Big decision, and no guidelines. Al has to make up his mind.
Al hadn’t had any particular thoughts about visas, citizenship, and so on until his organizer told him he was a month out from expiry. He’d been so at home in the business that it actually came as quite a shock. Emigrate? Him? Why? Just renew the visa……….
Well, no. He was committed here, now. It was a very disjointing moment. He wandered the Chinatown area like a lost soul. A staccato of elegant Chinese script rattled at him. Bill had said in passing that many of the Chinese had been in Australia since the Gold Rush, 140+ years ago. Seven generations. He strayed into his local butcher, and it occurred to him that there were a few people he could talk to about this. John Wang, the butcher, was a fourth generation Chinese Australian.
“John, I’m thinking of emigrating here. I also don’t know what I think about it.”
“Ah, look, mate, we live well here. What people see in The Old Country I don’t know. My family all go back to our village in China at least once in a lifetime and all come back very glad we live here. I have a Greek friend who said that if he never sees Athens traffic again he’d die happy. He still wants to bring the rest of Greece over here, but leave that behind. It’s peaceful, here, too, by any standards. You could do a lot worse.”
Fair comment, decided Al.
A bookshop run by an Englishman who wasn’t a drunk was a further reference. Bart Lewis, general wit and Voltaire addict.
“I came over here to try to live like a human being, not something in a bloody soap opera. Here, if you want to get out of the slums, you don’t have to leave the country to do it.”
Ahmed Abdullah, the dry cleaner:
“I’ve seen enough war to last me forever. I was trying to find a place for me and my family to escape the last few hundred years of predictable poverty. Things are strange here, it is very different, but you don’t have to put up with things you don’t like.”
Didn’t quite fit Al’s position, any of it, but interesting perspectives. Other matters intervened. He had to go to a party to which Dorothy was invited. Bill and Jane were also coming, as were Carla and Joe. Dorothy had asked them…good management…Al realized his social skills hadn’t been improved by all the years of being single. He should have thought of it himself.
Meanwhile, there was a party to go to. The party was for a cousin of Dorothy’s, who’d got engaged. Al made a mental note to try to get some cultural ideas, as he climbed into his suit. He was only just getting the hang of the way things were done in Australia and he needed exposure as participant, not an observer. Al had formed a pretty rosy picture of Australia. He’d met a lot of the better class of business people, the actual producers. He now met a real diversity of people. A reasonably crowded supply of them, all strangely familiar.
Dorothy had eclipsed herself. She arrived at Al’s in a stunningly beautiful dress, looking as though the sunlight was made for her. Al gaped unashamedly. They slithered over to the party in the late afternoon of a mild Saturday. Bill and Jane met them, dressed to perfection, and Al spent a little time wondering what he was doing as part of all this elegance. He wasn’t a fashion plate………. Actually he had tried to look good for Dorothy, and succeeded, and refused to admit it to himself on principle. Joe and Carla arrived. Joe had always looked carelessly Bohemian, he couldn’t really avoid it. Now, attached to Carla, he made some sort of sense, at least to Al. He now seemed carelessly well dressed. Bill said so.
“With Carla about, a lemming with a bow tie would look good,” said Joe, honestly. One look in the mirror had scared him, confronting him with a version of himself that he didn’t quite believe.
The girls had independently dressed down, understated themselves, as far as they knew, and had thus become belles of the ball. A riot of au courant fashion, predictable, tedious blacks and horrifying ensembles bounced right off them. A stunned group of women actually backed away from them as they passed. It reminded Al of Prom Night at his old high school. That glimpse was an aberration, because it meant that for a whole couple of seconds he wasn’t looking at Dorothy, who was now getting reactions usually reserved for royalty. Deference was the order of the day.
Al and Bill looked at each other with raised eyebrows as an older man and his wife materialized and welcomed her effusively. The man looked as though he owned the place, the woman made him look as though he should. They were in their late working life, evidently, and gave the impression of being very aware of their company, like a cattleman is aware of his stock. They both smiled when they saw Dorothy, which they had rather pointedly not been doing before. This was Dorothy’s uncle, Dave Flinger, and Aunt Carolyn. The remains of Dorothy’s parental family, apart from her mother in Brisbane. A few cousins dotted the area, notably the one who was getting engaged, who resembled Carolyn, small, elegant, and lively.
The vibes didn’t make any sense to Al. There was some tension, somewhere. Joe, who was basking in Carla’s presence, noticed it too, and was wondering why the two older people looked like they were trying not to explode. Meanwhile, Dorothy had found out. She glided over to the group.
“Dave isn’t too happy about the business end of this arrangement. The bloke Angela’s engaged to is a staff member, their sales manager.”
It turned out that Dave operated a very successful hardware franchise, called Hard Slog Hardware. He reminded Al of a very blunt version of Ian. Dorothy was obviously very fond of him, and said he was very like her father, so this tension was not what she wanted. They all sat down at the table with the family and the new fiancé, who was called Ashley Something. Al, as a passing American, attracted quite a lot of interest. He got the impression that he was representative of something, although he wasn’t quite clear what. Dave, however, didn’t seem impressed.
“How’s business treating you here? Bit different, I would think.”
“Thanks to Dorothy, Bill, Carla, Joe, Joe’s parents, and some luck, pretty good, really. Different, very. Still finding my way about.”
“Dorothy’s helping you? Sounds traumatic.”
This line, according to Al’s emotional dictionary, meant, “I adore my niece,” and Al relaxed a bit.
“Terrifying ordeal. She……… I mean…….you know Genghis Khan?”
“Not personally, no. There is a resemblance, I grant you. She was a strange child.”
“I was delightful,” explained Dorothy.
“You were a menace. She used to make mud pies and would hold these parties with her cousins, and there’d be mud pie fights. You wouldn’t believe what four kids could do with a bit of mud.”
“Nothing wrong with a bit of geological enthusiasm,” said Al, tolerantly.
“They made a statue out of the cat,” said Carolyn.
“She taught them how,” added Dave.
“Then she became a vet to throw people off the trail,” said Bill, grinning.