An Accidental Terrorist

by Steven Lang

  Eventually the machine arrived, after more time than seemed proper. It came whopping down the valley within the ambit of the mountains but still quite high, following the course of the river. Then careered off to the east.

  He went back out into the open with the compass and opened the map again, desperate for a reference point. He was on a long straight section of riverbed. Steep forested hills rose on both sides, obscuring the view to the north or south, but to the east, captured in the V of the river’s course, there was one broad hill with shoulders like the arms of massive chair, a blue haze cradled in the shadows between them. If indeed he had started back up in the hills where Carl’s biro marks indicated, then it was possible by a process of elimination to guess where he was.

  The problem with the map, if he was correct in his reading, was that it showed him as being on the other side of a mountain from the Farm. If he was to take an abrupt right turn and start climbing he would come out on the top of the mountain on whose opposite slopes he and Jessica had walked the day they made love in the grove. He had been walking towards Cooral Dooral because it was a destination he didn’t have to think too much about. There was a vehicle there, and the dogs needing to be let off their chains. He would have been able to get to Merimbula by twelve going that way, except hours had passed and it was after nine, the sun was out and helicopters were scanning the hills. It was all bullshit, he’d gone nowhere.

  The problem with the map was that it suggested it would be better for him to go back into the forest, and he did not want to do that. The trees frightened him. He had wanted to locate himself and now he had and he liked it even less. Be careful what you wish for, Carl had been in the habit of saying. Carl had been in the habit of saying a lot of things and Kelvin had been in the habit of not listening to them, of regarding them as no more than words used to fill the empty spaces between people. Kelvin had not been in the habit of listening to anyone, of letting anyone get through to him. The only people he had ever known who had wanted to get close to him had always turned out to want something. Except for here, in these backwoods, where he had encountered two people who had seemed to require very little from him. It was he who had wanted something from them. So what had he done? He had taken what they offered and betrayed them; because, well, because that was all he seemed to know how to do. It had happened with his mother, and with Yvette, and then in Melbourne with Shelley, and then again here. It would have been nice to think it was someone else’s fault, Andy’s perhaps. Except Andy hadn’t been in Melbourne, or Darwin. Kelvin was the common factor.

  He had had no idea how to find Shelley in a city of several million but had never doubted for a moment that he would. As if the sheer momentum of the journey from Darwin, down through the Alice to Port Augusta, then by road, hitching to Adelaide, across to Melbourne, had granted him special powers. Nor had he given much thought to what might happen when he did find her, the idea had been simply to get there. Except Melbourne was other than he had anticipated. Despite being summer it was cold and wet and excessively green, stately and solid after the frailty of tropical Darwin and the brittle sparse vegetation of the Centre. He went looking for her in the St Kilda clubs, as if it was inevitable that she would still be on the game, but without considering what that might mean. One of the girls said it was possible she had heard of her, who was he?

  ‘She’s my sister,’ he said.

  He found her living in a small flat behind a row of tenements. He had to go through a kind of tunnel, an archway into the back of the building, to get there. It had probably once been the stables of some grander establishment which had long since disappeared. There were stone buildings around a cobbled courtyard. Several painted doors giving onto it, one open, from which came the sound of a television. He knocked and someone within the dim interior moved and said, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘Is that you Jimmy?’

  He said, ‘It’s Kelvin, I’m looking for Shelley.’

  And the voice said, ‘Kelvin?’

  And the certainty which had carried him all those miles suddenly broke. He hadn’t seen her yet, she had only said six words, but already he could tell what was going on by the slowness in her voice and the smell of damp and of unwashed nappies and stale cigarette smoke laid over the top of some older, even more profound reek.

  His inclination had been to turn around there and then.

  But what was left of the momentum forced him on. It wasn’t as dark inside as he had expected. The flat had been made by dividing up a larger room with fibro partitions. There was a plastic-topped table bearing a litter of mugs and breakfast plates, open cereal packets and a small carton of milk, an overful ashtray. There was an old couch against one wall and a television badly tuned to a commercial station showing daytime programming; a tiny kitchen, a half-closed door to another room. Shelley was sitting at the table, smoking, her back to the screen. A child asleep on the couch.

  It was Shelley but she had changed. She was both heavier and thinner at the same time, as if she had lost weight and then put it back on but in all the wrong places, fluid retained in legs and wrists, in her neck and face. Her skin was pale and soft, her hair lank, the same grey colour as the rings under her eyes. It took several awkward moments to pull herself back from wherever she had been.

  ‘Kelvin,’ she said. ‘Come in, come in.Well, look at the place. Look at me.What you must think.Where have you come from like that, all of a sudden? I heard someone was looking for me, I didn’t think it’d be you.’

  She stood, she fussed, cleared dishes to the sink, put the kettle on, tied up her hair, but in a drawn-out way, not slow motion but not at quite the right speed either. She was wearing track pants and furry slippers, a sweatshirt with a faded picture of Mickey Mouse on the front. She came over and put her arm around him, laid her head on his shoulder.

  ‘You’ve become such a man,’ she said.

  He did not want her body against his.

  He sat at the table while she wiped it with a cloth that left a wet swirl of drops behind it. She lit a cigarette, leaned against the sink.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea.’

  ‘You too,’ he said.

  She spoke, she told him things, but they were just words. She was still somewhere else, she was acting, making up things to say that she thought were the proper things for old friends to say to each other.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said. ‘Darwin? Really? I keep meaning to get up there. I was going last winter, I could have gone, but there were Sophie to think of. I couldn’t leave her. Can’t wait for her to wake up. She knows all about you, Kelvin. I told her about our times together in the Cross, catching the train to Brissie.’

  As if she had conjured him up from her past for the sake of her daughter. He wanted to escape before the child woke. He didn’t want to be an honorary uncle.

  She became sentimental. She touched his hand when it was on the table and then his leg when he withdrew his hand. There was in her touch a closeness, a cloying lover’s need that made him withdraw, pulling into himself, like a mollusc in a tidal pool. He was not her lover, never had been. The drug in her was confusing even this relationship. He said that he had some people to see, that he had to go.

  She tried to tie him down to another visit. Later that night, or the next day. ‘We could do lunch,’ she said, as if she were living in Toorak and not some squalid boarding house with a habit and a child.

  He said, ‘I’ll give you a call. No, you don’t have the phone. Listen, I’ll come around tomorrow, in the morning.’

  He stood to go, but then couldn’t quite leave. She was watching him and when he met her eyes he could see that she, too, knew that he was acting.

  ‘It was nice of you to come, Kelvin,’ she said.

  The only other time he’d been quite as alone as he was next to Cooral Creek was during those days in Sydney, before he met Shelley, when he was a kid, fossicking in bins for old food. After that everything he’d ever done had been, in som
e way, done within the cradle of Shelley’s love — as if, even in Darwin, even out in a trawler in the Arafura Sea, he’d had a special force around him. It had been there for so long he’d forgotten it existed. Shelley had been family and he had simply abandoned her when it didn’t suit him. Just walked away, packed his bags and stuck out his thumb on the Princes Highway. The wrong road as it happened.

  According to the map the hill rose steeply for almost a thousand metres. If he reached the top he could then continue east and eventually he would come down into Gubra Creek. Almost any ridge would take him there.

  ‘Climbing mountains seems a pretty pointless activity to most people,’ Jessica said. ‘A lot of sweat for little reward. But if you stand on the top of one you find that a couple of paces in either direction will take you to a completely different world. There’s a kind of power in that. You stand in a place like that and you feel it’s possible to make decisions. Although,’ she laughed, ‘it’s probably just the oxygen deprivation, all that heavy breathing to get you there.’

  On the map it didn’t look particularly far, or even difficult; steep up for a time, then a long slow down.

  He took a drink from the river and started climbing. By now it was probable that men would be out combing the forests for him.A dangerous man on the loose.The men would have guns; for all he knew, they might have dogs. He couldn’t believe he had left tracks in the riverbed, he should have walked in the water in order to lose his trail. He laughed at that idea — like the ideas of a child in a game of hide-and-seek. They didn’t need dogs to find him. Andy would have told them who he was. It would have been better with Carl beside him. Carl would have known what to do, how to survive. The only thing Kelvin knew how to do was run.

  Once he had climbed a hundred metres the forest was clearer, the country similar to that he had seen with Jessica. If he hadn’t known better he would have said he’d been there before. It all looked the same on these ridges, endless grey-barked trees, silent, with no opportunity to see out, just miles of trees. The only thing which distinguished the one he was on from any other was its steepness. At times it seemed impossible that trees could grow at such an angle. The sun was well up and it was hot. A little cloud of March flies had found him. Whenever he stopped to take a breath, which was every few paces, they landed, settling on his clothes, producing a thin whine as they searched for blood. His or Carl’s.

  The hill defeated him. His legs simply would not do the job. His lungs could not provide enough air. He had had no way of carrying water and his mouth was parched. He sat, listlessly swatting the flies.When he got his breath back he dug around for Carl’s watch. Ten fifty-seven. Every minute of the day a calculation, a reworking of where he had been, where he was going, when he would get there. It was a way of covering for the fear of where he was and the fear of what would happen next.

  He looked about him.There was nothing but trees. Avenues of grey-barked trunks spreading out in every direction, labyrinthine. The air was still, thick with the scent of eucalyptus.That strange sense of distance he’d had beside Carl was completely gone. He was utterly present, trapped within the mountain, imprisoned by the trees. Men who wanted to kill him could be at that moment hiding amongst them, they could be there, watching. The terror of it stole his senses. He wanted to breathe. He wanted to be away from there. He hated the encroaching forest, this endless indifferent wilderness. He wanted the trees gone. Jessica talking about the crimes against nature committed by the first settlers. ‘They took it all,’ she said. ‘They didn’t leave even a single bit, that’s what I can’t forgive.’ But Kelvin understood. The forest enveloped him, he was trapped within it, hopeless within its vastness. It was not benevolent, not some earth mother who would suckle its favoured child, holding him against her breast. It was foreign and gigantic, utterly indifferent; if there was any benevolence then it was only that the forest made no judgement at all, would not help him to live, would not help him to die. It would not even fight back if it was threatened with its own destruction.

  On the slopes of the mountain Kelvin was subject to larger time frames than Carl’s watch. He recognised that he was invisible, and always had been. This was what he had never seen before, which had begun to penetrate his consciousness the night he looked in Carl’s mirror, Carl who was dead, don’t forget that, don’t for a moment forget that, Kelvin. He had been living in a fantasy world in which he, Kelvin, had occupied the central role; but there was, in actuality, another one, a real one, separate from him, one which had existed before he was born and would go on after he died. When he was dead this mountain would still exist.This was not a point of debate. Nor was it a thought he welcomed, alone in the forest, unknown, unaccounted for. He had lived, but he had made no impression, none at all.

  He started climbing again.

  When he reached the top he could hardly stand. There was no sign that he had attained the summit, just more forest, but he knew it must be the top because there was nowhere further up to go. He sat with his back to the trunk of an old and blasted tree and closed his eyes, just for a moment. Even the March flies, feeding on his hands and ankles and face, could not wake him.

  thirty-five

  It’s Jim who is there to meet her, standing outside the little shed which serves as an airport in Merimbula, and she can see immediately, even when he’s still in amongst the jostling bunch of tourists in their aloha shirts and panama hats, that he’s got something going.

  ‘Where’s Kelvin?’ she says.

  ‘He couldn’t make it.’

  ‘How come?’

  He does this little shuffle, as if to kiss or hug her, but then, when she’s in his arms, whispers something in her ear. Except he speaks so quickly and quietly that she misses it and has to ask him say it again.

  ‘I’ll tell you in the car,’ he says and she is instantly, unreasonably, furious. It’s probably just disappointment at Kelvin’s absence and all that might mean, but Jim’s secrecy, his clumsiness, suddenly seem to represent everything she hates about the Farm. They stand on the tarmac waiting for the tractor with the baggage cart. She has only been on the ground five minutes and already she’s being dragged into some pathetic intrigue.

  As soon as they’re in the Kombi he starts.

  ‘There’s big things happening out our way,’ he says. ‘Have you heard the news?’

  ‘No.’

  She has been at Claire’s all morning, their last morning together, sitting in the sun in the front garden with its view across the Harbour to Circular Quay and the Opera House and, even if it was a rented house and about to be demolished for flats, and the noise from the trains meant they had to pause every now and then in order to hear each other, it was still extraordinary to be drinking coffee and eating croissants with the great steel curve of the Bridge over the top of them. To be there with her sister at the end of a week in Sydney during which she had met important people, discussed important things. No matter that little had come out of it.

  ‘We should be able to get it on the local station,’ Jim says, fiddling with the dial.

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘It’ll be on in a moment,’ he says, ‘it’s just coming up to the hour — I want to hear it too — someone’s gone missing out in the forest. There’s helicopters, search and rescue, police. It’s something to do with the trouble in the forests, the cops are everywhere, I’ve never seen so many of them — I had to go through a roadblock out near the Farm, they’re searching every car.’ Jim has always been a talker but there’s an added nervousness to this speech. ‘I was terrified they’d find some seeds or an old can of dope I’d forgotten about, but they weren’t interested in that, they were looking for whoever’s missing. Not much chance of finding anyone in that country.’

  The topic of conversation at Claire’s was, of course, Kelvin. During the week she had come clean about his existence. It would have been hard to deny with the phone calls. Claire wanted to know what she was going to do about him when she got back and Jes
sica said she didn’t know, she was confused.

  ‘Yes, but do you like him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not asking you if you want to marry him.’

  ‘You’d have to meet him to understand,’ she said, ‘I miss him. He’s like, beautiful, but unknown, as if he’s never really been put on,’ using this odd Shakespearean phrase, surprised to hear it coming from her own lips. She thought she should explain what she meant but she saw that Claire, in the way of sisters, had somehow understood completely and was able, in an instant, to turn it around into some comment on her.

  ‘You like a man who knows who he is, don’t you?’

  A vast square ship, tesselated with containers, was emerging from under the Bridge. It let out a wonderful long blast on its horn. Claire’s statement might have been quite innocent but Jessica didn’t choose to take it that way, ‘Whereas you?’ she said.

  ‘I just like a man,’ Claire said, dissolving the tension with her wonderful coarse laugh. ‘Don’t look at me for advice. You know me, as soon as I open my legs my brain falls out. I’m just lucky with Michael, we’re stupid about the same things. But listen. You like him, he likes you. What’s the problem?’ Just a momentary pause. ‘Or is that it? He actually likes you?’

  Sisters.

  Jim pulls the van out onto the highway and works his way up through its gears.

  Her annoyance has blinded her to the content of what Jim is saying.

  ‘Kelvin’s involved in this, isn’t he?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know. He just told me that if he didn’t turn up by ten o’clock I was to go and get you, so I did.’

  She looks at him.

  ‘Really, I don’t know any more than that.’ He meets her eyes for a moment and then his mouth forms itself into a little smile that is stupid and nervous and supercilious all at once.

  ‘I hate things like roadblocks,’ he says. ‘Not that I get to go through them very often, you know, but customs, things like that, I feel guilty as soon as they look at me. It doesn’t matter that I’ve done nothing wrong …’