An Accidental Terrorist

by Steven Lang

  She steps out onto the veranda with her dog, lonely and disappointed.

  The young man, Kelvin, is sitting in the dark on an old bed, the coal of a cigarette gleaming.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, doubly embarrassed now, fumbling for the doorhandle. The attraction had been so obvious and she had behaved so badly in front of him. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

  ‘You’re not,’ he says. ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Suzy investigates him, sniffing at his trousers, and he puts his face down next to hers. Jessica holds onto one of the posts. The silence, which is not silent because of the drums, freezes her tongue.

  ‘Nice dog,’ he says.

  He rubs her hindquarters and the dog develops that pained expression she adopts when feeling blissful, a complete abandonment to the moment, accompanied by an overwhelming wish to withdraw, or at least not to be observed.

  ‘She loves attention,’ Jessica says, but thinking, really, what a slut she is. ‘You’re not a drummer then?’

  He shakes his head, ‘I never mastered the technique.’ Suzy sits down next to him, but slowly, leaning against his leg, one eye on her mistress.

  ‘I was about to go home,’ she says. ‘I’m not so good at being social, out of practice, you know.’ She is devoid of clever phrases, wishes she could have come up with something other than she was about to leave, because now she will have to.

  ‘I liked what you said before, inside,’ he says.

  ‘About pine planting? I didn’t think I was very supportive of the idea.’

  ‘Hey, it’s a job. I’ve only been doing it for a week.’ He bends down again and says some nonsense words in Suzy’s ear. ‘Besides, I thought that planting trees had been officially declared good.’

  ‘There’s trees and trees.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘So you’ve been told.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s a bit of play in that, a bit of the ball going backwards and forwards over the net; she has even managed to laugh at herself.

  ‘I meant I liked what you said about dope. That it’s not the cure for everything.’

  He is, she realises, actually trying. She spends so much time inside her own mind that sometimes she forgets to look out. The young man is there, in front of her, his masculinity arrayed before her in all its studied carelessness; and as soon as she sees it, the fall of the cloth of his shirt across his chest and belly, his naked forearm, she feels the pull of desire, perhaps that’s too strong, curiosity, she feels the pull of strong curiosity, holding her on the veranda.

  ‘I’m not anti-drugs,’ she says, seeming to feel it is important he should know that, although as soon as she’s said it she wonders why. She hasn’t been anti-drugs, she’s smoked and dropped as much as the best of them. But that’s in the past. Perhaps this is where her frustration at the group stems from. Their indolence. All that talk about doing stuff in the forest is just words, stoned raves. Dreams. She’s heard it all before. She prefers the hard yards of organisation, it’s something she has a gift for, but it’s not one that’s appreciated on the Farm. Inside the drumming reaches some sort of crescendo. A woman, probably Sally, lets out a high quavering wail, an ululation, like an African. Jessica would be at a loss to say how bad it makes her feel.

  ‘You want to come for a walk?’ she says

  ‘Sure.’

  The moonlight is still weak so they keep to the road, Kelvin in one tyre track, she in the other, her lantern abandoned beside the door of the main house because she hadn’t the courage to cross the room to get it. Their feet crunch on the gravel and he asks her questions and she finds herself answering, if only to fill in the space between them, but it’s complex, because if she has to explain what she’s doing on the Farm then she has to go back a long way – there’s the time she spent in London, and then what happened when she came back to Melbourne, her sad history of married men – and she’s not sure she should be telling a stranger these things.

  She had wanted to be a solicitor. She had even completed her degree, but then had found she couldn’t stand being an articled clerk for even a single day, let alone a year. She had been accepted by an old and venerable firm but had lasted just one afternoon. She’d been assigned to the stacks, and all those folders tied up with ribbon, the rows and rows of cases, each one no doubt a brick in the edifice of the law of precedence, seemed to lean in on her, suffocating her. She suddenly couldn’t bear to think of them as her life. She ran off to London; to escape her family, the law, whatever, to be a writer, which, in the event, meant working in pubs and becoming someone’s lover … there was no end to the need for everyone, apparently, to fill their lives with events, not only the big ones but also the little, ordinary ones, every minute filled with the imperative of doing. On the Farm these expectations are largely absent. On the Farm there is silence. Of course there are social pressures, perhaps even more intense because of the smallness of the group, but she still manages an unusual level of isolation. And if she resents the other people on the Farm, or has regrets, disappointments, about living here, they do not stretch to the landscape. She loves it. She loves the hills and the forest and the simple rhythm of her life. A clarity has settled in her, not just in her brain but also in her hearing; she can sense sounds beyond the reach of everyone else. In the safety of this separated world she gives herself over to them as she might to a lover.

  She realises, with the young man Kelvin by her side, that this quiet is what she had craved back at the main house, and in her social ineptness she has managed to drag him along with her so that now she still can’t hear it. Except, of course, it’s her who’s doing the talking, she’s the one filling in the spaces. He’s the one who’s listening, who’s got her talking.

  At the creek they turn up the steep hill towards her ridge.

  ‘Do you mind if we stop talking for a while?’ she says. ‘Sometimes I just like to hear the night.’

  So then there is only the grate of their boots on the gravel road.The moon is in its first quarter and the light is softer than it will be in another week, when the shadow’s edges will be cut by a knife.Tonight they are indistinct and the sense of the valley opening out all around them as they climb is given as much by a vacancy of air as by vision. Released from the need to explain anything she is all at once glad to be there in the night with him, alone. She puts out a hand and interlaces her fingers with his, pulls him off the road onto a path. She ducks beneath branches, leads him out onto one of the granite slabs, away from the trees. To where the whole world is laid out below them.

  There is no wind. Night noises reverberate around them; this is the silence she loves. Far below there is a sort of echoing plash, she knows the sound but has never managed to identify it. It’s an unknown noise, one that can only be heard by a kind of wilful listening, something akin to the exercise of imagination, which grants it an unusual power; the sound – this thing that is smaller and more abstract than anything she knows – enters her, rather than the other way around, and, once inside, expands, refusing to admit to the boundaries of flesh. It stretches her, including within her the whole valley, the hills, the sky, even the people, those distant drums, the man beside her, the dog, everything.

  ‘Can you hear it?’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ he replies, and it doesn’t matter what he is referring to, not then, not while their hands touch and the white air holds them on the face of the world.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he asks.

  ‘Not far from here. I’ll show you.’

  five

  He woke in her bed, a woman’s bed, surrounded by women’s things: bottles, jars, jewellery, clothes, scarves; a woman’s smell, that subtle litany of scents both natural and refined.

  A several-paned triangular window lodged near the ridge pole spilled a line of sunlight, exposing, in its angular course, the room’s unusual geometry. She was asleep beside him, head turned away, hair arrayed on the pillow. He
had not realised there was so much of it. As if drawn by his gaze she rolled towards him, put a hand on his chest, palm open, feeling him, confirming his reality, then swept back the hair, revealing her face, cheek pressed against the pillow. A woman’s face. Very close, puffed with sleep. Her arm displacing the covers so that he saw, also, a swelling of breast, white against the white sheet.

  She opened one eye and smiled. He watched the whole thing: her being asleep, opening her eye and, concurrent with that, her smile. Her expression did not pass through any stages on the way, did not stop at doubt, confusion, concern or fear, went directly to smile. Such unaffectedness could only provoke in him an instinctual terror. Kelvin needed time to respond to things. And despite his attempt to conceal it, and using only one eye, she saw his reaction. The smile faded.

  All at once she was up and out of the bed, her back to him, naked, bending over to find a sarong, covering up before he could see more of her, just the briefest glance allowed, pale freckled skin, swelling of buttock, smooth strength of thigh; then she was on the ladder, descending.

  She had not been so coy in the night. ‘Slow down,’ she’d said, her hands on his chest, ‘there’s no rush,’ lying beneath him, her breasts golden in the candlelight, her face softened by pleasure, his cock in her, ‘Slow down, we’ve all night,’ reaching up to touch his cheek, open-palmed, her fingers all over his face, rubbing it, and he had wanted it there, he’d nuzzled her hand with his face. ‘Am I pretty?’ she’d asked and he’d looked down at her again. ‘Yes,’ he’d said, and meant it, because she was; not just pretty but beautiful.

  The room was long and rectangular. The bed in a loft at one end. The walls were unlined, the weatherboards simply nailed to the outside of the framing timber, the ceiling the same, except for a layer of silver insulation paper next to the iron, now sagging between the rafters, tarnished bronze by smoke. The kitchen was a series of timber slabs with shelves underneath that lacked cupboard doors.There was a pair of camping gas rings and an old slow combustion stove.

  She came back inside with Suzy at her feet and he swivelled around in the bed, lay on his belly, watching; this new view of her. She was putting water to heat and mixing something in a bowl. In one seamless movement she raised her arms and wound her hair into a rope, forming a precarious turban, tumbling at the edges. She glanced up at him and the smile was there again, her mouth open, white teeth flashing, blue eyes bright in the sunlight. This time he was ready, waiting for it.

  ‘Do you like pancakes?’ she said.

  He liked waking in women’s rooms, in women’s houses. He liked the way they inhabited them. It was not just the bedroom. Jessica was evident in every portion of the structure. There were bits and pieces arranged in displays on tops of cupboards, on narrow shelves nailed in between the exposed studs; odd things: wooden boxes, shells, bits of tree and root, old biscuit tins, pictures from children’s books pasted onto card, whole wings from dead birds. And then there were the books, whole shelves of them. After years in Darwin that in itself was an attraction.

  Kelvin had lived in share houses, bunkhouses, aboard boats, in other people’s homes, but he’d never accumulated things.To have gathered things would have hindered his capacity to move, but would also in some way have defined him. He could not afford to do what she had done. In this house she was on display, reflected in its objects. Her life visible at a single glance. Beneath the loft was the area where she wrote, a single table with a chair and a manual typewriter, the walls lined with bookshelves. ‘Not published yet,’ she had said, showing him around, a candle in her hand, standing close to the table in case he looked at anything. ‘Well, a few articles,’ averting her eyes when she spoke, then bringing them back with unnerving directness, challenging him to doubt her.

  For the previous week he’d been sleeping in the bunk rooms of the old homestead at Rosehill, in a tall thin room entirely lined with unpainted pine boards, the building full of the raucous bastardry of men who lacked the company of women. At lunch on the third day he’d got up and gone with the hippies for a smoke.

  On the fifth day, when it had become apparent he was going off with Jim for the weekend, Stevo had been unable to resist a comment, ‘Sucked in mate,’ he’d said, ‘sucked in.’

  He sat at the small table in the kitchen. She stood at the stove, still in her sarong, still naked beneath it. Her crepes were good, served with lemon and sugar, everything about this woman was good.

  ‘My mother used to make these,’ she said, ‘every Sunday without fail.’ She flipped a pancake. ‘Nowadays it’s just Suzy and I. She thinks she’s in for a pancake. See?’ The dog was sitting at her feet, alert to every movement. ‘What sort of person would make a pancake for a dog? I’m not that sort of person, am I, Suzy?’ She was not really talking to him, it was more a kind of play-acting, the dog glancing around quickly, ears swivelling. ‘Did your mother cook?’ she said suddenly, catching him out, so that he gave his standard answer.

  ‘I never really knew her. She died when I was young.’ The one designed to shock and, by doing so, dissuade further enquiry. If that one didn’t work the next one usually did. ‘Cancer,’ he added with head slightly bowed, eyes to the floor.

  ‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘So who, I mean, where did you grow up?’

  ‘In Sydney. I was raised by my father.’

  ‘Just you and him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He’s a bookseller. I don’t have much to do with him these days.’

  He ate his pancake.

  Jessica poured more mix in the pan. ‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

  That much was true.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have much to do with my parents,’ Jessica said.‘They don’t approve of this. They think I should be in Melbourne, practising law.’

  He toyed with something he’d found on the table. It was a little Russian doll, the smallest piece of a series that must once have been stacked inside each other. His silence propelled her on.

  ‘I was a good Jewish girl – always did what my parents wanted. Well, up until a point. They still have hopes. When I left London and came back to Melbourne they thought I’d come to my senses, but I took a part-time job at Greenpeace instead. Then I came up here.’

  He still didn’t speak. He was listening, or looked as if he was but you wouldn’t have wanted to test him on comprehension.

  ‘So that’s my life.’

  She sat opposite him with her pancake, her tea in its cup and saucer, no two in the place alike. She ate. People seemed to need to tell each other these things. They weren’t satisfied just to be with each other, they had to fill everyone in on their history. As if anyone wanted to know, as if anyone had a right to ask. He had never been to London, had never left Australia, had no idea what the world was like. If he’d gone with Yvette he might have found these things out.

  When she was back at the sink Kelvin went and put his arms around her, kissing her neck, taking the weight of her breasts in his hands. She tilted her head back and leaned against him. He wasn’t good at talking but he could do this. The tap was running. He fumbled at the knot of her sarong.

  ‘Not now,’ she said, wriggling free.

  He stepped back, confused.

  She turned off the tap, propped herself against the bench.

  ‘You’re a strange one, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes.’ No humour there. ‘What are your plans? I mean today.’

  ‘I don’t have any. I was supposed to hang out with Jim.’

  There it was: the opportunity to leave and have it be her choice.

  ‘Would you like me to go?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I asked you first.’

  She wiped her hands, adjusted the sarong. Raised her eyes; that directness again. ‘No, I don’t want you to go. Not yet anyway.’

  He had nothing to do
with his hands. ‘I could stay,’ he said.

  ‘What about Jim?’

  ‘He’ll keep.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, ‘that’s settled then. I’ll have a shower, then we can go for a trip, a picnic. An adventure.’

  six

  The old Holden was a car designed by men for men. Within its sparse simplicity Jessica appeared excessively fragile, her fingers thin against the shiny plastic of the steering wheel, her back straight, her chin jutting forward so that she could see over the bonnet. The manipulation of the column shift in conjunction with the clutch was a major event. In the house she had seemed larger, at least as big as him.

  On the narrow farm road they came face to face with a panel van.

  ‘Andy,’ she said, nudging the car over to the side, the passenger wheels precarious on the broken edge of a wash.

  The van squeezed alongside and stopped, Andy with his arm resting on the window frame, leering in at them.

  ‘Great day, isn’t it?’ he said. He looked past Jessica to Kelvin. ‘I’m heading down the coast.’

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  ‘Where you two off to?’

  The question could easily have been seen as one of common courtesy, but Jessica did not seem to take it that way.

  ‘We’re going to pick some plums.’

  Andy looked behind him down the road. There was only forest that way.

  ‘At Cooral Dooral,’ she said.

  ‘Never been out there,’ Andy said. ‘I must make the trip some day.’

  Jessica gave no indication as to how this suggestion affected her. ‘We have to get going,’ she said.

  ‘Okey-dokey. Did you think any more about what I said last night?’

  ‘I’m not interested, Andrew. I have my own way of going about this thing.’

  She had not turned off the motor. She engaged the clutch and pulled the lever down into first. She waited for Andy to draw forward so she could go but he made no move. She raised herself up in the seat to see the road more clearly and began to roll forward, squeezing the big car into the gap, both hands placed nervously on the top of the wheel. Kelvin could see she was not going to make it. Andy had not moved. The front wheel began to slip. The heavy car lurched sideways. Andy, only then seeing the possibility of damage to his own car, pulled forward, but it was too late for Jessica. There was a dark scraping sound from beneath their feet. Jessica pressed the accelerator to the floor, lurching back up onto the road with a roar of gravel.