Next were the unfinished buildings, deserted entirely or surrendered to some different purpose. New structures abandoned, their concrete walls only half-poured, the incomplete second floors open to the weather, steel reinforcing rods thrusting out like barbarous spikes breaking from dusty grey concrete. Some were now homes, with curtains covering open windows, soccer-balls left on vacant lots, and people living between the steel spears.
Then came the bidonvilles, the slums. Shanties set one beside the other, so close that the sheets of roofing iron from one overlapped the next. Like a vast contagion, coloured pieces of plastic covered holes in this sweep of corrugated roofs, the corners of each splotch of colour weighed down by broken bricks. Metal cylinders were cut roughly through the corrugations, and in the early light these crude chimneys blew thin runs of smoke. The slums stretched for miles. Along unguttered roads and unpaved paths women trudged with water containers hanging from each arm. In places I saw burning sewage: thin towers of smoke linking city and sky. Dogs raking piles of rubbish with their front paws. Barefooted children balancing on the tops of overflowing industrial bins, their splayed toes holding fast to the steel edges while they paused in their rummaging to watch the bus pass.
We reached the end of the city, beyond the last broken settlements, where the countryside began. But there was no relief from the haggardness. A littered no-man’s land, the detritus of the city collecting at the margins, blown out by the prevailing winds of the place. The land was strewn with black plastic bags. Every stump, every low-growing bush, every branch of every tree had, wrapped around it, a plastic flag of flapping black. I saw a coloured inversion of the photos on the mantelpiece at home, the white crosses of the war cemeteries in northern France where my great-grandfather was buried. But where there was stillness in those white limestone crosses, here the black bags fluttered, like cindered effigies, waving.
THREE
So I looked away. I took solace in my guidebook, in the familiar shapes of the English words, the way they fitted together into sentences, and paragraphs and created images, and communicated information, even ideas. The way they gave order, and beauty, the way one of my people, in my language, had sought to describe this place. But more than comfort, I was reading out of need, taking it all in, everything these pages had to say about this country, these people. I had this chance, this opportunity for the hours or the days I was on this bus, to read and learn, and to try to make sense of the place.
I began at the start, like it was an instruction manual. As if I wouldn’t be able to build the thing which came with the manual if I skipped a section, or read it out of order. So I started with Facts About the Region, and Facts for the Visitor, before moving on to Getting There and Away. There were sections on Arts and Crafts and Getting Around. Next I read chapters – a few pages each – headed History and Religion and Language. I gripped the guide as if it was a key I couldn’t afford to lose.
*
‘So,’ I had said, ‘Africa.’
‘The Sahara,’ Jack replied, all that nonchalance of his. ‘A peacekeeping mission.’
It was the last time I’d seen him, the night he’d come home to tell us the news, two years after he’d enlisted. Our father’s surprise at him joining up in the first place had long since passed. He’d had faith that Jack would do his time in the army like they all had – him in Vietnam, his own father in the second war and his grandfather before that at the Somme – and that the quarry would wait. All the stories coming back to us about Jack’s nights on the town, his rolled ute at the Birdsville races, or the bookmakers he’d stared down, just added to his reputation at home. This son who could mix it with the world.
So the night Jack announced he was serving overseas our father was overcome with pride. He brought out the family atlas after dinner, and rested his hand on the northern fringe of that continent. Jack’s precise destination, Western Sahara – a place none of us had heard of – was obscured under his index finger. In that glowing moment, it didn’t matter much exactly where Jack was going. It was enough it was North Africa, and as our father said, pointing at Libya and Egypt, ‘It’s where your grandfather fought.’ As soon as our father started telling the stories once again of his father, the Rat of Tobruk, I retreated to my bedroom. They weren’t for me, those tales of valour. They were for Jack to take with him, letters of recommendation, guarantees of safe passage.
Later Jack saw the light still on in my room and came in, stood there in the doorway looking around. My bedroom shrank under his gaze. The way the army had trained him to look, the fullness of his eye. Though he’d always been like that, calmly absorbing everything there was to take in without anyone realising.
I watched him looking, tried to see what he saw. The pictures I’d cut from magazines and tacked to the walls, objects that had caught my attention, things I planned to sculpt one day. The photos of David and Moses. Night and Day and Dusk and Dawn. But not just Michelangelos. There were Rodins up there too. And the classics, Venus de Milo and Laocoön and Samothrace, pages from old National Geographics or a book on Renaissance art I’d taken from the school library – these I’d taped to the ceiling above my bed so they were the first things I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning. And there were my own rough sketches on butcher’s paper, a pile of them on the desk, the one I was working on when Jack stepped in, quickly turned face-down at the top of the pile.
‘So no fighting then?’ I asked.
‘They’ve been at war for fifteen years, and we’re stepping right into it. We’ll be keeping them apart, keeping them from each other’s throats.’
‘How are you going to do that?’
‘Don’t worry about that, Bas. We’ll find a way. And it’s not just us. There’ll be others there too. It’s a United Nations mission. We’re one of the first countries who’ve signed up.’
I remembered a black-and-white photo from our grandfather’s war: a line of fit, young men queuing to enlist. I tried to imagine how countries did it, pictured a line of presidents and prime ministers waiting their turn outside a recruitment office somewhere.
‘Why?’
‘We’re good international citizens,’ Jack replied. ‘It’s what good countries do. We’re our brothers’ keepers. Remember?’
One of our mother’s sayings. Blessed are the peacemakers was another.
‘So when’re you off?’
‘Three weeks.’
Cicadas in the dark beyond my bedroom window.
‘So, Africa,’ I said again.
Jack laughed.
‘You got it.’
‘Well, don’t forget the starving children.’
My turn to call up our mother. The dinnertime refrain from our childhood, so long ago, our mother’s gentle reproach if we’d left our peas on the plate. Think about the starving children in Africa, she’d say. As if the four of us at our dinner table could eliminate world poverty. As if we had an obligation to. As if it was our obligation, one that extended to the other side of the world.
‘What about you, Bas?’ Jack said, his eyes returning to the photos on the wall. ‘What are you up to? What have you been thinking about, Bas?’
That was the question he liked to ask – what have you been thinking? – the one that invited people to share their dreams with him. As often enough they did, allowing Jack to shape them, feeling enlarged by it, Jack’s vision. But I was wary by then of my own ambition: my hope of joining the pantheon of sculptors up there on the wall. This was a vision I sensed was growing beyond my control.
‘You afraid of being shot?’ I countered.
‘No.’
‘What about that girl?’
‘Which one?’
‘I don’t know, the one you brought back here a few months ago.’
‘I haven’t treated any of them well, Bas. I wasn’t serious. They deserved more. No, there’
ll be no one to miss me. But this, Bas, this is serious. Peacekeeping is important. It’s a chance to make a difference.’
*
The bus travelled down the coast. When I did look up from my guidebook, the sky was cold, with clouds and stiff winds scudding the blue with grey, and the Atlantic was dark.
There were towns which all looked the same. The half-built structures, the rubbish piling along the streets, the packs of barefoot children running alongside the bus. Petrol stations and tea-houses. The seething bus-stations. Near one I saw a truck with its freight of live cattle standing on a vacant lot of land, the truck jolting from side to side with the movement of the beasts inside. Beneath it, shaded from the sun, the driver slept on the ground, blanket pulled over his body, curved like a crescent moon. A little further along, leaning against a wall, were two youths, one with his wrist draped loosely around the other’s neck, their fingers entwined in a quiet gentleness.
The bus stopped at midmorning at a gare routière on the fringe of a town my guidebook described as a tourist attraction. I stepped out onto the asphalt, into the eddying humanity of the place, the torrent of passengers and their relatives come to greet them or see them off. All the water-sellers and shoeshine boys and chewing-gum vendors. The touts wanting my business, in my face, demanding to know where I was going. The limbless beggars calling up to me from the ground. And me shaking my head. Non, non, non.
I made it halfway to the café to buy some croissants and millefeuille, when a woman grasped my arm, her fingernails in my skin, her eyes wide with whatever it was she wanted. At the pitch of her voice I tried to draw away, but she started screeching, her face contorting, flecks of white at the corners of her mouth. I recoiled, but when I looked around for help, I saw that the men had made room and were standing in a loose circle around us, amused. We were a spectacle, I realised, the screeching woman and the cowering westerner, entertainment. But I didn’t know how to play my part. I pushed through the crowd and fled back to the bus.
From its sanctuary I waited, my heart pounding, for the bus to fill again. I stared out the window at the sky, not seeing, ignoring the gruff smile of the old man as he resumed his seat beside me, whatever he was offering. Some peace. In time the bus pulled out of the station, drew free of the whirlpool, and set off again through the streets. The movement was a relief.
FOUR
I read the final chapter of my guide, the chapter on Western Sahara. It began: What the tourist brochures refer to as the ‘Saharan provinces’ is largely disputed territory. The peacekeepers were here to resolve that very dispute. When I finished the chapter and thought of Jack, it crossed my mind that I should read the book again, that there was so much I hadn’t taken in I might need, that I should reopen it at page one and begin again. I turned to the window instead.
The afternoon was brighter, the clouds had been left behind. We had left the coast. There were hills, and villages on the sides of the hills. There were crop-fields. There were other tea stops. At one, as the bus drew into a village, the old man beside me stood, and reached for a bag in the overhead compartment. He turned and spoke to two women who’d been sitting across the aisle – the first words between them all journey, a gruff direction – and I saw they were together. Without looking at me, the old man led them away, those two swaying folds of cloth following the hooded brown cloak down the aisle.
I hated tea, our stepmother Em’s drink, so after stretching my legs I returned to the bus.
Not long after, a young man with close-cropped hair and a serious smile slipped in beside me.
‘May?’ he asked. A grey woollen hat lay in his lap.
‘S . . . sure . . .’ I hadn’t used my voice all day, and even in that short time it had lost strength.
‘May we speak English?’
‘OK,’ I said too loudly, overcompensating.
‘Do you like Bob Marley?’
‘I’m sorry?’
I couldn’t understand what he’d said for his accent.
‘Bob Marley. Do you know Bob Marley?’
I smiled, shrugged, nodded.
‘Buffalo soldier?’ I said.
He laughed with pleasure.
‘English?’
‘No. Australian.’
‘I want to learn.’
‘OK.’
‘Can we speak?’
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘Maroc.’
‘Where in Morocco?’
I didn’t understand his answer, heard only a thick guttural sound, as if his tongue had got in the way of the words he wanted to say.
‘Where?’
‘Dar El Baida,’ he said it again, slower. ‘We say in Arabic. In English: Casablanca.’
The bus pulled away. We talked. He told me he went to university, that he was studying business, that he wanted to go to France. He quoted Bob Marley, shining suns and sweet air and dancing feet, his accent changing to something faintly Jamaican. We must have been about the same age. He wrote his name down on a piece of paper: Lhoussine.
I read it aloud, got it wrong, tried again, this strange name. He tutored me till I’d settled on a close-enough version.
‘You have a wife?’ Lhoussine asked.
‘No. You?’
He shook off my question.
‘You have a girlfriend then?’
‘No. One day perhaps,’ I answered.
‘Inshallah.’ I had never heard this before, but would hear it a thousand times in the weeks ahead.
‘If God wills it,’ he said.
We were quiet for a moment.
‘Where do you go?’ Lhoussine asked then.
‘Laâyoune,’ I said. ‘Western Sahara.’
‘Incroyable!’ he said, grasping my hand. ‘El-Aaiún! I go to El-Aaiún too! Why do you go to El-Aaiún?’
*
‘Your dad needs to speak with you,’ Em had said, just a fortnight before.
I was down the back, working on my bearded dragon. The monolithic block of pink sandstone had been purchased by the shire council years ago for a sculptor to carve a giant lizard, a gesture of reconciliation to the local Aboriginal people that would stand outside the council chambers. Other sculptors had been commissioned, but had baulked at the piece: the size of the block, the rust lines that ran through it, so unpredictable. But the stone had been cut from our own quarry, and though I was young, though it was my first commission, I was sure I could carve it.
‘What is it?’ I asked without looking up. The light was almost gone for the day, and I didn’t want to lose any of it.
‘It’s important.’
I didn’t detect the weight in her voice.
‘What’s it about?’
‘Bas,’ Em’s voice sharpened, raw with something. She was not merely my father’s emissary in this. I followed her into the house. In the kitchen she went to the sink, her back to me. Go on, she seemed to be saying, you’re on your own.
He was sitting in the sunroom, what had once been a narrow front verandah but was now enclosed. It faced south, with louvers at either end for the sun. The room was filled with orange light. On the piano, which had been taken out there for storage years before, was a vase of hydrangeas, balls of light blue, darkening now. My father was sitting in his old armchair. He was erect in an unusual way, a tension in him I hadn’t seen before. He looked at me closely as I stepped from the hallway onto the parched verandah floorboards, looking, I guessed, for a sign that Em might have told me already.
‘Jack,’ my father said before I’d had a chance to sit.
Aah, Jack, I thought. Always Jack.
‘He’s gone,’ my father said.
I didn’t understand. Of course he’d gone. Gone with glorious fanfare twelve months before. Gone to represent all of us on some foreign
shore whether we wanted it or not. Gone to fulfil his destiny and ours.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s gone,’ my father repeated, his voice sombre. There was a sort of mourning in the room, but it was restrained, incomplete.
‘Killed?’
‘We don’t know,’ Em said, following me into the sunroom now, moving towards my father. She pulled up a seat beside him, her hand brushing his shoulder. I sat down too.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘They say he’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘They don’t know where he is. The last anyone saw him was at a base, deep in the desert. He had a week’s leave but he stayed. Everyone else went to the Canaries, but he stayed down there. In the desert. Now they say he’s disappeared.’
‘You mean he’s gone AWOL?’
Even as I was saying it I knew what it would bring. Still, I couldn’t stop the thought turning into the word, couldn’t muffle its form as it emerged. When it came out it was hard, like a lash, and my father flinched. My heart was thumping already, racing with the echo of my error. I saw his eyes close, his brow tighten, his whole face grimace. I remembered the stories he used to tell of deserters. Of all his war tales, all his collection of fighting deeds, his deserter stories held special place as warnings to his sons. Men unmanned. Soldiers without rank. Weakness and cowardice and fear and dishonour incarnate. More powerful even than the stories of glory.
He gathered himself slowly, labouring to rise from under the weight of the shameful word. When he eventually lifted his head, and opened his eyes, he was blazing. He raised an index finger to me, shaking with anger, the same index finger that had tenderly stroked the pages of his atlas a year ago and proudly given his paternal assent to Jack’s journey. He raised that finger and roared:
Closer to Stone Page 2