Oliver of the Levant Read online

Her name sounded like the surge of surf on the shore.

  Sabine. I’ve gone all gooey. Can you be gooey and cool at the same time?

  4

  Boom

  There was a quiet echo inside the apartment, a haunted feeling that someone had just left. A stranger’s chairs, boxes of drawers and weird little tables all of a wood the colour of cherries, huddled around the ghost-white walls. Persian rugs muffled our footsteps on cold marble. Some freezer in the sky pushed waves of icy, briny air through the windows, carrying the sound of church bells. We all stood together in our strange new home and listened to the foreign world outside.

  Babette had faraway, bewitched eyes. ‘Bells, ringing us into our home, on a stairway of notes. How lovely.’

  Dad hugged her so hard that when they broke apart his uniform button left a red indent in her cheek. ‘And later, you’ll hear a man’s voice. The muezzin at the mosque. Regular prayers, five times a day. The mosque is close, but you’ll get used to it. I particularly love the dawn service. It’ll keep you awake the first few goes, then becomes a lullaby, specially if you’ve just come in from a night on the tiles.’

  Jess rolled his eyes. ‘I think you’re not supposed to drink alcohol, and you’re supposed to wake up and pray.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Dad had grabbed Babette again and was kind of grinding his hips to get closer to her. I yawned, then yawned again more loudly. He noticed, but only so much that it gave him an excuse to get away from us. He tucked his mouth to Babette’s ear. ‘How about we all grab a nap and later, my darling, I’m taking you out. I’ve been longing to show you Beirut. It’s so madcap. Full of anarchists, comedians, fatalists, bullshit artists …’

  The bells were still pumping dreaminess into Babette’s eyes.

  From high in the sky came a fingernails-across-blackboard screech, then a whop, as if a cloud had burst above us, causing me to jump. Then silence.

  ‘Holy hell,’ I muttered.

  Dad held up his watch dial. ‘Eleven on the dot. The boys are never late.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Israeli jets. They break the sound barrier over Lebanon every morning. Letting everyone know they’re there. Unnerve the potential enemy.’

  ‘We can never go out into that.’ Babette’s excitement had drained away.

  ‘There are always guns and bombs, superpowers sticking in their noses where they don’t belong. Lebanon’s safe, honey. You’ll soon get the hang of that old Lebanese attitude – maleish, who cares? I’ve been visiting this joint for years, and I know you’ll grow to love it. The Lebanese know how to grab life and shake it.’

  ‘I’m not Lebanese.’

  ‘Neither am I, but this is your kind of town. That’s why I chose Beirut above all the other offers I got from airlines. Well, yes, darling, Angola’s airline was the only other one that could take me on in the time frame. But even if I’d scored Paris, I would have grabbed at this. We’ve just caught Beirut in an interesting moment. Lebanon’s a minnow that Syria would love to swallow again. Israel wants to get rid of the irritants on its doorstep; that is, the Palestinians, who’ve been flooding into Lebanon. You saw their camp, back on the airport road.’ He pointed his thumb over his shoulder. ‘The political set-up here is based on Christians and Muslims having equal power. But the Palestinians are mostly Muslim and they’ve tipped the balance. So there’s a power struggle. The Israelis are agitated because Palestinian militants take pot shots across the border. They hold the Lebanese authorities responsible, but the government’s paralysed by the power struggle.’

  Jess snorted. ‘It’s a mess.’

  ‘If shooting starts around here, don’t stickybeak out the window. You’ll find that head on your neck handy later in life.’

  ‘Ha,’ Jess said, deadpan, but Babette was still pale with shock. I knew why.

  I’d studied a letter Dad had sent to her in Sydney, a few weeks before, after the New Year. I’d known it was important because reading it had made her eyes bulge – and Babette hardly ever frowned. ‘Never give a wrinkle a break,’ she liked to say.

  She’d let the letter flutter onto the kitchen table and I’d hovered over it, pretending I wasn’t trying to make sense of the upside down words (‘Israeli’ and ‘pandemonium’) while she’d poured a giant gin and added a fizz of tonic like a sigh.

  She’d snatched at the letter, saying, ‘Leave off, Oliver. It’s personal,’ and swished her glass to clink ice blocks against the glass between her frosted pink nails. I pointed at the gin and then the wall clock, shaking my head. It was just after 10 o’clock in the morning. She put her drink down for a moment to throw the newspaper at me. ‘It’s midnight in London. The party’s just getting started. Besides, it’s only gin.’ She had a theory – maybe because gin’s the colour of water – that it didn’t make her as drunk as beer, wine or whiskey, so she could guzzle it. I was going to test that out for myself one day.

  When she’d downed the glass, she spent a whole twenty-two minutes in her bedroom and with a ‘Toodle-oo’ headed out, leaving a waft of hairspray in the hallway. I shimmied into her room as soon as she’d gone. Her bed tsk tsked when I sat on it, scaring me. If I’d been sprung she could have dobbed to Dad, who’d said before he’d left for Beirut, ‘I can belt you until you’re big enough and ugly enough to hit me back.’

  The room was rich with Babette’s scent of musk and cigarettes. I’d fingered her perfume bottles: Chamade, an inverted glass heart with an arrow through it; Intimate – ‘Even in the dark, he will know it is you.’ Crescendo.

  A heap of intertwined black lace underpants and red frilly bras had spilt from a drawer. If I thought of rosy body parts inside lace, I wouldn’t be able to look Babette in the eyes the next time I saw her, so I concentrated on the hunt for the letter. In the drawer’s corner, my knuckles touched something smooth and hard. A gold locket, looped with a frail chain. A baby picture, hacked from a magazine, was stuffed inside under the glass. It could have been any baby, with a pushed back nose and hungry lips.

  I didn’t know she liked babies.

  I found Dad’s letter in a shoebox under the bed’s dusty bedsprings.

  Kiddo,

  Sorry about the phone. Lines go out here when it rains. I was at the airport when the Israelis landed. Our airplanes were parked for the night, on the tarmac, vulnerable. First came the chopper’s insect hum you know from Vietnam War newsreels. Then the smoke blew into the building. They’d attacked.

  Pandemonium in the terminal. Outside, I could see shadowy shapes darting between our planes. I knew they were commandos, but I couldn’t place where from.

  I pressed my back against a pillar and pushed my airline cap back to show a bit of pale hair, hoping to convey that I was an important foreigner.

  A tall man in black, air of an officer, wiry face, called in an American accent, ‘Hey, buddy. Got some piasters for the drinks machine?’

  I handed him all my Lebanese change. He pointed his gun at my epaulettes.

  ‘What rank are you?’

  ‘Captain,’ I said.

  “Me, I’m a major.” He winked. I tried to wink back, but my eyelid wouldn’t work. Israelis. I got the picture at last. He ordered me to get him a drink.

  I bought him a tooth-rotter (dental revenge – although it may take years) and watched his Adam’s apple quiver as it glugged down his throat.

  ‘Lokhaim,’ I said. (That’s ‘cheers’ in Hebrew.)

  ‘Shookran,’ he said. (That’s ‘thanks’ in Arabic.)

  It was no joke, though. The explosions started. The bastards had fitted charges under the noses and wings of thirteen Arab aircraft, then blew them up. Domestic airplanes! The Lebanese cedar tree clear on their tails.

  I lay on the terminal floor and waited for the worst. The Israelis got away. They’d flown up from Israel to avenge the killing of an El Al engineer by Palestinian hijackers. World outrage, given revenge amounted to more than an eye for an eye. But the hawks of Israel just wear that.

  The Israelis
had dropped nails on the airport road, and some folks had left their cars and run, beseeching Allah to protect their families, so I couldn’t get home for yonks. Cars banked up in one of those magnificent Lebanese traffic jams where hands sit on horns, Arabic insults fly and arms wave, imploring someone to do something. Firefighters and soldiers banked up behind the traffic, sirens wailing. It felt like the end of the world.

  Darling, don’t fret. These tempestuous times can’t last. I’m indebted to you for being a mother to the children. I take your point that they’re probably the worst flatmates you’ve ever had.

  I plan to straighten Oliver out when he arrives.

  Sorry, honey. Not much of a love letter. Still longing for that moment when we touch. Every time we’ve made love has been better than the last.

  Yours forever and lokhaim,

  Lachlan

  ‘Made love’ – those words had shot heat to my ear-tips, because they didn’t make me think about him – erk – they made me think about Babette, her lace, her musk, her creaky bed.

  I loved being around her, and now I secretly wanted to hug Dad, too, after hearing that jet shout a war cry high above us all. To say, ‘I’m glad the Israelis didn’t kill you.’ But he would only have grunted if anyone who was not some lady he liked said something as mushy as that to him. I couldn’t let him know I’d read that letter. I couldn’t tell him that both Babette and I had to pretend that we weren’t scared of the men at the airport who might come back and kill any one of us.

  Now we were going to pretend we weren’t frightened when the same kind of men made the sky explode either.

  5

  Edge of the Known World

  I got in more snooping while Dad and Babette shut themselves in their bedroom.

  Jess giggled. ‘I know what they’re up to.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought they were going to do it in the car.’

  ‘Gruesome.’

  I stretched. ‘I’m zapped. Gonna crash out.’ I wanted to experience the sweet vibration in my soul when I spied on Babette.

  I slid my door bolt and balanced her suitcase on my new bed. Bingo! Layers of diaries, of all different colours, were stacked inside. Babette had hauled them here, as if she were a snail and these were the scribbles on her shell. She’d marked each diary cover with a different year in black texta.

  I grabbed 1963 and lay on my stomach, feasting on photos of a grinning, younger Babette performing an exotic dance surrounded by fake palm trees. She was holding a giant ostrich feather fan over her torso. It looked like she had nothing on underneath. Her left arm was stretched out, as if she was saying, ‘Tah-dah’.

  She’d written: Moi in Pink Onion Review, London – just another face above another fanny (says Phillip – jealous boy).

  Another shot of Babette on a barstool, centre of a circle of admiring men. Caption: Moi in drinking shoes. LL second from left.

  LL? That was Dad. Lachlan Lawrence. Only, it wasn’t. LL had bulging eyes, a slob’s mouth and oiled grey hair. He wobbled on one knee in a formal penguin suit as Babette extended her hand to him. Our Babette on some other planet.

  I want her to only ever be in our circle. Us four – me, Dad, Jess and Babette.

  A yellowed newspaper clipping marked October 8, 1964 dropped out of the diary.

  Babette barnie

  Dancer and model Babette, the Aussie with the signature impish grin, was at the centre of a Chelsea party brawl last night.

  It’s the third time in as many weeks the slinky starlet with green goggle eyes has raised hell in swinging London since her curious half-year disappearance.

  Her playboy pollie ‘mate’, Lord Louche, and boyfriend Phillip X made punching bags of each other at the Rumble Rum launch bash.

  Wags wonder how the comely Colonial managed to incite a 20th century Rum Rebellion.

  Here was Phillip again. The one who’d written the postcard. And maybe Lord Louche (I reckoned it must rhyme with ‘ouch!’) was LL. Just when my heart was bursting with my own brilliant powers of deduction, Dad rattled my bedroom door and I had to hide the case. ‘Orders from the Arab Office in London, Al Orentz. Mind your brother. Babette and I are hitting the town.’

  I was impressed he’d seen the movie, but pissed off because no-one would ever have ordered Lawrence of Arabia to babysit.

  I wished I could go out with Babette. She and Dad were gazing out to sea through the living room picture window. Seeing her in a tight red dress, her hair throwing out a silver light, I felt sick with an empty hunger for her secrets. I hated the old men in London who looked, in her photos, as if they had wanted to devour her. In her diaries I had tasted some part of the inside of her, and I wanted more, too.

  Dad had no idea of my thoughts. He was all bounce. ‘So glad to be home. Roster’s been relentless. I’ve been back and forth to Africa, the Gulf, Europe. Had one of those metallic things tied to my arse more hours than I care to count.’ He was flying away from us in his head again. He thought we didn’t know what it was like to be on the move, yearning for home. I couldn’t think of one place I could call home, except maybe the bus where my mother’s father, Grandad, lived, because I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. It had no wheels. Dad had always had us on the move each time he came back, searching for a place without skank for Mum. I’d just have made a friend and then he’d book the van to haul our gear with a ‘Hey, kids. We’ve got a new home.’

  I loathed being the new boy, hanging on the playground perimeter. But magic tricks got me an audience. When I was little, I put a carrot in our car’s exhaust pipe and whispered to Dad as he was about to turn the ignition key, ‘I stopped the ghosts coming out the back.’ He whacked me then, but made it one of his party stories.

  Dropping a ‘whoopee cushion’ on a teacher’s chair could get me in with the kids. I went on to make scarves disappear and reappear, worked sleight-of-hand card tricks, and even had a go once at sawing my visiting English girl-cousin in half.

  ‘At least it’s only a three-bandaid job. Could’ve been worse,’ my aunt said when my cousin ran to her crying. The trouble was, magic shows only lasted so long. The tricks ended. The audience dispersed. Jess’d be off with his mates, Mum in the land of Nod, the silkworms Jess would keep in summer too bent on becoming moths to communicate with me.

  Dad was all cosy now with Babette. ‘Well, darling, you’ve brought a clear enough day that we can see Cyprus on the horizon.’

  ‘Where?’

  He pressed his body into her back and lifted her arm until it was pointing out to sea. ‘There. At three o’clock.’

  ‘That thing that looks like a cloud?’

  ‘That’s where we go if it gets too hairy here. It’s in my contract. The sheikh who owns the airline will pay for our evacuation … Yep, there’s Cyprus.’

  He made it sound as though that was the edge of the known world and we’d tipped over into somewhere else. Cyprus didn’t look real.

  6

  Booza

  I got to know Sabine through a black dog. Jess still had summer in his head, a hankering for ice-cream and his ‘contingency cash’ from Dad. So after we’d scoffed cold canned baked beans and chestnut purée from the curfew cupboard, we left the old people to sleep off their partying and slunk past Sabine’s silent burrow.

  Jess pointed. ‘Oliver.’ Then he made a circle with his left thumb and first finger. ‘Sabine.’ He poked the finger through the circle. I whacked him across the head.

  ‘Owww. So-oh-rry. Love so sacred it can’t be mocked.’

  ‘You’re too big for your boots, like Mum said. You read all this weird stuff, or see it on TV and then spit it out. Just shut up. Or no ice-cream.’ I had to wait for him to bound ahead before I could peer again at Sabine’s door. Nothing.

  At the entrance to the building, Jess and I hesitated before heading out alone into the strangeness. The smacking of surf on sand, the whiff of hot tar road and vinegar on chips, the show-off grommets zigzagging their way down the waves, cutting in on us kids
with the cheapo boards, the girls smearing coconut oil over their bellies and rolling their eyes back at the big boys – these were all gone. School seemed far, far away. Dad hadn’t mentioned it.

  Everything felt fresh and full of promise in the new land. Below, at the bottom of the laneway, the cars on the Corniche were bunched end to end and voices bubbled up from people strolling along the long footpath by the sea. A man with a big belly arranged blood oranges around a metal juice pump in a lairy red-and-yellow stall, yelling, ‘Yallah yallah yallah.’ The Israelis busted through the sound barrier again. I jumped, but no stars fell from the sky.

  The Corniche could wait. We decided to explore the unknown world at the top of the laneway. We strode up the hill under a wall of new apartment blocks. Above us, a thin woman banged a russet rug slung over a balcony railing, making dust fly with the bamboo loops of her beating stick. The lane came to a dead end and we marched across a flat, stubbly paddock tucked between the glinting glass of buildings that had just been born. We admired the cranes that, like huge wands, had willed the buildings to rise up, and we envied the men who commanded it all from glass boxes. These were empty now, hovering high up near a billboard that towered over everything. It had one word on it, ‘Mobil’, underlined with a twirl of Arabic script, slick as the eyeliner Babette dashed across her lids.

  ‘Hail the oil god of the Middle East,’ Dad had said when we’d first seen it.

  Whenever I bent over the pools of yellow in the paddock to pick buttercups, I’d see Jess’s familiar toothbrush hair jerking rhythmically as he tromped behind me in the watery sunshine. A kind of happiness took hold of me as together we manoeuvred the scratchy weeds and our feet released a strange herb smell from the earth. We were lured into a shop by the scent of warm cinnamon and fat glistening on rows of meat cubes, half-expecting Melham the Man to be behind the counter. A cardboard label was taped to the window: Frish roast meat – Chicren – Kofta — Excllent prepared raedy and on deman – cow egg – brains – quik sirves For Houses.