Hard Word (11 page)

‘Oh, yes,' he says. And does look at me then.

‘Then why are you asking me?'

His eyes are brown and hard above the blue clipboard.

‘Have you ever,' he says, ‘cancelled a class, Mrs Trent-Harcourt? Without notifying the Centre?'

‘Cancelled? How do you mean –
cancelled
?'

‘Cancelled,' he says. ‘In that three months.'

‘No,' I say. ‘At least I can't –'

‘She's never visited your home? During a cancelled class, say?' ‘No –' I say, and it's only days later, remembering all this, that I work out why I'm getting so angry, so close to the edge of control. It's because talking to Kostas, answering these questions, fighting this suspicion, feeling aggrieved and helpless like this, I'm back
there
again, battling for my life – not with Kostas who, for all I know, has five kids and a mortgage out in the western suburbs somewhere and is battling for his own life – but with Stavros, and what – after four years back in Greece – Stavros had become. Adonis turned slob, fat and unemployed and infantile again in the hands of Mama Irini, and not wanting to do anything whatsoever about it. It's not, I realize, Ted Coster I'm fighting. It's not even for Sorathy. It's for myself.

‘Mr Coster,' I say again, ‘I'm not going to answer any more of these questions. The matter was totally straightforward. Sorathy left class on time, as usual. She went with Hafize, my Turkish student, who was rostered to drive her – and they were going straight to the Centre. There's never been a problem before –'

‘She was late,' he says, flipping a page on his clipboard, ‘January seven. By an hour.'

‘Yes, and I wrote to the Head of Security to explain that. It was my fault. We were on an expedition. We'd gone to the markets, and the bus …'

‘So it's not the first time.'

‘Whether it's the first time or the second,' I say, forcing myself to stay calm, ‘it wasn't her fault. Hafize stopped at her brother's to leave off some food for a sick child –'

Kostas's brows lift. He looks at the report on his clipboard.
That
wouldn't be on it.

Fuck, I think.

‘But they were still within time,' I tell him. ‘She stayed in the car, she didn't go in, they would have made it easily. And then they got the puncture. Anyone can get a puncture –'

‘And the puncture took an hour and a half.'

‘Hafize couldn't fix it herself. By the time road-service came – they'd been busy or something –'

‘She wasn't able to phone the Centre – to explain.'

‘Put yourself in her place for Christ's sake. She's never been in Australia –'

He frowns.

‘She's never been in
Australia.
She's been in a detention holding centre in Port Hedland, and now another one here in Sydney. But apart from her trips in the car to and from the college, fifteen minutes each way, she never gets out of the car –'

‘Except this time she did. When they got the puncture.'

‘The point I'm making,' I say, ‘is that she's never been free, loose in the country. She's no idea of the streets, or systems. She's confused by so much.'

‘How did road-service know to come?' he says. ‘If they weren't near a phone?'

‘A motorist who was passing had a mobile …'

‘And this mobile couldn't be used to ring the Centre.'

‘Oh, for Christ's sake –' I say, and I lose it completely then. ‘Can't you try, just for once, to see it from their side? Get out of that ridiculous fucking uniform and see her as a normal human being for once?'

‘Sure,' he says, and clicks the shaft on the top of his biro. Returns it to his shirt pocket. Interview terminated.

‘Look,' I say, as though we hadn't already passed the point. ‘She's confused, she doesn't know what's possible, what isn't. She might as well be in Siberia, or some hick village like Wagga, or Marathon …'

That does it. That finally reaches him. His head jerks back as if I've slapped him in the face. And I'm not sure, even now, whether
Marathon
is a final plea, a last attempt to reach him, to bring him home, or a desire to hurt by letting him know that I know precisely what he's been, the life he's come from. The days before the blue uniform.

‘Thank you, Mrs Trent-Harcourt,' he says. He pulls out his biro one last time, and looks at his watch. Scribbles something. Draws a line. ‘For your time.'

‘Mr Coster,' I say, ‘please –'

From the door, from a back which is suddenly more human and vulnerable, I just catch the soft
‘Panaghia
mou.'

And know I've blown it. And let Sorathy and the others down. It takes three weeks for us to get Sorathy back. Class during all that time is passive and silent. It's as though we've been through a death and are now grieving. No one will sit in the seat that Sorathy last occupied, which means there's always one chair in the middle of the group conspicuously empty. Worse than that, each of us blames ourselves in some way or another. Me for getting on my high horse with Ted Coster, handling him so badly, so childishly, Hafize for stopping off at her brother's that afternoon, Kossamak, the other Cambodian girl, for not having driven back to the gates with Sorathy as she often did …

Our classes remain hopelessly flat. Nothing works – none of the usual rounds or games. Conversational practice is ritual, unimaginative, no one laughs, or – if one person does – everyone else looks at her, grows embarrassed, and looks away. After a week of this, I drop all pretence, and we switch to written work. At least, I think, we'll learn how to write to an Australian bureaucracy. The strategy works. The class comes alive again, the students feeling they're doing something practical, hopeful. We perfect the letters to Immigration, each one different, each one with a personal plea for the reinstatement of Sorathy's privileges, all promising to make sure that the car roster in future will be double-checked, that phone calls will be made immediately if there is any possibility of delay or lateness. The pleas would melt most hearts.

In the end, however, we're fourteen women pleading for another woman, and it's actually Philip who has Sorathy's privilege's restored. Our letters produce nothing. Silence, blank.
Nothing.
My note to Ted Coster, offering to apologize, to grovel – in public if he liked –
nothing.
But one call from Philip to the Minister's Office, one faxed letter on his firm's letterhead, a single page muttering vague legalese about obligations to refugees under UNHCR guidelines, and he has a reply within days. ‘I don't actually know anything about this,' Philip warned me as he composed the letter, ‘but then, with any luck, they might not either. It's all just in the language you use really …' The reply from the Department is obviously unhappy, but they agree to the restoration of privileges. In the circumstances. And given the undertakings entered into by the teacher and the college. But the tone is still threatening. There is no point, the letter says, citing special cases – every case is a special case. The courts and review panels and appeal boards are clogged with special cases. The problem is that people who are given special consideration, privileges, come to expect them as of right. Rights, however, come with citizenship, not before. And privileges, once granted, or restored, can always be withdrawn. Nonetheless …

Nonetheless, it has worked.

‘You've done it,' I tell the class. ‘You see?'

‘She is coming back?'

‘On Friday. She will be back on Friday. You have done it.'

Pam Richter passes in the corridor and looks in while they are still dancing. She shakes her head as though dispelling an hallucination. And marches on, without looking again.

‘You were wonderful, darling,' I tell Philip. ‘Just magnificent.'

After all, it was hardly Philip's fault.

* *

And so now Sorathy is back with us, and each seat is filled.

‘I
was
going to stay in prison,' she says, ‘but I decided to come to school instead.'

‘A joke,' Maria says, unbelieving. ‘She has made a joke.'

They fall about.

‘Enough,' I say, and clap my hands. ‘Time for coffee. And after coffee, today we have Shamila, don't we? Will you be ready, Shamila? After the break?'

‘Yes,' she says quietly, and rises. She picks up a covered plate from the desk beside her, and crosses the room to the coffee bench. ‘I have brought sweets,' she says.

Coffee break is twenty minutes in the middle of the class – or it is supposed to be. Sometimes, like this morning, it extends to thirty because I simply can't get them back to their seats. Not that I worry too much for this is actually the time when their English flies, when everyone – even the shyest – joins in, swapping ideas and gossip about food, about recipes, about children, about customs, family, beliefs, life. And I do the same, enjoying it just as much as they do. And not merely for the gossip. Already this week we have had sweet mung-bean cake from Hué, and in the second class Eleni and Hafize arrived together with baklava and Turkish delight. On each occasion we gorge on this food, hungry after eighty minutes of hard work. There is no talk of getting fat, no shrieks of denial, no mention of diets, none of the usual neurotic nonsense. It is such a relief. This morning Shamila has brought a sweetcake made with cheese. But there is a suspicion, too, of something bitter.

‘What is it called?' they want to know.

‘Podo pitha
,' Shamila tells them. ‘It is from Orissa.'

‘And what is the secret?'

They laugh. Someone always asks this question. It has become so common, even Yuriko or Kossamak or Sorathy will lead off with it.

‘Tell, us, Shamila,' Maria says. ‘What is the secret?'

‘The base is simple,' she says. ‘Flour, cheese, a little salt, sugar, but the secret is, you must split the milk with lemon as you pour …'

‘You start with flour …?'

Shamila intrigues me, and not just because of the starkness of her colours – the brilliant reds and gold of her saris, the black oiled plaits of her hair, the whiteness of her teeth against the brownness of her skin, all of which I secretly envy – but because of the deep reserve I sense within her, something that isn't shyness, or lack of confidence, but is much deeper, a well of feeling or experience that I cannot see into. She intrigues me, too, in her friendships. I would have expected her to be drawn to Renuka, the Sri Lankan, just as the Afghani and Arabic women – Farida and Hafize, Njala and Samia – while they mix with the rest of the class, have some special cultural bonds that always pull them together. Shamila, on the other hand, seems particularly drawn to Maria, the Chilean, and I am reminded again how strong stereotypes are – and how much stronger individual attractions.

Shamila and Maria often come to class together, sometimes arm in arm. They share transport, Maria's ancient purple Beetle. Its exhaust is holed, and you can hear it coming from a block away. Thinking of all this, I remember Shamila's reaction to Maria's story of her torture, how she sat there, open-mouthed, stunned. How, at the end, she didn't clap at all, but sat with her hands clasped in her lap. I wondered at the time if she'd been shocked, upset by Maria's frankness about her treatment, her abuse, rape, the physical details. But everything about Maria was physical, and I thought it was partly this which drew Shamila towards her. And it couldn't really have been as straightforward as that – revulsion, shocked modesty – because, as they went out, I saw Shamila go up to Maria and touch the older woman's hand.

‘How could you tell that?' she said.

‘What?' said Maria.

‘All that.'

‘It was easy,' Maria said. ‘Because it was the truth.'

And then something unusual happened. I was expecting Shamila to comfort Maria in some way, to link arms, or give her a hug – something – but the reverse occurred. Maria put her arm around Shamila's shoulder and they went out, sideways, slightly awkwardly through the door, still linked, the older woman's arm about Shamila's shoulder as though
she
was the one who had sustained the humiliation, the pain.

This morning – I am astonished to see – Shamila is in white. She has a red bindi, the paint still glistening, in the centre of her forehead, and each of the black eyes beneath it seems somehow strung from or controlled by it. When she frowns, or wrinkles her brow, all three eyes move together. But it is the whiteness of her sari which shocks me most. Till now we have only ever seen her in red or gold. The whiteness not only highlights her own natural colours, but it lends an added seriousness to her face. It is almost as if she were dressed for some kind of ritual. And indeed, when I ask, she says:

‘Yes, it is unusual. In the north of Rajasthan, where I come from, it is also associated with death. And in the Punjab. Perhaps it is the Sikhs,' she says. ‘I am not sure.'

‘And the red flash?'

Her sari is white except for one startling line or hem of red that only shows when she moves.

‘It is to show the girl is moving into the state of woman,' she says, ‘the state of sensuality. Some girls wear it before marriage.'

‘And you, Shamila?' I tease her gently. ‘Are you about to get married?'

‘No,' she says, ‘I do not marry.'

‘I
will not
marry,' I say, correcting her.

‘No,' she says, correcting me in turn. ‘I do not marry.' And it is said with such conviction and intensity, that I have no choice but to let it go.

‘I live with my sister, Savitri. We are all that is left of our family. Our younger sister, Seetaa, died in the cholera with my parents. My father, I remember, called us his three
gunas.
Savitri, he used to say, was
rajas,
the bold one, whereas I was always much quieter, more withdrawn. I have lived with Savitri all my life, even when she left my uncle's house to be married. I went with her, as a servant, when she went to her husband's family to live. Right from the beginning there was trouble. The dowry was too small, payments were late, there were quarrels with Mrs Mishra. She had nothing good to say about Savitri, and Nawaz, Savitri's husband, always took his mother's side against her. Twice – when monthly payments for the balance of the dowry were not made – Savitri was beaten. More and more, at night, she would not sleep in her husband's room but come out of the house to my bed in the shelter of the kitchen wall. There was no one we could turn to. My uncle had two daughters of his own. He had only a small shop, and he had done all he could to help us.