Muddy People

by Sara El Sayed

  When Mohamed learned to drive, he had his own car already. But I didn’t. Every second Sunday Tov would pull up to the house a little late, in a blue Toyota Corolla. I ran out to the kerb, where Tov was already standing, shoeless.

  ‘How’s the family?’ he said, as he got into the passenger seat.

  ‘They’re good.’

  ‘How’s Mohamed? Still on the road?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What’s your Nan cooking today?’ He was always interested.

  ‘Warak enab.’ It was ten am and she had already started rolling the vine leaves.

  ‘God. Warak enab. I haven’t had warak enab in years. My wife doesn’t cook. She’s a bitch.’ He said often that his wife was a bitch. His wife was a white Australian. She was his second wife. His first had left him. He never told me that; I just made an educated guess.

  I had a question to ask him, but I wasn’t sure how to word it. I didn’t want him to say no, and I didn’t want him to tell my father. ‘Do you teach manual?’ I said, although I already knew the answer. I had seen a car with the Lively Learners logo stalling around the neighbourhood, with his other students in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Sure do. Do you want to have a go?’

  ‘I’ve already tried once. On my dad’s car. But I’d like to try again.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. I thought it would take a little more to convince him. He wasn’t as cautious as my father. ‘Just remind me next time so I bring the other car.’

  ‘Is it a Toyota?’

  ‘No. It’s a Hyundai.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘A Getz. Is that a problem?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ✾

  The night before my first manual lesson, I had a dream that Mama left Baba for a white man. He had straight grey hair and no beard. He smoked cigarettes, but in a stylish way. He drank wine out of a fancy glass at a mahogany dining table. In the dream, I was sitting under the table, crying, while I saw my mother’s legs beside those of this new man. I could never imagine Baba with a white lady. Not like I could imagine Tov with his wife. His wife, who was a bitch.

  ✾

  Tov was a Christian. A string of rosary beads with a cross hung from the mirror of the Getz.

  ‘I have these here because I always say a little prayer before I take off in this thing,’ he said. ‘She’s safe but, you know, some of these kids are crazy. They don’t know how to drive. But I guess that’s what I’m here for, hey?’

  We were still sitting in front of the house. ‘I don’t think I can go from here,’ I said.

  ‘Why? Where else would you go from?’

  ‘I’ve never driven a manual around other cars before.’

  ‘That’s why I’m teaching you, isn’t it?’ He kicked off his shoes.

  ‘I don’t know if I can drive on the road.’

  ‘Where else are you going to drive? On the moon? Come on.’

  My hands were clammy as I tried to pull on my seatbelt.

  ‘You gotta yank it hard,’ he said. ‘It gets stuck sometimes.’

  The smell of the car reminded me of old taxis in Egypt – most likely the melted rubber dashboard.

  ‘What are you watching on TV these days?’ he said, to help settle my nerves.

  ‘Um. Not much. Mostly America’s Next Top Model.’

  ‘Ah. No, I don’t watch that. My wife, she loves that sort of stuff though. Kardashians. She loves that sort of stuff. She has a thing for Armenians!’ He laughed.

  ‘Nana watches them too.’

  ‘The Kardashians?’

  ‘Yes, she’s obsessed.’

  ‘Ah. Your Nan has good taste. Or maybe terrible taste. Can she make me some warak enab? I’m starving in that house of mine. All right. Let’s go.’

  The sound of the car coming to life as I turned the key startled me.

  ‘She’s an old thing,’ he said. ‘That’s normal. Don’t worry about that.’

  ✾

  A couple of months later, Mama bought herself a new car. A red Hyundai Getz. It was sitting outside the house when I got home from school; she’d left work early just to pick it up. She let me practise in it. It was automatic, and small, so easy to manoeuvre. She said when I got my full licence, I could have it.

  I gave up on learning manual. During my last lesson with Tov, he told me he didn’t really hate his wife. ‘I just really hate her cooking. But she can learn, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I felt a little guilty leaving Tov, but I knew he would be okay. And, I hoped, so would his wife.

  The rest of my hours were spent with Mama, working towards getting that red Getz. Baba never got in that car. Not once. He thought my mother was trying to kill herself, and that she was taking me down with her.

  MAMA

  An angry, curly-haired girl, backpack on, waiting at the door. Nana says this is what my mother would do every day after they ran away from Melbourne and returned to Egypt. They lived above a travel agency, and my mother threatened, daily, to buy a ticket.

  ‘She would stand at the door and shout, “I want to go home. I hate it here. I want to go home.” And I would tell her that we were home. But she didn’t believe me.’

  My mother has never seen Egypt as her home, even though she spent most of her life there. Now, when I ask her about it, she says she would rather pull all her hair out than go back. She says it’s the bureaucracy. That nothing can ever get done in that place. She says they do it on purpose. Everything is slow for a reason. She’s made her home here, in Australia, where she’s always wanted it to be. Of course, each place comes with its own problems, but she would take this country over that one any day.

  It’s unfortunate that she has started to hate our neighbours, in this place that she loves so much. The bougainvillea petals from my mother’s tree were getting in their pool. If she had known, she said, she would have dealt with it. If this were Egypt, the neighbours would argue about the tree for years and nothing would get done about it. In Australia there is no talking – there is just cutting. She thinks the neighbour waited until she was at work to cut the tree. It was a strategic move, she says. It was his right to cut it, because the branches were creeping across the boundary. But he didn’t just trim the branches, my mother says. There is a stump where the tree once was.

  My mother does not shout often, but now she is shouting at our neighbour. I have never seen her this angry. ‘How dare you cut my tree,’ she says. ‘That is my tree, and you have no right.’

  The neighbour calls her crazy.

  She says there is no way he was able to cut the tree that low from his side of the fence. She accuses him of coming onto her property and cutting her tree.

  The neighbour says he will call the police if she doesn’t leave him alone, and closes the door.

  If he called the police, the police would come. Not like in Egypt, where no one would even think of calling the police over a tree. If they did think of it, and the police did come, they would expect a bribe.

  Like Nana, I find it hard to understand why Mama loves Australia so much. The memories she’s shared of her younger childhood here haven’t always been pleasant.

  ‘They called me wog at school,’ she said. ‘They put me in the wog class, with the Greeks and the Lebs. The teachers often made kids from the wog class wash the staffroom dishes. There was a redhead called Geraldine who came up to me in the playground and said I was just one big freckle. She said I smelled of fetta.’

  One day, while ten-year-old Mama was standing at the door, there was a knock on the other side. Nana tells me that Pa travelled from Melbourne all the way to Egypt to win her back. It sounds romantic, but it wasn’t. He had come to Egypt to make sure she knew that he had refused the divorce. ‘I told him to divorce me,’ says Nana. ‘I already had a man I was interested in at the time. So I told him, “Divorce me!” And your Mama’s father said no. He said he will always be my husband.’

  In Egypt, things are different. You need both parties to agree th
at they’ve had enough of each other. Things are slow, even if they are inevitable. But in Australia, it only takes one side. Things get done.

  RULE #17

  WAIT FOR A RING

  When she was twenty-six, Mama’s best friend got engaged to Baba’s brother. That’s how they met, she and Baba. She would go to his office in Alexandria sometimes and help him out with paperwork, she said. The brothers were managing their father’s business at the time. After a few platonic visits, Baba called Nana and asked if he could marry her daughter. She said okay.

  When I was eleven years old, I invited nine girls and one boy to the movies for my birthday. Baba answered the phone when the boy called to RSVP. Baba hung up the phone almost immediately and told me the boy would not be coming. No boys would ever be coming.

  The thought of bringing a boy home to my family as a teen made me physically ill. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to do so. I always wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend. It might never be possible, but at least it was okay to wonder.

  ‘There is no such thing as boyfriend–girlfriend,’ Baba would remind me every once in a while. ‘There is only husband and wife.’

  ‘But how do you ever get to know someone if you’re never boyfriend–girlfriend?’ I’d ask.

  ‘You get engaged. That is how you get to know them.’

  My parents were engaged for nine months before they got married, but it didn’t seem to have helped.

  When I was sixteen and a half, Mama began to start work early, in order to finish at three pm. I was told it was so we didn’t have to pay for after-school care for Aisha. Part of me also thought she wanted to keep an eye on me. She would pick Aisha up first, then me. Aisha always hogged the front seat. Every afternoon I could see her head bobbing up and down, complaining about something or other, as they approached my school gate.

  The car rides were convenient, as I had started playing the trombone as well as the baritone. Lugging two heavy cases home would have been difficult. A group of boys, including Jason, would loiter around the gate after school, harassing people as they walked past. ‘What you got in those cases? Bombs?’ he’d say to me, and laugh at his own joke. I would ignore him.

  At sixteen, I had had a crush on about as many boys as I had years of age. When I say crush, I mean some form of attraction due to some form of interaction, often modest. I worried it would come to the point where if Jason were to ever say something to me that wasn’t an overt racist insult, I would get a little tingle.

  It seemed as though every girl at school had a boyfriend. Even Carly had one, who smelled of Vegemite scrolls. But I couldn’t understand how I would go about getting a boyfriend, let alone keeping one. I had never had a boy express any interest in me. I didn’t know what that looked like. I envied girls like Carly. Their parents who shared romantic stories about meeting and dating. They had blueprints to follow. I, on the other hand, was trying to assemble Apollo 11 with instructions that came from a NutriBullet.

  There was a boy who sat at the end of the back row in band named Max. He played bass guitar, the incongruous electronic instrument in wind orchestra, and needed to be close to the power point. He really shouldn’t have been in wind orchestra, given he did not play a wind instrument, but he was that good, Ms H couldn’t risk a bass section without him. I had never seen him speak to a girl before. I wouldn’t call what he had a bowl cut, but it was bowl-cut adjacent. There was a mole on his face that looked like it could turn cancerous. And thick eyebrows – thicker than mine. He sat next to me in band when the trombonist was away. The cord of his base guitar had to stretch a little further, but he did it anyway.

  I was the only girl in the back row. There was absolutely no competition.

  In the week I decided I would make Max like me, he got the flu.

  I found him in one of the rehearsal rooms of the music block, drool dripping down his bass guitar. I called his name from the door. He didn’t hear me. I called again, and he sat up. This was the first time we had spoken.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He seemed a little shivery.

  ‘Ms H said to pack up.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Egyptians say el shatra tighzil birigl homaar, which means a smart girl can knit even if all she has is a donkey’s leg. With Max, I was about to make a sweater.

  I told Carly I liked Max, and I told her to tell him so, and she did. She owed me after the racist soapbox speech. I put myself in his shoes: never had a girl’s attention, and all of a sudden there was one right there, wanting to talk. Carly told me that when she told him he said, ‘Right.’ She was the second girl he had ever spoken to.

  I didn’t know what I was expecting him to do, but he did nothing. He was away from school the next day. I added him on MSN, but he didn’t message me.

  After days of his absence from school, I decided I had to make the first move.

  Hi. So I heard Carly spoke to you.

  Hi. Yeah.

  I’m guessing you don’t like me then. It was a disingenuous opener.

  Well. I don’t really know you.

  Perhaps I was asking too much of the boy to declare his love for me straightaway. So I decided to ease him into realising he wanted to be my boyfriend. His MSN profile picture was a cartoon hooded figure that looked like something out of Rune-Scape, after all.

  You’re sick, aren’t you. Or are you just avoiding me?

  Yeah. I think I have a virus.

  Gross.

  As the repartee continued, he told me that he worked at KFC, and that to make the gravy they used the old fat at the bottom of the fryer.

  My mum loves KFC, I said.

  Nice.

  I won’t tell her about the gravy.

  Probably for the best.

  Do you think you would like me if you got to know me?

  I think so.

  ✾

  Once he got over his virus, Max would wait for me at the front gate every day after school. We would stand there talking until we saw Mama’s car approaching, and then he would leave before she had a chance to see him. Eventually, he began hanging out with me at lunchtime too. He wouldn’t eat; he would just sit. Once we were sitting together, my knee touching his. A teacher on duty came over and beckoned to me with his index finger. I felt ill, just as I had when Baba answered that boy’s call. I had been found out.

  ‘What’s that?’ said the teacher. He was wearing a piano-key necktie. He was a Maths teacher, but not mine.

  ‘What’s what, sir?’ I said.

  He pointed to my neck. Around it was the gold chain Baba had given me, the one with the word Allah on it.

  ‘No jewellery at school. You should know the rules,’ said the teacher.

  ‘But I thought we were allowed if they were religious symbols.’ One out of every three white girls at school had a cross around their neck.

  ‘That doesn’t look religious to me,’ he said.

  ‘But it is.’

  ‘Take it off. Or I’m sending you to the office.’

  I unclipped the necklace and slid it into my skirt pocket. I walked back to Max, embarrassed. He didn’t say anything. A boyfriend is meant to stand up for his girlfriend. But we weren’t boyfriend–girlfriend, and I didn’t expect him to understand. At least he didn’t bring it up, so I didn’t have to talk about it.

  ✾

  On days when we had rehearsal, Max would carry my instruments for me from the music block to the front gate. I liked it. I knew what I was feeling wasn’t necessarily love, but I sat in it anyway. It was nice to have someone there.

  ‘Watch out!’ Jason yelled to Max as we passed him on our way out. ‘She might have bombs in those cases.’ He didn’t have much of a repertoire.

  ‘You’re hilarious,’ I said. Being around Max made me feel a little surer of myself.

  After six months of carrying things for me, Max gave me a ring at lunchtime. It was a simple silver band with a small sapphire in the middle.

  ‘Does this mean we’re getting
married?’ I said, half joking.

  ‘Maybe.’

  I wore it for the rest of the day. No teachers pulled me up for it. Maybe, I thought, this type of jewellery was acceptable.

  In the afternoon Max walked me to the gate as usual. As we were waiting for Mama, Max said, ‘Your dad will never let us be together, right?’

  In that moment, a spell was broken. Everything about Max became ugly to me. His bowl cut. His eyebrows. His mole. His cowardice. We hadn’t even talked about the rules. He had done his research, exposing me before I had a chance to explain.

  ✾

  I had forgotten to take the ring off before Mama picked me up.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ she said immediately. She seemed to see it even with me sitting in the back seat. I took it off and stuffed it into my pocket. My necklace was still in there. It must have gone through the wash.

  ‘Carly gave it to me. She said I could borrow it.’

  Mama didn’t say anything, but the look in her eyes in that rear-view mirror made me think she knew everything.

  MAMA

  The English Girls School in Alexandria is where my mother learned to pray. Nana never prayed, and her father only ever did so on Fridays. But there were devout girls at that boarding school, one from Nigeria, and one from Turkey, who taught her the proper way to do it. They taught her how to connect with her faith five times a day.

  Nana tells me that my mother had a boyfriend at that school. A young man who went to the English Girls School, despite the fact that he was not a girl. He was not a boarder, and his name was Charlie. His parents were English, expats living in Alexandria, although he had the nose of an Arab. Nana says Mama and Charlie used to skateboard together. I wonder what it would be like to know my mother at that age. On wheels and free. I wonder if she wore a helmet.

  Nana says Charlie asked my mother to marry him when they were seventeen. She wanted to, Nana says. She wanted to very badly. But she demurred. Her father would never let her marry an Englishman. A kafir. She never asked him, but she didn’t have to. The next year Charlie moved back to England with his family.