Joey had asked for extra chilli in his bánh mì because it numbed his mouth and he liked numbness. He was stoned, sitting on a bench on Waterloo Road watching the cars come and go and wondering how many of them actually had a legitimate destination. Cars were cans on wheels with people in them overtaking each other, colliding with each other. He’d once been in a car accident when his mother sideswiped a taxi on the way to drop him and his brother to school. The damage hadn’t been substantial, but his mum had cried. Really cried. And the old Italian taxi driver had told her not to worry, that she should get the boys to school, that his son was a panelbeater and would fix his car.
When he finished eating the roll, Joey stood up, scrunched the paper bag and lobbed it into the tray of a parked ute. The bin was in the other direction from home and he wasn’t about to carry the soggy ball around.
When he got home, his mother was on the phone in the living room, squinting her eyes at the old pendant light fixture as she babbled away. There was no prize for guessing that she was scrutinising the dust on it and that she’d ask him to stand on a chair that she’d drag from the dining room (to make the task harder to avoid) and dust it because she was too short to reach.
She swung between English and Arabic with whoever was on the other end of the call, talking about ‘eight centimetres’ this and ‘treatment’ that. Joey guessed the topic was what it often was with her and her friends: cancer. He sucked at Arabic. He could understand most of what was being said but his pronunciation was all messed up. Too much throat effort, and the words always sounded recycled coming from him. Maybe it was a genetic thing because his dad was true-blue Aussie.
Joey guessed the topic was what it often was with her and her friends: cancer.
‘Yeah, bowel … no, they only diagnosed him last week, haram, and straight away they started … she was saying her kids are beside themselves … no, apparently not … well, if he gave enough of a fuck about his brother he would go see him and stop involving other people. Mabaarif … yeah, okay, yulla, I’ve gotta hang the clothes on the line. Bye.’
She turned to him. ‘No work today?’ she said.
‘Nah, chucked a sickie.’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. I felt like taking a day off.’
‘Right.’
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ he asked.
‘Do you listen to anything that goes on in this house? I took the day off to do stuff for Alex’s birthday BBQ tonight.’
‘Oh. I forgot about it.’
‘No surprises there. Did you buy your brother a gift?’
‘Nah.’
‘Again, no surprises,’ she mumbled.
Joey wished she would get the chair already so he could dust the light fixture and move on. He made his way to the fridge, specifically to the chocolate his mum had broken up into bite- sized pieces. She did that when she wanted Joey and Alex to eat stuff. If they let her she’d probably chew the food up and spit it straight into their mouths. Sometimes she peeled mandarins and chopped up apples and put them on a tray in the fridge in full view just so they would be eaten. And she would remind them too, afterwards, that she had done it on purpose and that they were lazy shits. Like she was an absolute mastermind for passive-aggressively chopping up old fruit.
Sometimes she peeled mandarins and chopped up apples and put them on a tray in the fridge in full view just so they would be eaten.
Joey and Alex had once calculated that forty per cent of what their mother said was pure exaggeration. Their grandmother, Tayta Elaine, was the same, which meant it must run in the family. Luckily, they hadn’t shown any signs of the curse; in fact, they said the least number of words possible. On nights their mother was out, Joey and Alex could spend hours together without saying a single word. Those were nice nights, rare as they were. Their mother seemed to really enjoy their company, which they found odd. None of Joey’s friends’ mums would ever hang out with their teenage children, let alone enjoy it.
With his head half in the fridge, Joey heard his mother call out. Her voice echoed through their beige home, the corridor decorated with dorky childhood photos. The worst one was of him dressed as a rat from a primary school performance night. Ms Simpson had insisted that everyone wear red lipstick so that they were visible from the audience. As though the stage lights at Greenacre Public School were state-of-the-art enough to wipe their features clean off.
He ignored his mother’s first call and then her voice bounced louder around the white leather sofas, the glass coffee table with wrought-iron legs, the cabinet with giant scented candles on either side of the TV, and the new timber dining table and chairs that had no place among the rest of the curvy early 2000s furniture. He couldn’t ignore her call the second time around – he already had two strikes: one for chucking a sickie, the other for forgetting to buy Alex a birthday present.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Will you come with me to the shops? I’ve gotta get stuff for the BBQ, and you can get Alex a present.’
‘Mm.’
‘And before we go can you grab a chair and a cloth to wipe the light in here? Tfeh, it’s gotten grotty.’
He shoved a handful of chocolate in his mouth.
In the Abu Salim car park, Sudanese quarrelled with Egyptians about their parking prowess. Chubby Lebanese children chomped on sour plums as their mums loaded boxes of tomatoes and gallons of ghee into giant four-wheelers. The Syrian employees dragged the smoke of their cigarettes deep as they unpacked cartons of coffee off a battered truck. Joey was aware his mother had found an in with the gift-buying pretence because she hated to navigate the car park on her own. He couldn’t really blame her. Going to Abu Salim meant you had to prepare yourself for a riot. And that wasn’t purely due to the byzantine parking lot.
Going to Abu Salim meant you had to prepare yourself for a riot. And that wasn’t purely due to the byzantine parking lot.
No, inside was equally as raucous. Stock looked like it had been abandoned rather than put out for sale. There was never any clear queue for the checkout, just a conglomeration of tattooed young dads and religious old ladies and sticky school children in a funnel-type situation awaiting the cashiers’ frustrated, ‘Next.’ Oh, and then there were the plastic bags. If the large supermarkets had decided to impose a plastic bag ban, well, Abu Salim saw it as an opportunity for customer satisfaction – like a free gift with purchase. Everything was put into a plastic bag. A single can of chickpeas, a bag of nuts. Once Joey had seen broccoli being double bagged.
By some miracle there was a car spot that nobody was fighting over. Probably because it wasn’t an actual parking space but a nook that had nothing obscuring it. There was a council car park directly behind the supermarket that most people avoided for fear of the ibis gang that reaped the discarded manoosh with their scythe-like beaks. These ibis were a product of the area: staunch. If you got too close, they pushed their chests and wings out like guys bridging up before a fight. They had made the car park their slum and punished the plush wives of Greenacre by crapping all over their AMGs and BMWs as they lay back in the salons having their eyebrows fleeked.
Inside the supermarket Joey searched for places to sit while his mum wandered through the aisles. He could lose her for hours in shops. He watched her body change, relax even, in the presence of rows and stacks of products. She squinted at the labels, as though she could read anything without her glasses, widened her eyes, laughed to herself about a slogan on a pack of Jordanian biscuits. She checked the specials, sniffed the capsicums, compared brands, bonded with other shoppers about the price of cucumbers, laughed at them behind their backs. How she ever managed to complete a grocery shop run was beyond him.
She seemed to have forgotten that he was following her from post to post, leaning on shelves, checking his phone, filming her on Snapchat and sending the footage to Alex, who was probably about to get on the bus home from school. Joey missed that feeling – the Friday afternoon bus ride, having a laugh with the boys, planning something stupid.
Joey missed that feeling – the Friday afternoon bus ride, having a laugh with the boys, planning something stupid.
He sat on a box of dishwashing detergent. Patience was something he’d been trying to practise lately. His mum was weighing two identical bags of pasta as though her intuition was more accurate than the super-precise computers in the factory. A blobby employee with a few hairs combed over his bald scalp tapped Joey on the shoulder and mumbled something in Arabic. It startled him into action; he tugged his shorts up and charged at his mother.
‘Ma, what the hell are you doing? You said you were coming for stuff for the BBQ.’
He snatched the bags of pasta from her, dropped one of them among the perfectly arranged items in the trolley and shoved the other in the rice section on the shelf. He worked in the produce department at Woolworths and if he had caught someone doing that with the fruit, he’d lose it, but the lawlessness in Abu Salim permitted the mess.
‘Eh, orright, calm down. Yiy, you’re such a stress-head,’ she said.
‘I’m not a stress-head. You’re a pest, bro. We’ve legit been here half an hour and you haven’t even been to the butcher and God knows how long you’re gonna chat to him before you actually start over-ordering the meat.’
‘Joey, I’ve told you six hundred times, do not call me “bro”.’
She slowly reached for a jar of pickles. He could wait it out in the car, listen to music, but she’d struggle with the bags.
‘I’m seriously giving you five minutes before I leg it,’ he said.
This is an edited extract from Losing Face by George Haddad, (University of Queensland Press), available now at your local independent bookseller.
