Prohibited Zone (11 page)

‘So who's killing who there now?'

‘Well, the Americans and their allies, including Australia, are fighting the Taliban, which somehow is surviving being thumped by all those big weapons. But there are several different ethnic groups there and none get on very well. About half the population is Pashtun, and they've tended to dominate modern Afghanistan. If I remember correctly, the next biggest ethnic group is the Tajiks followed by the Hazara. A lot of the refugees to Australia are Hazara because they are one of the most persecuted ethnic groups. It wouldn't surprise me if that is what your friend is.' She had been frowning as she gave this potted history, but she suddenly re-focused and looked at me.

‘She is,' I said. ‘She told me.'

‘Aha. There you go.'

‘How do you know things like that, anyway?'

‘I'm a history lecturer. I
should
know things like that.'

I looked at my watch. ‘Well, I'm a lecherer and what
I
know is that an early night is on the cards. Especially if we're not going to open another bottle.'

She smiled. ‘The word is lecher. And that's possibly the worst pun I've ever heard.'

We were grinning at each other. The academician was gone and she was looking at me with those beautiful eyes of hers. Beautiful warm, sweet, smart Lucy; Lucy with the secret sadness, the shadow of which occasionally seemed to fall across her face. Maybe it was just the thought of her dickhead husband.

‘May I drive you home?' I asked.

‘Yes please.'

I paid the bill and we drove down Anzac Highway to the Bay, her hand resting on my leg. It was a warm night on the plain, and even by the coast there was little breeze. We made love with the curtains open, the pale moon lighting her dark skin. When it was over she held me tight for a while, her legs around me, and then released me with a sigh.

‘That's about as good as it gets,' she whispered.

‘Yeah, but let's not rest on our laurels.'

She laughed, but then was silent. My mind drifted pleasantly to lonely beaches I had known, and to Kara.

‘How many women do you have, Steve?' asked Lucy, after a while.

‘Never more than one at a time.'

‘Haven't tried a threesome, then?'

‘No. Do you want to?'

‘No.'

Pause.

‘Could you ever be faithful to one woman?'

‘Dunno, never tried it. Could you?'

‘I'd be faithful to you, if you were faithful to me.'

‘I don't think you're the faithful kind.'

‘And I don't think you know very much about women. Have you ever loved anyone, Steve?'

‘You mean, besides myself?'

‘Yes, besides yourself.' She was speaking to the ceiling, her black hair in disarray on the pillow. ‘Have you ever loved a woman so much that it makes you sick? Physically sick? So much that you think only death can cure it? So much that you think you must love her more than anyone has ever loved anyone in the history of the world? That you realise you were never a whole being before, and if you were to lose that love you could never be a whole person again?'

I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at her. She was lying on her back, with her hips tilted slightly towards me and her legs splayed, one arm lying crookedly at her side and the other resting on my groin, her hand idly fondling my penis. In the dim light she was as beautiful and as timeless and as sad as a classical Roman sculpture, but infinitely warmer.

‘Don't worry, Westie,' she said after a while. ‘If you need to think about it then I guess you've already answered the question. You haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, have you?'

‘How can I think when you're rubbing my dick?'

She laughed and tilted her head to look at me. ‘I'm sorry to go so serious on you. I always promise myself that I won't.'

‘And I always promise myself that I will,' I said, and wished I hadn't. There was a long silence.

‘Poor Steve,' she said eventually, her voice soft and sad. ‘Doesn't know how to love.' She turned away and we drifted off to sleep.

10

T
HE SUN HAD BEEN UP
for a couple of hours when we walked to the beach the next morning. Adelaide sits about two-thirds the way down Gulf St Vincent, and none of the suburban beaches get any surf worth its salt, just tiny wavelets that never rise more than a foot or so and then dissipate in little hisses of foam. We stood on the promenade, a strip of kikuyu grass and a row of straight-backed Norfolk Island pines extending north as far as Glenelg jetty and south towards Brighton Beach.

We walked down to the water. Lucy took off her sandals and waded ankle-deep as we wandered towards the cluster of cafes and restaurants abutting the jetty. She was wearing a broad sunhat, sunglasses, and shorts that showed off her legs, which were worth showing off. A very large elderly woman emerged from the sea dressed in a bright green, single-piece bathing suit. Her legs were dimpled and flabby and had varicose veins on them as bold and as blue as tattoos. She lumbered to a spot about halfway up the beach where she'd left her towel and a little bit of her dignity. Lucy veered towards me.

‘I suppose I'll look like that one day,' she said.

‘I can't imagine it.'

‘Don't try, thanks.'

We sat in a cafe on the foreshore, reading the paper and drinking coffee. I switched on my phone and it immediately started vibrating. Kara had left several messages asking me to call her, urgently. I didn't know how she got my number; maybe from Baz. Lucy was watching me play with my phone. She had swapped her sunnies for reading glasses and was looking brainy.

‘Anything interesting?'

‘Nah, just spam.'

‘I hope you were more convincing when you lied to police yesterday. Whoever heard of getting spam on a phone?' We looked at each other for a few seconds and I had to look away. She always won the staring contests. ‘It's your life, Steve,' she said. ‘You don't need to tell me what you're up to. But try not to lie to me.'

‘It's that woman, Kara.'

‘Oh, Big Ears?'

‘Yes. She wants me to call her.'

‘What for?'

‘She didn't say. She says it's urgent.'

‘You'd better call her, then.'

‘Do you reckon? I'm not so sure.'

‘No, but you will, Steve. You can't resist a damsel in distress.'

Baz had called Kara a damsel in distress, too. ‘What the hell is a damsel, anyway?'

‘You rescued me. Unhappy, bored, abused. You could have just used me up. You didn't.'

‘I didn't rescue you. I just happen to like you. You're bloody good in bed.'

We did a little more eyeballing, but I couldn't read her thoughts.

‘Yes, Steve,' she said.

‘I thought I might call in on Luke.'

‘Sure, let's change the subject. How
is
your brother?'

‘As far as I know he's still a ratbag.'

‘Will I see you tonight?'

I looked past her to the shoreline beyond. It was going to be another hot day. Families were staking out their ground on the beach, lugging eskies across the sand and putting up tents and umbrellas. Children clad in colourful shirts and shorts and dicky little hats were skipping into the shallow water or stabbing the sand with plastic spades, their faces smeared with sunscreen. The sky was clear to the horizon. There was no breeze; the few sailing boats that had ventured onto the water sat where they were as if painted on. Time often seemed to stand still in Adelaide.

‘I'll probably have a beer with Luke, but supposing I was to come to your place at about eleven?'

‘That would be fine, supposing you weren't drunk.'

‘Not me.'

‘And supposing you were free of urgent engagements.' Her eyes went back to the newspaper, although she didn't seem to be reading it.

‘What about you?' I said. ‘What have you got planned for the day?'

She didn't look up. ‘I thought I might go into the university. Spend the day in the library. At least it's cool there, and I'm trying to finish a paper.' She looked at me. ‘If you change your plans just call me on my mobile.'

I drove the ute onto Tapley's Hill Road and pulled into the shade of a Norfolk Island pine. I retrieved one of Kara's messages on my phone and scrolled to ‘call'. I held my thumb on the button; I only had to move it a millimetre and I knew I would set something in train that I probably wouldn't be able to control. If I had known then how it would all end, how many people would get hurt, I would have put the phone under the wheel of the ute, driven over it a few times, and gone fishing. But I didn't have a clue. I closed my eyes and stabbed the button and she answered on the second ring.

‘West, where are you?' she asked. She sounded the same as she had yesterday – intense.

‘Why?'

‘This thing is blowing wide open. I need somewhere to crash – in a hurry. Some nasty things are happening.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like threatening phone calls. All night. They're spooking the shit out of Teresa and her mum.'

‘What did they say?'

‘All sorts of evil things. Listen, West, can you pick me up? Leslie – Teresa's mum – wants me to move out ASAP.'

‘Tell me about the phone calls.'

She breathed impatiently down the line. ‘Leslie took the first call, about midnight. He told her he'd fuck her up the arse and feed her into a mincer unless she handed over the girl.'

‘And she was spooked by that?'

‘Yeah, hard to imagine, right?'

‘So did she hand over the girl?'

‘She would have, if she'd known where she was. But I've put her somewhere else, where she won't be found. So instead Leslie asked me to leave and to take my evil phone calls with me. I had to do a lot of talking to convince her just to let me stay the rest of the night. There were three more calls. One at two, one at three and one at four a.m. Then I suppose the evil dude went to bed.'

‘I don't want your evil phone calls, either.'

‘I know, I know, it's not your problem, you don't owe me, blah blah fucking blah. I bet you think you don't owe anyone on the planet.' Her voice changed key into something more conciliatory. ‘I don't have anywhere else to go, West.'

‘Hire yourself a car. Or try some of your protester friends. I'm on holiday.'

She tossed another exasperated sigh down the line. ‘Do we really have to go through this again?'

‘Where's Saira?'

‘Somewhere safe. Some place only I know about.'

‘Why can't you stay with her? If it's safe?'

‘Because it wouldn't be safe if I was coming and going. Someone might follow me. It only took them a few hours to find me at Teresa's.'

An ice-cream van calling itself Mr Whippy pulled over in front of my parked car, its loudspeaker blaring out a trite little tune designed to attract children to the edges of busy highways. Cars were flashing past, glinting viciously on their way to the beach or wherever the hell they were going. Selfish little cars driven by selfish little people in a selfish little city. I couldn't work out if I was more annoyed at Kara, the evil-phone-call dude or Mr Whippy.

‘Can we make a deal?' I asked.

‘What sort of deal?'

‘If I find somewhere for you to stay, you tell me what the hell this is all about. The full story. Do you agree?'

She hesitated about a nanosecond. ‘Sure.'

‘So?'

‘So what?'

‘Where are you?'

She gave me an address in the north-eastern suburbs, about half an hour's drive away. I looked at my watch; it was just after nine.

‘I'll be there at twelve,' I said.

‘Why so long?'

‘Because I have a goddamned life. See you at twelve.' I heard her squawk as I snapped the phone shut. I sat there for a few minutes, watching a handful of kids jostle for position at Mr Whippy's counter. Eventually I got out of the car and joined them.

My brother Luke lived in Renown Park, a small, bleak suburb which, contrary to its name, few people had ever heard of. Some recent money had been invested in its south-eastern corner, but most of the suburb was still above the high-water mark of the real-estate tide and was a drab mix of single-storey bungalows and light industry. It grew ugly trees on the sides of its roads. It was an ugly suburb, and Luke lived in its ugliest house on a cul-de-sac. It was a weatherboard box that had been painted a tragic shade of pink some decades ago and hadn't been touched since. It had an unruly garden and at least one boarded-up window. It was the sort of place you'd put up with if you were single and had lots of friends who liked to come around, get drunk and smash things. As I drove up, Luke's housemate, Rolley, was leaving the house, clad only in a pair of jocks with his jeans in one hand and a stubby of beer in the other.