Oliver of the Levant Read online

  I held my knuckle against the glass, imagining that I would find the power to knock. Heard the nurse’s angry voice trailing off to someone inside: ‘Why do these bitches breed?’

  Small gumnuts hurt my feet on the downhill path. I wanted them to. I didn’t want any comfort, not when I was leaving my mother behind. Jess tucked his small hand into mine, and when I felt the hardness of his bone in soft skin, I almost turned into a cry-baby. I shook his hand away. Fifteen’s too old to cry. My father said I was the man of the family for now, so I couldn’t blubber like a kid. I made myself remember: with Babette, we would be a family again.

  Four-strong, against the world.

  Babette kangaroo-hopped the car. ‘I will be delighted to ditch this lemon.’ Her voice was clipped and hoity-toity, like the Queen’s Christmas message, which was a put-on. She grew up in Chatswood.

  My face was tightening with salt and sunburn, brewing more freckles to cluster like tea-leaves over the last lot. Gravity held us; velocity propelled us. We were used to being twisted this way and that. I pulled on my lime-green jester’s hat, with a peak of bells. Men can be clowns. That’s what my mother said. Jess giggled and punched my side. Babette sliced her left arm behind her, hitting me and then trying for Jess. We both yelled in protest.

  ‘You bloody children are dangerous.’

  Jess squealed like a wounded piglet. ‘It was him, not me.’

  We swung past whole blocks where brown grass lawns whispered in the wind. Babette flung away her fag-end. If the southerly had lifted the butt onto the grass, it could have started a fire. But Babette never thought about things like that, saying there were plenty of worrywarts around to fret for her. She didn’t curl in on herself. She stirred people up, the way I wanted to.

  I loved the helplessness of the back of her neck, which expressed something I didn’t know how to say. The sun had long ago fallen through a slot behind the solid brick of Bondi. The next day, Babette, Jess and I would ride a plane through that slot, chasing the sun to the other side of the world.

  I tried to touch Babette’s shoulder but she recoiled, like a shellfish. She always held back, inside her own difference, making her face pale when everyone else was busting to get a tan, covering her hair in misty scarves, even though it was as magnificent as a palomino’s mane. She lived on cigarettes, apples, gin and nose-spray. I reckoned that was because she was once a model and starving had meant money. Babette could be a mystery, but I knew she was just like me: in control of everything and nothing.

  We were there together, on a cliff-top, between one life and another, hoping the next would be better than the one we had now.

  2

  The Slave

  At Sydney Airport, Babette stroked my cheek. ‘Oliver, be a sweetie. We’ll check in this blue case in your name, so I don’t blow out the weight limit. It’s the one with orange trim.’

  I pointed at the tears tracking down either side of Jess’s nose. She lifted the tag inside his T-shirt. ‘Hmm. No directions on what to do with the contents of this packet.’ She looked around, as if someone might be there to help. But there was only me. ‘Pat him. Do whatever you must to turn off the waterworks.’

  I took Jess’s hand, but he beat me away with his elbows and broke into hiccupping sobs.

  ‘Shush.’ Babette swivelled back to him on the points of her heels. Sometimes she didn’t know she was dancing. ‘Oh, all right.’ She knelt and Jess’s face fell onto her shoulder.

  ‘I do-oh-oh-ohn’t want to go.’ His skinny freckled arm and knuckles, tight on her hair, were desperate.

  ‘You’re a lucky boy. This is the best time. The best,’ she stage-whispered. ‘When you’re leaving something behind and going to something brand new.’ That made him wail more, but my stomach tightened with the thrill of adventure. No more being the fulcrum when one small move by someone else could tip everything out of balance. I could see now how Dad could leave his family behind when it meant the whole world opened up for him.

  On the plane, Babette bagsed the window seat and I slid beside her, my shirt sleeve touching the small golden hair wisps on her bare arm. I held my arm there. The pressure stopped it from shivering. We heaved away from the land.

  ‘Goodbye, old life.’ Babette waved her hand, as if she was shooing away bad spirits, then opened a dull gold box of Dunhills. She said it was worth paying more for quality. She liked the shiny gold band near the butt.

  ‘When I’ve finished this pack, we’ll be in Beirut.’ The smoke gave me a coughing fit. She patted my shuddering back and ordered a pre-lunch cocktail. ‘Dirty Mother, easy on the milk.’

  I held up my hand. ‘Make that two.’

  Babette guffawed. ‘If it was legal and would shut you up for the duration, I’d agree, you little beggar.’

  Jess looked small in the aeroplane seat with the big sky behind him. ‘I wish I was a teenager. They’ve got more power.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I flexed my bicep. I persuaded the stewardess to give him lollies.

  Once the plane levelled out, time became jagged. I was tearing inside; I’d misplaced something important, but I savoured the sadness of losing it. My nerves were reaching and moving for the touch of something, like the filaments of a jellyfish in disturbed waters.

  I’d brought my lucky rock with me. There was a day – not long before – when that rock could have killed me. Except that the tilt of the earth was just right and the rock sailed past me. I drew strength from rubbing the whorls of my fingertips against its nubbly grains. It held a tiny world. There was a line of lichen along a seam that might have been an ancient Aboriginal engraving. On another side, there was a dwarfish cliff. Small, dry moss leaves made a miniature forest-world in the crystal-encrusted hollows. It was a map of a kind of home.

  Babette gave Jess a sleeping tablet and he pretended with a theatrical sigh to pass out. He’d folded a drawing of two open blue eyes over his airline sleeping mask and looked cute and ridiculous as they stared through his fake snores. Which became real.

  Through the night, we were suspended like tadpoles in a jar of murky water. Then we were above Beirut in the gun-metal dawn, the plane’s wheels stretched towards a geometric puzzle of flat concrete rooftops. No desert, so far. The soprano whine of the engines moved down the scale. When we hit the tarmac, Jess and I clapped, making people smile. I bowed.

  ‘Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? I have.’

  ‘Yes, Jimi Hendrix. Yes!’ I could have shouted. We had chased the sun across the earth and caught it. I was here in the real world, not just the one that formed behind my eyes when I used to lie in my bedroom, red candles flickering around me, ice cubes numbing my mouth, cola bubbling in my stomach, the wah-wah of Jimi’s guitar shaking out the horrors in my head. He was with me on the third stone from the sun.

  Inside the beige terminal, a round, pompous man in khaki made me open Babette’s suitcase. Papers, pictures and letters sprung out.

  Heaven to a snoop like me.

  I grabbed a postcard showing a bare-skinned lady in a claw-foot bath, which seemed to be floating in an island of turquoise and emerald, the walls tiled in a magical pattern that gave the illusion that they were shivering. She held one creamy arm at a lazy angle, while a black maid caressed it with a sponge.

  The soldier smirked. ‘You like pictures of woman?’

  ‘This is not my …’

  I folded the lady into my pocket while he studied Dad and Babette’s wedding photo. Babette was looking straight at the camera, pale hair piled on top of her head, her cheekbones like struts. My father was grinning into her face, like a dog on a hot day.

  ‘Your mother is very …’

  ‘Beautiful … Yeah.’

  Babette never wanted us to say she was our stepmother: ‘It’s so ageing.’

  In the photo, I noticed for the first time that Dad had grown a furrow deep as a knife gash across his forehead, as if all the time that he’d been off overseas with his planes he’d been worried. Was it thi
nking about Mum that had made that furrow? Or Jess? Or me?

  Yeah, right. Wish away.

  Then Dad himself was beside us, his neck a stalk above his crisp collar, angled over his navy blue uniform. He pressed something into the soldier’s palm. The man snapped our bags shut one by one and smiled: ‘Be yourself at home in Lebanon.’

  Dad threw his arms around Babette and Jess as three fat porters grabbed our bags. Babette smooched him. Dad shook my hand, his eyes turned back towards her. He found a trolley and Babette jumped onto it, her boots facing forward when he pushed her, as if she were an ornament on the bowsprit of his sailing ship. Jess ran and jumped onto it, facing towards Dad and giggling into his face. I straggled behind, forgotten, the white-armed lady on the postcard folded into my shirt pocket, my rock in my fingers. I wished, with an ache, that somebody would wrap their arms around me.

  We piled into a maroon Cadillac, which Dad said was ours. Jess and I smothered in the back under Babette’s three hard suitcases, plastic-shrouded dresses and soft pillows. That was okay; I had perfect cover to study the postcard. The handwriting was slapdash, but we spies can crack codes. For instance, I detected that it had a British stamp.

  Happy Bondi Chrissie.

  Couldn’t resist. This is so you.

  Elsewhere. Where you always want to be.

  Missing you. News: I’ve papped P.

  Your slave,

  Phillip xxxxxxx

  Did Dad know about The Slave? He’d once said that Babette was as hard to hold down as a butterfly. I decided straightaway not to tell him. He might do something stupid and then we’d lose her, just like we’d lost Mum to the man with the grey-green teeth.

  3

  Sabine

  The apartments we passed seemed closed up, the people hidden. Their empty clothes flapped on rooftop clotheslines. I felt as filled with air as those clothes. What else did I not know? All this time, the Lebanese had lived here, while gravity had held me to other side of the same Earth, unknowing. Here I was, wondering who they were, while they went about their daily lives ignorant of my existence. An entire day and night had passed here as the whole globe had turned beneath me.

  ‘Well, it’s not quite Paris.’ Babette trailed her fingers along the car window. ‘Cement tunnels and high metal lampposts are rather unlovely.’

  ‘This is the arse end, darling. We’re heading towards the glamour.’ Dad’s deep voice was high with excitement. Babette turned to touch his uniform. ‘I didn’t really have to get into this captain clobber, but it serves a purpose. Despite all the anarchy in this madhouse, the militias and self-appointed commandos who pop up at roadblocks are suckers for a uniform.’

  ‘As am I.’ Babette made eyes at Dad, whose stiffness melted in a glance. Jess and I pretended to smooch, then gagged. Blech.

  ‘They hang people from those in Iraq.’ Dad gestured towards the lampposts’ elegant necks. Babette winced.

  Dad loves this stuff. He doesn’t know how much it scares everyone else.

  ‘But they’re not in the habit of hanging folk here. The Lebanese like to stage more democratic coups. Most of the gunfire is celebratory – weddings and the like.’

  ‘I half-expected rifle fire when we were married in Bogan.’ Babette spat the name, as if she were exorcising it. Their wedding was in a wooden church in the mountains, not far from the farm where Dad grew up. Babette was tall and bony in a long yellow dress with no underpants.

  ‘Bogong, darling. It’s not Hillbilly Central.’ He gave a thin laugh.

  Ash from Babette’s cigarette blew back onto us.

  ‘Stinking up the car.’ I waved my hand. I hated the way adults thought they could do anything and we kids just had to put up with it.

  ‘Oliver. You will treat your stepmother with respect.’

  I couldn’t help it if my face got an angry twist when someone did me wrong. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

  ‘Do you read me?’ He directed his eyes at me in the rear-view mirror. That was the only time he ever looked at me properly, when he was trying to convey the beating I would get if I didn’t hold his gaze. To him, that was a sign of being guilty of something.

  He had to switch back to watching the road. Babette saw my two-finger salute to Dad’s uniform, but she didn’t rat on me. She slid across the seat and licked his neck as if we weren’t there. Dad shivered. He forgot all about me.

  Seeeeeeex. Necking. Snogging. Groping. It looks awful, but I still want to do it.

  We passed a strange city of angular plywood, metal sheeting and tangled wiring. ‘Cubbies!’ Jess shouted.

  Dad grunted. ‘Refugee camp. That one’s mostly Palestinian. Everyone loves Lebanon. Home away from home, poor bastards.’

  Jess chuckled. ‘Like us, Dad. We’re away from home. But we’re not poor bastards now.’

  Dad swivelled. ‘Hey, no swearing.’

  ‘Yes we are.’ I’d thought aloud, but no-one was listening. As usual. Someone had put a lonely pot with a red flower in a lopsided window of the refugee camp wall. It was the saddest flower I had ever seen, and the exhilaration that had puffed me up fizzled away.

  Dad slowed at a wide, sandbagged roundabout, where three soldiers in sharply cut uniforms raised their guns towards us. I felt the same sliding in the gut that I got when I saw a snake in the bush near Grandad’s block west of Sydney. Snakes make you go quiet.

  A soldier with beetle eyes tapped his gun-barrel tip on the wind-screen. It was pointed at Dad. Babette’s nails scratched loudly on the seat. I pulled a pillow over my chest. Jess covered his eyes and reached beneath Babette’s pile of dresses for my clenched fist, which I let him squeeze.

  Dad gave a tight smile: ‘Everyone just keep calm. This is very normal here … Morning, officer. I’m with the airline. These people are members of my family. Come to live in the world’s most beautiful country.’ The man swept his eyes over us, the family about to live in the world’s most beautiful country. None of us moved a muscle. He flipped through our passports until he decided we’d passed some kind of test. Maybe he knew that I’d held my breath for the longest time ever in my life.

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan. Welcome.’ He eyeballed Babette, squeezed his crutch and rapped the car top. Dad gunned it so the wheels squealed, leaving a trail of cheering men.

  Jess let go of my hand, grinned at me and whooped. ‘Hey, burning rubber. Cool, Dad.’

  ‘They get bored. Best keep them entertained so they don’t decide to end their drudgery by shooting someone.’

  ‘I hated that gun in your face.’ Babette’s voice was thin.

  Dad shrugged. ‘We’re not the enemy.’

  Around a bend, the shiny, empty Mediterranean appeared, and we followed it until Dad gestured to a straight strip of road decorated with palm trees. ‘The famous Corniche. One of the great boulevards of the world.’ The sea lolled alongside a ferris wheel hung frozen above a sign: LUNA PARK.

  Jess turned all excited chipmunk. ‘Hey, they’ve got a Loonie Park here, too. Betcha I can beat you on the dodgems.’

  Dad grunted. ‘You’ll have your work cut out competing against the locals. They’re very creative when it comes to driving rules.’ I imagined for a moment that Dad could stop being the captain and turn into one of those fathers who join their sons on fun-park fast rides, screaming and becoming a kid again. Unlikely.

  Dad pulled up a sloping lane alongside a stone building, which glowed orange against the sun and blue sky. He slapped the steering wheel and made another announcement from the cockpit: ‘Paramount Apartments. Home.’ The salt breeze tasted of coffee ends, crushed geraniums and cats’ piss. Dad introduced a man with wobbly jowls and a black broken freckle on one cheek. ‘Joseph Khoury, VIP. He is the concierge. He runs the building. He can make our lives hell or plunge us into paradise.’

  The VIP gave a humble laugh, as if this was true. ‘Welcome. I want to make your life beautiful.’ He introduced his three sons, who had French names, holes in their jumpers and eyes like the sm
all black olives Babette liked to suck with a G&T.

  So I didn’t see her at first. She was a phantom, a purple shadow behind the VIP’s sons. She had a circular face, a half-moon mouth the colour of plums and big fried-egg breasts. Oh. I could see her wide, placid face echoed in the carvings of ladies carrying baskets through a palm tree grove on the entry courtyard’s stone wall.

  She watched as Dad pulled the whingeing joints of a metal gate across an elevator and herded us in. Through the criss-cross lift cage, I watched helplessly as she glided through a door off the foyer. She had vaporised.

  Dad pointed his eyebrows. ‘Joseph’s home. He’s our paid helper, but he carries grudges. If you don’t keep him sweet, suddenly garbage piles up and the power and water snuff out. Not nice mid-shower.’

  The elevator rumbled upward, smelling of smoky brass and wood polish, while the boys carted our luggage upstairs, their plastic sandals slapping. Joseph opened our cage at the seventh floor. ‘That lift is an old man. Bad back. Complain all the time.’ His sour face disappeared when Dad paid him.

  Jess grinned at me. ‘Hey, flash hotel.’ We were beginning to get an idea of the order of things. People would do stuff for us that back home in Australia we had to do ourselves and Dad would pay, five and ten lira banknotes melting from his hands into their outstretched fingers.

  A boy humped Babette’s blue suitcase into my new room. I was quick enough, through my jet-thrumming brain to ask, ‘Who was that girl down there?’

  He held out his hand. I tossed him twenty US bucks. It was the ‘contingency cash’ Dad had told Babette to give me for the flight over. I didn’t know what a contingency was, but I knew it involved some kind of emergency. Such as this.

  ‘My sister.’ The kid blitzed me with a smile. ‘Sabine.’