Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  ‘I’ll get by.’

  Silence for another few minutes of misery.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I really do want to know. How did you get into this?’

  And maybe it was just the kinship of suffering that made it easier for us to talk. Or the blackness, and not actually having to look at each other. It certainly made it easier for me, to have that sharp, bitter face of hers hidden. And for her—it gradually dawned on me that perhaps she was a little claustrophobic. There was a hint of panic that fluttered from time to time in her voice. So maybe the conversation, the connection with another person, made it better for her too.

  ‘I was recruited at Queensland Uni,’ she said.

  ‘What were you studying?’

  ‘Law.’

  ‘I might have known. But you had nothing to do with Islam before that? You weren’t raised as a Muslim?’

  ‘I wasn’t raised as anything. My parents didn’t believe in religion. My father was an English professor. My mother was an artist. They were soft.’

  ‘You were the only kid?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  And in the darkness I could almost see a vision of them, a settled, intellectual, middle-class couple, probably far too indulgent with their single precious child—a tall, striking girl who wasn’t satisfied with mere wealth and comfort.

  ‘I bet you were smart at school,’ I said.

  ‘I was too smart. I even scared my teachers.’

  ‘And your friends too?’

  ‘I was at an all-girls school. Most of the others in my class, they were pathetic. Completely empty-headed. I couldn’t be bothered with them.’

  Tall. Striking. Fiercely intelligent. And lonely. I suddenly remembered that Aisha wasn’t her real name. What was it again? Nancy. Nancy Campbell.

  ‘And did you hate Australia even then?’

  ‘I hated the things it was right to hate.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the smugness of this country. The self-righteousness. The greed. The obsession with trivialities. Celebrities. Sex. Money. Sport. We were supposed to be so wonderful, so fair and equal. But if you were poor or black or ugly or a refugee, then the whole country shat on you every single day.’

  Well, yes, and I’ve written down similar thoughts in these very pages. Even so, there is something to be said for trivialities. Better, surely, to be obsessed with sport than to be obsessed with war and religion. Indeed, in the old Australia, sport and sex and beer were about it—which was why I’d loved the place so much.

  Still, I knew what she meant.

  I said, ‘You were hardly the only one who thought that.’

  ‘I may as well have been. People here are in denial. The rest of the world can see how rotten the West is, how self-obsessed, how overfed, how destructive. Africa. Asia. The Middle East. They all know the truth. But here, we’re blind.’

  ‘Things are hardly perfect in Africa or Asia or the Middle East either.’

  ‘That’s because of the West. We have all the money, all the weapons; we’re like an infection. We exploit everyone else, invade everyone else, ruin everyone else. We have to, to keep our own obscene societies afloat.’

  ‘Then why does everyone want to be like the West?’

  ‘They don’t! They just want to be left alone. In peace, with their own culture, not caught up in some bastardised version of ours. But when they look at how we live—the wealth, the luxury—it’s like a drug. People can’t help wanting to have that too, even though it’s bad for them. Bad for everyone.’

  Oh, yes. Tall. Striking. Fiercely intelligent. Lonely. Restless. No fixed religion or philosophy. Possessed of a keen sense of justice and an overblown case of white middle-class guilt. Christ, these things were probably written down in a terrorist recruiting handbook somewhere.

  ‘So you went looking for answers in Islam?’

  ‘I didn’t go looking. They came looking for me.’

  ‘At uni? Some fundamentalist group there?’

  ‘Not exactly. There were Islamic groups at uni, but even in those days they weren’t liked. And they were already being watched by the government. They had spies taking down names and addresses. Even if I’d been interested in Islam at that stage, I wouldn’t have gone near those people.’

  ‘Then how?’

  ‘A woman in one of my tutes approached me.’

  ‘She was a Muslim?’

  ‘Not in any way that you would recognise.’

  ‘But she told you about Islam?’

  ‘Not about old Islam. She was talking about new Islam. About the war and the revolution that were coming.’

  I sighed inwardly, and said nothing.

  ‘The war she was talking about is the one we’re fighting now, against the West. The revolution is the one that’s happening within Islam itself. And it has to happen, if we’re to win the war. The old Islam can’t do it. It’s grown soft too. And corrupt. It needs new strength, new purity. And when it’s ready, then it can fix the world.’

  The inward sigh was now a groan. How did it happen that, just because an intelligent mind was disappointed by the society around it and searching for solutions, it would fall for the first hardline idiocy that it came across?

  My mind went back to a conversation I’d had years ago with an old friend. He was a long-lapsed Catholic, but he had decided to send his son to a Catholic school. When I asked him why, he said one word: ‘Inoculation.’ His theory was this—all religions and cults were dangerous, and he did not want his son involved in any of them. The problem was, if he raised his son with no religion at all, then the boy might well fall prey to the first religion or cult that he came across later, just out of curiosity and naivety. If he was raised Catholic, on the other hand, he would at least know a religion from the inside. And in my friend’s opinion, Catholicism was the laziest and most stagnant of the western religions, and hence the simplest for his son to rebel against while growing up. And having seen through the nonsense of one religion, he would never then fall prey to another. He would have had his inoculation shot, and would now be immune. And as crazy as the plan had sounded, it probably worked. I certainly never heard of that boy blowing anyone up.

  Nancy Campbell though . . .

  ‘So, this new Islam, it was some group of radical Muslims?’

  ‘There were no Muslims in it. At least, none who had been born that way. We were all converts. And it was secret. That was the most important thing.’

  ‘But what’s the point of that?’

  ‘The point is that Muslims were targets. Anyone who was Arabic, or openly Islamic, the government already knew about them. When the war came, they would be the first ones to be crushed. So we had nothing whatever to do with Muslims. We didn’t go to mosques, we didn’t go to Islamic bookshops, we didn’t dress Muslim or talk Muslim, we didn’t tell a single soul outside the group about what we believed. In fact, in public, we drank and smoked and fucked around. We prayed only in small groups, and in private. Allah understood the necessity. We had to be invisible, the most secret of the secret—and we were to stay that way until the day we were needed, when all the other Muslims of the world were victimised and oppressed and defeated. Then the new Islam would stand forth.’

  Some of the fervour was returning to her voice, and it was weirdly powerful, there in the dark. But the saner part of me went chill. What she was describing, of course, was the ultimate in terrorist sleeper cells. All of them average white middle-class Australians who had never even expressed an interest in Islam. I thought of the boys who had kidnapped me in the Australia Post van. They could have been in the local footy team.

  ‘And who was in charge of all this? Who was your mullah?’

  She turned scornful. ‘We’re an underground organisation, and you should know enough about them by now. We operate in cells. I’ve never known the names of anyone higher up than the woman who recruited me. And the people I recruited have never known anyone higher up than I am.’

  A point
confused me. ‘Those boys of yours, back in Queensland. If you recruited them, they must have seen your face. So why bother with that burqa?’

  ‘I didn’t recruit those four. I inherited them from another cell leader who was martyred, after the war started and the Great Southern Jihad went active. Lots of us have died for the cause since then. My own recruits know what I look like, obviously. But those men never did.’

  Men? What a laugh. They were four repressed, mixed-up, angry boys. Desperately lovesick for their goddess in the far-too-clinging veil.

  I said, ‘So when exactly did you go active?’

  ‘We had to wait and wait. We waited through September 11, we waited while Osama bin Laden cried out for our help, we ignored the Great Hero and did nothing while the enemy invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and then started all the other wars. Wait, we were told, the time isn’t yet.’ And it sounded like she was reciting a ritual passage of mourning. ‘But then came the holy fire in Canberra. That was when the war finally arrived in this country. That was when the government looked at the Muslims in their midst and hated them all. That was when the mass detentions started and the new laws were made and no Muslim could walk the streets anymore. That’s when we were needed. And the command came down. Begin the jihad.’

  I listened, horrified by her, but torn with a certain pity too, because what, after all, was this great war of hers? Her little terrorist cells were never going to achieve anything. Osama bin Laden was dead, he was never going to learn their names, or thank them for saving the Muslim world. It was a delusion of grandeur. A smart, lonely girl, dreaming of an influence she could never have. A teenager running away to punish her mother and father for their crime of conformity. I said, ‘And what did your parents think of what you were doing?’

  ‘They thought nothing. They didn’t know.’

  ‘And they still don’t?’

  ‘They never will. They’re dead.’

  ‘Oh . . . I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. They died in a car bombing.’

  ‘A bombing? But—’

  ‘I was the one who planted it.’

  ‘What?!’

  She sounded hypnotically calm now. ‘It was my first mission, after we went active. I knew it had to be done. The past had to be cut away. So that there could be no going back. They were weak. I needed to be strong.’

  ‘So—you just killed them?’

  I was staring, trying to pierce the darkness and see her face. But only her voice was there, disembodied, desolate.

  ‘You didn’t believe me, when we first met. Harry didn’t believe me either. But I told you. There’s blood on my hands.’

  We rode the rest of the way in silence.

  There were several more roadblocks, but we passed safely through them all. I even dozed for a while, jammed up against the side of the box in an attempt to get as far from Aisha as possible, my head full of nausea and bad dreams. When I woke I could feel that we were no longer on the open highway. The truck was moving slowly in heavy traffic. It was Melbourne at last—although there was no way to tell which part of the city we were in. Even when we finally stopped and the fruit boxes were removed and we climbed out, all bent and crippled and pale, I still didn’t know our precise location, because we were parked inside a large warehouse.

  ‘Hurry,’ Harry was telling us.

  We followed him as best we could across the concrete, through stacks of crates and machinery, then into a toilet block. In the floor of one of the shower recesses a manhole had been opened, leading down into darkness.

  ‘Where is this?’ I asked him. ‘Where does this go?’

  ‘The one place in Melbourne no one would think to look for us. The AFP, Citizenship, they never go there. They haven’t needed to, since they put up the walls.’ He was grinning. ‘Somewhere Aisha will feel right at home.’

  We climbed down a ladder into a tunnel that ran off into midnight. Harry had a torch, and led us forward. I thought I knew where we had to be going, although the very idea sounded like madness to me. The tunnel went on. A hundred yards. Two hundred. Then there was a light ahead, and a ladder climbing up.

  ‘We’re safe now,’ Harry said.

  We ascended. There were arms up there, waiting to pull us through. Into a small room, another toilet block, in another unidentified building. And all around us, faces. Smiling. Nodding. Reassuring. Aisha was staring in wonder.

  ‘Welcome,’ someone said, ‘to the Brunswick ghetto.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ah, Brunswick.

  The name probably doesn’t mean much to you, dear interrogators, but it takes me right home to the Melbourne days of my youth.

  Admittedly, it was never really my part of town. I was an eastern suburbs boy. But Brunswick and its main thoroughfare, Sydney Road, was very much the place to go in search of exotic Middle Eastern foods. There were some popular Turkish restaurants and bakeries, for instance. And it was a colourful area, a bit ramshackle and run-down, a bit foreign, but all in a good way—which was how most of the ethnic enclaves were, back in that far-off time when multiculturalism was not a dirty word. Not that everyone who lived in Brunswick was from Turkey or Egypt or Lebanon—you still saw lots of white faces on the street—but you certainly saw Arabic faces too. And scarves or veils on many of the women, even the occasional full-length burqa. If I’d been asked, before all the troubles, to find a Muslim community in Melbourne, I would’ve gone to Brunswick first.

  It was no surprise then—in the wake of the Canberra bombing—that Brunswick became one of the designated detention suburbs. Of course, it’s by no means the biggest Muslim ghetto in the world. Brunswick is downright tiny compared to those in America or England. Nor is it the biggest ghetto in Australia. That, I’m pretty sure, would be Bankstown in Sydney. It’s not even the biggest ghetto in Melbourne—there are more people confined to the northern suburb of Broadmeadows. Still, jammed into those few city blocks of inner Brunswick are something like forty thousand Muslim souls, the vast majority of them forcibly removed from somewhere else.

  Oh, they kicked up a fuss about it. As did the non-Islamic residents of the area, who were compelled to move away. As did Melbourne commuters, when a stretch of Sydney Road was cut off by the new walls. But my brother was quite adamant. There was, he declared, a poisonous two per cent of the population that needed to be dealt with. Too many to deport (and besides, no other country would take them) and too many to detain in the regular way. So ghettos were the answer. Or, officially, ‘cultural precincts’. Not prisons, my brother said, but merely a convenient method of collecting the Islamic community into central locations, as much for their own protection as anyone else’s, what with anti-Islamic feeling running so high. In the precincts, Muslims would be safe and sound amongst their own kind.

  Sure. Absolutely. And never mind the walls and the watchtowers and the spotlights and the heavily guarded checkpoints leading in and out.

  The irony, however, is that since the Muslims have all been locked in—with only approved workers allowed out on daily passes—it seems that the authorities have been content to leave the inmates to stew in their own juices. After all, what harm can any extremists do if they’re never allowed outside their own zones? Who can they blow up or terrorise, apart from themselves? And so the ghettos have become the one part of Australia that isn’t constantly under surveillance. The police stay outside the walls. There are no video cameras, no hidden microphones, no phone tapping, no internal checkpoints, no rules, no laws. In fact, before I actually went into one, all I’d ever heard about the precincts was that they’d been left to run wild—an overcrowded chaos of poverty, violence and gang warfare.

  You can see where I’m headed with this, can’t you, interrogators? What more natural haven for an outlaw group like the Oz Underground can you imagine than in the heart of lawlessness itself? The Underground High Council certainly thought so. Brunswick was the only place in Melbourne where it was safe for them to hold their secret gatherings. Which was wh
y Aisha and I had been brought there, so that we could be called before the OU hierarchy. Indeed, a meeting had been arranged for the evening of the very day we arrived.

  It seemed they were eager to get a look at us.

  In the meantime, we were kept out of sight. The tunnel had deposited us in another warehouse, this one much smaller than the one on the other side of the wall. Apparently it was the depot for what had once been a company dealing in eastern spices—the smell of them still lingered: cardamom, anise, turmeric—but for the moment the place held only piles of sacks containing government-supplied rice. And there we stayed until night fell. Not alone, of course. Harry had disappeared off somewhere, but Aisha and I were left with an honour guard of about a dozen young men and women from the ghetto.

  And a strange lot they were. I mean, by their very presence I knew they had to be Muslims. And I won’t lie, it felt weird to be sitting amongst them. You just don’t meet Muslims en masse in this country anymore. True, there were those men we encountered in the desert, but they were foreigners. Aliens. These people in the warehouse, they didn’t seem foreign at all. Okay, many of them looked vaguely Middle Eastern, but their accents were Australian, their clothes were Australian. Indeed, take them out of the ghetto and there was no real way you could have picked them. Which was the whole point, wasn’t it? They were the internal nemesis against which we had all been warned. Looking like us, sounding like us, existing as us—and yet hell-bent, according to the government, on our overthrow.

  But they seemed perfectly friendly. They gave us cold Turkish pizza to eat and new clothes to wear and we all reclined on the rice bags, watching the windows as the daylight faded. And for once no one was yelling at me, or pointing a gun.

  ‘Are you in the Underground too?’ I finally asked one of them who was sitting near me, a young man with an air of some authority over the group.

  ‘Sure, brother.’ He was a squat, well-muscled youth, dark-skinned, with a shaved head and a restless manner, dressed in jeans and a faded Essendon football jumper. Gold jewellery hung from his neck and his wrists, and his accent was pure western suburbs—so much so that I could picture exactly the sort of sports car he would have driven in the old days, cruising down Chapel Street with a sub-woofer thumping in the boot. ‘We’ve been waiting on you guys for days now.’