Saturday morning, I had hoped to relax and chill and sleep in my own bed. Unfortunately, Aunty Salma had other plans. While I’d been away at camp, she had decided that her mounds of luggage needed more space, so my brothers and I were forced to vacate our room and cram themselves into Feda and Amira’s room. Abdul and Saff shared an old mattress on the floor. My bed was made out of different couch cushions from the living room, which slipped and slid around on the cold tiles during the night. It was ’aab – rude – not to accommodate guests, my parents said, even if it meant my brothers stepped on me during the night every time they went to the toilet.
Welcome home, Tariq.
‘My bed is literally being used for her makeup,’ I said to my brothers as I tried to fix the cushions back in place with a fitted bedsheet. ‘Why didn’t you guys fight back?’
‘Tozz feek,’ Abdul said, annoyed. ‘While you were off on holidays, we had to totally rearrange the house and set up the perfect lighting for her billion selfies.’
‘So we have to sleep like this until she leaves?’ I protested. ‘How the hell did she bring everything over here in the first place?’
‘I’m sleeping!’ Feda snapped.
‘Alright, alright, stop yelling.’ Saff tried to calm things down.
‘We have to get up anyway. I think we’re taking Aunty Salma out.’
Without warning, Amira jumped from her bed and landed on me, her knee driving deep into my guts.
‘Me and Uncle Charlie have almost sold out of our jars of honey,’ she said, her hair tangled around her like a lion’s mane. ‘Khorloo said that you can sell some at school.’
‘Huh? How am I supposed to sell black market honey at school for that crazy embarrassment of an uncle? A pillow came flying across the room and hit me in the face.
‘Don’t talk about Khorloo that way,’ Feda said, now awake. ‘He does a lot for you.’
Another two pillows flew my way. ‘Don’t be a gronk,’ Abdul said.
‘He’s been copping enough shit from Aunty Salma without getting it from you, too,’ Saff added.
‘Yeah, yeah, but I don’t have time to help him out. There’s this footy comp and the poetry thing on top of everything else. Bob, you know I would, but I don’t have time to sell honey for your business.’
She crossed her arms and scrunched her face. ‘You’re not my favourite anymore.’
Abdul and Saff popped up from their mattress, each trying to take the newly-vacated spot as Bob’s favourite.
‘Ya Allah, fine!’ I said, giving in. ‘Alright, I’ll help you.’
She kissed my face a few times before bouncing onto Feda’s bed. ‘He said yes,’ I heard her whisper.
‘No one can say no to you, habibti,’ Feda whispered back.
Now that Aunty Salma had settled in, it was time to take her sightseeing using my parents’ ‘List of Places to Take Imported Lebanese Family’. On today’s agenda was the Royal Botanic Gardens.
The morning was as crazy as usual, with Mum in a panic and Dad trying to stuff the car with unnecessary things. We fought over the bathroom, and Amira clawed her way through to get in there first.
‘I’ll sneak you some Nutella.’ Abdul tried to strike up the first bargain in the weekly bathroom negotiations.
‘Don’t listen to him, Bob,’ Saff said. ‘He can’t even reach the cupboard.’
‘I’ll take you to Bunnings to sniff the fumes in the paint section,’ I offered.
No movement. Weird, because that usually worked.
‘C’mon Bob. I already said I’m going to help you sell some honey,’ I tried once more.
Feda pushed me out of the way. ‘Step aside, you morons. Bob, I’ll let you wear my makeup and help you straighten your hair.’
‘That’s the dumbest deal ever,’ I said, trying to inch closer to the door. ‘You know she hates that stu –’
Amira opened the door just enough to pop her head out. ‘With glittery stuff on my eyes, too?’
We stared at her in shock.
‘Some boys said I look like a boy.’ She opened the door a little more. ‘They said my head looks like a football.’
‘Who are these boys?!’ Saff demanded.
‘Where do they live? What do they look like?’ Abdul added. ‘We’ll kill ’em!’
Feda rolled her eyes. ‘Chill out, they’re eight-year-olds.’
‘But why does she like girly stuff now?’ Saff asked.
Abdul shook his head. ‘It’s too early for Bob to be into that stuff. Next minute, she’ll be on Instagram.’
‘Relax,’ Feda said. ‘It’s just some makeup. It’s not going to hurt anyone.’
While my brothers and Feda argued about what Amira should and shouldn’t like, I leaned closer to the door. ‘I’ll speak to Ibby, PJ and Huss, and we’ll make sure those boys never tease you again, okay?’
We all eventually managed to get dressed while Aunty Salma painted her nails. Abdul and Saff were furious because my parents made them wear the same red Adidas shirts and black shorts. It was my dad’s latest genius move to establish peace in the house.
‘Until you stop fighting about clothes, that’s when you can wear different things,’ Dad said. ‘Everyday same argument, now you have nothing to argue about. So you stop fighting, then maybe your mum let you wear different clothes.’
No wonder my dad liked Mr Archie so much – they both had the same sort of wild approaches to problems.
Instead of eskys, my parents used old cucumber and tomato styrofoam boxes they kept from the markets. My dad made us pack green plastic chairs, a fold-up table and our bright yellow gazebo with my dad’s Australian flag. Uncle Charlie had to take the ice-cream truck to help ease the load, and, thank God, Abdul lost scissors paper rock and ended up in the truck.
It took us about fifteen minutes to find parking at the gardens. My dad, with his fluffy white beard, wearing his white abaya, popped his head out of the window and asked random people if they were leaving their car spots. My uncle zoomed up and down with the ice-cream music on blast, which caused more commotion as a long trail of kids ran after the truck.
‘Ya Allah. I have no ice cream!’ he yelled. ‘I have good honey. Come buy honey.’
Saff and Abdul carried the foam boxes, still arguing about whose fault it was that they looked like twins. I tried to take advantage of the chaos and quietly slip away, but my uncle grabbed me by my collar and handed me a box of honey jars.
‘Yallah, you help Bob and me sell these to Australian later.’
As I placed the box of honey jars under one of the gigantic fig trees, I saw a couple of people pack their things and move away, but we were used to that by now. The rest of the family settled our tables and chairs in Mum’s favourite spot, with a view of the Quay and the Opera House.
‘Shoo haydar?’ Aunty Salma said, unimpressed with the view. ‘The bridge isn’t even that big.’
‘Maybe we should inject it with some botox,’ I said under my breath.
Mum kicked me beneath the table and raised her eyebrows.
The table was set with our traditional Lebanese breakfast: olive-oil drenched yoghurt, watermelon and toasted haloumi, boiled eggs and homemade crunchy falafels. My uncle set up the honey jars on the mini fold-up table as he and Amira discussed how they were going to split the millions of dollars they’d make.
Aunty Salma in her ladder-high heels decided she wasn’t hungry and went to take photos with an old man who was feeding lorikeets with a bag of bread. She raised her phone to the sky when a lorikeet landed on her shoulder. She smiled from ear to ear, gesturing for us to come over. We turned away and pretended not to notice, no matter how many times Mum told us to get up.
‘Yallah, I’ll go,’ Uncle Charlie said, tucking his singlet in his pants. He thought it would be hilarious to put a fistful of bread all over his sister’s hair. It didn’t take long for her to be swooped by all the birds in the gardens. As though my family didn’t make enough noise settling in, Aunty Salma now screamed and squawked loud enough to wake the dead.
‘Make her stop,’ Saff said covering his ears. ‘She sounds like a dying cat.’
Eventually, we packed up our portable restaurant and headed towards the Opera House. Even though it was almost a half-hour walk, Dad liked to check out the scenery and Mum loved smelling the flowers.
‘Okay, everybody stay here. I forgot to get something from van.’ Dad rushed away. He eventually came back holding a red megaphone. ‘Okay, we now go on walk and I show you around.’
Saff closed his eyes and prayed to disappear. ‘Ya Allah, please take me.’
Dad was now the self-proclaimed tour guide and tried to convince Aunty Salma that we had the best city in the world. We walked through the gardens and stopped at different plants and trees where Dad read all the information signs through the megaphone. He couldn’t pronounce half the words so he’d just make them up. Amira was up on my shoulders because once again she was too tired to walk.
At long last we reached the gate where the gardens opened onto the Opera House forecourt, when a man yelled out to my dad. He was a tall, muscular man, with a snake tattoo on his forearm, someone I never thought my dad would know.
‘As Salaam Alaykoom, Abu Jehad,’ Dad said. ‘How are you?’
‘Hamdulillah. I’m good, Hajj.’
Dad ushered me, Abdul and Saff forward to shake Abu Jehad’s hand. ‘These my sons.’
‘Ah, salaam, boys, strong sons,’ Abu Jehad smiled, just as the smell of coconut floated along the breeze. ‘My daughter JouJou and my younger son, Jehad.’
‘He’s in my class,’ Amira pointed at Jehad from my shoulders. ‘He’s the one that helped me when those boys said I had a football head.’
In any other situation, I would’ve clapped the kid on the back and thanked him for standing up for Amira, but I couldn’t move my eyes from his elder sister.
It was Jamila. Here. Where she was about to meet the whole circus that was my family.
‘Mashallah, your daughter is beautiful!’ Mum exclaimed with a smile. I’d seen that smile before. ‘How old is she?’ she asked. ‘And where you live? What school you go to, habibti?’ There was only one reason Mum grilled girls for this sort of information, and she wasn’t subtle about it.
Jamila’s hair waved in the wind as she answered Mum’s questions in perfect Arabic. Her eyes then caught mine and she twitched an eyebrow, as if to ask ‘I wonder if you’d look at my short dress now, in front of your family?’ I could feel the sweat dripping down my back and my face burned. No girl had ever made me this nervous.
Amira tugged at my hair and leaned down to whisper, ‘Stop staring at her, weirdo.’
Jehad came over, so I put Amira down and they talked for a while as Jamila made her way to me. She tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Tariq, right? From Poetry?’
‘Uh. Yeah.’
She then smiled, but that just made me more nervous. ‘Should I be worried?’
‘Worried about what?’ My tongue felt ten times too big, and I sounded like I was talking through a mouthful of cotton balls.
She looked at her dress. ‘Well, I wouldn’t want you to get too distracted in front of your whole family. Might be embarrassing for you. Again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Not going to do it again.’
She smiled.
‘Like, seriously. Wallah. Am I off the hook now? Or are you still going to kill me?’
‘Jury’s still out,’ she said, before turning to Amira and Jehad. ‘So, this must be the girl he doesn’t stop talking about. Something about the monkey bars?’
‘Yeah that’s our Amira. She’s been trying for the last month to get all the way across without feeling like her hands are going to fall off, but still no luck.’
Jamila squinted against the sun. ‘Maybe she should wear gloves. You know the ones with rubber grip? That could help her hold on.’
I shook my head and laughed. ‘So, all this time she’s been trying to finish it and all it would’ve taken is gloves?’
‘JouJou,’ her dad called. ‘Yallah, we need to go.’
‘I’ll see you at next week’s class, Tariq,’ she said, with a quick glance my way as she walked off.
I liked the way she had said my name. It was a dumb move with my family all around me, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her.
‘You know,’ she called without turning around. ‘The flowers in the gardens are much nicer than the ones on my dress. Maybe you should stare at them a little more.’
How had she known I was looking?
Okay, I needed to make a good impression on this girl, especially to make up for coming across as such a sleaze the two times we’d met. I racked my brain for a plan.
Who was I kidding, no I couldn’t. The most I’d be able to manage would be a patchy moustache, and I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help me not look like a sleaze.
Someone flicked my ear from behind.
‘Ow!’ I glared at Feda, who stood there, looking like she was trying really hard not to laugh. ‘Shouldn’t you be off killing sick people?’
‘I don’t need to go to work on my day off to do that, little bro. Plenty of sick people here, right in front of me.’ She looked to where Jamila was walking off with her family and then back at me with a grin. ‘Love life’s going well, I see. Maybe you could use some help.’
‘Maybe you should shut up.’
This time she did laugh. ‘Whatever. If you need some advice about how not to come off as a total perve, you know where to find me.’
‘Yeah, unmarried, still living with Mum and Dad. You’re a real pro at love lives, aren’t you?’
For once, the dig didn’t get a rise out of her. She just sighed and looked at me with what might even have been pity. ‘Tariq, did it ever occur to you that one of the many reasons I’m still single is because more guys don’t listen to decent advice from their sisters about how to behave? She seemed nice. It would be a shame to let her slip away.’ She patted my cheek and wandered off.