Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  I heard my father’s voice in my own, which, luckily, didn’t come out shaky. ‘No, Dom. We are not driving the car.’

  ‘I wanna hear the purr of those groovy wheels.’

  I opened the driver-side door, planning to force him into the passenger seat. Dom pushed past me and jumped behind the wheel. He dropped the bottle. Whiskey glugged onto the carpet below the pedals. I knew the whiskey was obeying gravity, a law of nature, but I couldn’t believe that this law had tipped so firmly against me. The injustice of the world pressed in on me. I felt sick. Or was it the Jack? When I’d swigged from the bottle, I hadn’t even wiped away Dom’s germs for fear of seeming a sissy.

  Dom shoved the key in the ignition. He turned it fast, to get ahead of my swiping hand. The Caddie’s engine protested with a strangled-chook shriek.

  ‘Oops. Forgot the clutch.’

  A whining began in my head. ‘Dom, you can’t drive Dad’s car. I’ll be slaughtered.’

  ‘The Mexican bandits are closing in. We’ve got to get away.’ He’d moved on from the dusty Beirut street and was in some movie set in his head. I was still standing at the open car door, hoping he’d smile, shrug and hop out.

  ‘Don’t, Dom. They’ll ground me for life.’

  Dom’s eyeballs were wild. ‘They’re coming up the gulch. I’ll cut you if you don’t let me have a go. It’ll be fun. God’s honour. Here – make love, not war.’ He wrestled his peace headband off and handed it to me. My stupid soul sang for a moment.

  Dom really does want to be my mate. I’ve won him.

  I lifted my hand away from the door to pull the headband on. Dom slammed the door shut and held it so I couldn’t open it.

  ‘Go on. Get in. We’ll head up the hill. I’ll bring it right back here. They’ll never know.’ He was shouting behind the glass. I ran around and leapt into the passenger side, hoping to find a way to stop him taking off. He was in a gulch. I was cowering under the deep shadow of a mountain – my father’s fury – with my stomach turning to acid.

  Dom roughhoused the gearstick into first and hauled on the steering wheel. The car hopped up the hill, then stalled and began to roll back. He pulled on the gearstick and started again. I calmed a little, thinking he couldn’t get far because he had no idea how to drive, but the car leapt away, a horse out of racing stalls, then wove slowly up the hill, as Dom braced. ‘I’m seeing red, man. I’m seeing red.’

  My pulse sped as we hit a gold Audi, then swerved and thumped into a grey Merc, and back again to bash a blue Volkswagen. My fingers gripped the seat, which smelt of Babette’s perfume and Dunhills. My body twisted with each shudder of Caddie hitting metal, and for a moment, a madness of joy made my face hot with blood.

  The car stalled at the hilltop. Dom pulled on the handbrake. ‘Sorry, man’. He made a peace sign, jumped out, sprinted over the verge of the paddock and disappeared. All warmth drained from my cheeks and jaw. No Mexicans arrived. The gulch returned to Beirut. A faint yelling, from behind, grew louder. It had been in my ears for some time. In the side mirror, I saw the source of the commotion. Joseph the concierge was running up the street towards me. I leaned over the gearstick and emptied brown liquid from my mouth onto the car floor where Dom had spilt the Jack.

  25

  Pop

  Dad was waiting the following afternoon when I got back from Habib’s Pinball Palais. He was in his armchair, which he’d pulled up to face the front door so he couldn’t miss me. On the round copper table beside him, his belt lay coiled around its buckle.

  I thought I could take him on this time. He wasn’t wide. His shoulders were bony. His lower eyelids hung low, like a bloodhound’s, over his booze-reddened eyes.

  ‘Stole my whiskey. Thieved my vehicle.’ It was more a weary whine than an accusation.

  ‘Dom took the car.’ Dad had a glass of clear liquid at his elbow. Poured right up to the lady’s skirt painted on the glass. I hoped it was water.

  ‘Dom. Dom. Always blaming Dom. He made you truant from school, too.’

  ‘No, that was his brother, Brendan. He bashed me … If you knew –’

  ‘There’s this, too.’ He handed me a postcard Grandad had sent me, via Dad’s airport postbox. On the front there was a photo of ladies in old-fashioned costumes holding their forefingers up to cheek dimples. The caption said: Bathing Beauties on Manly Beach.

  Oliver Oil,

  I write to reassure you that Australia survives without your presence. Knowing that you will never come home to fight, America must rely on others to support its troops in Vietnam. My lemon tree survives despite my attempts to kill it. Those mates of yours got into trouble for playing with explosives. The police came to see you, but I said you’d gone to Lebanon to terrorise the natives. I haven’t heard from your mother, but, like you, she always knew how to look after herself when she was little. So I’m sure she’s okay. That’s all the news from here. Write.

  Grandad

  ‘What’s this about playing with explosives?’

  ‘Not me. Boys who lived at Wadi Wadi, near Grandad’s …’

  Dad made slow movements towards me, teeth clenched. His hair was wet and he’d knotted his sarong below his bare navel. When I lowered my eyes, it was to the sight of his red belly hairs crawling over batik flowers.

  In one swift movement, he raised the belt buckle up. I grabbed the camel leather pouffe at his feet and held it as a shield in front of my face, waiting for the belt’s metal hinge to land, thwack, on my fingers or arms. We stood like that, eyeballing each other for the length of a muezzin’s prayer, or maybe for a whole year.

  Then Dad dropped back with a sigh into his chair. ‘Siddown.’

  The belt buckle clanked onto the metal tabletop. I lowered the pouffe and sat on it, watching him in case he reared up again in anger. But he appeared deflated. His eyes turned to the floor, his back rounded. The only sound left in the room was his smokers’ wheeze.

  ‘You just reminded me of someone. Myself, when I was seventeen. Came home from school in Sydney. The country around Bogong was in drought. Not the big dry that ruined your mother’s father. An earlier one. There’ve been a few. My father, your Pop, was in a paddock, farming dust till sunset. I sat in his big carver dining chair, the one my mother called The Untouchable. I had my feet up on the table, smoking a cigar, listening to Mum bustling over the stove, ignoring her complaints about the stink … Next thing, your grandfather, Pop, is on top of me, yelling, “Home to suck us dry. You think we’re your staff?”’

  Dad coughed. ‘I threw the cigar at him. His fist came at me. I hefted The Untouchable over his head. It seemed shockingly light. I had no intention of hitting him, but I fumbled. The chair fell. And fell and fell, for a very long time. It was the same sense of time warping as when a plane goes into a spin. The chair hit your Pop’s face.’ Dad touched his own cheekbone. A burst blood vessel hung in the white of one eye, like a jellied red teardrop.

  I remembered how hard it was to make Dom do what I wanted and saw that that’s how it was for Dad with me. But there was something different here that made me feel as if the earth was heaving in waves under my feet. He’d never spoken to me like this, without the harangue.

  Dad was threading and rethreading his fingers in his lap. ‘You know Pop’s eyes. Wary farmers’ eyes. They look sideways into your face, never right at you. But after I’d hit him, he looked straight at me. The next few seconds went on forever. They marched over the horizon and back before Pop bent over, eyes squeezed tight. He was hurting something terrible.’

  Dad blinked slowly, and I could see he was back there, in another time. ‘Pop came up with a roar, arms up to tackle me. I took off. He was capable of doing something really stupid, he was so gutted by drought. There’d already been a night when I’d woken with his gun butt on my forehead …’

  Dad’s wheeze and the creak of the camel pouffe under my bum as I shifted position were the only sounds now. He was giving me something I wasn’t sure how to take.

 
We don’t talk like this in my family, about how stuff hurts.

  ‘I bolted. It was just on twilight. The paddocks were a beautiful caramel colour, soft under my soles. Pop was after me, shouting, but he couldn’t catch me on foot. I jumped gate after gate. Pop hopped in the ute. The bastard engine kicked over first time. I took to the creek, all lined with lantana. The thorns scratched my skin to ribbons. Well, the ute bogged in the dust. Your grandfather was bloody ropable. He swore out of the bottom of his lungs to the whole sky. I followed the dry creek bed, jumping from stone to stone. I was heaving, crying, terrified. But I got away.’

  Dad had become breathless and his eyes were like the farmers’. They slid onto mine, and in them I saw the ghost of the bawling kid. Then they slid away. ‘That was the last time Pop and I spoke, until your mother and I had you and he decided it was worth ditching the grudge to see his grandson occasionally.’

  I didn’t remember Pop’s eyes. He’d died when I was six. Dad was overseas and none of us went to his funeral.

  I wanted to put my hand on my father, but I couldn’t find any part of his bony body where it would seem right. His voice had gone all husky. ‘I went to a neighbour’s and phoned my mother. She got me on a plane to London. Boarding school.’

  He sighed and gave a wan smile. ‘That’s how I met Walid. The only school that would take me on at such short notice was a crammer whose job was to get students, mostly Arabs, through their A-levels.’

  Dad upended his gin into his mouth. The skin of his upstretched throat seemed as thin as tissue. His eyes were small plugs in a swirl of wrinkles. He was all worn out from telling this story. The static in the air between us died. ‘I’m sorry for having tried to hit you into submission, Oliver. I should know that it doesn’t work.’

  I’d never received such an apology, from anyone. I didn’t know whether to trust it, but I wanted to say something, even though my tongue twisted with the jangle in my head.

  ‘Walid’s not your friend, Dad.’ My heart was thumping. Dad’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Do you know who LL is?’

  ‘Nope. Put me out of my misery.’ He pouted in disgust.

  ‘Phillip?’

  ‘One of your mice?’ He kicked his toe towards a mouse hole.

  ‘Did Babette tell you about P?’

  ‘What’s this game of riddles, Oliver?’ His voice had become hard again.

  ‘I’m trying to help you make things better with Babette.’

  He got up and looked down at me, and now there was no tissue-paper throat to see. Just gun-barrel eyes. ‘Don’t interfere in my marriage. Babette’s sick of it. You will never know what goes on between a husband and wife.’

  I felt the air go out of me. I dropped my head. ‘Is she coming back?’

  His voice cracked. ‘I truly hope so. If she doesn’t, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.’ He looked through the window, but there were no pigeons to follow. Just empty sky.

  We both said nothing for a long time, looking away from each other, feeling the hurt together. But that didn’t stop him declaring hostilities.

  ‘You’re bloody well grounded. Be thankful that’s all the punishment you get, so far.’

  For a moment I wished that we could speak. Really speak. But that idea left the room with him. I gave his back the finger. He was unlikely to hit me again, so if it was to be war between us, I could do what I liked from now on.

  Dom was not so lucky. His parents sent him home to the Yoo Ess of Ay. His father said that the best thing that could happen to him was to give it a few years and then he would be drafted to fight in Vietnam.

  26

  Butterfly Wings

  Now that Babette had gone, Dad let the part of himself rip that he didn’t show her. At three in the morning he appeared through the mushrabiya, his silhouette crazing. He was shimmying over the marble in a kaftan, tied to corkscrew headphone wire, being Mick Jagger. He bowed from the waist after every song, sucking in the adulation from the specks in the marble floor.

  It was left to me to find out who Babette really was. When he’d asked why she was always ‘scribbling away’ at her diaries, she’d said, ‘I can’t remember anything unless I write it down. I once lost a whole year.’ But he didn’t realise that if he read them he might learn how to get her back. And how to keep her.

  When he was away flying, I riffled through 1965.

  Left Phillip and our small palace of a flat. I feel ashamed. The other day I had to sprint up the stairs, chased by the panting media pack. Despite my having no more to do with LL, they’re still after me. Some yelled that they’d pay for my story.

  ‘Come on, Babette, let it hang out.’

  Phillip’s shown no sympathy: ‘You made your choices, love.’ I told him he’d used me all along as lens fodder.

  His reply: ‘I haven’t used you half as much as LL has.’

  Maybe that’s true. But what hurts most is the hollowness, where once I felt the brush of P’s butterfly wings.

  I strained to decode those words, ‘the brush of butterfly wings’. All I could think of was the beat of wooden oars, like swan’s wings, when she’d lounged in a rowboat with those men.

  The next time Dad flew in from the Yoo Kay, he was all a-froth about Leila Khaled. She was a Palestinian commando who’d hijacked a flight from Rome with an American airline.

  ‘Storms into the cockpit, pin pulled out of a grenade, and tells the captain that she’s now a human bomb. She and her boyfriend say they’re from some loopy Che Guevara Palestinian outfit. They order the captain to fly over Israel. The Israeli fighter jets buzz them, but can’t do a damn thing. Captain informs them they’ll be out of fuel soon and asks where they plan to land. “Damascus,” they say. Spur of the moment.’

  The plane was one of Dad’s precious 707s. He mimicked a female voice: ‘“Please get out. There’s a bomb on the plane.”’ He tossed his hands up. ‘Everyone evacuates and Leila and her mate blow up the cockpit. Airplane loses its nose.’

  Dad went into mourning for the nose. He thought of the plane as his. ‘I always knew I could die when some turkey blew up an airplane under my command. But I never thought the turkey could be a woman.’

  Hamra, the radio, the streets, buzzed with her name, which popped out of Arabic sentences I couldn’t understand. ‘Blah blah. Leila Khaled. Blah blah.’

  In the London newspapers that Dad brought home, moody photos showed her with a keffiyeh in the Palestinian colours – green, red, black and white – wrapped around her shoulders, holding a gun barrel like it was a posy of flowers. She said that she’d got the plane to fly over Israel because it was the only way she could see her hometown, Haifa. She said she was prepared to die to get her homeland back.

  I had a sneaking appreciation for her foxiness. But I also began to secretly admire Dad’s guts, too. He soared into those dangerous skies, not knowing when the fedayeen might strike. And they were multiplying like my mice.

  We were still at war with each other, but now that I’d seen the crazing in Dad’s hard surface, I pitied him in a new way. I’d never thought of my parents as people whose troubles weighed them down as much as mine did. I’d always thought they had solutions at their fingertips. Dad had been absent and impossible to know. Mum was so soft she squeezed away from me through that slit in the universe as easily as a squishy octopus slid through a crack in a rock.

  I phoned the sanatorium in Bondi. The nasty head nurse told me that Mum had left.

  ‘I can’t help you find her, but she’ll be back.’ She sounded kinder than before. Or maybe everything else around me felt more savage.

  27

  Bleeding

  Babette came home the day that people ran into the streets, their palms upturned to catch the first autumn raindrops. On the Corniche, cars shied away from pedestrians like ponies. The air had been dry all summer, the sun a hot nag. Now the gutter ran red with quarry water, until rubbish dammed it up, fanning a torrent acro
ss our laneway, which afterward steamed with rotted garbage stink.

  After school, I found Babette lying in bed, draped in a mauve gown, surrounded by crumpled tissues and ash. She shaded her face with her hand. ‘Don’t look. I’m a disaster area. I’ve flown from New York with a ghastly cold, and now I’ve got jet lag. Then Beirut turns on the waterworks.’

  I sat on the bed and kissed her hand. ‘Thank you for coming back.’

  ‘Oh, Oliver. Your voice is all even and deep. We’re losing our little boy. That’s good, because I will need an escort. I’ve vowed that this time, I’m going to make Lebanon my country. I missed it. I’m going to see every bit of it.’

  ‘I missed you.’

  She sneezed. ‘Big cities are so impersonal. You can’t be much more than a small blip. Lebanon is so much more human.’

  ‘And m’lady is waited on hand and foot.’ Dad was beside her, swizzling a gin and tonic. He inclined his head. ‘Scamper. Babette and I have a lot to talk about.’

  I hung around, waiting for her to come out, but soon realised their talk was without words. He was a blues guitar. She was a piping flute. Then there were grunts and Babette sang strange notes – half pain, half ecstasy. The mice in their holes were doing the same thing, but they were quieter about it.

  Jess came home. He was taller, with long hair and mirrored sunglasses glued to his tanned mug. He’d bought a miniature version of the Apollo moon mission spaceship, in pieces in a kit. Dad was in heaven, helping him put it together. He hadn’t tried to find Mum, but Jess and I were part of a family again, four-square against the world.

  School life was rockier. I hadn’t been sure whether Mr Stickler would continue to be my friend this semester. He was, at first. He was very complimentary when I brandished the genetic charts, which demonstrated, through ticks and crosses, that the gene for brown fur was dominant. He didn’t know I’d copied them from a borrowed library book so that they looked the way they should, minus the mouse orgy.