Act of Grace Page 13

  ‘So, who are your people then?’ she asked, and Robbie felt her cheeks grow hot. She lifted her shoulders and let them drop, glancing at Sophie.

  ‘What?’ Sophie said, looking at Robbie curiously. ‘You’re black?’

  Robbie shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. Sort of. Like a third.’

  Sophie puffed out her chest in annoyance. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s never come up.’ Robbie didn’t look over, but she could feel Bindi watching.

  ‘You ashamed?’ Bindi asked.

  ‘No,’ Robbie said curtly, and took a gulp of wine. ‘You?’

  She snorted. ‘Course not. But then,’ she touched her skin, ‘not like I can hide.’

  ‘I’m not hiding.’

  ‘Sure looks like it.’

  ‘What the fuck would you know?’ Robbie felt a jolt of rage. Now this woman who’d robbed them and spewed all over the place was having a go at her?

  ‘Well, you haven’t even told your friend,’ Bindi said defiantly. She looked at the flatmates. ‘You two lesbians?’

  ‘No!’ they said, and Robbie added, ‘I’m not hiding anything. I’ve got nothing to hide.’

  They were all silent again. Bindi reached over and squirted more wine into her glass.

  ‘Well,’ said Sophie finally, straightening in her chair, ‘I’m Maltese, if anyone cares.’

  Robbie stared at her. ‘I knew that.’

  Bindi peered at her too. ‘Isn’t that a fucking dog?’ she said, grinning.

  *

  ‘Ngardang?’ It had been two years since Robbie had visited her father and she’d spent a good portion of the drive in listening to her mum remind her that he would not recognise her. ‘Ngardang?’ he said again, his face incredulous as he sat up in his bed and stared at Robbie, while the other residents in the ward eyed the scene warily.

  Robbie looked at her mother. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered, thinking that perhaps this was a new quirk of her father’s dementia, but Claire shook her head. She was wide-eyed. ‘I don’t know.’

  Claire had told her to prepare for the fact that Danny had changed since Robbie had last seen him, and she’d expected that he’d be older, frailer, which he was. But he was blacker, too. She had not anticipated that. He was smaller, more crinkled, and molasses brown. ‘Like a sultana,’ one of the nurses said later. It was happening to Robbie too, much sooner than to him. Her face had changed, the skin around her eyes becoming even duskier, like a light in her was being dimmed. It was clever, she thought – as if, needing to survive, their genes had resorted to a slow release.

  ‘Ngardang!’ her father said again, impatiently. He began to fumble with the side of his cot, trying to get out.

  Claire gave Robbie a push. ‘Go,’ she said quietly, ‘go to him.’

  Robbie was scared. It was hard to know of what – not of her father, exactly, but of not knowing what he needed, how to act. She went to his bedside reluctantly and he grabbed her hands, pulling her close. He tried to put his head on her chest but she was stiff – and he kept kneading her, head-butting her gently, as if trying to make her softer. Claire came over to help. ‘Pretend he’s an animal,’ she whispered in Robbie’s ear.

  ‘He is an animal,’ she replied irritably.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Robbie sighed shakily. She closed her eyes. As they’d walked to Danny’s ward, they’d passed several glass cabinets lined up along the walls. Claire had explained that these were a new initiative from management, the cabinets to be filled with objects showing the ‘individual personalities’ of the residents. ‘Talk about tautology,’ she’d said of the phrase. Robbie had walked slowly, partly buying time but also out of curiosity. There were photos of husbands and wives, children and grandchildren, beloved pets and cars. Benign seaside watercolours and psalms printed in calligraphy. Hand-knitted footy scarves, self-published memoirs, military medals on a swathe of velvet. ‘This one is my favourite,’ said Claire, stopping at a shelf with a packet of Winfield Blues, a car’s dipstick and a photograph of an older woman with greyish-red hair lying seductively on a chaise longue in a green silk dress, the lens soft. Robbie smiled. When they reached Wattle Ward, Robbie saw her mother had placed on her father’s shelf an acrylic painting Robbie had done of Half Moon Bay: two tiny figures sitting on the Cerebus wreck, surrounded by stingrays on the seabed. ‘Oh, Mum,’ Robbie had said softly. She remembered painting it, the relief and the slight displacement of the wreck, placing it much further out to sea. How she’d hidden the figures of her mother and brother in the orange cliffs. Robbie opened her eyes and pushed her father back gently so she could unlatch the side and sit comfortably on the bed. Then she let him settle back into her arms. He nuzzled into her and, with a small, sweet smile, fell asleep.

  Afterwards her mother wouldn’t stop talking about it. ‘He must have known her,’ she kept repeating.

  Robbie was resistant. ‘You can’t say that for sure. Do you know what the word for “mother” is in his language anyway? How do you know it’s not just a sound people with dementia make?’

  Still, whatever was behind it, this behaviour from Danny became a kind of euphoria for Robbie. It didn’t happen every time she visited, so it was a bit like gambling: she couldn’t stop recalling the wins, the happy times he folded into her. It was complete surrender. But there was always the dissonance. She would be his ngardang, but when she helped him out of bed to go to the toilet he’d catch sight of himself in the mirror and nod solemnly, as if at a stranger. ‘Poor bastard,’ he’d whisper to Robbie – and she had to agree.

  Later, for an exhibition, she recreated the objects in the glass cabinets, all of them banal and victorious in their sameness, with the odd exception. Every now and then, there’d be a kind of glitch – a love letter, a telling X-ray, a court summons, an unpaid bill, mismatched birth and death certificates, a blackened teaspoon.

  *

  ‘I got a guy who says he’ll look out for me,’ Bindi said, jutting her chin in the direction of Barkly Street, keen for the girls to know she hadn’t done that, not yet. ‘You seen the bastards who drive around throwing eggs at them?’

  Sophie and Robbie had seen a guy lean out his window once and splatter an egg at a woman’s feet, shell sticking to her heels. They’d also seen guys in hotted-up cars pull over, wait for a girl to walk up, and screech off when she bent down to talk to them.

  ‘You know,’ Bindi said, ‘I reckon it’s those guys I wouldn’t be able to handle. I could do the fucking and sucking and everything else.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Robbie said, and Sophie murmured her agreement.

  Bindi’s head shot up. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she said, suddenly sneering.

  Sophie and Robbie looked at each other. It was time to get her out of here, but how the hell were they supposed to do that?

  ‘How old are you two, anyway?’

  ‘Twenty-four,’ Robbie said.

  ‘Twenty-three,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Nineteen,’ Bindi said proudly and, seeing their faces, went on the defensive again. ‘You don’t believe me? Well, I fucking am, and I seen more than both of you.’ She was still a teenager; Robbie didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before. ‘I been grown up when you were still having your noses wiped.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Sophie said, holding up her palms. ‘What the fuck is your problem? Remember, you’re the one who was nicking our stuff.’

  The girl stared at Sophie, then Robbie. She picked up her empty glass and flipped it over the balustrade, grinning at both of them before it shattered on the ground. Sophie started to scream at Bindi to get out, and Robbie agreed that needed to happen, she definitely needed to go, but it was like her arm and hand didn’t agree, and neither of them noticed until it was arcing over their heads, a spur of red wine and Robbie’s glass soaring through the air. They listened to it shatter. Then there was the sound of the neighbour’s locks jiggling.

  Sophie turned to Robbie. ‘What,
you two are sisters now? Fuck you both,’ she said. ‘I’m going to bed.’ Inside, she picked up the bags. ‘With our stuff,’ she added.

  *

  Robbie’s mother learned that Danny’s real mother, Betsy Carol, had tried to get him back after he’d been fostered out. Several times she went to the welfare board office, in a grim sandstone building in the city, and when they refused to help she went back to the hospital where she’d had him to get a copy of his birth certificate. But they said there was no record of her or of him. They told her the birth didn’t happen. When she wouldn’t leave, they called the police.

  It was like an old riddle of Danny’s: ‘If an Aboriginal kid dies in jail but no one ever told him he was black, is he black?’ he’d ask, and Robbie would stare back at him, not knowing what to say. When Danny began to call her ngardang, Robbie asked Claire about this. It was like a strange version of ‘if a tree falls in the woods’. Her mother said that when Robbie was younger, a teenager called Darren Wouters had hanged himself in a police cell. His mum was Aboriginal. A few years later, a fuss was made about whether Wouters ought to be included in the royal commission, if his was an Indigenous death in custody or not.

  ‘Was it?’ Robbie asked.

  Claire shrugged. ‘I guess that was the riddle.’

  *

  ‘We’re not sisters,’ Bindi said.

  ‘No way,’ Robbie agreed.

  ‘I fucking hate that shit,’ Bindi continued.

  ‘Yeah, bro,’ Robbie replied, and they both laughed.

  *

  There was a woman Claire found whom Robbie liked: Beverley. At first, they didn’t even know if she was blood, but she came with the others to one of the meetings Claire organised and sat in a paisley armchair. She didn’t press on Danny who she was, waving Claire away when she tried to include her in the introductions. When enough time had passed, the others hurried towards the exit in relief and she followed slowly, shaking her head.

  A few days later, Robbie, Otis and Claire visited again, and they found her and Danny in the sitting room, in companionable silence. Beverley smiled at them. She had a paper tray of oysters on her lap and was shucking them with a sturdy pocketknife. Her long skirt and hands were dusty with grit, and a tower of the shells wobbled on her knee as she squeezed a quarter of lemon over one, passing it to Danny. He hadn’t seen them, and they watched as he smiled at the woman, and nudged the grey mollusc into his mouth with his finger. He carefully placed the shell on top of the tower and licked his briny lips. Later, the woman told them Danny would have been her older brother, her half-brother. She did not say that he was. Robbie waited for their mother to correct her, but Claire didn’t say anything. Maybe the main reason Robbie liked this woman was because Claire started to back off – she was less frantic about connecting everyone like callers on a switchboard. There was a frankness about the woman, and her visits to Danny calmed him and made everything settle for a while.

  *

  Bindi Noon was getting agitated again. The cask was nearly empty, and she took the bladder from the box and squeezed what was left into Sophie’s glass. Sophie had taken the cigarettes with her to bed. ‘Go in and get them,’ Bindi said to Robbie, but she refused. Robbie asked for her necklace and Bindi took it off angrily, tossing it in Robbie’s lap. She paced and said she should go. Robbie nodded in agreement, but Bindi didn’t leave. Instead, she asked if they had a deck of cards.

  Once Robbie dug out a pack of her parents’ old playing cards, Bindi shuffled and dealt out a hand of canasta. She turned a card over to start, then stood abruptly and said she needed to go to the loo.

  When she didn’t come back, Robbie found the bathroom door. There was no answer. She opened it and saw Bindi bent over the toilet bowl, hair in her face. A splatter of vomit streaked with blood was on the tiles.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Robbie said, lifting her head out of the toilet bowl, ‘you’ve got to go to the hospital.’

  Bindi wrenched her head away. ‘No,’ she moaned, falling sideways, ‘no ambulance.’

  ‘I can drive you,’ Robbie said, wiping her mouth with a towel.

  She didn’t say anything, so Robbie sat her up, then ran out to get her bag and car keys. She thought she’d left the keys on the fridge, but they weren’t there, so she looked in the lounge room, pulling the cushions off the couch, and went into her bedroom, then into the bathroom again to check on Bindi. She was back over the toilet, her body shaking as she retched.

  ‘I can’t find the keys,’ Robbie said. ‘Just let me call an ambulance.’

  But Bindi shook her head, held out her hand as if to say ‘wait’ and retched once more. Then she wiped her mouth with her sleeve and put her hand into her front pocket and pulled out the keys. She didn’t look at Robbie as she held them out, still staring deep into the bowl.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, her voice muffled. Robbie moved closer so she could see the girl’s face. Bindi’s eyes lifted and she grinned.

  Act of Grace

  At the border the women greeted the Syrian guards warmly, introducing the girls, their pretty faces beaming in the direction of Damascus. ‘Off to meet their new husbands,’ one woman said, to laughter, the girls smiling uncertainly, the first prick of doubt flitting across their faces.

  Standing in the queue, Nasim watched. Many more pricks to come, she thought. She’d recognised two of the women on the bus and they’d recognised her, but Nasim kept her distance. Inside the black chador she clutched her handbag, repeatedly dipping her hand in to check for five rolls of money, her passport, Sabeen’s identity card and paperwork. It had cost Nasim a third of what she had left to get Sabeen’s documents. The man who had them – he had all the dead girls’ possessions, it being his flat where the prostitutes had been stacked in the shower – had no idea why Nasim wanted Sabeen’s things, not buying her ruse of sentimentality for a second. He rifled through the items and stared hard at the dead prostitute’s paperwork. He eventually settled on a high price but still looked haunted as Nasim bundled it all into a sports bag, no doubt fearing it would dawn on him later what she wanted so badly.

  The journey to At Tanf, the US garrison in Syria, had been rife with tension. Nasim had gazed out a window, past the old, squashed-peach face of the woman next to her, trying to say goodbye to Iraq, to find something in her heart. But she could concentrate only on the driver. Everyone on the bus had been focused on him, their collective breath held for six tense hours, thinking go faster as they went through militia zones, go slower as they approached American checkpoints. The bus was jammed: whole families; the madams with their naive cargo; and boys, so many boys, sent away by their relatives to escape abduction by militia or just being shot on the street, because boys turn into men and it was best, many of the insurgents thought, to get it over with. And so no one said goodbye to Iraq, only stared at it grimly.

  The border was congested with traffic, and the wait took hours. The area stank of urine; people squatted behind flimsy screens made from stakes and hessian sacks. By morning, the bus was finally waved through, everyone on board now clutching pink slips of paper. The visas have changed, a Syrian official told them: one month only now, then you apply for a new one. Same price.

  Once the driver crossed the border, he pulled over and they filed off, sitting under a battered tarpaulin while he unloaded some cardboard boxes. On this side the road was also clogged, mainly with trucks, the drivers drinking tea or waiting behind shattered windshields. The madams sat near Nasim, talking rapidly and gesturing with their hands, bracelets clanging. Nasim was tempted to join in, to start negotiating, to cast out on a path she knew, but she resisted. This was her chance. She turned away to watch three Bedouin men in the distance, a scattering of goats around them.

  When one man stopped, waving at the other two, she did not wonder about it, unable to stop listening to the women behind her. It was not until the boys sitting under the tarp went over to the men studying the ground, followed by the younger children, who ignored their mothers’
hisses to stay still, that she became curious. She expected an ordinance of some kind – an unexploded gift from Russia perhaps – but when she pushed her way to the front, the men muttering at her, she saw a long brittle skeleton on the sand, strips of dried, knobbled skin stretched over its ribs. It looked like a giant mythical eel, its curved tail crumbling, the tip desiccated. There were two yawning holes the size of fists on the top of its skull, and the creature’s long jaws were tapered, teeth intact and sharp. Then Nasim spied the four legs, the finer bones crushed like shell grit. It was a crocodile. She looked around, as the Bedouin men had done, trying to find a leak in the land that could have delivered a crocodile here, but aside from the makeshift shelters, the tea stalls, the long grey road and the trucks rippling in the heat, there was only cracked yellow earth. She looked to the sky, but it offered nothing, no clouds or spiralling birds.

  Their bus started up, its engine spluttering into life. One of the Bedouin men knelt, the edges of his white robe in the dust, and began to loosen the teeth, making a pile next to the carcass as the rest of them headed back to the bus, leaving the tribesmen to their excavation.

  *

  Why do you fear living in or returning to the country you listed at Question 25? The young Syrian translator took a sip of the cinnamon and apple hookah, Nasim’s form on the table in front of him, waiting for her answer. Since her departure from Baghdad, she’d taken to wearing black abayas, and had arrived at the café early so that she could sit facing the wall. Everywhere she looked in this part of Damascus, there were Iraqi men from the regime. Just three tables away, a group of them sat talking. She became aware of one staring at her coolly and pulled the hood closer around her, covering her mouth, leaving only an opening for her eyes.

  Time was running out. They’d all felt it slipping away on the bus when they were two hours from Damascus, hearts sinking on seeing the slums rising from the ground. There were thousands of makeshift tents, sacks stitched together, hallway rugs turned into canopies. ‘Syrians,’ one of the madams said knowingly, ‘peasants, farmers.’ The road was dotted with the rural folk, and each time the wind picked up, they would stop and fold into themselves, shielding their faces from the whipping sand with their sleeves. Nasim imagined their skin pocked like pumice.