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  Praise for Act of Grace

  ‘Masterful – a far-reaching tapestry of a novel. Nuanced and whip-smart, Act of Grace is a work of profound empathy – a book of and for our times. As the narrative unfolds with precise muscularity, Krien’s inhabitation of each character approaches the divine.’

  —Peggy Frew

  ‘Krien has taken a huge leap of creative faith, and from the very first page to the last I was ready to follow her anywhere.’

  —Ceridwen Dovey

  ‘Krien makes riveting the sweep of history and the lived price of war; at the same time she reveals, with great insight, the intimacies of daily love and tiny, splintering acts of violence in families. She is both wide-angle and close-up, and there is redemption in every line.’

  —Anna Funder

  ‘An ambitious and compelling study of trauma and how it’s transferred and inherited … a nuanced consideration of the different forms and ethics of activism.’

  —Books+Publishing

  Also by Anna Krien

  The Long Goodbye: Coal, Coral and Australia’s Climate Deadlock (2016)

  Booze Territory (2015)

  Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport (2013)

  Us and Them: On the Importance of Animals (2012)

  Into the Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests (2010)

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Anna Krien 2019

  Anna Krien asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781863959551 (paperback)

  9781743820339 (ebook)

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

  Lyrics from ‘Destination’ by The Church reproduced with kind permission from Steve Kilbey.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of material in this book. However, where an omission has occurred, the publisher will gladly include acknowledgement in any future edition.

  Cover design by Sandy Cull

  Cover photograph by Photosite / Shutterstock

  Author photography by Jesse Marlow

  Text design and typesetting by Akiko Chan

  Contents

  The Mouse Plague

  Turning Off the Lights

  Saddam’s Horses

  The Eel Trap

  Act of Grace

  Sorry Rocks

  Spirit Riders

  Shh, I Can Hear the Sea

  For Fuck’s Sake

  Acknowledgements

  The Mouse Plague

  Toohey hadn’t been one of the rock-throwers, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t wanted to. A couple of times he’d even grabbed one of the stones Jolley piled up on the floor of the Bushmaster and taken aim as they drove through a pre-teen ambush, homing in on a kid, his hair grey with dust and bare feet hopping angrily as he dodged the soldiers’ counterattack. With black caterpillar eyebrows and dark oily eyes, these kids were targets more real than the shadowy enemy.

  At the start of the tour, the children had flocked around the men – it was a hazard, but the soldiers only half-heartedly shooed them away. The kids cheered, stretching out their arms for gifts. The men had footballs to give, the Aussie flag printed on fake leather. The footies had been flat-packed, and they had to pump up about twenty each, a bag of them crammed under the cage where the gunner’s legs dangled. Whole thing was awkward as fuck, and they joked that some PR princess back home was getting a promotion for this. Still, the gunners enjoyed the rare safe moments when they could handball footies from the tops of their armoured vehicles. It made them feel good – the kids with their impish smiles, clamouring to high-five them. ‘No, no, that’s American,’ they’d say. ‘In Australia we do this,’ giving the kids a thumbs-up and an ‘oi, oi, oi!’ Soon children were running at them with both arms straight out like zombies, thumbs up. Made them laugh. ‘What a bunch of spazzes,’ Jolley said.

  Most of the kids were good kicks, and the men couldn’t help but compare them to their own sullen drips, who hid behind their mothers whenever the unit returned from a tour. The kids here practically lit up, flinging aside whatever they were doing, bolting out of houses, often wearing no shoes but sprinting over rocks and thistles. Their children back home didn’t come close to interested, except when a present from duty-free was dangled in front of them. Iraqi kids, they made it all worth it, the soldiers often said, as if this was the reason they’d signed up in the first place, to protect the children, oh, and the women – women and children – but shit, most of them didn’t have a reason for signing up when they did, only that school was finishing and the future lay empty ahead.

  Then the kids started throwing rocks. At first it was just one or two of them. ‘Go home,’ they’d shout, their faces hard, ‘you fucking war criminals!’ Words they didn’t know the meaning of, had just heard from the ever-larger groups of young men who stood watching, training their eyes on the convoys. The kids’ pronunciation was never right, and for a while this helped them laugh it off, especially when other children shushed the hecklers. The hecklers often ended up putting their hands out for stuff anyway, and the soldiers took pleasure in looking the other way. But after a month or so, more kids were yelling things. They’d put out their hands, take their pick of the presents, then start in. The soldiers began to see deflated footballs everywhere: on the side of the road, stuck up the spindly trees, in the middle of fucking nowhere. Soon they were being treated as potential IEDs and the men were ordered to stop giving them away. Some PR princess back home was getting fired for this.

  It all went to shit halfway through the second tour, after a long day spent escorting a food truck through the province. A group of kids came out of a cluster of houses on the outskirts. It was dusk and the unit was tired, wary of pushing the day’s luck, so the convoy only slowed, the gunners squatting to grab textas and sweets to lob. But when they came back up, rocks cracked against their helmets. For a second the unit thought it was an ambush, and the gunners swung their turrets, trying to get a bead. Then more rocks clipped the vehicles, and it clicked. The kids’ voices rose up over the engines. ‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,’ they were screaming, some coughing with the effort – croup they hadn’t been able to shake since the sanctions. Their faces were twisted with hate; a few even had tears streaking down their cheeks, snot bubbling from their noses. They stared at the men accusingly, their eyes raw and red. They threw all the rocks they had and scrounged in the dirt for more, still yelling, ‘Fuck off, fuck off.’ The unit just gaped. Some recognised kids from earlier in the day, who’d been sweet as pie as they collected their family’s rations. Eventually an order broke the spell and they accelerated in unison, leaving the children behind, ghostly in the dust, a final rock making a humiliating plonk against the rear vehicle.

  Heading back, the men were mostly silent. The commander had changed the route at the last minute. If they had followed the plan, they could have taken the glow of aid back to base, but they had gone a different way and rocks had been thrown.

  It kept happening after that, and the unit dropped any guise of parade, of selfless heroism. No more thumbs-up. No more ‘Good kick!’ They knuckled down. For the best, their corporal reckoned. Back to muscle and bone, eyes scanning the horizon. Counterinsurgency was
pissing in the wind. The only skin that mattered now was one another’s. Fuck the Iraqis, fuck the politics, fuck the diplomacy.

  What happened next was hard to explain. None of the men could say who started it or how, but they began fighting back. Some collected rocks before heading out, piling them on the rubber mats in their vehicles. The first time they did it, the Iraqi kids were taken by surprise. In such a short time, they’d absorbed the American spin that children were sacred, that they would be protected, no matter what. They stood in the open, not bothering to hide or cover their faces, so when the unit’s return fire hit, most didn’t move, their mouths open, catching flies. Only when a few were struck did they start to scatter, leaping behind walls and mounds of dirt.

  ‘Fuck you, you midget terrorists,’ yelled the soldiers, whooping over their radios as the kids screamed, red-faced and furious. Most soldiers aimed to skim the kids’ legs, to get a yelp and a hop out of them, but as the rock war intensified and the real war got murkier, a few of the guys started a competition: one rock, how many children? They’d aim for an angle: an elbow, a shoulder, a cheekbone if they were feeling real nasty, ricocheting a rock off one kid to the next. Record was four kids, one rock. Even soldiers dead against the business had to admit that hit by Wedge was pretty amazing. A good hit is all about the rock, was his theory, and he had his ammunition down to an art. He divided the desert rubble into types: the ‘cluster fuck’ was a chunky nugget that crumbled on impact, the ‘ninja star’ a sharp jagged quarry stone, and a ‘skimmer’ a thin, oval-shaped river rock. Wedge had flicked the skimmers at the kids like frisbees. He’d set his record with one, and so they became sought after.

  *

  A skimmer was what Toohey was looking for now. He was in a different desert, one with red dirt that bruised to purple at dusk, where the highway was bloated with kangaroo corpses, cattle too, belly-up, hit by road trains. None a potential IED. A different rock supply, but skimmers, Toohey figured, were universal. Jean was behind him crying, standing at the edge of the bitumen, and the night was pressing in on them. In front of him, the scrub rippled like a huge fish turning.

  There was a scurrying on the ground and Toohey saw a mouse dart across his boot. A lone straggler – the plague had petered out hours back. And then he saw it: oval-shaped, flat. He knelt to pick it up. It fit the curve of his index finger perfectly, and with his thumb he rubbed the surface smooth, scanning the bush for Gerry.

  *

  Two days earlier, the mice had made them happy. They spilled like marbles over the highway, scampering forwards and then backwards as Toohey fishtailed the car in their direction. ‘There!’ Gerry would scream, leaning forward from the back seat, his arm stretched. ‘There!’ Pointing through the windscreen at the little grey bundles. ‘You got it!’ he would cheer, turning around to glimpse the carnage while Jean made a show of covering her eyes in mock-horror – a performance, because in truth squashing the mice was bringing them together. The flattened strips of fur on the bitumen, guts coming out the mouth and arse like sauce, it was making them feel like a family. The killing relaxed Toohey, and when the cheering got quieter, he sipped slowly on his cigarette, still aiming for the mice but in a graceful kind of way, and the lull, the dance of the car, got everyone dreaming.

  Jean lifted herself off the seat to unstick her dress from her thighs. It was hot. The air rushing through the open windows was clammy. She took a tube of moisturiser from her handbag and, propping her feet on the dash, rubbed the cream into her calves. Before they left the bungalow in Kalgoorlie, Jean had shaved her legs and painted her toenails with peach varnish. She felt Toohey glance over at her appreciatively, one hand steady on the wheel. She caught his eye and smiled. She was happy to be going home, though careful not to show it. He’d figure she made it happen, made it all go to shit. He’d twist everything – the pinballing from Melbourne to Perth, briefly bumping inland to Kalgoorlie – until it was all her doing.

  In the back, Gerry stared out his window, fingers on the glass. He’d conjured up a cowboy and could see him, riding a chestnut mare in the red dirt alongside the road. There was a fence coming up, a long, dog-proof fence, and Gerry’s heart hammered like hooves. Up, he thought, up, and the cowboy cinched in his heels of his boots, pressing into the horse’s belly, and up she leapt, over the fence, the cowboy holding his hat, and Gerry could barely breathe, the galloping felt so real.

  It was Miss Munro who’d got him into this. She’d bring all these travel brochures into class for the kids to flick through and cut out pictures to make collages. There were lions, great big turtles floating in blue water, Maasai people wearing bright tartan robes, and so many places to stay: houseboats on old brown rivers, fancy hotel rooms with fridges and minibars, thatched huts on islands. Gerry got hooked on the brochures with cowboy tours in them: Golden Horseshoe ranches and cattle-branding experiences and bandy-legged men with stubble that flecked orange in sunsets. He would go through the box looking for these brochures and sneak them into his schoolbag, rescuing them from the scissors. At night, while his parents watched TV, he’d look at the pictures, carefully stashing the pages under the bed before falling asleep. ‘It’s not just cowboys in America,’ Miss Munro tried to explain to Gerry, when she noticed how he coveted the Midwest brochures. ‘There’s cities with famous buildings and celebrities. Hollywood.’ Gerry nodded, but he didn’t care about those things, and while cop shows blared from the television in the living room, sirens and gunshots and men yelling ‘Get down, get down!’, he’d close his eyes, listening to the clop-clop-clop of horses in his head.

  Toohey stopped the car suddenly and the cowboy almost got thrown as the mare skidded to a halt. Confused, Gerry and Jean looked at Toohey as he reversed expertly, using just the heel of his palm on the wheel. When he touched the brakes again, they were at the mouth of a small sandy road coming off the highway.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Toohey said, shaking his head. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d recognise it.’ He stared down the track, then nodded. ‘Yep, this is definitely it.’ He put the car into gear, the tyres loose on the sand, and drove inland. ‘You’ve got to see this,’ he said to Jean and Gerry, his eyes narrowing.

  Slowly the scrub thinned into solitary shrubs, brittle and white against the red sand. The mice petered out too, preferring to stay close to the highway. It made Jean nervous, this unexpected turn, and she balled her hands into tight fists. She kept glancing at Toohey, checking his mood. But his cheeks were flushed, his lips curled up at the corners. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be able to remember it,’ he kept saying, and she realised he’d been planning this, scanning the highway for a sign, timing it from the dog-proof fence.

  ‘You sure this is a good idea?’ Jean asked, as the road kept yawning out in front of them, the car bouncing over the corrugations.

  Toohey sniffed. ‘It’s a fucking great idea.’

  They drove past refrigerators and rusted husks of cars. They passed dead foxes strung up on a fence line, their tails like fiery brushstrokes, and a silver caravan with a satellite dish flattening itself like an ear to the sky. In the side mirror, Jean tried to glimpse Gerry, send him a smile, but his eyes avoided hers. She snuck her arm around the seat and gave his leg a squeeze. Several times the road forked into two and Toohey stopped, thinking, before accelerating again. He seemed to see markers that the other two couldn’t, until finally he let out a low whistle. ‘There it is.’

  It was an eerie sight, a rural village in southern Iraq growing out of the Australian desert. Shacks, shops, even a small mosque with a dome-shaped roof made from pressed earth, and there were black electricity cables woven between wooden poles, pulled so tight that the poles leaned in towards each other. A cyclone fence ran the perimeter, and as they drove closer Jean could see the street signs with Arabic script. Toohey stopped the car at a metal gate on sliding tracks and stared. He shook his head as if impressed. ‘Me and the boys thought we’d won the lottery when we saw this place,’ he said. ‘It was a damn sight better than Ka
ndahar.’ Toohey’s unit had trained here for their second stint in the Middle East, Jean remembered. There’d been a controversy in the papers, she recalled that too, when it got out that Iraqis on temporary visas were being bussed to a secret location to participate in an army training exercise.

  Toohey cracked open his door, dust pooling in the hull of the car. He got out and stretched, beckoning to them to follow. He walked past a sign warning against trespass and found a loose part of the fence, lifting it. Gerry was first, crawling under as thistles stuck to his shorts. Jean hung back. She searched Toohey’s face. She pointed at the sign. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t?’

  ‘C’mon. I’m not gonna hold this forever.’

  Jean got down on her hands and knees, ducking her head. As she went under, Toohey playfully kicked her bum. She yelped, crawling faster and laughing as she tried to swipe him away. On the other side, she stood up, brushing the orange dirt off her knees, and shyly held the fence up for him, but Toohey spidered his fingers through the metal diamonds and climbed over, his arms flexing, muscles bulging.

  Jean watched and felt an instant wetness between her thighs as he landed beside her. She got a flash of how beautiful he’d been when he came back from his first posting. His eyes had been clear, no demons, at least not of the Iraq kind. His body had been supple and brown. He’d been ripped. All the guys in his unit were. Toohey used to talk about how after training in the mornings most of them mixed up protein drinks in cocktail shakers, keeping a plastic keg of powder beside their beds. It was a point of pride that he didn’t touch the stuff.

  ‘The whole thing was a joke,’ she remembered him telling her brother-in-law when they were living in Melbourne. Toohey and Stuart had been getting along for once. ‘It was as if all we needed was weight, bulk, to crush Iraq,’ he had said. ‘But they ran rings around us. You couldn’t predict a fucking thing about them, and let me tell you, those bastards never had a fucking protein shake in their life.’ Stuart had laughed and laughed.