A Taste of Cockroach

by Allan Baillie

  But she tried to sound bright: ‘What have we done? You been arrested?’

  He did not seem to hear her. ‘We’ve got to talk.’

  ‘Is it that bad?’

  He nodded.

  She nodded back. ‘Okay, Dolphin Beach.’ She pulled him towards the bikes and they rode silently out of the school ground.

  At the beach he leaned his bike haphazardly on a fence post and walked away when it crashed to the ground. He stopped at the top of the slope that swept down to the surf. Gulls were wheeling round a patch of breaking sea. There was going to be a year’s-end beach party here in three days but he had forgotten about it.

  ‘Well?’ she said. But she did not want to hear him.

  He dipped his head and sat on the sand. ‘They’re sending me to Melbourne.’

  ‘What?’ She hissed the word. Far, far worse than she had expected. ‘Why do they do that?’

  He broke a twig. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do. You bloody well do! Did you want this? Is this your lousy way of saying goodbye?’

  Sok raised his head and there was water in his eyes. He tried to say something, lost it between a gulp and a cough, and shook his head.

  ‘That is over a thousand kilometres away. Why do they do that?’

  ‘Better education …’

  ‘Bull! Our schools and unis are just as good as anything in Melbourne. You know that.’

  He trickled sand through his fingers.

  ‘And what’s wrong with this school? No drug rings, no dumb teachers, not really dumb anyway …’

  She looked at him. ‘It’s me, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, no …’

  ‘But what else?’

  ‘They’ve been after a better education for me for years. They want me to be a lawyer, an architect, something which will - you know - “reflect honourably” on the family.’ He shook his head and pounded his fist into the sand.

  ‘We know that, we’ve known that for ages. I was expecting you to tell me you would be moving to one of Sydney’s posh colleges. That would have been all right, we could still have got together at the weekends … But Melbourne! Did you fight, did you say a single word to stop it?’

  He jerked his head up. ‘I fought. I stood in the kitchen and shouted at my father and my mother. Shouted, do you understand? Not a dutiful son, more like a drunk from the pub. I shouted at them, told them to let us be …’ He stopped.

  Shirley pressed her eyes against her knees. ‘Okay,’ she said wearily. ‘That’s it. What am I to them? Just the dumb bird down the road, the tramp stealing their fine son away.’

  ‘Your parents aren’t much better. What am I, the yellow heathen with evil intent for their lovely daughter? Fu Manchu?’

  Shirley flushed. ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘So I fought and I lost.’

  ‘We ought to run away.’

  ‘I can’t. There’s no fight left in me. I must remember they took that sinking fishing boat into pirate waters, stuck out the stinking refugee camps for years – just for me. I’m all they have.’

  ‘I was only joking. We can wait, can’t we?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  Shirley looked gravely at Sok. ‘But it’s going to be a long time.’

  ‘A long time.’

  ‘But we can try.’

  ‘Sure, we can try.’

  ‘And have the big battle then.’

  Sok was silent.

  ‘What’s gone wrong, Sok? We used to be such fun kids. Remember the movie parties, the fishing trips – I always caught more than you.’

  ‘Only because my dad taught you how to put the prawn on the hook.’

  ‘And then we took you for that camping trip, remember?’

  ‘Oh yes, eggs and bacon on a redgum fire and the two wallabies watching from the long grass.’

  ‘You could feed them by hand!’

  ‘Swimming in that cool, quiet waterhole by the ferns …’

  ‘Beware the bunyips!’

  ‘And singing round the fire under the moon. Your mum was a terrible singer.’

  ‘Terrible singers.’

  ‘And we went to bed in our own little tent.’

  They were quiet for a while. A handful of gulls found them, walked around them, then flew off.

  ‘That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?’ Shirley said.

  ‘When we were little. When we were kids.’

  ‘What would the parents say if we did it now?’

  ‘Sheez! Boggles the mind.’

  ‘Yeah, little kids can do no wrong. Big kids can do no right.’

  Sok nodded slowly, as if he was far away.

  ‘But I guess this is it, hey. Funny, I used to imagine how we would pan out together. Two kids, you a lawyer, me a teacher, and a rabbit-warren of a house …’

  ‘No.’ Sok slapped the sand. ‘This is not it. They have pushed us round for long enough. Now, that beach party …’

  Shirley listened to Sok in wonder. When he had finished she fell back on her elbows. ‘If they hear about it —’

  ‘Oh, they will, they will.’

  ‘Your dad is going to kill you.’

  ‘Oh no. I’m the only thing they’ve got, remember? But what about you?’

  Shirley nodded and began to laugh.

  * * *

  As the last glimmer of dusk faded from Dolphin Bay a boy came over the rise carrying a small card table. He placed the table on the flat of the beach and cartwheeled to the edge of the surf. He was followed by a girl carrying a broken bedside lamp and some sandwiches. She put the lamp on the table and took the sandwiches to the boy. Three boys staggered down the slope with a chest of drawers, which they emptied of ice and cans before placing it near the table. A girl wobbled after them with a large mirror, which she bolted to the chest of drawers. A giggling boy delivered a hat stand and a radio. Shirley arrived with a flight of china ducks which were strung from the mirror to the hat stand. A gas barbecue was set up nearby.

  After the New Guinea mask, the bowl of flowers, the phone which did not work and the music box which did, the doona, the bookshelf and the single book, Sok arrived with five loudly joking boys and a dismantled bed. Shirley stood in a crowd of giggling girls, with her face burning at the jokes as the bed was built on the open beach. The spring frame was lowered onto the brass ends of the bed, then a badly sagging mattress and the doona. The bed was carried into the space between the chest of drawers and the card table.

  They quietened for a moment as they stared at what they had created. The moon sat in the mirror, a breeze drew a strange note from the brass tubes on the bedhead, the ducks bobbed in flight …

  Sok put his arm around Shirley’s shoulder. ‘Welcome to our home. Let the party begin.’ He turned the radio on.

  The dancers whirled through the bed-sitter and out to the surf, a boy quick-stepping with the hat stand. Sok cooked sausages, shashliks, potatoes and chicken pieces on the gas barbecue. The bed became a stage for uncertain singers, soggy actors and reluctant poets. They danced wearily away from the bed-sitter and began to flop on the sand. Until they began to go home. Until there were only two of them on the beach, and the bed-sitter.

  ‘Now that was a party,’ Sok said, and fell onto the bed.

  ‘Don’t look at the mess.’ Shirley collapsed beside him.

  She looked past the chest of drawers at the moonlit sea, at the slow swell carrying silver to the shore. She could see beyond the hat stand, where the black cliff was toppling into the white haze of the patient surf. She could close her eyes and hear the dying notes of the music box, the quiet creak of the china ducks on their string, the shifting of the sand beneath her, the gentle slap of the waves. Or she could open her eyes and see nothing but a broad sweep of stars.

  Could it be like this?

  ‘Sok?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, Shirley.’

  ‘We really ought to paint the ceiling again.’

  ‘Ceiling? Oh yes. What colour do you want?’
r />   ‘Lime green. I get so sick of white ceilings.’

  ‘All right. Might as well do the walls too.’

  ‘Don’t overdo it. I’ve got an eye on a small house down the road.’

  ‘Ah, the mortgage trap! I don’t know if I can defend enough innocent burglars.’

  ‘You forget. I’ll be a headmistress next year.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  ‘Yes. Oh, there’s another thing. You have to speak to your son, Ian.’

  ‘He’s your son too.’

  ‘Yes, but he listens to you.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘It’s what he’s not doing that’s wrong. It’s his homework. He keeps on playing with turtles.’

  ‘Ah, but he’s bright.’

  ‘That’s beside the point. You have to tell him he’s got to do his homework or he’ll never grow up and be a lawyer like his —’

  ‘To hell with being a lawyer!’

  Shirley looked sideways.

  ‘And to hell with being the Number One son!’

  Shirley nodded and thrust her arm at the sky. ‘And to hell with their suspicion!’

  ‘Tradition!’

  ‘Religion!’

  ‘Race!’

  ‘Nationality!’

  ‘Family. Especially family!’

  ‘Stuff them all!’

  Sok raised himself on one elbow. ‘Shirley?’ he said softly. And he kissed her softly, once.

  He lay back and she squeezed his hand.

  And they slept.

  * * *

  Early morning swimmers on Dolphin Beach found two young people sleeping in a bed surrounded by enough furniture for a small flat. They were not disturbed, as the swimmers noted the piled cans and said they must have had a very wild party last night.

  But when some of the swimmers returned to Dolphin Beach after breakfast there was no trace of the cans, the furniture, or the couple.

  Gone. Like a whispered dream.

  THE PENCIL

  I had wandered across Afghanistan in 1964, and found a lot of easygoing people. Like the Herat policeman who had his cells open and no one there but a group of French hippies who were using the cells as a cheap hotel. He said that the hippies were a biblical lost tribe – maybe. But things change.

  Nerida slowly rolled the pencil in her fingers, as if she had never seen it before. But she knew it well, from the tooth marks at the top, the pocks on the sides, to the thick lead point.

  It was not a normal pencil. The lead was thicker and the wood was fatter, making the pencil clumsy in her hand. It was a carpenter’s pencil, for making marks on wood, but there was no carpenter here to ask for it back. Not any more.

  She touched those tooth marks. Once she had pushed the end of the pencil into her mouth to see if the tooth marks fitted, and of course, they didn’t. She had felt guilty for a while after that. It felt like she had stolen the pencil from Dad and she couldn’t do anything about it. But she had worked it out. She had only borrowed the pencil from him. Yes, it was hers now, but it was still Dad’s pencil.

  She looked up at the old black-and-white photo in its glassless frame, next to the rusty bolt on a shelf. A young Dad grinning with a camel, before Mum, before her, before everything. But that’s all they had left of him – the pencil, the Russian bolt and that photo.

  ‘Ready now?’ Mum looked across the dusty room.

  ‘Almost.’ She finished sharpening the pencil with a broken knife, only just shaving the wood from the fresh lead. She could write carefully at an angle to make the lead sharp. The pencil was getting too short as it was. She slipped the pencil into the shallow pocket of her faded red dress and smiled at Mum. ‘Now, I’m ready.’

  Mum studied Nerida, from the light white headdress, the dress, the long pants under the dress, to the camel-hide slippers. She squatted before her and tugged her long pants till they touched her slippers.

  ‘Ouch,’ Nerida said.

  ‘You’ll do, I think. Wait.’ Mum shrugged into her heavy blue burqa, which covered her from hair to feet. She wasn’t going to step outside, not without a guardian – that would be much too dangerous – but even just opening the door was a risk. You never knew who might be looking across the lane.

  Nerida watched Mum battling with the dense material. Mum and her friends called the burqa a bottle because it made a woman look like one, and they all hated it. It suffocated, it was hot as a baker’s oven, and the embroidered veil constantly rubbed the nose and created a spotted haze before the eyes. Next year she would be wearing that tent, but now she was only a girl.

  Mum pulled Nerida towards her, adjusting the headdress as she stared into her eyes. ‘You be careful out there.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ Nerida nodded.

  ‘Really. Watch everywhere, all the time. I hate this.’

  ‘I know.’ Nerida shrugged slightly. ‘But we have to, don’t we?’

  Mum closed her eyes. ‘Sometimes you sound like your father.’

  For a moment Nerida smiled.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Mum jabbed a finger at her. ‘You have to be frightened, and stay that way.’ She opened the door.

  The narrow lane trapped early morning shadows and particles of dust shimmered between the walls, but there was nobody outside.

  That’s a good start, thought Nerida. She picked her way through rubble, turned, waved at Mum’s shadow and walked away. An eddy scudded from a corner and hurled dirty clay into the air. Nerida stepped aside from it and remembered how it had been in the desert with Dad. There had been six windstorms, dark pillars reaching for the sun as they slowly danced around each other. Like gods talking.

  The memories keep coming back, but they are fading now.

  Nerida shook her head and walked from the empty lane into the noisy street.

  The street was different. Heavily bearded men brushed past her, their long robes swirling around their ankles, the tails of their turbans flicking their shoulders. Most of them were carrying a gun, but that was normal. There were a few women shuffling along in their dusty burqas. They moved in groups or with a man from a woman’s family – a brother, grandfather, husband – as guardians. The women’s male protection was as essential as the burqas in the street, but the women were ignored.

  And that is good, Nerida thought. If the Beards don’t see the women then they don’t see you. If you’re lucky.

  Nerida squeezed the pencil for luck as she edged along the yellow clay walls. All the walls were pocked, and many of them looked like they had measles. There were scars in the stucco; often the clay had been ripped from the bare bricks. Many empty windows gaped onto the street with fragments of glass glittering under them still. That was the work of old bullets, but why repair them? There will be other scars to join them.

  She took a battered bridge across the city’s grey river, still thundering but with less water then usual. The mountains were beginning to freeze over. Often, during a drought, a large market would operate on the dry riverbed, but not now. Nerida skirted a pile of rubble beside a ruined house. A family had tried to live in the shell of the building but they had moved on. The winds from the mountains were howling of winter, and there were better houses that were empty.

  Nerida looked up at the distant High Castle, an old ruined fortress that the British troops had destroyed in the nineteenth century. She used to climb up there, but the area had been laid with mines. Everywhere there were marks of war, from any time. Just up the road Alexander the Great left a settlement, and across the desert he started a city. Now she was walking towards the ruins of Maiwand Street. It was once the city’s busiest shopping area, but the bullets had hit, then shells, tanks, soldiers, looters, rockets and tribesmen. Now it lay in shattered devastation, but Nerida walked it every time to remember the name.

  Maiwand Street had been named after a battle. Dad would tell her the story of the battle, and of the great heroine called Malalai. On the flat desert, beyond the swirling windstorms, in 1880 a British army marched f
rom Kandahar to fight an Afghan army. In the battle Afghan tribesmen began retreating under the British fire – until Malalai acted. Malalai was a Pashtun bride, but she was a warrior on that day. She pulled her veil from her face, shouted at the frightened men and then waved her veil as a battle flag. Then she charged at the British …

  Malalai died in that charge, but Dad said it didn’t matter. On that day the British army was destroyed, but Dad said that didn’t matter either. What did matter was that the tribesmen followed her and her veil against the British guns. That was a time when women could affect things, and maybe there would be another time – if they were ready for it.

  And then Nerida thought about Dad’s war and the rusty Russian bolt as she took a corner. She walked up a low canyon of ruined buildings and climbed a pile of rubble. In front of the rubble there had been a wrecked Russian tank until a few weeks ago.

  She often told her friends that her father had killed that tank. Why not? He might have. The tank had now gone, but she had snatched a bolt from it before it was taken away.

  Putting his carpenter’s tools to one side, Dad had fought the Russians in the mountains, in the passes, in the hills and finally here, in the old city. Then the Russians left and Dad was ready to put his gun away and take up his pencil again. But the tribal armies who had fought the Russians to a standstill began to fight with each other for control of the city. Dad died in a storm of rockets in the blazing streets …

  The fighting was over now. The Beards marched into the city and everything changed. There were a lot of bearded men in the city but the Beards ordered every man have a beard – a beard longer than a man’s hand. The Beards loved giving orders. They ordered that there be no music, no kites, no laughter. Women had to wear burqas, had to marry, could not work, and worse …

  Nerida sniffed the air and frowned. She caught the taste of dust, the smell of dry urine, donkey manure, faint petrol fumes, and something else. Something warm and crispy.

  Then suddenly she smiled and skipped to the bottom of the rubble. She squeezed her pencil and hurried towards the corner of the ruined street.

  But she remembered that she was carrying nothing but her pencil. She couldn’t buy a burnt crust. She slowed for a moment, then hurried on.