Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  Moonwalk

  Summer break. All wagging was legal. Sabine was no more than a shadow or a murmur tantalising me. Jess was sending postcards back to his friends who lived in Sydney. He’d bought a job lot of ten that were all the same, displaying two photos – the Corniche and a scrappy surf beach – with MaRvEILoUs BeIrUt scrawled in different coloured letters across the two scenes. On the back:

  Dear (friend’s name),

  Just like a comet, I will appear as a flash in Sydney in July. Ring me at Ryan’s on 364256 or I’ll burn up.

  Jess Lawrence

  My plan was to visit Ringo, but Souhar said he’d gone to Jordan to train.

  ‘When he comes back, tell him I’m getting closer on that magic trick, but I need his help.’

  She gave a tired smile, as though she were indulging me. Her frame had shrunk and the wire in her muscles seemed to have gone slack. She waged a war against the mice I’d brought home for the summer; they had invaded our whole apartment.

  Mr Stickler had asked me to breed them as a genetics experiment, ‘for the sake of the other boys,’ recording the colours of each generation born. I was supposed to let a white mouse make love with another white, a brown with a brown, then a white with a brown, recording the colours of their offspring’s pelts on charts that he’d supplied. But I decided that wasn’t fair.

  The mouse I’d named Casanova snuffled in my ear that he agreed. So, I lowered him into a box with all the female mice. I let the remaining mice have sex with whoever they wanted. No colour bar. It was the era of free love. But there was a breakout. Some of the escapees made their homes in crevices around the apartment. Souhar didn’t see them as refugees, like I did. If one shot out, she’d try to break its back with her mop.

  Dad used the mice to get at me. ‘They’re bloody useless. You’re bloody useless.’ Meanwhile, Babette was sighing with boredom. Dad seemed to always be flying. I hit on a solution and worked on the mice still in captivity and in my power.

  I bowed to Babette. ‘You, Madame, are to be guest of honour at a magic show.’

  Jess and I rehearsed until sunset, when Babette settled into an armchair facing the Juliet balcony. Jess lifted her feet onto the tan pouffe decorated with gold camel stamps, which she had hidden in a cupboard since we’d bought it for her in a tourist shop on Hamra. The sun angled a blade of light into her eyes, and she lifted her hand as a shield. ‘I can’t see a thing.’

  I flicked the rose-coloured curtains across the big old sun and bowed. I wanted no competition from that sun, the biggest ham in the universe. The room became hushed and expectant. I assumed my ‘Amazing Ali’ bass, borrowed from horror movies, even though it sometimes lost its authority when my voice broke. ‘Let there be light.’

  Jess lit a candle with a wrist flourish that made his sleeve fall close to the flame. Babette winced. Babette clapped. She seemed to think this was the magic trick.

  I frowned. ‘Shhh. This performance involves live creatures. All must be still for the alchemy to work.’

  I placed my hand under the pulsating candlelight and uncurled my fingers. A white mouse was revealed, its sides heaving with panic, but I held its tail expertly between my forefinger and thumb.

  ‘This is Maisie. What is she?’

  ‘A mouse,’ Jess shouted. Maisie flinched.

  ‘The very embodiment of mousiness,’ Babette said, surprising me with her enthusiasm.

  ‘She is everything positive. She is One.’ From somewhere faraway – Hamra, perhaps – there was a rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.

  ‘And now, my brave assistant will aid me to make zero of this mouse.’ I picked her up by the tail. Jess shook a red scarf curtain across the scene. I blew out the candle.

  ‘Rest your eyes.’ I moved into the shadows, my back to my audience, the jealous old sun splashing scarlet across the rose curtain. ‘More light, please, assistant.’

  Jess relit the candle and held it over a small table where I had draped a red scarf over a box.

  ‘And now there is zero mouse … We are crossing over to the negative.’

  Jess folded his arms over his chest. ‘I was supposed to do the next bit. He put Maisie in that mouse house under the scarf, Babette.’

  ‘Shhh. We had one mouse. Now we have no mouse. We are minus one mouse.’

  ‘No, we’re not. She’s in there.’

  ‘Shut up! Don’t you remember what you rehearsed? Are you my beautiful assistant or not?’

  ‘Not.’

  Scrabbling claws echoed in the box. I turned my eyes to Babette, addressing her directly. ‘Now that we have minus one, how do we move to the root of minus one? We have to divide minus one by minus one.’

  Jess was sulking, so I directed Babette to pick up the candle, cup it in her hand and hold it above the box. She became a ghoul in its wavering light.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am performing the alchemy now.’ I stood, eyes closed in concentration, waving a pink feather duster over the box. ‘And here is the result.’ I pulled the scarf away. Four baby mice and their mother scrambled behind a translucent window. It was the plastic vegetable crisper from the refrigerator. ‘Maisie has divided into five.’

  ‘No, she hasn’t,’ Jess huffed. ‘Maisie had sex. Now she’s got babies. It’s nothing to do with roots. That was a crap show.’

  But Babette applauded. ‘Encore. Encore.’

  I bowed and she smooched me, then Jess. When we could shut out the rest of the world, Babette was ours again.

  One morning in July, when Babette declared that we’d survived six months in Beirut, Sabine was waiting for me in the foyer. I could only stand there like some galoot until she came up close and whispered, ‘You come, give me key near bird house after sun go away. My father finish with bird then.’ Then she slipped into her hole as fast as a mouse.

  I couldn’t eat. I shaved twice. First, I left my moustache on. Then I eradicated it – too straggly, might get in the way of a kiss. I brushed my teeth six times. As the sun sank, Dad flicked the rabbit ears on the TV and made us sit around to watch a man walk on the moon for the first time. He sprung across moon-dust like a robot on a pogo stick. Jess mucked around and turned off the sound for a minute so we would watch him doing an imitation of the moonwalk. But we kept our eyes on the silver man, who became a spirit figure, silent in an unearthly place, sucking air from our faraway planet through a pipe.

  ‘That’s his umbilical cord. Tied to Mother Earth,’ Babette said.

  ‘This really means something for engineering. What can’t man make?’ Dad said.

  ‘Babies,’ Jess said. Babette hugged him and said she was going to miss him. He was flying to Sydney the next day.

  ‘Sometimes it takes two to three paces to make sure that you’ve got your feet underneath you,’ the man, Neil Armstrong, said.

  Dad made out he was his colleague. ‘There’s one pilot who’s really made it big. What a piece of machinery. I could have got myself onto that space program. If not for …’

  Dad looked at Neil Armstrong as if he’d taken something away from him. Even the moonwalk had to be about him and his flying.

  ‘Yeah, we’re just clutter.’ I ran out of the apartment. A bout of disgust was the only excuse I could think of to get away. But as I pushed the squeaky, rusted roof door, I was wary of Joseph. I’d slid my wallet, with the condom circle pressed into the leather, into my back pocket.

  The pigeons had tucked their popping eyes under their wings, and I let my jaw go when there was no sign of Joseph. Sabine sat propped against a peeling beige wall, her bare legs stretched out to sandals. She was half in shadow and half in moonlight, mixed with the luminous shafts thrown from the building next door, where people flitted behind windowpanes. My heart ticked like a clock. Joseph’s spies could be anywhere. Sabine didn’t seem worried. Her wine-red dress plunged and clung, flashing thighs and cleavage. Her flesh was tight, like the skin on Mum’s custard, which I’d loved to pop with my tongue. I sat and gave her a cigarette, and she snuggled ag
ainst my side. The solid reality of her body next to mine made me warm and shivery at the same time.

  The sky was a prune colour against the moon, which held new footprints we couldn’t see. Tinier than grass ticks. Tinier than the pores in Sabine’s skin. And now I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was baffled by the realisation that we had almost nothing in common.

  ‘Isn’t it magic that a man’s up there?’ I said.

  She laughed, revealing the underside of her strong, moon-white teeth. ‘Those men are crazy. Maybe they can never come home.’

  ‘I think it’s neat.’ I lifted her hand closest to mine and pointed it at the sky. ‘That’s him, just there.’

  She pulled her hand back. There was something forbidding about Sabine, which I hadn’t noticed until now. She was older than me. I couldn’t tell how much older. I’d seen her in school uniform, which made her seem foreign and yet familiar to me, with its imposing badge that said in French, ‘College of the Immaculate Conception’. But she seemed to hang around home a lot. Her face was not as soft as I’d thought.

  I began to lose my nerve. The rogue gonad was getting an unreasonable hold. I held the key out to her as an offering, to stop her staring at my face in a way that made it hot with embarrassment. But she brushed the key out of my hand and it clattered into the shadows. She laid her lips over my mouth, which was hanging open. In a panic, I puckered like a fish and sucked in my breath.

  ‘Open your mouth, Oliver.’ Her deep voice was bossy, confident. I tried to obey. I relaxed my lips and breathed through my nose. A world that had been waiting opened inside me. We were kissing. I didn’t have to think about doing it anymore. She played her lips like feathers around mine. My lips chased hers. Moon-dust drifted behind my closed eyes in a cloud as light and warm as duck down.

  She pulled away, whimpering. I was about to apologise, but then she started spitting out a story about her brother Jacques. ‘He’s an animal.’ As she wiped her tears, I wondered how a kiss had brought on this string of beefs about her brother. I wanted to go back to kissing. But she was into a riff. I knew how good it was to let things held so tightly fall out, so I listened.

  ‘He calls us donkeys. He tries to make us his servants. When Mama and Baba are out, he beats us. He think he can do because he is their number one son.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Jess was Babette’s favourite. If he did some stupid little thing, like playing a few chords on the violin he’d got from school, she would say, ‘Oh, that’s so hard.’ When it wasn’t.

  ‘Here in Lebanon we say that even if a son really is a monkey, the mother see a beautiful gazelle … Mama thinks Jacques is a king, but when she went away, my small brothers agreed we will teach him that the king can be taken from the throne. We tied him with a rope to the bed. He cried out. My sister slapped his face. I punched him in the stomach and the little boys bited his ankles. He was red with anger. But I said, “If you tell Mama and Baba, you will not want to live.” The moon made sharp shadows on her face. ‘I showed him Abdo’s gun. In this way, we stopped him beating us.’

  Abdo. The savage. ‘Is he really your cousin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you can’t marry him.’

  She seemed puzzled.

  ‘You’re too beautiful for him.’

  She began crying again, which made me hopeful. ‘He is brave. He makes me happy for one reason: he is a leader of the Phalange. You know about this, Oliver?’

  ‘No’.

  ‘We have to fight the Palestinians. First, they kill people in Israel. Next, they will kill us. The Phalange is our army, to protect us.’

  I didn’t want to speak about the Palestinians. I felt sorry for Ringo and Souhar, but I could find no reply for Sabine. I couldn’t be sure what the commandos would do, and I didn’t want to think about it. Whenever I tried to understand what was happening in Lebanon, I felt that the mountains had fallen and buried me.

  But I found it exciting that a gun was not a toy to Sabine. I wished that her courage belonged to me. ‘I can see the man in the moon. Kiss me and I’ll show you where.’

  She ignored the longing that made my voice quaver and kept talking. ‘Many Christians have trouble here, for long time. My father told me that many years ago he saw a truck in the Place des Martyrs, with two bodies of Christian gentlemen. They had scars everywhere on their skin, made with cigarettes. When my father and other Christians saw that, they said, “Good Lord, we will catch these bad men who do this and torture them.”’

  ‘Did they?’

  She didn’t answer. Her cross was swaying in that valley between the peaks of her breasts, which heaved with the anger in her breath. ‘Then the killing did not stop. There was a priest. Some bad Muslim men tied him to four cars by ropes and made the cars go in four different ways.’ Her fingers were on her cross, holding it still.

  ‘Oh, Sabine, that’s horrible. It makes me sad. Please stop.’ I wanted to bring her back to the circle of silver light the moon had drawn around us.

  ‘But I have to speak about it. Hearing those things make me feel fury.’

  ‘Maybe they’re not true.’

  She pushed to her feet. As she tapped her impatient fingers on her thighs and her belly quivered above me, she seemed fabulous, an earthquake of flesh and emotion. ‘You don’t want to listen.’

  I scrambled up until our faces were at the same height. Surely she could feel what I felt; that the frosty moonlight was vibrating and our bodies were being drawn together. ‘Sabine, sorry. I can hardly –’

  ‘I want you to see what happen in Lebanon. I will show you pictures. I will come to your apartment.’ She picked up the key and ran.

  I was left with her absence, which was like those nights when the moon is so new that it is only a sliver and a memory of the full circle. My groin was bursting. I woke a coop of pigeons as I lurched against it. Eyes were on me. Even from the moon. I slid down the wall, settled on to my heels, the wallet with the condom lifting one bum-cheek higher than the other. I groaned with frustration.

  Did she say they pulled a priest apart? I can’t believe it.

  In my room, I turned my record player to full volume and got Jimi to howl for me. ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky. Dlang, dlang, dlang. Ner, ner, ner, ner, ner, ner … nyooowwwww!’

  Jimi played the guitar with his teeth, never scared of the electric charge that could have zapped him. He had cheekbones like ski slopes, he stuck his guitar between his legs like a big dick and twanged it, and the girls screamed. He sacrificed his guitar at Monterey by setting it alight and smashing it to smithereens. He went to magic lands in his head. He had jewels on his shoulders, he became a fuzz of electric wire on stage, dipping and bowing, and the girls at the stage edge put their lustrous hair in their hands and shouted until they sobbed.

  23

  Pigeon Rocks

  By lunchtime the next day, Dad was already flying to Doha instead of the moon. Waiting for his Sydney flight at the airport, Jess was a dwarf beside the huge suitcase Babette had filled with stuffed toy camels to give his friends, along with gold embroidered tablecloths and a purple kaftan for Ryan’s mother. ‘That’s to thank her for putting up with you.’

  Jess winced and Babette ruffled his hair. ‘Awww, I was kidding. For putting you up, silly boy. Don’t get all sensitive on me.’

  Jess shouted us all drinks, pulling a wad of notes that Dad had given him ‘for contingencies’ out of a leather wallet he’d cadged from Walid. But his swagger deserted him when his flight was called. We hunkered down for a farewell wrestle. He got his arms around my waist and clung to me, head down, coughing out a sob. He dropped his arms and turned away, leaving the sensation of his fingers pressed into my back, like skewers into dough.

  I cuffed him across the back of the head and asked the question we had both avoided: ‘Are you going to see Mum?’ It caught in my throat.

  I couldn’t see his face, but his voice was small. ‘Might.’

  His flight was called aga
in and he didn’t look back as Babette pushed him through the exit gates. ‘Scram. Have fun.’ She blew him a kiss and then whispered to me, ‘He’s a card, that one. He’ll be wrestling with the flocking ladies, one day. You could learn from him.’

  I was offended that she didn’t think I was a card. Or that ‘ladies’ would flock to me. But I would love to have learnt how Jess wrangled dosh out of people. Maybe the secret lay in the way he choked me up, there at the airport. You found yourself either laughing or crying with Jess.

  Back in Sydney, I’d tried to use Dad’s sporadic stays to wangle money out of him. But, usually, it was Jess who scored.

  One time, Dad had left me a bundle for ‘living expenses’, which I’d shoved into my old Commonwealth piggy bank. Mum’s peepers had followed me stashing the cash like a dog’s eyes tracking a leftover lamb bone to the fridge. So I hadn’t been surprised to find her skeleton claws shaking the little tin box a couple of days later. ‘I need that money, Oliver. My purse is somewhere around, but it’s vanished for the moment. We’ll get Chinese. Sweet and sour. Your favourite.’

  ‘The money’s gone.’ I’d moved the wad to my pocket, because the last time she’d tricked me into handing over money she hadn’t bought any food.

  Jess had widened his eyes. ‘Maybe we’ve been burgled.’

  She’d sucked in her narrowing face, suspicion in her eyes. ‘My own sons. You’ll do me in. I’m down to my last. No wonder I’m driven to this.’ Her bedroom had light lavender walls. Through the door crack I’d watched her thin back curved over the tourniquet pulled tight in her mouth, the needle at work in her skin, the collapse back onto the bed. I’d closed the door.

  I’d never wanted Jess to see her like that, but he hadn’t needed X-ray vision to know. He’d flourished a pile of banknotes stowed in a sock in his drawer. ‘Dad gave me this.’ He’d also nicked Mum’s purse, which was stuffed with cash. I frowned. He raised his palms. ‘You’ve got to be enterprising to survive. That’s what Dad said.’