Losing Face, page 16
Elaine marched back over to him and took the cup from his hand. Some of the coffee had spilt over onto his thick wrinkly fingers.
‘Okay, meet you outside. I go to ladies first.’
He raised his eyebrows at her and walked away. When he was out of sight, Elaine hurried over to the TV, sipping on the coffee. She definitely didn’t need the caffeine, but maybe it helped with courage. The camera was focused on the young woman in the wig. There was sound coming out of the TV but among the contorted voices of the race commentators and the jingles of the poker machines, she had to stand right underneath it to hear what the girl was saying.
‘… but I don’t want to be treated like a statistic. I still have a face and a life.’
‘It’s so brave of you. It really is. And I think what you are doing is sending out a message to other victims that they don’t have to live in shame for something they had no control over.’
‘Yes, and you’re also sending a message to the perpetrators that you aren’t letting this define you. It’s truly just commendable.’
‘Thanks.’
‘How have you been coping through it all?’
‘I’ve been really lucky because my family have been super supportive.’
‘Now we aren’t able to discuss the case in detail or reveal your identity for legal reasons, but have you been able to move on from what happened to you?’
‘I don’t think I will ever move on from it, especially while the legal side of things is still underway, but what I would like to say is that my life is on track. I’m happy and I’m strong and I’m looking towards the future. I would hope that anyone who has ever experienced something like this could do the same.’
‘Amazing words. Thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your courageous story. If you’d like to know more about our guest’s journey you can follow the Twitter handle at the bottom of the screen.’
‘And after the break we’ll take a look at a groundbreaking new procedure described as the lunchbreak nose job.’
Because she had been standing right underneath the TV, she hadn’t quite processed a clear image of the girl until she stepped away from the wall. The girl was small and wore the kind of blazer you’d wear for a job interview. Elaine had half expected to feel something for her, but she only felt flabbergasted that the girl had gone as public as she could.
Elaine’s hand shook, which made it hard to keep the insipid coffee in the paper cup. On her way to plonk it in the bin, she realised one of the men who had been watching the races was watching her. She pulled her shoulders back and walked towards the smoking area where her coffee suitor was probably still waiting. As much as she wasn’t bothered for the encounter, she couldn’t find it in herself to be entirely rude.
She passed the poker machine she had been playing earlier and the genie flashed up and winked at her. Elaine swore and fished through her bag for a pen and her little notepad. She scrawled down the Twitter name that the presenter had mentioned. She would have to get Alex to help her.
The man was savouring his cigarette as though he only smoked one a day. ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’
‘Sorry, I had to wait for toilet.’
‘It’s okay. I’m Valon.’
‘I’m Elaine. Can I have a cigarette?’
‘My pleasure. You smoke?’
‘I once was smoker, yes. Long time ago.’
‘I’ve never stopped. In Albania, you’re given cigarette with breast milk.’
The first drag of the cigarette comforted her, alerted her body to something like hunger. Well, it probably was hunger; she had only eaten a few almond biscuits all day.
‘Valon, do you know where to get good kebab in Ashfield?’
‘I do. Finish the cigarette and we go.’
21
The plume of cigarette smoke rebounded onto Joey off the glass pane at the bus stop. He ruffled his T-shirt and stepped further away into the open for fresh air. Centrelink probably had some clause in the application that hindered people’s payments if they spent it on shit like cigarettes. The last thing he needed was more strikes against him. Without a job, and with his mum on his back, he was willing to do anything to get money. Even if he didn’t go to jail, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hearing the guilt trip from his mum about how she paid for the lawyer.
When the bus pulled up, two middle-aged sisters wrapped in identical woollen scarves were sitting at the front. At first, Joey thought it was the one scarf entwining both of their necks. They were the only other passengers. He had forgotten his earphones, so he sat at the back and played a hip-hop playlist on speaker, holding the phone near his ear, dismissing the thought that it was annoying for the old sisters. One of them turned to glare. He swore at her under his breath and stared out of the window on to Roberts Road. Everything looked ugly, speckled with decay. Cloaked in shit. A dilapidated Hungry Jack’s tacked onto a servo so you could fill your car and your gullet at the same time.
Centrelink had only been open ten minutes and already there was a motley crew busting out of the weepy-blue waiting chairs. A bulging security guard winked at Joey and waved his hand in front of the automatic doors for them to open, as though Joey was invisible to the sensor.
He was incorporated into the ecosystem of Centrelink the moment he crossed the threshold. The office had its own geography, climate, native people – people brought together by messed-up parents, fibro houses, dictators, liquidators. He pressed the button on the electronic kiosk that said Make a new claim and a ticket spat out at him. He sat across from an old man with an eye patch who kept muttering and looking around. Next to the old man sat a skinny dude with his legs crossed at the ankles. Behind him was a lady in a business suit. There was also an Arab family eating from a Bakers Delight bag. They all looked like they had been there for years.
He panicked. Why wasn’t he off at uni studying something that would make him something, dating someone, driving a nice car? The answer burnt clear as day – because he was an idiot. Because he was a weakling. Maybe what Haz had said to him that night through the window was true. Maybe he needed to start acting like a man.
The old man’s sobbing dragged him back to reality. He wasn’t producing any tears, just making sounds from his droopy mouth and thumping his fist into his thigh intermittently. Joey wondered why the old man was alone. Surely he had children and grandchildren who could have accompanied him. Everyone else ignored the cries, as though they knew the old man, knew what he was up to. Joey tried to ignore it too, but he pictured Tayta sitting there on her own and his heart flared. The skinny dude rolled his eyes. There was something meditative about the cries. A moody accompaniment to the office orchestra.
Joey spoke to him. ‘What’s wrong?’
The old man cried louder.
‘Do you want some water?’
He cried louder again.
‘How long have you been waiting?’
Too loud.
In what could only be described as a scene-stealing moment, the skinny dude stood up between the sets of waiting chairs, turned his palms up to the yellowing rectangular sheets of the ceiling and yelled, ‘Youse know what? This is illegal, this treatment. I want the manager!’
The long-suffering employees and most of the other punters ignored him, just like they had been ignoring the old man, but Joey was intrigued.
The performance continued. ‘This is discrimination. My landlord already signed the bloody form! I handed it in already-oh-why-won’t-anyone-listen-to-me?’
He was shaking his legs like a baby at the beginning of a tantrum. His words were slop mixed with lament and they poured out of his mouth coated with a waning high that Joey recognised. Sweat ran through the lines on his face. Blisters on the forearms.
The guy became incomprehensible fast, whining like the mating cats that sometimes claimed the nook outside Alex’s bedroom window. The security guard marched over to the clerk behind the counter, who was waving a form in his direction without looking away from her computer screen. Joey got the sense that it was all another rehearsal. That all the people in there were trying to perfect a scene they had played over and over.
The security guard took the form over to the skinny dude and spoke with a sweetness that contrasted with his physique. ‘Just have the form signed by the landlord and either bring it back or upload it on the app. Do you have a smartphone? Trust me, the sooner you do this, the sooner they can help.’
The dude ignored him, reprising his hymn. ‘My landlord already signed the bloody form! I handed it in already-oh-why-won’t-anyone-listen-to-me? Why-won’t-anyone-listen-to-me? Why-won’t-anyone-listen-to-me?’
His sound had a strength to it, a penetration. It bounced around the security guard and the prams and the self-service kiosks. It rushed into the drawers in the desks, under the toilet door, and whirled around Joey’s head until words, lathered in the colour of scorn, prised open his chest and throat and mouth and cracked the dude’s cacophony. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ he yelled.
The office orchestra faltered. Joey looked at the faces around him. They were drenched in his voice. Sometimes the only thing that can break a sound is another sound. It had worked in class when a teacher couldn’t get everyone to shut up. Someone would whistle really loud and the class would go quiet and the teacher would continue.
Joey kept yelling. ‘No-one has to listen to your shit! Just take the fucking form and go!’ His scalp itched.
The security guard came over, and that was the catalyst for the workplace song to resume, albeit quieter. The dude, having had attention diverted from him, stormed out the sliding doors.
The old man had his working eye fixed on Joey, his hands tucked tightly into the pockets of his leather jacket.
His mother met him at the front door. ‘How’d you go?’
‘How’d-I-go-what?’
‘At Centrelink.’
‘It was fucked is how I went.’
She followed him through the house to the fridge.
‘Is there ever anything to eat in this house?’ he said.
‘Oh, sorry, I forgot you lived in a hotel. What can I get you, dear guest?’ Her words were lava.
‘I wish it was a hotel. At hotels you get some privacy.’
‘You’re an ungrateful brat, Joey.’
‘And you’re a fucking busy bee. You think Mrs Kyriacos makes her kids feel like they owe her something for taking care of them?’
‘I don’t have the fucking money and husband and mansion that Mrs Kyriacos has!’
Joey walked to his bedroom. She followed him and propped herself against the door frame. He lay on his bed with his shoes still on, which he knew would shit her. He poked at his phone without direction, willing her to leave him alone but also willing her to say something so he could fight.
She spoke with a fresh tone, as though they hadn’t just had an altercation. ‘So, what happened?’
Joey tried to summarise the events in his head. He dropped his phone onto his chest and fixed his gaze on the ceiling as he spoke. ‘It was hell. It’s full of freaks and all they told me to do, when I finally spoke to someone, was to go online and apply and I have to set up some other government bullshit account that you need ID for which I hadn’t fucking taken with me.’
‘Yeah, well, the government isn’t going to just give you money. They’re going to make you prove who you are and that you are in fact in need of it.’
‘Really? Tayta manages to get it for nothing.’
For a split second, Joey was proud of the mirror he held up to his mother, and then he felt like a teeny tiny boy in his childhood bed.
‘How dare you! Dragging your tayta into this. You think she doesn’t deserve her pension?’
‘I’m not gonna bother applying. It’s too complicated.’ He glanced at his mother before reaching for his phone.
She looked at the floor and then up at the spot he had been looking at. ‘You know what, Joey? This is all my fault. It’s all my goddamn fault.’ She spoke with a Home and Away calm about her. ‘And you know why? Because all those years ago when your other grandparents and my friends were offering help, I said no. “Let us do this for the boys, Amal. Leave them with us. We’ll show them how to do this. Take a holiday, Amal. The boys aren’t your responsibility alone.” When those offers were coming through, I was a fucking brick wall.’ She poked the wall. She was crying. ‘I was a goddamn wall. Fending off support because I wanted to do this all on my own. Because I thought I knew what was best for my sons and for myself, my family. Because I thought I could be a mum and dad and sister and brother and friend and teacher. Cook, entertainer. I thought I could do it all. My way!’ She was shouting now.
Alex emerged from his room and stood behind her. Joey shut his eyes.
‘My whole life. My whole life I spent worrying. When I was a kid, it was about impressing my parents. When I was a teenager, it was about what people would think. When I was with your father, it was about – I spent years worrying about him in jail, for fuck’s sake! And the shit you’re putting me through now!’
How much shouting did Joey have to deal with? The old man, the skinny dude, his mother – their souls were trying to escape via their throats. He opened his eyes to watch her, because she was rarely like this and it was refreshing to see her be different. Alex put an arm on her shoulder that she swiftly shrugged off.
She continued, drawing deep breaths and sobbing in between her words. ‘At the beginning of the year I was … I was excited. I thought, things are finally good, you know? You were going well in your job. Alex in his last year of school. Your tayta seemed chill. I was excited about …’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘And fuck me, look how it has all turned out.’
She nodded her head sarcastically at her own dwindling speech. Then she stood up straight, made a noise in her throat that sounded like she was agreeing with someone and walked away. Alex shook his head and slammed his bedroom door.
After a few minutes the sound of the food processer filled the house. More noise. He pictured the whirring blade in the machine mincing whatever it was his mother had put in it. He pictured her standing over it, staring into the funnel with her puffy eyes. He wished the machine would go rogue and gather the gusto to suck her in. To completely churn her up. And he wished it would pull him in from his bedroom and churn him up too. And then Alex, the furniture, the house. Greenacre, the whole goddamn country. Every single fucking thing sucked into the blades of the processer and emulsified into a useless thick sludge.
22
The kebab was a bold move for Elaine. She rarely ate takeaway, but she couldn’t deny that it went down well. And then it hit her stomach as she drove back down the Hume Highway and she had to let down the windows to air her farts out. She arrived outside Birrong Boys High School early enough before school was out that she found a car spot near the gates. The lanky eucalypts in the distance were static.
Umm Kulthum was on 2ME. Elaine undid the seatbelt, reclined the chair a little and shut her eyes. She remembered watching the video of this performance on one of the first televisions in the village when she was a little girl. Umm Kulthum was provoking her audience, repeating the same line over and over again, stressing different syllables every time. The concertgoers roared for her to keep going, to repeat the same line. They were under her spell, enraptured, pleading for her to sing into eternity. Umm Kulthum was a siren, controlling the horde with the undulations of her song.
Elaine wasn’t in control of a single thing.
The sounds of the young men siphoning out of the school gates prompted Elaine to open her eyes and pull the chair back up. She stared out the window at first a trickle and then a stampede of scruffy, greasy, caramel boys coming out of the gates, stealing each other’s hats and shoving and fist-bumping. Some of them hopped on to old buses, some dropped down into the train station and some climbed into people movers driven by flustered mums trying to avoid all the ‘no parking’ signs.
Alex had been completely obscured by a big boy with a beard and was about to hop on to a bus when Elaine wound down the window and yelled out his name. He looked everywhere but her direction so she called out again and beeped the horn. When Alex caught sight of her he became taut, like a resting puppet awoken by its commander. He crossed the road clumsily, leant in through the open window and gave her a kiss.
His face was dread. ‘What’s happened, Tayta?’
‘Baby, nothing. I was in the area and come to drive you. Come in.’
As they passed the primary school on Auburn Road, Alex said, ‘It’s a school zone, Tayta. You have to go forty kays.’
‘Forty kays, my ayr. We driving on eggshells? Not one kid on the road.’
‘Yeah, but what if one popped out in front of the car?’
‘You want me to drop you here so you get the bus?’
‘Maybe. I don’t want to be complicit in any crime. I think we’ve done enough of that in our family.’
Elaine relaxed her foot off the accelerator. She hadn’t discussed with Alex how he felt about his father’s reappearance. Amal had given her the rundown and, for the first time in forever, she had thought to let them figure it out themselves.
‘Have you spoke to Dad since?’ she asked
‘Yeah. Actually, we text every day. But don’t tell Joey, cos he’d kill me.’
‘You don’t have to worry about Joey. He has other thing to care about.’
‘Why didn’t you go left there?’
‘We going to my place. I need your help. You have your computer?’
‘My laptop, yeah.’
‘Good.’
At the dining table, Elaine took the little notepad out of her bag and placed it on the plastic covering the doily tablecloth. The Twitter handle wasn’t a name; it was something obscure, because the girl had to remain anonymous.
