Returning by Alice Pung

About a year ago, my friend Suzanne went on Facebook to find our primary school buddies. Since I wasn't on Facebook, Suzanne showed me their profiles.

There was Danielle W., who had two kids, there was Timothy Z., who had two chins. There was Jack, Suzanne's primary school boyfriend, who had a $30,000 debt from his most recent divorce and now drove trucks for a living. There was Dang, whose mother and my grandmother had shared the same hospital room when I was sixteen, and when only one of them came home he still called me up, genuinely happy for us. There was Meghan, the star of the school play, still pretty; and Nathan, my best boy buddy in Grade Four, who was now openly gay in a suburb where that could mean a broken bottle-top to the face if you weren't careful.

‘Remember her?’ Suzanne asked me, clicking on an image of another very familiar face. Of course I did. She had been one of those happy-go- lucky, freckle-faced kids who smiled easily even when she lived off Vegemite sandwiches every lunchtime. Until our Facebook expedition, I had not thought about Layla Owen since primary school. Over the next week Suzanne told me she had been messaging Layla, and that we should pay her a visit. 'She has a kid now,' Suzanne told me, 'and doesn't go out much.'

So on a Friday evening after work, Suzanne drove us to visit Layla. We heard her before we saw her. A shadowy figure emerged from the front door of a concrete house in a suburb where most of the residents' blinds were drawn shut during the day, and where they took as much care of their homes as they did their teeth. She sounded like she was taking her first and last inhale and exhale with every breath, like someone was doling out limited free supplies of air the same way shopping-centre mall spruikers handed out chips in small plastic bags, and she wanted to grab as many as she could and use them all up before they expired.

She emerged a different shape and a different size from what we had remembered, as if someone had put her in the oven to rise, but she had still managed to retain her uncooked colour. As she came closer, even though her walk was different, and she was now an adult, we took a look at her face and realised that she still seemed exactly the same. That's the funny thing that happens with seeing someone you haven’t seen in almost twenty years. They either look like the childhood version of themselves you have embedded in your mind, or they appear as complete strangers. But Layla was no stranger. In her face, we saw the familiar soft-pudding sweetness of an old friend.

'How have youse been?' She opened the wire-frame door for us.

'Yeah, not bad,' replied Suzanne. 'Same old.' When we entered, Layla's boyfriend was lying on the couch watching the footy. He just looked at us, and then back at the telly, like a walrus looking at some minor and unthreatening gyre in the ocean. Disinterested, uncurious.

Layla did not offer us food or a drink. This was not to be taken personally. All it meant was that she had never been taught that there was such an experience as 'having guests over' I was familiar with this sort of thing. Growing up here, houses were not places where your friends' parents offered to share their welfare proceeds with others on a regular basis. Lining up at Kmart with my baby sister in a pram, sometimes you'd hear, 'Git lost, we were here first.' Minding my sister while she sat on the stationary plastic carousel horses at Highpoint that moved only when you put a dollar in, mothers would come with their kids and say, 'Git lost, we’re not putting money in for youse too.' The baffling thing was that we never even asked. Yet those two sentences summed up life behind the carpet factories of Braybrook: Git lost, we were here first, and git lost, we're not putting money in for youse too.

Suzanne's father was a One Nation supporter who, after his divorce, solely dated small Asian women with minimal English skills. But when we were small he used to walk my brother and I home from school, take us to theatres and dole out countless kindnesses on us. Layla's mother came to my eleventh birthday party at McDonald's and gave me a doll. Their girls had grown into women, and they were still my friends, even though I knew their small talk would inevitably turn to a litany of complaints about the hardships of life and the crappiness of the government, despite their not being entirely sure whether the government we had was Labor or Liberal. It didn't matter, because the government was supposed to provide, and if it wasn't doing its job, then there was every right for the common citizen to bag them.

'Have you ever noticed the homeless in the streets?' Suzanne asked Layla. Just the other week we had been at Flinders Street Station at night, where Suzanne bought cheeseburgers for a woman who was sitting outside a McDonald’s drawing chalk pictures on the footpath. '‘Nah, I don’t get out much,' replied Layla.

'Well, you’ll notice one thing. They're all Australians.' Suzanne meant that they were all white. 'I think it's outrageous how our government can't even look after their own and yet are giving so much money for boat people and shit.'

Suzanne didn't realise what she was saying, because in her eyes I was like her. 'I swear, sometimes I forget that she's even Asian,' she once told a boyfriend, possibly the highest compliment you could offer in this area.

'Yeah,' Suzanne continued, 'I saw on the news that the government gives these people money to buy new cars and shit, when the rest of us are living rough, just trying to get by.' Centrelink wouldn't give you any money unless you had less than $3000 in the bank, something Suzanne had learnt the hard way one year when she lost her job at the glycerine factory.

'They don’t even know how to drive,' decried Layla.

And suddenly I could see it from their perspective. What strange and grating feelings must have developed in their solar plexuses, these girls who had known only one way of life, to suddenly see an enormous swarm of crazy migrants in their neighbourhood who just worked day and night, and to see how hard they worked their kids, never taking a break until they had achieved the new car paid for in cash and not through a 24-months interest-free deal; the new house, mortgage-free after six years; and the new life away from the carpet factories. You weren't meant to pursue 'the Great Australian Dream, they had grown up believing. It was just an ideal, like a television advertisement, and class was as fixed as the fascinators on the heads of B-grade celebrities on Melbourne Cup Day. How did these outsiders cotton on to how the system worked, and how did they do in one generation what usually took two or three? There must have been something dodgy going on with the new arrivals. It was impossible to believe that you could come to a country with nothing and end up with more than everyone else. And yet it was not, when you considered how much they worked, these ethnic relentless pursuers of the Great Australian Dream. In fact, the amount of work they did seemed obscenely unAustralian.

*
So I learnt to make concessions, which were small concessions. I told myself, you are skilled, you are university educated. I chose to forget the blind panic that engulfed me in my mid teens, the fear of what would happen if I wasn't these things, if I was stuck, spending my whole life with the git lost, we were here first crowd. I reminded myself constantly but for the Grace of God go I, even though I wasn't Christian. How tenuous fate is, how largely due to luck. Anyone could be nice to symmetrical-faced, liberal-minded, healthy, vegetable-raised middle-class young women who said all the right things, but my friends were my friends because they were true and transparent: Layla, with her house decorated with Target Home Depot tables and Big W cushions. Suzanne, with her quiet grace, her carefully applied make-up and her clean shoes. They did not censor their views, they did not pretend to love when they felt fear, they did not pretend tolerance when they felt contempt. And as much as I disliked their ideas, we made a strange form of exceptionalism for each other. They were kind people at heart, they loved and tolerated others on an individual basis, even if they had 'Fuck off we're full' stickers on the backs of their cars. They had their strong views, but they were never going to be the policymakers, the teachers, the lawyers or the people in positions of power in this country, younger versions of which I encountered at university – people who would never let me get a word in, and who spoke with expertise about the Third World because they had visited Cambodia on a school trip when they were fifteen.

There was a little boy, about six years old, jumping on Layla's other couch. This was, I soon found out, Layla's son, Jayden. I told Layla how beautiful her son was, because it was true. I also knew that these people did not make conversation. They just muttered out loud, mental reminders directed at no one in particular: 'I gotta go to the dentist soon.'

'Oh yeah?'

Pregnancy had made Layla's teeth wobble, she told us, until she could almost move one of her front teeth at a forty-five degree angle. Eating felt like she had those fake pink-and-white lolly teeth in her mouth. And then, one day the teeth just started to fall out.

So now she was waiting to get dentures made.

Jayden leapt onto the couch.

'Fucking git off me!' Those were the first words we heard the prostrate boyfriend say all evening.

Suzanne told Layla how we had, over the weekend, gone to a pub called the Sphinx in Geelong (the local residents referred to it as the Sphincter) to hear an '80s cover band called Shock Rock.

‘Can youse come and pick me up when you have another one of those again?’ Layla asked. She was almost pleading. She didn't have a car. ‘I don't go out much, with Jayden and everything. And lazy shit here won't take me anywhere.’

'Fuck you.' Lazy Shit did not move from the couch.

'So can youse?'

‘What are you going to do about your kid?’

‘Lazy Shit’ll look after him.’

I was inclined to be polite and say, 'Sure, when we next go we'll make sure to ask you along,' even though I had no intention of ever going back to see Shock Rock. But Suzanne didn't say anything, so neither did I. After all, I might have had the disingenuous good manners, but Suzanne was the one with the car.

'What does she do all day?' Suzanne wondered, after she pulled out of Layla's driveway. 'Imagine if we had never got out of the neighbourhood.' We tried to.

But we couldn't. We didn't want to even think of the possibility. The evening was still young, too young to be tainted with such fears. We were driving away, and on the way back the lights were green in our favour.

Copyright © Alice Pung,
Black Inc Books, 2018, www.blackincbooks.com.au