Demons

by Wayne Macauley

  Aiden stopped for a moment and stared behind me into the street. He let a thought pass through him.

  They were only a few metres away now, he said, and you could feel the line tightening. Then a cop in a different uniform appeared—maybe he’d been hiding behind the others all along? He stepped back into the empty space and put a megaphone to his mouth. Move away from the bus—Move away from the bus—Move away from the bus and you won’t get hurt—Move away from the bus. Some of us started chanting again: Hold the line! Hold the line! The guy with the megaphone started to yell: This is your last—but then, from the top of the lane, behind him, there was the sound of running and shouting. It was the same shout as before: Buses here! Buses here! The cop lowered his megaphone, the others glanced around: a mob of protesters was coming round the corner from the direction of the blockade, led by the anarchists in their boiler suits and masks.

  Charge! I heard someone say. Cops here! said someone else. Hold the line! a protester screamed. Then my cop, the cop with my name written on him, was on top of me. He ripped my arm away from the girl’s, twisted it behind my back and whacked me hard a couple of times across the head. Then he threw me aside. As I went down I saw him hoe into the guy next to me, then help another cop pull protesters away from the door.

  In a few seconds they had broken the chain but now the second lot of protesters was at their backs fingering the air. Whose streets?—Our streets!—Whose streets?—Our streets! The cops turned and it was game on. They charged the front-line, of anarchists mostly. (There’d been stories earlier that these guys were throwing paper bags of shit at the cops near the King Street entrance: this was revenge.) The cops beat a wedge through the anarchists but soon found themselves surrounded. The world is watching! The world is watching! I got to my feet and made it to the footpath, away from the action. My head was throbbing, I’d bitten my tongue, I’d lost my hat somewhere in the scuffle. I saw it lying in a puddle in the middle of the road—but then I heard the hooves.

  Time slowed down and sped up. The crowd scattered, the mounted police cleared a path to the bus and behind them came more reinforcements on foot. The lane was cleared, everyone was pushed back to the footpath and beyond. Protesters were running down laneways, cowering in doorways, falling back towards the river. People were bleeding, screaming. The cops on horses ringed the bus while a cordon on foot ushered the delegates out. I remember one businessman shouting over their heads at us: You fucking scum!

  The bus started up, the cordon tightened, and with the delegates looking out at us—safari tourists inspecting the animals—it drove off down the lane. The cops closed in and swallowed it up and the whole circus moved off to Spencer Street and from there, presumably, towards the main blockade.

  I hung around in the lane for a while; most of the others had chased the cops and the bus. Someone who’d seen me get punched asked was I all right and did I need medical attention or want to sign a statement. I said no, I was fine, thanks. The few who were left started drifting away. Then I remembered my hat, lying in the puddle. But it was gone. I heard the girl’s voice behind me, the girl whose arm had been linked in mine. I picked it up, she said, but I couldn’t find you. She held it out; I took it from her.

  Are you okay? I asked. She nodded. And you? Yeah, I said. She had a friend with her, older than her but younger than me, soft-faced, good-looking, a real sincerity about him. She told him who I was, what had happened. I’m Jordan, he said, and he shook my hand. And I’m Rani, she said. She looked at me, then her eyes clouded over. Is it worth it? she said. Yes, I said, I think so, yes.

  Well, continued Aiden, of course I felt like a hero. Why not? I was jumpy, I remember, I couldn’t settle down. I stayed around the blockade the rest of that day and came back again the next. No-one was getting in or out. Then, before dawn on Monday morning, everything changed again. The riot guys arrived, batons flailing, and attacked the least-protected Queen Street entrance. The protesters, still half-asleep, didn’t stand a chance. The cops came in over the top like sheepdogs, bashing as they went. The horses followed behind. After that came the buses, with the faces inside. It was all over in minutes.

  For days the airwaves were filled with suggestions about what to do with us scum now that we’d been vanquished—stick our heads on pikes at the city gates, and worse. We melted back into what we’d been doing, which, true, in a fair few cases, probably wasn’t much. But I’m sure everyone felt the same, that something had started and was gathering momentum, not just here but everywhere; that it was not just a handful of ferals screaming for change but all kinds of people, like on the blockade, like those who linked arms around the bus, people who had never got off their arses before now getting out and being seen. They’d been name-called and demeaned so many times over the years, by politicians, shock jocks, the patriotic plebs, and now they were standing up. It’s one of the bravest things you can do as a human being, isn’t it? Refuse to be belittled.

  There were more protests that year and into the next: Prague, Davos, Salzburg, Genoa. I got even more heavily involved with all this underground political stuff. I was on a high, I won’t deny it. I helped out with websites, wrote press releases, distributed flyers, went to meetings two or three times a week, all the time still washing dishes, cleaning offices, packing boxes or whatever. I spent my spare time online, sharing information and strategies with the other disillusioned around the world, or in the lounge room with my cask wine and juice-bottle bong watching news and current affairs. My housemates joined me in a rotating parade—I think they liked having the crazy older guy around. I read every analysis I could find about the present state of mainstream politics and the more I did the more helpless I felt. The drawbridges had gone up, the ranks had closed; democracy was an impenetrable fortress. You couldn’t get at it, it wouldn’t let you in. Politicians had become actors, their performances cool steel.

  Then one afternoon I rang Lil, to see how she was getting on. It was months since we’d spoken and she sounded estranged. I said again how sorry I was but, please, all the same, could I have a quick word with the kids? She said no. Then I heard a male voice, telling her to tell me to fuck off. Put him on, Lil, please, I said. No, Aiden, she said, you’ve got no right. I pleaded with her, said I was sorting things out, that I would come through this in the end for sure. Lil listened, then in a voice so cold it almost froze my ear, she said: Aiden, I’m with Niall now.

  He was a diplomat’s son, same stock as her—a few months later I was back in Canberra for the divorce. What a strange place. Niall was there, of course, but they wouldn’t let me near him. My God, Aiden, said Lil, when she saw me: what’s happened? It was a long and drawn out bitch fight, naturally, but in the end they gave me half the house if I agreed to stay away from the kids.

  Things went off the rails a bit after that. I started drinking more and smoking way too much weed. Most of the settlement money I squirrelled into a high-yield investment account but the rest I started giving away—for good causes, let me say, nothing but good causes. I even helped sponsor a John Pilger tour. Then one evening in early 2001 I was coming out of a meeting in one of the rooms upstairs at Trades Hall when I passed a doorway and saw Jordan inside. Jordan from the demo. He was giving a speech, a politico-philosophical speech. It took me a while to realise he was speaking not as himself but as an actor in a play. There were other actors there too; listening, gesturing, rhubarbing. They
call themselves intelligentsia, Jordan was saying, but they’re rude to servants, they treat peasants like animals, they are poor students, they read nothing seriously, they don’t do a thing. In the corner a young musician was bending and distorting the notes on an electric guitar. Rani was in there too. Jordan finished speaking and an older guy—shoulder-length hair, three-day growth—started giving him notes. Aiden! said Jordan, when he saw me. They all turned around. Everyone, said Jordan, this is Aiden, the guy who was with Rani at the front of the bus.

  It was a rehearsal, they were preparing a show, and instantly all those good feelings I had making student theatre came back. There was something about the smell in the room, the tape on the floor, the props in the corner, the old table with tea and coffee on it, the loose clothes of the actors. Dane, the director, called a break and explained what they were doing. It was The Cherry Orchard, in a new mash-up version. I told him I’d done Chekhov at uni. The winds of change are coming, said Dane, theatrically, just the same now as then, and again the self-satisfied bourgeoisie have stopped up their ears and cannot hear it: as if up in the sky, the sound of a broken string. He had his hand up, fingers curled, as if about to grab hold of the string.

  He was about my age, mid-thirties, a raffish guy with a big personality. He was hard not to like. The plan was to do the show guerrilla-style, one performance only, advertised underground on the networks, on an island (the Ranevskaya estate) in the middle of the Yarra. From the direction of the city, as the show neared its end, we would hear the approaching sounds of the machinery of change—chopping, slashing, grinding—and the looped wail of a broken string.

  The front bar of Young and Jacksons was starting to fill. It was just after four. Aiden poured the dregs from the jug. One more? he said.

  I was supposed to be back at the office, I had copy to fill, there’s no way I should have been drinking like that on a Tuesday afternoon. I watched Aiden take the empty jug back to the bar. Here’s my chance, I thought, turn now and run and you could be back at your desk working before he even realises you’re gone. But I seemed stuck to the stool.

  Well, said Aiden, filling our glasses from the new jug, I suppose you can guess what happens next. With my divorce money I offered to fund Dane’s production. It was crazy—and that’s exactly why I wanted it to happen. Aside from being its principal investor I helped out generally around the place, making props, doing the lunch runs. I was still living in the Coburg sharehouse, as far as I could possibly be from the Canberra public servant of old.

  One morning I headed off on the tram a little earlier than usual and when I got to Trades Hall Rani was sitting on the steps. The others hadn’t arrived. We started talking, about the play, mostly. I felt strange, there was a prickle under my skin. She had her hair up; her neck was pale, almost powdery white. That morning we worked on the scene, a tender scene, where the ‘perpetual student’ Trofimov (Jordan) speaks with young Anya (Rani) and waxes lyrical again: It’s so very clear that to begin to live in the present we must first redeem our past. We sat around the edges of the space while Dane worked the actors hard, occasionally turning to us and asking for an opinion. At one point he got Rani up and asked her to forget that she was only seventeen and to seduce shamelessly the older, bumbling Trofimov until she had him on the floor. She did as Dane suggested but I could see she wasn’t ‘in’ it. He called a break. Onward! Don’t fall back! said Jordan, putting a consoling arm around her, and everybody, including Rani, laughed.

  That night when I got home I encouraged my housemates to drink with me, dragging out the bottles I’d kept in my bedroom. I felt strangely free. Come on, one more, I kept saying. I was last into bed—it was well after midnight—still dancing on my thoughts.

  The big performance came around pretty quick after that: 21 April, 2001. Over the previous week, each night under the cover of darkness, we had ferried the gear over to the island and set up: generator, lighting, sets, costumes, props. I was among those who slept out there; we laid low, kept quiet, lit no fires, used torches only when we had to. On the night itself—a cool autumn evening and no sign of rain—the audience members gave a gold-coin donation to the boatman before being rowed over six at a time.

  It was a good crowd, a full house. They loved it, from the bustle of arrival to the final image of Lopakhin, the freed muzhik, taking a petrol-powered whipper snipper to the papier-mâché orchard while the electric guitar screamed and wailed. The cast took three curtain calls. The audience went mad. Dane joined them for the last, taking centre of the line, bending himself into a bow, holding the pause, letting his hair hang, rising and flicking it back.

  While the audience were ferried back off the island, the cast and crew stayed on for the party. Four big ice tubs were dragged out into the main performance area and the doof-doof started. I went back to the dressing room—a tent behind a stand of trees—to congratulate the actors. Rani had taken off her costume and was sitting in front of the mirror in a skirt and powder-blue bra, the top hook undone, the underarm edging slightly frayed. When my lips brushed her cheek it smelled of perfume, makeup and sweat. Dane handed me a beer. You see! he said. I hung around in the dressing room, listening to them talk, before pushing my way through the bushes to the riverbank on the city side where I sat looking at the lights.

  It had been a trip all right, from a public servant with a wife and kids in Canberra just two years before to this. I sat and thought about it. Then I heard a rustle in the bushes behind: it was Rani. The doof-doof had grown louder, as had the voices of the people partying back on the grass. Someone’s going to ring the cops, she said, sitting down next to me with her cup of wine: do you reckon we could swim from here? She was pointing at the far bank, the freeway above it, the cars whooshing past. She’d bunched her hair up and secured it with pins. The moon was high, a half-moon. All our fine conversations are just to divert our own and others’ attention.

  Everything got mixed up in my mind—I leaned over and asked could I kiss her. She didn’t say yes or no but she didn’t move away so I took this as a sign. She kissed me back at first, but then I felt a resistance—a resistance, ha! a rebellion! Her lips tightened, she turned away. But I kept going. She was only—what?—ten, twelve years younger. I put an arm around her and pulled her towards me. I kissed her hard. She bit my lip. I pulled back and she started to scream so I put a hand over her mouth. Please, I said. Please. Her eyes were wide. Please, I said, I’m sorry, don’t scream. I’ll take my hand away but don’t scream. She was huffing through her nose, trying to catch her breath. Please don’t scream, I said, again. My palm was wet with her spit. I drew it away. She gasped. Please, I’m sorry. I lay down next to her and hugged her close. I was crying, a grown man crying! I’m sorry, I kept saying, I’m sorry.

  She got up. It’s okay, she said. They were the only words she’d spoken since the whole thing started. Then she turned and hurried away.

  The first person I saw when I made my way back was Jordan. He’d come down to the river for a piss. I told him I had to go. But the party’s just starting, he said. He picked up the beer he’d pushed down into the grass—he’d already had a few. I told him something had come up, with my ex-wife back in Canberra; I had to leave Melbourne tonight. He said he’d row me back.

  He was high on the success of the night and chattered at me all the way back across the island to where the dinghy was tied up. He was still talking when
he raised the oars. It worked, didn’t it? he was saying. They were with us, weren’t they? Aiden? We must look for a deeper truth, beneath all the banging and shouting, we have to see our faults, change ourselves from the inside, before we can expect to change anything in the world.

  He was talking madly, rowing badly; the current was moving us downstream. We’d gone at least half the length of the island before we were close enough to the opposite bank for me to throw a rope and lasso a bush. The dinghy pulled up with a jerk. Be careful going back, I said. Jordan waved and smiled. I threw the rope; he turned the dinghy around. The doof-doof was fainter, but you could see the glow from the bonfire and hear the voices above the trees. Someone would complain, for sure. I took one last look at Jordan, still in costume as the perpetual student, Trofimov, rowing hard across the current.

  The story was, continued Aiden, that the cops raided the party soon after. The water police came in from the city side while three divvy vans covered the other bank. The partygoers were trespassing, they had no permit, they were disturbing the peace, all that. The cops didn’t treat them nicely. It was in the middle of all this ruckus that someone realised Jordan was missing.

  The dinghy was found next morning downriver, in the shadow of the city, jammed between the bow of a pleasure cruiser and the berth. The body didn’t turn up till two days later; it had washed almost out to sea. Because I was the last to see him alive the cops came round to see me. I answered all their questions, said he was drunk and reckless and that there was nothing I could do. The coroner called it death by misadventure—an understatement, if ever there was one.