The Marsh Birds (25 page)

‘I wish I was with them,' he said.

‘Asshole,' said Carrie and left the room.

Janine and John Johns exchanged worried glances.
He certainly lied about that yacht
, Mr Johns thought, and looked at Dhurgham with new mistrust. But Janine sat down and put her arm round Dhurgham, who hunched, oversized, awkward, in her embrace.

‘You are a cruel one, John,' she said later.

He was broken, wires raw and snipped, flaring unexpectedly with memories, seared by them.

Mr Hosni was back with his soft, clean fingers, parting and probing. Dhurgham's body was marked by those old touches, here and here; and through the marks Mr Hosni could return any time and unclench Dhurgham's crooked fingers from the world. Mr Hosni was a gatekeeper, and Carrie was a phantom, a dream. Dhurgham lay in bed sweating and numb.

Mr Hosni did nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed. He chatted through the night, reminding Dhurgham of the good times; looking, to Dhurgham's eye, a little old and sad.

‘Remember when we went to Busra? You loved it. You even forgot your family for a while and were as happy as any child should be. I was happy seeing you happy. I loved you, Birdie. I gave you everything I had.'

‘That's a terrible lie,' Dhurgham croaked weakly.

‘No,' said Mr Hosni, ‘it's the truth. In any case, it's my truth. I'm a bad man, but I am proud of myself for what I did for you. And I sent you to Australia to a new life with more than enough money to get you started, more than I ever gave anybody, even my own mother. What do you think would have happened to you if I hadn't taken you in and educated you myself? Do you think even Peter Pan and Wendy would have left you alone down there, in real life?'

Dhurgham had no answer.

‘You never once wrote to me,' Mr Hosni said sadly. ‘Not even a postcard. No email. Nothing.'

Dhurgham's throat was dry. He couldn't speak and stared at the ceiling. Mr Hosni had the ability to sit on the bed and stay in his field of vision, however. He was older. Much older. Perhaps ill.

‘The young these days are like that,' Mr Hosni said.‘No respect or love for their elders. They snip the ties,' and Mr Hosni scissored the air with his fingers. ‘You are forgetting Arabic, too, the only thing that really connects you to your old parents. My daughter Nura—not a word from her either—but I bet she's swanning it somewhere, pulling the bucks with that body.'

Dhurgham turned and looked at him in hope and horror. Mr Hosni grinned.

‘Don't get high and mighty with me. She was wilful, uncontrollable. I'm not the sort to go and get her brother to shoot her for the honour of the family. I thought we all just loved each other, no questions asked. But who would be a father these days? Deserted! That's it.'

And with that Mr Hosni vanished. Dhurgham struggled to pull his father's face into his mind's eye but could only get a shoulder, an ear, a stance from a distance. He reached for his mother but she was gone. Not even her voice. His father and mother were irretrievable. He switched urgently to Nura, his memory anchor, but a half-dressed woman with a garish face intervened and laughed out loud at him. Nura was gone too. He was adrift, floating away screaming.

Who was his father anyway? Now that he couldn't recall his smell, couldn't drag his face into existence, couldn't feel or hear him, who was he? He could quote his father, but only in Dhurgham's young voice, not with any echo of the timbre of his father, a father.
The country is in the hands of a devil—A good man doesn't mix with the degraded—Who made this mess?—Your mother suffers when you are naughty, but says nothing—Feed that screeching bird—Once we cross the border, NEVER use our real name. We'll get new identity papers as soon as we get to Damascus—If we get separated, we meet together at the Great Mosque.

He could also remember quotes and verses from the Koran but not the voice that uttered them. They had no fatherliness to them, just the cold knowledge that those now nothing lips had once held them. They had lost the mystery and glory a voice had given them.—
When Hell burns fiercely and Paradise is brought near: then each soul shall know what it has done.

What did it add up to? Nothing. Not a person. A man. Mohammad Amer Hassan originally of Samarra. Sunni. More religious than his mother. More religious than Ahmad. A university professor. A government … adviser. Maybe in a ministry. A political scientist, trained in London. According to Ammu, high up in a cell of the Resistance, the Opposition. Never home. Not good with children.

Father of a daughter, Nura; and Dhurgham, a son. Husband to Zahra Shammari, a Shia.

Nothing.

Mr Hosni popped his head around the closed door. He was in the middle of shaving.

‘Could you check my face? I don't have a mirror,' he said, pointing at his chin and neck, and thrusting his jawbone out towards Dhurgham. ‘Since you left, I've been a mess.'

He tried to talk to Carrie once. They sat together on the bench at the bottom of the garden. The grass was too wet to sit on. He turned to look at her and found he could not smile and could not tear his eyes away. He felt his eyes open up into raw holes through which she might see everything, and he couldn't twist his face into an ordinary smile or grimace, or anything to erase what he was releasing. He felt himself sucked backwards to his past, seeking his only anchor points, and still he couldn't tear his eyes away. He couldn't move. His hair rose on the back of his neck. Carrie looked at him closely.

‘What?' she said, staring at his pale face. ‘What?' she said more softly, shaking his arm a little. He blinked and was suddenly able to close that terrible gateway. He looked down at his hands.

‘I have seen the complete beauty of the world,' he said.‘Twice. It wasn't a fleeting moment. It was burned into me, day after day. In a mosque and on an ocean. I am not sure what it means. I had to be mad or nearly dead to see it.'

Carrie looked at him, unsmiling. She didn't know what to say. She felt in that moment totally excluded; then she felt sad.

After that he told Carrie nothing. She frowned at him and went out with her friends when he was moody, leaving him to huddle in a dimmed world until she returned. Three months passed. In that time he changed. He felt himself to be walking a cliff edge between madness and hope. Nothing made any sense and he had the steady, growing awareness that his future depended on infinitely variable nothingnesses, as opaque and changeable as the clouds above this city.

Carrie's friends were going to vote for hip-hop.

‘Gotya!' Mr Harwood said quietly to himself and leant back. He lit a cigarette and sighed happily. He buzzed Josie and Tulan from the other room.‘We've got him! AID's processing centre file. Listen to this:
“File Note: RRN230 A ringleader in the Easter riots 2001. Strongly influenced by POZ114, who is his self-appointed religious teacher. Confined for three days. To be monitored. No charges at this time
.” “Ringleader.” What a sweet word.'

‘He's to be returned to custody and deported,' Mr Harwood said coldly. ‘See to it.'

‘On what grounds?'

‘Where do I start? He escaped from processing in Australia—he broke the law.'

‘We knew that in the beginning. No one's going to accept that.'

‘Look, dimwit. He can face charges back there, thank God. If he goes back, we save seven billion dollars we can't do without. He's not worth one billion. Face it, Johns, he's not worth $500 000. He's not worth the time my staff have had to put into investigating him. He's bad news. He's a diplomatic disaster. He's an Iraqi, a failed, I stress
failed
, convention claimant. He has lied more times than I can count, and you still want him? Australia says he must be deported before they can talk, so he must be deported. Do it before lawyers hear of it. They won't be able to do anything once he's out of the country and buried in the Australian system.'

Mr Harwood looked him in the eye then. ‘You won't miss him, Johns. Don't pretend you will. There's been talk.'

Mr Johns said nothing. What was there to say? He guessed that the grounds on which Dhurgham had failed to be given protection in Australia were technical, not substantive, or Mr Harwood would have had more to go on and would have called a press conference. But what was there to say? What was a skinny Iraqi boy next to seven billion in national interest? He felt angry with everyone, with miserable penny-pinching New Zealand, but most of all he felt unreasonably angry with Dhurgham. What a lot of trouble that boy was.

Mr Johns looked at the two on the settee. They were sitting under the large framed portrait that Dhurgham had done of Carrie. The picture disturbed him. It was very good. It showed Carrie defiant and giving, both in the one moment. It claimed a kind of knowledge and it showed something rare. It set Dhurgham apart: he could see, and create, this Carrie. The signature in Arabic was a bold, alien scrawl across her shoulder. Dhurgham had presented the framed portrait (framed, Mr Johns noted, with Carrie's money) as a gift to him and Janine a week before, and Mr Johns' predominant feeling then was that he would rather the boy had not. He had been annoyed at Janine's delight and admiration.

Dhurgham's arm was loosely over Carrie's shoulders. Carrie was sucking on a pink iceblock, staring at the TV. Two ordinary teenagers. But he could only guess at who Dhurgham might really be, might really become, and he suddenly felt unreasonably angry with Carrie too. The boy looked like a lithe, lovely young man, maybe even Maori, a local. Except for the bird of prey face—the wings of his eyebrows; and the hot, hard glance from above that Dhurgham sometimes gave. No, really, he looked like an Arab. And in the end, how could you know? Isn't it hasty to take damage into your house, expecting it to be what the surface and the face tell? Hadn't he, John Johns, been unwise to give damage some hope? He felt grim and terrible, and glad too. That arm was going to be removed and it was not his fault.

‘You have to be returned to custody, I'm afraid …' Mr Johns said slowly, trying to keep the words smooth and calm, as if what he was proposing was as minor as missing dinner.

Dhurgham turned towards him from the couch, rising from it in the same movement, uncoiling, his face flushed at first and then pale and savage. Later Janine and Carrie said that he seemed to swell, fill the room with silence, and then just … burst. Mr Johns' words, ‘and deported,' were unheard.

Dhurgham felt himself rising without control but with utter precision. An instrument. His trajectory mapped out as if this was the known and practised response, a refined step in a dance that can only end one way. Then, at his uttermost, he was suddenly focused and possessed with an anger that took all painful thought and all other feeling away. In real time he erupted, froze, crashed and fell in seconds but was somehow still, frozen in that moment that was his pinnacle. Then his rage was a relief, the bursting of a great pus peak. He looked at Mr Johns, Janine and Carrie as if they were cowering together, as if they were remote. Their mouths were moving but he could only hear a roaring in his ears. He looked at them for a second with jealousy, hatred and with his head burning with the freedom to do anything to them, then he looked with pity for their innocence and their vulnerability. All this while he had not moved but was screaming, his arms outstretched, his hands like claws. He saw Carrie then as if through a mist, Carrie alone. She looked shocked and frightened, as if she were seeing a madman with no cage protecting her from him. He turned away from all three, picked up the vase of lilies and rhododendrons from the centre of the table, raised it and smashed it down through the glass top, shattering it, leaving the legs shuddering. He picked up a chair and smashed it against the frame, threw it across the room, and picked up another. The second chair left a club in his hand. Screaming and screaming. He battered the table to the floor, then smashed the club into his own head, again and again and again. He couldn't see for the screen of blood that filmed his eyeballs. He could just hear Carrie screaming with him and in some recess he felt glad that she was screaming too and he began to heave. Then he vomited as he fell unconscious into the bed of bloodied glass and crushed flowers.