The Art of Persuasion

by Midalia, Susan;

  A buzz on her phone. A message. From Adam.

  Would you like me to pick you up? Mosman Park is a long way from your place and you’ll be doing enough walking as it is.

  Only a man in his forties—well, Adam, anyway—would send a text with grammatically complete sentences, plus one apostrophe to denote a contraction.

  Thank you. That would be great.

  It’s the least I can do.

  After what? And then another message coming through:

  I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. I didn’t mean to but I’m worried that I did.

  She looked at her screen but her fingers were frozen, even as she wanted to write a grammatically complete sentence to tell him that he mustn’t worry but how kind of him to apologise and worry about her feelings when what she really wanted to say was that she was standing on the edge of the world, falling from a dizzying height, plunging headlong into desire.

  Then another message!

  Jessie has a new animal. Guess what it is.

  She hoped it wasn’t a gnu.

  Maybe a hippo but I don’t know how to spell it. Did you hear the one about the PhD candidate who could never remember how to spell Nietsche. So after a few months he changed his topic to Kant

  Ha-ha. But I think you’ll find that Nietzsche has a z.

  Smartarse

  I’m not being a smartarse. I’m being correct.

  Then nothing. That was it. Then another message!

  It’s a tortoise.

  Are you sure it’s not a turtle

  You like the last word, don’t you?

  Look who’s talking

  I’m not talking, I’m texting

  You’re being very literal

  OK Hazel. You win.

  She didn’t want it to end this way, with winning and losing and jokey banter.

  You didn’t hurt my feelings, Adam. I know you are the kindest man. That’s why I like you so much.

  She waited. Waited some more, but it seemed he had no more words to give her.

  It was awkward now. Unmistakably. Standing on her doorstep, Adam could hardly look at her. Had she pushed him too far? Declared her feelings and made him back off? But it was OK to tell someone you liked them, wasn’t it? Or had so much been too much? All she could do in the face of her confusion and his evasion was to quip about his hair looking mysteriously tamed. But he just shuffled his feet, darted his eyes about. Should she ask him to come in? For a glass of water? For anything? But he was saying they needed to get going, a fifteen-minute drive, and did she have an umbrella, because it looked like rain. They climbed down the stairs, Hazel in front, weighed down with disappointment. Stepping aside as he opened the door of his car for her, giving each other the widest berth. She slipped into his shiny blue car, spotless inside, but still he wasn’t speaking. She knew by his silence that she must have misread the signs: those telegraphic messages she’d begun to turn into a novel, her first fucked-up sentence of Shredded by Desire. But she refused to show her deflation. She was, after all, a woman on a mission, trying to do her bit for the greater good.

  ‘I’d like to do the first house,’ she said. ‘If that’s OK.’

  He threw her a quick glance, then turned back to look at the road. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But only if you feel comfortable.’

  She wouldn’t have offered, she said, if she didn’t feel comfortable. Then she felt churlish and silly and there was silence again. Unease.

  ‘Do you have enough leg room?’ he said.

  ‘My legs are very short.’

  Churlish again. And he’d probably never even looked at her legs. She listened to the silence, then registered a strange sort of quietness.

  ‘Does this car even have an engine?’ she said.

  ‘It’s electric.’

  ‘An electric car? Don’t they cost a lot of money?’

  ‘My father left me a bit,’ he said, matter-of-fact. ‘I got rid of my old rust bucket and bought this. It’s much safer for Jessie, and much better for the environment.’

  Of course. Did Adam ever do anything ignoble?

  He cleared his throat. ‘You seem a bit down,’ he said. ‘I mean, is there anything…’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. Nothing to complain about.’

  ‘You’re not a complainer, are you?’

  Hazel gave a fake laugh. ‘I do it a lot in my head.’

  ‘Like saying fuck in your head?’

  ‘Yes. That too.’

  Taking her back to the train and the first time they’d talked: when he’d noticed her, and she’d noticed him, and they’d discussed books and love and death, which pretty much covered everything.

  ‘Complaining in your head is a good thing,’ she said. ‘You don’t lose your friends, for a start, by wallowing in self-pity.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as self-pitying.’

  ‘Oh, I am. Really. I’m full of it. Just ask my former friends.’

  Which made him laugh.

  ‘Why should you feel sorry for yourself, anyway?’ he said.

  Was he having a go at her now? It brought her up short.

  ‘I know I have distinctly first-world problems,’ she said. ‘Although I would like a job very soon. I couldn’t even score a job in a fish market. Which is just as well, I guess, because the smell wouldn’t have helped my prospects in the romance department.’

  There. Take that.

  ‘So. You’re…not with anyone?’

  She heard an edge in his voice, and so she took another plunge. ‘I’m a bit fed up with the guys I meet, to be honest,’ she said. ‘Young men are immature. Clumsy. Superficial.’

  She saw his hands tighten, just a little, on the steering wheel.

  ‘That’s a huge generalisation,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m using a statistically valid sample, Adam. I’ve had seventy-eight young lovers since I turned sixteen.’

  He kept a straight face. ‘That’s not enough evidence. A statistically valid sample is at least a thousand people.’

  ‘Then I have a lot to not look forward to, don’t I?’

  She waited. He didn’t say a word.

  ‘I have an animal for Jessie,’ she said. ‘A gnu. I found it in a toyshop.’

  ‘Well. A gnu. He’ll love that, thank you.’

  He looked at her again, a little longer this time. She was measuring out her life with the length of his glances and his different tones of voice and his slightly tight hands on a steering wheel.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll find a job one day,’ he said. ‘Something that satisfies you, I mean. Work that does some good in the world.’

  He didn’t mention the possibility of lover number seventy-nine.

  So far no rain. So far so good. But then the first ten doors were No Shows and Adam was hardly saying a word and she was almost beginning to wish it would pour buckets so she could turn back. Go home. But then—finally—an elderly man with an open face who was always happy to talk, he said. But as soon as Adam said Greens that open face closed down. It wanted to send the illegals back to where they came from. Adam was standing back and so Hazel took a chance, told the bolshie man at the door how the government used that word to make asylum seekers seem like criminals.

  ‘They’re people seeking asylum,’ she said. ‘And under Australian and international law, they’re allowed to enter the country without authorisation.’

  The man scowled. ‘Well, aren’t you the clever one?’ he said.

  She flushed. ‘I’m not trying to be clever. I’m giving you the facts.’

  ‘Well, the fact is they have the money to pay people smugglers, so they sure as hell can’t be doing too badly.’

  Hazel sighed. But wasn’t this what she wanted, after all? Some semblance of debate?

  ‘Having money doesn’t mean they’re not fleeing persecution,’ she said. ‘Most asylum seekers, the vast majority actually’—she couldn’t remember the figure—‘almost all of them who reach Australia are fleeing persecution or war. They’re
not just looking for a more comfortable life.’

  ‘And you know this because?’

  ‘Their claims are assessed. Case by case.’

  He was leaning against the doorframe now. Was he being casual before trying to catch her out?

  ‘They could have stopped at other safe countries along the way,’ he said. ‘They’re just country shopping. Picking and choosing.’

  She seized another chance. ‘The countries along the way won’t let them work. So they can’t support themselves, let alone their families.’

  ‘Name one.’

  ‘Indonesia.’

  ‘Name another one.’

  She couldn’t. And Adam didn’t rush in to help.

  The man stopped leaning on the door, stood up straight. ‘Of course people want to come here,’ he said. ‘But we already take more than our fair share of refugees. How about other countries pulling their weight?’

  This time she did remember a number, found in Adam’s kit.

  ‘We actually take less than one percent of the world’s refugees,’ she said. ‘And we’re a prosperous nation. With lots of space.’

  ‘And a high unemployment rate, my dear.’

  He was like one of those big, blow-up plastic toys she’d had as a kid: she kept knocking him down and he kept bouncing back.

  ‘Let’s look after our own first,’ he said. ‘All the poor people living in cardboard boxes who don’t know where their next meal’s coming from.’

  ‘Well, we could help the homeless a lot more,’ she said, ‘if we didn’t spend all those billions on keeping people in detention. We could save an awful lot of money’—billions, an awful lot of money—but then she remembered something else. ‘We’re the only country in the world that detains asylum seekers while their claims are being heard. It would be so much cheaper, and more humane, to put them into the community.’

  The man nodded, as if he agreed, but then narrowed his eyes.

  ‘And so we take them in, treat them well,’ he said. ‘And then what? They’ll keep coming in droves. Look what’s starting to happen in Europe, millions of people flooding into countries that can’t look after them. That’s your solution, is it? Just let them all start pouring in. It’s not going to work, sweetheart. It’s already breaking down, all across Europe. They’ll have blood in the streets before they know it.’

  ‘Look,’ she said. Which wasn’t a good way to start. ‘Sir. I understand it’s a complex problem. That war and poverty are the root causes and—’

  ‘Complex! So what makes you an expert?’

  ‘I know we’re not helping by bombing other countries,’ she said. ‘We’re only creating more refugees.’

  ‘So you’re one of those people who think the West is to blame. You think that—’

  ‘It would have been better if the West had…’ She stopped, started again. ‘If we’d dropped plane-loads of flowers and chocolate instead of bombs.’

  The man shook his head. ‘You Greens have really lost the plot.’

  ‘I was using a metaphor, Sir. I meant we should have made friends with the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, the other troubled places. We should have—’

  ‘Thrown money at regimes and watch them waste it.’

  ‘We should have built schools and hospitals,’ she said. ‘That would have been a good start. To include people, give them a sense of hope.’

  ‘Shoulda, coulda, woulda, it’s all too late. We have to deal with the problem we have now. Because—’

  ‘But the bottom line right now…’ She’d interrupted again. She pressed on. ‘We have a moral obligation to treat asylum seekers decently. Wherever they’ve come from, whoever is to blame. Not lock them up and make them sick, not degrade them and destroy their sense of hope.’

  ‘They’re adults. They made an adult choice.’

  ‘What about the children? That’s no way to treat children.’

  ‘Well, why did their parents put them in harm’s way?’ He drew himself up, triumphant. ‘We’ve stopped the boats, haven’t we? We’ve stopped all the deaths at sea. That’s all that matters.’

  He waited for a moment, then turned around and swiftly closed the door. Hazel kicked the ground with a frustrated toe.

  ‘You gave him some valuable facts,’ said Adam. He was trying to reassure her, she knew, yet she couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘And it is a complex problem, Hazel, you’re absolutely right. And you’re right to say we should treat people decently. That’s non-negotiable.’

  She finally met his gaze. ‘But this all feels…’ She didn’t want to say pointless, didn’t want to give up. ‘Maybe I should be helping to raise money, or teach English to a refugee. Storm a detention centre.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I should have suggested building thousands of McDonald’s in the Middle East so the terrorists would get so fat and slothful they wouldn’t be able to move.’ She pulled a face. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t make a joke of it,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to feel like Neville.’

  He took a step towards her. ‘You’re doing your bit, Hazel. And you’re not going to change the world. Except, well, you could try to tone down your voice, just a little. Be a little less—’

  ‘Abrasive?’

  He nodded. She swallowed.

  ‘You did well,’ he said. ‘Honestly. Maybe he’ll think about what you told him. You might have nudged him just a little. It’s like teaching, I guess. On a good day.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘What about your parents?’ he said. ‘How did you persuade them to start voting for the Greens?’

  ‘I guess they were decent people to start with. I didn’t have to work all that hard.’

  ‘And that’s what you have to keep believing in. That basic sense of decency.’

  They drank some water. They moved on. More No Shows, then Adam doing the talking, she doing the listening again: to the cynicism on the threshold of too many polished doors with stained-glass windows, with so many people chorusing that politicians are a bunch of crooks…snouts in the trough…just in it for the money and the ego. She straightened her back, which was meant to be good for your spine as well as your morale. Knock knock knock. A middle-aged woman in tiny pink shorts, looking Adam up and down, clearly liking what she saw.

  ‘So what matters to me, you say?’ She was positively purring at him. ‘Childcare. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent place? And the cost! It’s astronomical and going up all the time and…’

  On and on she went, a self-interested, burbling pink machine, Adam nodding sympathetically, chipping in with details of Greens policy…over two billion dollars in a boost to funding…more money for parents using long-term daycare…money for assistants…and Hazel was growing impatient, wanting to butt in with the BIG issues: asylum seekers, climate change. And when Tiny Shorts was finally done and closed her parochial door, Hazel turned to Adam, indignant.

  ‘Why are people so selfish?’ she said. ‘Where’s their sense of proportion?’

  ‘But childcare’s a crucial issue,’ said Adam. ‘I’m lucky I have Candace to help me out. A lot.’ He stopped, started again. ‘People’s daily lives matter. They worry about having someone to look after their kids or whether they can afford their medication. New brakes for the car.’

  ‘But none of that will matter if the planet is dying. Can’t people see that?’

  ‘Most people see and yet they don’t. It seems too remote from their more immediate needs. I guess that’s how it often goes.’

  ‘So you’d call it human nature?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But it’s too easy to call it selfish.’

  He was putting her in her place again, and so she simply kept walking, keeping in step. Growing accustomed to more No Shows—six in a row now—and one thin-lipped rebuff. And then: a chink of light. A Greens voter, even if the woman didn’t have time to talk because she had a cake about to burn in the oven. Then more light, a burst of illumination, in fact: a retired farmer who’d voted conservative all his life but
was now feeling conned by the government…no long-term plans for the land…salinity…and now this fracking business…He fixed Hazel with a look.

  ‘What are your policies?’ he said.

  She recalled words like biodiversity and bio fuels and other things with bio in them. Under A for Agriculture: too far back to remember any details.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t really know about that policy.’

  ‘So, why do you support the party, then?’

  At least he wasn’t glaring, or sounding rude.

  ‘There’s a lot I don’t know,’ she said, battling on. ‘Things I should know. I know I should know them.’ This wasn’t going well. ‘But I care about two things most of all. Asylum seekers and climate change, the two most important things for the Greens. And I know we’ll have even more refugees if we don’t stop global warming. We’ll have millions of people without water or fruitful land…’ Fruitful land? ‘All I know is…’ She unclenched her hands. ‘Ninety-five percent of the world’s scientists believe in climate change and the urgent need to address it. That soon it will be too late to reverse the damage.’

  The man nodded. ‘My son thinks you lot are mad,’ he said. ‘That you care more about the loss of the hairy-nosed caterpillar than jobs and the economy.’ He laughed. ‘He actually said that. The hairy-nosed caterpillar.’

  ‘Of course we’re committed to ecological diversity,’ said Hazel. ‘But what people don’t understand—not you, I don’t mean you—we can have a vibrant economy and a healthy environment at the same time. Renewable energy, for starters.’

  ‘So that’s why you’re knocking on doors?’ he said. He was gnarled and lantern-jawed in that rural Aussie kind of way. ‘Something to tell your kids, then?’