Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  About the Book

  It’s 1969 and the world is alight with revolution. Oliver Lawrence, a Bondi Beach kid, is transported to one of the world’s most bewitching cities: Beirut in the Levant.

  The city is on the verge of civil war, but Oliver, who idolises Jimi Hendrix and Lawrence of Arabia, is more concerned with holding his family together. This mission becomes complicated as Oliver’s ravishing, gin-swilling stepmother, Babette, and cavalier playboy pilot father indulge in unbridled expatriate partying. And Babette has a secret that Oliver is determined to uncover.

  Beirut is a confusing place to learn how to be a man, involving snipers, codes of honour and purloined letters. As Lebanon begins to disintegrate, no one can avoid being caught in the crossfire.

  It’s bad enough when Oliver develops a very public crush on the local warlord’s girlfriend, but it turns disastrous when his young guerrilla friend, ‘Ringo’, enlists his misguided enthusiasm to turn his exploding cigar magic trick into a suitcase bomb.

  When Oliver is given an old Box Brownie, he finds a way into the world, into the lives of others and, finally, into adulthood. Oliver of the Levant is by turns humorous and heartbreaking, an all-at-sea story about the secret longings of youth and the uncomfortable truths that make us who we are.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Prologue: In Flight

  Chapter 1: The Multiple Uses of Towels

  Chapter 2: The Slave

  Chapter 3: Sabine

  Chapter 4: Boom

  Chapter 5: Edge of the Known World

  Chapter 6: Booza

  Chapter 7: The Straightening Out

  Chapter 8: Mahmoud

  Chapter 9: Education

  Chapter 10: Levitation

  Chapter 11: Little Beggars

  Chapter 12: Eff Off

  Chapter 13: Beit Zizi

  Chapter 14: Abdel Nasser

  Chapter 15: A Blast

  Chapter 16: Oliver of the Levant

  Chapter 17: Wimpy Bar

  Chapter 18: Harem Screen

  Chapter 19: Skateboard Cowboy

  Chapter 20: A Real Bomb

  Chapter 21: Skeleton

  Chapter 22: Moonwalk

  Chapter 23: Pigeon Rocks

  Chapter 24: The Gulch

  Chapter 25: Pop

  Chapter 26: Butterfly Wings

  Chapter 27: Bleeding

  Chapter 28: Knots of Nothingness

  Chapter 29: Tyre

  Chapter 30: Mouse, Lizard

  Chapter 31: I Make an X

  Chapter 32: Peace on Earth

  Chapter 33: The Bath

  Chapter 34: Duck Pyjamas

  Chapter 35: The War of Paramount Apartments

  Chapter 36: Pluck

  Chapter 37: Wedding

  Chapter 38: Milk and Honey

  Chapter 39: Zombies

  Chapter 40: The Bird-killing Forest

  Chapter 41: Pomegranate Cordial

  Chapter 42: Anthem

  Chapter 43: Exiled

  Chapter 44: Bomb Boy

  Chapter 45: Wreckage

  Chapter 46: One Brave, Bad Thing

  Chapter 47: Killer Pitcher

  Chapter 48: The Cold Lick

  Chapter 49: Explosives

  Chapter 50: War Art

  Chapter 51: Lord Lowch

  Chapter 52: Breathing

  Chapter 53: My War

  Chapter 54: Sniper

  Chapter 55: A Boy

  Chapter 56: The Field

  Chapter 57: Boat People

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  Prologue

  In Flight

  1971

  I didn’t think I’d be able to bear it when the earth fell away and the plane pointed its unseen nose towards the stars. I held onto the fat armrests, trying not to even blink, because when my eyelids met I tumbled into a space with no bottom.

  In that infinity, I heard the tick tick tick again and once more felt the rough shove on my shoulderblade when Ringo yelled, ‘Yallah! Run!’ I felt the thrill, again, of the awful crack of air as our bomb blew.

  Up.

  Then I lost sight of Ringo’s black cap of curls as his commando boots thumped down the hill and away into the straw and olive fields of the high Lebanese mountains.

  Now, tonight, his mother might be crying out for him, using the name she had given him: ‘Mahmoud. Mahmoud.’

  The endless replay made my heart flap over and over, like the wings of a bird with its tail on fire.

  Action, man!

  I had an urge to lurch up the steep aisle, crash into the cockpit and yell at Dad’s mate, Captain Masters. ‘I’ve got to go home to Beirut. Turn around. Now … please?’

  But they’d think I was a hijacker, with a beetroot expression and carrot hair. I could see how the faces of my fellow first-class passengers would hang in the aisle like masks, cold as ash. The genie with a conical hat would lift her perfect, black, semicircular brows high in the sky with fear. I would have to hold up my palms to show they were empty, except for a used chewie twisted in foil.

  Then, the genie would find her official air hostie voice: ‘Return to your seat, sir.’ With the tinge of adult exasperation I knew so well.

  ‘Here’s trouble,’ Dad liked to say. Nice greeting.

  Babette had once sighed, ‘If you dropped a pebble into a pond, you’d make more than a ripple. You’d start a tsunami.’

  They were panic merchants – Dad, especially, when he’d found out that the explosive device had been in our apartment. Muscling me into the Caddie and lecturing me on the airport road about how much the Christians would want to crucify, decapitate and castrate me if they found out what I’d done. ‘Drink it in, Oliver, because you can never come back to Lebanon. I’d like to cut your head off myself, just so I wouldn’t have to look at your silly grin again.’

  The genie said I seemed unwell, and I let her lift chamomile tea to my lips and lay a cool cloth across my forehead.

  I became Lawrence of Arabia, noble but tragic at mission’s end. I thought I understood what he meant when he’d said – after all that sky and tumult – that he didn’t want to love anything or anyone again.

  1

  The Multiple Uses of Towels

  Bondi, 1969

  Towels are nifty pieces of magic. At noon on that last day at Bondi Beach, I coiled mine on my head, made my surfboard my stage and pretended for Jess that I was shimmering on a camel between wind-whipped sand dunes.

  I’d just turned fifteen and I’d seen Lawrence of Arabia five times – three times when I was nine, then twice more as a teenager when I’d caught a chain of old rattler buses from Bondi to far-flung picture theatres to watch re-runs. As rain or wind tapped against the cinema’s tin roofs, I lost all sense of time and space. The air around me swelled with the most thrilling music I had ever heard, and a dream of another technicolour life billowed across the screen, carrying me on a wave of elation that surged and flowed and that I never wanted to end. I’d made Jess come on one of those bus expeditions, to a suburb we’d never heard of. He said I’d have to pay him next time.

  After one picture show I snaffled a poster from a wall down a lonely lane and sticky-taped it up alongside Jimi Hendrix in my bedroom. Now I could lie in bed and shift my eyes between the Hendrix afro, radiating out into a rainbow field of psychedelic swirls, and Lawrence’s weathered profile, shadowy inside a snow-white hood. Behind him, his men waved flags and brandished swords above the manes and flicking tails of the wild horses they’d tamed.

  I thought Lebanon would be similar to the film set: majestic desert and tall, cool houses.
I was going to be like Peter O’Toole, who played Al Orentz. Noble. Tortured inside, but a leader of men. Except I wasn’t going to do the bit where he dances on the sand in his new white Arab robes like a girl.

  Babette had forgotten to give us lunch money again, so we heaved empty bottles, sticky with sand, into Melham’s Milk Bar to swap them for food. The glass clinked in the sacks we’d made of our towels, and the tar road seared into our bare soles.

  I spat on my towel edge and rubbed at the zinc cream mask on my little brother’s upturned pixie face. Sand crystals lodged in the melted goo.

  Jess screwed up his eyes. ‘Ow. Feels like sandpaper.’

  Melham the Man pursed his lips at the grit trailed onto his lino.

  ‘Two devon sandwiches with sauce. And keep the change,’ Jess pipped. Melham managed to crack his face with a smile. Jess was good value like that; he was only ten, but he could be relied on to charm the enemy.

  ‘You can afford one sandwich, no sauce.’

  Melham said he was Lebanese, descended from the Phoenicians, the greatest merchants in the ancient world, and you couldn’t put anything past him. He said we were the luckiest kids in Australia because in Lebanon we would be able to swim in the Mediterranean and snow ski near the Cedars on the same day, and the beaches were made of beautiful concrete with drink waiters in aprons. He would go back tomorrow if his village was safe for his kids, just to smell his mother’s cinnamon chicken.

  Jess went owl-eyed. ‘Why isn’t it safe for kids?’

  Melham shrugged. ‘There are men there we call warlords. They are fighting each other for control over the people. They love the trigger, but they usually get someone else to pull it.’ He squared his shoulders and skewered me with his eyes, dark in his pale indoor skin. ‘You’ll learn how to be a man in Lebanon.’

  I rubbed my knuckles. I didn’t know you had to learn how to be a man.

  He wouldn’t budge on price. All those bottles for one lousy sandwich.

  ‘You can see why. Two would cut into his profit margin.’ Jess must have got profit margin out of a newspaper, and he knew that it would get an indulgent smile out of Melham. It was all right for him. He got the sanger. I wasn’t hungry anyway – all day I’d thought about our mother.

  I was scared of my mother’s breath; the medicine there.

  I was afraid of never feeling that breath on my face again.

  It was like there was a slit in the wall of the universe that certain people could slide through. The dead did that. My mother wasn’t dead, but she went through, came back. She took drugs to do it. She saw something on the other side that changed the look in her eyes and made her thin. It gave me an ache to think of it.

  The winter before last she met this narrow-gutted man, up the Cross. He had grey-green teeth and a blue teardrop tattooed under his left eye. He put gold hoops in her ears. He took her away from us. She began to wear black clothes and paint thick lines around her eyes. She dyed her raggedy hair jet-black. She wore torn stockings and bashed-up boots, and her clothes reeked of smoke from the incense and cigarettes that she liked to inhale in airless rooms.

  She changed her name. She used to be called Julia, a name with bells in it. I hated Keziah. It was like she’d nicked the name from a cemetery headstone all covered in lichen.

  Dad didn’t want to be married to Keziah. He came back from overseas and hired a detective to spy on her.

  I didn’t know Dad that well. Mum used to tell everyone he was a professional pilot who was in demand all over the world. We’d never lived in the same time zone together. Well, maybe when I was a baby, before memory. Mum had aviophobia – fear of flying. He couldn’t get a job in Australia because, according to him, he’d been busted flying small planes without a licence. She wouldn’t go overseas; he flew in and out of our lives. He brought toys for me when he visited, but he carried my mother off, driving around the countryside, up the coast. I kicked him in the shins with my leather baby boots.

  When I was eight, he took me into the cockpit of one of the jets he flew, grunting the names of the dials massed on the dashboard. They all looked like clocks to me, and I hated being cornered inside this glass-and-metal prison with this man who I could feel yearned for some kind of response from me.

  To love what he loved.

  Not long after that, Mum said it was over to me because she was too worn down. Jess was three, and on her bad days I wagged school so I could stay with him. I had to live inside a magic trick, my family balanced on me as its centre, just as I juggled a fork on a finger. That was called finding the fulcrum, Dad said one time when he was home on leave, after I performed a whole magic show for him, hoping to disappear some of his coins into my pocket.

  He just didn’t get what it was like when he wasn’t there. Being eight years old and dodging the beanpole of a guy with an eyepatch and a Chihuahua, who’d trip me over as I lugged the shopping from the corner store. ‘Whatcha got in the string bag?’ At nine, getting cornered, tackled and pummelled on the asphalt playground because I’d worn the uniform of my old school; never did get a new one.

  Jess and I often ate cold baked beans. Then I taught myself to cook, copying what I’d seen Mum do on her good days. Jess would hold onto the shaky kitchen chair for me so I could reach above the saucepan lip to stir the food on the flaming jet at the back of the stove. That’s what a neighbour told me: put it on the back burner, love, so the kid can’t reach up and pull it down all over himself. Jess would sometimes try to rattle the chair and I would push him away with my foot.

  We ate a lot of scrambled eggs and toast.

  Dad’d punch my shoulder as he left. ‘You’re in charge now.’ Deepening his voice, as if it was a joke.

  Dad found out about the narrow-gutted man from the detective. I wasn’t supposed to know, but I had ears. I never saw the photos, but I came to believe that they were taken at a place called Flagrante Delicto. Dad used the pictures to get a divorce and marry Babette.

  After that, Mum came back less often from the other side. Sometimes, now, her neck could barely hold up her head. She went to rehab, which Dad said was the best thing for all of us, but Mum said she was afraid of the spiders in her room, the ones I never could see. She’d leave and then end up back in rehab again, promising through tears that this time she would change. She was in there now with the people with hollow eyes and creepy conversation, who lurked in hallways lined with bunches of drooping plastic flowers. I didn’t know what else I would find to hate when I went to say goodbye.

  Blisters had begun forming on my soles when Babette wheeled up to the beach carpark, late, rigidly straight at the wheel, sunglasses above her powdered nose guarding against headlight glare, her cigarette out the window between two manicured nails, polished like pearls. She swung around, just missing my toes, and barked at us to get in.

  I banged the bonnet. ‘Hey! I need these feet.’ I wasn’t game to say how late she was. I didn’t complain that my shoulders itched from the clammy towel and the southerly wind that had streamed all the way from Antarctica to push me around, shoving seaweed stench up my nostrils, like one of those bullies at school pushing his hard palm into my face.

  At least the southerly can’t kick my balls.

  But it meant I would have to face the night nurse. I wished I could be my brother, who now watched the dark world with wide, vacant eyes, the streetlights flickering into them. Jess had already said his farewells last weekend, when I’d been sick in bed with the smallpox jab that had stamped a coil into my arm the shape of a bellybutton. He’d handed Mum the entire thirty-seven cents he’d made from a day of collecting soft drink bottles. He’d been giving her Dad’s money since he was about five anyway.

  Now, in the car, to take my mind off Mum, I tortured Jess. ‘In Lebanon you’ll have to eat goats’ balls and sheep’s eyes. And if you pick up food with your left hand, you’ll be a goner, Southpaw. It’ll be chopped off.’

  Jess flicked his towel at me. Babette thundered on in silence. No-one was
allowed to talk to her when she was driving. She braked halfway up a hill where black gum leaves tossed against the sickly electric-gold sky. A cracked sign on a peaked-roof mansion read: ‘Walking Towards the Light’. I pushed a peeling buzzer. A square figure in white grew in size through the frosted glass door.

  ‘Good evening. It’s very late.’ The night nurse cocked an acrobatic eyebrow. She had a sweaty jelly chin and dark plaits pinned over the top of her skull.

  ‘Here to see Julia Lawrence … Please.’

  ‘Stay. I’ll ask.’ I tried lifting one eyebrow a couple of times, like she did. Failed. Reckoned she must do eyebrow exercises. I didn’t know then there was a whole nation of Lebanese dedicated to the sport.

  ‘Sorry, no visitors. Doctor’s given her the drowsy juice. Call beforehand next time, will you?’

  ‘I’ve got to see her. I’m going away. For a long time.’

  She opened the door wider, and for a moment I thought she was going to let me in as an odour of cabbage, boiled bones and salt tumbled out. Nothing of Mum’s patchouli oil and sandalwood incense.

  I stepped up towards the nurse, into her thick, firm hand, which pushed me back. ‘Believe me, love, you do not want to see her right now.’ She slammed the door. I did not bang on it as she sealed me out with a key jangle and bolt clang, because I was afraid to see whatever my mother was that day. I was visiting the one who had been.