Hinterland

by Steven Lang

  The thing is, she wasn’t fazed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says, ‘happens to lots of blokes, doesn’t it? It’ll come back up again in a minute, won’t it?’ Which it did and this time he was able to do it better, fucking like, well, like a man, looking down at her while he was pushing himself into her and she’s making like she’s enjoying it, running her hands over the muscles on his stomach and his pecs, saying how handsome he is and making noises like a woman in a porn clip and it’s so fucking good he comes pretty quick again. Even then she’s all right about it. She brings out this I Ching book and three coins and says she’s going to do a reading for him. She sits up cross-legged with all that dark hair between her legs, as if it’s perfectly natural which, he realises – a stupid little kind of thought, but there you are – that for her it is, those breasts, the weight of them, the curve of them with their small nipples with the brown skin around them, the outward swell of her belly with its inset button, is her body, she doesn’t know anything else, just like him in his body, but even knowing that doesn’t make it any less magical. She has this thin band of multi-coloured cord around her ankle, a tiny little silver bell hanging off it, and that’s extraordinary, too, because it’s on her, the light from the torch spilling onto her skin. She smells of patchouli oil and sweat and sex.

  She unwraps the coins from a piece of silk, laying the cloth down in front of her, placing the book and the coins on it and performs this little ceremony with her hands over them before shaking the coins out on the cloth six times until she’s made one of these hexagrams for him which is pretty, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s called Stagnation, which even he knows means stuck, and he’s pissed off at that, as much because maybe it’ll mean she won’t like him now, as because, in truth, he knows it sums him up, he’s still marking time, still caught in that eddy he got washed up in after he left the forces, his life so close to a pile of shit it was all he could do to get out of bed. Just because he’s with a bunch of blokes who do training in the morning doesn’t make up for it.

  The hexagram says it all. Ange reads it out to him, but it doesn’t say what he should do about it, least not as he can understand. When she’s done with it they lie together and she’s small and alive in the curve of his arm.

  ‘Such a strong man,’ she says. ‘Feel those muscles. I like a man with a bit of weight to him.’ She puts a hand on his belly just below his sternum, rubbing it around. ‘But the Ching was right, hey? I feel you blocked in here, like all your energy gets up this far but can’t get any further. We need to get you moving in here, eh?’

  ‘I know a way to make that happen,’ he says, and rolls over onto her and kisses her and she kisses him back and he’s wonderfully grateful that she’s not rejected him for his bad hexagram and this time when they do it he’s suddenly got all the time in the world and if it’s like a porno clip then it’s not one he’s ever seen because even though they’re doing that stuff it’s not outside of him, not separate, it’s him at her and her at him like legendary wild animals, like fucking gods and he feels the strength in himself like he hasn’t for so long and he thinks that what’s happening is that she’s unblocking him, she’s releasing him from the prison he’s been in for as long as he can remember.

  The truth is, lying with her like that he’s prepared to believe anything she says.

  In the morning she’s still there. In the bed next to him. Naked. Getting in close, resting her head on his shoulder, her breasts against him. After a time they get up so as to go over to the kitchen for breakfast. It’s not a big tent, they’re getting dressed and he’s putting his side-pick in his boot and she says, ‘What the fuck is that?’ So he gets it out, shows it to her. It’s a beautiful thing, spear point, quick draw, made of AUS8 steel, with a full tang. It has this empty circle in the middle, between the handle and the blade which works as a kind of hand protector but also just looks cool. It slips down inside of his boot like it was never there. He explains to her how you hold it and she takes it and holds it like it’s a thing of power, like it’s dangerous just to touch, which it is. ‘Have you used it?’ she asks. ‘I mean, have you hurt someone with it?’ and he tells her he hasn’t but that they train with them, all the blokes carry them, you never know when you might need it, they like to be prepared and she hands it back to him and then kisses him and before you know it they’re doing it again and he can’t believe it, can’t get over how good it is.

  When they go over for breakfast he’s got this glow on him from what’s happened in the tent, it’s making the world lighter, it’s filling him up to some kind of bursting, but that’s not even the total of it because he’s also right there in the middle of the camp, surrounded by all these arseholes, and nobody thinks shit about it. He’s with Ange so they figure he’s okay. He can watch what’s going on and take notes, not literally, not with a pen and paper, but he can listen and keep it in his mind like he’s on a mission. Damo should see him.

  A few days before they’d been hanging out at the house, the four of them, talking about the hippies, the usual shit about them squatting out there, living on the dole, skinny fuckers with dreads, skanky girls with nose rings and shit, all sorts of weirdos coming from who-the-fuck-knows-where acting like they owned the place, this sort of thing, and Jaz said, One of yous should go over there, check it out, do a bit of recce. That way we could figure how best to mess with them. That’d have to be you, Will, wouldn’t it? You’ve got the hair for it, eh?

  Jaz is the one who calls it The House-on-the-Hill. He pays the rent. Pays for a whole lot of other stuff, too. Not clear where the money comes from. Something to do with a church Damo says. It’s an old place out on the east side of town, sat by itself in the paddocks with nothing round it but grass and cows, the best views in the world because the land drops right away there steep as anything. A wrecked car someone drove out into the paddock sitting perched on the edge, it’s back door open, like a cardboard cut-out of itself. A shell. Nothing but sea and sky beyond.

  Jaz was special forces; he’s a big dude, neck and shoulders on him like a steer. Sometimes, late at night, he’ll talk about what he’s seen, just a little bit, in Africa, Europe, Iraq, Afghanistan. More often he talks about what happened after. When he got into drugs and shit, hit the bottom hard before finding a way back up; how that happened.

  You had to have an invite to go there. Mostly it was blokes who’d been with the services. Will didn’t even know about it until one night Damo just said, Come’n I’ll get you to meet Jaz. They’d been at school together. Damo always a skinny kid, this thin streak with a long face and a great snoz, a snoz as wild as he was. When he’d had a few he’d do anything, drove like a maniac. Best driver he’d ever met. They’d be out in the middle of the night doing donuts at Pike’s turn-off and Damo’d be at the wheel of his Holden spinning and spinning with the blue smoke from the tyres rising up in the headlights of the other cars and each time he came round you could see his eyes shining out from behind the wheel, his eyes and teeth flashing in this crazy smile, a weird excitement in him like he didn’t care, just wanted everything to go faster. Another bastard of a father. But there you go. They went in the army together but Damo’d gone elsewhere. Into the line of fire. Will was in the machine corps. He’d been in some remote camps in Afghanistan when there was fighting going on round them. Shots being fired. People he knew had gotten killed, lost a limb, you name it. His work, but, was in the compounds, fixing the vehicles. He never saw action. He didn’t want to make out he’d done more than he had. Which isn’t to say it hadn’t affected him. When he got back he still had a year or so on his contract and he’d been sent up north building roads for Aboriginals. Doing maintenance on the machines. Couldn’t wait to get out, get on with his life. Thought he’d get a job in the mines, earn some real money, looking after the haulpaks and dozers. But when it happened, when he was free, instead of there being opportunity, he fell into this pit, living around these people who hadn’t the faintest idea of where he’
d been or what he’d seen and no way to talk about it. He came back to Winderran because of his mum and ended up staying not because he wanted to but because he couldn’t get himself up and at it, like there was this fucking boulder sitting on his shoulders. People he’d grown up with still where he’d left them, working Monday to Friday, getting pissed on the weekend while the world passed them by. Which was pretty much why he’d gone in the first place.

  The strange thing is, but, it’s home. As if it takes going that far away to know it. He and Damo grew up on dairy farms just out of town. All gone now. Subdivided into hobby farms for these fuckers with Mercedes four-wheel drives to build mansions on. Raise Belted Galloways because they like the way they look.

  He and Damo’d spent their time down in the creek, or on the dam, or riding motorbikes round the paddocks. One day they took the bikes out after it’d rained, following an old fire trail into the forest, the dirt shot by the wheels coming up behind them in great fountains, turning them into mud-men, riding for miles and miles with the taste of it in his mouth, which is what it meant to ride dirt bikes, the machine and you and the ground all connected, until eventually they reached a ridge where you got this view through the trees down towards the Brisbane River. They’d stopped the bikes and in the silence after the motors there’d been this feeling, their ears ringing, the mud already drying on their faces, cracking around their mouths as they smiled, extraordinary to be in the forest like that, alone, places nobody else went that they’d taken themselves to, the tall straight trunks of the trees and the view through them and the smell of the eucalyptus in the air. That was the day they decided to join up. They were stopped up there in the forest and Damo’d asked him what he thought and Will had said yeah, he’d do it and Damo said, Would you? I mean, we could do it together. And Will had said, Yeah, that’d be right.

  Damo’d been there when he got back from up north. Different but. Something happened to him. Still wild but more contained. Like a fucking grenade. He’s not so far off that himself, but Damo’s scary with it. Then one night he tells him about Jaz, like it’s some big deal. This ex–special forces freak who’s running a house for blokes like them. You got to watch out but, he says, ’cos he’s got God, which Will’d have to say didn’t sound so good, except Damo says he doesn’t rub your nose in it, it’s just there.

  When they go around it’s only a few blokes having a drink, smoking some cones, a couple of chicks visiting and it doesn’t seem anything special. Jaz a whole lot older than the rest of them, not drinking, and you had to wonder what he was doing hanging around with these younger blokes who’re listening to everything he says as if he’s some sort of teacher, but – and maybe it’s the dope or something, the dope is strong – he finds himself listening too. He’s never met anyone like Jaz. He has a kind of authority that’s not been given him by a uniform, or by someone else, but inside.

  He tells them there’s a war on.

  No kidding.

  The Middle East, Afghanistan, all that, they’re just a small part of it, he says, the war’s going on right across the world, it’s in Australia too, a war between cultures. He says the Middle East’s a fucking trap, the whole fucking Iraq thing was a grand fucking trap they walked right into, and now this thing with Syria’s another one. The West going in there’s exactly what the fundamentalists want.

  ‘These Islamists,’ he says, ‘you’ve seen them, haven’t you?’ Talking right at Will, past the others. ‘You’ve seen them in the madrassas, haven’t you?’

  Will’s not used to being picked out like that. But he says he has, because it’s true, he’s been in Helmand. He’s seen the young men in the doorways of the mud-brick buildings with the big books open on their crossed legs.

  ‘You’ve seen how they persuade these young men to join them? They work with them, individually, that’s what they do. They listen to them, they build relationships with them. These young guys, they’ve got fuck all, they’ve never had fucking anything and they can see – they’re not stupid – that they’re never going to have anything. It’s all stacked against them. They can’t even get a fucking job and along come these people who talk to them, man to man, about higher purpose, about divine right, about being part of something.’

  Will doesn’t know why Jaz has chosen him to talk to. As if he, Will, is the only one in the room who understands. It could be the dope. It could be he’s imagining that it’s him Jaz is talking to, but there’s no way of checking on that and anyway Jaz’s looking directly at him.

  ‘These guys take the time to listen, that’s the thing, to find out what matters to them. They listen and they show how they can help. We’ve got no hope against that kind of shit, you know? Even if we turn their economies round so they have jobs we’re not going to have that relationship with them. In this country we’ve lost that amongst our fucking selves. That’s the truth of it. We’ve killed it off by the way we’re living. We think we can just throw fucking technology at our problems and it’ll solve them but it won’t. We need to get back to what’s real. If we don’t we’ll be fucked. These people want to see us dead. Our technology will not avail us shit against that.’

  A couple of days later Damo finds him at his mum’s place. He says that Jaz liked him and he can come and live in the house if he wants, even though he hardly said shit the whole time he was there. ‘What did he say about me?’ he asks.

  Damo shrugs his shoulders. ‘That you’re fucking crazy. That’s the way Jaz likes it.’

  It’s not an offer he’s going to refuse. His mum’s getting older and shriller by the day, squashed in a little worker’s cottage on Burke Street, like there’s no hope, like she’s been left behind. Hippies playing music at all hours in the rental next door. His father down Maroochydore working for Bunnings, living with a co-worker. The Bunnies, his mum and him call them, but not in a nice way. There’s not been so much good said about his old man for a long time. Not since the dairies collapsed and he lost his job and went downhill, took it out on his family. It’s not something you tend to forget. So he moves out to The House, gets given a bed in the sleep-out, up early in the morning to train with the rest of them, like they were still in the forces, working part-time at the dodgy mechanic’s in town so he’s often not there during the days and it’s better, it has to be better than it was except it’s been three months now of not hardly being even noticed, of feeling like he’s there but still on the outside, as if there was something else going on in the house that he wasn’t part of, that was just over there but out of reach. But then that’s what it’s been like everywhere for a long time. Like a wall between him and everything else; only difference being that in the house it feels like there’s something he wants.

  Ange takes him round the camp. Introduces him to people, tells him everything about it. She knows everyone and they know her. Must be a hundred or more people from all over living there, old people going round Australia in their rigs, young people who’ve come from other campaigns, battles, they call them, everyone talking all kinds of shit, global warming and fracking and Aboriginals and land rights, like they’ve never been up north and seen those folk and how they live, drinking and fighting.

  It’s all fucking lies, of course, they’re professionals is what they are, professional protesters: rent-a-crowds. This is what they do. No idea what a fucking battle’s like. One bloke from Israel, another from New York. People sitting on bales of hay next to their van beating drums, drinking chai tea, talking shit about the End of Capitalism. The thing is, with Ange it feels different. She believes this stuff and even if he wanted to speak he doesn’t seem to have the words to show them how fucked they all are, the ones he’s heard Jaz say enough times you’d think they’d just roll off his tongue.

  When people ask Will what he does, he says he’s a mechanic. He doesn’t mention the army, but then they don’t ask. When he says he’s a local it’s like they lose interest, as if someone from around there isn’t worth anything, like their opinion doesn’t count.r />
  There’s a committee that runs the place, organising the water, the dunnies and showers, who works in the kitchen, but at the centre of it there seems to be, really, just one bloke, a Canadian, called Alt.

  Will’s helping an old bloke with his motor – Ange has gone to do a shift in the kitchen – when he comes over to say hello.

  He’s about medium height, with a scrappy beard, rangy. He doesn’t look any different from the others, wearing loose Indian clothes, dusty feet in sandals, but he’s onto Will right away. He leans on the mudguard of the Cruiser, just chatting, but it’s in a kind of close way.

  ‘Which part were you in?’ he says.

  ‘Of where?’ Will says.

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘How d’you know that?’

  ‘It takes one to know one. Just the look of you tells me. I can’t tell where you’ve been but I look at you, how old you are, and I figure it has to be there.’

  So he tells him and they talk a bit about what it was like over there. Alt wasn’t in Afghanistan, he was in Iraq, like Jaz. Or maybe not. You can never tell with those guys. They keep their cards close. You tell them stuff, not the other way round.

  ‘So, you still get the nightmares?’ Alt asks, just like that, no beating around the bush.

  He’s got one arm still inside the Cruiser’s bonnet. He looks in at the motor and nods.

  ‘And the moods?’

  He nods again. The moods. Is that what you call them? The fucking rage. And this curious guy, hard like, you can see it in him, he touches him on the shoulder with his closed fist and says, ‘It gets better man. In time. Trust me.’

  Not so sure what to say to that. Fucking hopes it’s true.

  ‘What you doing here, then?’ Alt asks and again, like before, there’s no notice given, the questions just come and Will’s almost caught out this time, as if being there’s a crime. He says he’s with Ange, but, and that seems to satisfy him.