GEOFF’S KITE-FLYING obsession had lasted only a brief year or so, when Mandy was five and Stephen a toddler, just before Cathy was born. For several months their father would drive Mandy and baby Stephen to the highest of the bare hills near the town, where the grey transmission tower reached into the sky above them. He would lift his kites—delicate creations of dowel and bright tissue paper—from the boot of the car. Mandy would huddle, sullen, in her nylon parka, hair whipping her face in the freezing wind.
‘I told you to wear something warmer,’ Geoff would growl while he untangled a cord. But Mandy had insisted on her pink tartan skirt and bare legs, and the wind was icy. Geoff plonked Stephen on a blanket on the hard ground with a bucket of plastic toys, rugged so tightly and bulkily in his little hooded jacket he was rendered almost immobile. When he turned to try to watch them the hood stayed where it was, and his face would half disappear inside it.
Mandy had to stand in the buffeting wind, holding the skein of nylon line in both hands, while her father strode up the hill ahead of her. Then he would throw the kite up, and shout at her, ‘Hold it tight! Up!’ and she would lean, her feet planted on the tussocky ground, holding the line up above her head. The kite would mostly swirl once or twice and arrow straight into the stony ground. But sometimes, sometimes, it would lift, the spool whirling and tumbling in her hands, the green box kite lifting higher and higher, and Mandy would begin to smile and then to shriek, standing with her head thrown back as the kite rose so high it was difficult to see, her feet gripping the spinning earth, laughing with her mouth wide open.
And Geoff would stand watching his daughter falling in love with the gamble, the chance of it. Falling in love with the high space beyond this town, and the possibility of flight.
Once, many years later, Mandy had called her father from Sarajevo for his birthday. Sitting on the floor in her room she had watched the window and listened. There had been no shots for an hour. She had twisted the satellite phone’s rubber aerial, pressed the numbers.
‘Hello,’ said Geoff’s voice then, in the way he always answered, with the downward, unexpectant inflexion.
‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ she’d said, smiling at the dingy carpet. She heard him breathing; there was a pause, like fright. But then he said loudly, gratefully, ‘Mandy.’
‘How’s the weather there?’ she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘How’s Mum? What’s the news?’
Her father cleared his throat across the oceans. ‘Sunny here today; you can probably hear the lawnmowers.’
‘What did you get for your birthday? I’ve tried to send you something, but the post . . . it might not get there.’
She had bought a battered old kite from a woman in the street who was selling her children’s possessions, clumped deep inside the doorway of an apartment block. The absurdity of the kite, red and orange against the gritty misery of the dusty, blasted city. The bright precariousness of it. She had wrapped it in the ruins of a plastic bag and some paper, and persuaded another journalist to take it out with him through the tunnel, made him promise to post it when he got home to Athens. Crouched there with the sat phone on the hotel room floor, she had already given it up as long-gone, tossed perhaps into the mud of that foul underground passage.
‘Mum’s well, we’re all well,’ said her father.
Their voices fell across the world, passing each other, halting and starting, father and daughter seeking each other out in the delays, in the small scurrying sentences. Then in the middle of her saying something, Geoff cut in. ‘We’ve been worried.’
She allowed the pause, felt the pain of tears building behind her eyes. ‘But it’s okay, Dad, I’m being very careful.’
She lay down on her back on the floor with the phone, blinking away her tears, watching the stained ceiling. Tell the truth, he had said to them all, all through the petty lies of their childhoods and adolescence. And now they were nearing the truth of her own life she could feel her throat constricting, her voice wavering.
‘What?’ her father said. He sounded older than he should, deafer.
‘I’m being careful,’ she repeated, louder, more definite. ‘I’m safe.’
‘Are you near that hotel? The one on TV?’
Tell the truth.
‘No, Dad, I’m a long way from there.’
His answer was lost under a loud noise from outside, something huge and metallic falling. They both paused. And then he began telling her about the garden, about Rotary. Snatches of images came to her: the backyard with its apricot tree; the crepe myrtles all down the street; the blue and gold Rotary Club name badge he kept with the spare change in a little Indonesian bowl by the telephone, and which he pinned to his sports jacket lapel every Thursday evening.
Then there was the staccato of gunfire, and she crawled to the window, the phone in her hand. Two soldiers were dragging the sobbing driver from the cabin of a car.
Geoff stopped. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing, go on, Dad,’ Mandy urged, and he began to speak again. But he knew she was lying, she heard the knowing in his voice as he tried to cocoon her with the Anzac Day barbecue, the mown grass, the last of the peaches.
She closed her eyes to imagine these things, and her father’s voice came gentle and rhythmic across the world, trying to help her stop the images dissolving, as she opened her eyes and watched the three young soldiers, each with a cigarette in one hand and an AK47 in the other, begin to kick the man to death in the cold street.
Three months later Geoff unwrapped a battered parcel, stickered with stamps and glossy with tape. Inside was a bent birthday card, and a folded paper kite. He held it up against the window and it glowed, red and orange as embers.
MANDY WATCHES late-night current affairs once everyone else has drifted to bed. Chris had told her he was ready for bed, and waited beside her on the couch for her to say something. When she just nodded at him he looked back, meaningfully, but said nothing for a moment. Then he let his hand rest lightly on her thigh and said, ‘Are you okay?’
Mandy looked down at his hand, then put hers over it. She held his warm hand and looked up, meeting his gaze steadily for the first time since she got off the plane. She nodded. ‘Thank you. I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
Chris let his hand rest in hers for a long moment, and then got up from the couch and left the room.
Her neck aches. On the television screen a Palestinian boy is crawling, dragging himself across the flat concrete roof of his apartment block. He is demonstrating for the reporter how he dragged his dead sister, who was shot while hanging laundry, across the roof. He shows the reporter how, as he dragged her, he tore a bath towel from the line as the shots kept coming, and he kept crawling and hauling, bunching the towel—like this— around her bloody, opened head. When the report is finished Mandy switches off the television.
She lowers herself into the bed next to Chris and lies there, gazing up into the dark. She breathes as silently as possible. She thinks of her father in the hospital, and she slows her breathing more, matching it to the slow, motorised rhythm of his.
When she wakes again, at three, the vision before her opened eyes is an old woman she saw once in Rafah, on the Gaza border. The woman’s back was horribly deformed, the great hump of it forcing her to bend so her face was almost level with her hands, clutching the handlebars of a battered aluminium walking frame. A young man, her son, walked beside the old lady, hands in his pockets. The woman’s legs were sturdy, but she could only take little scuffing steps like a baby, gripping the bars of her frame. Her son carried a large pack, and nervously scanned the street around them as they walked. He licked his lips, but he spoke all the time to his mother in a calm, low voice, the withheld, whizzing energy of his body only allowed expression in the jittering fingers, the fast blinking, against his mother’s slow, excruciating steps.
The son was hit in the legs, and he screamed at her to move, go! as he fell. But she was stuck, moti
onless, in the middle of the road. Why did they let her stand there for so long, sobbing into the dirt, holding to the ridged rubber handles of her frame? She could not bend to her son, could not straighten. Eventually, howling into her own chest, she began to push the frame forward again, one dragged step at a time. She wailed his name again and again, perhaps apologising for leaving him. He was no longer moving; blood was everywhere. No-one else came for her. The wind blew rubbish along the road.
Only when she had reached the other side did the sniper hit her. She fell without a sound, except the light clatter of her walking frame falling to the ground beside her.
Mandy forces her breath to come slowly again, lets her mind’s lapping waves enclose the woman and her son, waits for them to sink back away beneath the surface of the night. When she finally returns to sleep she dreams of coming home, of driving the Rundle streets, but the crepe myrtles and jacarandas are festooned with shreds of her father’s skin and flesh.
CHAPTER NINE
TONY STANDS motionless in the doorway to his living room, staring at the TV.
A kidnapped journalist has appeared on a video, begging for her life; the newsreader’s voice is tight with importance. Tony’s gut lurches before his brain even kicks up it’s not her, before the millionth-second’s reasoning that he’s seen Mandy here in Rundle with his own eyes just hours ago.
The American girl’s photograph appears behind the newsreader’s head. She is nothing like Mandy at all. There is no reason for him to keep watching, for this panic in his body. But still his guts knot. He swigs from his beer glass, the kitchen lit up behind him. The living room is gloomy but for the bright square of television; he’s not yet bothered to switch on the light. He has fed the dogs, but not himself. A bowl of microwaved pasta sits congealing on the kitchen table behind him. He tilts his glass steeply, watching the television’s blur through its base. And now there she is, the Yank girl. She’s wearing a headscarf. Hijab. Or is it abayah? Behind her is a giant flower, on some rug or curtain. The video is all blurry black-and-white. But in the middle of the flower and the hijab is her young girl’s face, while she says, ‘Please, just do whatever they want, give them whatever they want as quickly as possible.’
Her voice is American, calm, as if she is acting. There is no emotion.
‘There is a very short time; please do it fast. That’s all.’
She makes a weird half-smile.
The shot changes to file footage of the street where the girl and her translator were grabbed. On the street people walk about in their robes, there are cars beetling. All the dusty colourless decay.
‘Carroll is the thirty-first foreign journalist to be kidnapped in Iraq since the Iraq War began,’ the newsreader says.
Tony swallows, and exhales a long, slow breath. It’s a Yank, he tells himself, over and over like a mantra as he goes to the kitchen drawer for a fork.
But if it happened to her. His gut squirl begins again. Tony has seen the crappy video footage each time on the TV, on the net; each person unrecognisable from their smiling staff photos. He remembers the French woman, appearing against the dark, featureless background with her knees up, her big bony hands clutched together around them. She wore a grey, too-big sweater and her hair was stringy, her face haggard and filthy. Her choppy accent. My halss iz vary bud, she had said. I’m very bad sichologically also.
He has watched them all, their hair bushy and dirty, all the muscles of their face gone slack and their skin grey, crouched with their ankles bound on the concrete floor of some grey shithole. Once, that poor Yank boy with the orange overalls on. Everything grey but the overalls, a blob of terrible colour. But each one, talking always like they’re already dead, talking to the camera with their eyes rolled back like a corpse’s, giving their name, maybe holding their passport open on their chest. Maybe saying, I don’t want to die. Maybe asking the government to do something. But mostly sitting there, with the guns pointed, or the masked faces behind them, just waiting for it to be over, staring out of their dead, scooped-out eyes.
If it was her, could he watch it?
He watched it once, on the net. The orange overalls kid, pushed to the floor and then the awful screaming. The connection kept dropping out and Tony was glad of it, sitting there at the corner table in his living room, sweat on his forehead, his hand over his mouth. He saw the first dreadful movement of the knife, the sawing wrench of it, and then he ran to the bathroom and retched into the toilet. When he came back the silence told him the footage had frozen with the dropped-out line and he turned the computer off without looking back at the screen and then he sat in the dark, wishing away what he had seen.
If it was Mandy he couldn’t watch it. Crouched there, her ponytail showing the slender, naked back of her neck. Sobbing probably. Or maybe not, maybe so half-dead and sick with terror she would only just be breathing.
Tony realises he is crying himself now, standing here over the opened kitchen drawer. He sniffs, wipes his face on his arm. It isn’t her. You fuckwit. But still he can’t stop the tears coming as he shoves the drawer back in, goes to the table, pulls out a chair and sits, dragging the bowl towards him. He peels back the plastic wrap from the bowl and leaves it in a sodden gob on the tabletop, jabs the fork into the pale lumps of the pasta, sniffing back the tears.
Then it comes to him. If it happened to her, he would offer himself. The simplicity of it stops his guts quivering, stops his bawling. He would go to Baghdad, they would let her go, shoving her through a doorway into some stinking laneway. She would cry, thank him, and then they would shake hands and he would open the door and go inside. He would pull on those stiff orange overalls, and he would kneel down in the concrete room and wait.
After the first blow, perhaps it would not be so terrible. Perhaps even just one blow, and that would be it—living, done with. Hasn’t he wished it, sometimes? One sharp shock, the rabbit’s wrung neck?
He almost tried it once, that early release. A rope, a tree in one of the back paddocks. He climbed the tree, winding the rope around and around the branch. He found he liked the feeling of it, the rope running through his fingers, raspy like the bark. The little flick of its end, each time he pulled it up. It was a warm afternoon. It was a useless thing, doing that, but it felt useful, pulling up the rope like he was winding something in, then letting it fall: flick, flip. After a while up there the thick hard force churning in his chest had gone slow, and he was knackered again. So he just sat, feeling the bone of the tree branch under his arse, looking down and across the paddocks, and way off he heard the dogs whining for their dinner. He sort of lost the need for it then, in that moment. He felt too buggered even to get down. But eventually he did—half-climbed, half-slithered down, felt the bark rasping against his belly as he slid.
He left the rope there, for the next time, and he got back in the ute and drove back across the knobbled paddocks, the grasses lain over in tufts like the hair on a Scotty dog. In his rear-vision mirror he saw that small loop just hanging there, waiting for him, and then he put his foot down and drove back to feed the dogs.
He thought about her then too, while he drove across the paddocks. That maybe she sometimes felt like this.
Sometimes he thinks about joining up in the army. He watches the news, like tonight, and he thinks sometimes about the places, about all the people that’ve got nothing. He could go to one of those dusty, hot places and give stuff to the kids that haven’t got anyone. Lollies and things. He could have an M16 and drive an APC and all that, but mainly he would be nice to the people with nothing. He wouldn’t let the kids hold his gun or anything. But then on the news he heard some kids got blown up when some soldiers were giving them lollies, and after that he couldn’t sleep for a while, not in bed anyway. He could go to sleep on the couch with the television on, orange and blue in the dark.
He wouldn’t let those kids touch a gun. He could get one of those iPods, let the people listen through the little earphones.
The last ti
me he looked the rope was rotting away, with a lumpy sort of knot at its end. It probably wouldn’t even hold his weight anymore.
Before he goes to bed, he has a piss and then stands for a moment in front of the bathroom mirror beneath the dangling globe, staring at the stubble of his own face.
It is not possible that she doesn’t remember. Tomorrow he will talk to her properly. About their being the same. About how in all the years since the fire he has followed her, paid attention to her life, its importance. Tomorrow it will be possible to say the words of it: the car, the burned corpse. How they saved one another.
CHAPTER TEN
Day three
CATHY ROUNDS the corner and there’s something different about Dad’s face there in the distance, a different light spread over his bed. As she walks closer she realises what it is—he’s been shaven, somehow, beneath the drips and tubes and plasters. And then she sees Stephen, sitting in the chair, a hand resting on the white blanket through the bars of the bed. He sees her and stands up.
Cathy says, ‘I thought your car was at home.’
‘Walked,’ says Stephen. They both turn to look at their father.
‘Looks pretty terrible, doesn’t he.’
They stare at his ballooned, blotchy face.
Cathy moves to fetch the other chair from the side of the bed, pulls it across the waxy lino. ‘Yep.’
‘Did you shave him?’ she says then.
Stephen nods, reddening for a moment. ‘Couldn’t stand him looking like that.’ He looks at her, then seems guilty. ‘They said I could,’ he says, jerking his head towards the nurses’ station. ‘I asked them first.’
He stretches, scratching his back over his shoulder with a large hand. He wears a faded red polo shirt, the collar bent and whitened with age. His sneakers squeak on the floor as he moves. He and Cathy both sit back down in the chairs.
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