Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  And maybe that was the crux of my problem—somewhere in the Howard years, it all became about the money. I don’t mean my kind of money—the sort of money that was made with such sinful ease that the only thing one could do was hurl it around gleefully. No, this money was different. It didn’t matter that the country got rich again after the recession of the nineties, and then richer still—the weird thing was, this time around, no one seemed to be taking much pleasure in the process. It was grey, corporate money—that’s why. A wealth that was nervous and greedy for more. A wealth not for sharing.

  But we were happier than ever, apparently. Everyone said so. Safer. Smarter. Setting the whole world an example to follow. It was in the newspapers and on the TV screens every day. And that, too, I found disturbing. It felt as if that old bluff boasting of ours had turned somehow into a genuine arrogance. As if our old sense of humour had shrivelled up. Because if anyone dared raise a criticism about the new mood of the country, well, they were un-Australian, they were being negative, and we’d lost all patience with that. Instead, we were flying flags and singing national anthems. Even on Anzac Day—the crowds grew every year, but why were we there? Out of respect for dead soldiers? Or for nationalist glory? I honestly couldn’t tell.

  Nor, in my memory, had I ever heard so much talk about what exactly it was to be Australian anyway, or who had the right to claim it. ‘I’m proud to be Australian!’ we were suddenly declaring everywhere. Defiantly. Aggressively. As if to not say it was a weakness. And those declaring it the most were those of us who were white, who were born here. Which drove me mad, because what did we mean by it? Yes, we were born here—but why was being born somewhere something to be proud of? We might as well have said, ‘I’m proud I have blue eyes.’ Or, ‘I’m proud I have two legs.’ Or, ‘I’m proud I wasn’t born with congenital heart disease.’ It would’ve made as much sense. Being born Australian wasn’t an achievement.

  We just inherited the place. Us, the baby boomers, and generations X and Y and the rest. The post-war generations. We made no great sacrifices to be called Australian. We rose above no great challenges. We weren’t the ones who founded the nation. We weren’t the ones who survived the Great Depression, or who fought the Second World War, when the nation really was under threat. We weren’t even the post-war migrants who left their homes to make a new start in a strange land. We were just here. Sure, we all worked hard in our own lives, but the country itself, its institutions and liberties, its wealth and its lifestyle, basically, they were a gift. Which was something to feel lucky about. And grateful for. Absolutely. But why proud?

  Indeed, if you ask me, we Australians have faced only one real challenge in the last twenty years, and that was the challenge of preserving what the previous generations handed down to us—quite simply, a free country. A small enough thing to ask, you’d think. But have we even done that?

  I hardly need answer.

  And maybe it all sounds strange, coming from me. Ludicrous that I, Leo James, fraud that I am, would ever have cared about any of these things, or have let them bother me enough to spoil my joie de vivre. But look at my life. In the seventies I did what everyone else did, I slacked off and dropped out. In the eighties, too, I did what everyone else did, I tried to get rich. I’ve always been a child of my age, I’ve always gone with the crowd. I would have liked to fit into the Howard age, too. But for once I couldn’t. It was too hollow. Too grating.

  Anyway, to finish the story . . .

  I was heading downwards as it was, but then the economy went bust while Laurel was Prime Minister, and we were in recession again. Not a good time to embark on a major resort like Oceans Sands Green, but I was already committed, and it was my last throw of the dice, financially. Then the Canberra bomb went off, pretty much killing the tourism industry in Australia. International travellers weren’t going to visit a country that was a nuclear target, and domestic tourists were too busy building bomb shelters in their backyards to go on holidays. Construction halted at Ocean Sands, and I sank into a stupor of defeat. A stupor filled with parties and endless drinking and as many women as my aging dick could handle—which was not so many, truth be told—but a stupor all the same.

  I could perhaps have appealed to Bernard. Sure, he’d cut me off the night before the bomb, but that wasn’t necessarily forever. And meanwhile he had all sorts of juicy government jobs and contracts at his personal disposal. I could have begged him. But my heart just wasn’t in it. I was older and prouder now, and sick of seeing Bernard’s face on every TV screen, day in, day out. Besides, I suspected that, now he was untouchable, he would have told me to piss off anyway.

  No surprise, then, that I ended up at my empty resort—depressed, alienated, feeling about a hundred years old—half hoping that the cyclone might finish me off. It’s a joke, really. Before Aisha’s boys grabbed me, I wasn’t all that worried about dying. But when people tried to actually kill me . . . Well, it saved my life.

  Long enough at least for you, dear interrogators, to take it.

  PART TWO

  TWENTY-ONE

  You know me well enough by now, I assume, to understand that, when the fire-fight started, the first thing I did was to drop my own gun, unused, and the second thing was to fall flat into the dirt with my hands over my head. And there I stayed, eyes shut fast, as all around me semi-automatic weapons sputtered flatly and voices yelled and screamed and swore. It was probably no more than a minute. One of those minutes that is measured in years.

  Eventually, however, the shooting stopped, even if the screaming didn’t. I opened my eyes. Bodies lay everywhere in the fading light. Wailing. Mourning. A figure violently kicking another figure that lay unmoving on the ground. Unreal, unreal, unreal. Except that I’d seen it all before, such an aftermath. This was my fourth time now. And as I rose to my feet, a part of my brain reflected with cold rationality that the nausea and the revulsion and the sweat of fear turning into a deep chill . . . it was all getting worse with the repetition.

  I stumbled around in the dimness, smelling smoke and shit and blood. I saw many dead detainees, and others wounded, and others still unharmed, milling about as shocked and dazed as I was. I saw three dead security guards. I saw a body wearing an army uniform, and it was Staff Sergeant Daphne, her face set as hard and disgusted as it had been when she was alive. And then I heard someone calling my name. It was Harry, over by the Humvee.

  ‘Move it, Leo, we gotta go!’

  I stared at him. His face looked all black.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he demanded, voice hoarse. ‘Are you shot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then come on, for fuck’s sake.’

  I walked over, still treading on ground that felt like rubber. I passed by the white four-wheel drive. It had been sprayed with bullets, and multicoloured liquids were streaming from the engine compartment. There was a body hunched in the driver’s seat. The fourth guard. And from within came the crackle of a radio, and the urgent voice of someone in authority, calling and calling, unanswered . . .

  Harry was beside me. Blood was streaming down his face from a gash on his forehead. Only his eyes stood out, furious and white.

  ‘The bastard got to the radio before I could stop him,’ he said. ‘He put an emergency call into his base. In half an hour this place will be swarming.’

  He was dragging me towards the Humvee. Behind us the wailing and moaning went on. Then Aisha appeared out of the gloom, pristine and untouched.

  ‘We can’t leave them here,’ she said.

  I glanced back. There were at least a dozen men still upright.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Harry retorted. ‘We don’t have room.’

  ‘Even so, we have to help them.’

  ‘Help them? You stupid bitch—any second now they’re gonna realise that we’ve got the only serviceable vehicle here, and then it’ll be our arses on the line.’

  Aisha sounded as mechanical as a robot. ‘They have no chance without us.’

 
; ‘Goddamn it! They never had any chance! They were all dead as soon as you pulled that trigger. What do you think will happen when the reinforcements arrive? Who do you think will get the blame? Everyone here will be shot before dawn. And it’s your fucking fault! You killed these people!’

  She seemed to falter at that, staring wide-eyed.

  Harry was dragging her then, too, his tone level again. ‘The only important thing is that we don’t die with them. We’ve got to go. Now.’

  We climbed in, Harry behind the wheel. But even as he cranked the engine, I heard rising shouts from the detainees. A knot of them were moving towards us. Some were carrying guns, liberated from the dead guards.

  ‘Run!’ Aisha screamed at them. ‘Run away from here!’

  The engine roared, and the tyres spun wildly. Then we were fishtailing away. Angry yells came from behind, and I’m sure I heard shots fired, but we raced into the new night, and when I finally looked back, there was nothing to be seen but figures moving futilely to and fro against the horizon.

  ‘Dammit dammit dammit,’ Harry was saying.

  I was in the front seat beside him, Aisha a pale shadow in the rear. For a long time no one else spoke. What could anyone say? There was just the hum of the engine as Harry sped faster and faster along the track. We skidded on sandy curves, and I didn’t dare look at the speedometer.

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘Don’t get us killed—not after that.’

  Harry wiped blood out of his eyes, scanning the half-darkness ahead. ‘We have to get off this road. There’ll be police or military coming along it before long. And as soon as they interrogate those detainees, they’ll be looking for us.’

  ‘You mean us specifically? They’ll know who we really are?’

  He shrugged bitterly. ‘They might not guess who you and I really are—except that we’re not genuine army. That’s bad enough. But Aisha? Those detainees heard me say her name. You can bet your arse someone is going to work it out fast. And then the shit will really hit the fan.’

  I glanced to the back seat, where Aisha sat glowering.

  ‘So what now?’ I asked Harry.

  ‘We need to disappear. We need a side road.’

  But there were no side roads. We were already on a side road. All around us there was nothing but bare wilderness. The time and the miles flashed by, and we met no one, saw nothing. The night deepened, the land fading to black. Was it twenty minutes since the disaster, was it thirty? Then I noticed that Harry was staring at the dashboard, tapping the dials.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The oil light is on, and the temp gauge is through the roof.’

  My heart sank, and I pitched my ear to the engine. It was true, an ominous whine was emanating from it now.

  Harry thumped the steering wheel. ‘What next!’

  I said, ‘It must have got hit too, in all the shooting.’

  ‘Either way, we’re fucked.’

  But my eyes were on the road. ‘There’s a turn-off!’

  It was the merest trail, leading off to the right. Harry braked, swung the wheel. Then we were bouncing and swerving along narrow wheel ruts, the engine sounding horrible, the stink of overheated metal in our nostrils.

  ‘C’mon baby,’ Harry soothed, stroking the wheel. ‘Not yet.’

  And I suppose they really do build those Humvees pretty tough, because it ploughed on for what must have been another twenty minutes. But finally it began to hitch and choke. Sensing the end, Harry spun the wheel, and we leapt from the track altogether, plunging straight across the virgin desert. I knew what he was doing. If the thing was about to die, then better that it didn’t die on the roadside, where it would be easier for the hunters to find.

  Low bushes jumped up in the headlights, then disappeared under the bullbar. Rocks and the banks of shallow gullies tore at the vehicle’s underbelly. The stench had grown awful, and the engine sounded like ball-bearings being tossed in a clothes dryer. Then there came the terminal clunk of something separating. The motor rasped and died. The Humvee limped along for maybe another fifty metres, and finally rolled to a gentle stop. Steam hissed into the silence.

  ‘Everyone out,’ Harry ordered.

  We climbed out into what was now full night. I stared up at the stars, and at a sliver of moon sinking in the west. How far had we come since the massacre? Not far. Certainly not far enough. I gazed to the north. Somewhere back up there, the surviving detainees were probably already being rounded up. There would be army trucks—real army this time—and police and Citizenship men.

  Harry was digging in the back of the dead Humvee, pulling out several dark packages. I heard the gurgle of liquid.

  ‘Emergency rations,’ he said. ‘Every army vehicle has them, thank Christ.’

  I looked at him, bloody-faced, his uniform filthy and yet, somehow, looking more and more like a real soldier every minute. The anger in him was still palpable, but it had never been anything like panic. Through it all, he’d remained in control. Absorbing each new set back, and moving on swiftly to a new plan.

  I said, ‘How do you know all this stuff?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘About military things. About guns.’ It came to me even as I spoke—and hadn’t I noticed it as soon as he first donned the fake uniform? He looked the part. ‘You were in the army yourself, once, weren’t you? Before this Underground thing.’

  Aisha, too, turned suddenly and stared, as if seeing him for the first time.

  Harry shook his head. ‘I was never in the army.’

  ‘Then what was it?’

  He gave a strange laugh, and for a moment it sounded like panic after all. ‘Those people back there. The detainees. That’s what I used to do.’

  I gazed at him, not understanding.

  ‘Jesus. I was a security officer. Guarding illegal immigrants.’ He fixed Aisha with eyes that blazed even in darkness. ‘Like the ones we just killed.’

  A noise arose in the night, the distant drone of a helicopter.

  We stared about—and there, low on the horizon, a light was lifting into the sky. We watched, transfixed, as it rose higher and soared almost directly above us, rushing into the north.

  ‘What do we do?’ I asked.

  ‘We walk.’ Harry pointed south. ‘Out there.’

  ‘But do you know where we’re going?’

  ‘Not a damn clue.’

  And so we set off into the desert.

  TWENTY-TWO

  What did I say about not being an Outback person?

  Okay, so I’m not even sure that a few thousand square miles of sand and scrub somewhere in the south-west corner of New South Wales is the Outback . . . But it sure felt like it to me. Especially as we set out into the middle of it, the sand still warm under our feet from the heat of the day, and our only landmark a dead Humvee behind us in the night. We had a mere scrap of food and a drop of water on which to survive, and we were alone in a place so big and empty that we could wander there until we collapsed and died, and our bodies might not be found by another passing soul for months—for years. To me, that was alien. That was scary. I felt more helpless and trapped in those first few miles of walking than I had in the back of the Australia Post van after my initial kidnapping.

  Ah, but the sky! It’s true what the brochures say, after all. In my entire life, I don’t think I’ve ever spent a night so completely away from man-made lighting. There wasn’t even the glow from some distant town beyond the horizon, or the shining of a single illuminated window in a lonely farmhouse. The world was a great grey shadow, unbroken—except for a flicker that came and went in the east, and that was only lightning shimmering amongst the tops of far-off storm clouds. A hundred miles or more over there it might be thundering and raining in the hills, but out in the desert the sky was clear. Just the warm evening breeze, the silence, and the stars.

  And satellites. Glittering pinpricks, crossing far above us. Every time I glanced up in the early hours aft
er sunset, my feet stumbling on the black ground, there seemed to be one moving stealthily up there. Military, civilian, who knew, but they were like an itch, like lice crawling about the globe, because they too were the enemy now. Spying eyes in the sky. It wasn’t until the night deepened, and the satellites were no longer visible, that I could look up and simply see . . . well, the universe. Not so much something that was above me, it was more like I was walking upside down on a huge ceiling, and there was an immense gulf below into which I could fall, eternally, if the vertigo made me let go of my grip on the earth and launch off.

  Ha! But maybe that’s just an Australian thing, or a Southern Hemisphere thing, anyway—the arse-end hemisphere, to paraphrase Mr Keating. We’re all down-under here, supposedly, clinging to the bottom side of the planet. In the meantime, the sky had more mundane uses, like navigation, and working out which way was south. Me, I just would have walked towards the Southern Cross.

  ‘You’d be wrong,’ Harry corrected. ‘If you did that all night, you’d end up walking in a giant curve, because the cross describes an arc in the sky every evening. To head directly south, you take the long arm of the cross and extend an imaginary line from it downwards. Then you find the two pointers—those two bright stars a bit below the cross—and extend another imaginary line upwards from them, perpendicular to, and bisecting, the line between the pointers themselves. Where your two imaginary lines cross, that’s true south.’

  I took his word for it. He would know, after all, being in the Underground, and with the Southern Cross being their symbol—the five stars and the ‘Free Australia’ slogan.

  ‘It’s always upside down though,’ I said to Harry as we stomped along, side by side, Aisha a white ghost behind.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The Southern Cross. Whenever you guys leave it as a calling card, you draw it upside down, not right way up.’