Chapter 34

CHAPTER 7 — BOOK III

 

Between Drift and Direction

 

(Central Queensland University, Sydney — 2007 to mid-2008)

 

CQU did not arrive with drama.

 

It arrived with forms.
Queues.
Student cards that took too long to print.

 

Embong told himself this was sensible.

 

A Bachelor of Business Administration.
Practical.
Marketable.
A correction after the mountains.

 

The campus felt functional in a way Manly never had been. Less stone. Less ceremony. More glass, more noticeboards, more timetables taped slightly crooked to walls. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t inspiring. It was a place designed to move people through.

 

Getting into the building was more work than it needed to be.

 

Every morning, to reach his first lecture, he had to show his student card just to access the lift. Not once, but every time—security at the desk, then again at the turnstile if it was busy. The routine wasn’t hostile. Just procedural. A small, repeating friction that made the day feel as though it began with permission rather than momentum.

 

If he forgot his card, he was stopped.

 

The head of security—a Pakistani man with a patient voice and a tired authority—would explain, carefully, why the card mattered. One morning, when Embong admitted he’d left it at home and that going back would take at least half an hour, the man studied him for a moment, then waved him through.

 

“Next time,” he said. Not unkindly.

 

Embong nodded and went.

 

Some mornings he watched the line inch forward and thought, briefly, that even movement here required proof.

 

CQU was genuinely international.

 

Not in the brochure sense—in the everyday one.

 

Pakistanis and Bangladeshis arguing gently about cricket scores.
Europeans comparing winter coats they didn’t need in Sydney.
Australians moving between groups with easy familiarity.

 

Embong fit in without needing to announce himself.

 

He made friends the way he always did: through shared tables, borrowed chargers, half-finished conversations that picked up again between classes. The university didn’t ask him to be anything in particular. It let him be provisional.

 

He liked it for simple reasons.

 

A tuck shop that stayed open when you needed something warm and quick between lectures.
A large library that made the work possible, even if he didn’t always use it the way he should have.

 

Some days, that was enough.

 

One thing about CQU made life easier in a way he hadn’t expected.

 

There was a quiet room on campus set aside for prayer.

Not grand.
Not ornate.
Just clean carpet, chairs pushed to the sides, and enough space to hold more people than you’d think.

 

On Fridays, if his timetable allowed, he joined the others there.

 

Students from different courses. Different countries. Different levels of observance.

 

They lined up shoulder to shoulder and borrowed silence from the middle of a working day.

 

For a while, the week paused.

 

It wasn’t Manly.
It wasn’t home.

 

But it was enough.

 

He started going to academic support.

 

Not because he was suddenly disciplined—but because he was tired of guessing.

 

Most students didn’t bother. The waiting area was often half-empty. Embong did. He brought drafts. He listened. He nodded. Sometimes the advice helped. Sometimes it just made the work clearer. Either way, it was a form of effort he hadn’t been consistent with before.

 

He first met Dr Maria Vasques in one of his economics classes.

 

Filipino by birth, Sydney by habit. She had lived there for years with her family, long enough that her daughter sounded entirely Australian and corrected her mother’s slang without thinking about it.

 

Maria taught with clarity rather than performance. She liked clean examples. She liked students who tried.

 

One afternoon, they were talking about opportunity cost.

 

“What does it mean,” she asked, “to choose one thing over another?”

 

Hands went up.

 

Embong offered a few examples that landed well. Time versus money. Work versus rest. Certainty versus risk.

 

Maria turned to the board and wrote it without emphasis:

 

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

 

She let it sit there for a moment.

 

“Every choice costs something,” she said. “Even the ones that pretend not to.”

 

Embong wrote it down.

 

Not because it was clever.

 

Because it kept turning out to be true.

 

Then he added, lightly, “Or, you know. Spending your money on textbooks instead of marijuana.”

 

A few students laughed.

 

Maria looked at him for a moment.

 

Then she smirked—just slightly.

 

“That is not an option,” she said. “It is illegal in Australia.”

 

The room laughed again, softer this time.

 

Embong lifted his hands. “Fair.”

 

“Good thinking,” she said. “Wrong country.”

 

It was 2007.

 

Some jokes still had edges you couldn’t pretend weren’t there.

 

Some of these conversations happened in the lab.

 

Between screens loading and chairs scraping back, someone asked him once, “What music do you listen to?”

 

“I don’t listen to music,” the other student said. “Music is haram.”

 

Embong looked at him. “No, it’s not.”

 

The other student didn’t respond.

 

Didn’t argue.
Didn’t explain.

 

He just turned back to his screen.

 

Embong still listened to music on the train home. Once, he stayed on a stop longer than he needed to, just to hear an Indian man finish singing a Bollywood song—his voice warm and unguarded, carrying more life than the carriage seemed built to hold.

 

Another student told him, just as calmly, that celebrating birthdays was haram as well.

 

Embong shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

 

That one didn’t turn into a debate either.

 

CQU was like that.

 

Many countries.
Many convictions.
Sometimes sharing the same room.
Rarely the same conclusions.

 

Generally, he did well with the management subjects.

 

Organisational Behaviour suited him especially. It was about how people moved inside systems—why teams worked, why they didn’t, how small decisions reshaped whole rooms. He could see those patterns without forcing them into formulas. He wrote clearly. He argued carefully. The grades followed.

 

Human Resources Management came easily too, for much the same reasons.

 

Accounting and economics were different.

 

He kept up. Mostly. But the numbers resisted him in ways conversations never did. He passed, then scraped, then passed again. Enough to move forward. Never enough to feel settled.

 

It wasn’t failure.

 

It was friction.

 

He was still himself, though.

 

Still restless.
Still occasionally stupid.

 

One afternoon, between classes, bored and craving a reaction more than he cared to admit, he took out his phone in the gents’ toilet and pressed play.

 

The When Harry Met Sally clip announced itself to the corridor in a voice that left no room for subtlety.

 

His phone erupted with a very familiar, very exaggerated “oh… yes…” that carried far beyond the door.

 

Someone in a nearby lecture room started laughing first.
Then everyone else did.

 

He was caught before he could disappear.

 

The woman from academic support—the same one who had helped him with his draft the day before—looked at him, shook her head, and smiled despite herself.

 

“Next time,” she said, “maybe keep your sound experiments out of public spaces.”

 

He apologised.
She waved it off.
The draft still got reviewed.

 

CQU didn’t fix him.

 

He passed some things.
Struggled with others.
Told himself more than once that the next term would be different.

 

It wasn’t—at least, not in the way he hoped.

 

The problem wasn’t the campus.

 

It was the way he lived inside it.

 

By early 2008, the pattern was too familiar to ignore.

 

Trying.
Drifting.
Catching up.
Falling behind again.

 

Not dramatically.
Just enough.

 

By the end of that year, he stopped pretending momentum would arrive on its own.

 

He didn’t need a better building.

 

He needed a different method.

 

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