Oliver of the Levant

by Debra Jopson

  After she’d hung up, Babette came in with that same grim face she’d worn when Sabine took her perfumes. Facing her was like having vertigo, hanging over a cliff and deciding to jump, rather than waiting to fall. If I jumped – if I told her everything – I wouldn’t have to endure the hideous waiting for her and Dad to find out. But I didn’t break. I was Al Orentz, who held his secrets fast.

  I stood over Jess and tried to stop him, but the dirty little snitch didn’t hold back – except that he was unable to say how I’d got the bomb. Babette wilted like a plant without water and her black make-up settled into the thin grooves below her lids. ‘Who’s Ringo?’

  I shrugged, afraid Souhar would overhear. But she was out of earshot, attacking life with polish and a cloth. ‘A mate.’

  Babette glowered. ‘I don’t know what to do with you. Just stay here until your father wakes up. He’s put in a lot of flying hours over the past few days.’

  Guzzling hours, too. ‘Where was he?’

  ‘The Gulf.’

  Dad was usually in a good mood when he came back from there. He’d once told me there was ‘a little stew, poppet of a thing’ who was always on his roster to the Emirates. I chilled out with top-volume Jimi Hendrix in my headphones, ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, the bit where the guitar mangles the American anthem and warps it into bombs falling and crashing into Vietnam. Then ‘Voodoo Child’. ‘I’m a voooooooooodoooooooo chile. Oh, yeah, I’m a voodoo chile.’

  Maybe everything’s going to be all right. Ringo home safe. Dad pissed off for a few days. All back to normal. I’ll take Babette up to Hamra and shout her a hair-of-the-dog G&T.

  My hopes rose further when Dad yelled, ‘Back from the hunt. Come and wrap your chops around the world’s best prawns, fresh from the seas of Persia and Araby.’

  I had to have one more track of Jimi. The star-spangled bomb – again. Without headphones.

  My mistake. Babette, or Jess, got to him. I didn’t hear the door opening and Dad looming. He came at me, a red-knuckled swing bowler, his fist folded over a belt. The buckle slammed down on the top of my right hand, poised over the needle on the vinyl, which I had for an inestimable number of times lifted to replay the bomb sequence. When the buckle hit, the needle scratched a line across the black grooves. The record squealed and spattered into static. The buckle gouged into my hand. I pulled my bloodied fist into my chest and cradled it, yelling through spit, ‘Fuck off, you fucking fatherless father. Sharamoota.’

  I sucked the warm, meaty drip of my own blood. Then Babette was there, an angel in marmalade fur, yowling. She grabbed Dad from behind. He dropped the belt and punched the wall, smashing his knuckles. Two of us now, sucking our hands, tasting raw steak.

  ‘You could’ve killed your own brother.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s all you care about. Not me. You just want to get rid of me.’

  ‘I’d love to kill you before the Phalangists do, but you have to get out now. That’s the end of Beirut for you. You’re going home.’

  ‘What home? I never had a home. This is home,’ I found myself saying, bloody spit hanging from my mouth.

  Babette picked up the belt and spirited it away.

  ‘Not anymore, nincompoop. Throw your stuff in a suitcase. Get your passport.’

  Dad stormed into the living room, a shadow puppet through the mushrabiya, his shaky fingers in the phone dial, working his contacts to get me out of Beirut. I ran in to stop him. We both dripped blood onto the marble.

  ‘You’re kicking me out for nothing,’ I yelled. ‘It was a gag.’

  ‘Oliver, you’re a clueless clot. Abdo could go after you. If he gets wind of it, he’ll roast you on a skewer. The whole bloody village will want your head. That was their land you blew up with your imaginary friend, Dingo, Bingo …’

  I wasn’t worried about the villagers, who’d rushed about like panicked goats then rubber-necked at the fire. But I would have liked to walk in the cold ashes of that forest to make sure our bomb didn’t kill any living thing; neither squirrel, lizard nor bird.

  I never wanted to hurt anyone.

  ‘What about Jess?’

  ‘You’re both going home, but you’re the emergency case. You’ll be taking the first flight I can get. Then it’s off to boarding school – they’ll straighten you out good and proper.’

  He’s not getting me into any prison for straightening out, as if I’m some kind of unravelled spring.

  I barrelled back to my room and started chucking things in a bag, letting anger at Dad smother every other thought. Then I sat with my head flopped between my knees, hearing Babette’s agitated voice on the phone to someone in the next room. A long time after she’d hung up, I left my room to find her.

  Babette lay on her cheese longue, pretending to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  I stood a few metres from her, hoping we could talk before Dad appeared. There was something about the set of her chin, angled away from me, that told me she was unapproachable. I wished I could lie against the rise and fall of her heaving breath, my cheek crushed into the shiny silver beads on her ginger jumper. Her legs were stretched over the gold cushions Souhar had plumped up. She’d painted over the dark crumples under her eyes and was Cleopatra again. I brimmed with yearning and desperation. ‘Babette, please. Don’t let Dad send me away.’

  She shook her head and turned a page. ‘I can’t handle this, Oliver. It’s all too heavy.’

  Dad stormed in. ‘Leave Babette alone. She’s already saving your skin.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘She’s found somewhere for you to stay in London, until we can get you onto a plane back home.’

  ‘My friend Phillip will pick you up at Heathrow.’ Babette’s coolness enraged me.

  She’s only ever pretended to care about me.

  ‘Phillip? Your slave?’

  Babette blinked hard.

  Dad turned to her. ‘Oh, Phillip’s your vassal, is he?’

  Babette had a small smile in her eyes. ‘Wish I did have one, but so far, no luck in this life.’

  ‘Dad, he writes love letters to her. They get all lovey-dovey on the phone. She calls him “sweetie-pie”.’

  ‘Criminal!’ Dad wagged his finger at me. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Yes. She’s had a baby with Phillip.’ Babette dropped the book and sat up straight. I went right in for the kill. ‘Who’s P?’

  ‘You despicable sneak.’ She lifted her cat’s claws to her face. I was glad that I’d erased her smile. I fetched the blue cuff from her jewellery box. Flourished it at her. The label read: Baby P.

  ‘Who’s this belong to?’ I asked.

  She sprang up to grab it, cat leaping to a toy, dangled to tease. ‘How did you get that? Still spying, you interfering little beast, even after you’ve been caught out.’

  I threw the cuff at her. ‘Have it then.’

  ‘Hey. Hey. Order. Order,’ Dad yelled.

  I twirled to face him. ‘She’s got a kid, Dad. In London.’ His face boiled crimson. Babette thunked back down onto the cheese longue, her arm across her stomach, hair drooping across her face.

  ‘The baby was taken away from me.’

  It was a simple statement. My great, exploding world fell back to small things – Babette’s downturned eyes with lakes of tears in them and the tremor in Dad’s fingers as he crushed his cigarette in an ashtray. The shrivelling black slug of my anger making my tongue heavy.

  I should never have thought Babette was any different to all the adults whose worlds revolved around themselves.

  As the silence extended, Babette fingering the empty blue cuff like worry beads, I began to regret my eruption. She stayed slumped over, heavy with desolation.

  ‘Babette …’ I tried to stumble towards an apology, but Dad interrupted, his voice cracking.

  ‘Shut your trap. None of this is your business.’ His eyes were opaque. I wanted Babette to say something, but the only thing that spoke was her trembling lip. Dad folded his cigarette butt into an
ashtray and shoved me into the hallway. ‘That’s enough of this nonsense. We’re going now.’ Jess emerged, ashen-faced. I blanked him because I wasn’t sure if he’d blabbed to Dad.

  I stood at the door. Low enough to beg. ‘Babette. Please. If I have to go, come with me. Please. I don’t want to be alone.’

  But the room where she lay remained still and quiet as a baby’s sleeping breath.

  43

  Exiled

  The plane followed the path the sun had taken that day and every day, from the Levant to Europe. As soon as Captain Masters levelled it out, I realised that I wasn’t finished with Lebanon. The bomb bound me to it. On the Beirut airport road, I’d peered into the refugee camp’s maze of tin sheeting rattling reflections in the windy sunset, yearning to know that Ringo was safe.

  I can go back. Make things right. Find Ringo. Explain to Babette. Ask Dad to keep me there.

  The genie air hostie said she loved flying with Dad. ‘He’s a legend.’

  In London, I headed for the Air Cedar counter to request an urgent return ticket, as the son of a legend. I imagined ambushing Captain Masters in his cockpit on the flight home: ‘Ha ha! Didn’t need a grenade to have you fly me back.’

  I jerked at the soft squeeze on my arm. ‘Hey, carrot top. You must be Oliver.’ A hard handshake. ‘Ah, nice to meet … I’m Phillip. Babette’s friend. Your guide in the Old Dart.’

  The Slave. He was short with curly blow-waved hair, monster eyelashes, small muscly arms and an oversized rib cage.

  ‘If I was casting Puck, I’d use Phillip,’ Babette once wrote in her diary.

  ‘Gotta go to the ticket counter.’ I headed away.

  ‘Nah. Sort ’em out later. You’re a VIP. No point waiting in a British queue.’ He skipped ahead and grabbed my bag from the carousel, then pushed me into a tall, black taxi. ‘How’s Babs? Babette?’

  ‘She’s …’ I burst into tears. ‘I’ve got to go back.’

  Phillip crossed himself, only he pointed a finger at his forehead, then at each nipple, then at his crutch. ‘Poor darling, you. Another acolyte.’

  I’ll stay the shortest time I can.

  London turned out to be an infuriating sprawl of a city, smelling of car exhaust trapped inside icy fog. Phillip lived in a brick flat in a suburb full of straight lines. ‘Salubrious Streatham.’ He mouthed the suburb’s name as if it were a disease. I reached Phillip’s couch and lay with my face towards the gas flames leaping in his fake fireplace.

  I can hear the tschk tschk, see Ringo’s hunched spine. If I could reach back and freeze the universe as it travelled through that moment, halt the sun’s track across Earth, I would make sure the bomb never exploded.

  I strained to keep my eyes open. But as the gassy flames of the heater merged with my tortured memories of those ruinous tongues of fire at Beit Zizi, I fell back into exhaustion.

  ‘Wakie, wakie, hands off snaky.’ Phillip opened the blinds and a thin light trickled in. The sun acted mean and old, as if it could only spare a few grey beams for this city. ‘I thought you were dead. You slept for hours.’

  I gagged on the hot, toxic atmosphere and opened a window. A sliver of cold slinked in.

  ‘I try to pretend I’m back in Oz. When Babette and I first came to London, we couldn’t afford to run heating overnight. Our breath made ice on the cracked windows. So I overcompensate. Sorry.’

  When Babette and I came to London. He acted as if he owned her. I said nothing, fumbling for my shoes.

  ‘What are you? The strong, silent type?’

  ‘Gotta get my ticket back to Lebanon.’

  ‘Glad you’re enjoying my hospitality. Who’s giving you the fare? Thought you were heading to Oz.’

  ‘Can I use your phone to call Babette? She’ll get Dad to put me on a flight to Beirut.’

  ‘O-ho. I see. Your intercessor. But would your father take any notice? I don’t know exactly how bad a boy you’ve been, but if you’ve been very, very naughty, he’s unlikely to be swayed by her, even if she does take your side.’

  He pointed me towards the shared bathroom in his block of flats, where people’s lives were all squashed together. ‘Bathe. Scrub. Nobody gives cherries to pigs.’

  ‘Not a pig.’

  ‘Touchy!’ He whipped a towel end at me, making me smart and remember fondly the fights Jess and I used to have.

  That leaping Lebanese life pressing in from the outside had dwindled to nothing in London. There were no horns; just a faded red bus rumbling past and the sound of slick wheels in the wet.

  Phillip was just as good a cook as Babette. He made me soft-boiled eggs that had cracked and filled with water. He burnt bacon and crumpet, and plonked them on a plate with cold baked beans tasting of the tin.

  ‘I hear you’re a magician,’ he said.

  ‘Was.’

  ‘And a photographer.’ He pointed at my camera.

  ‘Sort of.’

  He held the lens. ‘Nice piece of glass. Brought anything that shows me what you can do with it?’

  I pulled out my scrapbook and found myself anxious to please as he opened it.

  ‘Ho, ho, hah.’ He had a high, loud, womanly laugh. ‘Love the ladies in sequins lining for the loo. And the sheikh poking his tongue out at the baccarat tables. And the half-drowned dancer gasping for air in that jar of water. You’ve got a terrific eye, Oliver.’

  The same warmth oozed through my body as when a magic trick made the audience’s eyeballs pop. ‘I’ve got a roll in here I want to develop.’ I began to pry my camera open, hoping the film had still clung to the teeth of the spool during the slalom down the Beit Zizi hillside.

  Phillip put his hand over my quivering fingers. ‘Don’t do that. It’s only halfway through a roll. Whatever you’ve got on it will be exposed. Or do you want to lose it?’ He raised his eyebrows and I could see that he was prepared to be my conspirator.

  I reeled back into a memory. I was under the thin canopy of the Lebanese forest, Ringo uncurling from his squat after setting the bomb’s timer. He’d scowled at my cocked camera.

  We could have died in that forest and his glare would have been the last image of my life. I want, so much, to live now.

  ‘Let’s shoot off the roll then, ducks. You can develop it in my darkroom.’

  ‘Can I call Babette?’

  ‘After.’

  Phillip’s studio in Chelsea was overheated, too. I had to wipe sweat beads from my lip, and the belt-buckle wound throbbed under the cottonwool Phillip had stuck over it. He was some kind of society photographer. Smiling partygoers’ teeth glowed lemon-yellow as they emerged like paper ghosts in his acrid developing tubs and were then hung from pegs on lines crisscrossing the darkroom. Beyond that, his studio was all snowy gloss walls and spotlights.

  ‘Like my gallery?’ Phillip had a boyfriend, a palace guard with a bearskin hat and a love of the lens. In one portrait, he lay stomach-down on a fake jaguar skin rug, nude except for the hat, with one finger in his mouth and a toe pointing to the ceiling.

  ‘Ken. On a Love Rug. Does snail-stamping for a living. You know? Knees up. Boots. He marches up and down, queen guarding Queen.’

  ‘The Queen’s slave.’

  Phillip looked at me in an odd way. ‘Don’t say that to Ken.’

  A small boy with Babette’s cut-glass eyes stared from a gold frame where two of Phillip’s white walls met under a stark, yellow globe. ‘There we have evidence of the startle reflex, often seen when we pap persons of interest.’

  ‘Pap?’

  ‘Paparazzi. Spy on subject to ascertain whereabouts, sneak up on subject, shoot. Sell for dosh if you’re a pro, which I’m not. Papping for a living would make me feel dirty.’

  ‘It’s like you’re a sniper. Why’d you do that to him?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have posed, darling.’

  ‘But your own child should be …’

  Phillip’s wide pixie face grew dark. ‘Babette’s child, sunshine. Not mine. We were strictly girlfri
ends. I’m just the fairy godfather.’

  ‘He looks like Babette.’

  Phillip put his mouth over first one breast, then the other, draining out the useless milk. This was P!

  I felt as if I was falling as I stared into the face of the boy she’d left behind, who would not let her go.

  ‘I can see his father in him.’

  ‘Who’s his father then?’

  ‘That’s for Babette to tell. You know, before he arrived,’ Phillip tapped the boy’s face, ‘she was so full of brio. She was a presence. The camera loved her and she loved the camera. After him, after she gave birth, she became dull, disinterested, ordinary … a spent firework.’ He said ‘gave birth’ in the same tone he’d said ‘Streatham’.

  ‘Babette’s all right.’

  ‘Is that your best compliment? Whoa! I’m still one of Babette’s most admiring fans. I was speaking as a professional. I’ve been forlorn since I lost my prized model.’

  I brushed my fingers over the uneasy face of Babette’s son, frozen behind glass. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s no model … Oh, you mean he lost a mother? He’s on Easy Street, darling. Rich papa, doting new mama. He has a blessed life.’

  ‘I don’t think he has.’

  Phillip studied my face too closely for my comfort. I made it blank.

  ‘Where’d you shoot this?’ It made him shift his focus away from me, onto the photo.

  ‘The kid loves the glasshouse in the Chelsea Physic Garden. Over there. Lovely light.’ Phillip indicated the walled park across the road. ‘Goes there once a week with his nanny to see the Venus flytraps and the pitcher plants. The carnivores.’ Phillip clapped his hands together, making them into a mouth catching a fly.

  ‘Can I pap him too?’

  Straightaway, I regretted saying it, remembering how Babette hated being chased by photographers in London.

  ‘I like that. You’re a man I can work with.’ Phillip rubbed my shoulder.

  What do I want to do? Steal this little boy’s spirit?