Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘Fucking cunts,’ she breathed to us all.

  Agent Spencer was unperturbed. ‘Was she armed?’ he asked his men.

  ‘Two handguns, loaded,’ one replied, ‘and a knife.’

  ‘There might be more. Strip her.’

  Another struggle followed, and it took four of them to do it. I looked away. I know that she had planned to kill me, but still, I didn’t need to see this.

  ‘There’s nothing else,’ I heard one of the agents say.

  ‘Cavities too,’ Agent Spencer ordered.

  Screams ensued, female, then the sounds of blows, and laughter from the men.

  Then, ‘She’s clean, sir.’

  ‘Okay.’ His voice became formal. ‘Your name is Nancy Campbell?’

  ‘Fuck you!’ she yelled back.

  And despite everything I thought—Nancy Campbell? Her name was Nancy? I’d been kidnapped by a terrorist named Nancy? You had to be kidding.

  ‘Also known as Aisha Fatima Islam?’

  Well, that was more like it . . .

  ‘You have no fucking right!’ she raged.

  Agent Spencer paid no attention. ‘Nancy Campbell, you are charged with consorting with a known terrorist organisation, and of conspiring to, and committing, criminal acts against the people and government of Australia. How do you plead?’

  ‘Not guilty, shithead!’

  ‘You have been found guilty as charged. Under the authority of State of Emergency Decree 44, I am empowered to impose sentence and implement same. The sentence is death by execution, to be carried out forthwith.’

  I spun around.

  Nancy Campbell (and I was still struggling to believe that was really her name) hung naked and exhausted between the two agents. Her nose was bleeding, and her white body looked defenceless amongst all those uniformed men.

  I said, ‘You’re gonna kill her?’

  Agent Spencer was as collected as ever. ‘It’s the law.’

  ‘But right here, right now?’

  ‘She’s a killer herself.’

  ‘But surely you’ve got to interview her. Interrogate her. Find out what she knows, and who she works with. I told you, these guys did Canberra!’

  ‘We already know all we need to about her. And her group.’

  One agent was tying her hands while two of his colleagues held her. The other three men had formed a line and were checking their weapons.

  I couldn’t believe it. ‘But you can’t just gun her down!’

  ‘Shut up, Mr James.’

  ‘You think you can just do this? I’ll tell my brother about it, believe me. And not only him—I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen.’

  It was like lightning. Agent Spencer’s arm shot out from his side, and suddenly the barrel of a pistol was hard against my temple. ‘I’ll tell you one last time, sir. Shut up.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Mr James, let me explain. As far as anyone in the outside world knows, you’re already dead. I can make that a reality, very quickly. Now, your brother has indicated that he would prefer you alive. But he only said prefer. Because, frankly, you’re more of a problem than anyone needs right now. And the main condition of your continued survival is that you forget everything that has happened to you in the past few days. That you forget everything you have seen here. And that you never mention a word of it to anyone else. All of this will be made abundantly clear to you during your debriefing, and trust me, you will not be released until you have fully agreed. But for the moment . . . shut . . . the fuck . . . up.’

  I gaped. And said nothing.

  Agent Spencer lowered his gun. ‘Right,’ he said to his team, ‘step clear of her.’

  The men holding the woman shoved her to her knees and moved away to either side. She knelt there on the road, pathetic, hands behind her back, nose still bleeding. But she was taking her impending death better than I had.

  ‘Pray to Allah, girl, if you want,’ Agent Spencer said.

  She spat out blood. ‘I hope your dicks rot off.’

  ‘Squad, take aim.’

  I looked away again.

  Shots spluttered out, even though no one had said ‘fire’. Then there was screaming, male this time, and more shots. Something exploded and I was thrown to the ground. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of figures leaping down from the top of the cutting. Federal agents were falling, bloodied and agonised, and smoke was billowing into the air.

  Fuck, I thought, in a kind of weary amazement, three times in as many days.

  Here I go again.

  EIGHT

  I really wasn’t born for such excitement.

  Me, a child of the placid 1950s.

  Mind you, in my youth, we did have the cold war. And looking back, that really was a war. Two monolithic powers, evenly matched, slugging it out for control of the whole world . . . or at least the mutual destruction of it. It was a different scenario from today, believe me. The Russians were something to truly fear, an enemy who actually had the capability to win. Who would have thought that, sixty years later, the evil empire would be long forgotten, but we’d all end up twice as terrified of nothing more than a few thousand stateless terrorists? Or that, in the name of eradicating them, we’d be fighting a dozen different shitty little wars across the globe? Stalin would have been thrilled to cause half as much alarm, and he had a fully equipped army five million strong behind him.

  I’m sure that my parents, securely enclosed in the great swathe of white middle-class Australia, and fighting the good fight against the red peril, had no idea what oddities the future held. We had the house in suburbia, we had the picket fence, we even had Mum waiting on the couch with a cocktail for Dad to come home from work. We were proof that democracy worked, and we knew that, once the Russians finally admitted defeat, all would be right with the world.

  What on earth did Islam mean to any of us?

  This was Melbourne. We lived in Camberwell. Leafy streets, green lawns, and a ‘dry’ zone. Not even a pub in sight to disturb the peace, let alone a mosque. (In fact, last time I visited the suburb nothing much had changed, the odd AFP checkpoint notwithstanding. When Camberwell gets rowdy, well, that really will be the end of western civilisation as we know it.)

  My father? He was a public servant, Department of Mines and Energy, upper middle grade. My mother didn’t work, and Bernard and I were the only children. The good life was all ours, so much so that looking back it seems like a fairytale now. Actually, a rather boring fairytale, for very little of my earliest years seems to stand out in my memory. Playing in the backyard, watching TV, walking to primary school, holidays at the beach. Bernard was always there too, of course. Did we get along then? I don’t recall hating him. But not really liking him either. He was my brother, he was just around all the time.

  But as we grew older, to about age nine or ten, two things became clear. Bernard was more timid than I was—quieter, less adventurous, less daring. But on the other hand, he was far more stubborn than me. Say there was a gang of us kids throwing rocks at the windows of an empty factory over Collingwood way. I’d be in there amongst it, and when the windows were all broken I’d be the first to suggest we creep inside and see whatever secrets there were to see. But Bernard, if he was tagging along, would frown at the rock-throwing, and refuse point-blank to break and enter. Even when the rest of us mocked him and called him a girl and chanted other horrible things at him, he still refused. Shaking his head all the while and growing red in the face—but red with angry defiance, not embarrassment. He never ran away, or burst into tears, or backed down.

  And it’s not that he was simply law-abiding. He wasn’t at all. He could be downright sneaky when it came to disobeying our parents. Stealing biscuits, or avoiding chores around the house, or cheating off my homework. But if the law-breaking was public and dangerous, then he wasn’t interested. It was a matter of risk assessment, of investment versus return, of calculating the odds. In every other way he would grab whatever he could, legal or not
—as long as he was certain of not getting caught. The other kids were completely baffled by him, but they caught on, eventually, to that stubbornness in him, and eventually gave way before it. He was never as popular as I was, but he was tolerated and respected in a grudging kind of way. A super-cautious little prick, everyone agreed, but certainly clever.

  Me, I changed my mind about everything twenty times a day. And while I’d charge off on any caper that was going, well, as soon as it went wrong I’d hightail it out of there just as fast. And I had no problem whatever in backing down if the other kid was bigger and meaner than me, or worse, if it was the school principal. I’d throw in fulsome apologies too, as lengthy and inventive as they were insincere. Christ, it was only for a laugh, so what did it matter?

  You can tell which one of us was destined to be PM, can’t you?

  Our education was private. We weren’t at the best schools in town, but they were far from the worst. Church of England—sport, God, buggery and the Queen. Well, okay, no buggery, not in my case at least, and nor, as far as I know, in Bernard’s. To be fair, not so much of God or the Queen either. And while neither of us were geniuses, we got by all right, academically. Me, I think, on native intelligence, breezing along without really trying, and Bernard more by rote learning and by an innate grasp of how to work the system. He was one of those kids who always pinned the teachers down on exactly what part of a lesson would be in exams and what wouldn’t. One of those kids who always had a good excuse as to why he should get an extra two days to finish an essay. One of those kids who always demanded his test papers be reassessed, and who would fight over every half mark. A ready-made lawyer, one teacher called him. An annoying little twerp, said another, while wearily changing a C into a B minus.

  No, by the time we were teenagers, I really didn’t like my brother very much.

  And we were going our separate ways already. I’d discovered girls, for instance. Not to mention all sorts of useful, entertaining things to do with erections. The underside of my mattress became the repository for a growing collection of racy paperback novels and stolen issues of the quaint, softly pornographic magazines of the day. Thankfully, Bernard and I had our own bedrooms by this stage, so what sort of stash he had I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t have one at all because there was nothing under his mattress. On the other hand, he would never have hidden it somewhere so obvious. Indeed, as I’ve already mentioned, he did that kind of thing in the garden shed.

  Real girls, meantime, while not actually taboo, were still dangerous and foreign things to boys from an all-male private school. The other lads and I hung out at milk bars and cinemas and studied them like novice game hunters amidst a pack of lions. It was a time of heavy-breathing trysts behind cricket sheds and the sheer trouser-straining ecstasy of touching female lips, arms, legs and (oh my God!) breasts. I was no Lothario, but I had my share. Bernard, however, took no part. He never lingered on his way home from school, he never snuck out at night, he never, as far as I saw, even spoke to a girl who wasn’t either a relation or a family friend.

  Shit, now that I think of it, his wife is the daughter of a friend of our mother’s! They were set up, Bernard and Claire, by their respective maters, when they were both in their early thirties and apparently heading for eternal spinsterhood.

  I was already over my first divorce by then.

  Anyway, I don’t think it was that the young Bernard didn’t like girls. What seemed to bug him most about the rest of us horny teenage boys was the disorder that sex brought into our lives. The shrieks, the futile moans of passion, the furtive swapping of magazines under the desks. It was too wild, too likely to bring the authorities down upon our heads. And his attitude persisted even after we’d finished school and enrolled in uni. By then, he was free to do pretty much whatever he liked (it was the late sixties, for fuck’s sake), but I still never saw him with a girlfriend. Oh, he had female acquaintances. Dour-looking girls from his economics tutorials, and stiff blue-blooded daughters from the Young Conservatives Society that he joined and later chaired. But a woman he was fucking? A woman who might ruin his life and cast shame upon the family name? No way.

  But, man, let me repeat, the late sixties!

  I was in my element. I moved straight out of home into a filthy share house in Carlton and took gleefully to drink, drugs and debauchery. I have to say that I never really bought into the philosophy of those times. I was never a hippie. I was never into incense, meditation or gurus. But I was certainly into free love and good times. Bernard could have his dreary business degree, I was a free-wheeling arts undergraduate, out to impress the chicks. I grew my hair long, packed myself into the tightest, widest-flared jeans available, stuck some anti-establishment badges on my denim jacket, and posed as a tall dark radical sex god. It was bullshit, mainly, and I failed utterly in my studies, while Bernard succeeded in his stolid way . . . But then Bernard hadn’t even moved out of home.

  That’s right, he stayed with Mum and Dad for his entire university career. (I know that this is the done thing for kids now—but in those days, it was unheard of.) And we had rather different attitudes to our parents, Bernard and I. For all that I thought they were a little dull, I did have genuine affection for them. And they returned it, despite my evil ways. Indeed, from both of them I detected the merest whiff of envy for the way people my age had it so swell. A hint that my father, given a chance, might have liked some similar sort of fun in his day. And a wistful look in my mother’s eye, as if she were considering other lives she might have lived, given the pill and permission to burn brassieres. But maybe I’m just making that up, maybe they just tolerated their wayward son for love’s sake. Still, they were no arch conservatives, even though they voted for Menzies and Co all the way through.

  In theory, they should have approved of Bernard more. He was the good son, the earnest son, the son with his eyes on the future. And yet I think they were dimly appalled by him, skulking quietly around their house. Surely parents want a little rebellion from their children. (I was always quite proud when my own various offspring told me to bugger off out of their lives. The misery of it aside.) And who knows, left to an empty nest, my mum and dad might have loosened up a bit and really swung, man. Other people their age were doing it, getting with the times. But with Bernard always frowning about the place, what chance did they have? He did see them as arch conservatives, and expected them to remain that way forever. They, and their generation, who fought the war and rode the boom and obeyed the rules, written and unwritten, who never complained or marched or caused trouble—they were his fixed inspiration.

  So forgive me if I declare I was the better son. Sure, I didn’t call, I hardly visited, they had to bail me out with money time and time again. Indeed, I was a shame to them in nearly every way. But ah, how their faces lit up when I entered the room! Bernard, I think, suspected all this, and resented it.

  But then, he resented almost everything he saw. Nothing had changed since school really, and the same kids who had mocked him for not smashing windows were now long-haired layabouts mocking him for his neat hair and sensible clothes, for his sobriety and his work ethic, for being pro the Vietnam War and for his membership of a right-wing political society—they even mocked him for the virginal state of his dick. He suffered it all with his usual stubborn silence, but I knew he hated them for it, and hated everything about their lifestyle. To no one’s surprise, when he finished his degree he joined an accountancy firm. Moreover, he joined the Liberal Party. And yet he still hadn’t bothered to move out of home.

  Me—after failing arts, I started an architecture degree, in which I managed to scrape passes for two years. Not out of any genuine interest, but it was better than conscription for Vietnam. Thankfully, the Whitlam government came along in 1972, and I could safely drop out of uni to take up intermittent pub work, or work waiting tables, or labouring, or whatever else looked like easy money for a while. I didn’t have a clue about what I really wanted to do with my life. In fac
t, apart from my disastrous first marriage—childless, thank heavens—I don’t think I took a damn thing seriously for the rest of the seventies.

  Bernard . . . Well, I don’t suppose he had his life planned out exactly either. But deep in his gloomy dreams he must have yearned for authority. He could see the world going to pot even as he emerged into it. And like many a long-suffering conservative all around the world in those wild and free days, no doubt he was even then plotting his revenge.

  It was a while coming, but oh lord, when it did come . . .

  NINE

  Another day, another basement.

  I was becoming a connoisseur of them—and this one, I had to admit, was much better than the first. No bare walls or dirt floor or dingy light bulb. This room was large and carpeted and well lit, with comfortable couches and a bathroom off to one side. There was even a studded leather bar in the corner, vintage 1970s. The shelves behind it were empty, alas, but the wall did at least boast a neon beer sign. (‘Brisbane Bitter’ it said, which to my knowledge hasn’t been brewed in several decades.)

  It was someone’s snooker room. Sans table. Which was fine, really, because there was no one down there for me to shoot pool with, apart from Nancy Campbell (sans burqa), and I doubt that she would have been interested. Not that I would have trusted her with a cue in her hand anyway.

  And where was this place, you ask, interrogators dear?

  Good question.

  It was the same old story. The men who carried out the ambush were all masked with balaclavas. (I’m talking about the second ambush here, the one in which the AFP were the ambushees, not the ambushers. Ludicrous, really—I don’t think even back in the bushranger days had one road cutting ever seen so much action.) Then, in all the shooting and screaming and confusion, me and the naked Nancy Campbell found ourselves bundled into the back of the van (the AFP van, now appropriated, not the postal van) and driven at breakneck speed for maybe half an hour to who knows where. They’d put bags over our heads right from the start. Professionals, these boys.