An Accidental Terrorist

by Steven Lang

  When they’d finished eating, the hippies announced they were going for a walk. They went around the back of the homestead.

  ‘A walk my arse,’ said Anthill.

  ‘Fucken drongos,’ Stevo said. He mimed holding a joint to his mouth and sucked in loudly. He lay back on the grass, crossed his booted feet and yawned. He put his hands behind his head, amongst the tousled mass of blond hair, and closed his eyes. His face, vaguely familiar, was almost handsome in a larrikin way, except for, or perhaps because of, a certain cruelty.

  Kelvin would have liked to go with the hippies, not because of any particular affinity with them, simply out of the desire for a joint. A smoke, never mind that he’d promised himself he’d give it away, would have helped this kind of work, easing the passage of the afternoon. He could have gone; he’d seen their invitation – the meeting of eyes and the slight tilt of the head – but he’d been too slow to move. It had felt like it would be premature to abandon the company of the Eden men.

  Stevo stirred himself. He pointed towards the house. ‘How come you put up with these cunts, Al?’

  Al was engaged in the process of extracting a packet of Winfield Blue from his shirt pocket.

  ‘Al?’

  ‘They do the work,’ he said, the cigarette between his lips.

  ‘You know what they’re doin’ don’t ya? It’s not like you need to stretch your fucken legs.’

  ‘It’s not exactly a workplace health and safety issue,’ Al said.

  ‘They’re all on the fucken dole, growing marijuana out there.’ He turned to Kelvin. ‘You watch out for them mate. They’ll be onto you.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Just watch it.They’re full of shit, mate.’

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ Al said.

  ‘I say what I think,’ Stevo said.

  ‘See the fucken wimmin,’ Anthill said. He was a small man, Stevo’s sidekick, narrow in the face, but also in his manner; it was unclear whether his nickname derived from his christian name or his appearance.

  ‘What about the women, Anthill?’ Davo said, smirking. He cupped his hands over his chest. ‘Is it the tits you like, swinging free?’

  Anthill grinned, showing his yellow teeth.

  ‘You fucking wish,’ Davo said.

  When he saw they were laughing at him Anthill lowered his head.

  ‘Fucken greenies,’ Stevo said.

  ‘They’re just people,’ Al said.

  ‘Jackshit.’

  ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’

  ‘You’d waste your breath.’

  Anthill kicked Stevo’s leg. The others had come out from behind the homestead. When they reached them they sat on the logs, smiling, as if sharing some secret joke, like a row of jackanapes. One of them, apropos of nothing, said, ‘Right.’

  ‘Yeah,’ another agreed.

  ‘Shall we then?’ Al said, standing.

  The afternoon was harder than the morning. The swinging bag wore a strip of flesh off his shoulder and there were blisters on his hands. Every step involved placing his foot on broken ground, up or down, neither easier than the other.

  Stevo came abreast of him, planting two trees for every one of his.

  ‘Buggered, mate?’

  ‘A bit,’ Kelvin said.

  ‘Thought you’d be.You don’t look like the type.’

  Kelvin stopped. ‘What type is that?’

  ‘No offence, mate,’ Stevo said. ‘You don’t look like you done much of this shit.’

  ‘More’n you’d know,’ Kelvin said.

  ‘I reckon I seen your face somewhere,’ Stevo said.

  That would have been eight, nine years ago in school, Kelvin thought, having placed him now, an older boy, a bully even then. ‘You been to Sydney?’ he said. ‘That’s where I come from,’ working the lie, watching it work.

  ‘Up the Smoke, eh? That’s what I meant. It’s not like this up there, is it? Not so hard.’

  Stevo pulled out a packet of rollies and made a cigarette, offered the pack to Kelvin. ‘I was up there once,’ he said. ‘Got some cousins who live in Strathfield.You know Strathfield?’

  ‘Sydney’s a big place.’

  If he’d had more energy Kelvin would have mustered up some real dislike for the man, but he was too tired. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, then picked up his spade.

  ‘I’m going slow,’ he said, ‘I better get back to it. Thanks for the smoke.’

  Stevo watched, leaning on his tool.

  ‘See that bag,’ he said, ‘you need to tie it back. Bastard the way it swings around. Use a bit of baling twine. Some in the truck.’

  three

  It is the usual crowd, but for once she does not care. The main house is warm and light, full of people and noise and the smell of cooking. Some days she hates the isolation of her life so much she is grateful for any distraction.

  She hangs the kerosene lamp behind the door, telling Suzy to shoo – such a shy dog, tangling herself between her legs, eager to leave, too scared to go, a thin whippet of a thing – and goes directly to the kitchen, weaving her way through the chairs around the long table, smiling, nodding to everyone. Andy, the new man, is sitting by himself, reading, his skinny legs in stove-pipe jeans sticking out from the armchair. He glances up at her as she passes and she raises her hand to him as a concession to politeness. In truth she cannot bear the man, neither the look of him nor his manner. Nor does she imagine he holds a higher opinion of her.

  Eva leans forward for a kiss, floured hands held out to the side to avoid spoiling her clothes. Yes, she’d love some help, would she cut the apples? She’s making a crumble. Always this staple food, beans and rice, fruit and vegetables, the room thick with the blue smoke from the frying pan even as Eva pats out more lentil burgers between her plump fingers.

  Jessica washes her hands and sets up at the bench, looking out on the room, safe behind her job with the apples. The main house is the only building with electricity. The bare bulbs hanging on their cords expose the paucity of the furnishings. It is a group house, shared by all, owned by none.

  Before long Eva comes back and says not to bother peeling them, just to core and slice. ‘It’s only a crumble,’ she says.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ Jessica replies, but then sees that saying this has upset Eva. As if Jessica’s insistence on peeling some apples is a deliberate attempt to put her down. As if it were a class issue or something. The problem is, she thinks, that in the last year and a bit she’s managed to lose the social skills for even the simplest operation. She’s hardly been in the room five minutes and already she’s put everyone offside.

  When she first visited the Farm, researching material on alternative communities for Making Waves, the Greenpeace magazine – the one, she always said, putting herself down, that goes out to everyone who supports them whether they want it or not – these people had seemed fascinating, a wonderful assortment of eccentrics who had not only thought about things but had acted on their conclusions. She had jumped at the opportunity to buy in.

  How quickly they have become simply human.

  Martin is in his usual position at the head of the table. He and Sally are talking to Jim and some man she doesn’t know, sitting with his back to her. Their children are playing a game which involves running through the room yelling, cardboard tubes like swords in their hands. There are several other couples, they’re almost all couples, except for Jim, and Jim, being congenitally opposed to monogamy, doesn’t count.

  Sally brings the stranger over.

  ‘This is Kelvin,’ she says. ‘We picked him up hitchhiking on the way back from Melbourne. I just knew he would end up here.’ She gives a silly feminine laugh, delighted by her own prescience.‘Jess and I go way back,’ she says to the man, pleased to be the author of their connection, to, in some way, claim them both.

  Jessica puts down the peeler and offers to shake his hand, looks up and meets his eyes, notices that he is more than simply pretty. But young. Lo
oking her over. She blushes. The pale skin of her face, with its famously rosy cheeks, goes embarrassingly pink. He says he’s working on the pine plantation (a fact not designed to endear him to her, but then he isn’t to know). He’s just passing through.

  And before anything else can happen Jim comes over and he puts an arm around the young man’s shoulder too, as if he, like Sally, wants to state some sort of ownership. She picks up the knife again.

  ‘You’re not still planting pine trees, are you Jim?’ she says.

  ‘That’s where I met this bloke.Thought I’d rescue him from the Eden boys.’

  Jessica cuts into an apple, quartering it. With a smaller knife she takes out the core, cutting from the flower, like her mother taught her, popping out the small ellipse of seeds.

  ‘We’re almost finished Rosehill,’ he says, bumbling on.

  Jim’s a big man, with great wafts of jet-black hair on his head and face, and a kind of hauteur, generated as much as anything by his size and his plummy voice. At first she’d thought he was cold and distant, a snob, but it’s not so; when he feels safe he is, in fact, like a Labrador pup, all over everyone without any apparent awareness of how they might feel about it. He contains oceans of indiscriminate friendship, some of which is clearly lapping around the stranger.

  ‘It’s great country over there,’ he says to her. ‘You should see it, I had no idea. The Coalwater does a long loop in this direction. That hill on the other side of the property runs right down to it.’

  She likes him well enough. She even slept with him a couple of times – almost impossible not to, he is like a force of nature, but equally transient. He loves walking, and this is their common ground.They share the process of exploration, telling each other what new creek they have followed up, what clearings they’ve found.Tonight she is scratchy, she has no time for it.

  ‘So you’re planting right down to the river? They’ve cleared right to the edge?’

  ‘They didn’t have to,’ Jim says. ‘There wasn’t much growing there, a few scraggly gums, a bit of wattle and ti-tree.’

  She cuts into another apple. ‘Which they removed so as to get in a few more of their fucking pine trees.’ The fuck word somehow louder and dirtier, more like a swear word, when it comes from her mouth. But Jim is oblivious to even this message, he’s arguing the point.

  ‘Reforesting some of that land isn’t going to hurt the river,’ he says.

  ‘Reforesting with an exotic, Jim. One that will adversely affect river flows.You know that as well as I do. It’s called the Coalwater. Why do you think that is? Because before white people came here it ran deep and black.’

  There are three people standing on the other side of the bench, Jim, Sally and Kelvin, there is a whole room full of people, but she no longer cares, she’s had enough, although of what is not quite clear. The tiny scene with Eva perhaps, or Sally’s silliness, her disappointment in them all when seen through the eyes of this new man. Everything really; the blue smoke from the lentil burgers and the ugliness of the room combined with the knowledge that she’s going away to Sydney in a couple of weeks to do something important. Even if it’s only for a little while.

  ‘Come on Jessica,’ Jim says. ‘You know I don’t like what they’re doing any better than you.’ He gives a little laugh to defuse the situation, turning to the others for support.

  ‘The difference is you work for them.’

  ‘They’re the only gig in town.’

  ‘Big deal.’

  ‘It is a big deal,’ he says, the words coming out loud, momentarily silencing the room. ‘Some of us have to work for a living.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? That I don’t? Are you saying that your need for extra cash justifies you doing anything, as long as it’s the only gig in town?’

  Jim glances at the others again, but Sally has turned away. She’s checking out Martin who is talking to the children. Perhaps he’s trying to get them to shut the fuck up. Some hope. Kelvin is blank-faced, neutral.

  ‘Of course not,’ Jim says. ‘But this isn’t so bad.They’re planting the things anyway, why shouldn’t I work? It’s not like it’s the chipmill – ’

  ‘It is the fucking chipmill.’

  ‘Bullshit. It’s nothing to do with the mill. It’s the softwood industry. It’s based in Bombala – ’

  ‘It’s the same thing exactly, different owners but working hand in hand. We should be out there stopping them, not working for the bastards.’

  Jim’s shoulders drop. It’s another aspect of his puppy nature: instead of fighting, he rolls over and shows his belly.

  ‘Shit. I’m sorry,’ she says, her anger melting at the gesture. ‘I just get pissed off seeing all these plantations. In another twenty years this place will look like Bavaria.’ She looks at her pale hands on the board and the slices of fruit, browning. ‘I didn’t mean to go off at you. But this is serious stuff. We have to make a stand.’

  ‘That’s right, we have to make a stand,’ Andy says, calling out from where he is slumped in his chair.

  He gets up, scattering the dogs. He’s tall and good-looking, but in a mechanistic way, in the same way a mannequin is good-looking, his hair tied back in a ponytail, his strong chin disguised by a scrappy beard. He moves in the room with force. She doesn’t like the way the others, even the dogs, yield to him.

  ‘How do you propose we do that, Jess-i-ca?’

  He likes to say her name so that it comes out as three syllables, as a child might, as if he’s constantly undermining her.

  ‘I have my own ideas about that An-du-rew,’ she says. Perhaps that’s what’s missing from his handsomeness: the eyes. His eyes are clear, even startling, but they lack even the beginnings of compassion.

  Eva has left the stove and is standing to the side. ‘Are those apples done yet?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, yes. I mean, nearly, I’ve four left to do.’

  ‘Well give me the pot and I’ll get them started.’

  She bustles in, all self-righteous perspiration and flour, swinging the big pot over to the stove.

  ‘Guess it depends what you want to take a stand against,’ Andy says.

  ‘The rape of our forests,’ Jessica says, distracted by Eva, the words out before she can stop herself, ‘by anyone or any organisation. The chipmill in particular.’

  ‘The rape,’ Andy says, savouring the sound. ‘You feminists love that word, don’t you?’

  Jessica picks up another apple and begins peeling it. The little pieces of green skin fall on the board.

  ‘You don’t have to be a feminist to want to stop the exploitation of our forests.’ There is an alarming teariness in her voice.

  ‘So what do you want to do about it?’ Andy asks.

  To her surprise he’s not going in for the kill.

  ‘Lobby. Demonstrate; occupy the forests, not work for the bastards.’

  ‘Very good, but not very, what d’you call it? Effective. They cut it down and you write letters. Fat lot of good your letters to Telecom have done. I don’t see any telephones, do you?’

  ‘We don’t just write letters, we organise meetings, we get people involved.’

  ‘More fucking words,’ Andy says. ‘They fuck with our forests, you talk about it.’

  ‘Sounds like you guys could do with a smoke,’ Martin says, pushing in, handing a joint to Andy who takes a long pull, looking at Jessica all the time, then offers it to her, the smoke still in his lungs.

  She pushes it away. ‘Contrary to popular opinion I don’t think marijuana is the solution to every ill,’ she says.

  For a moment Andy demonstrates what appears to be honest amazement, then bursts into laughter, smoke emerging from his nose and mouth, caught in his hair so that he seems to be alight, bending over and coughing and laughing, slapping his thigh.The others join in.

  ‘No, but it helps,’ he says.

  Nothing has been achieved. She should have stayed at home. Better to be lonely than to fuck up like this
every time. She can no longer hold back the tears. She is acutely conscious of the young man. She turns away, lifting her apron to her cheeks.

  Andy comes around the bench. She tries to turn even further away but this would expose her to the others. He puts a hand on her shoulder, speaking quietly into her ear.

  ‘If you’re serious, come up and talk about it.’

  Then he is gone, still laughing.

  four

  It is the drumming which eventually drives Jessica from the room. No other community activity is so completely guaranteed to alienate her. She doesn’t mind the singing or the music they make with guitars and flutes and mandolins. There is a joyous anarchy in the loud cacophony which emerges when everyone plays together. The drumming is something else; it is a tight rhythmic rant, a disowning of the individual to the beat of the tribal which, in this case, means playing along with or behind Martin, the master musician, the one who holds it all together. It is the most significant way in which he maintains his position of authority. Jessica’s inability to keep time, her lack of desire to even attempt to do so, more neatly confirms her status as outsider than the altercation with Jim.

  As she gathers her things, readying herself to slip out the kitchen door, Suzy is instantly beside her, standing her paws on Jessica’s hips. She strokes the dog’s head and whispers reassurance, looking around to see if she needs to say goodbye to anyone, but there is no one. They are, anyway, lost in their syncopation.Tonight there seems to be some kind of competition taking place between Martin and Andy. They are sitting next to the fire, across from each other, drums lodged between their legs. Their palms beat the skins but their eyes are locked, not so much playing with each other as vying for dominance.