Losing Face, page 17
She explained what she wanted Alex to do, and he didn’t ask any questions. He just looked at her for a moment, spun around to his backpack and took his laptop out.
Alex leant in close to the notepad, squinting his eyes. ‘Is that an A?’
‘Ah, let me see. Is it A? Is it E? E.’
He tapped into the search bar and hit enter. ‘What are you going to say to her, Tayta? You don’t even know a hundred per cent if it is her.’
‘Of course it’s her. You think Channel Seven fool me? I’m gonna say sorry. Tell her Joey is good boy.’
‘You know you can get in trouble for that? For contacting her.’
‘Maybe. We see. This is the page?’
The two of them leant in towards the screen, their temples tight against each other. Alex clicked on the result that she was pointing at and read the bio aloud. ‘Survivor. Activist.’
‘That’s her,’ she said.
‘Do you want me to read her latest tweets?’
‘What’s tweeds?’
‘Tweets, Tayta. That’s what Twitter posts are called. Here, look. Her latest one was from this morning: “Thank you to these lovely women for helping spread awareness.” And there’s a photo of the show’s hosts.’
‘Okay, what else she says?’
‘Yesterday afternoon she posted this TED Talk video. It’s a conversation between a rape victim and her attacker ten years after the incident took place.’
‘What’s Tek Talk?’
‘TED Talk. Like, a video of a speech.’
‘Okay. What else?’
‘Four days ago, she wrote: Being raped is not MY story. It does not define ME.’
‘Okay, enough. Send her message.’
‘What? Hell no. Not from my account.’
‘Make one for me.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Okay, but if Mum or Joey find out, I had nothing to do with this.’
‘I told you, don’t worry about them two.’
She watched as Alex followed the necessary steps to create her Twitter account. She had never had any social media. Amal had tried to get her on Facebook a long time ago so that she could interact with her family overseas, but she hadn’t been bothered. There was nothing to talk about with them. Their lives had split like an old hair the second she left the village.
She still hadn’t worked out what she wanted to say to the girl, but she knew in her bones that she had to say something. Her fresh Twitter handle was @Tayta_E and her profile photo was one Alex had on his computer from her birthday last year.
He pulled away from his laptop. ‘It’s done. You’re lucky she accepts direct messages from people she doesn’t follow.’
‘She would be receiving lot of good messages from people. Why would anyone say no to that?’
‘It’s the internet. She’d be receiving lots of hate and being trolled too. What do you want me to type?’
Elaine hadn’t given it much thought but she started dictating anyway. ‘Hello, I am Elaine, grandmother of Joseph Harb. I see you on TV. I hope it is okay to message you. On behalf of my grandson and family I want say sorry for everything you have been through.’
‘That’s it?’
‘No, I’m thinking. Say: you are strong girl and one day you will be even stronger woman. My grandson, Joey, is good boy—’
‘Tayta. No. You can’t say that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then you’re making this about Joey. As if you have said these nice things to her to get to the part where you talk about Joey.’
‘But this girl, she is strong, habibi. I saw her on the TV. She is strong, I know it.’
‘You saw her for five minutes on TV. You don’t know how traumatised she really is and the last thing she needs is the family of one of her attackers telling her he is a good person. And that’s assuming that this is even the right girl.’
‘So you want your brother to go jail?’
‘This isn’t about that! You’ve made it about him again. You’re forgetting that she is the victim.’
Alex was shouting and Elaine, try as she might, couldn’t really see what he was trying to say. She felt a little silly. Alex had moved away from the table and was looking out of the window at the old fig tree in the driveway. Youssef used to shroud the whole thing in mesh like a giant lollipop so that the birds and rats didn’t feast on the fruit. Since he had died, Elaine couldn’t bring herself to do the same. In fact, she hadn’t eaten a single fig from the tree in a year. The creatures, on the other hand, had gorged.
The week after Youssef’s death, the house had been inundated with first, second, fifth cousins who didn’t know when to leave. Every day for a week the relatives had come with bags of freshly ground coffee and sweets and cigarettes and pots of fassoulia to feed her mourning family. Every night Elaine poured the food down the toilet in the laundry, dry-retching and cussing about the cook’s cigarette-stained fingers or their grimy kitchen she once saw. Joey and Alex had stood behind her like altar boys as though she were executing some divine ritual. Ready to fetch the pot, hand her a tea towel, flush the toilet, grasp her elbows as they guided her back to the kitchen-bench altar. They had been so helpful that week. Unlike Amal, whose devastation at losing her father had manifested in long and loud naps.
The three of them had stayed over the entire week. Joey and Alex had shuffled through the house, shifting furniture back into place, wiping coffee spills off nesting tables, emptying ashtrays, closing blinds, and coercing seat cushions back into shape when the relatives had finally left.
Elaine walked over to Alex at the window and put her hand on his shoulder. She was so much shorter than him these days. She had to reach. ‘You hungry?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have malfouf in the fridge, or I can make chicken snizzle.’
‘Nah, I’ll have the malfouf.’
‘You don’t want chicken snizzle?’
‘If I wanted the chicken schnitzel, I would have said.’
‘I’ll make chicken snizzle in case.’
She wandered over to the kitchen. Alex was neglected in all of this. She could see that now. She was glad he was texting with his father.
‘Sorry for snapping at you, Tayta.’
‘Don’t be sorry, habibi. Give me that bowl.’
‘I think you should send the apology as it is. That way you could see what she says before you say too much.’
There was no denying Alex was her favourite. So reasonable, intuitive. He was so much like her.
‘Okay, baby. Send it.’
Michael and Sonia had invited Elaine over for dinner. She’d desperately wanted to avoid them in the lead-up to Joey’s trial, but she couldn’t think of any excuses. The trial was all Michael would want to talk about.
Their house was on a narrow street in Enfield that led to Henley Park. Michael had bought the land cheaply almost twenty years ago and they’d lived in the little bungalow for a short while before he made a tonne of money from property he owned in Queensland and redeveloped the house into a multi-level complex. Elaine was proud of him but some of it could have been toned down. Although, probably not with a wife like Sonia.
Elaine parked the car, made her way to the intercom and pressed it.
Sonia answered the door wearing a brown tracksuit that was covered in a gold tessellated logo. She was holding one of the dogs and the others excitedly scampered around her feet. Her hair was slicked back, which was unusual for her, and she was wearing contact lenses that made her eyes green.
They kissed each other on the cheeks and then, in the very white hallway with the too-big chandelier, Charlie and Chanel appeared. Elaine was happy to see her grandchildren. She didn’t see them at all as often as she saw Joey and Alex. She kissed them multiple times on their cheeks and Chanel put her arm around her and ushered her to the living area.
‘Where’s your dad?’ Elaine asked.
‘He just went to pick up dinner. He’ll be back any minute,’ Sonia replied.
Elaine looked over at the showroom kitchen. The giant vases with sticks. Everything was so impractical.
Charlie and Chanel caught her up on their studies. Michael returned carrying bags filled with Thai food.
The conversation flowed during dinner and then there was a moment of silence and Elaine knew it was coming.
‘So, Ma, Simon’s back in the picture, then.’
Elaine pushed the noodles around her plate. ‘Yes, I told you.’
‘Amal finally realised she can’t do it on her own.’
‘She did on her own this whole time.’
‘Clearly she hasn’t done a great job.’
‘Please, can we leave it for tonight?’
‘Why? Why do you always want to leave it?’
‘Because I’m embarrassed enough in news and with relatives. We still need to talk about it in the home? You invite me over to question me, Michael? I’ve had enough.’
Her grandchildren were silent, staring at their plates. Sonia stood and started clearing up. It struck Elaine that everyone was always so silent when Michael was around.
‘Chanel, habibti, what you think of the situation? You think your cousin is guilty?’ Elaine asked.
Chanel looked at her father, then her mother. ‘Well, I can’t imagine Joey doing something like that, but he was still involved in it. And what those guys did is something that needs to stop happening.’
‘Listen to your daughter,’ Elaine said. ‘Seventeen and is smarter than all of us. All you wanna do, Michael, is talk: talk about Joey, about Amal, about shit. Why? Is this important? You forgetting what real problem is.’ She hadn’t expected to unleash. She didn’t like to do that in other people’s homes, not even her son’s. And what she was saying was hypocritical because she too couldn’t handle Joey and Amal and all that came with them recently. ‘Stop judging your sister and her boys. Yes, they have different life to you, but you know what could happen tomorrow? You know what situation Charlie can be in, in future?’
Michael scoffed. ‘I can hands down say that Charlie will never be in that situation.’
‘Charlie, what you say?’ she asked.
‘No-one knows what the future holds, I guess, but I will definitely avoid those situations.’
Elaine gestured towards her grandchildren. ‘Listen to your kids.’
There was silence, then the dogs started yapping.
Later, as they ate ice cream in the lounge room, Chanel said, ‘Tayta, can you tell me one of those stories about your grandma, please? It’s been ages since you did.’
Elaine laughed. The rest of them were watching football on TV. She was glad Chanel was her only listener.
‘Have I tell you how I get this?’
Elaine fished her necklace and the pendant of Mariam Our Saviour out of her blouse. Chanel held the pendant in her fingers, inspected it.
‘You haven’t, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you not wearing it.’
‘I never take it off in forty-five years.’
‘So how did you get it?’
‘It was my grandmother’s,’ Elaine whispered.
Chanel came in closer to her. They created their own little bubble that blocked out all the football noise.
Elaine went on. ‘The morning of my wedding, my aunts – her two daughters – give it to me in secret.’
‘Why was it a secret?’
‘Because they not supposed to have it. Years before, my tayta was put in the tomb wearing the necklace when she die.’
‘So they took it afterwards?’
‘That’s right. And you wanna know something else from the day she died?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The priest, he didn’t let her coffin in the church, and he didn’t pray for her.’
Chanel gasped. ‘Why not?’
‘They closed-minded in the village. I don’t like to say the word, but they call her a witch. Even though she have special way, she was still religious woman.’
‘Tell me about something she did.’
Elaine racked her brain. ‘In the war, before I’m born, there was no food in the village. Babies dying of hunger, people eating their fingernails for dinner. There’s a cave in the village that go from one side of the mountain to other side, like long, long tunnel. Dark, scary. No-one ever going in there because they scared of the hyena. In my time, they block the openings to the tunnel with concrete because a little boy go missing in there. Anyway, everyone dying of hunger, no flour to make bread, nothing, and someone say they see my tayta, she was a young woman then, walk into the cave. The whole village say, “Ah, she’s dead woman.” The family give up on her. They think they will never see her again, and maybe they don’t mind so much because it mean one less mouth to feed.’
Chanel was wide-eyed, almost in Elaine’s lap.
‘Two days later, a young man from the village is walking past the cave, and he fall to his knees from what he saw.’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘He saw my tayta walking out of cave carrying big sack of ameh, grain, on her back.’
‘What! How did she get it?’
Elaine put her hands up in surrender. ‘No-one ever ask, and she never tell. And the young man who see her coming out of the cave, he end up marrying her, your great-great-grandfather.’ She whispered in Chanel’s ear. ‘When I die, this is yours.’ She held the pendant up and it twinkled in the glow of the many downlights.
Chanel buried her face into Elaine’s neck, kissing her repeatedly.
23
Along with most things that had happened in the past months, waking up to a text from his father wasn’t something Joey had ever anticipated would happen to him.
Hi Mate, I’ll be arriving Wednesday. I’m staying at a hotel in Strathfield. Hope you’re feeling okay.
The number wasn’t saved in Joey’s phone, but he could tell from the ordinariness of the text that it was him. And ‘mate’ didn’t need to be capitalised.
At their last meeting, Marco had told Joey that Kyri was acquitted and didn’t have to go to trial but that it wasn’t public knowledge yet. Even though Marco said that Joey would still likely go to trial, he had been more confident that Joey would get off. The confidence did nothing to release the trap Joey felt caught in.
His whole predicament was deeper than his dumb parents. Deeper than Kyri and Emma moving on from him like he had wanted to move on from Boxer and co. Deeper than being left on ‘read’ by Ivan. Sometimes the thought of ending up in jail filled him with relief.
Hi Mate, I’ll be arriving Wednesday. I’m staying at a hotel in Strathfield. Hope you’re feeling okay.
What a stupid text. Joey dropped his phone back on the bedside table and put a pillow over his head to block out the afternoon sun blaring through the window.
Alex came bursting into the room holding his phone screen towards Joey, his eyes aghast. Before he could say, ‘Get the fuck out I’m trying to sleep,’ Alex had jumped to the side of the bed and thrust the phone close to Joey’s face.
‘Have you seen this?’
Joey recognised The Sydney Morning Herald insignia. The headline read: Western Sydney man cleared of sexual assault. He snatched the phone from Alex’s hand and sat up.
A Western Sydney man charged with violently attacking a woman he met on a train has had his aggravated sexual assault charge dropped at the Downing Centre Court this morning. Abdul Abbas, twenty, was one of five men involved in the gang rape. During the trial, the court was told how the group of men targeted the young woman on a Bankstown train and drove her to a nearby car park where the assault occurred.
Abbas claimed the young woman had consented to the oral sex and at no point used defensive language or asked him to stop.
The woman claimed she did not agree to the sex and was forced to take drugs that clouded her judgement but admitted to replying to a text from Abbas the next day asking if she wanted to meet again with the words, ‘Just u and me, yeah.’
In his judgement, Justice Francis Reynolds found the charges ‘unreasonable’ and said he ‘could not ignore the reasonable doubt as to the accused’s guilt of having committed aggravated sexual assault. The obstacle was the issue of consent.’
Earlier this month one of the co-accused was acquitted of his involvement pre-trial and a further three are awaiting their own trial dates.
Boxer was free.
The numbness inside Joey rooted itself to every nook of his organs and all the avenues of his veins. He handed the phone to Alex and sank back under the doona.
‘Joey, this means you’re going to get off. He did way more than you.’
‘Shut the curtain properly on your way out.’
Alex didn’t move. Joey turned to see what the matter was and saw him, mouth open, fingers limply grasping his phone. Joey pointed to the curtain.
24
What does a widow in her mid sixties wear to court? What does a widow in her mid sixties wear to court to watch her grandson be put on trial? What does a widow in her mid sixties wear to court to watch her grandson be put on trial for aggravated sexual touching? Elaine attempted to ground herself and keep at bay the wooziness she had woken up with.
The lawyer had all but assured them that Joey would be absolved of the charge, considering the outcome of the other boy. It had come as a shock to her when Amal called with the news about him being found not guilty. She had cradled the idea that Joey would be safe very delicately, but she had been sure the others would pay. They had done very real things to the girl. But they weren’t paying. Who would? The girl.
She had to stop herself from thinking that it was all a waste of time and energy for the girl. That it was all in vain. The interviews and the Twitter. She had never replied to Elaine’s message.
