Comfort Zone

by Lindsay Tanner

  Dan O’Connell’s — or the Dan, as it was universally known — was one of very few remaining old-style pubs in Carlton. Aside from a few that relied on the student crowd, and a couple that had been tarted up, most of the old mainstays were gone. The Albion, Poynton’s, and now even the Lemon Tree were nothing more than fading memories.

  The Dan somehow managed to hang in there against the trend. Located on the corner of Canning Street and Princes Street, it still featured live music, rough decor, and interesting patrons. It was Jack’s second home, a place where he could always find someone he knew, an environment where he felt like he belonged. As inner Melbourne grew more affluent, places where humble taxidrivers could hang out were disappearing. These days, if you didn’t dress up to go out for a drink, you were out of place. And no amount of dressing up could disguise the fact that Jack was a late-middle-aged loser in the eyes of the fashionable types who drank at these places.

  Like most traditional pubs, the Dan was divided into two main areas, a public bar and a lounge. In theory, the lounge was for more genteel patrons — even a few ‘ladies’ in the old days — but now there was little distinction between the customers on either side of the bar. Jack generally preferred the lounge, because he liked sitting on proper chairs. Bar stools made his back hurt after a while, and he couldn’t be bothered standing for hours.

  The lounge was a large rectangular room filled with a scattering of tables and chairs, which doubled as the live-entertainment venue on some nights. It was shrouded in gloom, the darkened timber walls and ceiling overpowering the weak lights and accentuating the haze. It didn’t smell that bad — these days, the management worried that the traditional odour of stale beer, smoke, and sweat might alienate potential customers. It did have a slightly musty, mouldy smell, though. Of course, after a couple of decent drinks, all these details tended to fade into the background.

  As always, Rowan was full of conspiracy theories when Jack told him of his latest problems.

  ‘These ASIO guys, they’ve got shitloads of money. Howard sprayed them with cash for years. They’ve got to spend it on something. Not much going on, so they just make it up. Everybody’s happy: they get to play James Bond, politicians can say they’re keeping terrorists out, general public feels safe. Everyone’s a winner! Except those poor dickheads who pay taxes, of course.’ The clear implication was that paying taxes was entirely voluntary, engaged in only by stupid people.

  ‘What about the poor Somalis on the receiving end of all this stuff?’ Jack asked, surprising himself.

  ‘Pretty soft compared with what they’re used to at home, hey?’

  Jack couldn’t argue with that. Presumably there were some real terrorists out there, but investigating Farhia seemed absurd.

  ‘So you reckon it’s all bullshit?’

  ‘Guaranteed. Why would a single mum be a terrorist? Ridiculous.’

  ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Play along. Might be fun. Become a spy! Think about it, my friend. Unassuming taxidriver saves Australia from terrorists! I can see the headline now!’

  Rowan’s eyes had lit up, and he was waving his arms furiously. He had a habit of punctuating his chats with Jack with theatrical performances. All part of the image, Jack assumed.

  ‘Sounds good,’ was the only response Jack could offer. He swallowed the rest of his pot in a single emphatic gulp and stood up. He hitched up his pants in an ungainly motion.

  ‘Time to head off, mate. I’ll let you know how it turns out.’

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled and all that. Alert but not alarmed. The walls have ears, you know.’ Rowan tapped the side of his nose, managing to tumble three of the five senses into an appalling mix of espionage clichés within a few seconds. He was having fun. Jack wasn’t sure whether Rowan was mocking him or the whole spying thing. He gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘See you round, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, see you.’ Rowan smiled and stood up, and strutted off towards the men’s toilets. No arrangements for a future meeting were made. Jack knew he would bump into Rowan again soon. The Dan was a good way for Jack to kill an empty evening, and Rowan could be an amusing drinking buddy.

  Jack wasn’t a fantasist — far from it. He saw the seamy side of human nature in his cab every day, and that made him even more cynical and pragmatic.

  Now he was hooked on a fantasy. Farhia was much more than a beautiful, exotic woman to be worshipped. She was also at the centre of a mystery. Jack could feel his obsession dominating his senses like a hallucinogenic drug. He felt different. The air he breathed tasted different. The sky looked more vivid. His flat was bigger. His back was straighter, and his belly smaller. Even his shoulders were bigger.

  He spent hours on the internet, researching Somalia and Islamic terrorism. He even started taking notes. He was starting to drift into the world of Robert Jeffrey.

  It didn’t take long to confirm Farhia’s rough outline of the tribal composition of Somalia. Wikipedia was very helpful on such matters. He found that the Hawiye were dominant in the south, and antagonistic towards the Darod, the major tribal group in Puntland. A Darod sub-tribe, the Majeerten, were particularly hated by the Hawiye, as they had long dominated the Somali elite. The Isaq seemed to run their own race in Somaliland, and he couldn’t quite work out where the Digile and Mirifle fitted into the picture, except that they were found in south-western Somalia. He was uncertain about the pronunciation of these names, a matter of some importance if he was to talk to Farhia about them in future.

  Jack also discovered there was a group called al-Shabab or ‘youth’, an Islamic extremist outfit that had taken control of much of southern Somalia. It was mostly of Hawiye origin, and motivated partly by contempt for the traditional Somali elite, particularly those from Puntland.

  Farhia’s region was also home to another dangerous group — pirates. For a number of years, groups of Somali pirates had been seizing large ships passing the Horn of Africa, and holding their crew and cargo for ransom. This lucrative trade had been triggered by one incident when hijackers had been paid $2 million to release a vessel. There were large numbers of young men who had lost official jobs in agencies like customs and the police as a result of the conflict in Somalia, and had turned to piracy as an alternative. It had quickly become a major business, with large sums changing hands, and western governments were now treating it as a serious security threat.

  Nice work if you can get it, Jack thought, as he scrolled through articles on the Somali pirates.

  It was all fascinating when examined from the safety of his Brunswick lounge room. Jack had no doubt that it would look very different in real life. Some of these groups had also kidnapped westerners — typically aid workers, journalists, and tourists — and Jack felt relieved he wasn’t living in the dangerous circumstances that prevailed in parts of Somalia. He wasn’t sure whether his obsession with Farhia would extend to being prepared to place himself in serious physical danger for her sake — no matter how lurid his romantic fantasies became.

  Jack had a basic understanding of Islamic extremism and the terrorist threat associated with it. Since the September 11 attacks, Australia had been gripped by a kind of psychosis about Muslims and terrorists. He didn’t much like Muslims, and he certainly didn’t approve of people blowing up innocent children and things like that, but he didn’t like Americans either. Secretly, he was quite pleased to see the American bullies get a taste of their own medicine. His immediate reaction to the September 11 atrocities had been Now you know how it feels. He took a casual interest in the drama that was playing out across the world — Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorist attacks — but he was no better informed on the subject than most Australians were.

  Still hampered by the lack of a mobile phone, Jack decided to lie low for a few days. He would have to play a long game with Farhia, learning as much as he could about her background and the issues th
at had aroused the interest of ASIO.

  He used the lull to deal with mundane domestic matters. He paid his overdue rent, did some washing at the laundromat, and replaced the broken light bulb in the bathroom. And he tackled the Gideon problem. After a respectable defeat at the hands of the Preston Panthers — not a bad outcome, really, as they were second on the ladder — he had a serious word to Ben, his star player. Jack had discovered that Ben was one of the ringleaders tormenting Gideon, which made it personal. One of Jack’s kids getting bullied was bad enough, but if one of his other kids was a key perpetrator, it was serious. It was bad for the team, and Jack himself might even get blamed. He felt obliged to do something.

  ‘Ben, mate, I hear on the grapevine you and your mates have been making it hard for Gideon at school. That true?’

  Ben flashed a look of guilty defiance back at him.

  ‘Right. Well, here’s the story. As of now, you’re sticking up for him, okay? You want to be part of this team, you stick up for your team-mates, okay?’

  ‘But he’s useless! He’s a real girl … does nothing but read books and that shit. Should get rid of him.’

  ‘It’s you I’ll be getting rid of if you don’t clean up your act. And I’ll be telling your mum why. Sure she’ll be rapt with all the extra travel if you have to switch teams. Bit of advice, kid: don’t be a dickhead all your life. There’s always going to be someone tougher than you around the corner.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ben conceded sullenly.

  Jack felt the need to ram home the point. ‘Understand this, Ben. I’m your friend, and you’re my best player. But if you want some nasty shit to happen to you, just keep picking on Gideon. You won’t know what hit you, and you won’t know where it came from.’

  Suitably chastened, Ben nodded. As he walked away, Jack called out after him: ‘And don’t think I won’t find out what’s going on, okay?’

  In a strange fashion, Jack felt rather proud of himself after this exchange. Exerting a bit of power to protect someone weaker than him felt good, even if it was only being exercised over a boy half his size.

  This righteous mood lasted long enough to help motivate him to tackle a task he’d been putting off for days: cleaning out the cab. Jack and Ajit took it in turns to do this job. Each claimed to be a more thorough cleaner than the other.

  Still energised by his Farhia fantasy, Jack was determined to give the cab a once-over it would never forget. However humble his station in life, he still retained some pride in his craft. A clean cab was more important to him than a clean flat.

  On this occasion, he poked into places previously untouched by human hands since the car had left the assembly line: in hard-to-reach spots under the seats, difficult places beneath the dashboard, and hidden bits of the glove-box, he went in search of rubbish and dirt. Armed with a damp cloth and a plastic spray bottle containing a miracle cleaning agent — or so the advertisement said — he slaved over the car’s interior for over forty minutes.

  Then it happened. A moment of pure relief, of sweet triumph.

  Beside the front passenger seat, in a tiny space at the bottom next to the central console, he touched something odd — an object that felt plastic, hard, and flat.

  Even though he was only touching a small part of it, he realised immediately that he’d located his missing mobile phone.

  ‘You fucking beauty!’ he yelled at maximum volume. He didn’t mind that it took a further few minutes of awkward groping and fumbling to extract it from its hiding place. The world was a wonderful place again. He still had the photos of Farhia’s book, he was reconnected with the rest of the human race, and, best of all, he didn’t have to buy a new phone. Hallelujah!

  As he often did at moments of good fortune, Jack went back upstairs, opened a can of VB, and put on his favourite Slade album. As the sun slowly melted into the haze of dusk, he sang along to ‘Gudbuy T’ Jane’ with even more gusto than usual.

  Jack still owned over a hundred vinyl records, most of which dated from his youth. He was especially fond of Slade, whose emergence in the early 1970s in opposition to the intellectual pretensions of bands like Yes, King Crimson, and Pink Floyd had appealed to him. Even though he’d gone to demonstrations and smoked a bit of dope, Jack’s personality was much too mainstream for the fashions that had appealed to his peer group in the early 1970s.

  The recovery of his mobile had changed everything. Whatever was written in Somali in Farhia’s little book was important. ASIO thought so. Farhia clearly did, too. He wasn’t sure how it would benefit him, but possession of a copy of the book’s contents certainly made him relevant.

  Without it, Jack was just a nice taxidriver who’d helped out when some kids were being picked on. Even though he had twice blundered by talking about the book to ASIO and the cops, in a weird way this had worked in his favour. Something strange was going on, and he was part of it.

  Deep down, he realised this was just a symptom of his otherwise boring existence. Someone like Matt would have regarded all this stuff as inconsequential, a matter of fleeting interest at best. Part of the reason his obsession had become so strong was that Jack didn’t have a great deal else to worry about.

  He thought about finding someone to translate the contents of the book for him. He could barely make out the letters in the text — his eyes weren’t what they used to be, admittedly — and he wasn’t sure that anyone would be able to read them directly from his mobile. He knew a few Somali drivers, but he wasn’t sure he could trust any of them.

  In the end, he resolved to sleep on it. Tomorrow was his day off. He would have plenty of time to think it through and work out a plan of attack.

  Jack’s bedroom was next to the lounge room, a small, square space that was almost filled by an old double bed that sagged in the middle. Apart from built-in wardrobes with sliding doors, the only other piece of furniture was a small bedside table. It held a clock radio, a bedside lamp, a few books, a dirty handkerchief, and a half-empty packet of Nurofen. An ashtray with a horseshoe rim lay beside it on the floor, containing plenty of evidence of Jack’s unfortunate habit of smoking in bed.

  There was no decoration on the walls at all. The naked light bulb dangling from the middle of the ceiling reminded Jack of the opening sequence of the 1960s cult British spy drama Callan. For the thousandth time, he resolved to do something about the lack of decoration in his bedroom, as he stripped down to his underpants and singlet and fell into bed. He lit up a Peter Jackson, and groped around between the bed and the bedside table for the book he was reading, an early Robert Ludlum novel. He tried to imagine Farhia sharing the room with him. But he knew that, even for a single mum from the flats who’d escaped from a brutal civil war in Somalia, it would not be an enticing prospect.

  5

  Adventure

  Jack didn’t sleep well that night. Normally he was a heavy sleeper, but he’d had a lot of random thoughts spinning around in his head. By the time he’d eventually nodded off, he’d worked out a rough plan of attack. He would call Farhia and ask to see her again. He might mention his latest encounter with law enforcement, without being too specific. She would assume it was the police, and he could play his ASIO card when they were face-to-face. He would deliver a carefully edited version of his meeting with Robert Jeffrey, and offer to help her sort the whole thing out.

  Exercising extraordinary self-restraint, he delayed calling Farhia until just before lunchtime.

  ‘Hello, Farhia, it’s Jack van Duyn. How are you?’

  ‘I am well, thank you.’

  Jack paused to allow Farhia to respond in kind, but when nothing happened, he concluded he’d better get to the point.

  ‘I’ve had another visit from the law, asking questions about you and stuff.’

  ‘What questions?’ The quiver in her voice was subtle, but unmistakable.

  ‘Strange stuff. About Somalis … Think I shoul
d drop round and fill you in. It’s my day off today so …’

  ‘I am sorry, Jack, but I help at the Somali Welfare Centre this afternoon.’

  ‘… or I could drop by after my shift tomorrow. Or the next day.’ He hoped the pleading tone in his voice wasn’t too obvious.

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow. If you think it is important.’

  Jack gazed wistfully at the expensive jeweller’s shop on the other side of the street. His heart was sinking as the reluctance in her voice grew stronger.

  ‘I’ll drop around a bit before four. Should be able to do my changeover by then.’

  ‘You may have to play with Yusuf and Omar then.’

  ‘No worries. You’re at 20 Elgin Street? What flat number is it?’

  ‘It is better if you call me and I will come down.’

  ‘Okay, great — thanks, Farhia. See you tomorrow.’

  He refused to be put off by the distance she was maintaining. The refusal to allow him to come to her flat could mean any number of things. She might even be embarrassed by her poverty.

  Jack spent the afternoon watching a Port Adelaide–Fremantle game on TV, the ultimate in pointlessness in late winter. He didn’t mind, because he had another date with Farhia. And it was tomorrow.

  Monday morning was usually busy in the taxi scene, so Jack was hoping for a nice, normal shift with a few solid fares. He hadn’t counted on getting a call from Matt.

  The young investment banker had faded into the back of his mind. He was so besotted with Farhia, and so disturbed by the intrusion of ASIO, that he had almost forgotten about Matt.