The minute I took off my shoes and entered the room, I felt protected by a wall of ritual. The thick carpets on the floor were carmine red, the red on a vamp's fingernails. Green and white velvet drapes hung across the doorways and the walls had been decorated with tapestries of Arabic writing. I luxuriated on a green cushion on the floor, my legs stretched out before me, and enjoyed this new sensation. I was in a place where everything had already been determined. There was no need to worry, I only had to follow.

The girls around me chattered in a mixture of languages - the drawling tones of English tempered by the softer inflections of Arabic, Persian and Urdu. Two girls by the door, their heads bowed over homework, muttered to each other in staccato bursts.

- Arabic?

I whispered to Zahara, who sat to the right of me, her bright yellow socks unceremoniously out of place in the subdued atmosphere of the hall. She cocked her head for a second, listening.

- Not Arabic, Indonesian.

The men and women had naturally divided themselves. The men milled about on the other side of the room, standing in clusters. I sat in a long row of women, our scarves making us look like a jumbled box of coloured pencils.

Reshma, on my left side, was busy catching up with a group of girls. She turned to me, giggling.

- They think you're Muslim. I told them you were Persian.

- You didn't!

Reshma couldn't stop laughing and I knew that she had. I felt a hot blush creeping up my neck and hoped that it would stay there, hidden by the scarf wrapped tightly around my head.

I'd spent Friday lounging around Zahara's home, feeling unproductive while both she and her sister were at work. I tried to help her mum with the housework but she waved me away, her happy moon-face momentarily creased with displeasure.

- No, no, guests don't clean here. You relax, enjoy yourself.

So I spent most of the day either dozing on my mattress or sitting on their couch, contemplating a shimmering gold wall-hanging in their living room. It was a sensuous piece of silk, delicate and dry to the touch. Its repeating pattern of stylised flowers in brown and golden threads was a vision of what King Midas' garden would have looked like. And sitting before it, I felt as isolated and mournful as he must have.

My dad, after he'd gone through his pack of beers, had a habit of yelling that we were good-for-nothing-useless-bludgers. We were stupid kids, codging off his hard-earned money. This was the signal that he was about to move onto the vodka. Sometimes I was guilty of pushing it closer towards him, so that he'd just shut up and move onto the weeping phase. That was difficult too, but at least when he got sad it was only directed at himself.

I could still hear him, as I sat there, at a loss with what to do with myself. You lazy bugger, you worthless little shit. You shit.

At about three o'clock Zahara's mum, or Mrs Kath, as I'd decided to call her, left to do the shopping. She paused before the wall hanging and took its thin, soft cloth between her fingers.

- You think this is beautiful, right? This was gift from one of my closest friends. She was married when we were fifteen, and her husband took her to live in Pakistan. We cried, cried, cried when she left. I didn't think I'd ever see her again. But, fifteen years later, she returned for a visit. She returned and she still remembered me. She brought this and told me - our friendship is like the golden thread that runs through this cloth.

- It cannot be broken, no matter how far a distance the thread must run. For it is the thread which holds the cloth together. Maybe she somehow knew that I was going to come here, even farther away than Pakistan, and she wanted to give this to me so that I would remember, as faithfully as she did.

Then she came over and placed her hand on my arm.

- Your family is here in Sydney, yes? You should let them know that you are safe. They must be worried about you.

A better daughter would have called home. I knew that Mrs Kath was right and mum would be going crazy with worry, threatening to contact the television networks and storm the Prime Minister's house. My hand hovered over the telephone receiver. But I also knew that I was eighteen now and they couldn't set the police on my trail. I felt sorry for mum, so sorry that my hands shook and my gut pulled tears from my eyes, but I could still see her quietly clearing the dishes while dad sat there at the dinner table, his splotchy face knotted in anger, spitting out at us with his beery breath.

You ungrateful little shits.

Instead, I sat on the couch until Mrs Kath came home with bags full of groceries, until Mr Kath returned with his neat shirt and loud "hello-hello-hello", until their girls stumbled in looking crumpled and sweaty and exhausted.

Zahara threw her backpack on the floor and collapsed next to me on the couch.

- God, I hate fussy old women and their change. Why can't they ever just find their change? They try to cram in a running speech of what their grandson's favourite brand of cereal is and isn't the sugar so bad for his teeth, when all I want from them is five cents - five cents! I swear, it's just not worth all the aggro.

- What are you guys doing tonight?

I was leaning forward, hands on my knees, words coming out a little too quickly after so much silence. Reshma was looking at herself in the mirror, pulling her scarf forward and rearranging the pins.

- We're going out tonight, do you want to come?

- Reshma.

Zahara shot her sister a stern glance. I looked back at Reshma, puzzled by Zahara's surly tone.

- Where are you going?

- It's this lecture I always go to on Fridays. Zahara's coming tonight.

Zahara waved her hand at me.

- You don't have to come. It's going to be a religious lecture.

- Like church?

- It's not church, exactly. We're not going to the mosque. They have these religious lectures every Friday, and tonight there's a guest speaker who's really good and I want to go see. You don't have to come.

- Where abouts is it?

- Granville.

I'd never been to Granville before, but of course I'd heard about it. My parents talked in hushed voices every January about the Granville train disaster. My mum had a classmate who'd died in the accident. Not someone she knew well, but a pretty girl who she'd seen around uni and talked to a few times. She kept the sepia tinged newspaper clippings in a scrapbook that sat on the shelf alongside our encyclopaedias.

I'd looked through the grainy photographs many times. They seemed to come from somewhere deep in the past, a dream-world that never really existed. The photographs were a patchy mash-up of light and dark, edges and metal. It was hard to imagine that people had been inside those images of twisted metal.

I watched Reshma, preening in the mirror, and I wondered what she saw when she looked at herself.

- Is it bad to wear the scarf if I'm not Muslim? I mean, isn't it disrespectful?

Zahara shook her head.

- It's a sign of respect. Look at me - I don't usually wear the scarf because I don't really see the point of it, but I'll do it tonight to be polite. Besides, it doesn't mean anything. It's just what's done.

Her face was earnest. I couldn't see what she was really thinking. They'd both seemed accepting when I told them that I didn't have a religion, but now I wondered. A religious lecture. News footage of Jihad Jack Thomas standing outside the courthouse came into my mind. His beard and hair were both closely cropped, forming a fuzzy ring around his pink face. The first time I saw him, dressed in a dark suit, I thought he was Jewish. When I found out he'd been accused of being a Muslim terrorist, I wondered how someone like him had found a religion that seemed so foreign.

- No, I'll come.

- Really?

The look that Zahara gave me showed that she didn't believe me.

- Really. It sounds interesting.

Reshma squealed with delight and went racing down the corridor.

- I'll choose what scarf you're going to wear.

My dad's family had been in Australia for seven generations and he was proud of it. Whenever we went shopping in Chatswood, he'd grumble under his breath to me. "These days you feel like you're no longer living in Australia." I'd walk a little ahead of him, hoping that people wouldn't realise he was my dad. He always spoke a little too loud. "This whole place is just a Chinatown now." I was afraid that someone would bash him, but they never did. Instead, they'd steer clear, giving us wary looks that I pretended not to see.

Now an old man wearing a white turban stood at the lectern. He tapped the microphone and reminded us that the talk was about to begin. Zahara nudged me with her elbow.

- That's the Sheikh.

- What does Sheikh mean?

- Nothing. It just means that he's a wise man.

The Sheikh had bright blue eyes and a warmth that rose off him and threatened to embrace the entire room. I didn't trust him. He seemed - jolly - and with his white beard he threatened to call up memories of Santa Claus.

He waited for people to take their seats - chairs had been placed in the middle of the room, on either side of a green partition that separated the men from the women. Then he began to pray and the room joined in with him.

I didn't know the words but the rise and fall of them carried me away. It reminded me of when we used to go to Christmas mass, when everyone seemed joined together by their reverence for the church. Outside there were old friends and neighbours whose smiles displayed their shark teeth. They'd seen my dad retching in our gutters, heard the clatter as we cleared out his bottles in the morning. But inside the church, singing songs together, it seemed as though we might all be on the same side after all.

- First of all, I have the pleasure, inshallah, to be invited to speak with you all today. So I thank those who invited me and who made it easy to come and share with you what I have about the topic tonight which is on the importance of the family.

My face went as red as the carpets that we were sitting on. I turned my head to the floor.

- It is all too easy, in these busy times, for family members to become strangers to each others. We come home and watch television, we talk on the telephone, we get on the internet and slowly, but surely, we grow apart from those people we are supposed to be closest to. The home becomes a hotel where we eat and sleep. Parents and children become like guests who nod to each other as they pass in the lobby.

We stopped going to Christmas mass the year my dad decided we should crash the neighbourhood Christmas party. Mum had found very good reasons to avoid it the past couple of years, but that year she drew a blank. She told my dad that we couldn't go because we hadn't been invited. My dad roared. "What do you mean we haven't been invited? We bloody live here, and we've a right to go. Come on kiddies, we're going to celebrate."

And so we dutifully picked up his packs of beer and went next door where the Roberts family was cooking up a barbeque. Everyone had brought something with them - a salad, a casserole, a cake. Mum brought a loaf of white bread and dad brought three packs of beer.

The neighbours were kind to us children. They must have felt sorry for us. But mum sat quietly in the shade of a tree, whispering stories to Lark, while dad drank his beer and tried to pick a fight with whoever had the courtesy to try talk to him. When he finally vomited in the barbeque, Mr Roberts escorted us home with a sound warning not to return.

The Sheikh turned his palms up towards the ceiling and held them out towards us. He looked at me and I felt as though he knew that I wasn't really Muslim but understood what I was doing there.

- If we do not value the family, then what do we have left? Go home to your families. Look at them in the face, and appreciate them.

After our shopping expeditions in Chatswood, my dad would sit in the car, his face grim. He'd sigh and his bluster was gone. He was just a beaten-down middle-aged man, his paunch spreading towards the steering wheel. "When you no longer recognise the street where you spent your childhood, that's bad."

The silk around my neck was suddenly hot and itchy. I coughed, and felt the lushness of the room creeping along my arms, threatening to suffocate me with its softness. Then I was running, out of the hall, into the street, wanting to breathe in the clear, cool air of my past.