Muddy People

by Sara El Sayed

  When we arrived at the hospital, my sister was wearing the Winnie the Pooh outfit I had picked out for her. She smelled of cooling dough, and screamed as I held her. I passed her to Nana and ate the jelly the nurse had left for Mama.

  Baba was freaked out by her fingers. ‘So long and thin,’ he said. ‘Creepy.’

  By the time Aisha was one, she had a head of blonde curls that took everyone by surprise. ‘Like an alien,’ Baba said.

  Aisha’s sebooua was the last time I saw all my family and friends in one place. A sebooua is a sort of christening for Muslim babies. So, not a christening at all. A doula came to the house and placed Aisha in a sieve on the floor. She put a large knife next to her, then moved it to the other side, then put the knife on Aisha’s little chest. Everyone else walked around the house in a line, a candle in one hand, slipping sugar-coated almonds into their mouths with the other. Nour stepped on the backs of my shoes as we circled the apartment.

  I barely recognised anyone. The only sense of warmth was from the candle in my hand and Nour’s hot breath on my neck. They all must have been there before, for my sebooua, but I hadn’t seen them since. People only show up when there’s food.

  ✾

  Mama already had an Australian passport because she’d lived in Melbourne before. In the 1970s, her father got a job at an architecture firm. Nana remembers the names Glenferrie and Malvern, and a tram on their doorstep. Nana worked in a library while Mama went to preschool with little girls named Liz.

  They stayed until Mama was ten. Then Nana took Mama and fled, back to Alexandria, leaving her husband behind. Nana didn’t mind Australia, but there was no place beautiful enough to make her forget the hate she had for her husband.

  Mama loved Australia, and promised herself that she would return one day.

  ‘I found it very strange,’ Baba tells me, ‘that your mother was so obsessed with Australia. Every year from 1992 to 2001, she would ask me, “Can we go to Australia now? Can we go to Australia now?” Like a little girl asking to go to the toilet. I don’t know why she wanted to go so badly. I kept saying no, I have a business here, we can’t go. But it got a bit hard. The business. The money. So I said, “Okay, fine. Let’s go.”’

  My parents decided to leave Egypt for good. The economic uncertainty and political unrest that would eventually erupt into a revolution in 2011 was showing its signs.

  In 2001, Baba began compiling a binder of all the suburbs in Brisbane – comparing house prices, schools, jobs. He spent weeks on the computer researching.

  Since Mama was already a citizen, her children could become Australians too. But Baba had to get a visa.

  ‘Are you sick?’ I asked as he prepared to see a physician. We didn’t visit doctors in my family, because Mama was a doctor. We only had to show Mama our cut or the colour of our poo – she’d figure out what to do. Baba seeing someone else was odd.

  ‘No. But I have to get checked before they let us go.’

  ‘Why, if you aren’t sick?’

  ‘These are the rules,’ he said.

  Years later, Baba tells me what the physician said that day. ‘There was a shadow behind my heart,’ he says. ‘He didn’t know what it was. He just saw a shadow there. But he let me go. To him, I was healthy.’ Baba places both his hands on his chest. ‘You know, when I was young and I played with my friends, I always had a problem with breathing. I couldn’t run for so long. And I think – I know – it was the shadow. If the doctor had known at that time. If he had known what it was, maybe he would have tried to treat it. Maybe it couldn’t have been treated. Either way, we wouldn’t have come here. We would’ve stayed in Egypt. I would be alive or dead. But I would be alive or dead there – not here. The shadow has been behind my heart for a very long time. Allah put it there a very long time ago.’

  In his bedroom, twelve years after his first doctor’s visit since marrying my mother, Baba’s lymph nodes swell and press against the nerves in his back, his abdomen and behind his heart, and he falls to his knees.

  ✾

  There was a room in our Alexandria flat with couches no one was allowed to sit on. A carpet no one was allowed to walk on. No muddy footprints. No feet at all.

  Most families I knew had this. A salon. A façade for friends.

  A gold-framed picture of my parents on their wedding day hung on the wall. It was near the balcony, and in the afternoons the light would catch on the frame, and on the edges of the furniture.

  When we moved, we took at least one thing from every room. From the living room, videotapes of Teletubbies and family celebrations. From the kitchen, plums to eat on the way to the airport, which ended up giving us all diarrhoea. From Mohamed’s and my bedroom, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. From my parents’ room, the Qur’an. But we did not take a thing from the salon – from that sunny room. That room was to be preserved as it was at all costs.

  My parents are still there, hanging on the wall.

  BABA

  I want to talk about my father. I’m sunk in the plastic chair next to him, and he is in a much nicer chair, surrounded by nurses who are growing frustrated. They are prodding his arms with a needle, trying to find a vein. They are frustrated because my father is frustrated, and he can be coarse when this happens. He asks them to draw the curtain around him. I can see he is angry. The other chemo patients in their chairs are pretending not to look. A nurse pulls a curtain around the chair, and my father starts to cry. Angry tears flick from his lips.

  He says he wants to go home, but it’s 2014 and home for him is now 3000 kilometres away, in Katherine, Northern Territory. He is here, in Queensland, only for this. He says there is no point if they can’t find a vein, and the nurses almost agree. They leave, telling him they will be back later to try again. My father wipes his tears on his sleeve.

  ‘Do you want anything?’ I ask him.

  ‘Cappuccino,’ he says. His voice raises when he says no sugar, because he’s been burned by me before. He points to his bag. I take his wallet and pull out the tip of a twenty-dollar note. He nods and I stuff it in my pocket.

  The Gold Coast hospital has won design awards. The glass walls exposing the arriving maxi taxis and shuttle buses remind me of an airport. The central staircase is panelled with artwork – stencilled silhouettes of trees and blades of grass in aqua, white and black. One image stands out from the rest. It is a burst of red that spans across three white panels. A thick branch holds several thin branches, and those branches hold many thinner. On the ends of some are swollen fruits – pears or apples. They are the same shade of red as the branches. The picture is how my father describes his lymphoma.

  The café is called Doctors Orders, which was cute at first. I ask for a hot chocolate, because coffee gives me heart palpitations, and a large cappuccino with no sugar. I watch the barista as he dusts cocoa on the cappuccino. I know that if my father was here he would say, Hey, I said no sugar. Coco is sugar. I let it go. He is stuck in the chair, which means he can only argue with people who come to him.

  I return to the chemo ward and hand him the takeaway cup. I watch him as he sips it. It is too hot, he says. Burning.

  RULE #1

  DON’T TOUCH ALCOHOL

  Australia was closed on Sundays. A ghost country. The streets were empty of cars, garbage and people. We had sixteen suitcases, each tagged with red, white and blue ribbons that aunties had plaited for us. I looked out the window of the maxi taxi as we drove away from the airport after our twenty-four-hour journey and did not see a single thing move, aside from the road. We had entered a still image. A billboard of Australia. We were in The Down Under.

  Our guardian, the taxi driver, had a neat beard like Baba and wore a turban. Baba had been bald since at least his wedding photos. The driver and Baba spoke back and forth, neither understanding the other’s accent. But both were laughing as if they understood something much more important. Or, more likely, nothing at all.

  It was January 2002, and it was hot. The a
ir-conditioning hardly reached the back seat. Nana, who was sitting in the middle row of the taxi next to Mama and Aisha, turned to Mohamed and me.

  ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘Australia is where kangaroos live. Tell me if you see one.’

  ‘I saw one! I saw one!’ said Mohamed, his fat hand pressed against the window, his breath fogging up the glass. ‘It was hopping near the road!’

  He was a liar. I looked for the whole trip and didn’t see a single one.

  ✾

  When we first arrived in Morningside, named for the nineteenth-century sunrises hitting the hills, Baba booked two rooms at the Colmslie Hotel, named for the house of a colonial aristocrat who delighted in horseflesh. In the hotel, Mohamed and I were in one room with Nana; Aisha was in the other with Mama and Baba.

  Across the road was a small shopping complex, of the blandest colours and geometry the 1960s had offered. The place echoed with the emptiness of absent churchgoers and late sleepers. The lights in the supermarket were off. A mat sat at the door of the butcher, imprinted with a deceptive welcome. We were still in our clothes from the plane, Aisha’s spittle encrusting Mama’s t-shirt. ‘Does no one eat on Sunday?’ Mama said.

  A produce store had its roller doors up, and there was a man inside, sweeping the floor. Baba approached him.

  ‘Hello. You are open.’ He said this as a question, but it sounded more like a command.

  ‘No,’ said the man. ‘This is closed. I’m the cleaner.’

  ‘But you are open,’ said Baba.

  ‘No, I don’t work here. I am the cleaner of the complex.’

  ‘But you are working here. I need to buy food for my kids.’

  ‘I can’t help you, sorry.’

  My father didn’t understand. ‘I need food!’

  ‘Fine,’ the startled man said. ‘Take it.’

  Baba started gathering food in a basket. He took it up to the counter. ‘I pay here?’

  ‘No. No one is here to take your money.’

  ‘But you are here. I have to pay.’

  ‘I don’t work here!’

  ‘I have to pay. I am not a thief.’

  ‘Fine. Give me ten bucks.’

  Next stop was a nearby petrol station, whose counter housed a lady clad in hi-vis. He bought some bread, milk and five semi-frozen meat pies.

  ‘What time … do you go home today?’ he asked the lady in his halting English.

  She looked disturbed. ‘Excuse me? I’m not telling you that,’ she said.

  ‘No, no.’ Baba was embarrassed. ‘What time do you stop work here?’

  ‘Oh. Do you mean what time do we close?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘Four pm.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’ He watched her scan the meat pies one by one. ‘Are these beef?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Are they halal?’

  The lady looked at him, confused.

  He coughed and rephrased. ‘How were they made?’

  ‘Do you mean how do you cook them? You just warm them in the oven.’

  ‘We have no oven. We are at Colmslie.’ He pointed out the window.

  ‘Oh. A microwave will do.’

  The hotel held two appliances we had never used before. One: a toaster. Mohamed and I were fascinated and kept making toast. We didn’t have square bread in Egypt, we had shami – a round flat loaf, which people in Australia like to call pita bread, or Lebanese bread, or wraps. We’d toast shami in the oven, or on a naked flame on the stovetop. I’d watch Mama flip the bread over with her fingers, not feeling the flame. But Australians didn’t use stoves with flames, Baba said. They used stoves made of plastic and electricity. Australians only cooked with fire for fun, when they went camping and pretended to live like cavemen. They didn’t wash their assholes, either. No one owned a bidet. We each had four showers a day in the Colmslie.

  Two: a microwave. We had never used a microwave before – and Baba wasn’t about to start the day we arrived in a foreign country. When he got back from the petrol station, he bit into the cold pie. He spat it out. ‘Eh da? Yuck.’ But he ate the rest of it so as not to waste food.

  ✾

  Back in Egypt, Baba was an engineer and an architect. In Australia, he was nothing. He started taking cash jobs, laying bricks.

  ‘I am an educated man,’ Baba said, ‘but for my family I will do anything.’ The difficulty manifested physically. In his back, when he lifted loads. In his fingers, which calloused and formed a tough skin. In his mouth, as he tried to connect.

  ‘Can I get you anything while I’m at the shop?’ he asked the other workmen on smoko. He thought fetching their lunch would make him some friends.

  ‘Just a pie and a ginger beer for me, thanks, mate,’ said one, a greasy-looking man in his twenties.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Baba said, uneasy. ‘I can’t buy those sort of things.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Beer things. It’s against my god.’ He pointed to the sky. Baba took his religion very seriously. He never drank alcohol. Was never in the vicinity of alcohol if he could help it.

  ‘No mate, it’s not beer. It’s ginger beer. No alcohol,’ said the guy, laughing.

  ‘I don’t do this. I won’t buy it.’

  ‘It’s just a soft drink.’

  ‘I won’t fall for a trick, mate. Beer is beer. I know what beer is, mate. I can buy something else.’

  Despite his difficulties in making friends, it wasn’t long before Baba found a position as a foreman. He soon had an esky for a lunchbox and a hard hat without a scratch on it. He was working on a site in Hamilton – a skyrise apartment building near the wharf. Once it was finished, it filled with occupants almost immediately. Baba was immensely proud of himself. They started work on a second building to face the first. By then, the group of tradies he worked with had earned themselves a reputation with Baba.

  ‘Every time a lady or a girl walks past the site, they go crazy,’ he said. ‘The boys point and stare, like monkeys. I don’t understand this. Because some of them have beautiful wives and girlfriends who come by and drop off their lunch. Then they go and do this staring thing. It’s not good. It makes the new residents unhappy.’

  One lady complained to Baba’s boss. She said their ogling was making her uncomfortable. His boss came to the site and handed Baba an envelope.

  ‘Don’t look inside, but take this up to the lady on the fifth floor,’ he said.

  ‘Why can’t I look?’ said Baba.

  ‘Because if you look, I know you won’t want to take it to her.’

  Baba looked inside. It was a Beer, Wine and Spirits voucher. ‘I don’t want to be involved in alcohol,’ said Baba.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ said his boss, ‘a peace offering. To make her happy. From me to her. Not from you. You’re just delivering it. Can you do that for me?’

  Reluctantly, Baba made his way up to the fifth floor. He knocked on the door and was greeted by a young woman who looked like she was on her way to the gym.

  ‘Hello. Peter sent me to make you happy,’ said Baba.

  The woman turned red. ‘I’ve had enough of this crap. Fuck off,’ she said, and shut the door in his face.

  Baba was embarrassed. He gave the envelope back to his boss and resolved never to touch anything to do with alcohol again.

  We moved from the Colmslie to a modest three-bedroom, with a landlord who lived next door. The house was beneath a flight path, and the whirr of planes, with time, would come to remind us of the ocean.

  The landlord was a nice man with two kids and a new wife. He would peek over the fence every time we were in the yard and ask us what we were doing, in a friendly way. We didn’t meet our neighbours on the other side at first. We could hear and smell their chickens, which strutted around their garden, and we could see the Australian flag that flew from the thick pole that sprouted in it.

  During our first week in that house, I watched an episode of Hi-5 where Kellie uncovered a time capsule she had sup
posedly buried when she was a little girl. I decided that I, too, would make a time capsule. As we had just moved from across the world, we didn’t have many things we were willing to part with. But I was determined to capture our family as we were – a new start, in a new house, in a new country.

  In the dining room, my mother’s arms were stuck to the plastic gingham-patterned tablecloth, which was covered with newspapers, and the newspapers covered in highlighter. Mama’s latest rejection was from the supermarket, where she had applied to be a cashier.

  ‘Do you have anything I can put in our time capsule?’ I asked her. She didn’t answer. I asked again. ‘Do you have anything?’

  ‘I’m busy, Soos,’ she said, her eyes reflecting the vacancies.

  ‘Anything?’

  She reached across the table and grabbed a wad of junk mail. ‘Here,’ she said.

  I thought of a place that was full of things no one would miss: the rubbish bin. I dug through and found an empty yoghurt tub. I washed it out and stuffed it in with the junk mail. Also in the bin was a box with the words rum balls written in cursive, still full.

  If there was one thing Baba hated, it was waste. It was haram to waste food. Since that cold pie from the petrol station, I’d seen him spit out food only once – when the landlord gifted him that box of rum balls on moving day. He put a ball in his mouth and read the box, saw the word rum, spat it out, rubbed his tongue with a baby wipe and rushed to the bathroom to gargle. He did this with the same energy one might lick the salt off the back of their hand, down a shot and suck a lemon.

  I took two rum balls out of the box and put them in my time capsule.

  The ground in the yard was hard and dry, so I dug a hole in the loose bark that sat at the base of the tree on the nature strip. The time capsule was a box of us. This is the story it told: we liked yoghurt, because the yoghurt tub was licked clean; we received junk mail, because we finally had a mailbox; and we never, ever ate rum balls, because we were Muslim.