
Even though my body had started blooming — three pubic hairs had sprouted and my breast tissue was tender — I was still unsure if I wanted a boyfriend, and even if I did, Jeremy would not have been a contender. He had brown hair and nondescri
pt features. He wasn’t the sort of boy that girls noticed.
‘I don’t—’
‘I’ll bet he wants you to be his girlfriend,’ Kayla said, cutting me off before I could finish saying that I didn’t know if I liked him. We’d never spoken and our only contact had been a few smiles in passing.
‘Wouldn’t that be great,’ Sharon said.
‘But I don’t know anything about him,’ I said.
‘He’s in year nine and everyone knows him,’ Kayla said.
‘Did you have a boyfriend before?’ Sharon asked.
I shook my head. I had only developed my first crush in the three months before I left Bosnia for Australia. His name was Samir and he was the smartest boy in my class. All we did was exchange glances and smiles, and when I stopped studying because I knew I was returning to Australia, and couldn’t answer the teacher’s questions, he moved from the front row to sit beside me in the back and whispered the answers.
‘Have you ever kissed a boy?’ Sharon asked.
I shook my head again.
‘We’ll have to fix that,’ Kayla said.
I looked at her wide smile with trepidation. I had been shocked to find out that Kayla had kissed her first boy in fifth grade and had already had a few boyfriends, while Sharon had had her first kiss when she was in grade six. Sharon and her boyfriend broke up when they went to different high schools and now she was on the lookout for her first high school boyfriend. In Bosnia, old fashioned attitudes and expectations about female virtue prevailed. A girl was supposed to avoid members of the opposite sex in case she got a bad reputation. I had once returned home from a female friend’s house and my grandfather had beat my finger tips with a stick — I could only imagine the punishment he would have meted out for kissing a boy.
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