The Marsh Birds (21 page)

‘Dig! Dig!' Mr Harwood yelled at his team.‘We've got to find something. This can't be happening. Ask AID for his entire case history, off the record. They're as keen to resolve this as we are.'

Carrie Johns met Dhurgham with open hostility. She looked him up and down with seventeen year old righteousness, turned to Janine and said loud enough for him to hear, ‘He looks like a terrorist.'

‘Carrie!'

But for some reason Dhurgham didn't feel shy. He was bursting, his chest full, body charged. He felt like hugging himself. He felt like raising his arms to the sky to hold the charge at his furthermost. He was more than grateful to the Johns, and exceedingly polite, but he suddenly felt too big and too free to go through the door into their house.

‘Please, Mrs Johns, may I—?' he gestured towards the green garden.

‘Carrie, show Thor—him the garden.' Janine had a warning note in her voice and Dhurgham felt like laughing out loud. Nothing mattered. He felt so much older than Carrie. And he felt in love with Carrie. He walked with a spring at an appropriate distance from her, wanting to run. She sulked next to him, waving her hand at this and that in the garden, not saying a word. He watched her fine arms flung this way and that, her long fingers with black nail polish. He caught the scent of her shining black hair, pulled back in a ponytail. A sort of teenage, apple and peach scent, a waft he almost recognised. A young, free smell. Her breasts were small and high under her tight shirt. Her face was triangular, pointy and aggressive. Her shiny black hair flicked back and forth across a broad white brow. Her eyes were large, dark and right now very nasty. He wanted to laugh. He leant towards her slightly and looked at her, his eyes shining, until she unwillingly met his glance.

‘Hey, New Zealand! Have you ever met a terrorist before?'

And then he could not stop himself from running, his arms in the air. It was an impossibly green garden. He ran down the long lawn-like meadow towards the looming ferns, trees and green belt that bordered a hidden stream that wound through the garden. He was laughing, his body bursting, his skin singing, the charge reaching the sky. His feet seemed to press an aroma from the grass and earth: herbs, flowers and cut grass, crushed grass, and underneath it all—wet earth. He didn't look back until he reached the bottom, a small semicircle of brighter green grass forming a thick mat on the bank of the creek. He could not sit. Carrie was stomping down the slope after him. She came up alongside.

‘This is my spot. You are trespassing.'

Dhurgham grinned. He didn't understand.

Carrie pointed at the ground.‘Mine!' She pointed at him and said very slowly, insultingly, ‘Illegal immigrant.'

Dhurgham pointed at her and said, equally slowly, ‘Bitch.'

Carrie stared at him, her eyes widening in shock. She spun and raced up the hill to the house, leaving him there. Dhurgham stared down the steep, fern covered embankment. He could see a glimmer of a forest pool down there. If it wasn't for the tree trunks and the furry fern trunks, one might have run down the grassy slope and jumped, flying through the air, to land in that still black water. His elation had left him. He felt himself quieten, retreat from the sky, the trees and the grass, and re-enter his body. He probably should not insult the daughter of his hosts but, although his high joy had left him, he was not regretful. Not now.

‘He called me a bitch!' Carrie was outraged. They were doing him a huge favour. Her dad had nearly lost his job for this guy. He was in their house, for God's sake, out of the kindness of their hearts.

Janine laughed, although she was slightly taken aback.

‘What did you call him?'

‘An illegal immigrant, which is what he is.'

‘And a terrorist.'

‘Most likely ditto. Australia rejected him, remember.'

‘Pretty bitchy, Carrie.'

‘But shouldn't he be quiet and grateful and stuff, and generally more, more—'

‘Subservient?'

‘Yes! He is trying to get into the country for nothing!'

‘Maybe that's not him. Maybe that's what got him into trouble in Australia.'

Carrie swung her hair in irritation and went to her room. She sat on her bed, then went to her window and watched Dhurgham walk slowly back through the rhododendrons and hydrangeas up towards the house. He didn't look crushed. He stood up straight. His hair was wet, as though he had run his hands in the creek water and then slicked them through it, and his eyebrows looked like birds' wings. He was dark and shining against the pale pink of the bunched flowers.

Dhurgham settled into the Johns household quickly. He loved their house. It was made of wood and built into a steep slope so that the street face and the front looking over the huge garden both seemed in different ways to be the front. It was timber, outside and in. The floor was polished a pale golden colour and all the walls were cream. It was light and airy throughout. The kitchen was part of a long open room with colourful rugs on the floor, a lounge and TV, and a dining table. Sunlight seemed to fill this room nearly all day through a series of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked north and out over the garden below. His room had a bay window facing west; Carrie's had an identical window facing east. Outside his window the rhododendrons massed, and in the middle distance the mountain rose sharply, peppered with many variations of the same kind of stately yet modest house. The sky, usually either blanketed or speckled with clouds, filled one triangle of his compound window. He loved it all.

Carrie told him that he was not to go near the bathroom until after 8.30 am, do anything male with the toilet seat, or to wander the house in his pyjamas, so he didn't. Janine gave him a set of keys as his own and told him with an indulgent smile to try not to lose them. He treasured them, amused and charmed by the typical teenager her smile made him out to be. He read books in their library, watched whatever television programs they watched, washed the dishes after dinner (earning an approving comment from Janine and a filthy look from Carrie). Janine gave him a razor and a can of shaving lotion and his own set of shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and toothbrush. He shaved his face for the novelty of it rather than the necessity and made sure he left no chin or lip hair in the bathroom that might annoy Carrie. He made his bed every day and learnt how to use a front-loader washing machine. He lay in his bed at night, reading, then just staring at his cedar door. It had scrolls, waves and polished ridges of red running through the deep maroon brown. It gleamed. He loved it that his door and Carrie's across the hallway were the same style but each unique in its swirls and wood patterns.

Dhurgham's new land was new the way no other had been. He was free to discover it, to find where he had finally landed, where he would, one day, be at home. He took to walking everywhere through Wellington's startling city scape. It was a hilly city, a city that hadn't fitted into the small harbour bay and had flowed up the steep mountains and over into the many steep valleys and clefts. From the Johns' it was an hour's walk to the harbour city, a walk that took him through the suburbs over small winding village roads to peaks bristling with cute whitewashed wooden houses overlooking stunning views of the sea and mountains. He thought, in that first week, that it was the loveliest place he had ever seen, and the thought filled him with an inexplicable pain and loneliness, even foreboding.

The first time he headed over the peaks to the final steep descent from the cottages to the skyscrapers was full of surprise. He found himself faced with woodland, or parkland, rather than houses. He plunged down into what was suddenly no park, but a thick forest. Its smell hit him: thick, fecund, rotted. He could hear water gurgling and singing; a wild brook, no fountain. He stared up at the tangled trees, lianas and ferns. He had never seen anything so majestic in its excess. Gnarled roots tripped him as he strode. Huge dark trunks, most of them tagged with tiny plastic markers giving a number, rose to make the kind of forest canopy he had only ever seen in movies. It was utterly silent, as if wild enough to have hushed at his entrance.

A few metres down the track, he heard the sizzling sound he later found out was cicadas. And then the forest was ticking and wheezing, sighing and twittering in his ears. At first it was just the sigh and creak of wood on wood, leaves against each other, and the sudden soft thud of a pine cone falling. Then simple notes, then complex scrapes and whistles of a bird. And suddenly he found he could hear a child playing somewhere, a sound that must have been there before. It was a loose scuffling on a parallel track, hidden somewhere to his left. He could tell a child was shooting an imaginary enemy with limited success, making attack after attack with increasing bravery. A woman was laughing. He smiled to himself.

Then, behind the unfamiliar bird calls and the fading gunshots, he heard a distant squeak and thwock that he took to be another strange creature. But as the path rounded a bend, the forest gave way suddenly to a view through trees of green asphalt tennis courts way below in the valley. Small figures, girls in white shirts and short blue skirts, ran back and forth. The path turned back into the deep green shadows and he strode on under the giant umbrellas of tree ferns. Again there was no real sign that he was in a city until the steep path gave way to garden as it levelled at the bottom.
Central Park
, the sign said.

There was nothing on earth he had ever imagined to be like New Zealand.

Dinner at the Johns'was a slightly formal affair in which everyone who was in the house, family or friends, gathered to give due appreciation to Janine's cooking; to be given also, in excess, when Carrie cooked. It was a subtle ritual that Dhurgham understood without thought. He passed his comment, too, on each dish. He participated lightly in political discussions and generally carried himself as a young man who respected his elders. He felt completely at ease at these dinners. He looked forward to them. He could feel the approval of Mr Johns and Janine. He could feel their guests' interest in him as a kind of generosity and he knew that they left impressed by him. And he could feel Carrie writhe and snarl under her calm face. With all this he felt at ease, relaxed and natural.

Carrie cracked, finally, after three weeks. The family were gathered over a spaghetti bake she had made, which was overcooked. She had planned all morning to make something special and had shopped especially for unusual ingredients: artichoke hearts and aubergine. She was furious with everyone for the blackened tips of the spaghetti, the mush underneath and the hardness of the browned crust. She smacked the salad bowl down on the table slightly too hard and sat down to eat without a word. A tear slid down her cheek and she kept her head down.

‘Hmmm—good!' Dhurgham said.

Carrie raised her fierce face to his and said,‘Mr … Perfect!'

Without thought Dhurgham flicked a cherry tomato across the table at her and hit her on the cheek. Carrie gasped, and then, despite herself, despite everything, she smiled. She began looking for something to throw back.