After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  ‘What happened then?’ I said.

  ‘I gotta go to the ladies, gimme a sec.’ Mum ran into the RSL. Before I could reflect on anything she was back with two more schooners. I knew I couldn’t stomach any more beer but I thanked her to be polite.

  ‘So after I left the desert I went to more desert!’

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘Got the East-West mail plane to take me to Tom Price, I thought it was a good-luck job, having your name and all. Anyway, it wasn’t glamorous, you never came there, I was a security guard. I was live-in as usual, no kitchen, no bathroom, but good for me to save some money, except there it was hell. On country you see, brothers and sisters got money from the government every Thursday and then shit shows for four days. I even went to the local council and said will you please bloody give them grog money on fucking Monday when the pub’s closed! They didn’t listen, they didn’t fucking care.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘GUBBA-ment, Tommy! Anyway, I kept working there, I learnt their lingo, they called me sister, so all good, right? Wrong! One night, bloody fight breaks out over fuck knows what and everyone’s throwing pool balls and fucking cues. Deadly weapons if you ask me. People were even smashing chairs. I came in the middle of it, the middle of the bar and screamed stop now! That’s enough! – and one bitch come up to my face with a glass, wanted to glass me. I said you think that’s a good idea? That’s all I could think to say at the time. Luckily some of the brothers come up then and said no, she’s a sister or something. I can’t remember, I was so scared. Next thing I knew I was out in the carpark shaking hands with all those crazy violent bunch and wishing them well on their way home. I don’t even know what came out of my mouth that night, but I wasn’t killed, the staff weren’t killed, I still reckon to this day a spirit came and spoke for me, stopped me from getting my face slashed apart!’

  ‘And then?’ I asked, but she was already up getting more drinks for us. My mother, in a floral dress, weaving her way through the patrons, drunk and unstable on her high shoes, I saw her bump into the back of another woman, spilling the white wine in the woman’s hand. ‘Fucking watch it,’ she yelled at Mum, but Mum didn’t notice.

  She came back with a schooner of beer for me, and a shot of clear liquid and lemon for herself.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ I asked.

  ‘Bub, I never get to go out, ever, Darryl and me are always at home, please just don’t bother me having a couple of drinks?’ She eyed the table with the white-wine woman sitting there.

  ‘I won’t, it’s okay,’ I said, even though I was already drunkish-talking. ‘Where’d you go then?’

  ‘What-fucking-ever Tommy! I went to the same old live-ins, same old fucking shitholes.’

  ‘It’s okay, Mum.’ I tried to reassure her anger. ‘I’m just making conversation, I like when you tell me stories.’

  ‘There’s only one story true, Tommy, I was a no-good mother to you.’ She swallowed hard and I let her finish. ‘I was dirt sad, Tommy, that’s sad when not even the free dirt, the free life on earth, don’t make you thankful.’

  ‘Let’s get a cab,’ I said.

  ‘Naahh, let’s not.’ She pointed her index finger then and poked me on the tip of my nose. I thought it was odd, and that no-one had ever done that to me before.

  ‘I love you, boy, but I did you wrong,’ she said and then got up from the bench, walked to the open glass door to the bar, and through it. I finished my beer slowly, drew a cigarette out of her forgotten packet and crushed it like I used to do when I was a kid. I didn’t like all this; I wished I wasn’t feeling this way, with everything atilt. I wished my mum and I could communicate in other ways, but in every memory, ever since I could remember, there was always a drink in the foreground.

  Mum hadn’t returned so I went in the bar and found her at the poker machines. Resting another beer at her chest and tapping at the buttons below the fluorescent-lit screen. I stood behind her, a couple of other older women gathered round. Mum was winning money: ‘How much did you put in, Mum?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Twenty bucks – now look, Tommy – $210! – You must be a good-luck charm I reckon.’

  The ladies whooped with her as the numbers went up to $230, $260, $320, back to $200, then $260. ‘Mum, stop now, can’t you just collect it and then we’ll get a cab?’ I tried to coerce her, keep-the-money-and-run style; I hoped she would stop. I hoped she’d save it to fix the oven or the showerhead, anything but staying here with the aged sirens gathering around to sing her into the rocks. She tap-tapped again and again.

  ‘Please, Mum.’

  ‘Leave your mum be, she’s winning good, lad!’ one of the vulture women said then.

  ‘Don’t worry, Tommy, I’ve got plenty of money.’ Mum said this, paused momentarily and then threw her arm toward the bar. ‘Only problem he’s sitting up there still alive!’ At her punch line, the vulture women chortled, laughing at some inside joke. I didn’t get it, and shot my eye in that direction. I couldn’t miss the sideburns: Darryl was drinking at the bar. I hurried toward him, eyeing the floor, looking for my tiny, crawling brother.

  ‘Where’s Joe?’

  ‘Hey mate!’ He gestured toward the barmaid, one arm around my shoulders. ‘Bev, this is Margie’s young boy!’

  ‘Where the hell is Joe?’ I nudged his arm off my shoulder and said the words clear enough so he knew I was serious.

  Darryl lowered his voice, talked as if I were standing behind him. ‘The door locks, mate.’

  I turned on my feet and rushed toward the glass doors, and heard him sling ‘Have a beer Tom, mate!’ at my back.

  I glanced back through the glass as I passed it. Darryl was making the barmaid laugh, and there was my mum, also laughing, with those nearby predators. I had the sharp apprehension I’d stepped out of a sort of asylum. And then I ran.

  ‘I ran as fast as I could, and in what direction I could remember.’

  ‘At what hour approximately did you then ring the emergency services?’ The officer leant his notebook against his thigh. Light blended the walls behind him, made them all lemon-tinted, shadowless, and everything appeared one-dimensional, like a pantomime backdrop. Like the theatre sets we’d painted at the boarding college. When we were just boys.

  ‘Too late,’ I said.

  The Last Class

  ‘Who brought the knife? In fact it wasn’t a good idea to have a knife at school.’

  ‘I can’t remember if it was Ahmedov’s knife, or he had only taken it. I just remember it was him that flicked the knife back, and the splatter against your long skirt. You brushed your hand against the fabric and I said it’s not ruined, it won’t stain but I didn’t quite know how to say ruined or stained so I said for the moment it’s bad but after wash it’s good. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ Kamla almost laughed at the thing we both remembered.

  ‘Listen to us now – we can speak fluently!’

  ‘Yes, it’s true.’ She seemed sad then.

  ‘How is your family?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  The screen beside us flashed and announced her number and we both looked down at her ticket.

  ‘It’s me – I hope to see you again someday,’ she said.

  ‘God willing.’

  And we kissed on each cheek and said goodbye. I walked back to the end of the growing line that was snaked around the building.

  During one of our classes, comparing our employment visas and how they’d read ABLE TO WORK, Amina – my quick and closest friend – had said that the cards should instead read ABLE TO WORK AS A CLEANER. We laughed about it then; I can see her now taking the end of her hijab and covering her mouth as she did when she cackled, covering her teeth, then wiping the laughter-tears that would gather at each eye. We’d become friends on the first day, her and Selma and I, all three of us ha
d known a little English and Arabic so we were drawn to each other for that reason. It was like that at school, we all spent time together and we all spoke our new language, but for lunch and during break we naturally ordered ourselves by the ability to chat freely, to speak as fast and widely as we liked. Our lives outside school – in the street, posting letters, buying groceries, translating clothing sizes, dealing with bills, school notices, our children’s homework, doctors, pharmacies, the labels on medicines, train ticket booths and, most dreaded of all, the telephone – were in translation, confusion, so it was natural, I think, that we all did separate a little. In the same way, there was something very intimate between all of us in the class; we shared something extraordinary, so we were joined forever in some way. We all were. We’d remember each other, I’d hoped; I want to remember each other.

  Before school, way before, we were different. We were nothing, we shared no common tongue with our new country and we’d spoken all different languages and had all manner of ideas on how to live. We’d come by sea, by foot, by flight; some stowaways, some stamped. Some waited seven years, and lived four to a chambre de bonne, shared a USB of prepaid internet each night and Skyped their families so far away, babysat babies that weren’t their own before having the courage to apply to stay, to bring their children over finally, to go to school. Others had applied for asylum right away. I myself had slept in the park with my children for two nights before being told about, and moving to, the place that the local people called the fourrière, which I found out a long time later meant the unwanted-dogs home: the pound. I don’t want to remember that time, though – it’s in the dark past, in that forever-time that we think will never change before it does. I have to carry it, it’s filed away in my rib bones; I carry it, but I don’t want to remember.

  When we got to school we were all barely legal, barely audible, and now I see Kamla and we can talk clearly about the errors of our speech in the past. Not when we were infants, but when we were grown women, mothers. No-one knows this experience but us.

  I remember every single day of school. Isn’t it strange, I think. I don’t remember all the days of my children’s lives, I don’t remember every day of the terrible times, but I remember school. I recall the first appointment, the glossy blue folder I was given by the lady from immigration, how kind she was, how I watched the video on equality and democracy with the plastic translation handle against my ear, and how I took the test for TB and the cold glass pressed against my breasts. I’d wept a lot and used up so many tissues, had drawn the final tissue from the carton, and then the nice radiology assistant had gone to find another box of tissues – which finally made me realise I needed to stop crying. I remember the doctor also, another kind woman, who wrote out seven different sticky yellow notes for me that I’ve still kept somewhere. One for an optometrist because my eyes were weak, she said, though I still haven’t gotten the glasses, maybe at the end of this month. She wrote another note for a pap smear at the polyclinic that Médecins Sans Frontières ran, and that didn’t cost a thing. She’d written another sticky note for the dentist, because my teeth were bad. We also talked about the foods I loved and the ones she loved and missed too, and she wrote down a very good, reasonably priced Lebanese restaurant in the city.

  The following week was my first day of school, at thirty-one years old. The evening before, I’d laid out a long skirt, opaque stockings, a sleeved blouse that tied above my collarbone, a purple scarf. I got up very early, when the sky was still inky blue, and prepared my makeup, pinned my hair. Selma had shown me a photo on her cell a few weeks later of her hair that she’d done in the morning – it was wavy ringlets, beautifully curled and blow-dried. ‘I do it like this every day,’ she’d said. ‘But then you tie it up in your scarf all day,’ I said, noting the obvious. ‘But I know how beautiful it is under my scarf’ – she giggled then, her fingers flat, pressed just below her nose. Did I cover my mouth when I laughed too, I wondered?

  That first day we’d all been together in the Beethoven room; it was cold, I remember. The rooms were named after composers – Chopin, Schumann, Bach, Vivaldi – and all the rooms were cold since, as we were to discover, the temperatures were controlled by the local council. We were from forty-one different countries, the teachers told us; they told us many things in French and even though the first day they had a projector set up with images to match, pictures with red circles and red slashes across the images, the universal sign for not allowed, it had still been difficult to understand. They told us there was no spitting in the classroom or the quadrangle outside, that we were obligated to speak French from morning until evening. We could not smoke inside, we could not pick the fruit and vegetables from the garden in the centre of the courtyard, we should respect the tables and chairs and drink our tea and coffee outside, and we could not have our phones on in class. Most importantly, they said, the classroom was a public space, a neutral place, a place free of religion, and so we could not practise our religious beliefs in the classroom; no-one was to wear symbols of religion, the teacher said, no jewellery with a cross or anything like that. Someone put his hand up then, I remember; he’d asked: ‘And what about the hijab?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ the teacher had said in a way to end the conversation and moved on to the curriculum and sorting us into our classes. I was placed with Amina and Selma; we happened to sit together, by chance. All of us students arranged ourselves into the bracket-shape of assembled chairs and tables. We went through our objectives:

  1. understand, read and write French

  2. learn the social structure of France

  3. understand how police, the postal system etc. work

  4. learn how to get around the city

  5. prepare for the exams

  6. obtain a certificate of French comprehension.

  ‘Every time you come, you must sign in to the class,’ the teacher said. ‘If you do not turn up to class you do not get your papers to stay here. If you have a job, your boss will see the paperwork; if you are not here and not at your work then you will not get your visa to stay. In the morning you will learn to speak; in the afternoon you will learn to write.’

  Many other days happened after our first: we became close, we laughed a lot with the teachers in class, sometimes we watched films without subtitles, some people graduated without fanfare and we said goodbye, every day we took turns to bring food and sweets to each other from our countries. Sometimes on weekends we’d visit second-hand markets together, and meet at the housing-association apartments for meals too, although never at Amina’s apartment since she was embarrassed of her apartment, on account, she said, of the mismatched furniture that the housing association wouldn’t let her change.

  Amina, Selma and I were having coffee during break when she explained we could never come over.

  ‘I said, madam, please we need to get more furniture, I just want to add a sofa for guests to sit on – it’s embarrassing having this outdoor furniture inside!’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said no, because what if there is a fire, you will make us pay for your sofa if it is destroyed. I said, madam, I promise I won’t make you pay for it, I’ll sign a contract. No, no, no! she said.’ Every time Amina was angry outside of school she’d take a selfie, the angry selfie we called it. After the argument with the housing lady she’d gone outside and taken her first one, and she’d showed us. ‘Oh please do this every time,’ we pleaded with her, laughing. Every week she came in and showed us new ones, scrolling through dozens of selfies: stern eyes, pursed lips, different coloured scarves, and different waiting-room backdrops. Most days we laughed so hard we cried.

  As we became more fluent in French, the language began to weave into our conversations at break and lunch. One day the three of us were talking about an exam or our children not sleeping through the night or something or other, and we were speaking, by habit, a mix of Arabic, English and Frenc
h, each of us starting our sentence in one language and finishing in another, finishing each other’s sentences in another language and so on for a few quick, distorted minutes. I threw my arms around my friends’ waists and leant into their faces, serious, but half smiling: ‘Ahh, girls,’ I said, ‘can we please just choose one language per conversation?’ We looked at each other wide-eyed then, realising, and began to cackle, cackle until I almost peed, and our laughter bellowed through the quadrangle. ‘We sound like witches,’ Selma said – which made us laugh even louder, deeper. I looked around the courtyard: there were some men staring at us near the vegetable garden, smoking cigarettes, bemused. I wasn’t embarrassed, we laughed even more. ‘We are fucking idiots,’ Amina said. ‘Yes, we are fucking idiots,’ Selma agreed, nodding, laughing; I felt so free then, so perfectly free.

  There were arguments at school too, sadder days, but we were changed from them, we became better, more whole I think. Once I wanted to come to school and talk to my friends and complain that my husband wouldn’t allow me to buy new shoes this month but Selma was visibly upset, her grandmother’s house had been bombed. Her grandmother was safe but when Selma had Skyped with her younger sister who was ten years old, her sister had laughed about the bombs, how funny it was that they fell right on their grandmother’s house when she was out getting groceries. Selma was smoking cigarettes that day, she’d never smoked before, and she held it like a strange small torch in her fingers, puffing and wincing as she told us: ‘It’s like they see the bombing as so normal now, and it scares me, that maybe she doesn’t know how to talk about how she really feels, like she is actually in shock?’ I didn’t complain about my husband and the new shoes in the end.