‘It’s a reflection of my life, Mother. I’m an adrenaline junkie. I love to slake a deep thirst.’
‘What about your poor stomach?’
‘Doesn’t seem to cause me any problems.’
‘Surely there are things the Taliban can see women doing in civil life?’
‘Yes, there are.’ He reaches for a third plate of custard. ‘They can be female doctors and midwives dealing exclusively with female patients.’
‘And you can’t be a female doctor unless you’re taught by females?’
‘You follow. What they hate is coeducation after puberty. Might fan the flames of illicit love, you see…’
‘How things have changed for you, son. You’re a very different person from the chap with the hookah in the days of Peshawar.’
‘Oh God, that makes me cringe. I’m so lucky to have been able to shake it. I’m sorry to have lived in such a haphazard way.’ He’s scratching his head now and then looking at his fingertips as if he’s caught some nits. ‘But it’s the way of an investigator. I’ve always been curious, needed to know and to go where it takes me. The trouble is that now I know more than I can put to use. I have to suppress a lot of it.’
‘You and Phoebe never talked of a different kind of life?’
‘No. Phoebe was, and probably still is, the complete party girl. No one has ever wanted to impress as much as Phoebe. After all, she was a stunner! And I have to say that sometimes, even often, she did impress. Her whole life was one great, dangerous party at which she sparkled. I was allowed to applaud and to be her husband but never her soul mate. Soulless parents, soulless child.’
‘Charles Green is a nice man.’
‘He had a different mother,’ he sighs. ‘But yes, you’re right. Charles is a brick.’
‘Do you keep up with him?’
‘I’ll see him when I go to Geneva. He’s always pleasant. We’ll go for a drink somewhere, talk for a few hours and then go our separate ways. It’s nice.’
‘Do you talk about Phoebe?’
‘Not really.’ He pulls his hands across his eyes and down his face as if to get rid of his thoughts, then suddenly asks, ‘How is my grandma?’
‘Oh God. I don’t know. I haven’t had her on my mind recently. She’s back in the home but the nursing home section of it, unfortunately. Do you know, it’s the first time in years I haven’t had to spend any time at all during the day thinking and worrying about her. I just haven’t thought of her at all since about a day after I arrived here. Mick just says she’s okay, or that she’s settling in to her new accommodation…’
‘Has she been in hospital?’
‘Oh, I haven’t even told you, have I?’
So we talk about the old lady for a minute or two and about Nin and Dan and very briefly about Checkie’s case against me but it all seems a very long way away and Eli and I are about to be parted again.
I take his small, shapely hand, ‘I love you so, so much,’ I say to him, my complaints stuffed somewhere way down in my socks as we reach for the shoes we took off inside the door.
‘I love you back.’ And off he goes, over the stone-walled yards, waving, to the SUV with the VIP’s entourage on board. The door shuts on him and he jolts off in one of the passenger seats, his beloved palm on the windowpane until I can’t see it anymore for distance and tears.
‘Hoh,’ says Meetra at my elbow. ‘Come.’
We drove back to Kabul, arriving in time for the evening prayer which Meetra performed in front of me.
I sat at her desk as she made her bows and prostrations towards Mecca. Over and over, she reminded herself that there was but one God and that Muhammad was his messenger.
I’m not sure if she believes or if this is ritual. She is, after all, a proud Muslim: it seems to be a good deal more than custom. At the very least, it’s exercise, but Meetra seems to have a deep gladness in her that comes when God acts in her favour. She seems to be a fatalist and to believe in her mission. Maybe her morning singing amounts to chatting with God. I think she has faith; I think her performance of her prayer in front of me was an act of inclusion.
I do not resist Meetra: I accept her completely.
In the absence of God, there was nothing for me to do but watch and think and enter the idea of continuance as a companion in hope.
One day I hope the worms will feed on me and transform my body into good earth that life may feast on me.
My soul? I am myself in the chain of selves. Dan will carry some small part of me out into the future, whether he wants to or not.
There might be a component that will surface again as me-ness in another life. For now, I am who I am and it cannot be otherwise. Perhaps the mind is a continuous, and continuing, invention. Perhaps it has no bounds, but is always growing, emanating away from its source.
The journey to Afghanistan was over. We spent the last day hurtling as usual from place to place. At the tail end of a Turkish trade fair we hunted for preserving equipment for Meetra’s agricultural projects but we found none. What we did find was a ten-year-old boy picking some women up at the entrance to the exhibition hall in the family car. Meetra strode up and ordered him out, while the women grew hysterical with laughter in the back. He drove them everywhere, they said, he’d never been pulled over, he was a good driver, what were they expected to do? Stay at home and wait till he grew up? Meetra’s head was craning for a policeman while little children crawled all over the car’s interior. ‘Meetra!’ I called, laughing myself. ‘Meetra, you can’t reform everything…’
‘But this boy, this boy…’
‘Meetra Jan, it doesn’t matter.’ She’d said it to me often enough and now I said it to her. For once I won. She’s a wonderful, forceful creature, Meetra – a Mad Meg out to reform a hellhole. She has done a lot. The evidence of her work and the work of others like her is everywhere. Of a hellhole, they have helped to make a city of hope, a seed in a country’s heart.
Abdullah, his silken talisman hanging from the rear-vision mirror, drove us to the airport. Edris and Haroon squashed in beside him in front. They dropped us without ceremony at the women’s checkpoint and I was hard put to it then to keep up with Meetra, who, once checked, was through the door before I had time to rezip my flash drives into my backpack. I called, ‘Slow down!’ but she didn’t. She had something on her mind and wasn’t listening. We didn’t see the boys again. Maybe they were touting for a car park, I’ll never know, but obviously there was more to their quick disappearance than that. Perhaps it was that Meetra didn’t want to grant Edris the time for his marriage to his very young arranged bride. I know they argued about Edris not taking responsibility for his own choices and not having a more mature outlook about women. It was hard for the boys being so far from home and the customary way of doing things, but Meetra’s situation is easily as hard, running an aid organisation from the other side of the world and needing to be able to rely utterly on her staff in Kabul. Imagined feats and exploits have to be matched by real ones. She doesn’t say no to the boys but she does say, ‘Consider what you are doing.’ And she makes it known when she disagrees with their choices.
The long journey home was reflective and much quieter than the journey out. There was space to lie stretched out on the aircraft seats, just sleeping and watching movies and sorting out the images I’d taken. We wandered around the airport in KL and snacked on French pastries in the patisserie; I was glad to wrap my mouth around some real coffee. We straggled into Melbourne in the early hours. Mick was there to meet us and somehow we managed to pack in all the purchases that Meetra had made to sell for her fundraising.
As we drove out Chadstone way to drop Meetra home, I saw that she was trembling all over. I put my hand on her upper arm, tenderly, but she just said, ‘Hoh! It doesn’t matter.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s nothing.’
But it was something. Not anger, I felt, but exhaustion. She had never paused in all our time away. Apart from visiting
bereaved families – of which there were too many – she had visited officials in refugee agencies, food-distribution centres, educational institutions and women’s centres. We had met female judges and politicians, female principals of schools and directors of agricultural centres. We’d met women hosting the projects of Meetra’s group and women in NGOs. We’d also met men, plenty of them – senators, vendors, teachers, instructors, mechanics and, of course, engineers. How many engineers does it take to run Afghanistan? If you want to impress, stick ‘Engineer’ in front of your name. Once I stood on Meetra’s roof and watched while a man who might have called himself an engineer laid tarred material on a neighbouring roof: he set about burning any obstructing debris out of the gutters with an acetylene torch then set the bolt of material alight with it and kicked the bolt out with his foot until it was all played out. Then he sealed the edges. Meanwhile five possible engineers stood by watching, not raising a finger. It reminded me of the men at the ford when Edris got the car stuck, all contemplation and no action – engineers, the lot of them.
Meetra’s resolve is enormous; at every encounter she risks rebuke, but she handles it all with such mastery and such certainty in her manner that she is rarely challenged. She knows she is a person who gets her way and is unused to refusal. These are the qualities needed to rehabilitate a nation after the guts have been torn from it by war.
Meetra’s Australian household was asleep as we sorted her banners and carpets and embroideries from mine inside the huge front door – an Afghan door to be sure, not a weakness in the fortifications, but a portal strong enough to keep the enemy out and wide enough to let in family and friends. She had brought home far more than I had and my bags were stuffed with her things. At last there were the Kuchi dress and the carpet and the little knick-knacks I’d brought home for my family at the bottom of my case along with my scant supply of personal things, and we left, but before we did, I took her trembling hand in mine and held it steady so that the warmth of friendship and admiration would reach her. I hugged her. ‘You’re very, very brave, Meetra, and tireless. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were trembling with fear and emotion now you are home. Be soothed. I appreciate everything you’ve done and all the work you will do. You’re more stubborn than a warlord.’
And she is. Meetra is one of the truly brave women of the world. She could well be targeted and killed doing what she does, but she will do it, she will press on, believing that there is a right way to do things. The cow will jump over the moon. It’s in her.
When we opened our front door, little feet came pounding down the hall to meet me and a curly-headed boy flung himself at my middle. ‘Sibella!’
Nin slid out of my studio, where there is a spare bed, and slipped her loving arm around my neck. A laden lump of humanity, we squeezed our way down the hall to my little sitting room and fell in a fond heap. Then there was hot chocolate and cake and… JOY! A big whisky and soda. ‘Return to normality,’ said Nin, as she balanced a Kuchi herder girl’s very large neck ornament on her swelling belly.
‘Everything going all right there?’ I asked.
‘All good.’
‘Know what it is yet?’
‘Yep.’
‘Are you telling?’
‘Nope, you’ll just have to wait to find out.’
‘How are Princess and Lightning going, Dan?’ But Dan was asleep, an embroidered Afghan hat pulled down over his eyes.
David had been active while I was away. Once he realised that Nin was back in Melbourne, he began terrorising her, jumping on trams she was on, and following her till she had to escape into a women’s toilet, where she rang the police and told them she was being stalked.
‘He was still standing outside when the police arrived,’ she said. ‘They rang me inside and asked me to come out and identify him, which I did. Then they arrested him, but he got sick in jail and now he’s in hospital. I’m not going to visit him. Even if he is dying, I’m not going to visit him. He lobbed rocks at your house and, I don’t know whether you noticed it on your way in, but he’s broken your front window. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it to be fixed.’
‘It’s not the money, Nin…’
‘I’ve got a job.’
‘What!’
‘Well, if you can go to Afghanistan, I can get a job. It’s a guest event at NGV Australia. I’m going to organise a big drawing show of the postwar painters – Reg Sorby, Leslie Hallett and…wait for it…Henry Coretti!’
‘How?’
‘Oh they know me there. I’m not as stupid as I look. They know I’m Henry’s granddaughter and I know quite a bit about him. Not everything’s in the bloody Siècle Trust. A friend of mine has just received a big promotion to Curator of Drawings and I went in to see her and she took me down to the store and we went through the collection and reckoned there was a really good show in there. So I’ll be working on that until the baby’s born in November and the hang will be in March.’
‘That’s marvellous!’
‘Yeah. Checkie’ll be spitting chips,’ and then there was a change of tone. ‘Oh…there’s a letter for you from Raven and Barratt in that pile. Guess it’s about the case. I’ve been out and finished all the documentation with Lexie. I think we should say we own it jointly and then Checkie will have to sue me as well.’
‘But what if she wins the case? It’s our bread and butter.’
‘You need to paint and teach, Bel, that’s your bread and butter.’
‘Well, that’s right, but I still haven’t much faith in my capacity to make money at it. My last show didn’t give me much more than what it cost to hang.’
‘Enough already.’ She sounds just like Allegra. She never used to. She bundles up Dan and carries him off to his loft bed in the studio. We squeeze past the door, beckoning Mick to come and hand Dan up. The bed is flying a pirate flag and has the plastic rib cage from Dan’s kit skeleton hanging over the side on a piece of string. ‘That’s the anchor,’ Nin nods, ‘and that’s some hair from your hairbrush tangled in it: that’s the seaweed.’ She lies Dan down and a hail of binoculars, toy compasses and maps comes over on top of us.
Yes, the trip to Afghanistan is very much over and, with it, the clarity of thought I had away from Stella.
‘I’m sorry I can’t seem to die,’ she says, catching me in my hangover of other emotions. I fear there will be no graceful death, no choosing. All will go on being silly, crabbed and half lost. She will have been the Midnight Knitter, the madwoman who passed long years just knitting anything, driving needles into stitches, turning corners, making heels in God-knows-what-garment; she, whose hands became too crippled to go on; she, who saw the light briefly, long enough anyway to chuck out the garmentry in favour of mowing down the populace of Hawthorn East in a motorised buggy; she who must surely be at the end of the road, surely… Please God, she can’t be so unpleasing to your gaze that you’ll never take her in.
She looks up at me with those hazel eyes of hers – eyes that have sunk a thousand ships – from the chair where she now spends most of her time. ‘You’d better bring a brick in a sock next time you come.’
She shares her new ward with three other very old women – although none of them as old as she is: she is ninety-nine. Wendy, Nin, Daniel and Mick came in with birthday cake and had a party to celebrate while I was away. ‘Where’s she?’ she asked. ‘Afghanistan,’ they said. ‘Oh yes, I’ll bet. After-man-istan, you mean.’
After the great lengths taken to retrieve some of her hearing, what she hears now is others saying, ‘Ner-erse, ner-erse,’ and ‘What do I do nee-ow?’ and a trembling mumble with a silvery refrain that sounds like beads being said over and over again along a strident chord.
Liz, the heroine of the Christmas-cat disaster, is looking after her. ‘She is so funny! We just adore her in here,’ she says.
In the common room, from where Liz and I have wheeled her to the ward, there were blackbirds chirruping at the windows. Had we not been quite so far away we c
ould have seen the children’s playground and the parklands where tall white-trunked gum trees play the summer wind gusts like fiddlers in an orchestra farewelling a ship, a kind of Edwardian weatherboard liner, bound for the ultimate destination, trailing red-brick wings.
The old claw points towards me and she strains her head so much turning to look over her shoulder at Liz that a bloodless stripe forms down the bridge of her nose. It’s a fine little nose, elegantly shaped, one of her best features, although she wishes it longer because, among Mottes, short noses are synonymous with syphilis.
‘She’s a research fellow,’ she enunciates very carefully out of the blue as if she’d read my wish for more decorum. ‘You know, Sir Macfarlane Burnet and all that.’
‘Really?’ says Liz, smiling at me, her soft, brown eyes deepened by acceptance. She is trying to coax Stella’s foot into a new slipper.
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘I’m a painter; it’s a long time since I worked at the university and I wasn’t a research fellow, I was helping one of the scientists with a hobby of his. He was the Research Fellow: capital R, capital F mind, Liz. Important personage.’
I’ve liked Liz from the start for her diplomacy. ‘Your mother’s very proud of you,’ she says. ‘It’s Isobel this and Isobel that. Science and art. There must be some clever genes in your family.’
‘There are,’ says my mother, who normally wouldn’t have heard that. ‘I’m related to the Edinburgh Gregorys. They were surgeons and mathematicians.’
‘You’ve bucked her up,’ says Liz. ‘She’s been rather down in the dumps since you went away. She’s had one or two good spats with your nice gentleman friend but apart from that I think something’s gone out of her.’
‘She loves a good skite. She loves having something to skite about.’
‘The older we get, the less there is of that,’ says Liz, ‘but she’s been winning a few games of Bingo lately. Wendy’s been coming in and helping her. She plays by her own rules – when Father O’Brian calls out a number, if she hasn’t got it, she puts a milk bottle top on an empty square – if she has got the number, and realises that she has, she leaves it up to whoever’s playing with her to put a lid on the right square and somehow or other she gets to call out “Bingo!” all the time.’
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