Читать книгу Searching For Sophia - Andrew Saw - Страница 10

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Don’t let dreams become real. It could be a Broadway melody, but the science behind every torch song is accurate. Once the prefrontal cortex starts the process, there’s no turning back. The cascading release of dopamine, serotonin and adrenalin creates a storm of pleasure. It’s there by day, and always in dreams.

The frothing warriors of Islam are caught in the same tempest as the models surging down catwalks for Victoria’s Secret. No part of human history, no race, profession or religion escapes. I’m saying this because, despite our radically different backgrounds, it’s weathering the storm that makes Joe and me friends.

We met as first-year veterinary students at Sydney University and the bonding was instant, although on paper we shouldn’t glue at all. I’m six-foot-three in the old language. Joe is about five-footseven. In anthropomorphic terms, I’m a Border Collie and he’s a finely formed marsupial. I grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Joe is a product of a cosmopolitan culture where the Torah, Talmud and B’rit Hadasha are assiduously read.

The only thing we really have in common is that we both come from medical families. My parents are suburban GPs; Joe’s parents are specialist surgeons. They were dismayed in their separate ways when we decided to study veterinary science; but there the obvious connection ends.

I love my cricket and footy. I’m always one of those sad figures lurching towards the finishing line in the city to surf annual marathon, and I still surf most weekends. “Jews don’t surf,” Joe once said with an authority that discouraged dissent. He prefers his boxing and he’s never lurched with a sweating mob towards a marathon ribbon.

The differences between us run deep but actually strengthen the friendship, which is even more unusual when you know our family backgrounds. I’m solid Anglo-Irish. Joe is German Jewish, with family roots deep in the Rhineland and Westphalia. His grandparents emigrated just after the Second World War; his father is an obstetrician and his mother a plastic surgeon, two tricky professions for people with their real family name: Frankenstein.

For the record, it’s Old German, meaning “stone of the Franks”, but “Dr Frankenstein” is never going to look great on a brass plate for an Australian obstetrician or plastic surgeon – or a vet for that matter – so for professional reasons they shortened their name to Franken. Although Joe has always kept his real name on his passport, something that often gives him grief. Jokes about viridian skin and bolts in the neck follow him through most airports. “You can’t hide from Frankenstein,” I once heard him say at JFK after the usual neck-bolt crack. “I was speaking to Barry Frankenstein in San Clemente just the other day.”

The Wildes of the Northern Beaches are Anglo-Irish, as I’ve said, with no connection to Oscar, despite my father’s wild assertions. That’s his joke, not mine. My father Bill and my mother Sally are both politically conservative, staunchly Christian GPs, lumbering through gumnut suburbia like a pair of Aryan Goliaths. My mother’s daily reality is homogenised with hospital-strength bleach. My father’s passion is for order, and cricket on TV. The chemical air freshener of my childhood was always fresher than fresh air. Our toilet water was always a vivid synthetic blue.

For Sally and Bill, the Northern Beaches are a safe domain where they help decent families battle skin cancer and whistle hymns to a blond Jesus; but their Protestantism makes them paranoid. Buddhists and Jews are deeply mistrusted in that order. Muslims are Lucifer’s children. My father is vague on the reasoning; for him it’s instinctive, but my mother is the mistress of dogma.

“What’s wrong with Buddhists, Mum?”

“They have no god.”

“Muslims?”

“Devils of the desert.”

“The Jews?”

“They murdered our saviour.”

“But God’s Jewish, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The son of God is a Jewish guy called Jesus, it’s pretty simple.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Is he God’s son, or isn’t he?”

“Get to bed.”

“Mum, I’m thirty-eight years old.”

“Do as you’re told.”

I love them because they’re like a million other sets of solid citizenry. The planet is spinning at around 1600 kilometres an hour and sometimes it feels like Australia could peel off and hurtle into space at any moment. Like all of us, they’re hanging on as best they can, but it was definitely a shock for a sheltered twenty-oneyear-old university student from the Northern Beaches to meet the Doctors Frankenstein for the first time.