Muddy People

by Sara El Sayed

  ‘Ms C, could I try a saxophone? I think I’d be better at the saxophone.’

  ‘We don’t have any saxophones on the levy program.’ She said it quickly and without looking at me.

  ‘But I noticed the girl before me got one.’

  ‘That’s her personal saxophone.’

  ‘And Adam got one too.’

  ‘Yes. They have their own saxophones. You’re welcome to bring your own.’

  I sighed and pushed my mouth into the brass cup.

  ‘Yes. Much better. This instrument doesn’t need such tight lips. It needs big lungs, but it seems like you’ve got those!’ She made an awkward gesture towards my chest. Was she calling me fat?

  The baritone weighed a tonne and made my walk home from school a living hell. Ms C suggested a trolley, but didn’t have one to offer me. I swapped sides every two minutes to keep my arms from falling off. I decided Ms C was a mole – I’d heard that word on Australia’s Next Top Model – who was out to get me.

  When Mama got home from work, she laughed at the noise the baritone made for two seconds before sending me to my room to practise. I practised for two minutes before Baba told me to stop.

  ‘Can you drop me at the morning rehearsals?’ I asked Baba.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Fridays.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven-thirty.’

  ‘Sorry, habib. Too late for me.’

  ‘But I have to go. And Mama is working night shift.’

  ‘I have to be at the site by seven.’

  ‘Can you drop me on your way?’

  ‘It’s not on my way, ya Soos, and you cannot be at the school alone so early.’

  I told Ms C I had to quit band before it had even begun. ‘I can’t make it to rehearsal,’ I said. I pretended to be sad, but in all honesty, I wasn’t. Band hadn’t worked out how I pictured it. I was meant to be playing on the beach in a bikini and a bandana like the woman on the Sax on the Beach album cover. All I was doing was lubing my baritone valves and ejecting spit onto my shoes.

  ‘What if I pick you up?’ she said. ‘You’d have to be ready a little earlier, but I can pick you up on the way to school. Just let your parents know.’

  This was a strange offer. It was hard to imagine teachers existing at all outside of school, and yet here she was offering to pick me up from my own home in her own car. I didn’t know how to decline, so I said, ‘Okay.’

  The next Friday, Ms C picked me up at six-thirty in a white RAV4. I was waiting for her outside the house because I didn’t want her to get out of the car. I sat in the front because there was no door for the back. Definitely no kids, I decided.

  ‘How are you finding the baritone?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s good.’

  ‘It’s a fun instrument. I thought you would like it.’

  ‘Yeah, I really like it.’

  We sat in silence for the rest of the ride.

  When we got to school, she made me unpack the chairs and set up all the stands while she sorted through sheet music. We didn’t speak a word. Maybe the only reason she offered to help me out was to get someone to do the grunt work for her.

  At seven-thirty, kids started showing up. It became clear very quickly that all the pretty girls had flutes or clarinets. The fat boys had brass and, ironically, the boys who couldn’t count were placed on percussion. The cool, and evidently rich, girls and boys had the saxophones. I sat in the lower brass section, next to a boy who was constantly emptying the spit valve of his trombone into the carpet.

  ✾

  On weekends, we always had breakfast as a family. That Saturday, I was, as usual, at the opposite end of the table to Baba and Mohamed. They liked fetta. My aversion started young, when Tom and Jerry would play with cheese that emitted dastardly stink lines. Something about those cartoons lodged in my brain, and I could not stand the stuff.

  ‘Can I get a saxophone?’ I asked Baba loudly enough to cross the distance between us.

  ‘Eh? You already have one.’

  ‘No I don’t. I have a baritone.’

  ‘Aywa, and it is bad.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t like it either. Give it back to the school.’

  ‘So, can I have a saxophone instead?’

  ‘No. I have a headache.’

  ‘How much is it?’ said Mama, peeling a boiled egg.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me how much it is, and we’ll think about it.’

  ‘You can have a shush-o-phone,’ said Baba. ‘It’s free.’

  If anyone knew how much a saxophone would be, it was Ms C. I asked her when she picked me up the next Friday.

  ‘They can be anywhere between a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you happy with your baritone?’

  ‘I am happy. Very happy. I would just like to learn the saxophone too.’

  Ms C adjusted her seatbelt, which was constricting her chest. ‘A lot of people love the baritone. I love it. It’s a great instrument.’ She sounded like a used car salesman. ‘My ex-husband plays the baritone,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. He’s very good at it. I know if you work hard you could be very good at it too.’

  ‘Does he like it?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Does your husband like playing the baritone?’

  ‘My ex-husband.’

  ‘Sorry. He must. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stuck with it for so long, right?’

  ‘It’s best if you just try and stick with it. With what you’ve got. That’s always best.’

  At school, I set up the chairs neatly in three rows. I had started to get a sense of who was dedicated – would show up to rehearsals – and who would just be dead weight when it came to performance nights. The saxophone section was shrinking each week. That meant there were brand-new saxophones languishing in rich kids’ bedrooms, going unplayed. They’d only be carted out when parents were in the audience.

  We were working on a new piece called ‘Market in Marrakesh’. It sounded awful, and I had a feeling it would always sound awful. There was no way an almost all-white band of adolescents from South East Queensland could capture the essence of Marrakesh, no matter how much Ms C tried to convince us otherwise.

  We were barely eight bars in when the boy next to me in the back row emptied his spit valve onto my shoe.

  ‘Yuck,’ I said. ‘Can you not? Ew. Stop!’

  ‘Enough talking back there,’ said Ms C from her conductor’s stand, over the horrendous sound of the band.

  The boy flicked his spit valve down and blocked the stream. ‘Is it weird having your mum at school?’ It was the first time he had spoken to me.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t Ms C your mum?’

  ‘No. Why would you think that? We don’t look anything alike.’

  ‘You sort of do.’

  ‘We literally have different skin colours.’

  ‘I dunno. Adopted or something. Or maybe your dad is black.’

  ‘She’s not my mum. She doesn’t have any kids, or a husband. She has an ex, but he’s not my dad.’

  ‘I said quiet back there,’ shouted Ms C.

  The boy emptied his spit valve again. There seemed to be an awful amount of spit, despite very little playing. It hit his leg and dribbled down into his sock. He laughed, and I couldn’t help but laugh too, because he was so disgusting.

  I wondered what made Ms C’s ex-husband leave her. Or maybe she left him. Maybe he couldn’t have kids and she wanted them, or vice versa.

  After rehearsal was finished, she called me and the boy to her office – the storage room.

  ‘The talking today was a problem,’ she said.

  ‘He was talking, not me,’ I said.

  ‘I heard you. Both of you.’

  ‘She was talking about her dad,’ the boy said, sniggering.

  I knocked him on the shoulder. ‘No I wasn’t.’

&
nbsp; ‘I know what you were talking about. I heard you.’ And then Ms C spoke the last words I ever expected to come out of her mouth. She took a deep breath, like she was about to blow into a baritone, like she was already regretting it before she aired it, and she said, ‘You were talking about my boobs.’

  Boobs. A teacher saying the word boobs. Ten thousand times more strange than seeing a teacher outside of school.

  I couldn’t believe it. I went wide-eyed. I almost screamed. I tried not to look at her boobs.

  ‘What?’ spluttered the boy.

  ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is highly inappropriate.’

  ‘But … we weren’t …’ I said.

  ‘As a female teacher, I will not tolerate —’

  ‘This is so weird,’ said the boy.

  ‘— this harassment. And that is what it is. Harassment.’

  ‘We were talking about you, but not about … that,’ I said. ‘He thought you were my mum, and I said you don’t have kids, and that your husband isn’t black or my dad.’

  Ms C went silent, her face whiter than usual.

  ‘Why would we be talking about your boobs?’ said the boy.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Ms C. ‘This is your first and only warning. Go away. Get out.’

  The boy and I left through the corridor.

  ‘My sock is still wet,’ he said, sniggering, and I pushed him into the wall.

  To say I was embarrassed would be an understatement. I was mortified, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it, no matter how much I wanted to. Boobs boobs boobs. That’s what she thought we were laughing about. She thought I was a Lilly, making fun of her chest. That moment at the swimming carnival, in that toilet cubicle, had changed the way I thought about my body. Maybe Ms C had had something similar happen to her too. Someone had told her that her body was not okay, and she was still carrying that with her. It worried me that she was an adult and still had these feelings. It worried me, because it meant I wouldn’t forget for a long time to come.

  MAMA

  Every tea bag on the supermarket shelves contains leaves that were swept off the floor in a factory in India. That’s what my mother told me. She saw a documentary about it on TV. It does not matter how much you spend trying to be better than someone else, because we’re actually all so scarily the same.

  Every morning, when my mother gets out of bed, she takes two mugs from the kitchen cupboard. This habit is one of the few she’s kept from when she was with my father. Only now the other mug is not for him, it is for me. She puts one Bushell’s tea bag in each. A teaspoon of sugar in mine and an Equal in hers, and she doesn’t boil the kettle until I wake up. In the meantime, she finds something to do. Like work on the chicken coop, or tend to the worm farm.

  My mother has a lot of habits that keep her busy. They are not always hobbies, because hobbies imply enjoyment. Habits, in contrast, are born from compulsion. The habit of making a mug of tea for me every morning makes my sister irate. To Aisha, I am our mother’s favourite, and I always have been. It is hard to disprove this, because I know I get on my mother’s nerves the least of her three children. While Aisha and Mohamed scream at each other like vultures over roadkill, I tend to keep the peace. That is, if keeping the peace means keeping quiet.

  Aisha says Mohamed is Baba’s favourite. I agree; Mohamed is the only boy. But, I tell her, if Mohamed weren’t in the picture, or if Mohamed were a girl, Aisha would be Baba’s favourite, because I look too much like Mama and he doesn’t need the reminder. ‘You are Baba’s favourite girl,’ I tell Aisha, but she doesn’t believe me.

  Mama begins to get a mug out for her too, to smooth things over. But Aisha doesn’t drink tea, so the mug sits there day after day, ready with a tea bag and three sugars for my sweet little sister. So, really, Mama’s habit hasn’t changed at all. Every day she gets two mugs out of the kitchen cupboard, one for her and one for me. But Aisha is still not satisfied.

  Aisha is a jealous type. Why, I don’t know. Aisha gets everything I have, and everything she wants on top. She was luckier genetically than Mohamed and me: she doesn’t have the nose. Instead, she has big doe eyes and long lashes that Mama calls cow lashes. A pretty little cow.

  There is a picture of us at a school disco when I was eight. The disco was for Grade Threes and up only. I reiterated this to my parents: Grade Threes and up only. Aisha was not even in school yet. Not only did she demand to go, but she wore the same outfit as me – a white t-shirt with a picture of a girl on it, long black tracksuit pants and sandals. In the picture, she is in a flamenco pose, hogging the camera, and I am in the background, half shrouded in darkness, my arms extended and my lips pursed. I am trying to keep up with her.

  Next to the picture in the album is a lock of blonde hair. Nana kept it from Aisha’s first haircut. Aisha is Nana’s favourite child. They are so alike.

  BABA

  There’s an article online that says custard apples are good for killing cancer. Baba eats one with every meal and keeps one out on the kitchen bench, in a dish of its own, at all times. He bought it when he started this round of treatment, and it is going brown and hard.

  ‘Look,’ he says. ‘This is what it is doing to the bad cells.’ He holds up the rotten fruit and flicks it. It sounds hollow. ‘It’s working,’ he says. ‘Imagine: this is my cancer before the fruit’ – he holds up a fresh one – ‘and this is my cancer after.’ He drops the rotten fruit on the plate, and it clangs against the ceramic.

  ‘You can’t believe everything you read on the internet,’ I say. ‘A lot of that is fake.’

  He has been sharing this stuff on his Facebook page. He has also been sharing the same picture, every day, for the past three years, of a cartoon dinosaur that says ‘Rawr means fuck you in dinosaur’. It is accompanied by his caption ‘RAWR SISI’. Sisi is the new Egyptian president.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ he says, ‘I know. Look with your own eyes. I don’t need to believe in what I can see. I can see it.’

  ‘I’ve seen lots of fake things online recently,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen articles about people who have gone to jail because of fake things they have posted about Sisi.’

  ‘That is true,’ he says. ‘He takes people’s mobiles for no reason and puts them in jail. There are thousands and thousands of people in his jails right now, under the airport, everywhere. He tortures them.’

  ‘Does that make you scared?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘But RAWR SISI.’

  He cuts the fresh custard apple in half and eats a spoonful. I can tell it is going down hard.

  RULE #8

  IT IS HARAM TO WASTE FOOD

  Nanu Kawther, my paternal grandmother, wore black for the first year of my life, because her husband died one month after I was born. His first words to me were ‘Akbar Sara?’ – ‘What’s Sara’s news?’ He didn’t have time to say much else.

  Nanu Kawther died eleven years later, in Egypt. When a Muslim dies, they are buried immediately. There is no announced service, no open casket, no coffin. They are wrapped in cloth and in the ground within a day, their head facing Mecca. Brisbane to Alexandria is about twenty hours – there was no way we could’ve made it in time.

  Nanu Kawther was a wonderful cook. Her meat was so soft it fell off the bone. Her rice was full of flavour, and she’d save me the best part – the burnt bits on the bottom of the pot, which were chewy and buttery. She burnt the rice on purpose, I knew this for sure, because whenever Mama made rice there was never as much.

  Nanu Kawther’s hands were small but strong. When I was young, she would take me to her bathroom after eating, cover her hands in a pungent, lemon-scented soap, and scrub my mouth clean.

  Nanu Kawther was never empty-handed. When we visited her in Alexandria, she’d have already sent her house girl to get us bags of sweets from the shops. When she would come over to ours, she’d insist on stopping off at Toys and Toys before seeing us.

  Nanu Kawther was from the Egyptian countryside. Her childhood fr
iends called her Sara. She lived a content life, albeit poor, going to school and running in the fields with her friends until sunset. That’s the story my father tells me. When she was eleven, she moved to Alexandria with her family and trained in sewing. She never returned to school, but she knew how to write, and she knew how to read the Qur’an. She was a deeply religious woman. The only time I saw her get really irritated – apart from when one of us didn’t finish what was on our dinner plate – was when she had arguments with Nana over something the Qur’an did or did not say. She had a quiet voice that would only strain, not rise, with anger.

  ‘Nanu’ isn’t an Arabic word for grandmother. It’s a variation of Nana. When Mohamed was born, the grandparents stood in the hospital room to decide who was going to be known as what. Mama’s mother bagsed Nana. Baba’s mother wanted something similar, but with its own flavour. She tried options: Neenee, Noono, Noona. She settled on changing the last vowel.

  Nanu Kawther did not speak English. She knew ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, but other than that, when she visited us in Australia, she would just nod at people who spoke to her. She would come every year, and each time she visited, I felt it. I was losing the language. Shame replaced warmth as I struggled to find the words to communicate with her.

  In Egypt, my Arabic had been fluent. In Australia, my tongue was not cut out, but it was sanded away, gradually and painfully. My father would continue to speak to me in Arabic and I’d respond in English. You hear about people’s ageing relatives losing their ability to speak, but I changed in front of Nanu Kawther. Her chubby-cheeked granddaughter, to whom she could once speak freely, had grown into a mute stranger. One who knew what to say, but not how to say it.

  I didn’t look much like Nanu Kawther, with her white skin and soft features. She wore big glasses that made her eyes look three times their size. She had straight grey hair that she’d only show to her immediate family. But she had a mole on the right side of her chin, just like me. Baba calls my mole Nanu Kawther, and he touches it with pinched fingers, like he’s picking the essence of his mother off me. Then he kisses his fingers.