An Accidental Terrorist

by Steven Lang

  Carl got up to rummage for food. He found meat in the fridge and put potatoes on the stove, poured oil in a pan and threw in rough-cut onions, stirring them with the point of his knife. Kelvin fiddled with the chessmen. It was a child’s set, plain wood, the pieces shiny from handling. He was not sure what to do while Carl prepared the food. He was excess baggage, both a burden on this man and burdened by him. He stuffed the chess pieces in their little box but the heads of the bishops stuck out, he had to rattle them to make it close.

  ‘You known Jessica long?’ he asked.

  ‘Some.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Oh, I know a few of them. Not much. I keep to myself. They’re good neighbours, that’s what matters, I don’t get involved.’

  Carl had a habit of leaving such long spaces between his thoughts that Kelvin was ready to ask another question by the time he got around to continuing. ‘I have opinions but I keep them to myself,’ Carl said. ‘I like some of these people but I don’t get involved in the day-to-day stuff. They have to have a referendum to figure out whether to grub out or spray the blackberries. I haven’t got the time for that, I get on the tractor. I’m not good at meetings, committees. I like to get things done.’

  He pushed the onions to the side and laid the meat in the pan, bent to find some plates, put knives and forks on the table.

  ‘I spent a deal of time on farms like that back home in the late sixties, early seventies. People going back to nature. People looking for something.They grow up in the suburbs and they think something’s missing and then they hear of this back-to-the-land stuff and they think, that’s for me. So they come down here and straightaway they’ve got problems. They have to have a roof, they need wood to keep themselves warm. So they learn some things real quick, they build a house and a garden. It’s good for them. They get their hands dirty. How do you take your meat?’

  ‘How you do it.’

  ‘Then here it is.’

  He lifted a great slab out of the pan and brought it over to the table.

  It came from a beast raised on the property, cut thick, cooked so it was still red in the centre.

  ‘The trouble is once they’ve got the house, what are they going to do? Small-acre farming? You’ve got to be kidding. That went out in the Middle Ages. That’s survival stuff, and these people are educated, middle-class. Physical work is good, but only as a kind of spiritual practice, not to make a living. So now they’re out in the country and there’s still something missing. So what do they do? They find a cause. Either that or they turn on each other. I try not to get involved.’ He started to eat.

  ‘Jessica’s into organisation,’ Kelvin said, assuming this diatribe was in some way directed at her. How could it not have been? Everything in his mind referred back to Jessica.

  Carl raised his eyes from his food. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘All this stuff about wood-chipping. She seems to spend all her life in meetings.’

  ‘You don’t think much of that, huh?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m like you, I don’t like meetings.’

  ‘Jessica’s different.’There was an edge to Carl’s voice.

  ‘Hey, I like her,’ Kelvin said. ‘I’m just not into all this political shit.’

  He was shocked to catch a look of disapproval, even malice, on Carl’s face.The older man chewed on a piece of meat until apparently he decided there was nothing more to be gained from it. He took the morsel out of his mouth and laid it on the side of the plate.

  ‘Pericles said … You know Pericles, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Athenian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pericles said, “We do not say that a man who has no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business. We say that such a man has no business here.”’

  ‘Right,’ Kelvin said, too quickly. He took a drink from his bottle. ‘What’s with you two?’

  ‘We’re friends.’

  ‘Just friends?’

  ‘These days.’

  Kelvin smiled his broadest smile, white teeth flashing, a bit slow on the uptake but warned now, the ground laid out for him. At least he knew the bloke wasn’t going to want him to fuck.

  nine

  The first time he’d seen Shelley he was thirteen years old and scavenging through bins behind a cafe in the Cross. Two boys roughly his age had come upon him and started to make a play of their find, taunting him, swearing at him, throwing empty cans at him, calling him a dog, a shit, a piece of fucking dogshit; like a song. Behind them, apparently indifferent, but watching, was a girl, licking an ice-cream cone. When she was finished eating she turned away. The boys abandoned their game and followed her.

  At that point he could not remember when he had last spoken to anyone. He had left Eden several days before on the early bus, alone, running away, all his energies directed towards this part of the plan, all the lies and scheming and petty theft culminating in his presence next to the heavy glass of the bus window, nothing left for what might happen when he arrived. But by the time the Nowra train arrived at Central it was dark and raining, and the vague ideas he’d nurtured of working nights in a bakery or at the markets so that he could sleep in a park during the day were shown up for the adolescent daydreams they were. He walked out along Broadway, into City Road, the pavements slick and cold, a wind blowing against the shop windows. He cowered in a doorway when a police car slipped past. He waited for them to turn and come back, for the inevitable hand on his shoulder, but it never came. Instead he continued on beneath the streetlights, shivering, panic-stricken, exposed, until he found an abandoned warehouse. He crawled under the wire and into the building where at least it was dry, if horribly dark, stinking of urine and age. No one had been looking for him. The police were not draining the marshes, there were no men in yellow overalls walking in long lines through the scrub calling his name. He had made it to Sydney, alone, and no one had noticed or cared.

  He watched the three of them go, sticking to the middle of the lane, shouting and laughing, the boys swinging around the older girl, engaged in a kind of dance with the tarmac, the blue-stone kerbs, the parked cars and the rubbish. He followed, and if they noticed they gave no indication. At Taylor Square they turned past the courthouse, out onto the brightness of Oxford Street, where they became suddenly smaller, as if in larger areas they knew how to become invisible. They took a side street next to the gay pub; when he reached its awnings he just had time to glimpse them slipping into a laneway down the back.

  The street was ill-lit, part of some one-way system and subject to rapid bursts of determined traffic.The houses on either side were boarded up, their tiny front yards filled with rubbish. The laneway was even darker. He went right to its end and back again but there was no sign of them. He could not have said why he was there. The boys had tormented him with a violence made more intimidating by its casualness, and the girl had simply watched. But his small stash of money was gone and any illusions about the city long forgotten. He was hungry and cold and would have happily been found, happily been taken back to Eden and suffered the beating from Rick. At least he would have been owned. He sat in the laneway, furiously pushing a stick backwards and forwards in the dirt to stop himself from crying. He was stupid, stupid, stupid. The ground was hard-packed, the stick made hardly any impression on it. When he looked up a boy was watching him through a hole in the fence. Their eyes met and the boy said to someone behind him, ‘It’s the kid from the Cross.’ Another voice said, ‘Let’s see,’ and then there were a bunch of them, peering through the gap.

  ‘You need a place to stay?’ the girl said.

  There were five of them living in the squat off Barwon Terrace. It was a cavernous place whose internal walls and floors and anything else of value had been stripped.What timber was left was being slowly cannibalised to keep the building warm and to cook the small amount of food they bothered to prepare themselves. Mostly they lived on takeaway, stuff they bought, au
gmented with anything they could pilfer. The girl was Shelley. She wasn’t the leader, that honour went to Spic, an older boy, thin and keen, already skilled in the way of the street, to whom they paid allegiance and any money or goods they came by. In turn he divided up the spoils, keeping a larger portion for himself and in return offering protection from drunks and drug addicts, the casual flow of the marginal folk. Spic was number one but it was Shelley who held them together. She was close to sixteen, her hair cut short and ragged. She wore loose clothes whose bagginess concealed her fragility, the sleeves of her skivvy hanging down over her hands.

  Kelvin stayed. He hung on, especially to Shelley, accompanying her wherever she went, and she accepted his adoration as she might that of a pet; because of her they all tolerated him, allowed him to drift with them through the streets, sitting on kerbs looking at people and discussing how it would be for them later, what kind of car they would have, what clothes they would wear. How they would spend the millions they were going to win in the lottery.

  When she was preparing for work even Shelley didn’t want his company.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why do you think? I do it for guys.’

  ‘You do what for guys?’

  He really didn’t know, or didn’t want to think it possible.

  ‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘They cruise past in cars.You get in, you jerk them off.There’s nothing to it.’

  She was applying a mask. She invoked strong feelings. He watched her and his heart rate increased, his limbs became loose and awkward. He tried to think of things to do or say to please her. He wanted to be next to her all the time. He loved her smell, was like a child beside her. But when he watched her doing her face it seemed that the features came apart from each other. Her eyes, her nose, her mouth became too big for the space they occupied. They were each individually perfect, but out of balance. He had to concentrate on just one bit at a time.

  ‘I could do it too,’ he said. ‘I could do it for women. We need the money. I could earn some money too.’

  ‘Women don’t do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘How much do you get?’

  ‘Ten or fifteen bucks for a hand job, twenty-five or thirty if they want to touch you, forty bucks for head.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You don’t know what head is?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I do.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  He had no idea.With each addition to her face she was getting further away from him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Well why d’you say you did, stupid? It’s when you suck them off.’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’

  He did not believe her.

  She stood up. ‘Well that’s me. How do I look?’

  She had become someone else.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You can come with me to the street, just this once, okay? You can come and see what it’s like. But you do what I say.’

  William Street was broad and brash, running up to Kings Cross from the city full of the tail-lights of cars, the great neon signs at the top proclaiming the nature of the place; the Ferrari, Rolls Royce and Jaguar shops with their broad expanses of glass lining the boulevard. The bass beats blaring from car windows and the high-maintenance women in heels laughing loud beside men in shiny suits.

  In a laneway running parallel things were not so bright. The boys who dressed as girls leaned against a concrete wall and pushed out their narrow hips in tight little skirts and frilly blouses. Men in cars crawled passed, hidden behind tinted windows, while a stream of invective fell against the glass and metal, was tossed backwards and forwards across the way from the red-rimmed mouths – a repetitive, harsh sound, like charnel birds interminably claiming territory.

  When Shelley came by they turned it on her. They called her a slut, a little whore. They spat on the ground where she had walked. They told her to go elsewhere and swung their handbags on their little gold straps, suggesting to Kelvin, in falsetto voices, that perhaps he might like to stay.

  Down the far end she stopped. She told Kelvin to piss off and went to the edge of the kerb. She opened her little bag and took out a compact, checking her lipstick in its tiny mirror, put it away and lit a cigarette, then, holding the pole of a parking sign, slightly raised one leg, stretching the cloth of her short dress, exposing her upper thigh. She stayed that way, talking to Kelvin hidden in a doorway, but not looking at him, talking as if she was addressing the cruising cars, telling him what she thought of them in saccharine tones, pouting her lips and bending forward to show her little cleavage, inviting them to come to her, to try a real girl, a teenage girl, to explore their teenage fantasies, the language of the street coming from her strange but rich in all its textures, the street dark and narrow, the glittering boys further up tossing smokes to each other while under their skirts their genitals smarted from the tape.

  When a car stopped she told Kelvin to wait, she’d be back.

  After an age she returned, pulling down the back of her skirt as she left the car, searching in her bag for make-up, a cigarette already in her mouth.

  He wanted to know what she had done but she wouldn’t tell him. She returned to her post, to her posturing, waiting for another door to open.

  Kelvin watched the street as he might a film. With Shelley there it didn’t touch him. These cars going by, their windows down or up, this concrete laneway, the backs of the buildings with their graffiti-stained roll-a-doors, the glittering transvestites themselves, were all harmless players in something designed for his entertainment. He had escaped from Eden and come to a place where things were real, where the adult world was shown to be the way he had always sensed it was, completely fucked up.

  When she finished they went up the Cross together, just the two of them. She had money. They wove through the crowds, past the touts and louts, the glossy shops, moving together in the bright vigour of the street. They bought ice cream and walked back to the squat singing some stupid pop song it didn’t matter how loud because there was no one who could hurt them.

  He didn’t see how it affected her. He saw her go out in the back yard in the night and wash herself with the hose and he thought it strange and asked her wasn’t she cold, but it wasn’t until he got in a car himself that he saw what she was washing off, that this world, too, had a way of getting under the skin, as if there were layers and layers of the stuff.

  ten

  A week later he comes back. Jessica was not certain he would, or if she even wanted him to. He does not strike her as the reliable type, not simply because of his age; he has a fluidity to him, as if he is permanently passing through, owning nothing, a clean slate, an empty vessel. The perfect zipless fuck. It is part of his attraction. He hovers, naked, in the morning, at the top of the ladder, exquisite, smooth-skinned, tight-bodied, white buttocks almost crude against the sunburned back. He knows she is watching. She can see that in the way he holds his shoulders back, offering his best side. It seems he is accustomed to being admired. She notes it, she admires, but she could do without it, that vanity. It doesn’t suit. As if he is the peacock, she the Plain Jane. It’s not the way it is. He’s just a boy.

  She takes him into the forest to show him who’s who.

  She leads him across Gubra Creek and along the fire trail which tracks its course. They get occasional glimpses of the developments on the other side, Martin’s sprawling structures, his vegetable garden, much smaller from this vantage than it appears close up; Andy’s permanent tent in its sunless valley, the chimney smoking blue in the morning air.

  She turns uphill, following a path of her own design, pushing through the debris of peppermint and dogwood, crashing on dried leaves and tassels of bark, the smell of eucalyptus cut with that of mustard or curry from the small leaves they brush against.

  ‘This won�
�t last long,’ she says, anxious to reassure him, her guest.

  The undergrowth gives way abruptly to open forest.This is where it begins.

  The mountain rises in ridges, the slopes taken by stringybarks, Eucalyptus muelleriana, a name which her vague grasp of Latin attaches to the idea of women, although there is nothing especially feminine about them; they are, if anything, spectacularly asexual, populating the mountain’s flanks with an ecclesiastical air, curiously still, vast cathedrals of grey trunks, fire-blackened at the base, clear underfoot, obscuring all view except of themselves.

  They climb. He walks beside her, matching her pace, separating and coming back together as the terrain permits. She normally comes here alone, without even the dog, today tied up at home. She lives close to this. They all do, but most never enter it. The Farm is already wild enough. The mountain’s geography can only be revealed by exploration, its contours only learned by touch. There are no landmarks, no paths, no signs. The given directions are up or down or across, and the latter is mostly impossible. The slopes are steep, and any attempt at a traverse leads the inexperienced walker into gullies of loose rock and bracken fern, tangled with vines. The best passage is along the line of the ridges.

  She stops at the summit of a small rise in a series of indistinguishable rises. There is a ring of rocks and an old and blasted tree which once must have been taller than everything around. Kelvin sits to catch his breath. Jessica perches on a rock looking out, though there is nothing to see, only branches latticed against the sky.There is also, now that the crashing of their feet has ceased, no sound. This is not some crowded aviary, no mammalian haven. The ground is little more than bare rock. Ants with gold regalia on their backs chart their immediate territory with wilful incomprehensibility.

  He is about to speak but she holds up a hand.

  ‘Listen,’ she says.

  A wind is moving in the valley below. Down through the trees this current of air is tossing branches and leaves, engaged in a struggle to depart or stay, it is unclear which. The contrast between the stillness where they are and the turbulence below is startling; moreover, this patch of wind seems to be approaching, albeit not directly. It climbs, then veers off, then climbs again, like a searching animal, racing across the flanks of the mountain, swinging in one direction and then another. A cloud passes across the sun. Jessica is fixed where she was when she turned to him, her hand up, like a traffic cop, holding him with her eyes. Suddenly it is on them. Hot air sweeps over them; every twig, each leaf and branch, every molecule rattled by its passing. The sun breaks through, tossing myriad shafts of light in their eyes. Then the wind is gone again. In its wake kookaburras, unseen before, begin their clamour, barking out their laugh in crazy elongated speeches, thrilling, strange.