The Lebs

by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

FINALIST FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARDS 2019. WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIERS LITERARY AWARDS MULTICULTURAL NSW AWARD 2019. 'Bani Adam thinks he's better than us!' they say over and over until finally I shout back, 'Shut up, I have something to say!'. They all go quiet and wait for me to explain myself, redeem myself, pull my shirt out, rejoin the pack. I hold their anticipation for three seconds, and then, while they're all ablaze, I say out loud, 'I do think I'm better.' As far as Bani Adam is concerned Punchbowl Boys is the arse end of the earth. Though he's a Leb and they control the school, Bani feels at odds with the other students, who just don't seem to care. He is a romantic in a sea of hypermasculinity.Bani must come to terms with his place in this hostile, hopeless world, while dreaming of so much more. Praise for The Lebs: 'an open-eyed and highly charismatic novel broiling with fight, tenderness and ambition.' - Big Issue. 'The Lebs is a strong and resonant novel that deserves to be widely read.' - Weekend Australian. 'The author never lets his superb command of idiom or his eye for the absurd overwhelm a deeply felt exploration of the hurt and damage that can come from encounters with the Australian Other. No one who reads The Lebs deserves to come out unscathed.' - The Saturday Paper. 'Ahmad's piercing storytelling cuts away at the lace and trimmings of race relations in Australia today.' - The Lifted Brow.

Release date: February 27, 2018

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 272

Sample

THERE ARE NO BULLIES AT PUNCHBOWL BOYS. The school captain, Jamal, stands up and screams out at assembly like it’s thug life. ‘Bullying is for faggots and pussies. What kind of a sad fuck is bothered to pick on some other sad fuck?’ Specks of tabouli blaze in his eyes. The teachers react by barricading the school, erecting nine-foot fences with barbed wire and cameras, and creating one way in, one way out, through the front office. They lose all their privacy but tell us it’s a small price to pay for freedom. Students pour through the front door all morning, and the principal, Mr Whitechurch, who’s White, and the deputy, Ms Aboud, who’s Libyan, stand at the entry. ‘Good morning, Bani,’ they say to me at the same time, like two coppers. I step between them, along the blue carpet and past the reception desk, which has a bulletproof glass shield, and then through the door that leads into the school. It opens out from the front office, swings closed and locks.

There used to be seven hundred students at Punchbowl Boys, but when Mr Whitechurch was appointed he expelled three hundred and ninety-nine of them in one go. I was fifteen at the time but it starts over again like I’m staring at the western suburbs through my rear-view. Every day the remaining boys sprint along the corridor that joins to the front office, pretending they are driving a Subaru WRX. Their heads and spines are tipped back as though they are sitting in a bucket seat, their left hand is on their cock as though they’re shifting a gearstick, and their right hand is out in front of them as though they’re holding onto a steering wheel. While they move through the corridor they make engine and gear shifting sounds, ‘Baaaaaa-baaa ba-baaaaaaaaaaa.’ Then before they turn a corner they kick in the sound of the turbo, ‘Bre-bre-bre-bre-bre-breew!’ Mustafa Fatala moves so fast down the corridor that he crashes through a window. He tears open his hand and damages vital nerves, which means he can’t write properly anymore, but that doesn’t matter because he never receives a grade higher than thirty per cent anyway. He rambles on about how he’s going to sue the school until one day Ms Aboud says to him, ‘Yeah, tell the lawyer you were acting like a car.’ Every Punchbowl Boy except me pisses himself laughing. I keep my pleasure to myself, grateful to see Fatala in pain because of the time I’d stepped past him in the corridor and he screamed ‘Yaaaaaaaaa!’ into my ear. I thought someone had put a bullet in my head; then I turned and saw him standing there staring at me with his jaw clenched and his eyes possessed by the jinn, a creature made of smokeless fire. Fatala seethed at me as air pushed in and out through the gaps in his teeth. Why he acts this way is a mystery between him and his maker. It brings me down – knowing that such a being exists and that we are only different to others within the walls of this school. In here Fatala is Black and I am White. I am at the centre of every teacher’s affection because I can discuss Faulkner and Joyce and Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. The teachers look to me whenever they need to be reminded that it’s the Boys of Punchbowl who are wrong, who are lesser beings. But then, when we’re on the outside, Fatala and I are the same – we are sand niggers, rejected and hated and feared. Cops and transit officers target us and chicks and Skips avoid us. There’s nothing I can do about it. Fatala and I look like the gang rapist Bilal Skaf, who is on the front page of every newspaper today.

The main corridor leads into the quadrangle at one end and the school hall at the other. All the way down the cracked vinyl tiles are the Maths rooms, six in total. My 2 Unit Maths room is between 3 Unit on the left and Intermediate on the right. I hate Maths like I hate being a Lebo – I am above it. I will be neither Isaac Newton nor Bilal Skaf, I will be a great novelist, like Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I will shape reality through my own words. I’m sitting in Maths writing a short story about a very young boy with enormous wings instead of learning equations when there is a loud screech outside that goes, ‘Fucken black cunt!’ All twenty boys in my class shoot up and tumble into the corridor like bodies through a windshield.

A Pacific Islander named Banjo is standing with his arms dangling by his sides, a kitchen knife in his right hand and a serrated pocketknife in his left hand. His jaw hangs open and his eyes are filled with the fizz of Coca-Cola. He looks like an ogre, towering over all the Lebs. His head is small and round and he’s hunching, his size-seventeen Converses rake across the vinyl. Rajab stands in front of him; a short-arse Lebo with a wound shaped like the centre of a strawberry across his shaved head. Blood runs down his temple and cheek, dripping from his jaw onto his shoulder, his white school shirt blotching with red like a slashed lamb. Banjo isn’t strong enough to penetrate Rajab’s skull. That’s the thing about Punchbowl Boys: we swing like men but we’re still just boys – we’re not as strong as the bones that hold us together, so the knives just ricochet against our flesh. Perhaps if we were smart enough to sharpen those knives, and smart enough to learn the most sensitive points in the head to swing those knives at, we’d kill each other. Perhaps stupidity is Allah’s way of protecting us from ourselves.

The Lebs gather around Banjo like a pack of wolves, but nobody bothers to chase him when he bolts down the other end of the corridor, towards the school hall. We just stare at Rajab, who looks confused, his left cheek wincing, even though he knows, like the rest of us, that all this happened because he stole Banjo’s Nokia 3210.

Two students walk Rajab to the sick bay, which means the principal has had to unlock the front office, and everyone else is sent back into Maths. Mrs Stratton’s dehydrated skin wrinkles as she scowls, ‘Concentrate.’ She turns her back to us and continues writing on the whiteboard, her arm reaching right up over her head because she’s short and stumpy. She wears a thick woollen jumper that’s so long it might as well be a dress, and her grey hair sways from side to side in a way that shows me it was blonde once – the envy of every dark-haired Wog she’s ever taught. She writes numbers that mean nothing to anyone, the silence building inside the classroom until finally a student named Shaky spits out, ‘Fucken Banjo, fucken pussy cunt!’

Mrs Stratton twists, her sharp nose and beady eyes snapping towards him. In her tight, nasal voice she says, ‘Leave him alone. Banjo’s just scared.’ The teachers always take the side of the Fobs. Maybe they feel sorry for them because they’re so heavily outnumbered by the Lebs, or because they’re even poorer than us and stand out the front of the school in the morning sharing a two-litre bottle of Coke, or maybe it’s because we call them Fobs, which stands for Fresh Off the Boat and makes no sense to White teachers because to them the Lebs are boat people too.

On the second level of the school building are the English classrooms, and the corridor is exactly the same as on the first level, with cracked vinyl tiles all the way down and light spilling in from windows that overlook the quadrangle. Every English room is the same, with unpainted brick walls and chalkboards that have been rubbed so many times they are covered in a permanent haze of white chalk. Mr Whitechurch pulls down the poster of Mecca hanging in our English room and says, ‘If you can’t respect other people’s cultures, then the school doesn’t have to respect yours.’ This is because next door, in Ms Keller’s room, the boys have burned two Aboriginal paintings that belonged to her grandfather. Mohammad Usuf says, ‘Sir, that’s racist, man – how do you know it wasn’t one of the Fobs?’ It seems like a fair point, and so all the boys except me start banging on the tables and chanting, ‘Hoa, hoa, hoa,’ and shouting, ‘Rock job! Sir, you got rocked!’ Mr Whitechurch waits for them to settle. Then his leathery skin sags at the corners of his mouth and he says, ‘Referring to Pacific Islanders as Fobs is racist.’ He walks out of our classroom with Mecca rolled up in his hand. He knows, as well as we know, that it wasn’t the Fobs. What he doesn’t know is that Mohammad Usuf never comes to school without his Zippo lighter. He bought it last year in Lebanon. It has the word kafir written across the lid in Arabic, which means ‘infidel’.

The desks in our English class have metal legs and thin plywood tops. Using pens and knives, the Boys of Punchbowl leave their mark on the wood. ‘Lebz Rule.’ ‘Fuck Aussies.’ ‘Thug Life.’ One of the engravings, which looks like a jagged wound, says, ‘Jesus & 2Pac R Muzlim.’

All the chairs in English have a dick drawn on them in black permanent marker so that when you sit down it’s like a cock just went up your arse. I always sit in the front row, usually the spot right up against the desk of my English teacher, Mrs Leila Haimi. She’s twenty-eight and Lebanese and Muslim like the rest of us, but her skin is like milk. She’s angry that she has lost the poster of Mecca but she cares about Aboriginal culture too, so the Boys of Punchbowl call her a traitor. They also call her Brad Fittler – because in her short skirts are thighs so chunky they’re always pressing against each other. She’d be devastated if she knew they nicknamed her after a staunch football player, but the boys don’t mean it as an insult; they love her thighs and the green and the red skirts that expose them, and every day after English they fantasise about being between them. She’d be devastated if she knew this as well. A Syrian student named Bara is almost an exception. He listens to the boys talk about Mrs Haimi’s thighs and, as though they are talking about beauty and not about fucking, he says, ‘Well, she has nice eyes.’ Everyone laughs at him and replies, ‘Faggot, what a faggot.’

‘Wha-at!’ Bara retorts, like he has a Big Mac in his mouth. ‘Her eyes are blue.’

I know better. Mrs Haimi does have nice eyes but not because they are lighter than ours. The boys are staring at the black line between her hefty legs, and Bara might be looking at the surface of her eyes, but nobody except me has ever ventured into her pupils. Nobody but me listens when she says, ‘Read James Joyce.’ When she does, I find a short story called The Dead and I stay up all night reading about haunted love and the living dead and all morning memorising the final lines, and just as I am stepping past Mrs Haimi in the corridor I say, ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ Mrs Haimi’s gaze lights up, and it’s like I’m looking into the centre of the universe. The next day in class she says, ‘Read Gabriel García Márquez.’ I find a short story called A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and I stay up all night reading about the withered angel with dirty feathers and all morning memorising the last line, and just as I am stepping past Mrs Haimi in the doorway to her English room, just as we are breathing the same air, I say, ‘She kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.’ Mrs Haimi’s small black pupils begin to expand from her blue irises and now it is as though I am looking into the heart of the Archangel Jibrail. This time in class she says, ‘Lear is a man more sinned against than sinning.’ I have slipped into a realm that existed before there was any such thing as blue eyes, to a time when there was nothing but sand. I wish I could be alone with Mrs Leila Haimi. I will promise her to remain a boy, never to sin, a very young man with enormous wings so that one day she can hold me at her complete mercy and may drive me across the endless desert. Her reading voice is slow and soft and fluent and it assures me that I can be free when a loud squeal breaks in from the back of the classroom. ‘Meees,’ says Solomon, ‘isn’t it true that Shakespeare was a poof?’ Every Punchbowl Boy but me considers this a serious question and waits silently for Mrs Haimi to answer. Her fair lips curl in my direction – enough to show me that I don’t need to be alone with her to be alone with her. She says to Solomon, ‘You’re an idiot.’

Then Mrs Haimi hands out a questionnaire. The first question reads, ‘The snail is a castle. What is the metaphor in this sentence?’ It takes five minutes before Mohammed Khaled starts calling out, ‘Meees! Meees! What’s a metapor?’ Mrs Haimi looks my way again with the little smile and then calls out to the rest of the boys, ‘Just skip the ones you don’t know.’

‘Meees!’ the boys howl. ‘Meees!’

‘Skout ouh-laa!’ Mrs Haimi replies in Arabic, which means ‘shut up, you’. She sits, and straightaway I slide the questionnaire across my desk and onto hers. She looks down at it and quickly examines the answers. Then in her squeaky voice she whispers to me, ‘It’s good to be at a school with retards – you will stand on top.’ The words are like a dagger between my lungs. This is the extent to which she sees my potential.

I was fifteen years old and longing for Leila Haimi like Majnun longed for Layla. Each time I turned a corridor at Punchbowl Boys, each time I stepped through a doorway, I did it with the anticipation and the hope that she would appear before me. Often she emerged amid a hundred Lebos like me and would not notice that I was even there; but then one day she called out to me and only me, as though all the other Punchbowl Boys around us were blind, deaf and dumb. ‘Read Lolita,’ she instructed. ‘It’s the most beautifully written book you will ever know.’ I found an unopened copy in the school library, which had bright red lips on the cover and pure white pages inside. I read it over the three following nights, and then I ran with it for three years, believing that I understood it, that Mrs Leila Haimi had recommended the book to me in code. Perhaps she was Humbert Humbert and I was Lolita Haze, and she planned to one day take me around the country, far away from Punchbowl and Lebs and laws. Or perhaps I was Humbert Humbert and she was Lolita Haze, and her blue eyes and fair skin were destined to haunt me until the end of my days. And so I began to sympathise with Humbert Humbert, believing his love for Lolita was pure and innocent, like mine for Leila Haimi. His poetry became my poetry, and his flare for words became the only truth I would ever need. The next time I found Mrs Leila Haimi she was walking out of the library. Quickly I said to her, ‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, Mrs Leila Haimi.’

Suddenly she stopped, which was strange and exciting because usually she’d just smile at me as she kept walking. ‘And …’ she said, raising her thin eyebrows at me. ‘What about the rest?’

‘The rest … what do you mean? Those are the last lines.’

Then she smiled at me, like a schoolgirl in slacks, and carried on walking as my heart thumped.

Mrs Leila Haimi and I are caught between sex and skin, between war and peace. When she is alone in a classroom with her students she is an Arab like me, but when her English class comes together with the class of a White female teacher she is a woman like her. The head teacher of English is Ms Lion. She looks like a ninety-year-old prostitute, with dyed-blonde hair and monolithic sagging boobs and an arse like melted haloumi. Her cheeks are always bright pink and her eyes dressed in deep black mascara. She says she lives in Newtown. I never tell the Lebs but my family started off in Newtown too. My father and my grandmother owned a house on Copeland Street but they moved us out when I was ten because they said the area was full of pooftas and overpriced falafels.

‘Miss, do you have any kids?’ That’s what the Boys of Punchbowl ask Ms Lion at least once a week. ‘I have a dog,’ Ms Lion responds bluntly. This makes all the boys, including me, feel sick. In Islam we call dogs najis, which means ‘ritually unclean’. Here is our proof that Aussies are scum – they love dogs more than they love people. It is revolting that Ms Lion compares her najis to a human child, lets it run around the house, sit on her couch, lie in her bed, sniff at her laundry.

Ms Lion brings her class together with Mrs Haimi’s class to teach us an Australian play called Blackrock. She tells us that the text is based on true events: in 1989 a fourteen-year-old girl named Leigh Leigh was assaulted, raped and murdered at a birthday party in Stockton by a group of young men.

‘What’s this shit got to do with us?’ asks Shaky. ‘Those guys were Aussies.’

Ms Lion scrunches her mascara-filled eyes and her lips, and stares at him like he’s some kind of animal. She must be thinking that Shaky is a self-hating traitor because his dad is Lebanese but his mum is Anglo like her. That’s why Shaky’s skin is fair and his eyes are green, the kind of green girls on the street notice. Whenever someone asks Shaky his background, he just says he’s Leb like the rest of us but I’ve seen him take full advantage of his mixed heritage – he gets head jobs from Wog chicks that think he looks like Brad Pitt and he gets head jobs from Aussie chicks that think he looks like Enrique Iglesias.

Ms Lion gathers us in the school common room, an empty hall at the end of the English corridor. She breaks us up into groups of three to memorise scenes from the play. I stand in a circle with Shaky and Bassam and we read the first scene, which involves two Skips named Ricko and Jared. We put on the tightest nasal accent we can muster and read in unison, ‘Piss off, Cherie – shut up, Tiffany.’ Then we laugh like hyenas. Ms Lion will never admit it but the real reason she’s making us read the play is because Lebos had pack-raped some Aussie girls last month and it’s been all over the news. The problem is that the Punchbowl Boys aren’t going to learn about misogyny and patriarchy from Australian literature, because even when Aussies are being sexist they sound like faggots to us. I read out Jared’s line, ‘Girls can’t surf.’ Bassam scoffs and says, ‘Surfing is for pussies.’ Then he steps in close and whispers to Shaky and me, ‘Ay, boys, you think Bilal Skaf is guilty?’ He looks around to make sure the teachers haven’t heard him.

Mrs Haimi is standing with Hamza and Mohammed and Bader on the other side of the room. She’s shorter than all three of them but whenever I see her standing on her own in the corridor or on the playground she looks like she could crush a. . .