Act of Grace Read online

  On learning that Nasim played the piano, Salima arranged for one to be delivered to the club. Nasim played folk songs, taking requests from the men while the other girls danced and led men into bedrooms, and for a time Nostalgia was special – not in the sense that it was above its primary purpose, but it exuded a warmth. Yes, the girls were prostitutes, but they were also Arab, proudly so. There was fondness among them, and blissful times between business hours when they sat on the couches in leggings and T-shirts painting their nails, the heady fumes making them silly. It was the girls who eased Nasim’s grief when she received her mother’s body, their soft incantations willing her to the surface of her despair. By this time, she’d become more like a mistress to Omar, and it was through his intercession that she was allowed to receive the body and arrange a plot, with a small plaque, in which to bury her.

  Salima permitted Lana to help Nasim bathe and prepare the body, both girls taking in its nail-less fingers and toes, its scorched genitalia. When Nasim put her hands on her mother’s face to dab the grimy skin with soapy water, her fingers slipped inside Nhour’s mouth, and she jerked them out in horror. They had cut out her tongue. Come to me when you have lived. It was a relief to put her mother’s body in the ground and cover it with earth. It was a relief to return to Nostalgia.

  *

  ‘Pretty at a distance but stinks like something rotten up close,’ Alby said to Nasim and Salima, as they sat in the back seat and discussed a rival club that had opened up, Flamingo’s Garden. ‘They stand in their own shit,’ the Sudanese driver explained of the birds in his homeland, and the women were delighted.

  Flamingo’s Garden was a luxurious villa decorated with plastic palm trees and plastic birds perched in blocks of green polystyrene. The dance floor was a pattern of cubes that lit up in different colours, and the ceiling was pocked with enthusiastic gunshots. It was 1996, well into the sanctions. By now Nasim was an old hand, proving a cool head with business, and Salima no longer made a decision without the girl’s input. The two women had invited themselves into Flamingo’s Garden one evening on the ruse of selling a girl to the madam, Farrah, but in truth they wanted to see what made the club so special, for it seemed everyone was getting favours from the regime except Salima.

  After seeing the club, Nasim and Salima paid their new guarantor a visit. He was an insipid, overweight man in the information ministry who’d made himself indispensable after Omar disappeared, offering to sign the lease when their landlord became aware the women were on their own. In his office, with a portrait of Saddam looking down on them, he waved dismissively when Salima started to describe Flamingo’s Garden. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘I’ve been there myself. Splendid place. Made me wonder why Nostalgia is so behind the times.’

  A tremor of anger went through Salima. ‘I think you know why,’ she said carefully, their guarantor feigning ignorance.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  Salima opened her mouth to reply, but Nasim shot out a hand, putting it on her sheikha’s arm.

  Their guarantor’s eyes glinted as he took his time to fill the silence. ‘Now, I understand times are tough – Iraq is being cruelly punished – but Farrah has been particularly helpful in these hard times. It is only right that she is rewarded.’

  The women glanced at each other, hearts sinking. Inside the club they’d watched as Farrah excused herself from their negotiations to take the arms of new arrivals, men who paid no attention to the women on the dance floor or at the bar. She led them to a guarded door at the back of the room, opening and closing it swiftly. Children, Salima and Nasim had thought, and now, listening to their Ba’athist man, his voice rich with a new knowledge, a new pleasure, they were certain of it. They weren’t fools: they’d seen the widows on the streets with tattooed faces, wearing black abayas largely out of poverty, not devotion, children clinging to them like kittens on dried-up teats. It would not cost the madams much, a few thousand dinar perhaps, to pry loose those mewling children.

  Saddam was everywhere now. There was a tradition – many said it was born in his home village near Tikrit – for girls and women to be abducted from the families of regime opponents and raped for weeks. They were often returned home accompanied by videotapes of the rapes. ‘Breaking the eyes’, it was called. And now, as their guarantor continued to speak of the merits of Farrah’s new club, Salima and Nasim looked at their laps, not meeting his gaze, for it was all in the eyes.

  *

  Evenings at Nostalgia became increasingly strained. Their clients, whose needs Salima had been able to intuit for so long, had become inscrutable. They began to dismiss Salima and the girls abruptly, leaving early, sometimes in the middle of a dance, complaining about the girls’ hair, their lacklustre eyes, that they were bony and didn’t smile enough, and that when they did their breath stank.

  Once, Nasim ventured that they were hungry and drew a vicious look from the men. ‘No one in Iraq goes hungry,’ one of them said, his eyes menacing.

  It had been a long time since Nasim had been asked to play the piano. Instead they started to bring in videotapes, Western pornography, and the content got harder over time, increasingly cruel, the situation made all the more bizarre when they demanded that Arab pop music be played on the CD player at the same time.

  It was around this time that Salima became sick, her handkerchief stained with blood and yellow matter as her body was wracked by coughs. Nasim took charge, and it was under her helpless watch that the clients replaced the flagons of wine with American bourbon and increasingly her girls were hurt, Nasim unsure how to approach the men for money to pay for their injuries. On Salima’s sickbed instruction, she told the older girls, including Lana, to leave, and began selling some of the younger ones, including Sabeen, trading three for a girl whose hips had not yet filled out. It was no relief when news came that Farrah had been executed as part of Saddam’s Faith campaign, her severed head now on display outside Flamingo’s Garden.

  On hearing this, Salima spat into a bowl. ‘So, they’ll fuck us by night and kill us by day,’ she said, dropping her head back on the pillow. They moved the club into an apartment and Salima’s sickbed into the kitchen, and it was here they learned, along with the rest of Iraq, of America’s designs on Saddam. He is a man, the Americans wrote in the pamphlets they dropped over Baghdad, who cannot go to sleep at night without killing someone. The coalition forces are committed fully to the liberation and the wellbeing of the Iraqi people, the pamphlets said in Arabic – and Nasim and the girls, for a moment, considered what such a liberation might bring.

  Salima set them straight, the stink from her bedclothes rank. ‘More cock, that’s all it’ll bring,’ she said, and the women laughed, for even the hipless child was now a woman, and they looked to the horizon, for General Tommy Franks and his platoon of cock, the ‘open and pale-faced infidels’, as Uday described them on the radio, exhorting Iraqis to rise up against the Western pestilence. ‘Sacrifice yourselves, even the children,’ he said, a sentiment his father later echoed on television.

  Their guarantor paid them a visit, flanked by two men, and ransacked the apartment for what was left of their earnings, Salima spitting at him from her corner of the kitchen while Nasim discreetly disappeared a dirty roll of dinars inside her vagina.

  *

  In the beginning, the fighting was against the Americans. The Ba’athists handed out rifles. Median strips were dug up and filled with oil. Soldiers hid behind stacks of boxes, the barrels of their guns pointing out like crabs’ eyes, waiting for General Franks to drive over the horizon, for the explosions, the red tracer and magnesium flares, the whistle of faraway missiles, to become real. As the Americans drew closer, the call to prayer became constant, the amplified Allahu Akbar a soulful accompaniment to the scattering of unexploded cluster bombs that went off in children’s hands. Visitations from the sky saw buildings stripped of their cladding like bodies of their clothes, and the levels of various concrete headquarters concertinaed to the gro
und.

  When the Americans finally drove into Baghdad on the six-lane highway, tossing the wrappers of their MRE breakfasts from the tops of their tanks, the Iraqis greeted them and danced. ‘Al kalb to the end,’ Salima muttered, her own days numbered.

  The screens on their television sets flickered and died. It was done.

  *

  Nasim was standing in a narrow street that twisted through Baghdad like smoke. People were running, cheering as they pushed wheelbarrows loaded up with Persian rugs, kitchen sinks, gaudy ornaments, even IV drips attached to their metal stands. There were old women standing in their doorways, with sour expressions like Salima’s, already wearing the muted colours of mourning. They knew how it was going to play out, Nasim realised later, but at the time she hated them, their wrung-out faces, their deadness, while inside she stoked a tiny flame of hope. Would they be released, now, from all the consequences of times past? Could she go back, pick up where she left off – the girl in Chinese pyjamas, playing the piano for an appreciative audience other than whores and whores’ lovers?

  Someone ran past with an oud, twanging the strings with his fingers, and Nasim smiled, watching him disappear. She had an image of her father, dancing as he strummed, his footfalls soft and gentle, and of her mother playing the piano, one naked foot on a pedal, releasing it slowly, like a clutch, conjuring the melody of hooves.

  Then she smelt them: the sweaty flanks, the hot yellow dust, the tang of salt and flint. Nasim turned as they rounded the corner, a group of men chasing, trying to corral them. She did not move. Instead she imagined she was a tree, a rock, a streetlight even, and she felt their breath, the warm whip of their hair, as the horses, Saddam’s horses, spilled around her like a bolt of velvet.

  The Eel Trap

  When Bindi Noon came barrelling out the front door, the others weren’t paying attention. It was close to midnight and Robbie was coming up the stairs with Sophie. Robbie had her hand in her bag, feeling around for the key. Sophie was talking, as usual. They didn’t think when this skinny black woman came out of their flat; they just pressed their bodies against the wall so she could pass. She was carrying two plastic bags, and it was only when a bag brushed Robbie’s leg that they woke up. Robbie yelled, and the woman started to run. Robbie leapt down seven steps to the next level, and Sophie followed, all of them skidding to the bottom of the stairwell. The woman disappeared around the corner and Robbie chased her, only to find her on the ground, vomiting up foamy spit. The bags were strewn around her, with Robbie’s laptop, Sophie’s camera and a heap of their CDs spilling out. The two flatmates stood there, not sure what to do, listening to her retch. Then Sophie started to pick up their things, pulling the bags away almost apologetically.

  Finally, the vomiting stopped. It was quiet, except for the flap of leathery wings as a bat dipped low, then up into a palm tree. The woman flattened her hands on the concrete to steady herself, and they saw she was wearing Sophie’s rings – cheap silver ones from St Kilda market. Sophie opened her mouth to say something, but the woman heaved again, a flurry of slop coming out.

  A light came on in one of the ground-floor flats, and there was the jiggle of their neighbour unlocking his door. ‘What the fuck is going on out here?’ he barked. It was the guy Robbie and Sophie hated; he’d always magically appear when they were taking out their rubbish and follow them to the bins, accusing them of dumping stuff in his. He was scowling now, arms crossed over a pair of flannel pyjamas.

  ‘Nothing,’ Robbie said, and went quickly to the woman and put her hands under her armpits to help her up. The woman’s hair hung over her face, and a slag of spit lengthened from her mouth.

  Robbie began to walk back to the stairs slowly with the woman leaning against her, and he turned away, disgusted. ‘Any more noise and I’ll call the cops,’ he said. Sophie, who was behind carrying the bags, muttered ‘Arsehole’ after he closed his door.

  At the top of the stairs, their door was wide open. There were chips of paint and wood on the doormat from the jimmied lock. The woman stopped and looked around wildly. She wriggled away and was about to head back down the stairs when she stopped and swayed, emitting a guttural sound. Sophie rushed to the kitchen, returning with a bowl and holding it under her chin as the two girls crab-walked her inside and over to the couch. She retched into the bowl, but nothing came up. ‘There’s spew in the kitchen, it looks like there’s blood in it,’ Sophie whispered, as they stared at the woman. ‘Should we call an ambulance?’

  ‘No, no,’ the woman said, trying to lift her head. She rolled herself off the couch, her face thudding against the carpet. Slowly, her arms shaking with the effort, she started to crawl towards the door. For a second or so, they watched as she dipped her head, closing her eyes, willing her way across the mud-brown carpet. She was wearing cut-off denim shorts and a grey hoodie that hung heavy, like a pregnant cat’s belly, around her middle. The soles of her thongs were gummed with grass tufts and price stickers and threads of chewing gum. Then, from under the collar of her jumper, Robbie’s necklace slipped out, the one her mother had given her for her eighteenth. It was a long silver chain with a shamrock on it, as well as a copper eel traced and cut from a metal sheet. The way it was hammered, the copper seemed to ripple when it was worn.

  ‘An iuk,’ Claire had said when she gave it to Robbie. ‘You know they built these ingenious eel traps along the river?’

  ‘So now you’re handing out totems?’ Robbie responded and put it aside.

  But of course, after that Robbie saw eels everywhere. Smoked and hanging in stalls at the market, plastic chunks in the windows of sushi shops, even one washed up on the beach. One night she turned on the television and watched a man in a raincoat balance on a rock as young glass eels pushed against the current of a river. He spoke of the upstream migration of these primordial creatures and how Aristotle once speculated that eels were born of the mud. Robbie’s mother had put the damn things in her head even if she didn’t want them, and now there was this woman, the iuk around her neck, and Robbie couldn’t shake the revulsion that one had found its way here, gills choked, eyes closed, trying to feel its way free.

  *

  It was Nathan who got her mother into it. He had found Scottish ancestors in his family tree and bloodlines dotted all around the Arctic, down into Nunavut territory. ‘Whalers,’ he told the three of them, saying it reverently, as if carving off hunks of dark fibrous meat while standing ankle-deep in guts was inspirational stuff.

  ‘So that’s where you get your sense of adventure from,’ Claire said, and Robbie had thought she was joking, but then she squeezed his arm and Robbie wanted to be sick. The man lived in Glen Waverley.

  ‘So let me guess, you’re also Inuit now?’ Robbie asked, smelling a rat. Nathan didn’t respond but started buying Inuit art online, and one day he was showing them a print of an Eskimo spearing a fish and Robbie suggested maybe he should invest in some colonial rapist artwork as well.

  Claire lost it then. ‘What is wrong with you?’ she said, and for Robbie, it was like, Exactly. So much is wrong with us.

  Once Nathan got Claire interested in it too, they spent days at the library and at home sitting at the computer, his hand on hers, clicking the mouse together. ‘A seamstress,’ her mother would say of a great-aunt, or ‘A convict,’ of a great-great-uncle – ‘just a pickpocket’, she’d mumble, a dreamy look on her face. It enraged Robbie. ‘It’s not hurting anyone,’ Otis would say when she tried to get him riled up with her.

  But it was worse when Claire got into their father’s stuff. She would walk into any Aboriginal place she saw, even a medical clinic, and ask if anyone knew Danny O’Farrell’s mum or her people, and sometimes someone said they did and Claire would get the phone number and call them. Robbie would hear her crying on the line as if she’d been trying to find them forever. She told them about Danny and the dementia, even organised meetings at the home so their father could meet his cousins, half-siblings, aunts. He sat in a chair, be
wildered, and in rare lucid moments tried to remember them and cursed his illness when he couldn’t, not understanding that they hadn’t been there to begin with.

  *

  How the woman came back to life, Robbie didn’t know. Sophie had managed to coax her to the couch, and then put a blanket over her because she was shivering. The woman held her hands between her thighs like a child. Eventually, when her shivering began to ease, she popped a hand out from under the blanket. ‘Either of youse got a smoke?’

  Next thing she was on their balcony, smoking Sophie’s cigarettes, telling them to put on a CD. Robbie got three glasses and brought out the cask, squirting red wine to the rim of each.

  She was Bindi Noon. ‘It’s a good name,’ she said proudly. She told them about heroin and how much she loves it, how even when she’s spewing her guts up on it, it feels amazing. ‘Not like that,’ she grimaced, gesturing below to where she’d vomited. ‘Fucking awful, that is. No, no. You dream on this stuff.’ She sucked hungrily on the cigarette. ‘You know that feeling when you’re coming in and out of sleep? It’s like that.’

  Robbie nodded. The early morning was her favourite time of day, when it felt like the world was still asleep, everyone just animals, limbs strewn, sheets creased like the trunks of ghost gums, the sky outside a healing bruise.

  ‘Even breathing feels good,’ Bindi continued. They were all quiet for a moment as if focusing on their breath, considering it. Then Robbie noticed Bindi Noon looking at her.