Act of Grace Page 14

  Their bus driver kept stopping for passengers, grinding his desertdry gears, unable to resist the extra fares, and pointing to the roof, where people were already perched on the racks. When they banged on the roof with their fists, the bus stopped. The Iraqis watched as the men leapt off first, then held out their arms for the bags tossed over by the women, who climbed down in their long colourful dresses, children clinging to them, all disappearing into the vast tent city.

  Every day since arriving in Damascus, Nasim had been stopped by police checking her paperwork, telling her how many days she had left. This morning she and the other Iraqis in the hostel were woken by a group of soldiers waving a piece of paper from the ‘Baghdad government’ – ‘Free buses back to Baghdad,’ they yelled, refusing to leave until someone gave in.

  Now, in the café, the Syrian man sat back and looked at his phone as though accustomed to Nasim’s silence at this question. ‘I got a warning,’ Nasim said at last. ‘Leave or be killed.’ He barely looked up, writing down her answer as if he’d heard it many times before.

  *

  What she had become was not what she was meant to become. Nasim tried to explain this, at least an edited version of this, in her interview at the Australian embassy. The Syrian translator had proved his worth, getting her an interview. She was using Sabeen’s name but was not ready to give herself up entirely. She had studied under Najat Malaki, she said to the Australian official, who had been taught by the pianist Beatrice Ohanessian. ‘You must know of her,’ she insisted, but the interviewer shook his head. She had studied, listened to music, read the classics. ‘Like you, yes?’ He said nothing.

  ‘My mother, she —’ Nasim stopped. ‘Are you sure you don’t know Ohanessian?’ she asked instead. She offered to spell it for him, but he declined. When he jotted a few words on his notepad, Nasim surrendered, reaching into her handbag and bringing out Sabeen’s paperwork. She pushed a letter across the table, the interviewer’s brow creasing when he saw the Australian government crest. He read it, then read it again, and left the room.

  In the silence a sickness rose in Nasim’s throat. Was there anything she would not do to survive?

  When he returned, his face was grave. ‘Why did you not tell us about this in your application?’

  The sickness turned to shame, Nasim’s face burning. She looked at the floor. She heard him pull out his chair, the rustle of his clothes as he sat down, and she glanced up. His eyes were soft now. ‘We are glad you came to us, Sabeen,’ he said. ‘We will do everything we can to help you.’

  Nasim closed her eyes. She remembered the day she had found Sabeen; she knew straightaway she had an earner. They were common as dogs by then, the women, mostly widows, wearing dusty black niqabs and walking among the traffic, hands out, begging. It was routine for Nasim to scrutinise them, those wretched ghouls. Alby was still driving for her, though his large black hands trembled and he could not function without the hideous rice wine he fermented in his basement bedsit. He had an instinct for nubile hips and breasts even under all that cloth, while Nasim studied the hands and eyes for lines. When Sabeen paused at Nasim’s open window, Alby nodded in the rear-view mirror.

  Nasim had put her hand into her purse and pulled out a single dinar. ‘You can have this,’ she said, placing the note in the girl’s hand. Then Nasim took out a wad of notes. The girl’s eyes widened. ‘And if you want work,’ she said, ‘you can have this.’ The cars around them began to rumble forward. The other widows in their black niqabs hurried back to the kerb, and the girl was torn. Nasim knew the feeling well. The cruel, false notion of choice. She opened the car door and shifted over, patting the seat beside her. ‘C’mon, honey,’ she said softly. ‘You’re not a rosebud anymore.’

  Nasim was right – the girl was a good little earner – but the impressive breasts turned out to be shredded newspaper. Less than a month earlier, Sabeen revealed, she and her husband’s family had been shot at in their car when approaching a checkpoint outside their neighbourhood. At first she thought she had been hit, the impact of the gunshot thrusting her against the seat. When she looked down her lap was bloody, but it wasn’t her blood; it was her baby’s. The girl was dead. They came past later, the soldiers – Australians, she said, showing Nasim the document the lieutenant had given her. ‘If you sign, you can have this.’ There was US$2500 in the envelope. Sabeen signed, and when the soldiers left, her husband’s family took the envelope and threw her out. Her breast milk had not yet dried up, and the girl had stuffed her bra with shredded paper to soak it up.

  *

  Sabeen, Sabeen, Sabeen, Nasim repeated to herself on the flight to Australia. Yes? she envisioned herself answering the question. Yes, I am Sabeen.

  She’d been scared getting onto the plane. ‘What if it falls out of the sky?’ she heard herself asking the man beside her. You are like a dumb peasant, she told herself. As a child she’d flown with her parents to Egypt and Jordan; they had even been to London once, when her mother was invited to a literature festival. She’d not felt an inkling of fear then, only excitement.

  ‘If it falls out of the sky,’ the man had responded, his tone purposely playful, as if she were a fool, ‘we will be well rested.’ And with that, he propped his seat back and closed his eyes; a seasoned traveller. Nasim – no, Sabeen – scowled at him, loathing his calm. But they made it, and Nasim was full of regret as she followed the other passengers into the terminal, shivering at the cold wind that came up through the gaps of the gangway and flinching at the crass, brassy accents. People were half-dressed and ugly, their thighs and tummies spilling out, the men thick-necked and the women sloppy. There were floor-to-ceiling posters of bikini-clad girls on surfboards, and Nasim wished she’d joined the deceitful madams with their village girls instead. Life had given her a role and she’d refused to say her lines. For what? This? This?

  She asked herself the question again, months later, as she walked past the girls on St Kilda Road, near Carlisle Street, their left legs folded beneath them like birds as they leaned against the dark green fences. Yes, she had landed on her feet – survived – unlike the unfortunate Shi’a girl she’d bought in the Baghdad traffic and later sold, but for this?

  Nasim counted the girls, as she always did. They were mostly white, hair greasy, cheeks dappled with acne, feet forced into stilettos, skin marbled blue from the cold. Two Asians. No Arabs, Nasim always noted. Not yet. Once she had looked up to see a photographer kneeling in the middle of the road as if in a combat zone, snapping as she walked past the prostitutes. For a few seconds she thought she was in his way. Then she realised it was she he was capturing, hunched against the wind in her cloak with all that flesh behind her.

  When a white van pulled up at the kerb, two men flinging open their doors, Nasim spun to warn the girls, expecting them to startle and lope away in their heels. But they just smiled, lazily unfolding their legs. Nasim watched as the men waved and opened the van’s back doors, revealing a large urn beside a stack of paper cups and a box of sandwiches and fruit. The girls gathered around as the men handed out coffee, helping themselves to milk and sugar, carefully blowing the steam away, chatting.

  Nasim stared for so long that one of the girls noticed. She waved and held out a cup.

  There was a kick of fury in the Iraqi woman’s chest. She began to yell at the girls, cursing in Arabic: ‘Ya zbala! Ya kalb!’ She shouted all the things she had been called and worse, not knowing why, only that this country, this country, was ridiculous.

  The girl holding out the cup snarled, ‘Well, fuck you then, you frigid hag!’

  The others chimed in.

  ‘Go home, ugly cow.’

  ‘Good luck getting any wearing that, darling.’

  When one of the Asian girls yelled, ‘Assimilate, bitch!’ there was a brief silence, and then they all erupted into laughter.

  Nasim turned away, abaya flapping, hands trembling. She continued to curse them as she walked. She wanted to yank them by the hair. Your coun
try, she wanted to say, is pathetic. You are a ridiculous people.

  She had cried when they stamped her documents in Damascus. They had thought she was crying with relief, with gratitude. High on their charity, the Australian officials said they would be happy to assist with collecting her child’s remains, that they could provide a plot in Australia. Nasim shook her head. The child – her child, she corrected – was home. She belonged in Iraq. Nasim did not say with her mother, wherever it was that Sabeen’s body had been dumped. Nor did she say that there was something they could assist her with. If they could rebuild the streets, put the music back in the radios, return the gardens to Babylon. If they could undo the borders, shred their maps. If they could let her fry kubba, almonds, cinnamon sticks and mince once more, so when men put their lips to her hair they could taste home. If it meant heaving on the ropes and pulling the statues back up to standing, so be it. If it meant putting the bodies back in Saddam’s prisons and reanimating them, then that too. She felt sick with shame as the embassy’s printer jerked into action and spat out inked letters. An act of grace.

  *

  ‘It’s up here somewhere,’ Toohey yelled, face flushed as he weaved unsteadily along the footpath, peering down another laneway. He’d put on weight, Gerry had noticed when they met at the train station; his neck was heavy. People – women in heels, men with ties loosened in preparation for the weekend – gave him a wide berth.

  ‘Here it is!’ Toohey cried, as he zigzagged into the mouth of a lane, three girls swerving out of his way. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he called out, turning to admire them. One scowled and carried the dirty look over to Gerry, who was lagging. He was taller than his dad. Like the weight, this had taken him by surprise.

  They had met under the clocks at Flinders Street Station, had shaken hands like men. On the way there, Gerry had listened to his mix, mostly Tupac, tunes to make him feel strong. He’d carried the feeling as far as the pub his father had suggested, a depressing place with pokies and fluorescent lights, but by the time a waitress noticed them he had slipped into his old habits, mumbling his answers, wishing he had said no to meeting up.

  ‘How’s school?’ Toohey had asked, thrusting each word across the table. Later Gerry wondered how his father managed to make even the simplest questions so aggressive. Of course, he blundered. He had planned on not saying much – just filling in the gaps and getting it over with. But less than five minutes in, he’d stupidly mentioned he was studying Civics and Politics and was thinking of going on with these the following year.

  ‘Civics?’ Toohey said. ‘What the hell kind of subject is that?’

  Gerry looked down at his paper serviette, rolling it between his fingers. ‘Democracy, diversity,’ he mumbled. ‘Rights, that sort of thing.’

  Toohey laughed. ‘Rights? You got to fucking earn them.’

  Gerry looked wistfully at a waitress as she delivered a bill to another table. He was an idiot. What did he think, that listening to a bunch of Tupac tracks was going to make this any easier?

  ‘What about the politics?’ Toohey said, and Gerry blinked, looking at his father.

  ‘Huh?’

  Toohey’s eyes narrowed. ‘Huh?’ he mimicked. ‘What are you, a chimp? Whose politics are you studying – what country?’

  ‘Oh. America.’

  ‘Yeah? Which president?’

  ‘Bush,’ Gerry replied. ‘Senior.’ Then added defiantly, ‘Oil tycoon.’

  Toohey bristled. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He was, before he was president.’

  ‘No, he wasn’t.’

  Gerry didn’t say anything. He was sure, though, sure Bush had been.

  ‘He was director of the CIA,’ Toohey said. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Heat bloomed up Gerry’s neck. He resisted the urge to look it up on his phone and stared at the beer his dad had ordered for him, drawing stripes with his finger in the frost on his glass. ‘Same thing,’ he muttered.

  Toohey’s face darkened. He drained his glass and leaned forward. ‘Tell me, Gerry,’ he said. ‘What’s a tycoon?’

  Under the table, Gerry dug his nails into his arm, leaving a trail of red crescents as a reminder for later. He had said yes to this because he felt guilty. He had already lied twice when Toohey had asked to see him: the first time, he had too much studying to do; the second time, he was going away with a friend. ‘So, you’ve got friends now?’ his father had said on the phone – and it hadn’t sounded cruel, a little wistful if anything, and Gerry almost came clean and said he wasn’t really going away. Truth was, he still hadn’t made any friends, just like at all the other schools. Though this time, it was a loneliness of his own making.

  The community school had been Aunty Bron’s suggestion. She had raved about it to Jean. She said she and Stuart would have sent their kids there if they hadn’t moved. ‘Down-to-earth’ was how Bron described it. ‘Soft’ was how Gerry saw it. He had spotted this right away when he and his mum had a tour, the same way one might clock the soft and pinkish underside of a dog.

  Glowing like a religious icon, the principal came out of her office to greet them. She had long brown hair, and the skin around her eyes was dusted with sparkly gold make-up. She wore a paisley shawl over a cream blouse, and a long denim skirt with red sandals. As she showed them around, students said hello, using her first name. In a courtyard with a gum tree at the centre, its roots rippling the brickwork, a group of students and a teacher watched as two boys played chess. Along the back of the science building, students in face masks spray-painted a mural, following the outline of a Chinese dragon a projector splashed onto the wall. The principal introduced them to a guy called Gomez, in a Slayer T-shirt and baggy denim shorts, with sleeve tattoos. ‘Gomez is a street artist,’ she explained. The students were colouring in the dragon. ‘Do you like it?’ she asked Gerry.

  He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Sure.’

  On the lawn, some senior girls were lying on a picnic blanket, legs tangled as they read textbooks, highlighters poised above the pages. A group of boys playing soccer darted around them. A guy kicked a goal as they watched and did a victory lap, taking his jersey off. He grinned as he ran past, the others catching up, all falling into a joyful stacks-on. The principal cupped her hands like a megaphone. ‘Well done, Zareb!’ She looked at Gerry and Jean. ‘Zareb is a special boy. He’s come a long way.’ He’d fled Sudan with his family in ‘tragic circumstances’, she said, and the school had worked hard to make him feel safe and help him thrive. ‘Now he is representing the north in the state league and excelling in his studies.’

  Jean was delighted. ‘This is exactly the kind of environment Gerry needs,’ she gushed.

  But it was too late for that kind of thriving. And so, on his first day, he walked in with a swagger, earphones in. He sat alone in class, pretending he had somewhere else he wanted to be. He mastered his father’s long uncomfortable gaze if anyone asked him a question.

  A few times in Term One, the principal had invited him to her office. She’d offer him tea like he was a grown-up. He’d always shake his head. ‘This is a safe place,’ she told Gerry, and he would suppress a smile. ‘Sure,’ he’d reply. ‘Sure it is.’ Sometimes he’d marvel at his nerve, at the distance he could maintain. It was like he’d swum into a cold part of the ocean, a dark blue shard in among all the sunlit swathes of turquoise. The principal was right. It was a safe place. A safe place to grow a new armour, test it out.

  By Term Two, the principal stopped inviting Gerry to her office. His grades came in as average and sometimes even above. He wasn’t slipping through the cracks. And there were others who needed tea: girls with shaved heads and shadows under their eyes, boys with violent tempers, a kid who had a meltdown if he accidentally stepped with his right foot first instead of his left. Gerry’s armour was serving him well. But that night, after he’d lied on the phone about going away with a friend, he dreamt about his dad. His father’s neck was weeping with pu
s, and then up through the tiny holes came worms, hundreds of them, their ringed bodies writhing. His father was screaming, trying to pull them out, but they kept coming. Gerry woke up, his pillow wet with sweat. He decided to see Toohey.

  Now, in the pub, he felt like an idiot. His dad was fine. Unchanged. ‘There are no other people in your dreams,’ he remembered his Aunty Bron had said once, opining in that superior voice of hers. ‘There are only projections – representations of your own feelings and fears.’

  Toohey signalled for another pint. ‘What’s this fucking school your mother’s sending you to? If I’d known it was some leftie wanker place, I would have put my foot down.’

  Gerry ground his teeth. He hadn’t done it in months, but they found their familiar grooves. He knew that Toohey couldn’t put his foot down, not anymore, but he still hated him for thinking he could. He hated them all. He’d overheard his aunt talking about his anger. ‘You need to make sure Gerry learns to manage it,’ Aunty Bron had said to his mother. He had wanted to smash his aunt’s face. Like he had no reason to be angry?

  ‘Your mum is a brave woman,’ Bron said to him once. ‘She did this for you.’ Gerry had a fleeting thought that he was from a different planet: it was the only explanation, because she knew, she had to know, it was impossible not to know – it was in his file, for god’s sake – that he had been moved away and his mother had simply followed suit. No one had been brave. Except perhaps his father, the truest irony, for it had been he who pushed for Gerry to be reunited with Jean, saying the boy needed to be with his mother, and promised to stay away. His mum did nothing, except open the door for him when he arrived.

  As for this evening, he’d waited for her to offer some advice, maybe ‘don’t talk politics’, or even some support. But she just kissed him on the cheek and asked when he thought he would be home. As if he was going to see a movie.