One Halal of a Story by Sam Dastyari

Author:Sam Dastyari [Dastyari, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522872088
Google: G2_SAQAACAAJ
Amazon: 0522872085
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

HOW TO CONDUCT YOURSELF AROUND CHILDREN

I’ve been in some pretty rough mosh pits in my life. I’ve seen people be dragged down and beaten when crowd surfing. I’ve spent time at all-day festivals where drug-induced paranoia feeds the violent tendencies of middle-aged tattooed men. None of this, however, adequately prepared me for proceedings at the nativity scene in which, with her school companions, my 5-year-old daughter recently partook.

Frankly, I blame myself. All the warning signs were there. When the teacher rose to caution parents that, in the case of an emergency, they ought not to push children out of the way to get to an exit, I simply should have read the tea leaves. But I laughed, thinking that the teacher had made a joke, before realising how seriously this was taken.

Helen was working, which meant that she had to do her paid work along with the eighty or so other essential things that had to be done that day. In consequence, she couldn’t get to the play until later. So she needed to delegate. I was the delegatee, meaning that I had the straightforward job. All that I had to do was to drop off Hannah on time and reserve some seats. Sometimes things that at face value seem to be straightforward aren’t, well … Let’s just say that the designated task had its challenges.

The play was to start at 6:00 p.m. and the children were to arrive by 5:00 p.m. for costume. I thought that I could arrive at 5:00 p.m., drop off my daughter and still get decent seats. How naive. Seats, being a finite resource, would be sought after. They would be subject to intense competition, and those who got the good ones would be fiercely envied by those who didn’t. By 5:10 p.m., the only seats that I could get were in the fourth-last row—row 17. People had been filing in from midday.

I had arranged seats for a friend, Lucy Mannering, who was coming with her two other children. Lucy has a daughter, Sybilla, in the same class as Hannah. It hadn’t gone perfectly to plan for Lucy—she had to launch into crisis-management mode once it became apparent that the costume department was in a tizz.

Lucy had overlooked Sybilla’s white socks, the required dress code for the ‘naughty sheep’ in whose guise both our daughters were to be appearing. I had to fight off parents trying to take the seats that I’d reserved for her and when she at last arrived was disappointed that she didn’t appreciate the difficulty of procuring, and then of retaining, these shit seats. I’d needed to establish and patrol a beachhead. I’d deployed items of clothing—arrayed strategically on a series of seats—and had mustered my 3-year-old daughter, Eloise, to do guard duty by sitting across two seats that, had there been no bum or leg on them, would doubtless have fallen to the enemy.

‘I need to ask you, politely, not to move your chair into the aisles, not to stand in the aisles, not to obscure the aisles and not to encourage your children to run into your arms.

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