Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

Ah, but I was, in my own way. In Beirut that steamy summer, I finally had Babette to myself.

  ‘Beach! I need you to be my chaperone, Oliver. Lifeguard, too. Defend me against sharks.’ Babette meant the men. Now that I was on holidays from school, we were off to the swimming club across the road every day. She clanked around in her pink high heels, which jiggled their puffy ornamental feathers. I high-stepped with loud ‘oh-ahs’ across the hot tar of the Corniche, carting towels, a rubber float and a beach basket stuffed with her books, cigarettes, lighter, suncream, blow-up pillows, nail polish, letters, tissues, keys, magazines, purse, sarong, scarf, lip balm and plastic shoes for walking on barnacles. She carried her hat.

  It was pretty much the same every day – Babette sunbaked and I swam. But one day, after a morning of phone-whispering, she suddenly decided she didn’t need me as shark patrol. ‘You must be sick of hanging around with me. I’ll give you pocket money and you can hop up to Hamra and have fun. Pop into the pinball parlour.’

  ‘Nah. Thanks. Cops shut it. I’d rather swim.’ It was sort of true. The police had raided the Pinball Palais for drugs, shut it and re-opened it when the owner, Habib, had greased their palms.

  Babette heaved a sigh. ‘So I have my own personal enforcer at my side. You don’t have to come. We’re not joined at the hip.’ I laughed and ignored her protest. She needed watching over.

  We joined a drowse of bathers who’d already surrendered to the heat beneath angled umbrellas advertising Almaza beer and Pepsi. We lowered our bodies onto the pitted rocks, where water popped and sucked and dragged seaweed about. I soon lay stranded inside a brain haze, while signals from the world outside washed over me. The throaty beat of Arabic voices bounced over the seawall’s edge, along with occasional rusty squeaks from the turning Luna Park ferris wheel and the screams of misguided saps trusting it to return them to earth. A vendor’s cry of ‘kaak’ tripped me into a waking dream: my teeth crunching into a crust of bread, sesame seeds cascading down my fingers, my tongue pushing into savoury, soft dough and the taste of thyme exploding in my mouth. Realisation. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Babette lay in a coconut-oil haze, honey-pale in her snowy one-piece, a straw hat balanced over the top of her face, too zonked to answer. I admired the pinpoints of perspiration gathering on her chin. There was a pool of moisture in the dip at her throat, and one drop occasionally separated and slid down her chest towards the rise of white cloth that marked her breasts. Her sticky, silvery hair draped across the rock in my direction. Salt crystallised in crumbs on her short, blonde arm hairs. My head lay heavy with bliss on my hands.

  Babette kept lifting her eyes to the club’s rusty clock hanging over the pool. The eyes of the men arranged around the rocks rose with her as she stood. I gave them my dirtiest look, but they were too busy watching Babette to notice. I handed her a sarong to cover herself up. ‘You’re getting burnt.’

  She held a hand over her brows. ‘I thought I saw Sabine in the pool.’

  I checked every dark head, including those that bobbed like seals below the water. I couldn’t see Sabine.

  Babette waved a bundle of banknotes. ‘Anyway, you’re hungry. Go and get something nice. I’m going out to explore Pigeon Rocks.’

  I stood, torn, as she picked up our Li-Lo float and shuffled down to the water. She carried my breath with her. I’d inflated the float with the air from my own lungs an hour before. She juggled it over the rocks to the sea, curling and gripping with her toes, whose tips she had painted coral pink.

  Within a few minutes she was a distant figure in the bay that opened out all the way to Cyprus. A bunch of men hooning on a speedboat whistled and vibrated their tongues as she lay, pale, on the cushion of my breath, surrounded by bright, lush blue-and-silver points of sunlight. Her creamy legs moved to a beat, her long, pearly hands dipping and reappearing like half-closed fans as she propelled the Li-Lo purposefully towards the chalky rocks.

  I walked around the pool, in case Sabine actually was there. My plan was to shout her an ice-cream. I kept hoping, but I didn’t believe Babette. At the same time, I didn’t care to think that she wanted to get rid of me. I loved our daily routine of swimming and sunbathing together.

  When I looked back out to sea, Babette had travelled alarmingly fast towards Pigeon Rocks, which reared cream and salmon-pink out of the marine blue. Had I poured enough of my breath into the mattress? What if it sprung a pinpoint hole, sighing out air? ‘Tsssssssss …’ The sound, real or imaginary, intensified in my head.

  Babette seemed sure, but she could be reckless.

  ‘Your stepmother’s a complex creature. I don’t try to understand her,’ Dad had once remarked after she’d thrown a crystal ashtray at his head.

  I watched Babette, who had become a speck, disappear behind a rock. An image entered my mind, of Babette struggling and sinking silently into the sea. Bubbles swirled as she descended. A crocodile clutched her waist between his jaws to take her down and to turn her over and over in a death roll. It thrashed her body against the sea floor, the dance of its tail starting an underwater whirlpool that roiled to the surface in a gush.

  Foam from waves slapping on concrete fell onto my face.

  No crocs in the Med, stoopid.

  A real shark, then, an Australian great white that had followed a ship through the Suez Canal, feeding on the gourmet scraps of fat passengers in tuxedos. I ran to the water’s edge and slipped on green slime, ducked below the waves and rose, choking. I was never a smooth swimmer, despite all my hours in the surf. My hands slapped the water as I sprinted with mechanical arms through the rainbow slick whorls left by the speedboat. I rounded the first rock. She wasn’t there. I called her name. There was only an echo.

  My stroke grew jagged. I stopped at the second rock. From the shore, it appeared to be a majestic castle with a welcoming centre arch. Up close, it was a chunk of wrinkled chalk; a cave framed by an old man’s broken smile, his lower lip torn away by water.

  Voices rose and fell as the waves surged in and out of the cave. At first they were natural echoes of water slopped on rock. Then I knew they were human. Babette and who?

  ‘Babette.’ I was treading water. Silence. I dog-paddled under the arch, into shadow, thought I saw the head of a sea creature – a walrus, maybe – dive down. Babette lay in the gloom on her plump mattress, hair and one hand trailing lazily in the water, some current turning her slowly around, as if she were a jewel in a shop window. Her eyes were hidden from me. Above my zig-zag panting, a drip-drip plopped from the chalky cave roof. The scent of orange peel and hot skin had evaporated. Here, there was a kelp saltiness. The waves slapped and I shivered with goose-bumps in the shadows. Pigeons cooed. I rested my elbows on a seaweedy soft ledge.

  ‘Was there someone else here?’ I asked.

  She guffawed. ‘You’ve been smoking the funny stuff.’

  ‘I heard a man’s voice.’

  ‘A man? I came here to get away from them.’

  ‘I thought you might sink.’

  ‘Wish I could … Don’t look so alarmed, Oliver. I just want to be here for a little while … All this peace sitting just across the road from our apartment.’

  I watched, wishing that she could explain about Phillip and LL and P, that I could be older and not trapped in her idea that I was a child.

  ‘Who –’

  She cut me off. ‘You can’t sink in the Mediterranean. Too much salt. Let me be.’ Then she paddled out and away, across the dimpled skin of the sea. I searched again for Sabine and spotted a red Audi wheeling out of the car park.

  The apartment was empty. Babette and Walid had escaped me.

  Over the next few weeks, Babette spent the deep night whispering on the phone, and by day she came and went with secretive eyes.

  Diary,

  I am lying on my bed, glowing and guilty, full of feelings I haven’t experienced since London. Walid took me to Byblos.

  He knew Lachlan was away. Phew! Chutzpah. Walid didn’t say what afflic
tion he had, but he’s pale. It makes him seem distant and suffering. His eyes are like soft, dark cloth. I feel joined by something sad in him.

  Lachlan left for his latest overnighter without a goodbye. I have not yet discovered the source of my latest sin, except he says I let Oliver run wild in Beirut. When we fight, it’s nearly always about Oliver.

  Byblos is a collection of stones that were once buildings. Walid bargained in English with the guides. ‘I’m not trying to buy the ruddy site. I just want to hire you for a couple of hours.’

  He chose the rather earnest Milad, who limped, bent over as if his eyes had been fixed on the soil of Byblos for its entire 7000-year existence. Milad told me the stories of the seventeen successive civilisations, almost sending me to sleep with his singsong voice.

  This I remember: it was a centre of trade for gold, copper, spices and incense, and in the Bronze Age, Semitic people cut the cedar trees in forests nearby. The Phoenician civilisation that lived here gave the world the alphabet. Papyrus was traded out of Byblos. The Word of God was written on papyrus. And so, Byblos gave the Bible its name.

  ‘And now it is a city of weeds with the occasional beautiful flower. A lesson for Lebanon,’ Walid said.

  Walid was my shadow; where I turned, he turned. Occasionally, the back of his hand touched mine, and I wanted to twist my palm around and put it in his. But, I settled for decorum. Being alone with another man not my husband is frowned on in Lebanon.

  In the Crusader Castle, we pretended to be grandees in the battlements gazing across the Med. But ancient grooves are a great trap for high heels, so when I had complained enough, Milad took us down a stone-walled alleyway and had us sit on small stools in a dim room, where we drank bitter coffee.

  Milad reached into a hole in the wall and gave me a jar of sweet flowers, faintly browned at the petals’ edges.

  ‘For sweet love,’ he said. I couldn’t look at Walid for embarrassment.

  As we watched a fisherman crouched on the wet ground, sewing his net, Walid said he knew I had some secret. He could see my unhappiness. If I wanted, I could tell him.

  I focused on the fat wooden boats that rocked in the beautiful blue cove behind him, clanking their chains. A fisherman had his hands in a writhing net. A seahorse was caught in it. I watched him untangle it. He handed the seahorse to me. It felt delicate and bony, but I hated its fishy, briny smell. I threw it into the water. Walid had too many damn questions in his eyes.

  I said, ‘Some things shouldn’t come to the surface.’

  We ate in the port’s famous fish restaurant. Downed two bottles of Ksara white wine, which Walid said would dissolve any fish bones. God knows how he got the Audi back to Beirut. When he helped me out of the car, he whispered into my ear, ‘We were there, surrounded by all that history … My history … but the most important thing I found in Byblos today was you.’

  What am I going to do with that?

  I said to her diary, ‘You’re going to stop it right there.’

  But it was Dad who stopped it. He got home late, and down the hallway I could hear my name jumping out of their shouts, which I turned into distant radio static by pulling my pillow over my head. I felt like I was to blame.

  By the time I woke at noon, Dad had driven Babette to the airport in the Caddie.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Off to Paris to buy some item of clothing made with a skinned animal,’ Dad said as he headed out the door to the Mayflower with dead eyes.

  24

  The Gulch

  The apartment echoed with the lonely sound of no-one but me. Before Dad had flown out the next day, he’d prodded his finger at a headline in The Daily Star:

  AUSTRALIAN ARRESTED OVER AL AQSA MOSQUE FIRE

  ‘Better plan a day in, matey. Embassy’s warned us to be careful. So, eat out of the curfew cupboard. Don’t tempt fate by thinking you’re immune as an Aussie. This headline says there could be riots. There could be shooting. So for once, pull your sorry head in and stay here.’

  All I could find were some rusty cans of Egyptian foul – beans drowned in glug. I lay on my bed, wallowing in boredom. The radio news said the Australian had burnt one of the most revered sites in all Islam.

  By the middle of the day the heat was so overbearing that the traffic had evaporated. The rich people of Beirut had motored to their mountain villages, and the empty Corniche baked under a crust of sea salt, oil slick and dried debris from long ago when it last rained. I re-read Jess’s postcard from the Kosciusko snowfields.

  Dear Oliver,

  It’s freeeeeeezing here in this lodge made of logs. Ooh, I feel like starting a little fire to stay warm. Ouch. Ouch. Get the hose.

  Ha ha. Ryan’s family skis every year. Skiing’s a gas, but by the time I see you my nose might have fallen off. Hope you’re at the beach!

  Yours sincerly,

  Jess XOX

  I wanted to write back, ‘Break a leg.’ How come he could just walk into any family and join it, while I rotted here? I thought of ignoring Dad and heading for the surf on Beirut’s south side, but I didn’t want to be alone in the waves, no-one to admire my moves, no-one to sizzle beside on the sand.

  I burnt a pinhead of hash in a pipe I’d scrounged from the pinball parlour and sucked the genie smoke in deep, making a sound like the wind. The hash plant tendrils crept over my brain and then, tah-dah, the sunlight outside sharpened and danced over the quarry, proclaiming the brilliance of life.

  ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.’

  I was soaring beyond Earth when Dom rang the bell, pretending he was looking for Jess, when for sure he knew my brother was still in Australia. Dom said his mother wanted him to ask about Babette.

  ‘Has she left your dad?’

  I rubbed my nose and tried to think of a joke. Babette never wanted the expat wives to know her business, but he could tell from how hard I blinked my eyes that it was true.

  ‘Sorry, man, about the, you know, rumble when you moseyed into our li’l school. Just an initiation. A bad tradition.’

  He held out a joint with an awkward laugh. ‘Peace offering.’

  He was okay without his brother Brendan around. He was one of those kids who already looked grown up at fifteen. He wore a headband woven with peace signs. He had a square jaw and a five o’clock shadow, but Jess said he sucked his thumb in his sleep.

  We toked on a doobie of Lebanese gold and I laid a zoned-out rave on him. ‘They just don’t get that if the root of minus one is imaginary, the number one itself can’t exist. The whole … edifice … of maths collapses. It’s a building made by the mind, and it just crumbles, man.’

  ‘We say “math”.’

  ‘Math. And not just maths, but existence itself, everything around us. We can’t believe any of it, and we have to go around pretending that it’s all real.’

  ‘Edifice, whoa. I’ll have to look that up, man.’

  Suddenly, it was the funniest word we’d ever heard. We bent over double. When we were both spent and couldn’t set each other off anymore, Dom leant back.

  He sighed. ‘I’m faded.’ He had long legs, like a foal’s, and I could no longer see the bully in him. He could be mean, but not like Brendan. ‘Beirut’s so boring. Back in Mariposa, we could go fishin’ down the creek, push spiders back into their holes. Hey, once we climbed the fence into the girls’ school. Cool bananas.’

  ‘Didja get busted?’

  ‘Yeah, they sprung us. But my old man sweet-talked the principal. Got me out of it.’

  I was going to tell Dom about putting a gecko on purple cloth and watching it try to change colour, until the jive about the girls. That trumped the gecko.

  ‘Nothin’ to do here but watch the old man get wasted. Hey, he puked the other day, right into a flower pot,’ Dom said.

  I groaned. ‘Dodging car bombs. That’s what we schoolkids of Beirut do.’

  ‘Hey, you’re the pinball king.’

  I tried not to look too happy he’d noticed.
‘I filched a whole day of free games the other day. Piastres got stuck in the slot. Habib didn’t find out till I’d scored about twenty goes. Kicked me out. Old prick.’

  ‘Hey, Oliver, is that your old man’s booze on the bar?’

  My skin prickled. ‘Well, what do you reckon?’

  ‘C’mon, let’s have some Jack Daniel’s.’

  I caught my breath. The one thing Dad knew in this apartment better than anything was the amount of booze left, down to the drop. But I wanted Dom to be my friend.

  ‘C’mon, don’t be a pussy.’ Dom rubbed his hip suede boots together. I wanted to be in those boots, but the thought of Dad lifting his bottle towards the light and yelling, ‘Oliver!’ dried out my tongue. My mind scrambled through the doobie haze for a thought that had grown in shape and then dissolved. It came back.

  Even if Babette comes home, she never remembers how much she’s drunk.

  I whacked Dom’s arm in excitement. ‘We can drink the gin.’

  ‘Nah, c’mon, let’s go the Jack.’ Dom grabbed one of Dad’s glasses, tipped whiskey in, then gulped, fixing a defiant eye on me. I almost felt sympathy for the adults who dealt with him. My stomach dropped. I felt the cut of Dad’s belt buckle and grew jittery. The dope made every imagining too sharp, too real. I made my brain lurch for an answer.

  The car keys were nestled in a pearl shell box in the apartment entranceway. The photos on the hallstand were arranged in a curve. This tidy ordering of things spoke of Dad’s power and presence, despite his absence, in a way that Dom could never understand.

  ‘You know my dad has a Caddie.’ It might be a way to coax Dom away from the whiskey. ‘Let’s go and sit in it. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Hah.’ Dom grabbed the whiskey bottle. For a moment I wanted to cry. Our sneakers slapped on the stairs; I prickled with the sensation of approaching doom. I needed courage to face it, so I swiped the bottle from him and, cowed by the enthusiasm in his eyes, swilled.

  He swaggered. ‘First dibs at driving.’