When Matt finished university he worked for a law firm, and in the next year he surprised us all in two ways. He stopped doing all the extra-curricular things he had always done and second, he came out. Looking back on it, he told me, he realised that keeping so busy was a strategy he’d adopted to stop himself from thinking about the fact that he was gay.
I had often thought that Matt had seemed intent on building the perfect CV, at creating a record of achievements that anyone would be impressed by. Everyone who knew him was impressed, but deep down he wasn’t. Having gone through the initial angst, and eventual relief, of looking honestly in the mirror, he was happy to let the perfect CV sit, pretty much un-added to, from then on. He stopped being a superman, and became a real man.
He had learnt how to enjoy each day. And if you can do that, what else matters?
I, on the other hand, would never have said that the ability to enjoy each day as much as I could was one of my strengths. It was definitely one of Lucy’s; she was excellent at it. Worries seemed to roll off her, and hassles and stresses passed over her like water over a rock. Bibi was pretty good at it, too. She, like most kids, was always totally engaged in whatever it was she was doing. If there was enjoyment to be had from something, she would get it.
But I spent too much time disengaged from what was happening right now, thinking about either the future or the past. I clung possessively to worries—I wouldn’t let them go—and I sponged up hassles and stress wherever I could find them. I was always preoccupied with where I was going and how I was going to get there, to the extent that what was happening right now got ignored. I had been that way since I was 25, which, ironically, is when I had finally got my act together.
At 25 I was a corporate lawyer, almost by accident. When I finished school I went to university because that’s what everyone at our school did if they could, and I picked law because I didn’t want to waste all those marks I had studied so hard to get. In my final year at law school everyone applied to all the big corporate law firms, so I did too.
I got a job at one of the biggest and corporatest. On my first morning they told me that to be good at the job I would need to read the Financial Review each day, and I immediately knew I was in the wrong place. The nearest I had gone to the business section of any paper was when I delved a little too deeply into the sports section and stumbled upon a page with company names and lots of numbers on it. The thought of working in a place where those names and numbers were important scared me. Everything thereafter reinforced the accuracy of my first impression, from the pressure not to leave the office each evening until it was too late to see your friends or your kids, to the work itself, which mainly involved helping lots of big companies make lots of money from each other.
Then it hit me, a blinding flash of inspiration that made sense of my whole life. I was a pathetic, stupid idiot. Of course. That was it. I had had every advantage anyone could ask for—born to nice, upper middle-class parents, private school, university education— but because I had drifted mindlessly along without ever thinking about what it really was that I wanted to do I was in completely the wrong place. All I, too, was doing was building a CV, albeit one considerably less exciting than Matt’s, to impress others.
I realised that if I kept refusing to steer the ship one day I would be a 55-year-old corporate lawyer who drank too much, tried to crack onto his secretary and drove a fast red car that caused everyone to make jokes behind his back about his penis size. I suddenly saw that I had wasted most of my life doing the wrong thing. It gave me a shock, and it finally got me off my arse.
That’s when I started to work out where I wanted to be, and how I would get there. Which was all very well, in that it motivated me to get out of corporate law and into an area I found far more interesting and satisfying, criminal law, and to kick-start a stand-up comedy career that I had previously been too scared to have a go at. But I over-compensated. I changed from never thinking about where I was going at all, to thinking about it all the time. I became totally goal-focused, and was always looking for angles and trying to work out how to create, and take advantage of, opportunities. So much so that without really noticing it I lost the ability to enjoy the ride. I was so focused on tomorrow, I forgot about today.
Ten years on, most of the destinations I had aimed at had been reached. I had the job I wanted, I was living with the woman I wanted and we had the baby we both wanted. So why wasn’t every part of every day a joy? Why couldn’t I switch the planning part of my brain off, chill out and enjoy things? Why did I spend so much of the present, so much of my time with Lucy and Bibi, distracted and half-absent, wondering about something that might or might not happen next week?
‘Do you want to get going?’ said Lucy.
Just as I had been doing. Here we were, sitting in a café having a holiday, and I was mentally off somewhere else again. Surely a first step towards enjoying each day as much as I could was to actually be in each day as much as I could, really be in it, and clearly I had a bit of work to do on getting better at that. But at least sitting in a café in Haberfield I had realised for the first time that enjoying each day as much as I could was a good aim to have.
I looked up at Lucy. ‘Sure.’
I also realised that I hadn’t been plotting or planning before we stopped to have coffee. I hadn’t been worrying about tomorrow, but simply enjoying the newness of wandering around and looking at things I’d never seen before. I felt strangely exhilarated, as if some new way of looking at life had been revealed to me. I looked down at my empty cup and hoped it wasn’t just the coffee.
Although it had been a wonderful morning, we did manage a disagreement over the route of return. Lucy wanted to go past more shops whereas I preferred back streets.
‘This is like a three-legged race,’ she said.
Again she was right. We could do whatever we wanted as long as we both agreed on what it was. That’s what travelling with someone else is, even if it is only in four-hour stints. It involves lots of new and exciting decisions to make, hence lots of new and exciting ways in which to disagree. Luckily Bibi was too small to have an input, or we would have been split three ways.
Lucy and I had discovered early in our relationship that we had dissimilar travelling styles. After we had been together about a year we went to Europe for a month, first stop Rome. The first two days were full of little compromises, me waiting outside while she looked in a clothes shop, then her not looking in the next clothes shop because she didn’t want me to have to wait outside again. On the third day we went to the Forum, a huge area of ancient Roman ruins. I wanted to race around, to walk and walk and soak up as much as I could, and kept forcing myself to slow down to accommodate Lucy’s saunter. She, of course, was hurrying up to accommodate me, but I didn’t notice that.
Eventually, inevitably: ‘Come on, let’s go up here.’
‘In a minute.’
‘We’ve been here five minutes already.’
‘You go then.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll meet you back at the hotel in, say, three hours.’
‘Wha . . . but?’ It didn’t fit the image. We were young lovers joined at the hip, strolling around the Holy City arm in arm, every moment a joy and even momentary separation unthinkable. That was the movie I wanted to be in. If we went our separate ways it would mean . . . what would it mean?
I tried to explain. ‘But . . . what if . . . I don’t have a watch.’ Very feeble.
‘Ask someone the time. Bye.’
It saved the holiday, perhaps more. Each morning we’d break up for a few hours and explore on our own, meet back at the hotel for lunch, laze about and then head off together in the late afternoon.
In Haberfield we remembered the Forum and compromised on half the shop street and half the back street. It felt very adult.
Halfway back to the car we stopped and talked to a seventyish man lingering outside his house, arms resting on his front fence. He wasn’t a f
an of Haberfield’s ‘stupid heritage stuff ’ and lamented the fact that he had to ask the council ‘before I can paint the bloody letterbox’.
‘Ah well,’ I said, ‘at least you don’t have developers building everywhere.’
‘Might as well have, what with all the noise from the buses and planes.’
We paused. And listened. Crystal-clear silence.
‘It’s not as bad as it used to be,’ he eventually said begrudgingly.
‘Bye,’ he said as we moved on. ‘I’m just waiting here for the mailman, then I’ll be back inside. He’s late today.’
We made our way back to the car along Crescent Street which, strangely, at that point seemed to be dead straight. As we drove out of Haberfield I thought about that old bloke. If the mailman arriving was a big event there couldn’t be much else going on. I hoped he got some letters—and not just bills.
six
a bit of east in the west
That night when I got home from work, I was greeted by a sight that made my blood freeze. A shopping trolley was standing outside our house. (Or should that be sitting outside our house? Anyway, it was there.) I had seen the shopping trolley hanging around outside number eighteen for a couple of weeks. That was okay; it was number eighteen’s business. Now, it was outside our house.
For some reason it made me incredibly angry. It was obviously the builders’ doing. How dare they, after waking us up each morning and blocking our light and driving us bonkers with their drills, put a shopping trolley outside our house. I grabbed it and shoved it back along the footpath until it bashed into a pile of rubble outside number eighteen. So there. No one fucks with me.
The next morning the trolley was there again, directly outside our front gate. I looked over at number eighteen. None of the builders giggled or looked guilty. They said good morning as normal, but I knew one of them had done it.
We got in the car and drove off somewhere peaceful and stress free. Auburn and Lakemba.
I had driven past Auburn many times over the years but had never thought of going in. This time we turned off the Western Distributor and headed south along St Hilliers Road. We soon came to its major intersection with Boorea Street. Across the road was Auburn. Luckily the lights were red because it gave us a chance to let the view sink in.
Across the intersection at ground level was a row of modest weatherboard houses. Towering above them, looking as if it was growing out of their roofs, was the Auburn Mosque. On 4000 square metres stood a huge grey central dome, big enough to hold 5000 people, flanked by two towering minarets—or spires—reaching to the sky. It looked like the gateway to the suburb. It was grand, impressive and slightly intimidating.
All I knew about Lakemba and Auburn was that a lot of Arabs lived there, a lot of Muslims lived there, each suburb had a mosque and whenever there was a news story about Muslims in Sydney the media went there for comment and footage. And that driving toward it made me feel slightly uneasy.
I, of course, am a supporter of multicultural Australia who believes that in times of international suspicion it is even more important than usual to reach out and build bridges between people, and to focus on the common humanity that connects us all, no matter what we look like, where we are from, who we believe in and whether or not we play cricket. I believe that it is wrong to make fun of anyone because of their race, unless of course they are from England, America or New Zealand, in which case it is okay because they speak English and look like me. I understand that when we feel threatened it is far easier to label a group of people who are different as the villains (the rich, the unions, the Muslims, the dole bludgers, the Catholics, the Jews, the hairdressers) than it is to actually puzzle our way toward the truth, but I believe that puzzle our way toward the truth is what we must nevertheless do.
I had always felt nothing but contempt for racist attitudes, either overt or subtly betrayed, such as the caller I once heard on talkback radio who began a spray with, ‘Look, don’t get me wrong, I’m no racist. Like, I really like Thai food an’ that, but . . .’
In short, I believe all those things that broad-minded, educated people are supposed to believe—that we should open our arms and embrace, rather than fear, difference. So why did driving to the Muslim centre of Sydney make me feel slightly uneasy?
Because while I believed that we should open our arms and embrace, rather than fear, difference, I had never actually done it. It wasn’t as if I had actively avoided it. It was just that I had never seen much difference to embrace.
I grew up in Anglo middle-class Canberra and was insulated from diversity even further by attending Canberra Grammar School, where the students were so starved of proper minorities to have a go at they had to tease me for being Irish, a label which in my family’s case was 120 years out of date.
The university I attended, Sydney University, was back then very Anglo and very middle class. The closest I got to a multicultural experience there was going to nearby Newtown for a kebab.
Since I’d lived in Sydney I’d lived in Anglo middle-class Crows Nest, mainly Anglo middle-class Glebe, and Bondi, where my main connection to the large multicultural population was being woken up by pissed English backpackers singing outside our window at 3 a.m. as they stumbled back to the hostel. I had, of course, preached about how wonderful multicultural Australia was at Anglo middle-class dinner parties, but as we drove gradually west to Lakemba and Auburn it occurred to me that I knew jack shit about multicultural Australia. The closest I had ever really got to it was ringing the local Thai restaurant and asking for a number 64 with chicken, a number 26 with seafood, and two boiled rice.
The picture before us as we entered Auburn was of two cultures. The bottom half was Anglo Western Sydney, the top half Middle Eastern Sydney. Together they were Auburn, and Lakemba, and all the other places where East and West bump up against each other. I wondered how much, if at all, they had merged to produce some sort of cultural fusion. Or were the two parts, as the image we could see from the traffic lights suggested, on each other’s doorstep yet separate, trying as best they could to pretend the other didn’t exist?
The lights changed. We drove into Auburn and immediately saw a very different image. In a busy park Muslim girls in hijab (veils) were playing soccer with Arabic, Asian and Western boys. There’s your cultural fusion. Kids; they just don’t know enough to be paranoid and afraid.
We parked near the shops. It’s got a hum, Auburn. There are busy, buzzy streets with lots of people about. It’s a big centre with lots of butchers. Every third shop is a butcher, and one of the other two is a tobacconist. If you smoke and eat meat, it’s the place for you. One day the shops will merge and sell lamb cigarettes and roll-your-own-chicken breasts.
We passed Michael’s Smoke Zone, and a pharmacy that looked like any other in Sydney apart from its name, the Ramadan Pharmacy. Western culture doesn’t mix religion and business like that. There are no Lent Newsagents or Jesus Died On The Cross Milk Bars. Western culture generally keeps religion in its own box, separate from the rest of life and away from commerce, an approach which runs the risk of making religion irrelevant. Almost everyone my age I know was brought up Christian but gradually drifted away as they lost any sense of connection between what the church was on about and their own lives.
We passed Australian Bizarre Bargains, but they only sold electrical goods so how bizarre could the bargains be? A bizarre bargain isn’t letting a TV go for $80, it’s selling one for four paintbrushes and a slug. So much for truth in advertising.
Outside a dress shop two Arabic men were talking about how to get New Zealand permanent residency if you were Iraqi. Inside was a tiny sky-blue dinner suit with huge black bow tie fitted onto an eight-year-old boy-sized mannequin. No wonder there’s trouble in the world when parents exist who make innocent children wear such things.
Next door was a beautician that promised to create ‘hair of elegance’. An Arabic woman walked in but I doubted they could help her. Her hair was impos
sibly elegant already.
Another example of two cultures side by side—a Muslim woman in a hijab walked past a giant billboard featuring a woman with pretty much nothing on, advertising power drills or chips or lawnmowers or something. Western culture may have separated religion from commerce, but sex is still right in there.
We passed a clothing shop where a sign politely requested that we ‘please do not steal’, and obeyed it. Most of the shop signs were in both Arabic and English, and most faces on the street were Arabic or African. There were more men than women, which would be unusual most other places on a weekday.
A park next to the railway line was full of kids playing and not-quite-relaxed parents keeping a watchful eye. Next to the swings was a shopping trolley. Not our one, I hoped. It’d be really spooky if it had followed us. Near the road was a big rock commemorating the opening of the park in 1985. The plaque listed all the Auburn councillors of the day, and back then all thirteen had Anglo names. When I got home I looked up Auburn Council’s website. Their slogan is ‘Many Cultures, One Community’ and judging from the names and photos they now have five Anglo, three Asian and three Arabic councillors.
The mayor’s page on the website indicated that in the last few months the council had formed a partnership with the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors, which provides services to refugees settling in New South Wales. It had also held a soccer benefit match to support Refugee Week, and had invited nominations from the community to select the best places to put up four council Christmas trees. Many Cultures, One Community.
We passed what looked like the world’s most elaborate Turkish delight shop, the contents of which looked so good that I almost forgot I don’t like Turkish delight, and followed the railway line away from the shops toward the mosque. On the way we passed several newly built and nearly built apartment blocks, the first fully concreted non-carported front garden we had seen, and the Sydney-Turkish Welfare and Cultural Centre.
A Month of Sundays Page 5
