Muddy People

by Sara El Sayed

  My father is thin these days. The thinnest I’ve ever seen him. He looks weak when he walks, as though his bones could splinter at the slightest touch.

  ‘Do you want some tea?’ he asks, as I start to head out to the recycling bin. ‘Where is my favourite mug?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘It has bismillah.’

  I know the one – it is a white mug with brown scripture on it. I put the box down and reach in the cupboard, to the third row, and grab it.

  ‘No!’ he says when I pass it to him. The handle has broken.

  ‘I didn’t even see that.’

  ‘Oh no. My favourite.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Khad el sharr,’ he says. This is something we say when things break. It takes the evil away. He throws the broken mug in the box, and it shatters in two.

  RULE #5

  DON’T PLAY ALLAH

  The matriarch of the family had red lips and big tits. No, pink lips. Pink lips and a boob tube. A miniskirt and high heels that she could wear all day. She had long brown hair, half up, half down. She was turned on by vampires, turned off by cologne. Her aspiration was Family: she wanted a husband and kids. She was a Gemini. I twirled her around in the dressing room to make sure I had everything right. I blinked, the first blink in some time.

  I was ready to build my patriarch in The Sims when Baba called for me from the living room. His friend from the mosque had arrived. I didn’t answer, but with the second loud boom I peeled myself from the chair, my mind still on my Sim family.

  His friend had a thin black combover, stubble, a potbelly and a poorly ironed grey-and-blue check shirt. He was laughing at something my father had said, one hand on Baba’s shoulder like they’d known each other a lifetime. But they had only met when they stood next to each other at Friday prayer two weeks ago. His aspiration, I imagined, was Popularity. Wanting to have as many friends as possible. In other people’s houses as often as he could be. A real schmooze.

  The schmooze came with a daughter, which is why my father had called me. She was wearing a floral dress that skimmed the ground. On her head was a delicate white hijab. I would’ve picked floral, to match the dress, if she were my Sim. She was taller than me, and closer to my brother’s age than mine. Her thick eyebrows had no curve to them, sitting straight across her forehead. She didn’t make eye contact. I knew immediately that she didn’t like me. We both knew that she was a better Muslim than I was.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ her father said. He was talking to me on her behalf, a dummy with his ventriloquist.

  ‘Soos, this is Fatima,’ said Baba. ‘Take Fatima and go and play.’

  I stared at him. My eyes said please don’t make me, but he ignored them. We were always taught to be nice to our guests, and to do what we could to make them happy. That included things that would make us unhappy.

  ‘Go and show her your room,’ he said.

  ‘She doesn’t want to see my room.’

  ‘Go show her your toys. Your new book. That one you like so much.’

  Fatima smelled like strawberry liquorice perfume – the knock-off kind, that would have the word Beyonce in cursive written on the bottle and would end up in a lawsuit.

  As soon as we left the living room, it started.

  ‘I’m bored,’ she said, picking at the edge of her scarf. ‘What’s this book your dad was talking about? Sounds boring.’

  I pulled the book out from under my bed. It was blue, with a smiling sunflower on the front. It was a friendship book that came loaded with questions. Each page was a profile waiting to be created. I had only filled out the first page, about Mama. What’s her favourite colour? Green or blue. What’s her best feature? Her hair. What’s my favourite thing about her? She washes my bum for me sometimes with the shatafa, the hose cut-off we used as a substitute for a bidet. Even for a nine-year-old, it was hard to get into all the nooks and crannies. I flicked past the first page quickly and opened to the second.

  ‘You fill out the questions,’ I told her.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to fill them out for me?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know the answers.’

  ‘You’re meant to ask me. Duh.’

  I pushed the pen towards her. ‘It’s quicker if you fill it out.’

  The Sims jingle was still playing faintly from the computer down the hall. I watched her write slowly, thinking on each question. As if she knew nothing about herself. As if she was making it up on the spot. I started designing my patriarch in my head. Tanned skin, muscles. Turn on, make-up. Turn off, perfume. Strawberry liquorice.

  Underneath the question What do they want to be when they grow up? Fatima wrote, A millionaire.

  My patriarch’s aspiration would be Fortune.

  ‘Do you want to play on the computer?’ I asked her.

  ‘Play what?’

  ‘I was playing The Sims before you came. We could play that.’

  ‘No.’ She shut the book.

  ‘It’s one-player, but we can share.’

  ‘That game is bad.’

  I was surprised. ‘Who said?’

  ‘Um. It’s haram. Duh.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘It’s playing God. You can’t make people and control what they do. That’s Allah’s job.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘It’s just a game.’

  ‘You can’t say it’s right when it’s wrong just because it’s a game. Ask my dad.’

  ✾

  My parents had a long-running rule that I was not allowed sleepovers at other people’s houses. They were afraid something would happen to me. Essentially, they were afraid I would get raped. They never said this outright, and it would be uncomfortable for them to explain, so they just banned sleepovers.

  Fatima became the only person I was allowed to break that rule with. She asked my father and he said yes, just like that. ‘Of course, habibi.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘I thought we weren’t allowed.’

  ‘Fatima is fine,’ said Baba. ‘She is a good girl.’

  I was fuming.

  Late that night, she was in my bed, I was in Mohamed’s bed, and Mohamed was in the living room, sleeping on the floor. But Fatima, she did not sleep. She also did not, for a moment, shut her mouth. She was talking about Home and Away. Describing the characters as if they were real people, ones she knew. As soon as I’d start to drift off, she would raise her voice in excitement. I imagined taking her long brown ponytail and stuffing it in her mouth.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she said suddenly. It was late. Everyone else in the house was asleep.

  ‘Can you wait until the morning?’ I said.

  ‘No. Get me something to eat? Yalla, good girl.’ She spoke like an aunty, like I had to do what she said. Just because she was older.

  In our house, once Baba went to bed, that was it. There was no getting up in the middle of the night. There was no going to the kitchen in the dark. There was no pulling out the bowl of cherries that was meant to be for everyone. But there I was, in the glow of the fridge. I imagined Mohamed waking up and seeing a figure and screaming, my parents running in thinking I was a thief, the police bursting in with the commotion and shooting me dead. All because Fatima couldn’t wait until morning.

  When I got back to the bedroom, the light was on.

  ‘Does your mum still wash your ass?’ she said, my book in her hands. I didn’t say anything. ‘Your mum sticks her hand up your ass? Ech.’

  She ate half the bowl of cherries and then, finally, fell asleep. Full and satisfied. A stupid grin on her face.

  I didn’t want to see Fatima again, but I had to, because she woke up in my bed. Mama would have noticed that the bowl of cherries was missing from the fridge, but she said nothing. Instead, she made scrambled eggs for everyone.

  ‘I want an omelette,’ said Fatima.

  ‘Hardir,’ Mama said. Right away. Like a servant. And went back to the kitchen to crack ano
ther egg.

  Her father showed up at midday. I hovered near him, hoping to offload his daughter quickly, but he sat at the dining table, meaning he would be there for some time.

  ‘Why don’t you play your picture game with Fatima?’ said Baba.

  ‘What picture game?’ she said.

  ‘Pictionary,’ I said. ‘But you need more people for teams.’

  ‘What’s your brother doing?’ Fatima asked. She already knew where he was. She walked down the hall and into our room. Mohamed was on the floor, playing his Xbox.

  ‘Hey, Mohamed. Do you want to play Pictionary with us?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. But he sighed and paused his game, because he had to. I pulled the box off our shelf and took it out to the dining table. I needed to keep Fatima in her father’s sight to make sure he remembered to take her home. ‘We need one more player,’ I said.

  ‘Uncle, will you play?’ said Fatima to Baba. He smiled and nodded, mid-sentence, in conversation with her father. He didn’t fully understand what he was agreeing to, I could tell, but that did not stop him doing as he was told.

  Fatima and I formed one team, Baba and Mohamed the other. Mohamed was picking his nails under the tablecloth as Fatima and I had our turn. The word was carpenter. I drew a stick figure with a saw, standing next to a table and a tree stump.

  ‘Man?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Cutting?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tree?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wood?’

  ‘No.’

  The timer ran out.

  ‘It was carpenter,’ I said.

  She looked confused. ‘Then where is the carpet? You should have drawn a carpet.’

  ‘Carpenter. Why would I draw a carpet for a carpenter?’

  Her father interjected. ‘No, habibi,’ he said to his daughter, ‘carpenter can also mean someone who works with wood.’

  I saw both Mohamed’s and Baba’s eyebrows jerk up at the word also. I imagine mine did too. She was wrong. Completely wrong. And he was too scared to tell her.

  ‘Oh. Okay,’ she said. ‘So, you just drew a confusing thing then. Next time just draw a carpet. Duh.’

  ‘Let’s move on,’ said Baba quickly.

  ‘I don’t want to play,’ said Mohamed, not because he cared about the injustice that had taken place, but because he was bored. He jumped off the seat and headed back to the bedroom.

  ‘Do you want to try another card?’ I said to Fatima.

  ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘No one wants to play.’ And she followed Mohamed back to the room.

  I packed up the cards. When I entered our room, Mohamed was mid eyeroll, handing her the controller to his Xbox. And that is when I had enough.

  ‘I don’t care what you say!’ I said. ‘I’m going to play Sims. I don’t care what you and your dad say.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she said, her eyes not leaving the television screen. ‘You’re the one who will have to answer to Allah on the Day of Judgement.’

  I stood in the doorway, frozen. She had me.

  My brother and I watched Fatima kick her Mortal Kombat opponent in the head repeatedly. Eventually, she got bored and asked her dad if they could go home.

  ‘We’ll see you at the mosque soon, eh, Soos?’ said her father as they were leaving. A familiar pang of guilt hit me. It was the same one I felt every Friday when Baba went and I made up an excuse like I was tired or I was sick or I had homework. Fatima looked at me as though she knew what I was thinking. She was a Good Muslim, and I wasn’t.

  There is a secret aspiration in The Sims. It’s the Power aspiration. I found out about it when looking up cheats. You have to enter a special code to get it. Sims bestowed with this aspiration seek a mix of Popularity and Fortune, and to control the Sims around them. They gain pleasure from giving orders and telling people what to do, influencing others to the extent that their lives are controlled not by will but by command. This secret aspiration was never fully developed by the game-makers. It caused glitches – Sims with this aspiration would be perpetually unfulfilled because it was impossible to achieve real Power. There was only one Sim that possessed a fully realised Power aspiration: the Grim Reaper, the hooded figure that descended on the neighbourhood when it was time for a Sim to die. He was the only one with the ability to truly control lives. And no one could play the Grim Reaper. But I did try to make my Sim have sex with him once, unsuccessfully.

  So, there I was playing God, trying to bump uglies with Satan, while good girls like Fatima were at the mosque. And that thought made me hate myself.

  MAMA

  I find myself wanting to ask my mother why her father disowned her. The timing doesn’t feel right – she’s building a chicken coop in her garden, and I’m watching through the window. She labours on it every morning before work. Today she’s putting in a miniature picket fence around the coop. There’s a can of white paint nearby, ready. She will not be getting a rooster, because the chickens will be for eggs only.

  Even if I did ask about her father, I doubt I would get a direct answer. Mama doesn’t like talking about serious things. She’s the type of person to get a hysterectomy and not tell anyone about it beforehand: she will say she’s popping off to Woolworths and then get a body part removed. While Baba is very open about his health, Mama is a locked door, and that scares me.

  Everything I know about my mother I have learned from Nana, because Nana has no problem talking. Once Mama has left for work, Nana wanders out to the chicken coop. Since it’s empty, she’s not going to visit any chickens – she’s just going to inspect her daughter’s work. The same way she inspects her cooking. I follow her, and because it’s quiet, I ask.

  ‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ Nana says. When she speaks, she sways from side to side with the rhythm of her own voice, and touches her thumb to each finger on her right hand, like she’s counting her memories, or keeping a beat. ‘When we were in Melbourne – you know we lived in Melbourne in the seventies?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, I was so depressed there. I had had enough of your grandfather. I hated him, I really did. You know he didn’t let me do anything? He controlled all my money. My wages went right into his bank account!’

  ‘Yep, you’ve told me, Nana.’

  ‘He was all about money. Money, money, money, money.’

  ‘I thought he stopped talking to her way after you left him?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, hold on. I’m getting there. Leaving this man wasn’t easy. Like I said, he wouldn’t let me go anywhere. Even when my father died in Egypt, he wouldn’t let me go to be with my mother. Can you imagine? Evil little man.’

  The beat on her fingers was steadily getting faster.

  ‘So, I had to make a plan. I wrote a letter to my sister in Egypt. I wrote to her and I said, “Can you write a letter back to me, telling me there’s some inheritance issues I need to come and sort out, and that I have to go to Egypt to sort them out, and if I don’t sort them out I won’t get any money?” And she did. She wrote a letter back to me saying exactly that. And of course, because it was about money, your grandfather couldn’t resist. He let me go. I packed as much stuff into one suitcase as I could, I grabbed your mother and I left.’

  ‘But he wasn’t angry at Mama for that, was he?’ I said. ‘How could he be? She was a child.’

  ‘Let me finish! Anyway. When we got to Egypt, I immediately wrote your grandfather a letter. A very simple letter, only four words: I want a divorce. I thought that was it. I had done it – I had gotten away from this wretched man. When his reply came in the mail, I opened it up, and it was very simple too. One word: No.’

  Why would a man so adamant about keeping hold of his wife cut his daughter off? But Nana’s blood sugar has dropped a little; I can tell by the changed rhythm of the swaying. She turns to go inside. She doesn’t finish the story. She doesn’t give me an answer.

  When Mama gets back from work in
the evening, she brings in bags. She’s been to the shop on the way home and bought punnets of marigolds and beetroot sprouts, to be planted along the white picket fence. Marigolds and beetroot are apparently chickens’ favourites. She’s also bought another bucket of paint, the right kind this time – outdoor, not indoor.

  I am scared of the things my mother does not tell me. We all keep our secrets from each other, but I wish she would tell me her mistakes so I could learn from them. I am made from my mother, after all. If something breaks for her, it may well break for me. If something is wrong inside her, chances are it’s inside me too. I can’t escape what’s hereditary. But it’s only natural to want to avoid the damage I can.

  BABA

  Baba starts having anticipatory nausea before going to the hospital, which doesn’t sound sensible to me. He knows he will be sick soon, so he becomes sick now. I scroll through my phone while I wait for him. A prayer mat is hanging from the back of a dining-room chair. My knees haven’t touched one in a very long time. It’s possible that I have forgotten how to do it.

  There is no such thing as a Bad Muslim, really, because if you are not a Good Muslim, you are not a Muslim at all. For me there has been an expiration.

  The sound of my father’s retching fills the house. There is another carpet on the floor – just a regular rug, not for prayer. He told me it was made in Palestine and it must be true, because it is so beautifully asymmetrical. He got it from eBay. It curls up at one corner, and I always forget this, tripping over it every time. When my father sees me trip, he reminds me that if I visited more often, I might remember to watch my step.

  ‘Do you want to hear a funny story?’ he says as he emerges from the bathroom, wiping his mouth and buttoning a fresh shirt. I check how long it will take to get to the hospital in current traffic. ‘Do you remember when you were small baby and you fell off the toilet?’

  I do remember, but I can’t tell if the memory is really mine or just because he has told this story so often. ‘You were leaning forward so far, and you fell off and hit your head on a tap, and the tap broke off! And you were crying and crying.’ He laughs.