Underground

by Andrew McGahan

We climbed out into dead night, overcast. It was a narrow trail in the bush somewhere, not a house or a light to be seen, only the shadows of gum trees, and a fence running along a paddock. Aisha slipped away behind a tree. I did the same. And standing there, I could see no reason why Harry shouldn’t just drive off and leave us. But he waited. I finished up and went back to the van. Aisha didn’t reappear. I went looking and found her fifty yards up the track, standing at the fence and staring vacantly off into the night. There were mountains there, darker shapes rising against the sky. Her arms were folded as if it were freezing, even though it wasn’t.

  ‘I think I’ll just stay here,’ she said tonelessly.

  I led her gently back to the van, and studied her once we were inside and under way again. The blood on her face was her own, from a jagged cut on her temple. She was concussed, I decided, pressing her back onto the bed.

  We drove on, and I lost all sense of place. We went up hills and down them, and skidded on tight corners. Northwards, was all I knew, from my bones; we were heading north. Five hours. Six. At some stage, we must have crossed the border into New South Wales. Although how that was possible without meeting a checkpoint, I can’t guess, even now. The fates were just with us that night. I slept for some time, and when I woke we were on a rough dirt track. I peeked through the front curtains and saw dawn growing in the sky. We seemed to be in the middle of some backwoods property up in the hill country. There was an old wooden shed ahead, leaning and forgotten. Harry steered the van into it, then switched off the engine.

  ‘I have to sleep,’ he said. Then he gave me his gun. ‘Keep watch until I wake up. If anyone comes near—no matter who it is, even if it’s a child—shoot them.’

  And so we spent the day there.

  There’s nothing stranger, I think, than to be in your own country, and yet not know exactly where in that country you are. But waiting in that shed, I had to admit that I couldn’t have pinpointed our position on a map even to within two hundred miles. It was such an alien feeling. Nor were there any clues. The sky was hidden by low clouds, with rain drifting across, and from the shed my only view was of a forested hill rising before me, its head wreathed in mist. The little rutted track by which we’d entered wound away behind the shed, and I didn’t dare walk outside to see where it might lead. I could hear no other sounds of life, no cars on a distant highway. The land had simply swallowed us up, and we’d vanished.

  Ah, but the peace of it. Harry had sprawled out on some mouldering hay bales, and Aisha was either asleep or unconscious on the bed in the van. So it was only me to stand watch. And although I was tired, I didn’t feel like sleeping. The shed was dark and dry and safe, and so I just sat and stared, thinking that I might never have the chance to spend a day like this again, completely at rest, and in such solitude, listening to rain on a tin roof, and to the calls of birds under the clouds.

  It was beautiful, and it was Australia, some faraway little piece of it where nothing had changed, and to which no trouble had come. It seemed impossible that I was still in the same nation in which thousands were confined to ghettos, or where terrorists exploded bombs, or where Citizenship and the AFP ruled at gunpoint, or where the US Army hunkered down in its bases of occupation. Or, indeed, that this was the same planet in which, even as I sat there, so many millions were fighting in so many wars, and scrabbling to kill or to die or to just survive.

  But it was the same world, of course, and the same country.

  The day progressed into afternoon. Harry awoke, and sat eating sandwiches as the light faded, his gaze dull. He said nothing, and I didn’t ask the obvious questions. What are we doing? Where are we going? I knew he wouldn’t tell me, that the very sight of Aisha and me made his mood all the worse. I tried to reason it out myself. It was to do with the dead man from Sydney. An air traffic controller, who knew something, it seemed, about a plane crash—an accident that was no accident. So were we perhaps headed for the site where the plane came down? But what could be the point of that? What could Harry want with smoking wreckage in a field somewhere? Or with dead bodies, and the smell of burnt jet fuel?

  And if not the plane, then where? The man had come from Sydney, so was Sydney itself our destination? Was there some vital secret about the city that Harry had learned, some last Underground mission that he could save? The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. The more right it seemed. If the rest of Australia had gone bad, then Sydney would be its rotten heart, and if the evil root of our times was to be uncovered, it would be uncovered there. It was the city which my brother had made into his capital, after all. And where he had built his bunker, at Kirribilli House, overlooking the Harbour and the Bridge and the Opera House—the national icons. Each of them bristling with fortifications and barbed wire, defiantly, as if my brother was personally protecting them from the infidel.

  Perhaps it was even Bernard himself that we sought. Maybe Harry, in his despair, had fixed upon some act of madness. Maybe the dead air traffic controller had revealed some hidden way by which we might reach the Prime Minister. And even if that wasn’t Harry’s intent at all, the idea still stuck with me, a lurid daydream. If we reached Sydney, I would leave Harry to do whatever it was he had to do, and myself, I would get dropped off at the front gates of Kirribilli House. And somehow, magically, I would get past the guards and the snipers. I would leap over the barricades, and evade the dogs in the gardens. And, finally, I would meet Bernard there on the front steps. The Great Leader, my brother, an ugly, empty man. And I’d proceed to beat his smug face to a bloody pulp.

  Are you laughing at me, interrogators?

  Aisha woke just on dusk, and the delirium seemed to have faded from her eyes. She crept gingerly to the door and looked at the misty evening. Her face—wan, thin and young—had been robbed of any sort of energy. She only stared out bleakly at a place she didn’t belong—a place with no targets, no people, no ideology—then went and found a sandwich to eat. I had no doubt at all that she would leave us sooner or later. At some point she would simply slip away. What use were we to her anymore, or her to us? No doubt there was some other terrorist cell she could seek out and join, and then begin plotting our destruction anew, all the while preparing for prophets and madmen who would never arrive to congratulate her.

  And so we waited there, the three of us—finished with each other, essentially, with nothing to say—until the rain stopped, and darkness fell.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Harry.

  I commandeered the bed in the van for myself this time. For an hour maybe I lay awake as we drove, watching Aisha’s narrow back. The van twisted and swayed, and it seemed that we were climbing more hills. And still the miracle held. No roadblocks, no checkpoints. But in truth I was falling asleep by then, so deeply and darkly that nothing could have woken me—not soldiers banging on the windows, not the smell of burnt jet fuel and dead bodies, not even peak hour in downtown Sydney. I didn’t dream of anything, and I don’t know how many hours I was unconscious. But in the end I was woken by the sudden silence of the engine switching off.

  ‘This is it,’ Harry said from the front.

  Aisha was hunched at the curtains, peering out, and shot me a puzzled frown. I rose groggily and opened the sliding door, half expecting to find myself in yet another Underground safe house—a garage, a warehouse, a factory.

  But I didn’t see any of that.

  I saw a clear night sky, and a plain of grass and shadows extending away before me, and hills in the distance, and not a single sign of civilisation.

  It wasn’t Sydney. And there was no plane wreck in sight.

  Harry slammed the driver’s door shut. ‘We walk from here.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Southern Cross hung above us, like a great and cold Australian flag in the sky. The constellation was on our left, so I knew we were heading west.

  But the direction hardly mattered. This was no place I recognised. It was a ghost landscape, the landscape of a dream. We were traversi
ng a preternaturally flat plain, seemingly a dozen miles wide, and it was rimmed on all sides by tall, silent hills. It reminded me, on a vaster scale, of the dead lake we’d found out in the desert. Only this was no desert. The plain was covered with thick, knee-high grass, shining like water under the pale moon, and the hills were black with forest. And yet across the whole immense expanse there were no houses, no roads, no fences, as if no one had ever trod this piece of ground before.

  Where on earth were we?

  But Harry did not explain. ‘We have to get there before dawn,’ was all he told us.

  Dragged in his wake, Aisha and I followed without a word.

  The western hills drew closer. Harry paused suddenly, his eyes dark cavities, watching. Far off to our right, lights had appeared, moving along the edge of the plain. The headlights of a vehicle. They came slowly towards us. They didn’t deviate, or rise or fall—and I formed the impression that the vehicle was driving along a wide, straight highway. But what highway? And why would such a road be utterly deserted, apart from this one slow car? As it neared, I saw that it bore an orange light on its roof, flashing steadily. It was the kind of light I’d seen on security vehicles. Military patrols. Harry tensed at my side, and touched the gun jammed in his belt. But a few miles from us, the headlights slowly curved away, following the unseen road, and began to climb into the hills. Then they disappeared, leaving the night even more empty and unreal than before.

  Harry relaxed slightly, moved on.

  At the edge of the plain we came finally to a fence. It was ten feet high, strong and sturdy and new, and topped with razor wire. It ran away to the north and south as far as I could see. On the further side, a dirt track followed along the fence line. And beyond that, a eucalypt forest swept up into the hills.

  Harry touched the wire with the back of his hand.

  ‘Arrogant bastards,’ he said, half to himself. ‘They haven’t even bothered to electrify it. They’re that confident that no one would ever come here.’

  He searched about. There were a few lone gum trees on our side of the barrier, and at the foot of one he found a fallen branch. Taking it up, he climbed the fence and poked and pried at the razor wire until it came free in big loops, under which he could slip. He dropped down to the far side, looked back at us.

  ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘There’ll be a patrol along this track, sooner or later.’

  Aisha and I climbed the fence in turn—not without some difficulty—and joined him. Then we plunged on, uphill, into the blackness under the trees. Walking was harder in there, stumbling over rough ground and dead branches and invisible holes. I was gasping when we crested the rise, and through the canopy I could glimpse the stars, but all around the world remained grey and featureless. We could be anywhere. Then it was down again, and onwards through the forest.

  We walked for hours, leaving the plain far behind. Harry was setting a cruel pace for my leg. And the further we walked, the more baffled I became. At one point a sealed road crossed our path. It ran smoothly through the bush, but even though we waited warily for some minutes, there was no traffic. Hurrying across, I felt leaves and twigs crunch under my feet, as if the road had not been used in years.

  Miles later the forest had faded away and we were hiking through country that was more open. In fact it was farmland, and yet it seemed overgrown and neglected. There were fields, and sheds, and even some houses, but the fields were deserted, and the houses were silent and dark, their windows smashed. We crossed more roads, all of them as disused as the first. The entire area felt abandoned. Derelict. But then, finally, we cleared a rise and I could see, faraway, a few points of light. They were off to our right and left. Distant houses. Or streetlights, maybe. Straight ahead, however, there rose a ridge of hills that terminated in a single low mountain, heavily draped in forest, and black against the sky.

  Harry led us on. We were slowing down now, but eventually we crept to the mountain’s foot. And here was another road. A highway. And as we paused there, headlights appeared, and a car went rushing by. Not a military vehicle, or a patrol car, just a normal sedan, unmarked. Two women inside.

  Harry made no comment. We crossed over. On the peak above us, a tall structure of some sort stood out from the treetops. We began to climb.

  My leg was on fire. We’d been walking for something like six or seven hours, and the sky was beginning to lighten, the first hints of dawn. Up and up we went, scrambling on the steeper slopes. Off to either side I could see lights again, many of them, widely spread over the hills like the sprinkle of outer suburbs.

  Then the ground levelled out, and we were on the broad peak. There was a road there, and paved places for parking. The tall structure, I could see now, was a communications tower. There was decking built around it, like a viewing platform, with stairs leading up. And a creeping dread took hold of me, because I knew this place. I’d been here before at some point in my life, and something about the memory was very wrong. We stumbled across the car park to a stone wall that marked the far edge, where the mountain fell away again to empty air.

  But even as we did so, a sound rose behind us. The growing roar of aircraft engines. I turned, and through the trees saw a huge passenger jet drifting out of the sky, off to the west and only a few hundred metres above us, wheels down and landing lights flashing. It soared across the hilltop, losing altitude steeply as it did so, the engines whining, and then sank from view beyond the further rim of the mountain.

  Harry was already standing at the wall, facing south and staring down. Aisha and I hurried to join him, the view below us springing up as we approached.

  ‘Fuck,’ Harry was breathing, over and over. ‘Fuck.’

  I could see the jet again, below us in the middle airs, lowering towards an airport that was off to the left, only a couple of miles away. But everywhere else there were lights, orange and white, the expanse of a whole city, complete with traffic moving sparsely in the pre-dawn streets. From our vantage point, we were directly in line with a wide, sweeping avenue that split the town in two. The avenue began at a hulking domed building on the slopes of the hill below us, and then ran away, ablaze with illumination, lined with statues and memorials, to the shores of a narrow lake. On the far side of the lake was a sprawling grass concourse, at the back of which stood an imposing white building with two outstretched wings. And behind that lifted another hill, one that had seemingly been excavated and consumed by a half-buried building of glass and steel. And over that building rose a gigantic metal edifice, four great beams that vaulted inwards to join into a single spar, which then rose high above the hill, and above the entire city. A flagpole.

  I recognised it all in an instant. The War Memorial, Anzac Parade, Lake Burley Griffin, the old Parliament House, Capital Hill and the new Parliament House.

  We were standing at the lookout atop Mt Ainslie.

  And before us lay the supposedly dead city of Canberra.

  Alive and well, after all.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ah, interrogators. I know that all through these pages of mine, you’ve been marvelling at my stupidity. My sheer gullibility. And the only thing I can say in my defence is that the rest of the nation shares my blindness. Canberra is gone, it was wiped out, we all saw it—what possible reason is there for anyone to doubt it? After all, what sort of madman would conceive of such deception, let alone carry it out? I still find it difficult to credit.

  Even as I sit here in my prison cell, at Canberra’s very heart.

  But all that aside, I’m embarrassed. I should—at the very least—have realised that we were in the Canberra region long before we reached the lookout. As soon as we stepped out of the campervan and saw that unearthly plain before us, surrounded by hills, I should have known. How could I not have recognised Lake George? I’ve driven along its shores dozens of times, riding the Federal Highway on my way to or from the capital. Oh, I know, it was night, and things can look strange and unsettling in the dark—but then, even in broad dayligh
t the lake has a surreal air, doesn’t it? And true, there was no water. But that’s the mystery of Lake George—the water that comes and goes, so that sometimes the lake is like an inland sea, and at other times there’s only a grassy expanse where sheep graze. People talk of underground rivers that connect to secret reservoirs, channels that alternately fill or drain the basin. Whatever the truth, I should have remembered the place.

  And there were plenty of other clues to our location. The fence we climbed. The military patrol we saw. Those deserted outer roads we crossed. The lifeless farmhouses, the paddocks left to run wild. Even the shape of Mt Ainslie itself, rising in front of us. They were all warning signs.

  But then again, even if I had worked out where we were, I would only have assumed that Harry was taking us to look upon the ruins of the dead city.

  Nothing would have prepared me for a living Canberra.

  We stared down at it, the lights glittering.

  All I could say was, ‘But it’s impossible.’

  Harry was gripping the railing on the stone wall, his fists clenched in rage. ‘You see it, don’t you? Believe it.’

  I saw it, all right. I turned to him. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. Not for sure. Not until now.’

  ‘But you brought us here. You suspected.’

  His eyes hadn’t moved from the city. ‘It was the air traffic controller. He told me. Just before he died.’

  ‘The controller? He was involved in this?’

  Harry gave a tight shake of his head. ‘He only found out four days ago. And straightaway he ran, looking for someone to tell. He had friends in the OU. But people were on his tail. They got to his Sydney connections, liquidated them, so he had nowhere to run but Melbourne. And they followed him there anyway. I think it was him they were after with the attack on the ghetto. They must have tracked him to that hall. They mightn’t even have known that we were there, or that the High Council was meeting. We were probably just collateral damage.’