The Book of Ordinary People Read online

  About The Book of Ordinary People

  A grieving daughter navigates the morning commute, her mind bursting with memories pleading to be shared.

  A man made entirely of well-cut suits and strictly enforced rules swims his regular morning laps and fantasises about his self-assured promotion.

  A young lawyer sits in a fluorescent-lit office, typing indecipherable jargon and dreaming of everything she didn’t become.

  A failed news hack hides under the covers from another looming deadline, and from a past that will not relent its pursuit.

  And a young woman seeking asylum sits tensely on an unmoving train, praying that good news waits at the other end of the line . . .

  In this charming, moving and affectionate novel, Claire Varley paints a magical portrait of five ordinary people, and the sometimes heartbreaking power of the stories we make of ourselves.

  Contents

  Cover

  About The Book of Ordinary People

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1: Aida

  Chapter 2: DB

  Chapter 3: Evangelia

  Chapter 4: Rik

  Chapter 5: Nell

  Part 2

  Chapter 6: Aida

  Chapter 7: Nell

  Chapter 8: DB

  Chapter 9: Evangelia

  Chapter 10: Rik

  Chapter 11: Aida

  Chapter 12: Patrick

  Part 3

  Chapter 13: Aida

  Chapter 14: Patrick

  Chapter 15: Nell

  Chapter 16: Aida

  Chapter 17: Evangelia

  Chapter 18: DB

  Chapter 19: Patrick

  Chapter 20: Evangelia

  Chapter 21: DB

  Chapter 22: Nell

  Part 4

  Chapter 23: Aida

  Chapter 24: Nell

  Chapter 25: Patrick

  Chapter 26: Evangelia

  Chapter 27: DB

  Chapter 28: Nell

  Chapter 29: Aida

  Part 5

  Chapter 30: Aida

  Chapter 31: Nell

  Chapter 32: DB

  Chapter 33: Evangelia

  Chapter 34: Patrick

  Chapter 35: DB

  Chapter 36: Evangelia

  Chapter 37: Nell

  Chapter 38: The last chapter before the next chapter

  Acknowledgements

  About Claire Varley

  Also by Claire Varley

  Copyright page

  For John, my heart, and Mojdeh, my liver.

  In memory of Yiayia who loved unconditionally and completely.

  Prologue

  Slowly, thoroughly, the traffic came to a stop. Cars halted mid-creep, bumpers kissing, grinding the Tullamarine on-ramp towards standstill. It spread neatly and efficiently along Bell Street, branching off in rivulets: Sydney Road, Nicholson, St Georges, High Street, blooming to the north and south in a seemingly choreographed dance of inconvenience and ire. Tram brakes groaned, peppered motionless between stops, as cars amassed along the urban vertebrae. The word went out, relayed from station to station: traffic was banked up across the tracks and all trains were to remain still until signalled otherwise. People listened to their car radios, volume up high, or streamed updates through their mobile phones. The choppers reported the same ominous message: gridlock, gridlock, as far as the eye can see, and from where their eye in the sky hovered, it was far far far indeed. On the ground, reactions varied. Some reached for mobiles, sending pre-emptive apologies for imminent tardiness. Some silenced engines, reclining their seats for the wait, weary already before the work day had begun. Others were livid, pounding their steering wheels at the very injustice of it, because it was 2016 and the future was now and how on earth could this possibly still keep happening in the modern infrastructure economy and by Christ you better believe someone would be losing votes for this. In the most northerly north, the drivers sat with practised patience amid the building blocks of their half-built estates, one road in, one road out, smug that finally others felt their pain. And in the inner north, passengers spilled from trams, their legs primed for the walking they’d always promised themselves they’d attempt, lungs opening curiously to the mid-autumnal air.

  Here they are, these unremarkable strangers, caught in a moment of stasis before the everyday continues:

  Evangelia Kouros sits in her car stuck in Reservoir’s High Street, her children bickering from the back seat about trivial nonsense and her head pounding with the promise of a headache. She watches a woman attempt to escape the traffic, zigzagging her little hatchback in a hundred-point turn that bumps and grazes a pole, the curb, a nearby bumper, and Evangelia mutters under her breath.

  In the Clifton Hill pool, DB Arnolds swims his regular morning laps, his head in the clouds and his heart in his mouth, oblivious to both the traffic jam around him and to the ting ting ting of the increasingly frustrated texts from his increasingly frustrated wife who, with a first period year nine History class and their child still in his car seat, will twice be late this blustering leafy morning.

  On the South Morang line, Aida Abedi tears a tissue into a thousand pieces somewhere between Thomastown and Lalor, anxious she will miss her appointment with her case worker and have to wait another procession of weeks for the next. Each piece forgets itself as it piles onto her lap, for she is waiting, always waiting . . .

  In his boxy Thornbury apartment, the Failed Hack pulls the blanket over his head to drown out the angry horns bleating from the street outside, and turns to the wall, wide-eyed and weary from yet another night unslept.

  And in a fluorescent-lit CBD office, bright-eyed and coffee-ed, Nell Swansea has missed the entire thing because she has been here since seven-thirty, tapping away at her keyboard as another day begins its crawl towards the end.

  Time passes, emergency response vehicles weave towards the freeway, and the north has no choice but to wait.

  Part 1

  1

  Aida

  I’ve always hated waiting, ever since I was a small girl. Tugging at my mother’s coat as we queued to buy barbari bread, yowling restlessly from the pavement as we trudged through Tehran’s endless foot traffic, stealing past the stovetop to smell if the rice was done cooking. Even in the womb I couldn’t bear to wait, kicking impatiently at the fleshy walls around me while my father and older brothers prayed for the Iraqi bombs to stop falling from the sky. My mother told me many years later that my movement inside her reminded her to be strong – that after nearly eight years of war she could hold out a little longer. My brothers, both of them stubborn grown men now, told me that during the air raids my mother would cradle her full belly and shake her head sternly at their anxious cries, refusing to acknowledge the danger. ‘Why would they bomb our family?’ she would ask them, her face firm with disbelief. ‘We have never done anything wrong.’ As if cowering in the bunker were all a game, as if being sardined in the darkness with her least favourite sister-in-law and the neighbour she was certain pilfered clothes from our line were all an amusing pastime. As if people she knew – school friends and colleagues of my father – hadn’t died already, lifeless and cheated beneath the rubble of war. She would refuse to be scared because this, she was certain, was what they wanted: Saddam, Khomeini, Khamenei – all of them, she was sure, were hoping to render us powerless through fear. When it came to people, she trusted few and feared none.

  There were many things she could have feared at the t
ime of my birth: that she would go into labour just as a bombardment began and would be forced to deliver me on the floor of a crowded bunker with my aunt Simin shouting useless commands and my uncle Asadollah hiding his eyes for shame in the corner. That the announcement of my birth would be eclipsed by the wretched news from the frontline that some close relative had been lost – riddled with bullets or frozen by chemical weapons – causing them to mourn a new martyr instead of celebrating my birth. That we’d be flattened, all of us, and she’d be interred for the eternal hereafter alongside her light-fingered neighbour and least favourite sister-in-law. Perhaps she had faith too in the missiles Deputy Commander-in-Chief Rafsanjani sent shuddering back across the border, as if the two opposing warheads would meet mid-flight and obliterate each other. Either way, I was born in the dying months of the war and to my mother at least my birth represented a new beginning for our country.

  She is sentimental like this, my mother, but hides it well, like the way you don’t notice weight so much on tall people. In hindsight her sentimentality is obvious, but in person it lurks behind an exterior of dry levity and unimpressed eyebrow lifts. Don’t tell her I said that or there’ll be trouble, even though we’ve oceans between us now. She rarely disciplined us when we were small, using the mere suggestion of physical punishment as punishment in itself. Her displeasure would be made known by the purposeful easing off of her house slipper followed by the steady drumbeat of the faded plastic sole slapping against her palm. My brothers Alireza and Amin used to refer to it as ‘Maman’s angry heartbeat’, and the sound would send us scuttling across the living area and into the hidden crevices of our wardrobes. Eventually, when the cautionary metronome died down, we would sparrow-call each other from our respective hiding places, whistling and chirping an invented cryptography until we dared to emerge. Our mother, now seemingly engrossed in the kitchen in some repetitive preparatory task, would ignore our tentative steps, waiting until the moment we were but metres from her before she would whip around, pelting us with flour or the wilted peel of vegetables. Shrieking with laughter, we would dance about in the fine powdery shower or scoop up the vegetable clippings as if preparing for a nutritious snowball fight. My father, disturbed from his reading, would peer out from his study, his index finger keeping place on the page somewhere between Alexander’s burning of Persepolis and the Parthian rebellion. Taking in this scene of mayhem, his brow would furrow into a mighty Persian scowl as he tilted his head to one side then the other. Then, taking note of the ingredients coating our shoulders and noses, he would look my mother dead in the eye and predict what was for dinner.

  These things – these are the things I remember. The smell of it all, of the soft white flour frosting Alireza’s hair, or the tang of sweat dancing across Amin’s heavy brow. That steady drumbeat played out on my mother’s fleshy palm, its creases and folds dried and calloused from a childhood spent farming and a marriage of household chores. The bristles of my father’s moustache as it brushed my ear, tickling and irritating and whispering good night. These are the things I remember though both time and geography have distanced me from them. When every day becomes too everyday and nothing seems to change. If you want me to tell you my story, it begins and ends with memories like this. Perhaps this is not what you want but this is what is here, swirling through my head as I lie sleepless in the relentless dragging night, jamming my ears from the cries remembered of the hopeless and the resigned. My father used to tell me that if you write too much about the past you become stuck there, that this is where you remain. He would know, with his history books and lecture notes gathering temporal dust on the sagging bookshelf. But perhaps sometimes this is for the best – better than this present, anyhow. These are the things I remember as I wait.

  Aida blinked once, twice, and she was back in the world of the almost living. She tucked her notebook away and looked around the waiting room. A man was arguing with the young woman behind the reception desk. Stooped and exhausted-looking, he swung his hands in frustrated circles that haloed the young woman’s passive face as if in despondent religious ceremony. This happened a lot – every time she was here, in fact – except that each time the language and cause of the frustration changed. She had once seen a woman break down in weary tears, her thin body collapsing across the benchtop and scattering leaflets all about the place like a colourful, informative rain shower. Another time, a teenage boy refused to leave, chaining himself to the chair with a complicated twist of limbs before eventually wandering off, bored with being ignored. Aida glanced at the clock on the wall. Fifty-five minutes past her appointment time and twenty since she’d rushed in red-cheeked and frantic from the train station. Sarah seldom kept to schedule. Her clients were never made to leave until they were ready – and rarely were they ready – which meant Aida had spent countless hours perched uncomfortably on the faded maroon waiting room chairs, her eyes scanning the various posters and public health messages on the walls. Have you been tested? one of them asked Aida from the wall near the clock, two concerned-looking youth staring out at the world. Yes, she wanted to reply each time, though not in the way you think.

  Sometimes, as she sat in the waiting room, flashes of the past would claw out of the places she’d hidden them. Long ago, fresh out of high school, she had entered and won an essay-writing competition for the nation’s university students. How proud she’d been, life stretching before her so promisingly. Sometimes here, pressed between the tired, sweaty, anxious bodies, she wanted to scream it out into the dense silence. I won the national essay-writing competition! I don’t belong here! But she knew the whole room was most probably full of people like her, forgetting daily the awards and victories of their lives past.

  She stretched her neck, the right side straining reluctantly the way it had for months now, then checked her mobile. There was a handful of new messages from her mother, who had taken to the messaging app with unbridled fervour after Aida had assured her that unlike international phone cards, it was free. What is the weather like? Have you touched a koala? Do they have saffron? Have you heard anything yet? She used it to keep Aida updated on the progress of Aida’s friends: who was pregnant, who was divorcing, who had been harassed by gasht-e ershad, the guidance police. Aida scrolled through her mother’s gossip, the distance and intimacy of it both unsettling and comforting her. There were few other people who messaged her now. Shirin, occasionally, and once or twice something from Afshar, though these were like hen’s teeth since he had been swallowed up by his new wife and the stresses of fatherhood. Aida massaged her neck with her other hand, the insistent knot having reformed itself at some point during the night. She had hoped to start the new year free of the constant pull and strain, but the Gregorian, lunar and solar celebrations had all been and gone while the ache remained. She kneaded it harder, wincing, her free thumb working her mobile. Another message appeared as she did: Your father woke me with his coughing again – is it morning there too? She placed her mobile carefully in her lap, as if her mother might notice from the other side of the world that her only daughter was ignoring her. She would respond to them later, when the world felt less urgent. She counted back the hours in her head. It was 4.00, no 5.00 am in Tehran. Her mother would soon rise to start her chores as the city rumbled awake around her. Her father would lift himself gingerly to his elbows before commencing the clockwork procession of phlegmatic coughs that brought his bronchitic lungs to life each morning and sent her mother into fits of worry. Phlegm all over his good pyjamas, she’d messaged once. You have to scrub it out by hand. These types of messages were more frequent now, the minutiae of the flu her father could not seem to shake. Two different doctors and still no better, her mother would write, and it worried Aida to reply. She pushed the phone deep into her pocket, out of sight for now.

  It had been a month since their last appointment, when the only news Sarah had had was that she’d found a new housemate for Aida. Her previous housemate, unsettled by the endlessness
of waiting, had moved to a regional area where her brother worked picking apples and where she thought the prospects of her protection visa application might be improved. Her brother earned slightly less than the benefits payment had been but it was worth it, her housemate had said, for the purpose it gave his days. Aida had struggled with the rent, existing on flavourless packet noodles, until Sarah had found the new housemate. Or housemates. ‘A housemate and a half,’ Sarah had joked when Elham had walked into the room with Niki clinging to the hem of her shirt. This was their first introduction – Niki’s face coiled into a tired scowl as she clawed at her mother for attention. Her dark hair springing from two uneven pigtails, she had looked at Aida with a contempt and displeasure far beyond her years.

  ‘She’s tired,’ Elham apologised quietly in Persian, attempting to prise away Niki’s hands as they stretched the material of her shirt and exposed the flesh on her belly.

  Niki’s response had been to let out a high-pitched shriek, slapping at her mother as she buried her face into her trouser leg. Aida watched Elham cringe, her body moving wearily with the demands of her daughter.

  ‘I think you’re going to be great housemates,’ Sarah said encouragingly, her voice rising to compete with Niki’s increasingly deranged howl.

  A week or so later Elham and Niki had moved in, the grand sum of their worldly possessions held within the zippers of two large chequered storage bags. A tired red and blue stripe, they were the symbol of transience the world over. Aida lent her some bedding then helped her float the sheet across the narrow mattress.

  ‘It’s only a single,’ Aida apologised, but Elham shrugged.

  ‘We’ll fit.’

  Niki, ensconced in the far corner gripping a well-worn teddy bear, eyed them suspiciously then hurled herself dramatically onto the faded carpet.

  ‘No room,’ she cried, mixing an English ‘no’ with a Persian ‘room’.