From the top of the hill, in between the tailor’s and the old pound shop, Rahim thought the tall building on the horizon must be the Sydney Opera House. The geometric slants of the architecture were unlike anything else he’d seen before. He wondered how long it would take to walk there.
His brother took him home. One of the few books they owned was pulled from the back of the cupboard, where it was trapped by a copy of the Yellow Pages—itself several years old and sitting amongst the family belongings for no good reason.
As he pulled, the cardboard cover almost came clean off. It was only Shabaz’s careful hand that saved it. Half the image on the cover had already been torn away, succumbing to what looked like water damage, revealing the ugly beige underlayer, but they could still make out the title with just the top half of the lettering.
ATLAS.
Shabaz shoved some of the stray pages back inside the book with little care for the order, for he was only looking for one double page spread. When he found it, he laid it out on the coffee table and both brothers looked down at the world map.
Shabaz pointed to where England was, and where Bradford was within it. He didn’t know which city the Sydney Opera House was actually in, so he just pointed vaguely towards Australia in the hopes it was enough to illustrate his point.
Rahim wasn’t sure what this cleared up.
With a biro, Shabaz touched the page to make the lightest dot he could over Bradford.
‘When you’re standing on the hill,’ he explained, ‘that’s about as much of the world you can see. Probably less.’
Rahim scratched his stomach. He knew that couldn’t be true, and didn’t like being lied to. Though he had no reason to actually be in a sulk, he marched off to their bedroom and closed the door.
There was no dinner that evening because of what happened in the morning. Their parents had caught Shabaz sleeping on the floor again. An argument erupted between them where their mother yelled and screamed—once an adequate way of communicating with her husband—and their father said little, which he recently discovered was all he needed to do to come out of any dispute on top.
He was a competitive man with a very small life. He liked to win in little ways.
In all the commotion, Shabaz forgot to remind Rahim to do his homework, and so the younger sibling received a red cross on his behavioural chart from their teacher for failing to hand in his sums.
Their mother sat on the doorstep all throughout the evening smoking her way through half a packet of cigarettes. She didn’t smoke, not really, but their dad did and she liked to imitate his behaviours when she was stressed. It made her feel connected to something.
‘These ungrateful children,’ she said. In the middle of the night she would make them sandwiches, and they would eat them in silence. This was forgiveness.
It was of no use explaining why Shabaz had taken to sleeping on the floor, as any explanation would feel like stepping on the fruits of her labour. They learned to keep the details of the lives inside of them.
It was just that the springs were too sharp in his mattress. Shabaz was prone to tossing and turning, so he couldn’t even share a bed with his brother, though the springs weren’t much better in Rahim’s bed either. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the ground, but if he wanted a full night’s sleep, it was the only option, even though it was like sleeping on concrete. The carpet was old and rough, the fibres all worn down flat.
In the morning, Shabaz woke Rahim to remind him to fill in his grammar sheet. Their mother found them on the bedsheet Shabaz had laid on the ground.
‘You’re both filthy,’ she said, pulling the bedsheet from beneath them and adding it to the laundry basket. ‘You’re not to go to your friend’s houses after school. God knows what they’ll think of us.’
They were never allowed to go to visit their friends, though of course they did. That was where they discovered what carpet should feel like. They took off their shoes and waded through, like they were digging their toes in sand at the beach. Rahim felt like he was sinking into it. If this is what quicksand was like, he would have welcomed the descent.
The kids at school did not think he was filthy. If they did, they never said as much—he’d come to notice that other children were known for saying exactly what they saw, which was a surprise to him because he said so little. The things he saw were his own little secrets.
In fact, the other children merely thought him scattered. If they were marbles spilled from a bag, his would be the one to fall in the wrong direction. Or worse, he’d strike the other balls and dissolve the trajectory of the entire sway. Their next lesson, the last thing the teacher said, were all mysteries to him. He came to school in his uniform on non-uniform day, and carried his book bag even when they were due on a school trip. No, he was not all the way there, but to his knowledge, no one had ever called him filthy, and he hung onto that.
Perhaps this is why he demonstrated such discretion towards the other students. When his best friend Nasikah came to school one day with no eyebrows, he was the first to notice, but the only one to keep quiet.
He always thought Nasikah’s life must be perfect. Her hair was neatly plaited every day, her middle part always a perfect straight line; and every day after school her mother would take her skirt and run it through the wash, dry it, and iron her other one before the start of the next day. Rahim’s jumper often contained stains from last week. He was confused, though he only found the words for it much later, how someone’s parent could love them that much—or at the very least, how they could show their love so clearly through their actions.
One day, however, she turned up with her hair loose and covering her face, and she kept her head down and didn’t make much eye contact. It was a strange shift in behaviour. Her personality usually shone in a room, like the only clear spot in an otherwise dirty mirror. Now whenever she spoke, she offered her responses to the ground. Rahim noticed immediately what the issue was, but somehow he was the only one for a while—apart from the teachers, who been told by Nasikah’s mother to be compassionate.
Several months later, when the hairs had grown back enough, so that her mother no longer had to draw them on with a pencil every morning before school, she confided in him what had happened. She’d plucked them out one by one because she couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore. It was only after the final follicle had been felled that she realised it was a mistake. Rahim hadn’t really considered her eyebrows before this, and so couldn’t believe they had been bad enough to remove entirely.
He learned then that other children might also worry that they were filthy too.
In their own ways.
This was the time when they became back of the classroom students, while Nasikah recovered from her hair-down-no-eyebrows phase. The only addition to their group was Abdul. He’d been away for a month on a holiday to Pakistan (though, for the purpose of not getting in trouble with the school, it was for a funeral) and came back entirely transformed. His hair was longer and shaggier, his skin darker, and his wrist was in a cast from a sprain. There was a lightness to his demeanour, however, that entranced both Rahim and Nasikah, who were simultaneously experiencing their first real life crush at six years old. Later, in his twenties, Rahim would understand that the look that Abdul had was one of someone who saw that the world was so much bigger than they thought, and found joy in that. Rahim had never travelled anywhere, and so he harboured the frustration of a child who thought his life was all there was to the universe.
Between his classes, Rahim tugged on the folds of his teacher’s jumper. When he received a sharp look, he coughed and corrected himself.
‘Excuse me, Mr Carr, sir.’
Mr Carr smiled down at him. ‘That’s better. What is it, Rahim?’
‘Where’s Australia?’
Mr Carr smiled, always happy to talk geography.
‘Oh, it’s very far away. All the way on the other side of the world. See,’ he said, and retrieved a globe from the top of the bookcases, crouching down to show Rahim the distance, much like Shabaz did.
‘Can you see Australia from the hill?’
‘Well, I don’t know what hills you’ve been climbing recently, but I’d say it’s very unlikely.’
Rahim was unsatisfied.
‘How would you know?’ he said, though he meant it literally, rather than indignantly.
‘Well, considering I am Australian, I think I can be sure.’
‘Are you from Australia?’
‘Yes,’ he said, laughing.
‘Where in Australia?’
‘It’s a little town called Port Hedland.’
Rahim considered this.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Did you really not know I was Australian, Rahim? I’ve spoken about it before. Why do you think I have this accent?’
Rahim didn’t realise he had an accent. He thought all white people just spoke a little funny, like it was a bit they all did.
‘Can you see Portenderland from the hill?’
‘Port Hedland. And no. Now go to your next class, before you get us both in trouble.’
After school, Shabaz went to play football with his friends. Rahim didn’t go home. He went to his hill and checked to see if the Sydney Opera House was still there. It sat on the horizon, and was only a couple of centimetres between his fingers. He started walking down the street until he reached the main roads, then crossed and kept going. In a couple of hours he’d get there. The weather would turn and the ground would change from concrete and grass and mud to desert. He imagined the Sydney Opera House sat in an empty plane of hot dry land.
And then the weather did change. It grew colder. The sky was clear but it grew darker, and he had to reckon with the idea that it would take a little longer to walk to Port Hedland, for this was now where he believed the Sydney Opera House to be, not realising it was named for its location, than he initially gauged—but he didn’t want to give up. He looked at the street ahead of him, which was much the same as all the other beige streets he’d passed, and the road behind him, ending in the bright lights of the intersection where all the shops were, and considered how much further he was capable of walking tonight.
Eesa Manzoor grew up in Bradford, West Yorkshire. They studied creative writing at Bath Spa University, and spend their free time working on their debut novel.
Instagram: @eesamanzoor
X (Twitter): @eesamanzoor
Idle Ink 