Underground (7 page)

Real girls, meantime, while not actually taboo, were still dangerous and foreign things to boys from an all-male private school. The other lads and I hung out at milk bars and cinemas and studied them like novice game hunters amidst a pack of lions. It was a time of heavy-breathing trysts behind cricket sheds and the sheer trouser-straining ecstasy of touching female lips, arms, legs and (oh my God!) breasts. I was no Lothario, but I had my share. Bernard, however, took no part. He never lingered on his way home from school, he never snuck out at
night, he never, as far as I saw, even spoke to a girl who wasn’t either a relation or a family friend.

Shit, now that I think of it, his wife is the daughter of a friend of our mother’s! They were set up, Bernard and Claire, by their respective maters, when they were both in their early thirties and apparently heading for eternal spinsterhood.

I was already over my first divorce by then.

Anyway, I don’t think it was that the young Bernard didn’t like girls. What seemed to bug him most about the rest of us horny teenage boys was the
disorder
that sex brought into our lives. The shrieks, the futile moans of passion, the furtive swapping of magazines under the desks. It was too wild, too likely to bring the authorities down upon our heads. And his attitude persisted even after we’d finished school and enrolled in uni. By then, he was free to do pretty much whatever he liked (it was the late sixties, for fuck’s sake), but I still never saw him with a girlfriend. Oh, he had female acquaintances. Dour-looking girls from his economics tutorials, and stiff blue-blooded daughters from the Young Conservatives Society that he joined and later chaired. But a woman he was fucking? A woman who might ruin his life and cast shame upon the family name? No way.

But, man, let me repeat, the late sixties!

I was in my element. I moved straight out of home into a filthy share house in Carlton and took gleefully to drink, drugs and debauchery. I have to say that I never really bought into the philosophy of those times. I was never a hippie. I was never into incense, meditation or gurus. But I was certainly into free love and good times. Bernard could have his dreary business degree, I was a free-wheeling arts undergraduate, out to impress the chicks. I grew my hair long, packed myself into the tightest, widest-flared jeans available, stuck some anti-establishment badges on my denim jacket, and posed as a tall dark radical sex god. It was bullshit, mainly, and I failed utterly in my
studies, while Bernard succeeded in his stolid way . . . But then Bernard hadn’t even moved out of home.

That’s right, he stayed with Mum and Dad for his entire university career. (I know that this is the done thing for kids now—but in those days, it was unheard of.) And we had rather different attitudes to our parents, Bernard and I. For all that I thought they were a little dull, I did have genuine affection for them. And they returned it, despite my evil ways. Indeed, from both of them I detected the merest whiff of envy for the way people my age had it so swell. A hint that my father, given a chance, might have liked some similar sort of fun in his day. And a wistful look in my mother’s eye, as if she were considering other lives she might have lived, given the pill and permission to burn brassieres. But maybe I’m just making that up, maybe they just tolerated their wayward son for love’s sake. Still, they were no arch conservatives, even though they voted for Menzies and Co all the way through.

In theory, they should have approved of Bernard more. He was the good son, the earnest son, the son with his eyes on the future. And yet I think they were dimly appalled by him, skulking quietly around their house. Surely parents want a
little
rebellion from their children. (I was always quite proud when my own various offspring told me to bugger off out of their lives. The misery of it aside.) And who knows, left to an empty nest, my mum and dad might have loosened up a bit and really
swung,
man. Other people their age were doing it, getting with the times. But with Bernard always frowning about the place, what chance did they have? He
did
see them as arch conservatives, and expected them to remain that way forever. They, and their generation, who fought the war and rode the boom and obeyed the rules, written and unwritten, who never complained or marched or caused trouble—they were his fixed inspiration.

So forgive me if I declare I was the better son. Sure, I didn’t call, I hardly visited, they had to bail me out with money time
and time again. Indeed, I was a shame to them in nearly every way. But ah, how their faces lit up when I entered the room! Bernard, I think, suspected all this, and resented it.

But then, he resented almost everything he saw. Nothing had changed since school really, and the same kids who had mocked him for not smashing windows were now long-haired layabouts mocking him for his neat hair and sensible clothes, for his sobriety and his work ethic, for being pro the Vietnam War and for his membership of a right-wing political society—they even mocked him for the virginal state of his dick. He suffered it all with his usual stubborn silence, but I knew he hated them for it, and hated everything about their lifestyle. To no one’s surprise, when he finished his degree he joined an accountancy firm. Moreover, he joined the Liberal Party. And yet he
still
hadn’t bothered to move out of home.

Me—after failing arts, I started an architecture degree, in which I managed to scrape passes for two years. Not out of any genuine interest, but it was better than conscription for Vietnam. Thankfully, the Whitlam government came along in 1972, and I could safely drop out of uni to take up intermittent pub work, or work waiting tables, or labouring, or whatever else looked like easy money for a while. I didn’t have a clue about what I really wanted to do with my life. In fact, apart from my disastrous first marriage—childless, thank heavens—I don’t think I took a damn thing seriously for the rest of the seventies.

Bernard . . . Well, I don’t suppose he had his life planned out exactly either. But deep in his gloomy dreams he must have yearned for authority. He could see the world going to pot even as he emerged into it. And like many a long-suffering conservative all around the world in those wild and free days, no doubt he was even then plotting his revenge.

It was a while coming, but oh lord, when it did come . . .

Another day, another basement.

I was becoming a connoisseur of them—and this one, I had to admit, was much better than the first. No bare walls or dirt floor or dingy light bulb. This room was large and carpeted and well lit, with comfortable couches and a bathroom off to one side. There was even a studded leather bar in the corner, vintage 1970s. The shelves behind it were empty, alas, but the wall did at least boast a neon beer sign. (‘Brisbane Bitter’ it said, which to my knowledge hasn’t been brewed in several decades.)

It was someone’s snooker room. Sans table. Which was fine, really, because there was no one down there for me to shoot pool with, apart from Nancy Campbell (sans burqa), and I doubt that she would have been interested. Not that I would have trusted her with a cue in her hand anyway.

And where was this place, you ask, interrogators dear?

Good question.

It was the same old story. The men who carried out the ambush were all masked with balaclavas. (I’m talking about the second ambush here, the one in which the AFP were the ambushees, not the ambushers. Ludicrous, really—I don’t think even back in the bushranger days had one road cutting ever seen so much action.) Then, in all the shooting and screaming and confusion, me and the naked Nancy Campbell found ourselves bundled into the back of the van (the AFP van, now appropriated, not the postal van) and driven at breakneck speed for maybe half an hour to who knows where. They’d put bags over our heads right from the start. Professionals, these boys.

At the end it seemed that we pulled into a garage. Then we were hurried through a house and down some stairs and, when the bags came off, there was the ‘Brisbane Bitter’ sign to greet me. And five men, dressed in civilian garb, but still in balaclavas, still with their guns. They dumped some clothes on the floor for my burqa-less friend, and then left, locking the door behind them. All throughout I’d been yelling questions at them—who were they, what did they want, what the fuck was going on? Not one of them had spoken a word.

So there we were. Me and my would-be executioner.

‘Well then,’ I said, after prowling about the room for a time, and verifying that there was no escape, no alcohol, and nothing else to do but talk. ‘Nancy.’

She was slumped in a beanbag. (This room was strictly retro.) The clothes they had given her were not her own—those were presumably still lying on the road where the AFP had dropped them. Instead she seemed to be wearing a man’s clothes, several sizes too big for her. Her wild white hair was tied back into a bun, revealing a pale, narrow neck, lividly bruised.

‘That’s not my name,’ she said, staring at the floor.

‘You’re not Nancy Campbell?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘Oh right, you’ve got that other fancy Muslim name.’

Her head lifted. ‘Aisha.’

And the hate still smouldered there, amidst the blood and the cuts. She might have looked like a waif in those clothes, but only a fool would have considered her to be harmless or beaten. There was no one called Nancy in there, that’s for sure.

‘Okay, Ay-eesha, do
you
know who these guys are?’

She shook her head, unblinking.

She was in shock, I supposed. After all, it was only her first time being kidnapped or ambushed or otherwise caught up in an assault, while this was my third. And her compatriots were dead. Gunned down right in front of her. She had been right on the verge of death herself.

‘Are you okay?’ I heard myself ask, amazingly.

In answer she rubbed savagely at the wounds on her face, raising fresh blood, then lifted her reddened hands, her eyes on me all the while. My incipient pity died. She was telling me she didn’t give a fuck about pain or death or sympathy.

‘You really
are
crazy,’ I told her, and left her alone.

For a while anyway. But hour followed hour, without any distraction, and there was no ignoring her presence. An albino terrorist on a green velour beanbag. At the most, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Hell, my own eldest daughter was twenty-eight. And the only things Rhonda seemed to be interested in were money and clothes and parties with her friends. The world might be going to hell and new wars breaking out every day, with half of Australia locked down for security’s sake, but she had a social life to get on with. The spitting image of her mother, in fact. (Okay, maybe the spitting image of her father, too. Even though she made it clear that she despised me, and men in general—her rampant promiscuity aside—and I’ll be needing that cheque
now
, please, Daddy.)

But this Aisha creature. I couldn’t see
her
hanging around with my daughter’s crowd. Parties would fall silent as soon as she walked into a room, and most boys would run screaming
from those eyes. All right then, she was a different sort of youth. Someone very serious and very angry. But where on earth had she come from? I watched her as surreptitiously as I could. She didn’t fidget or squirm or yawn. Once she rose and went to the toilet, but otherwise she just sat there. Was she meditating? Was that even the right religion? And that was another puzzle. She wasn’t of Middle Eastern descent, that was for sure. She had to be pure Viking stock, cursed to live under a burning Australian sun. So where did Allah come into it?

The silence got to me in the end.

‘Don’t you have to pray or something?’

She glanced my way as if I were a silverfish.

‘You’re a Muslim, right? I thought you guys prayed five times a day. Don’t you have to get down on the floor and face Mecca every now and then?’

No answer.

‘Not that you could tell which way Mecca was down here, right?’ I was rambling on for my own amusement as much as anything else. ‘It’s in Saudi Arabia, isn’t it? So from Australia I guess you just face roughly north-west? Yes?’

She rolled her eyes, in an ‘are you really so stupid’ sort of way, and for a split second she
could
have been my daughter.

Still, she had me there. On this topic, I was pretty stupid indeed. Not that she was the first Muslim I’d met. Back in the old days, before the camps and the ghettos, I’d dealt with investors from the Islamic community often enough. I’d even schmoozed the occasional international Arab banker. And as far as money and business went, they were pretty much the same as anyone else. God wasn’t the issue. The only trick, from my point of view, was to work out whether a particular Muslim was worried about the drinking thing or not. And plenty of them weren’t. Especially if quality scotch was on offer.

I’d never actually seen one pray, however. Nor, come to think of it, had I ever dealt closely with a Muslim woman.

‘Women do pray too, don’t they? I mean, I’ve seen pictures of mosques and people on their knees and all that, but it only seems to be men.’

The boredom must have been getting to her as well, because she spoke finally. ‘You’re the same as everyone else in this country. You don’t know a thing about Islam.’

‘Well?’

‘Women are perfectly welcome in mosques.’

‘Really? I must have seen the wrong photos.’

Her lips tightened. ‘In some countries the women prefer to pray at home. It’s a personal choice. Men and women. You can pray wherever you like.’

‘And you? Obviously you don’t go to mosques, they’re all shut down. But what about right now? You’re just doing it there on the beanbag, are you?’

Her chin went up. ‘You wouldn’t ask another Christian questions like that.’

‘Another Christian? You think
I’m
a Christian?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘Red-blooded atheist, babe.’

She made a spitting sound. Then she pointedly shuffled the beanbag around and turned her back to me.

Well, what did I expect? Muslims, I knew, had at least some respect for Christians and Jews, even if everyone was at war right now. Maybe they even saw some worth in the Buddhists and Hindus and Sikhs, too. But the utterly godless? Especially fat, semi-alcoholic, dirty-old-man, several-times-divorced, washed-up, cowardly types like me? Not bloody likely.