Lim - Real Differences

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

www.transitlounge.com.au

Copyright S.L. Lim 2019

First published 2019

Transit Lounge Publishing

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Cover image: www.kipscottphoto.com

Author image: Sean Ellwood

Cover and book design: Peter Lo

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

A pre-publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN: 978-1-925760-28-6

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals...

George Orwell, Reflections on Gandhi

CHAPTER ONE

When I grow up, I wrote when I was twelve, I would like to save the world and live forever.

It seemed like a reasonable ambition at the time. Id known for as long as I could remember that I was special: my mother told me I was one in a thousand, and since I was the only one in my class who could read words with sch in them, this sounded plausible enough. My parents, a doctor and a lawyer, were always gently anxious about something, like whether my arms were the right length, and if my motor skills were advancing fast enough for a boy my age. They were very well educated, with the grace to be embarrassed about how much money they had. Theyd been happy as a couple but had determined, in their mid-to late thirties, that their lives would be depleted in some intangible way if they did not produce a child. They told me I could be anything I wanted, which was supposed to be reassuring but had the opposite effect. As I grew older, the question of what I was going to be picked up its own disturbing momentum and intensity.

I graduated from high school with all the trimmings and followed this up with an enjoyable gap year building houses in Malawi. We were meant to teach a group of widows and orphans how to weave baskets out of straw, but the widows and orphans turned out to be better at this than we were, so building houses it had to be. I carried bricks, and felt pleasingly, redemptively tired, and at the end of each day savoured a sunset so perfect it was as though it had been made especially for me. After such profound and alien loveliness uni could only be an anticlimax, at least initially. I hated my classes. I was disappointed by my fellow students, who were either poorly read or so effortlessly brilliant that they shamed me. There was no-one on my level. I was studying Arts, of course, and Law, which was what you did when you had some cleverness and no clear idea of where to put it.

Then I met Andie. I think we took a class together, although I couldnt name the subject now. We met in a lift, and her eyes travelled up and down my body with healthy unerotic curiosity. So, Nick, she said. I noticed you drew forty-five smiley faces in your notebook last week.

We became best friends without needing to talk about it, in the way that first years can. We lived together for two years, and though weve both had peaks of joy and accomplishment since, I hope its not too much to say neither of us has since approached the uncomplicated happiness of that period. We edited each others OkCupid profiles, and invented foods like Salmon Rushdie and Smoked Salman, and developed an ecosystem of jokes which must have rendered us obnoxious or at least impermeable to outsiders. Sometimes we told anecdotes in tandem not at a sentence-finishing level, but close. She brought the detail and observancy, I added the poeticals and literary merit. It was a great recipe that made the both of us look very deep.

Then we got older. Aged twenty-one or twenty-two there was an appealing lack of definiteness to our plans; we were keen to do something in human rights, but when that something failed to manifest we found ourselves creeping closer to McKinsey and the corporations wed disdained during our idealistic phase. Andie got a boyfriend, a proper one this time. A screen fell between us, the invisible barrier which divides couples off from the rest of the world. I got the sense she was disappointed in me. Goodness knows I was disappointed in myself. Far from saving the world, Id taken a job in a minor department of the public service. It felt entirely unreal, coming back to the office after even a day or two outside. My colleagues seemed to have sprung from another, much more awful planet. Through some optical illusion they always looked like they were out of proportion, with massive heads and squashed, misshapen bodies, as though they had been hacked from stone or cheese. They smiled kindly at me, like friendly Godzillas. And yet after just a few days it felt like there was no outside world at all, just the office stretching on through time and space so that all which came before it was a dream, and all after just a semiconscious daze, temperature-controlled, where nothing important could happen and the milk was labelled just in case the paralegals drank So Good that was meant for the Economic Group, or something equally dire.

By day I talked about disbenefits and deliverables; by night I roamed the mediocre alleys of the internet. My friends and I discussed intellectual topics, like the socio-political ramifications of casting in the Harry Potter movies. It was as though having progressive thoughts about pop culture was a substitute for doing literally anything at all. And then even this devolved further into suburban self-regard, so that we talked about careers, spouses and holidays, and whether banning late-night alcohol sales was an infringement on our civil liberties. We did not talk about how to do right in the world. We did not talk about ideas.

I wasnt happy but I was scared to move because the slightest change on my part might topple everything, though if you asked me, I could hardly have said what everything was.

Andie and I stayed friends until she died. Towards the end, though, I think we were starting to drift apart. You mythologise people you remember them for what they meant to you, rather than how they actually were. Too much time had passed; the relationship could not be reconstructed from first principles. I thought I hadnt changed but she had, and she would probably have said the same about me. What is our story? We were friends, then she was gone and I drifted, then she came back and told me things which I wrote down before the final disappearance. And now shes gone for good and here I am, putting words into order; and the more I think the more ridiculous it seems, curating these events for a beginning and end, conflict and catharsis and all the rest. Pimping out my own trauma for effect. So you must keep an eye on me, you must not let me get away with anything. If theres one thing Ive learned, its that other people exist - something I didnt quite know back then, and am only intermittently conscious of now. They are just themselves, not examples or morals. They are not a backdrop for me to develop my sense of self. But I did care for Andie. I really did.