Act of Grace

by Anna Krien

‘No, she wouldn’t know the history,’ Toohey said to Gerry. ‘Bloody Muslims are all about destroying history.’

  Gerry glanced at the girl and saw her stiffen, her fingers pause. God, would his dad ever let him leave? He picked up his phone and checked it for messages under the table.

  ‘What’s the matter, Gerry? You embarrassed?’ Toohey’s eyes were bulging as he leaned over the table. ‘You embarrassed of me? Want to go home to your mummy?’

  Gerry slapped his phone on the table and held up his palms. ‘No! Jesus, Dad! Can we just go now?’

  ‘We’re not finished,’ Toohey said, pouring the dregs of the bottle into his glass.

  The girl appeared, sliding a saucer between them with a bill on it.

  ‘What kind of name is Robbie for a Muslim girl?’

  The waitress didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’re not Muslim,’ he said then, a low menace in his voice.

  From the kitchen, Gerry noticed the chef look up. The waitress stared back at Toohey. ‘What’s it to you what I am?’ she said.

  ‘A lot, actually,’ he replied. ‘We had to have a woman on our unit in Iraq just so we could search women wearing that kind of get-up. It was a liability having a female soldier with us.’

  The waitress looked at him in disbelief. ‘No, you didn’t,’ she said.

  ‘What, you don’t believe me?’ Toohey laughed. ‘Go on, tell her, Gerry.’

  The waitress turned to look at him and Gerry nodded grimly. Her eyes widened, then narrowed; Gerry could almost see the new information register, see its meaning settle. She was about to say something, but the chef interrupted. ‘C’mon, Robbie, take that shit off.’

  The girl’s eyes flashed at him. ‘No way. That’s discrimination and you know it.’

  The chef laughed. ‘Not if you don’t believe in it.’ He came out from behind the counter. Toohey leaned back in his chair, a smile playing on his wine-stained lips. ‘Sorry about this, mate,’ the chef said, and Toohey shrugged. ‘C’mon, take it off, Robbie. This is a restaurant, not a fucking art show.’

  The girl had her hands on her hips now. ‘Jesus, Louie, I can feel the loyalty. I’ve been here for how long, and you take this guy’s side?’

  Gerry watched his dad. He was drumming his fingers on the table, the happiest he’d been all night. You are a fucking prick, he thought. His phone beeped. Are you coming home? His mum. Gerry wanted to explode. He stood up, pushing his chair so hard it fell backwards.

  ‘We’re going, Dad,’ he said, not looking at Toohey. He held out his card to the waitress. ‘Savings,’ he murmured, not looking at her either, looking at nothing, so that when his dad stood, sloppily knocking over his glass, Gerry didn’t see it, only felt it. Felt his father behind him, the sensation so familiar he was relieved. This was what his dad had wanted all along – some kind of eruption where a molten truth could be spat out, a truth that could only be animated in violence. He straightened, chasing any softness from his shoulders, held his head steady, all of him ready for the blow. But nothing happened. The girl was holding an eftpos machine out to him and he focused on it, typing in the four digits. Together they waited for it to clear.

  *

  ‘You’re a silly girl.’ Nasim smiled as she adjusted the abaya. Robbie grinned, her face bursting outwards, her freckles standing out now that the rest of her had receded into the black material.

  Nasim shook her head. ‘You can’t smile like that,’ she said sternly. ‘It is clear you are not true.’

  Robbie rectified her expression, dampening her grin into a modest Mona Lisa smile. It made little difference. The girl’s hair was also a problem; it kept escaping from the hood like a creeper searching for a foothold in the sun. ‘You’ll have to use spray,’ Nasim said.

  Robbie made a face. ‘Yuck.’

  ‘Yuck,’ Nasim mimicked. She tucked a strand of Robbie’s hair under the hood and stood back to look at her. ‘It will not work.’

  Robbie was undeterred. She went into the bathroom to see herself. ‘It will!’ she called out. ‘It’s just because you know me,’ she added.

  Nasim followed Robbie into the bathroom. ‘How long?’

  ‘A year,’ said Robbie. ‘I’ll keep a diary and do some sketches. I’ll get a friend to document it. He’s a photographer.’

  Nasim thought of the photographer crouched on the road, taking photos of her, the prostitutes lined up behind. She laughed, a little bitterly. ‘A year,’ she said. ‘You think it is a long time, but it is not. It is not a life.’

  Robbie turned to face her. ‘I know that,’ she said seriously. ‘I do.’ Then she turned back to the mirror, held up her arms and flapped them. ‘Oooooooo ooooooooo,’ she sang out, ‘I’m a ghost!’ And as always with this girl, Nasim couldn’t help it – she laughed, and the black ghost swung around and caught her in a hug.

  *

  ‘Hey!’ The voice cut through the rain. ‘Wait!’

  Gerry stopped and looked back, unsure if the voice was directed at them. Toohey stopped as well, but he was too drunk, whirling around and bumping into the wall. He stayed there, holding onto it, blinking.

  ‘Stop!’

  It was the girl. She was running down the alley towards him, her black boots slapping in the wet, her hood sleek as a swan. When she reached him, she was puffed and had to catch her breath. Gerry stared at her, confused. Then she held out his card. He groaned, took it, mumbled thanks, and was about to turn around when she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Gerry was so surprised he didn’t move. As she kept her lips pressed on his skin, he felt the warmth of her, felt it come off her and into him. Then she was gone. Running back along the lane, her hood falling off, hair spilling out, she disappeared up the stairs.

  Gerry stared at the empty space she’d left, still feeling her lips on his cheek. When he turned back, Toohey was swaying unsteadily. His eyes were a little off-centre but still he managed to ask, ‘What the fuck was that about?’

  *

  Robbie kept the hood off as she walked to the tram stop, enjoying the feeling of the rain on her hair. The abaya was now unremarkable, just a long, baggy dress. Her tips had diminished since she started wearing it, though; her share of this evening’s offering, a handful of coins, was just enough to pay for her tram ticket. Was that racism, she wondered, or sexism? Tips aside, the hijab, the abaya, it wasn’t working. Nasim had been right. As an experiment it was impossible. Her lecturer had been so excited when she told him about the project – he’d said it was edgy and brave, and, in the beginning, she agreed. To an extent, maybe it was important to experience the hostility that came off people towards her, the visceral hate that saw her even more loathed than a fat person. Shit, even fat people scowled at her. But beyond that, what was there to know? Nasim had said there were too many contradictions, that she would only be able to understand the abaya as a physical thing, when it was more, so much more. Robbie had countered that if it was spirit she was talking about, then yes, she felt smothered too. Nasim laughed. ‘You cannot forget yourself,’ she said, ‘this is the problem. With the abaya, there is no self, no individual.’

  Robbie was perplexed. ‘But what about you then, Sabeen?’

  ‘What about me?’ she replied.

  ‘Well, you’re not nobody. You’ve got a name, a life that is yours. Even if you can’t control the way things have turned out, it’s still your story. Surely that can’t be taken away?’

  Hearing this, Nasim had almost laughed aloud at the irony. ‘Yes,’ she murmured instead, keeping her expression blank. ‘This is true.’

  Robbie neared the arcade where a bunch of kids gathered on Friday nights to breakdance, taking turns in the circle’s centre, twisting like cobras on the tiles. A speaker attached to a phone thumped out the rhythm. Robbie watched for a while, some of them recognising her and waving. They were her favourite thing about working Fridays. One night, she promised herself, she would persuade Nasim to meet her at the restaurant, to walk down to the tram, and she’d show
her these kids. A girl in the crew swaggered into the circle and began to dance. I Don’t Want Your Money, Honey was scrawled in pink across her T-shirt. She was awesome and wild and free, in a Western way no doubt, but fuck, who cared.

  Robbie decided she was going to stop wearing the abaya and the hood. It was a stupid project. Nasim would be happy.

  At the tram stop, everyone who planned not to get blind drunk and stuck in the city till morning was waiting, necks craning as they gazed down the street, squinting through the rain for a familiar shape. Robbie stood under the shelter near the lights and began to read the newspaper someone had left behind. She was trying to finish an article when a car stopped at the red light in front of her, beats belting from it. A man in the passenger seat flopped his hand out his window, tossing an empty can of Red Bull. It clanged and rolled into the kerb, near her feet.

  ‘You cannot forget yourself,’ Nasim had said. And another time, when Robbie had a run-in with the awful neighbour, she said, ‘You do not think, this is your problem. Nothing in you averts.’

  But it wasn’t true. She did think, and she thought of her father, how he had cleaned up after schoolboys, how they saw him coming, tossed their wrappers on the ground for him.

  Robbie bent down, picked up the can and threw it back into the car.

  The rest was quick. The man was out of the door and in her face, pushing her backwards until she was up against a shop window, three unseeing mannequins behind her. ‘You fucking ugly bitch, what the fuck did you do that for? You ugly cunt, I’ll flatten you.’

  Robbie couldn’t think straight – she could only see his face, and the eyes of everyone around them, sliding away. It was all so out of proportion. She had a thought that if she were to sketch this it would require no sense of scale, no squinting or lining up her pencil. He had the can in his other hand and crushed it. Then he shoved it into her stomach. It tinkled at her feet.

  ‘You should put it in the bin,’ Robbie heard herself saying, and he grabbed her abaya at the collar and made as if to headbutt her. She flinched, and he stopped.

  ‘You stupid fucking cow,’ he said instead. ‘You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.’

  The car beeped. A girl was leaning over into the passenger seat, her hands on the wheel. ‘Cal, come on,’ she called out, ‘the light’s green,’ and she looked at Robbie sourly. Before the man turned away, he kicked the can so it bounced against her shoes. ‘You put it in the bin, bitch.’

  *

  The problem with killing a man is that you can only kill him once. This is what Nasim thought when she watched the execution of Saddam on her phone. They had found him in a hole not long after the invasion, and the news of his capture spread like a fever. The Americans said he had been hiding on a farm near Tikrit; that he was a crazed, bearded wild man; that they’d flushed him out like a spider. At first there were rumours that the Americans might let the Iraqis have him and tear him apart on the streets, but they put him in one of his old palaces with twelve young Marines as guards. It was said those American boys ended up falling in love with him. He was like a grandfather to us, one later told an American reporter. The Iraqis spat at their televisions with anger when they learned this. But Nasim understood the American soldiers. Everyone had loved Saddam once, if only for a day.

  When Saddam was hanged, Nasim was still in Baghdad, but she could not watch the execution with her girls. Instead she disappeared to the rooftop of her apartment building and forbade them ever to speak of it. Despite everything, she had not been able to wring her heart clean of him. Now, in Melbourne, Nasim decided to watch. She had always known the footage was there, on the internet, patiently waiting like all the other grisly productions.

  It was almost boring, how she’d come to the decision that evening, and she wondered if this was how most perverse choices were made. From her window she’d looked at the houses on her street, the pale blue glow as people watched television in their living rooms. In a way, it was loneliness that made her do it. She could just as easily have brought up images of the dictator in his heyday, proud and powerful. But that would have been a treachery, so she decided it was time to see him die.

  When he appeared, the footage grainy, she cried out. He had a beard, and his silver-and-black hair was combed back in neat waves, revealing his wide, serious brow and solemn eyes. He was wearing a formal coat, buttoned to the collar, and polished leather shoes. Four men surrounded him, each wearing a black hood. They were dressed casually beneath: unbuttoned shirts, beige pants and bomber jackets. Nasim felt anger as the men kept swapping positions and conferring, their palms pressing on Saddam as they led him up to the gallows. Then, on the platform, there was confusion. Nasim watched closely, trying to work out what was happening. Saddam did not want to wear a hood, she realised. There was much gesturing and talking while Saddam resolutely shook his head.

  ‘Make him,’ hissed Nasim, as if it were happening in real time. But the men didn’t. One of them gently looped the hood like a scarf around Saddam’s neck. What? Nasim scoffed in the silence of her flat. You want to protect him from rope burn? She almost threw the phone down in frustration. But she watched on as they led him to the front of the platform, where a thick rope was hanging, the noose lying coiled over a balustrade. One man put the noose over Saddam’s head and tightened it around his neck. Then, they all stepped away.

  If they had hoped to show him as a man stripped of everything, they had failed. Saddam glared down at his audience as if nothing had changed. It almost seemed possible, to Nasim, that he could start calling out names, beckoning unseen henchmen waiting in the shadows to come lead them away, one by one, to be shot.

  But still, the crowd was bold. They started to exclaim, praising Muqtada al-Sadr; light flashed across Saddam’s face as they took photos. Nasim wanted to stop it – the footage, the yelling, the execution – but as with all things on the internet, it was too late.

  Suddenly Saddam roared: ‘You call this bravery?’

  It was as though he could see her. No, she wanted to whimper, it is not bravery. She thought of what he would think if he could see her now, hiding in a cheap, barely furnished flat in Australia and watching his death five years after the fact on a tiny screen. Still scared.

  ‘Go to hell!’ someone in the crowd yelled, and the hatch could have opened then. But there was a pause instead, as if the executioner was curious for a reply. ‘The hell that is Iraq?’ Saddam said, and then, a short hadith later, the hatch opened. The rope dipped down with the man like a sparrow checking his flight, then it pulled up tight, and the deed was done.

  Nasim watched this last part over and over. It was reported after the hanging that one of the Marines who’d guarded Saddam in those final years had to be held back when the hooded men undid the noose and brought out the body for people to spit on. ‘It just felt wrong,’ he told the reporter afterwards, and Nasim wept, remembering this, the words the hell that is Iraq still ringing.

  There was a knock on her door and Nasim jumped. Briefly she forgot where she was, but the knocking continued, someone calling out. It was Robbie. She flung the door open, and Robbie was standing there in just her striped tights and a singlet, the abaya and hijab folded over her arm. The girl’s face was blotchy, as though she had been crying.

  ‘You were right,’ Robbie said, holding out the clothes.

  *

  ‘Gotta feed Melanie,’ Toohey was saying. ‘Poor bitch will be freaking out.’ Gerry had no idea what his dad was talking about. He had been ranting in the taxi all the way, and now Gerry had to half-drag him upstairs to his flat. ‘Stole her, cunt was treating her something rotten, so I waited for him to go out and went in there.’

  They were wet from the rain, but it was sweat Gerry was struggling with, his hands slipping from under his dad’s arms. ‘One more,’ Toohey said, looking around, swaying as he pointed up the stairs to the next landing. ‘Tried to bite my hand off like a fucking piranha.’ He stumbled backward, Gerry stumbling with him but ma
naging to stop the fall, pulling Toohey back to his feet. ‘Was sitting in its shit. I could feel its ribs, and its heart was going so fast I thought she was having a heart attack.’ Shut up, Gerry thought.

  They came to a stop outside a neat white door. ‘This is it,’ Toohey said, and dug his hand into his pocket and dragged out a key. There was a light tinkling as the key went flying, tumbling down the stairwell. Toohey sat on the doormat while Gerry searched for it, yelling out instructions that made no sense.

  When Gerry came back, holding the key aloft and away from his father, Toohey put his face close to his son, his hands on Gerry’s shoulders. ‘She was fucking ugly. Lost most of her hair and what was left was grey dreadlocks smeared with shit. Cowered every time I touched her. You wouldn’t know it now.’

  Gerry wriggled from his father’s grip, trying to avoid his breath. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, Dad,’ he said, putting the key in the door, but when he opened it a tiny white dog came yapping out, jumping up on his dad’s legs, pink tongue trying to reach his fingers. His father tapped his chest and the dog leapt up. He caught her, letting her lick his face, his neck. He had his eyes shut, smiling, saying, ‘Hey girl, hey beautiful girl.’

  Inside the flat Toohey set the dog down on a blue couch and poured out a bowl of biscuits, putting it on the floor and almost toppling over as he did. He went into the bathroom and shut the door. Gerry looked around. Aside from the couch, there was a television; in the kitchen, a bar fridge, a microwave, a table and chair. A blue camping mug upside down, next to the sink. A mattress in the bedroom, pillow with no cover, doona, clothes folded neatly in the corner.

  He went back to the living room and sat on the couch next to the dog, letting it lick his hand. He rubbed the pinch of fur above the dog’s temple and she relaxed, rolling onto her back, paws up, belly pink with dark blotches. Gerry had no money left for another taxi, but he could walk home. It didn’t matter how long it would take. He called to his dad but got no response. Melanie sat up keenly. He got off the couch and knocked on the bathroom door.