Demons

by Wayne Macauley

  So that was the situation, continued Cameron, when one morning a bit over a month ago near the end of a long Friday-night shift, this incident happened. Let me explain. There’d been a huge influx of Afghanis, I mean after the big NATO surge. Lots had been supporters of the Coalition—drivers, interpreters and so on—but lots more were illegals. Everyone who hadn’t visibly fought against us was assumed by the Taliban to have been fighting with us and there was now a mighty rush to get out. A crazy time. And it was our job to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’d been out late with Aria almost every night that week and by four in the morning at the end of an insanely busy shift I was wrecked. The TV crew had been following my team all week and this shift they were specifically following me.

  Three quarters of cyberspace would disappear if you took away the vanity, wouldn’t it? Point a camera at us and we’ll perform. Look at Aria and her friends. And that’s the way it was for me: I couldn’t turn in any direction that night without a camera and a boom mike somewhere around. Act natural, they said, but acting natural’s still acting, isn’t it? And with the camera always in my face I found myself acting out what I thought was natural while also feeling—how can I explain it?—that it was not me in my body but me in the camera, watching me act. Do you know what I mean? I was acting like Cameron, the border security official, the way he, the other Cameron, imagined he should.

  Late in the shift a family came through: a couple, mid-thirties, and their three kids, the oldest a girl in her teens. The man claimed to have been a driver for a detachment in Uruzgan and had a letter on army letterhead signed by someone called Captain Smith. I believed it to be a fake. We put the family in the interview room while I searched the database for Captain Smith. I found no such serving member. I told the Afghani male—his English was good, he shook his head—then asked why they had travelled here? He said they had family. I must have looked impressive, doing the US cop-show routine. The crew were happy with the footage. I brought in my superior and briefed him (unbelievably, he didn’t double-check the Captain Smith thing) and he agreed the family were illegal and would need to be put on the next available flight out. The Afghani man pleaded, cried, hit his head with his hands; the wife and kids were crying too. Please, please, he said, they will kill me. Late the following afternoon, while I was in bed asleep, they escorted them onto the plane.

  It was a few weeks later that I heard the news: the man and his family had only been back two days when they were gunned down in their house. Only Hasti the fifteen-year-old girl survived by hiding under the other bodies and playing dead. It was on the front page, part of a series the paper was doing on the aftermath of the surge; the reporter on the ground had investigated and found the family had been sent back in error. The man—his name was Mehrzad—was a driver and Captain Smith, the leader of the forward detachment for which he worked, had written a letter for him. Accompanying this article was a photo of the surviving daughter, dressed traditionally, looking off-camera, a backdrop of village roofs and rugged, snow-capped peaks.

  It was an awful feeling; I’d never felt anything like it before. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing that picture in my head of the family being shot (the article said they’d been pushed with rifle butts into a room at the back of the house and mown down with a machine gun), of them cowering in the corner, of the young girl opening her eyes after the killers had gone and realising she was the only one alive.

  The doctor gave me sleeping pills. They helped, but they also left me so washed out I hardly ever got up before midday. Aria started getting cranky with me—you asked me what was wrong so I’m telling—and yelling at me to snap out of it. (If only I could!) To her my guilt—guilt that was literally making me sick—was misguided. What are you fretting for, she’d say, you did nothing wrong, those people might have been terrorists, they could have been plotting some suicide attack or something; you sent them back, you were doing your job, why should you feel guilty? I tried to explain that it wasn’t that simple, that I had every right to feel guilty, I’d made a mistake that had cost the lives of four people, including two little kids. But Aria wasn’t listening. She was thinking about the new nail polish, the new dress her friend had bought, the new shoes for Saturday night.

  I’m sorry, I said, said Evan, but I’ve got to stop you there: we are talking about my daughter, after all. I mean, I know she’s got her faults and that but, listen, I’m going to be straight with you, Cameron, I don’t get it. You and her, I don’t get it. Cameron looked at the ground. Neither do I, he said. He looked up. I bought her a drink, that’s all. I was there with a couple of mates; she came up to me and we chatted. It’s hard to talk about it, but there was a connection, even on that first night, and it never really went away. Not, at least, until now.

  So anyway, he continued, Aria and I stopped seeing each other for a while. We still talked—calls, texts, screaming Skypes—but your daughter’s opinion was fixed. I had done the right thing, I was being stupid, I should get back to work. I argued back. Like the rest of her generation, I said, she was being selfish, a selfish bitch. A family had been killed, just because it happened on the other side of the world didn’t make those deaths any less tragic. And to say I was somehow not responsible was to draw a big lie over the facts. I sent her the picture of Hasti, from the paper—the green eyes, the sad stare, the snow-capped mountains behind—and asked did she feel nothing?

  So, said Cameron, that’s what’s been happening. He leaned back and sipped his beer. (The women had left us alone, though at one point I did see Kate come to the back door and watch.) You asked, said Cameron, looking at me, I wouldn’t be telling you otherwise. I had a conscience, your daughter didn’t. Simple. But—he dropped his head, stared at the back of his hands, jiggled his knees—I love her, Evan, that’s the trouble. I love her. A lot.

  His voice was wavering. I didn’t know where to look. He was whimpering over his love for my daughter! And then, he said, raising his head and shaking it like he was shaking away all those bad thoughts, a few days ago I called Aria and told her that I was making plans to try and sponsor Hasti, the Afghani girl, that there was no other way of dealing with this thing, that I didn’t care what she thought and if it meant the end of our relationship, well, so be it. She thought the idea was ludicrous. We argued. Then this morning she rang and asked would I like to come here for lunch. But something was up, I knew. She’d been talking to her friends, I was sure, and was working to a strategy they’d figured out for her: don’t dump him yet, you have things on lay-by, a credit card debt, you owe money on your phone. Just before we got here in the car today, I laid out this theory to her, how I believed she was playing a game. She said yes, it was true, she planned to spill the beans in front of you and Kate about this Afghani orphan thing and my pathetic attempt to make myself look important. I had become an embarrassment to her. She said again how she thought it was ludicrous. She looked so young, stupid, naïve.

  Cameron was staring at me now, said Evan. I didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, just then, Kate called us in to eat.

  Adam looked at his watch. Maybe you could skip through it a bit, he said, so we’re not still here at dawn? Yeah, maybe, said Evan.

  Well, as you can imagine, he continued, the relationship deteriorated pretty quickly after that. She tried to hang on to him for a while, but Cameron saw through it. One day she came home all haughty-looking, her nose in the air, and we both knew it wa
s over. Within a week, she was going out with this guy called Justin, a student, same age, good-looking; he did weekends in a carwash and drove his parents’ four-wheel drive.

  But, said Evan, I couldn’t get Cameron out of my head.

  I went to see him. He lived out near the airport, in a unit off Taylors Road. He answered the door in his tracksuit and slippers, unshaven, dishevelled and sort of distracted; when he saw me he turned around and walked straight back down the hallway to the kitchen. He’d lost his job, this was the first thing he told me; after the incident with the Afghani family he hadn’t been able to cope, always thinking he might make another mistake. He’d even started to doubt the value of the job itself. Why were we sending these people back? Didn’t we have enough space? Throw open the doors! Let them all in! He took a payout but the money was going fast. I said maybe I could find him something—I knew a bloke, an old mate of mine, subcontracting on the stations being built on a new railway line out through the north-eastern suburbs. I could put in a good word. It would be physical work, I said, mostly, but good pay. Nine months at least and it could lead to more.

  Cameron’s reaction was lukewarm. He said thanks, yes, he’d consider. I said how sometimes work is the best way to get us out of ourselves and that moping around all day on your own can’t be a good thing. (My daughter’s ex-lover!) Maybe he should have a think about it? I’ll ring Jonno, I said, have a chat, you could even start next week. You need to put all that other stuff behind you, you can’t change it now. Then he dropped the bombshell. He was in the process, he said, of seeking permission not to sponsor but to adopt. Nothing else would reconcile him to a past that now, he said, shivering slightly, had stuck to him like black glue. I am going to become Hasti’s father.

  The guy was a fruitcake. I should have left him alone. (And didn’t Kate let me know about it after!) But who was I to say he was wrong? And compared to my shallow, skin-and-clothes daughter, to my mind Cameron was the only one who had come out of this relationship with his integrity intact. At least he was feeling something.

  So I rang Jonno. Cameron started the following Monday. He helped mix cement, cart bricks and tiles, tidy up. Hard work, but hardly taxing on the brain. Jonno said Cameron seemed a bit noncommittal, whatever that meant, but he was happy to do me the favour. I didn’t tell him he was my daughter’s ex. Then one day Jonno rings to tell me the government has put the new rail line on hold. Everyone’s laid off, he says; I’m sorry, mate, but I can’t worry any more about your hazy friend. I’ve got a multi-million dollar contract in dispute, they’ve pulled the pin on the whole thing, there are three half-built stations out there and a line going nowhere. I took the day off work and went round to Cameron’s place. He was at the computer. What was I doing?

  I said I’d spoken to Jonno and if Cameron needed I could help him out for a bit but I was sure he could find something if he put his mind to it. He said he didn’t have time to look for work, this was his work now. That night when Aria came home I told her how I’d seen Cameron that day, by chance, that he didn’t look happy and maybe she should give him a call? She went berserk, screamed at me, called in Kate and said I was an interfering freak and could she (Kate) please tell me that she (Aria) was not speaking to me ever again unless I got the idea out of my head that she (Aria) might somehow get back with that paedo-creep who actually she would be very happy to see dead? Kate tried to calm her down and the conversation (argument) went on between them for hours, barrelling out through the door of Aria’s room. I got a beer and took it outside—the night was warm, the sky full of stars—and started wondering again what on earth I was doing. When Kate came outside later she gave me her lecture (all pretty standard). I agree, I said, I’ll stop, I said, I promise.

  But I didn’t. Why shouldn’t Cameron adopt the Afghani girl, give her a new life, make recompense, somehow, for his awful mistake? I shuffled some money around, opened a new account, then secretly sent him a bank cheque every fortnight for roughly what he would have earned if he’d been working. I asked no questions, nor did he.

  Time passed. I tried hard to avoid contact with him. But one night he rang me; I had to take the phone outside. He was all bubbly, up. He said—my God!—how since we last spoke he’d been writing to the surviving relatives of the girl and how, if he walked in the true way, they’d said, and paid sufficient dowry, there would be no impediment to him taking Hasti as his bride. What? There was nothing perverse about it, he said, it was the only way to subvert the authorities, save the girl, and put his conscience to rest. Would I lend him the airfare?

  Would I lend him the airfare? Do you hear me? Adam? My daughter’s ex-lover, the man who put his cock inside her, the man whose cock she probably took into her mouth, this weird freakoid ex-border official was asking would I lend him money so he could go to Afghanistan and marry a fifteen-year-old girl! I said yes. He went. He stayed a year, married Hasti, and brought her home. He got a factory job; they rented a house in Doveton. The last I heard they’re still there now.

  Evan went silent.

  No-one ever knew I helped him. But something went awry in our house. A dark energy came down. Kate and I couldn’t stop arguing. Aria became estranged. Then I met Megan—she’d just separated, I was doing her new kitchen—and it seemed right: an older woman, smart, with depth. Depth and feeling. I put all that other stuff behind me, the whole fucking crazy thing.

  Evan looked at his watch. Oh Christ, he said. He dragged himself up off the couch. So, yeah, anyway, there it is, that’s what happened, go figure.

  He walked off down the hallway, the bathroom light went on. Adam could hear him pissing, then the toilet flush. He went to the window and parted the curtains. Yes, Tilly was asleep. The bathroom light went out. Adam damped down the fire and turned off the other lights. In the bedroom he quietly closed the door.

  Turn the light on, said Lauren. He couldn’t find the switch; she turned on her bedside lamp. Is she still awake? She’s sleeping now, he said. It’s not right, said Lauren, lying down again. What? said Adam. Everything, she said. She’s upset, she’s not sleeping out there because she feels like a little camping holiday. Stay out of it, said Adam, taking off his clothes, you can’t interfere with stuff like that. Her uncle’s just topped himself. Marshall shouldn’t have brought her, sure, but we don’t know the circumstances. And you know what Jackie’s like, she’s not exactly Zen Mother.

  That girl’s upset, said Lauren, that’s all I’m saying. She’ll be all right tomorrow, said Adam, she’ll be hungry, she’ll be tired. They both lay looking at the ceiling.

  What were you talking about? asked Lauren. Just crap, he said. She turned off the lamp.

  There’s something a bit sad about us, isn’t there? said Adam. Us? said Lauren. I mean how we’ve only ever danced across the surface, had everything our own way, free education, free dole; no wars, no revolutions. We’ve not lived to the limit of human experience, we’ve moved in a little circle. We’ve looked out for ourselves, not others, and if we do make some big magnanimous gesture there’s always something a bit calculated about it. Even when we’re listening to another person’s cares and woes, aren’t we actually thinking about ourselves?

  Stop talking, she said, and she rolled over and pulled the covers up to her chin. We’re pragmatists, said Adam, idealism’s not our thing. No, said Lauren.

  Adam lay listening to the
sea.

  SATURDAY

  When Adam woke, fuzzy from the wine, Lauren was already up. So was everyone, by the sounds of it. He went into the kitchen. Megan was at the sink, still in her pyjamas, a pair of ridiculously fluffy slippers on her feet.

  She’s gone with Hannah and Leon for a walk down the shops. How did you sleep? Good, said Adam, good—is Tilly still in the car? Megan nodded. And Evan? What a night, he said. Megan continued rinsing the dishes. And you? I slept okay, she said. I kept getting all these images, said Adam, not really dreams but the stuff that comes to you when you’re sort of skating across the surface. Hannah’s story, especially, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Do you think it was true?

  It sounded true, said Megan.

  True’s a funny word, isn’t it? Have you got a story?

  I think so, yeah, and you?

  Yeah, I think I’ve got something.

  They heard a toilet flush.

  Fuck me, said Evan, walking in—Megan, honey, what were you thinking, telling me to drink all that wine? Where did you get that idea from? He was hugging her from behind; she kept looking out at the rain falling on the stand of acacia trees on the hill behind the house.