Act of Grace

by Anna Krien

  Nasim could feel her hair beneath the hijab becoming damp. A lump formed in her throat. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t know what to say. Then the policeman was back beside the car, and she was almost relieved to see him. He handed over Robbie’s licence without fanfare and looked in again. He had her licence in his hand. ‘Can I ask why you are here, Sabeen?’

  Nasim’s head began to thump. Why was she here in Australia? Was that on the computer? Was he checking her story? Her eyes widened with fear and she felt snared by the cop, his inscrutable gaze on her. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked again, but then pointed at the bridge up ahead.

  ‘Today?’ Nasim breathed.

  ‘Yes,’ the cop said impatiently. ‘Today.’

  Nasim looked helplessly at Robbie, pleading with the girl to speak for her.

  ‘She’s helping me,’ said Robbie. ‘With the baby.’

  The policeman looked at Sidney, then back at Nasim. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve made a formal note of both of you being here, so if there’s any trouble . . .’ He let the sentence trail off, the meaning clear. He passed Nasim’s ID to her and straightened, so the women were gazing at his stiff leather jacket. Then, bow-legged, he returned to his motorbike, revved it and took off.

  Nasim sank into the seat, drooping with relief. She tried to smile weakly at Robbie.

  ‘It’s the hijab,’ Robbie said.

  Nasim nodded.

  There was a strange look in Robbie’s eyes, as though she were no longer looking at her, but studying her. ‘What’s going on, Sabeen?’ she asked, perfectly to the point. The girl’s directness had been what drew Nasim to her in the first place. But not now.

  ‘I think I should get out,’ Nasim said quietly. She pointed at the service station. ‘I can get out there.’ She waited for Robbie to say no, to shrug and say it was no big deal, but the girl didn’t. Nasim spoke to fill the silence. ‘It’s my first name, Sabeen. Nasim is my second name. Many people go by their second name in Iraq.’

  Robbie continued to stare at Nasim. ‘Okay,’ she said coolly. She turned back to the front, starting the engine again. There was more space between the cars and they made some headway, slowing again alongside the service station. ‘You can jump out here if you want,’ Robbie said, gazing at her in the mirror.

  Nasim looked away, suddenly angry. She was subject to someone’s whim again, this time a girl almost half her age, a girl who thought she knew so much, but knew nothing. Nothing. Nothing of surviving, of war. This girl – she was just like her mother had been, Nasim realised. Unforgiving and unyielding. Obsessed with truth as if it were the only important thing. Nasim set her jaw, unclipping her seatbelt. Then she looked at Sidney and wanted to cry. She put her finger on his puckered lips and softly strummed the bottom lip, smiling as he gurgled. She didn’t want to leave them.

  Robbie had turned around in her seat, the car stopped in the emergency lane, indicator ticking.

  ‘It’s this,’ Nasim said, tugging on her hijab.

  ‘I know,’ Robbie replied. ‘That’s what I said.’

  She spoke impatiently, and it made Nasim feel old. She blinked and looked down at her hands.

  ‘You could take it off.’

  Nasim winced. Robbie had never said that before. She knew Nasim was not Muslim, that she wore it for some other reason, a reason the older woman could not or would not explain. But Robbie would often see Nasim without the hijab. In each other’s homes, the headscarf lay on a dresser or draped over the back of a kitchen chair. Nasim never felt the need to put it back on when Jack came home. It wasn’t like that.

  She hung her head now, the scarf shielding her face. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I could.’ She put her hand on the door. ‘Here?’

  Robbie nodded, softening a little. ‘You could get a taxi from the service station?’

  Nasim did not want to lose Robbie. She had crocheted that rug for the baby in that awful ugly fashion, deeply in love with the girl, her lover and their child. There were times on weekends when she would see Jack wearing the baby carrier, Sidney knitted to his chest, and she would feel as though she might break at the beauty of it. ‘In Iraq,’ she often said to them, ‘you would never see a man doing this,’ waving her hand at Jack. But the girl knew. Not the truth, but that there was a lie, and Nasim knew the girl. It would not go away. She would have to know. They had reached an impasse.

  ‘Okay,’ Robbie said quietly. Nasim gathered her handbag and leaned over Sidney, kissing his warm mossy head, breathing him in. Then she wriggled between the two front seats to the girl. Their lips grazed, and their eyes met, and she said goodbye.

  *

  Robbie edged back into the traffic. She fiddled with the stereo until thick hip-hop rolled out, and almost involuntarily, her fingers began dancing on the lip of the open window. The road started to lift. Again, Robbie had to slow down, the police waving her into the two lanes they’d left open. From here, Robbie could see the artificial islands and clay-coloured treatment ponds beneath the bridge, a vast car park where brand-new vehicles were unloaded from carrier ships. The mouth of the wide river flushed boats in and out of the bay, while on the horizon a queue of ships had anchored. To the west were the markers of the industrial age built atop coastal tussock and saltpans: lime burners and oil refineries, smokestacks puffing next to wheat silos and tallow works. She came to a standstill, a few rows from the front, waiting her turn to drive onto the bridge. Her chest hummed with excitement. Just say you’re Italian, her father had said to her before he got properly sick. Now Robbie winced, felt a familiar, habitual hurt in her heart. You poor, poor bastard. She thought of him, how beautiful he’d been, and complicated, too. As though he’d worried himself into knots. ‘A Wurundjeri Wathaurung man’, the priest had been instructed to say at the funeral, ‘also of Scottish and English heritage’. But he wasn’t. He was the man only she, Otis and their mother knew. And they’d loved him.

  Robbie’s phone beeped. Jack. You on the bridge?

  Almost, she typed back.

  Sid okay?

  Robbie turned to look. Sleeping, she typed.

  That’ll be right. Sleeping through history.

  The policeman waved his wand at her to pass. She lifted her foot off the brake and eased the station wagon onto the bridge.

  Up she went, up, and Robbie sat tall. Not proud, as this, it wasn’t hers to be proud of, but tall, in that she was part of it.

  *

  A couple of ruined jetties stuck out from the brown water, mangroves growing around them. Nasim had given up waiting for a taxi and walked past the service station, around the slip road, hugging the concrete barrier, and found a gravel side road that doglegged off the arterial. She walked down it, hot and thirsty, until she emerged into a squally suburb tucked under the bridge, wedged right up to the water’s edge. She’d never been this way, taking in a row of tiny houses among the factories. In the little front gardens were blooms of geranium, groups of gaudy gnomes, a wishing well. Inside a pair of old boots someone had planted powdery white succulents with pink flowers. She looked up and saw the underside of the bridge, its ribbed belly like a snake. She could see the police gathered on their horses, cars compressed, then released, two by two, onto the bridge. All of them were small as Lego.

  Nasim unclicked a rusty gate and bent over a tap, twisting it on and drinking, letting the water run down her chin and inside the neckline of her headscarf. Her thirst quenched, she walked on. At the end of the road, an uneven path of quarry rocks extended into the water and Nasim followed it out, sometimes having to jump between stones. She passed Asian fishermen with bells on the ends of their rods. Another finger of quarry rocks came out, and further along she could see more lone fishermen, each on a solitary perch, stranded by the tide.

  That’s one way to get away from the missus, Nasim thought, smiling at herself in surprise. Maybe she was becoming an Australian after all. At the end of the trail of rocks, she sat on the flat curve and looked out at the sea
. She ran her shoes over the mussels and barnacles, trying to lever the limpets off with her acrylic nails. A movement startled her and Nasim looked up to see a grey heron beside her, two long legs coming out of the water, neck folded like a U-pipe. It had frozen, pretending to be a statue, or perhaps a rock. Nasim wagged her finger at it. ‘I can see you,’ she said. She admired the bird, its eye on her. Then she turned around to the bridge, wondering if Robbie had driven over it yet. She hoped Sidney was asleep and not wailing.

  On the breeze, there was a tinkling. A fisherman moved quickly to wind in his line and Nasim watched the water break, a silver fish emerging, twisting on the hook. The angler reached out to catch it, detach it from the tiny barb and throw it back in. Nasim leaned back on the warm rock and closed her eyes. She was tired. The sun glowed red behind her eyelids. In her quiet, crabs edged forward, out of their cracks. Sleepily, she reached up to loosen her scarf, letting it spread out around her. Beside her, the heron lifted its skinny leg, then the other, its beak poised to pierce the water, deciding to trust the woman on the rock.

  For Fuck’s Sake

  ‘Argh, for fuck’s sake,’ Toohey growled, slowing. Ahead was bumper-to-bumper traffic, winding all the way down from the Bolte Bridge and into the slip road. He leaned forward, peering at the West Gate, the next bridge along. It too was jammed with cars. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ He threw a sideways look at his son, trying to coax something out of him, but Gerry said nothing. The kid sitting in the passenger seat was not a kid anymore, that was obvious, and Toohey was oddly pissed off that he hadn’t been the one to spur his son to manhood. Instead, a bunch of fucking American lefty freaks grew him up. So much for Gerry’s little campervan trip.

  ‘Your mum will be pleased to see you,’ he’d said gruffly on the plane, when they’d finally negotiated their way out of the States, and Gerry had looked at him with interest. Toohey thought he’d finally connected with his son.

  ‘Are you and Mum back together?’ the kid asked, and Toohey, he’d no idea where he got this line from, because it most certainly wasn’t his own, replied, ‘How would you feel if we were, son?’

  Gerry drew back in surprise, then collected himself. ‘I honestly wouldn’t care,’ he said, and Toohey’s temper quickened.

  ‘Well, you can drop the attitude, Gerry,’ he snapped.

  The kid didn’t quail. He looked out the port window, then squeezed the side button on his armrest, tilting his seat back. They had an empty seat between them. Toohey was antsy; he got up and paced regularly. He’d got the fright of his life, seeing Gerry in that cell – seriously. It was more frightening than that time with the woman with the baby in Baghdad, and then tracking her down in Melbourne, sitting in the car outside that ugly nail shop, seeing her falute around the joint with stupid airs. He didn’t recognise her. He doubted he’d ever known what she looked like – all he’d seen was the wetness of her open mouth and the bloody blouse. He had a letter drafted, was planning on sending it to a bunch of departments, demanding an answer to why she was here. For fuck’s sake, whose side were they on? He’d held off on emailing it when the Gerry stuff happened, figuring he’d better lie low with immigration until he got the kid home.

  But still, he hadn’t expected the emotion, seeing his son in a standard-issue tracksuit sitting on the floor with an al-foil blanket over his lap, playing cards, a lone white guy among the Mexicans. It was the disrespect, mostly. He’d fucking fought an American war and they put his son in here with god knows what kind of scum. Then there was the steely way his son appraised him. It wasn’t that Toohey had thought of himself going in as the saviour, that Gerry would be overcome with gratitude – it wasn’t that. But there could have been at least a bit of grovelling. Of ingratiating. Not that he would have respected that. When Toohey said Gerry was lucky he wasn’t up on terrorism charges like the Indian kid, his son looked at him with contempt, and Toohey had almost left the boy then and there. But then Toohey got this uneasy feeling the kid wouldn’t care. That it was him who was cornered. And there it was: the fucking to-ing and fro-ing in his head, the not knowing what he wanted from his son.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Toohey said again, fiddling with the car radio dials, flipping past snippets of music and ads until he got to talkback, the host taking calls from outraged drivers.

  ‘You know, if they want us to feel the least bit sympathetic for them, then this is the wrong way to go about it,’ a woman sniped, the host cutting her off.

  ‘That’s Cathy’s point of view. How about you, Chris, what are your thoughts?’

  ‘Well, Dayno, next election this government is going to seriously regret today.’

  Toohey turned the dial again, stopping at the next station along. ‘The Victorian premier says today is a momentous day for treaty negotiations as Melbourne’s most famous bridge, the West Gate, is flying the Aboriginal flag on both towers for the first time since its erection. Lucy, a member of the Kulin nation, is on the bridge right now. Lucy, how —’

  Toohey snapped off the radio. ‘You’re fucking kidding me!’

  Beside him, Gerry shifted, staring hard out his window. ‘I can see them,’ he said. ‘There’s two of them, two flags.’ He looked at Toohey. ‘Can you see them?’

  Toohey didn’t look; instead he shook his head furiously. ‘What a fucking joke this government is! Look at the pile-up. They’ve stopped the entire city, for what? A fucking flag?’

  Gerry unwound his window and held out his phone to take a photo, pinching the screen with his fingers so he could zoom in on the bridge. Then he brought the phone back and started tapping on it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Toohey said fiercely.

  Gerry didn’t reply, just kept tapping.

  It overtook Toohey, the anger, and he jerked his hand out, whacking the phone from Gerry’s hand. It fell on the floor at the kid’s feet, and for a second, Gerry just looked at it. Briefly it pleased Toohey, seeing the tautness of his son, the rope of rage uncoiling. You little fucking prick, he thought, welcome to the real world. What, you think you’re some Red Indian chief now, all zen on your mountain? Well, fuck you. Welcome, fucking welcome.

  But it all drained out of him when his son leaned down to pick up the phone. Gerry sat up and unclicked his belt. ‘You’re still living at the same place, Dad?’

  ‘What are you doing, Gerry?’

  ‘Mum’s there too?’

  Gerry opened the car door and Toohey rolled the car forward but there was nowhere to go, the car in front wedged tight. ‘Same place, Dad?’ Gerry asked again, and he did that thing kids do, kind of nodding in reverse, like a seal pushing a ball up to the surface; smooth, sort of jazzy. It shat Toohey to no end. He clenched the wheel.

  ‘Well,’ Gerry said, getting out of the car. ‘I’ll make my own way there, I reckon.’ He reached into the back seat and pulled out his pack, swinging it over his shoulder and shutting the door. He popped his head back in the open window. Toohey saw all the different faces in the kid then, bits of Jean, bits of him, bits of his own mother. The kid smiled and Toohey wasn’t so dumb that he thought Gerry was smiling at him, more for the impending escape, but still, he suddenly wanted it. He wanted that smile for himself.

  ‘Thanks, Dad,’ Gerry said.

  Then the kid walked, between the cars, people looking from their windows at him, irritated and envious. He walked down the Bolte Bridge, and paused at the slip road that led to all the fuss at the West Gate. Gerry took it, the road, disappearing around the bend, Toohey watching until he lost him.

  Acknowledgements

  The author is indebted to the reporting, research and analysis of many – in particular, war reporters Paul McGeough and Jon Lee Anderson, and authors Said K. Aburish for Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge, Jessica Bruder for Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century and Geraldine Brooks for Nine Parts of Desire.

  ‘Sorry Rocks’ is inspired by the lived experience of the Anangu, traditional owners of Uluru, and rangers at th
e Uluṟu-Kaṯa Tjuta National Park, and draws on the work of Jasmine Foxlee, who documented the ‘sorry rocks phenomenon’ in her work Cultural Landscape Interpretation: The Case of the Sorry Rock Story at Uluṟu-Kaṯa Tjuta National Park.

  The author acknowledges the timely and generous assistance of the Australia Council for the Arts, Deakin University and the Sidney Myer Fund.