Prohibited Zone (10 page)

‘No, but thank you.'

‘How are you going?' I asked.

‘A friend is picking us up,' said Kara. ‘I texted the address to her so she should be here soon. Excuse me, Holly, where will I find Saira?'

‘Here, come with me,' said Holly. She led Kara out of the room, giving me a look over her shoulder as if to say, ‘this is a bossy one'.

There was a knock on the door. Warren jumped up from the basket in which he had been placed and raced to the door again. The figure of a slender, almost hipless young woman was framed in the flywire. I opened the door to a goth with painted white skin, eyebrows as thin as fishhooks and amorphous black hair hanging to her shoulders. It was difficult to guess her age because of the make-up, but probably early twenties. She had a down-turned mouth and multiple piercings, including a barbell through the bridge of her nose and two silver studs, one just above her top lip and the other below her bottom lip.

Sweat had somehow penetrated the make-up and was sitting in beads like liquid mercury on her upper lip.

‘I've come for Kara Peake-Jones,' she said.

‘You can have her.'

Harry and Fred arrived from the street, a little out of breath and very sweaty. Evidently they had decided there were too many girls around to be out kicking the footy.

‘Bugger off,' I said to them.

They just grinned. Harry was sixteen and Fred fourteen, both at an age when women scared and excited them in about equal measure. I was still pretty much like that, too, although goths only scared me.

‘Do you have a name?' I asked the woman.

‘Teresa.'

She didn't hold my eye, looking over my shoulder into the house beyond.

‘As in Mother Teresa?'

She finally favoured me with a glance, the sort of look she probably otherwise only used on dirty old men.

‘Where's Kara?'

‘Hi, I'm Westie,' I said. ‘And this is Thug One and Thug Two.'

Fred, who was bolder than his older brother, stuck out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.'

Teresa looked at him with a contemptuous curl and attached stud on her lip and then ignored him forever. I heard a noise behind me and Holly, Kara, Col and Warren all came around the corner, virtually at the same time. Col wasn't wearing anything except a ridiculously brief pair of jocks, and his beard was damp. He was clutching his shorts in his hand.

‘You made it,' he said to me, hastily pulling on his shorts.

‘So did you. Any problems?'

‘Nah, none. Cops didn't even stop me.'

Holly stooped to pick up Warren.

‘Hi,' said Kara, to Teresa.

‘Hi.'

‘What car have you got?'

‘I borrowed Mum's.'

‘Let's go then.'

‘Where is . . . she?'

Col stepped back to allow a small figure through. Saira had discarded the chador she'd been wearing in the morning and was now dressed in a light, long-sleeved blouse and long pants. It was the first time I'd seen her hair; it was long and dark-brown and formed a backdrop to her face like a mahogany frame around a Rembrandt.

‘Hi,' I said.

‘Hi,' she replied.

‘For God's sake, this formality is killing me,' said Holly. She nuzzled her head into Warren's coat. ‘Killing me, isn't it?' she said to the dog, which responded by yawning. Holly put her nose almost between his jaws and inhaled deeply.

‘Oh, I love the smell of puppy breath.'

Saira burst out laughing. It was a sight to behold, like a late-afternoon mountain top illuminated by a sudden burst of sunshine.

‘That is funny!' she said.

‘You've got to be kidding me,' I said to Holly. ‘Puppy breath? That's perverted.'

Col nodded and rolled his eyes. ‘Tell me about it. She's nuts about dogs.'

‘Come on, we've got to go,' Kara said to Saira. She went out the door and looked up and down the street, which was devoid of animation without the boys. ‘I think it's okay. Let's go.'

Saira took Holly by the hand and thanked her, patting Warren at the same time. Holly did an awkward sort of curtsy.

‘Do we all have to die now that we've seen your hair?' I said to Saira as she walked past me. She stopped and looked at me. Her beauty was breathtaking and she had a scent, an aura, that made me woozy.

‘I believe you are a good man, Westee,' she said. ‘But you should not make fun of my culture.'

‘It was dumb. Sorry.'

She smiled a sad, ancient smile that gave me a contemporary tingle in my groin and walked out the door. Kara was already outside. She looked over her shoulder at me.

‘Thanks for the ride,' she said.

‘It was so much fun.'

She raised her middle finger at me as she marched off.

‘She likes you,' said Holly. She turned her attention back to Warren, burying her face in his fur. ‘She likes him, doesn't she, you beautiful boy?'

‘Jesus Christ,' said Col, rolling his eyes again.

Holly took Warren inside and the boys resumed their kick-to-kick on the street, showing off. Kara, Saira and Theresa piled into an old sedan and drove off down the street.

‘Not so fond of dogs, meself,' Col said as we watched the car disappear around the corner. ‘Not since me uncle died of hydatids.'

‘You don't say.'

‘Nasty disease, I can tell you.'

‘You don't have to.'

‘Dogs are only carriers; don't suffer from it themselves. They just pass it on to us buggers. When he died, poor old Uncle George had a sack of hydatids maggots in his guts the size of a bowling ball. It burst one day and he died of toxic shock.
Pop
and it was all over.'

‘Poor old Uncle George. But please, no more about his maggots.'

‘Just warnin' yer, Westie. Wash yer hands after patting the dog, that's all.'

‘I will, mate, if I ever pat a dog again.'

‘That's how it's spread, y' know. Dogs chew on an infected carcass, suck up a few maggots, and the cycle begins again. Course, Uncle George wasn't eaten by a dog. He was cremated.' Col held open the screen door. ‘Anyway, come in and have some roast.'

‘Actually, I might pass,' I said. ‘But thanks anyway.'

9

L
UCY LIVED AT THE
B
AY
, a few streets up from the beach. There was an old Norfolk Island pine stuck in the pavement outside her renovated bungalow, buckling the asphalt with its roots and dropping long twigs ringed with fat, perfectly arranged little leaves on the cars beneath. A brush fence with a cute wooden gate shielded the house from the street. I parked the ute down the road a little way and walked back. She came to the door as soon as I rang the bell.

‘God, you're looking rough,' she said.

‘So people keep telling me.' I followed her into the house, which was cool and dark and had a faintly perfumed smell that I had come to associate with sex. We grabbed each other in the hall and made our way gracelessly into the bedroom, unbuttoning each other as we went.

‘I need a shower,' I said.

‘Later.' Her skin was cool and dark and smooth, and it tasted good.

Sometime later we lay next to each other in an afternoon light dappled by the Norfolk Island pine outside.

‘You were right, you did need a shower,' she said.

I laughed. ‘You seemed to cope.'

‘Yes, I coped, thank you very much.'

Earlier she had discovered the mango on the side of my head with her fingers and now she was peering at it curiously.

‘Why were you late?'

‘Tell you later.' I was almost asleep.

‘Okay. Tell me at dinner.' She put her hand on mine and that was the last thing I knew for some time.

She had booked us into a discreet little Vietnamese restaurant in the city, about twenty minutes' drive from her place. Adelaide is a small city and she didn't want it widely known that she was cheating on her husband. As we went in we both scanned the restaurant for people we knew and both gave it the all-clear. Strangers sometimes recognised me, but nobody caught my eye tonight.

‘How's Mike?' I asked.

I'd had a shower, a shit and a shave and three hours' sleep and I felt pretty damned good. If anyone told me I was still looking rough I'd clock them.

‘He's fine, unfortunately. He's in New York.'

‘What's he doing there?'

‘God knows. I don't. Maybe God cares, too. I don't.'

‘Remind me again why you married him.'

‘Do we have to talk about him? How's Olympic Dam?'

‘Like Hell with the heat on. Do we have to talk about it?'

A young Vietnamese woman approached us armed with a pen and a notebook.

‘Are you ready to order?' she asked in a broad Australian accent. I hadn't even looked at the menu but Lucy already knew what we wanted and ordered using the Vietnamese words.

‘Your pronunciation is excellent,' said the waitress.

‘Well, I spent a few months in Vietnam once.'

‘Really? Whereabouts?' The two women compared notes in Vietnamese while I watched. Lucy was a pretty woman. Twenty-eight years old, PhD in Asian studies, somehow married to a psychopath. We had met at a bar late on a Friday night about eighteen months ago. She'd let me buy her a drink, and then another, and then she'd let me drive her home. She'd given me a peck on the cheek and a promise that she'd call. Which she had done, a few weeks later, and we'd started meeting whenever I was in town, sometimes for coffee, sometimes for a beer and maybe a couple of late-night drinks, sometimes for dinner. And, eventually, for sex, sometimes at her house, sometimes, in an emergency, in my brother Luke's spare bedroom, and a couple of times at her beach house at Port Willunga. Her husband was a handsome corporate lawyer who belonged to the Adelaide Club, the city's most exclusive club for gentlemen and other wankers, was well-liked by his colleagues and thoughtfully only took his frustrations out on his wife in the privacy of his own home. She had black hair, Italian skin, a friendly mouth and soft, intelligent brown eyes. She was sadly wasted on him. The waitress departed and we could speak English again.

‘Show-off,' I said.

‘I'm horribly out of practice.'

‘Show-off.'

She smiled. ‘You were going to tell me why you have a lump on your head. And also why you were late this afternoon. Are you finally getting sick of me?'

‘I think I showed you this afternoon that I'm not the slightest bit sick of you.'

‘I guess so. It's okay, you don't have to tell me.'

I spent the next hour telling her. She listened closely, asking a few intelligent questions and correcting my ignorance of Afghan culture. We ate while I talked and drained the bottle of cold sauvignon blanc she had brought along.

‘So, what do you think?' I asked when I'd finished.

‘I think you've been sucked in.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning that this Kara is either a brilliant manipulator or extremely naïve.'

‘She could be both. But as far as I'm concerned it's over. Let's talk about the sexual positions we're going to try tonight.'

Lucy was studying the wine in her glass, swirling it slightly.

‘I'm not sure it's possible to be both. I'll have to think about that. And I'm also not sure it's over. If I was a single woman with a big problem in a strange town I'd enlist all the competent help I could get. And I'm sure she could see that you're competent.'

‘And handsome.'

‘And conceited.' She laughed, but the laugh died quicker than a suicide bomber. ‘Is she pretty?'

‘I wouldn't say so.'

‘Describe her.'

‘Big mouth, big ears. Mostly skinny but big around the hips, bow-legged.'

‘So, like a giraffe?'

‘No, not that tall. Standard-length neck.'

‘Blotchy skin?'

‘Fair skin. Smooth.'

‘Hair colour?'

‘Brownish.'

‘Eyes?'

‘Yes.'

‘I mean colour, you twit.'

‘Green. Fierce glare.'

‘So she's not ugly.'

‘Not ugly, not pretty. Average.'

She devoted a few more seconds to building a mental picture and then gave it up with a shrug.

‘Anyway, I have to agree with her that the treatment of asylum seekers in this country is a disgrace,' she said. ‘It's not so much the facilities themselves, it's the powerlessness they must feel and the Kafka-like bureaucracy they have to deal with. I've got friends who do a lot of work with refugees. The biggest issue is the way the system dehumanises them, removes their sense of self-worth. Incredibly destructive psychologically.'

‘Shall we open another bottle?'

‘And there's no doubt that Afghanistan is a severely messed-up place. Did you hear anything I said?'

‘Of course I did. Tell me why Afghanistan is so severely messed up.'

‘Do you really want to know?' Her eyes were searching my face.

‘Yes, I really do.'

She was fingering her paper serviette. Now she looked at it and started folding it along the original fold lines. ‘Sometimes I think I'm too serious for you.'

‘Lucy, sometimes you think too much.'

‘I'm not sure
you
think enough.'

The serviette was fully folded now, so she unfolded it again.

‘Afghanistan. You were going to tell me about it.'

She gave me another quick smile.

‘Okay, if you insist.' She pursed her lips and twisted her mouth, which is what she did when she was thinking like an academic.

‘I'm no expert on Central Asia,' she said, ‘but I think Afghanistan's basic problem is its location. Someone once called it the roundabout of the ancient world; it sort of sits somewhere in the middle between India, China, Pakistan, Iran and the Caucuses. Big brutal masses of humanity, all of them. Armies just cruise on in, butcher a few people, get butchered back, and leave. They don't stay because the Afghans are brilliant guerrilla warriors with an incredibly rugged landscape to hide out in. You could lose an army in there, as the Soviets discovered in the eighties. It's still pretty much a feudal society, a bunch of warlords trying to keep their personal fiefdoms together. Then there's the opium trade, which seems to be thriving despite the efforts of the Americans to stop it. And the fact that the country borders two intensely Muslim countries, Pakistan on one side and Iran on another, means that it is a fairly natural place for al-Qaeda to hang out in.'