Demons

by Wayne Macauley

  Anyway, said Abbie, to cut a long story short, some time after this Ange told me she knew someone who worked in the remote communities up in the Territory. Apparently they’re not so diligent with their record-keeping and there is no Board of Suits to tell you you’re evil. You do what you can with the money you’re given. That might suit me for a while. Abbie stared at the road ahead. Ah, she said, perfect timing. She was pointing at a road sign: Oodnadatta 10. So, she said, what’s your story?

  They all sat in silence for a while, thinking: Oh, I see, now we’re going to get another story, Megan’s story within the story, and if that’s the case then maybe we should look around for some more wine? But then Megan, reading the room, said: No, that’s it, that’s the end. When we got to Oodnadatta I decided not to go all the way with her. The car rental company said they could get me a replacement the following day and would put me up for the night. And Abbie, she was weird—it might have been true, I don’t know—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more of her stories, or for that matter tell mine. She dropped me off. I said thanks and good luck. But I couldn’t help looking at her crew cut as she drove away, thinking about the supervisor’s expression and the plumber pulling the hair out of the toilet, the faces of the board when she got dragged up before them. I wonder if stories can change how things are in the world or if they’re just us telling others what we think the world looks like? Do you know what I mean?

  It was dark. Lauren pulled the curtains closed. Do you want to stoke the fire? she said. Evan did. Megan was still on the couch, thinking about her story and the question she’d asked at the end. Yes, said Adam, I think they do. Really? said Megan. Does me pointing a camera at a blackfella change anything?

  Nothing changes anything, said Leon. They all looked at him. The power’s elsewhere, he said, always has been—but no-one knows where elsewhere is. It might have been the politicians once, a long time ago. Writers and artists once had power to change things. People say it’s business now, global corporations, the media, the new media—but I don’t believe that either. They’re powerless too, they’re chasing an idea of power that even they know is elsewhere. People power? Nah. I don’t believe it; no left-winger can believe it after what happened to Soviet Russia. Maybe that’s power’s natural property, said Leon, to coagulate, concentrate. Stalin. Mao. Pol Pot. Mugabe. The excitable energy and goodwill of the people, that great maelstrom of peopleness, all that fantastic fire is eventually distilled into one single despot. Maybe by its very nature power can’t be a spread out thing. And that was the trouble, for someone like me, a journalist with a conscience: no-one changed anything unless he or she was lucky enough to be the one who became the despot, the right person in the right place at the right time in whom all that power was held. So no, Megan, or Adam, sorry, stories change nothing.

  Megan was about to strike at her brother and his insidious idea, the way he’d turned her melancholy moment into his own smart brand of nihilism, but before she had a chance Marshall was talking. I’ve got a story, he said. Do you reckon I can tell it? Everyone looked at him. Shouldn’t we eat? said Leon. Marshall threw his hands up. There you were, all hoeing into me, giving it to us politicians—we’re liars, we don’t do anything. Well, do you think I’m happy with the situation? (He was on his own trip again.) I mean, you talked about those people before, Leon—Lee?—in your story, the protesters, everyone shouting: We want to change the world! But what did they achieve? You try to make one happy, you put the other one’s nose out of joint. We’re too polite, we have to be. We’ve become polite-icians. And why? (No-one knew whether Marshall wanted an answer.) Because there are always two sides, he said. Never three. Or four. Or twelve and a half. It’s always on the one hand this and on the other that. So how do you get hold of an issue that’ll actually give you some traction? Politicians aren’t leaders. Once were, not now. We’re followers, folks. Real leaders are going to have to come from somewhere else. Sport maybe. I don’t know. Guerrilla knitting. He drank. Anyway, he said, it’s short, trust me—and I don’t think it’ll hurt anyone’s feelings.

  They all agreed that maybe they did have time for one more before dinner.

  Well, said Marshall, putting his glass back on the table, this story is something another pollie told me just after I’d taken up my seat. It’s about a Canberra backbencher and the problem he had with this guy in his electorate. Maybe stories don’t change things—Megan, Leon—but things in the world become stories, don’t they? It was yours, Megan, said Marshall, that made me think of it. It’s about real estate, too, in a way, which should give a few people here a few laughs. It’s called Like Bartleby. Contrary to the secret opinions of certain people in this room, I did pay attention at uni and if you remember in first year we studied Melville and he had a story about a clerk in an office who refuses to go home and actually ends up sleeping there and his boss, the guy telling the story, doesn’t know what to do. Well this story is a bit like that, said Marshall, and he picked up the stick. That’s why I’ve called it Like Bartleby.

  Marshall: Like Bartleby…

  The backbencher’s name was Payley and his seat—unlike mine, which I wrestled from the blue bloods by a one per cent margin—was rusted on Labor, twenty per cent margin at the last election. Mostly outer suburbs with lots of new housing estates full of aspirational lower middle class which, as we know, is contemporary Labor’s core constituency. All mortgaged to the hilt. They’re popping up everywhere out there, these estates, like mushrooms after the rain. Fair enough. Why wouldn’t the farmers want to sell? The land is worth jack shit as farmland but for housing it’s worth millions. Most get sold off the plan: some newlyweds go out for a drive on a Sunday, turn off into one of the new streets that have been cut through the paddocks, have a look around and say: Yes, this block here, this looks nice. They visit the display suite, pick a house—the Fortitude, say, or the Liberty—and whack down their deposit. Six months later, they move in. It’s a pretty efficient system, when you think about it, if anything it’s been working a bit too well. But occasionally you get a spanner in the works.

  Payley first got wind of it through his electorate officer; a reporter from the local rag had rung to say he was running a story and would his boss like to comment? The story was about a young Indian couple who had recently bought a house off the plan, they were expecting their first child and were pretty keen to move in. The woman was seven-and-a-half months pregnant. But the house was only a few weeks away from finished when someone started squatting in it. The couple had gone out there one Sunday for a look—there were still a few fittings to go in and some last-minute painting to be done—but when they put their faces to the window they saw a man sleeping on a mattress inside. They went to the display suite and spoke to the woman but she couldn’t do anything and suggested they ring the police. The police came round and looked in through the window and banged on the door and then things started to get complicated. The couple said it was their house, yes, but naturally they weren’t living in it yet, and no, they didn’t have any documents with them to prove ownership. The cops banged on the door a few more times. Still the man inside didn’t move. They suggested the couple take it up with the housing company—surely they were responsible for security while the house was being built?—and if they still had problems they should try the police again.

  But after that it all went completely off the rails.

  When the painters arri
ved the following Tuesday a small group was already gathered out the front of the house. They were all black. One of them, a well-dressed young woman, explained to the painters that she was a lawyer and that the house was off-limits because of a land-title claim currently underway; they would need to remove themselves from the site and check in with the developer: they would certainly not be doing any work here today. The painters left. The police arrived. The Aboriginal lawyer explained to them how the man inside was exercising his right to sit down in the land of his forebears and that the police would need to cast their judicial net a bit wider than mere ‘trespass’ if they wanted to stay involved. The police went away to confer.

  About a week later, the electorate officer pulled Payley aside and told him what was going on and how the local paper was planning to run a story the following Monday. Payley cleared his social calendar and went out there on Saturday morning for a look.

  Well, as you can imagine. There were about a dozen people now camped permanently in the front yard—still just dirt and building rubble with a portable toilet to one side. There was a hand-painted sign—Always Was, Always Will Be—strung along the fence and a black, red and yellow flag tied across the front window. Payley explained to them who he was, and how he was therefore the one probably best positioned to listen to their grievances. To that end, said Payley, he would like to talk to the gentleman inside. One of them got on their phone and made a call and told him to wait.

  Payley stood on the footpath. He was wearing his suit and the day was already hot; the sky blue, the sun fierce, he could feel the sweat gathering under his arms. He let his eye roam over the landscape that made up, let’s be honest, a big part of his electorate, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw: scrappy paddocks with new houses going up in them, bulldozers parked in front of mounds of dirt, shiny cars cruising the streets and circling the courts and gathering at the display suite back there at the roundabout. My country, he thought. The protesters in the front yard were all watching him, quietly, with vacant stares—someone somewhere had a radio on, previewing the football. Then he saw a flash-looking red hatchback coming down the street.

  It was the Aboriginal lawyer, dressed in a sharp skirt and jacket and knee-length black leather boots. Payley told the lawyer who he was but this didn’t seem to impress her. She explained the situation and the legal precedents on which it was based. The old man inside—she kept calling him ‘Uncle’—was exercising his basic human rights and until these rights were tested in an international court of law she was not sure what Payley, as a local member, could do. He tried to explain to her how parliamentary democracy worked, how the couple who had bought the house in good faith from the developer were as much entitled to a sympathetic ear as her so-called uncle, and as their duly elected local member he was that ear. It is always better to avoid the courts if we can, he said, and he explained how as a Labor man he was certainly alert to her cause and the deeper issues underpinning it but that he also believed in the power of honest conversation. I should at least, he said, have the opportunity to hear your uncle state his case.

  By now the Saturday house shoppers were beginning to cruise the streets of the estate: whitebread Aussies, Chinese, Indians, Africans, Middle Easterns, all slowing down or stopping to look. The lawyer led Payley to the front door and opened it. He expected it to be cool inside but it was in fact hot and stuffy, with the air an oppressive mixture of cooked food, fresh paint, plaster, plastic and human breath. The air conditioner wasn’t connected. All right, she said, he’s in the lounge room, and she went back outside.

  Payley could hear the radio in the front yard and muffled voices coming from somewhere inside the house. He passed a room in which people sat cross-legged in a circle playing some kind of board game: a few of them looked up. He walked further down the hall, past another room, this one with kids lying on their backs on mattresses with their game-screens held right up to their faces, then past the kitchen with something simmering on the stove. It was an open-plan house with a big living area out the back and a small paved courtyard that stopped abruptly at a treated pine fence. The living room was bare except for a double mattress and blanket in one corner. It was on this mattress that Bartleby was sitting.

  He would have been in his seventies, at least, with a mop of white hair and a long white beard, his hands arthritic claws, the lines on his face carved as if out of black stone. He was blind, or almost; when Payley entered the room he could see Bartleby turn his head and look vaguely in his direction but his eyes never focused properly on him. They had a milky sheen. Payley hung in the doorway until he was sure the old man was at least aware of his presence and wouldn’t be scared by his voice. He introduced himself as the recently elected local member of parliament. I’ve come for a visit, he said, to see what’s going on—there are all sorts of rumours, as you can imagine. Bartleby was still looking through Payley. He didn’t speak. Can I sit? asked Payley. He took his silence as a yes and sat cross-legged opposite—he’d never discussed things with a blackfella before but he figured that’s what you do.

  So anyway, said Marshall, going on, there they were: Payley the backbencher in his suit, Bartleby the blackfella in his old track pants and hoodie. Payley started by saying that, basically, there was a problem. A young couple had paid a lot of money to live in this house, hard-earned money, he said, money that doesn’t come easy these days, and clearly they were upset that a group of people who had paid no money—no money at all—were now living in it instead. You see how this might seem unfair? Bartleby didn’t answer. It is the dream of every young couple to own their own home, said Payley, to make a nest—the woman is expecting a baby—and you can see just by looking around at this estate here which is almost entirely pre-sold how many young couples are looking to make a nest and how many houses and estates we’ll need to satisfy them. We can’t just let anyone in to take these houses, they’re not here for the taking, they’re a reward for hard work and frugality.

  Bartleby had his head cocked to one side, as if one ear heard better than the other. Payley left a decent pause; Bartleby filled it.

  Now I’ve sat down, he said, I won’t be getting up.

  That was it—and even these few words sounded like they had struggled to get out. His voice wavered, his lips barely moved. (That’s what made me think of the Bartleby story, said Marshall, and how this guy was him.)

  Yes, said Payley, I understand how you’ve sat down, but you see my problem? We can’t all just sit down where we want when we want, that would mean anarchy. Some places you can sit down, some you can’t; a public place, you can sit down there, most of the time, with some exceptions, but a private place, you can’t sit down there without permission. Do you understand? Payley was treating him like a child because he was acting like one. To get permission to sit down here, he said, you would need to go through a whole lot of processes—I won’t go through them with you, they would make your head spin—with the purpose basically of getting permission to sit down from the person who bought and therefore owns the property you want to sit down in. That’s what ownership means.

  It was only then he realised some of the others in the house had gathered in the hallway at the far end of the living room to listen: young kids, a couple of young women, a middle-aged man. (The middle-aged man was the only one, thought Payley, who looked properly black, the others looked more or less white to his eyes—the kid with his face poking out
from behind the middle-aged man’s leg for all intents and purposes was white.) I am explaining to Uncle here, he said, turning, about ownership, how someone has already bought this house and to sit here like this, like Uncle is doing, is unfortunately against the law. At last one of the women spoke. She had broad hips and a wild head of hair. Uncle, she said, are you all right? This fulla’s the one who doesn’t belong here, not you, she said. Payley could see he was up against it, so he tried another tack. Come in, he said to the woman, come and join us, I have nothing to hide. On the radio out the front, very faintly, he could hear the sound of the siren to start the first quarter of the football and the distant roar of the crowd.

  The group in the hallway all trooped in and lined themselves up behind Bartleby along the glass wall that looked onto the courtyard. Payley now realised that more people were behind them, backed up into the hall, black people, or black people of various shades, and white people too, hippie types. By the time they had lined themselves up with the others there were at least twenty people in the room.

  Listen, all of you, said Payley, beginning to raise his voice, I sympathise with what you’re doing here, I understand the concept of prior ownership, I’m not stupid, but you’re going boots and all into something you really don’t understand. There are processes, comrades, which everyone has to go through. I’ve just explained this to Uncle here. The colour of your skin or the shape of your eyes, this doesn’t matter; there are forms you have to fill in and sign, documentation you have to provide, payments you have to make. I’m sorry, but the state government is making nearly fourteen thousand dollars stamp duty out of the sale of this place: who here is going to come up with that sort of cash? You have to do the paperwork, he said, if you want to get anywhere in this world.