When I emerged, Tamara was still waiting outside.
‘Took your time,’ she said.
Already the cramps were coming on. ‘Do you have an Advil?’ I asked.
She reached in her bag and fished out a loose turquoise capsule.
‘A pad too, by any chance?’
‘Bad luck,’ she said. She reached in again and pulled out a tampon. ‘You can swim with this, at least.’
‘I don’t know how to use it,’ I said.
She looked at me strangely, like she didn’t believe me. But she turned around and went back into the toilet block. Inside the cubicle, she mimed what to do. ‘You can put your leg up on the toilet. That might help if this is the first time. You just have to try and find where it fits.’
I pulled the wrapper off the tampon. Its shape was intimidating. I felt like I was doing something unnatural.
‘Do you want me to leave or stay?’ said Tamara.
‘I don’t think I can use this,’ I said.
Tamara looked disappointed. ‘It’s not that hard,’ she said.
‘No, it’s just that …’ I paused. ‘I’m not allowed to use them.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’ll break my hymen. Like sex. I’m not allowed to do that. Not until I’m married. Or my parents will kill me.’
Tamara laughed. ‘This is nothing like sex. Trust me.’ She took the tampon out of my hand. The words trust me lingered. ‘Do you want to go to the movie instead of the beach then?’
‘No. I’ll come with you. I just won’t swim.’
Minutes later, I could already see the back of Tamara’s neck burning as we sat on the beach. She had insisted that we sit in the sun, to tan. She hadn’t applied any sunscreen, even though it looked like she needed it. At least some of her was protected: she was wearing a bikini too, but hadn’t taken her skirt off yet.
‘So, when do you leave again?’ she asked me. She had asked me before. I didn’t know if she was forgetful, or just checking that the plans had not changed.
‘In a couple of weeks,’ I said. As much as I had wanted to be at Victoria Woods, that afternoon, sitting on the sand at Hervey Bay with Tamara, wasn’t so bad.
A group from our class were playfighting in the water: two skinny girls sat atop two boys’ shoulders, squealing as they flailed around, grabbing at each other’s wrists. ‘You can go in,’ I said. ‘I’m fine here.’
‘I don’t really feel like it,’ said Tamara. She was a lone wolf; that much was clear to me from the first day I saw her. But I wondered whether it was always by choice. She twirled a twig in her fingertips, like it was a cigarette.
‘I would do that with you,’ I said, nodding to the game in the water. ‘Could be fun.’
‘Yeah, I don’t really want your period on my neck, thanks.’
We both laughed.
‘How about I just stand in the water. Below crotch level.’
‘All right,’ she said. She got up and dusted the sand from her backside, then pulled her skirt down. High up, near the tops of her thighs, were faint lines. Some looked like stretchmarks. A few were deeper, still fresh.
She turned around and headed for the water. I watched her dip her foot in. She walked in, the water rising to her shin, then her knee, then covering her scars. I meant to follow her, but I didn’t. And she didn’t turn around. Tamara was used to being on her own, I told myself. But that didn’t make leaving any easier.
RULE #14
USE YOUR WORDS
When we moved back to the Redlands, things were different. My parents started sleeping in the same room again. We were able to convince them to get us a cat. Her name was Mama, and she was a grey tabby. She only gained that name because she fell pregnant before we could decide what to call her. Mama Cat’s baby daddy was a stray Manx that lived in our neighbourhood. Ginger and matted, he had been lurking around the street for at least the last eight years and, judging by the network of ginger cats in the neighbourhood, enjoyed a free-love lifestyle. Chaz. That’s what Baba named him, because his face reminded him of a philandering tradie he used to work with.
I hadn’t been inside a mosque since my days at Morningside. The last time I went, Baba had talked to the old Pakistani imam. They spoke in English, because the imam only used Arabic when reciting the Qur’an. He had turned to me and asked if I understood what he had said during prayers. I nodded, because I was too embarrassed to admit that I had no clue. I knew the prayers by heart, but I didn’t exactly know what they meant.
‘Allahu la ilaha illa hu,’ he said. ‘Al hayyu l-qayyoom.’
I stared back blankly.
He looked pleased with himself, making a young girl feel ashamed for praying in a language she did not understand. I felt like asking him a question in Arabic. I could’ve said a swear in front of him, like cous, and he would never have known. But I knew that would be bad. The next time Baba asked me to go to the mosque, I refused.
Perhaps Baba thought after I returned from Hervey Bay that I had spent enough time in self-imposed exile, that I needed to get back in touch with my faith. So he dragged me along with him one Sunday afternoon. We pulled up in front of the mosque, an old, boxy building that was past its salad days. The imam had the keys and would only open the doors at prayer times. It used to keep much the same hours as a 7-Eleven: the devout were able to walk in and speak to Allah any time they liked. But then Molotovs, bags of dog shit and homemade pyrotechnics seemed to find their way through the doors too. Disgruntled neighbours who didn’t think the mosque belonged left gifts. So now we had to wait for the imam. Occasionally, Baba said, graffiti would appear on the outer walls, or a pig’s head would arrive at the doorstep, but inside was safe enough.
I told Baba I had forgotten to bring a scarf with me, so I couldn’t go in. He didn’t say anything – he knew there wasn’t much he could say to convince me. He got out of the car without a word and made his way inside. I watched a group of hijabi women walk in. They were all chatting in Arabic. I listened hard; it sounded like the Lebanese dialect. To me, Lebanese Arabic is like pig Latin: the words are jumbled, but if I listen hard enough I can decode them. But they were speaking too fast, with too much excitement in their voices, for me to catch on.
Something compelled me to follow those women. The way they were speaking made me curious; perhaps I could understand if I tried a little harder. There was an old towel sitting on the back seat of Baba’s car. It looked nice enough to be a scarf. I grabbed it and put it over my head, draping the ends around my neck. Even if someone were to see me in it, they wouldn’t know me. The perks of being estranged from the community.
I reached the door and looked inside. I could see Baba kneeling near the front. The women were at the back, still chatting. Prayer hadn’t begun yet. The imam – a younger man I had never seen before – was sitting on a plastic chair in the corner. In front of him was a girl in hijab; an older man, who looked like the girl’s father; and a white man, who looked lost. I could hear bits of what the imam was saying. He was talking about hadiths. There are two major parts of Islam, he explained. First there are the words. These are recorded in the Qur’an. They are the words of God, as passed through the Prophet. The second is the practice, otherwise known as hadith. Hadith is not the direct and explicit word of God, but the practices of Islam as observed and recorded by Prophet Muhammad’s peers. Some hadiths are widely accepted. Some are widely disputed. It’s hard to know the difference. Each imam will likely tell you a different story. He was telling the man the basics.
The girl sitting next to the white man looked embarrassed, but the white man was listening intently. It looked like she had brought in a non-Muslim who wanted to convert for marriage. A part of me felt jealous of her, while another part felt sorry for her.
After a little while, the imam shook the white man’s hand and excused himself. The father of the girl joined the floor, kneeling near where Baba was. The girl joined the group of women at the back. And the white man came towards the door
. I let him pass, but he didn’t go much further than where I was standing. He waited there, just outside. The imam began leading the prayer as the group behind him followed his movements. I couldn’t join in, even if I wanted to. I had forgotten what to say. I stayed at the door and watched, and once it was over, I went back to the car.
When Baba returned, he spotted the towel in my lap.
‘What you doing with that?’ he asked, before taking it to wipe the sweat from his head and throwing it into the back seat. We sat in the car for a few minutes, the engine running.
‘I helped build this mosque,’ he said. He told me, not for the first time, of the tile work he had designed for the internal archway. ‘I was on the site one day, and they were planning on making it just a plain old wall,’ Baba said. ‘But it is the house of Allah, so it has to be beautiful. I started drawing a pattern that I thought would look nice. I took my time. I was drawing on the wall in pencil. I didn’t finish it. I left it there. The next day the imam called me and said, “Hey. That design you did. Can you come and make it happen? We’ll pay you ten dollars an hour.”
I scoffed. ‘What a rip-off.’
‘I would have done it for free, Soos. It is the house of Allah. But yes. Ten dollars an hour.’
I would never do that. Not for anyone. Not even for Allah.
I could never be as good a person as he was.
He reached over my lap and opened the glove box. Inside was a small transparent packet, carrying a thin gold chain. He handed it to me.
‘While you and your mother were gone, I did some cleaning in the house,’ he said. ‘I found a lot of Nanu Kawther’s old things. There was some gold jewellery. I knew you would not wear it. So I took it to be melted, and asked that they make this.’
I pulled the chain out of the packet. A square pendant swung from it, inscribed with a stylised Arabic word I couldn’t make out.
‘What does it say?’ I asked.
‘Allah.’
Shame crept up on me. Of all the words, I should’ve been able to recognise Allah.
‘I didn’t melt everything,’ he said. ‘There is one thing she told me to save for you. It is a bracelet. A very beautiful gold bracelet. You can’t get anything like that here. Not Egyptian gold like that.’
‘Where is it?’
‘She told me to give it to you when you get married. When you start your legacy.’
✾
On my first day back, Victoria Woods High seemed different from how I remembered it.
‘It’s like you’re returned from the dead,’ said Carly. I may have been resurrected, but she was reincarnated. She had dyed her hair burgundy, and was much taller than a year earlier. She spoke differently, too. She used words like ‘considered’ and ‘forming’, as in the sentence ‘Have you considered forming any new friendships here?’ She sounded like our guidance counsellor. Part of me thought she was a sellout. Part of me thought maybe I had been the one holding her back from being her best self.
In the brochures, which still sat on my old bedroom desk, Victoria Woods High was a place where kids tucked in ironed shirts beneath uniform jumpers and gold ribbons. In reality, it was also a place where students, from time to time, stabbed each other clean through the hand with etching tools in art class. Or pile-drove a rival into the ground outside the library before the morning bell. It was a place where teachers hoped for the best but expected the worst. Sometimes they got the best – Victoria Woods bred the most competitive dance troupes in South East Queensland, the smartest kids in the country when it came to Science and Engineering Tech. Carly told me she was in the academic class.
I rejoined band, thinking that playing the baritone again may help me to reconnect. James Stickler was in Grade Twelve, due to graduate that year. But the spark I once had for him was now long gone. I had lost the dream. Victoria Woods wasn’t anything like what I wanted it to be. All I could think about, as I went through the motions each day, was how much I missed being with Tamara. I found myself wondering if she was okay. I texted her for the first couple of weeks of school, but she slowly stopped replying. She was used to being alone, I reminded myself. It was time to move on.
A month into the school year, in the biggest move in the history of the Victoria Woods instrumental music program, Ms H announced that the band and the choir would be attending the Tutti Youth Music Festival. Schools all around the world would gather in Beijing to attend masterclasses and put on a musical spectacular. Ms H said it would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I, being the only baritone player, was invited. It was an opportunity, I thought, to get away, even for a little while. At every moment I made myself feel alone. Even if I had Carly in my ear. I wanted to be far away from it, and China would do. There was an old book in the library: Mandarin 101. I checked it out.
I told Mama about the trip, and she told me to ask Baba. It would count as the longest time spent away from my family – that is, if I didn’t include the year away from Baba. I knew it would take a lot to convince him to let me go.
Asking him for something always started the same way. ‘Inshallah,’ he would say.
Mama Cat brushed up against my legs as I stood before him in the living room, trying to convince him to let me travel to the other side of the world. Mama Cat was a timid thing, startled by loud noises. So when all of a sudden Baba boomed, ‘Why are you so interested to learn another language when you have let go of your mother tongue?’ she jumped and tried to hide under the couch. She got stuck halfway, her pregnant belly too big to slip under. Her back legs stuck out, like those of the Wicked Witch of the East under that house.
I didn’t have an answer to Baba’s question. He was right: every word I spoke to him in English was proof that I was a failure. A disappointment to my language, my religion and my family.
When I asked him again a week later, he reluctantly agreed to let me go, on the condition that it would be my birthday present for the next decade. He was showing his kindness, because he knew I had been sad since I returned from Hervey Bay.
I knew my parents were unhappy too, as much as they tried to hide it. Baba would sit in front of the television every evening and talk about how he was thinking of leaving his job. Baba’s troubles at work often stemmed from his struggles to get people to understand his intentions. It wasn’t his fault; English was his second language. People would take his words, and when they didn’t fully understand them, make new meanings for them.
Mama would listen, then she would get up and make tea. She’d make Baba’s strong, despite Baba liking it pale. The thought to spit in it even crossed her mind – the look on her face told me so. I wasn’t sure at what point my mother started to hate my father, but it was now well behind us. Every word from his mouth seemed to boil her blood. I don’t think there was a specific catalyst, a flick of the switch. That would have been simple to explain. If he had done something awful, like beat her, that would have been easy to understand. But he wasn’t that type of man. This hatred was gradual. Brewing slowly, and with depth, like the kind of tea Baba had asked for.
✾
It was a sunny day, but my parents had the curtains in their bedroom closed, as if that would block out their voices too. Mama called me in, saying they wanted to talk to me. I sat on the bed. A crocheted picture of a flower, a gift from the receptionist at Mama’s work, hung on the wall. The flower’s edges were jagged, unnatural. Mama hadn’t hung it up when we were in Hervey Bay, but she had hung it up here. It looked like we were back for good.
‘Your father has some news,’ said Mama. Her face was hard to read.
‘Yes,’ said Baba. ‘We’re moving to Cairns.’ The words sounded strange coming from his mouth, as though he had picked the wrong sentence. We had only just moved back; we couldn’t possibly be leaving again.
Or that’s what I was supposed to say, as a teenager who needed stability. I don’t want to move schools again. I don’t want to leave my friends.
But I quite liked the idea. I want to get o
ut of Victoria Woods.
‘Your father got a new job,’ said Mama.
I saw the way he was looking at her, carefully, as though they had rehearsed what they were going to say and he was making sure his lines came out right.
‘For how long?’ I said.
‘What do you mean, how long?’ He was angry that I’d asked. ‘Forever. A job means forever.’
My mother was looking at me like she was trying to tell me something. They hadn’t asked to speak to us kids together. Mama had called me in only. She did that on purpose. I was sad in this place, but I could see she was much more so. Her sadness wasn’t grounded in a place, like mine was, that she could leave behind at the end of a day. Her sadness was in that room, and she was stuck there. I was her ace to play, and I knew what she wanted of me.
‘But I can’t go,’ I said.
‘It’s not your decision to make,’ said Baba.
‘But we’ve already paid the deposit for my trip.’
‘What trip?’
‘Her China trip,’ said Mama. I had said the right thing. ‘We can’t get that money back.’
‘So you think a school trip is more important that your husband?’
‘Did I say that?’ said Mama. ‘I said we paid money, and we will lose it.’
‘I don’t want to move schools again,’ I lied. ‘I really want to go on this trip.’
‘So how come you moved for your mother and not for me? How come you move so easily for her and not when I tell you?’
‘I wasn’t moving forever,’ said Mama.
‘Why do you feel okay to disrespect my decisions and not hers?’
‘How about you go and try this new job for a couple of months, and if it works out then we will move with you?’ said Mama. Space was what she wanted. Mama needed space.
Baba went silent for a moment. Then he looked me straight in the eye. ‘Okay, Sara,’ he said. ‘You can stay here.’
‘Really?’ I said.
Mama looked as surprised as I did.
‘Yes. But I want you to know that if your mother and I divorce, it is your fault.’
Muddy People Page 13
