Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  Two men stepped out from amongst the plants, rifles at their shoulders, aimed squarely at the three of us.

  ‘—guards,’ Harry finished, shoulders sagging.

  ‘Drop it,’ one of the men ordered.

  Harry let his gun fall.

  And I remember thinking—what the fuck is happening in this country? Supposedly we have some of the toughest firearms laws in the world. Officially, no private citizen is allowed to own a weapon of any kind anymore. And yet it seemed that every single person I’d met in the last few days was armed, as if the entire nation was swimming in ordnance. Where did it all come from? And then I was recalling things I’d read or seen on the news—how the army somehow manages to lose ten per cent of its rifles every year, allegedly to a thriving black market run by conscripted soldiers; how murder and armed theft and violent assault are at record highs; and how odd it is that the more peace and safety and security from terrorists we have, the more guns the bad guys seem to possess.

  We stared at our captors. They were Aboriginal, and even disregarding the rifles, they looked mean. Hard, hostile faces. Bare chests. Tattooed arms.

  ‘Hey,’ Harry declared, hands raised. ‘It’s cool. We don’t want any hassle here.’

  The men glared. ‘You got it anyway, mate,’ said one.

  ‘We’re lost. We’re just here by accident.’

  ‘Yeah? Since when does the army get itself lost?’

  Harry glanced down at his uniform in frustration. ‘We’re not in the army. We just . . . borrowed this stuff.’

  The men exchanged puzzled frowns at that. But behind them, the marijuana crop waited, dense and tall, reaching almost to the shade cloth. I’d dealt a bit of grass in my younger days—and a plantation like this, it was worth big money. The kind of money that spoke of underworld gangs and crime bosses. The kind of money people killed for, puzzled or not.

  ‘Just let us walk away,’ Harry continued carefully, ‘and you won’t see us again.’

  More hard stares over the gun barrels. ‘No one’s just walkin’ away.’

  ‘Look. We’re no threat. We’re out here trying to hide from the same sort of people that you are.’

  ‘What sort of people is that?’

  ‘The army. The police.’

  ‘Police? You got cops on your tail? Right this minute?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ Then Harry’s face fell, already seeing his mistake as the men’s eyes went deadly cold, their fingers tightening on the triggers. ‘No . . . I mean, not right behind us this minute.’

  And it might have ended there, dear interrogators, all our days on the run—but at that moment an old black woman emerged from the plants.

  ‘That’ll do, boys,’ she said.

  The men stared at her. ‘Mum, we got it covered . . .’

  She gave them a swift glance, and snapped out a rush of words in another language. She was barely half their height, a round figure in a faded floral dress, with skinny legs and horned bare feet. But there was no doubting her authority.

  ‘No shooting,’ she commanded in English.

  ‘But they’ve seen the crop,’ one of her sons protested. ‘They’ll report it!’

  ‘This lot? Bullshit. They won’t be reporting anything.’ White wisps of hair escaped from under a tattered beanie on her head, giving her a half-mad look, but her eyes were perfectly sharp and aware, studying us. ‘I know who they are.’

  Harry was amazed. ‘You do?’

  ‘Not you, maybe. But these other two? You bet.’

  ‘But . . . how?’

  She rolled her eyes at him. ‘I watch TV, don’t I?’ She was pointing at me. ‘He’s the Prime Minister’s brother. He’s supposed to be dead.’ Her finger moved towards Aisha. ‘And her . . . Oh, I’ve seen plenty about her lately.’

  Harry could only shake his head. After all the roadblocks and checkpoints, after all the people who’d seen our faces and not recognised us for an instant, this old creature had seen through us like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And she didn’t even have the grace to act surprised.

  Meanwhile, her sons had not lowered their rifles. ‘They got people after them,’ one warned. ‘They said so.’

  ‘I’ll bet they have. This little girl here is worth half a million reward, last I heard.’

  The men regarded us with renewed interest.

  ‘You all terrorists then?’ the old woman inquired.

  ‘No,’ Harry answered intently, ‘we’re exactly the opposite. The things you’ve seen on TV—they aren’t true. Look . . . I don’t know if this means anything to you, but I’m with the Oz Underground, and we have to get under cover.’

  ‘Ah. The Underground.’

  ‘You’ve heard of us?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard.’ But she didn’t seem terribly happy about it. ‘These people chasing you—they close behind?’

  ‘I don’t know. We dumped our vehicle last night, north of here, off the road. If they’ve found that, they will have found our tracks leading here.’

  ‘Dropped us right in the shit, haven’t you?’

  ‘We didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Don’t give a fuck what you meant to do.’

  She sighed, and then turned to her sons, muttering something in her own tongue. The boys responded in what was apparent disagreement, but after further heated discussion a decision was reached. They shouldered their rifles, gave us all a dark glance, then headed off up over the ridge.

  She watched them go, considered the three of us. ‘C’mon inside, anyway. No good you standing out here in plain bloody sight.’

  We followed her in under the shade cloth and through the plants, the smell of marijuana warm and cloying.

  ‘Where did you send them?’ Harry asked.

  ‘To keep an eye out. And to clean up your mess. They’ll follow your tracks back a couple of miles, then see what they can do.’

  ‘You mean hide the tracks?’

  ‘Maybe. They can’t work bloody miracles though.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She was still displeased. ‘I’m not doing you any favours. I just don’t want the cops charging in here.’

  The greenhouse seemed to hold hundreds of plants, and in the middle of them we came across the generator. It was powering a pump that stood at the head of an underground bore, from which water was diverted into black plastic irrigation pipes. The old woman hit the switch and the motor died. She frowned at us accusingly in the sudden silence. ‘And now my damn plants will have to go thirsty.’

  But she led us onwards, to where the gully ended in a half-formed kind of cave. Several swags were spread there, a table, some chairs, a gas barbecue, petrol drums, even a television set that was linked to a small satellite dish, a power cord running off towards the generator. All the comforts of home. The old woman, meanwhile, was scratching around on the table. She found a box of matches, lit the gas ring on the barbecue, and set a kettle down on the flame.

  ‘Right,’ she said finally. ‘Who wants a cuppa?’

  The tea was hot, sweet and an utter godsend. We sprawled about on the swags, exhausted, and drank. Our host made herself comfortable in a chair, stuffed a pipe with tobacco and began to smoke it. Her name, she said, was Frieda.

  ‘You’re a local?’ Harry wanted to know.

  ‘’Course I bloody am.’

  ‘Is this your property?’

  ‘The station? Nah. It’s my country, though. And the owner knows we’re here.’ She glanced pointedly at the crop. ‘He gets his cut, fair and square.’ Then she gave Harry a look. ‘Whose fool idea was it coming out here anyway?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘It’d wanna be.’

  ‘Right now, we’re just trying to get south.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘The Murray, for a start.’

  The old woman gave a pitying laugh.

  ‘Why? Aren’t we even close? Where are we, exactly?’

  ‘You’re nowhere much. The Murray’s a good fift
y miles yet, straight south.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Harry, crestfallen. He took a breath. ‘The thing is, we’ve been walking all night, we haven’t slept. We need a place to lie low for the day.’

  ‘What—now you wanna stay here all day?!’

  ‘There’s nowhere else. And tonight we need to cross the border.’

  She scowled around the pipe. ‘I’m not in your bloody Underground.’

  ‘But are you against us?’ And Harry sounded raw, pushing hard. ‘Are you on the government’s side?’

  ‘I’m not on anyone’s side.’

  ‘So is there a way we can get to the river from here without being seen?’

  ‘Depends how hard they’re looking for you.’

  ‘But could you help us?’

  She puffed smoke doubtfully. ‘Why do they want you so bad in the first place?’

  ‘It’s because of Leo and Aisha here—they know something that can damage the government. We don’t know what that is yet, but it’s gotta be something big. And something that big can maybe help bring this government down.’

  Her eyes were mocking. ‘The whole government, eh?’

  ‘In the long term, that’s our aim.’

  ‘It’s not my bloody aim.’

  ‘Why not? You can’t be happy right now—things are worse for your people than ever under this government. None of them give a shit about Aboriginal problems, not when they’ve got their precious war on terror to fight. Christ, they even closed down Uluru because they say it’s a terrorist target.’

  The old woman shuddered with laughter. ‘Yeah. I heard about that. They put up a big fence, right around the Rock.’

  ‘You think it’s funny?’

  ‘Hell, the blackfellas up there still get in. No fence is gonna stop ’em. And at least it keeps all the damn tourists away. But that fence has got nothing to do with terrorists. It’s because the army built some kind of satellite base on top of the Rock, some spy thing they need and don’t want anyone to see.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said.

  She glanced at me benignly. ‘Nope. Doesn’t matter, though. Aborigines burnt it down. The poor old army can’t work out how it happened.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Harry. ‘You see—you have to fight these things.’

  She shrugged. ‘The Rock’s not my country. None of my business. And the government pretty much leaves us alone, this part of the world.’

  ‘But the rest of the country . . .’

  ‘Bad times, I know. But it’ll all pass one day.’

  Harry reared up. ‘It’ll pass?’

  She fixed him with a stare. ‘Listen, Underground man. You walk out the end of this gully and what do you see? That old lake bed. You would’ve been twenty feet underwater here once, before it dried up. There’s dry lakes all around here, they’ve been dead for thousands of years. Lake Mungo—you’ve heard of that, the one where all the tourists go to look at the fossils? That’s twenty-odd miles west of here. But even this little lake that no one’s heard of—I can take you along this shoreline and show you campsites that my people were using forty thousand years ago. We’ve always been right here, my lot. We survived everything—the lakes drying up, the desert coming, even you white folk trying to wipe us out. And as long as we don’t go and do something stupid in the meantime, like getting ourselves arrested and shot, then we’ll still be here in another forty thousand too. And by then, not a damn soul is gonna remember any of this stuff you’re talking about.’

  Harry sank back, disappointed.

  The old woman shrugged again. ‘We got enough enemies of our own. We don’t need to take on yours as well.’

  I said, ‘But you can’t just send us back out there.’

  ‘I didn’t say I’d do that either. Just let me think, damn it.’

  We sat in silence for a time. Beneath me, the musty old swag felt like the most comfortable bed I’d ever imagined, and sleep beckoned irresistibly.

  Frieda was staring at Aisha. ‘You don’t say much, girl.’

  Aisha looked almost too tired to glare back. ‘I’m not a girl.’

  ‘Oh no?’ Her smile showed broken teeth. ‘And it’s not true what they say? You aren’t a terrorist?’

  ‘I’m not a terrorist. I’m fighting in a war.’

  ‘One of them jihads, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you kill for that, right?’

  ‘If it’s necessary.’

  The old woman thought. ‘’Course, Aborigines could have gone that way too. We still got a few hotheads wanting to blow up white people, to get our land back.’

  ‘You should. It would be a way to stand up for yourselves.’

  ‘Ha! It would be a way to get ourselves killed, that’s all. No, we do our standing up on the inside, girl. We might not look like much, us lot out here, but we could teach mad buggers like you a thing or two about it.’

  From above and far-off, came a shout that sounded like a warning. Frieda was up in an instant, head cocked alertly.

  ‘What?’ Harry asked.

  ‘My boys,’ she said, holding out a hand for quiet. There came another shout, then, surprisingly lithe, she clambered up the side of the gully to the underside of the roof. A patch of the shade cloth was detached there. She flipped it back to the open sky and lifted herself out to look. A long moment passed in silence . . . Or could I hear, just on the fringe of audibility, a hum of some kind? Finally, the old woman indicated that we should climb up and join her.

  Above the roof, the morning was well advanced now, the sky empty and blue. But Frieda pointed away to the west, and there, in the distance, a tiny black shape seemed to hang in the air. Not a helicopter, but a spindly thing, half plane, half insect, moving slowly south.

  ‘Predator drone,’ the old woman said.

  Harry was impressed. ‘You’ve seen one before?’

  ‘The army’s got bases out here. Australian Army. American Army. They test things. Those drones come over once in a while. Never spotted us here, though.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said. ‘They’ve got to be close.’

  Frieda shook her head at me. ‘That drone’s good news. They wouldn’t be using it if they were anywhere near, or if they were on to your tracks yet. But it’s no time to be walking out in the open, with those little devils about.’ She ushered us all back under the roof, and pulled the flap over. ‘Okay. You stay here for the day, and get some sleep. Only thing to do—otherwise they’ll find you out there, and you people are so dumb you’d probably tell them all about me.’

  ‘And tonight?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Tonight, we’ll get you to the river.’ Her faded eyes glinted wide a moment, sad and stern. ‘You can fight all you like after that. Just don’t do it here.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When I woke, groggy and thick, it was late afternoon. Nearby, Harry and Aisha still slept on their respective swags. There was no sign of Frieda, or her boys.

  The heat was stupendous, and my bladder was full to bursting. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a toilet, so I rose and shuffled blearily through the marijuana crop, until I emerged from under the roof. A dozen yards along the foot of the ridge, I unzipped, and let loose—noticing, belatedly, that my stream was washing away the thin sand, and that something white and broken was emerging from just under the soil. It was a calcified fragment of bone. A fossil.

  I was suddenly fully awake, eyes wide. I looked at the sky. It was bleached colourless by the day’s heat, dry and empty, as if it had never known rain. I looked at the ridge, a beaten, crumbled arc of abandoned shoreline. I looked at the lake floor, white and stark and dead, like the skin of the planet had blistered and peeled away. And just for an instant, all alone out there with my dick hanging in space, the age of the place hit me. The silence of it. The stillness. Twenty feet of water, burnt away by the sun so long ago that even the memory of it was gone. Except for that fossil in the sand . . . Animals had thrived there once, and forests, and grass. Fish
had swum by their thousands in the water, and birds had hunted them from the air. And humans were there too, camped on the lake shore, waves lapping at their feet. Their eyes staring out across a landscape teeming with life—year by year, decade by decade, century by century, age by age—watching as the weather changed and the desert came.

  And now only the humans were left.

  It makes you think, dear interrogators.

  I mean, how much of this mess that we’re in right now stems from the old hatreds in the Middle East, and the ancient claims of Arabs and Jews and Christians? And yet all those disputes only go back a few thousand years. Most of us came in even later, and only because of the oil. How does any of that compare to forty thousand years, and those people at the lake? We’d have to keep this up for another thirty-five millennia! What the old woman said was right. Does anyone really believe that after so long we’re still going to be fighting and dying over the same old arguments? Or that by then anyone will even remember that oil and Islam and Israel and Christianity ever existed? We humans might still be around, but all that we value now or think worthy of belief—all that will be long gone.

  It’s obvious enough, I know, but the bigger perspective really catches you occasionally. A momentary thought at a dead lake in the middle of nowhere. Or a longer thought—let me tell you—sitting in a giant prison cell, while you’re waiting for either the next round of torture, or for execution.

  The rank, short-sighted stupidity of it all.

  Anyway, I zipped up, and headed back. And as I did so, I saw a figure out on the lake bed, a shadow against the sun, heading towards me. I caught a burst of language, and a low laugh. And indeed, as if I’d called her up with my thoughts, it was Frieda, the descendant of all that unimaginable length of history, hobbling across the sand in her ridiculous beanie, white hair a mess, talking rapidly into the mobile phone jammed against her ear.

  I waited. Her conversation finished as she came up.

  ‘You get reception on a mobile out here?’ I asked.

  She gave me one of her eye rolls. ‘’Course not. It’s a satellite phone. Even then, you have to go out in the middle of the lake to get a good signal.’