Underground Page 8

  Me, I was on a different track altogether.

  I’d long since cut the apron strings. The eighties were my decade. Money was just everywhere. And luckily, I’d dropped all my leftie pretensions and my aimless drifting at precisely midnight, 31 December 1979. I woke up on 1 January and could literally smell the new age. I could also smell the mould and the filth of my little rented flat—home since my first divorce—and decided I was heartily sick of it all. I realised that I wanted to be rich. I’d been working as a surveyor’s assistant for the previous months, laying down new residential developments in Melbourne’s outer ’burbs, and it suddenly struck me just how damn easy it was for developers to make money. And so I borrowed a wad of cash (my parents going guarantors), bought a few suburban-fringe horse paddocks on the cheap, put in some cul de sacs and drainage, set up the bunting and a tented sales booth on site, and six months later I’d sold the lot at over one hundred per cent profit.

  Voila! I was an entrepreneur.

  Okay, it wasn’t quite that simple, but it almost was, and I didn’t look back. In the following years I built more housing estates, and then moved on to hotels and resorts, each project bigger and better than the last, and each one funded by bigger and better loans. Cash? I never really had any, but who cared, you didn’t need it back then. Everyone remembers the eighties tycoons, and I was typical of the breed, right down to the exhostie second wife with the tanned skin, white clothes and chunky jewellery, and a hopelessly spoiled daughter to boot, the aforementioned Rhonda. There was only one golden rule to understand, and it was this—the larger the debt, the safer you were. If you owed a bank a hundred grand, say, and couldn’t pay it back, then the bank would shut you down in an instant. But if you owed a bank a hundred million, and couldn’t pay it back, then the bank itself was in danger, and so would do absolutely everything to keep you afloat, including throwing more money at you. And not only banks—state governments would jump in too. Because if you folded, and the bank folded, then that was a crisis, and people lost jobs, and MPs lost votes.

  So you couldn’t go wrong. Debts got shuffled and hidden, annual reports got fudged, shareholders got deluded and ripped off, and the long lunches got longer and drunker and ever more desperate. Until the whole house of cards collapsed, of course, and then everyone was rooted. Suddenly it was a recession and half the country had lost their savings and the other half was out of work. Welcome to the 1990s. Ah, but we all had fun, right? And I didn’t do so bad out of the crash. I ended up broke, but I didn’t go to jail like some of my colleagues. It wasn’t that I was any more honest, or that my schemes were any less dodgy, but I was (I’m forced to admit) one of the smaller players of those days, and by the time the really big boys had been humiliated and imprisoned, no one much cared about me.

  Plus there was Bernard. He was still only a minor figure in the Liberal Party, but he had connections all the same, and none of the party powerbrokers wanted a sitting member embarrassed by a corporate criminal brother. So administrators and commissions and judges were talked to and soothed and intimidated, and I sailed away from the bankruptcy proceedings a free man. Privately, of course, Bernard was disgusted with me. Me, and my whole tycoon ilk. We’d given the private sector, the love of his life, a bad name. Sullied something pure. It was like he had a teenage sister, and we’d got her pregnant.

  Still, he protected me. And as the nineties progressed, his star finally began to rise. With the economy in extremis the long-serving Labor government was on the nose, and so was multiculturalism and welfare and the environment and anything else to do with minorities. Mainstream Australia had had enough of pipe dreams. All they wanted were jobs and low interest rates. Bernard began to make a name for himself, returning to old themes, and bashing the government on immigration and Aboriginal land grabs. He was not an exciting speaker, but that stubborn insistence of his was there, a sort of I may be dull, but I know what’s right persona which, year by year, more people came to respect. By 1995 he was in the shadow cabinet, with the (albeit minor) portfolio of Local Government. And then at the 1996 election the Liberals stormed into power, John Howard became the new PM, and suddenly my own little baby brother was a federal government minister.

  It was a happy day—the dawning of an age in which Bernard finally felt not only comfortable, but in tune, in the right. He was a fervent admirer of John Howard—another life-long politician who had mastered the ‘drab, dour, but honest’ schtick even more proficiently than Bernard himself had. Indeed, Bernard’s only source of frustration was that Howard’s first term was relatively lacklustre. No great conservative agenda was proposed or pursued. Fact was, the Liberals had come into government with few actual policies. They hadn’t needed any, what with Labor so profoundly unpopular. Even more perplexingly, in their last few years of power, Labor had themselves adopted market reform and deregulation, the only real policies the Libs espoused, so it took a while for Howard to cut any new ground. Bernard might rail about the dangers of missed opportunities, but as he was only the Minister for Local Government, no one really gave a damn about him.

  I gave a damn, however. Local Government meant town councils, and town councils controlled property development. My palms were already getting itchy, thinking about the possibilities. The nineties had not been very kind to me. During all the legal action of my bankruptcy, I went through my second divorce, an expensive exercise for a man already in financial trouble. Then I was banned from the property market for three years. I got around that particular ruling by marrying a third time—to a man-eating, alcoholic, long-legged real estate agent, the mother of my other two daughters. But when that marriage inevitably went sour I was in even more trouble, seeing that all my new projects were in the bitch-wife’s name. So 1996 found me single yet again, poor, and with a whole mess of alimony and child support payments due. I was eking out a living as the assistant manager at a Gold Coast resort that I had once owned—well, on paper anyway—but that was no life for a high-flyer like me. I wanted back in, and with a brother in charge of the grants system that helped fund every town or city council in the nation, how could I fail?

  The only difficulty was that, by the 1996 election, I hadn’t spoken to Bernard in some years. He hadn’t forgiven me for dragging his name into the bankruptcy courts, and I hadn’t forgiven him for all his tedious lectures while bailing me out. But suddenly I felt overcome with fond feelings for my little brother. How could I have let things slide for so long? We were family! On the other hand, I didn’t even know his home phone number. But the new Parliament was sitting, and he had to be in attendance, so I jumped on a plane to Canberra. It was my first visit there, oddly enough. My earlier dealings had often involved the state governments, but never the federal. A dreary-looking town I thought it, too. Still, there was power in the air, no doubt about it, so I checked into Rydges and dialled up my brother’s department. Leo James calling, I declared, and I’m coming in to see Bernard.

  They put me on hold for five minutes. Then they came back and asked me if I had an appointment. I’m his fucking brother, I replied. They put me on hold for five more. Then I got his personal secretary. And damned if I couldn’t hear Bernard’s own voice muttering angry instructions in the background. He knew it was me calling, all right. But the woman just said that he was a very busy man and really the only way to see him was to set up a meeting.

  Fuck, I said, shaken. Okay, when can I get in?

  In the end, the little bastard made me wait two weeks.

  TWELVE

  I don’t suppose that the residents of a police state really grasp the truth about their nation until they become fugitives within that state. But it opens your eyes, let me tell you. Suddenly, all those security roadblocks that you used to sail through—annoyed at the delay, perhaps, but unscathed, and certainly aware of the necessity, given the unstable times—they become hundred-foot-high walls, impossible to clear. Suddenly those identity papers that you had to renew every year, queueing up for hours—another ann
oyance, but no different from a driver’s licence, surely—the lack of them leaves you feeling like you’re naked in a crowd. And all those police and soldiers on the streets—a sight that you found slightly distasteful maybe, but also rather comforting, given that they were there to protect you—now every single one of those uniforms is your enemy.

  Bad enough if you’re actually a terrorist on the run. But when you’re completely innocent, then it’s something else again.

  Luckily, with the Oz Underground I was in the hands of experts when it came to security evasion. And by the time I got to look in a mirror, I had to admit that I barely recognised myself. It was many days since I’d seen my old reflection, and then the face staring back at me had been smooth and round and well fed (if a little raddled) under a full head of dark hair. Now I had a dirty blond crew cut, huge shadows around my eyes, a certain gauntness about the cheekbones, some freshly healed scars on my chin, and a swollen nose bent a good ten degrees from true. It was still me, and yet not at all the typical me. Certainly I didn’t look like my photos on television—but was it really enough? A beard might have been more camouflage still. Or at least a moustache. But Harry had changed his mind about that, and ordered me to shave. And when I’d suggested some fake glasses, or an eye patch, or a wig, he’d only laughed.

  Aisha, on the other hand . . . Well, I’d never been that familiar with her appearance in the first place, so it was hard to tell whether she was recognisable or not. But Harry hadn’t been kidding, they really had taken her long hair and cut it into a sixties-style bob. They’d dyed it, too, from white to dark red, with accompanying work on her eyebrows. Then they’d adorned her with some dangling clip-on earrings and makeup and a bead necklace and, finally, dressed her in neon green tracksuit pants and a sweatshirt. The transformation was quite freakish—from pale terrorist to suburbanite fashion victim. Not that I was any better. They’d given me a button-up short-sleeved shirt, brown shorts, long socks and (God forbid) a pair of sandals. It made no sense to me. Surely someone dressed like a lay preacher from the 1970s would attract attention rather than blend in. But Harry, with some particular plan in mind, was content.

  Plus we had papers again. Harry presented me with a worn old wallet that held—besides a small amount of cash—the standard Australia Safe identity card, a driver’s licence, several credit cards, frequent flier cards, and even some membership cards for gyms and the like. All in a new name, and all bearing a photograph of my new face. A complete life, bogus address and occupation (hardware supplier, in my case) included. Aisha received the same, wrapped in a handbag. And those papers were my first clue to just how powerful the Underground’s contacts were. Because they weren’t merely clever fakes. They were real. The Australia Safe card came straight from the Department of Citizenship. Which could only mean that the OU had an operative in the department. Someone highly enough placed to take my new photograph and plug it into the database, attached to an electronically created false identity. Impressive. (Very impressive, obviously. Otherwise, interrogators, you wouldn’t have been so interested in this part of my story during our chats. But I’ve told you everything I know on that score. Several times, as I recall. Once courtesy of cigarette burns.)

  Anyway, we were ready to face the great outdoors.

  Or at least to leave the snooker room.

  ‘Our first objective,’ Harry told us before we climbed the stairs, ‘is to get you out of the immediate area. We’re aiming for Brisbane on our first leg.’

  I said, ‘You haven’t told us exactly where we are now.’

  ‘I haven’t? You’re in Hervey Bay.’

  Ah. So in all my recent travels I hadn’t come far at all, and Brisbane was still three hours to the south. Not that I knew Hervey Bay very well. It was a tourist town of sorts, but too sleepy for my tastes. It had a nice enough beach strip, and some whale-watching tours in the bay itself, but otherwise it was just a sprawl of retirement housing and caravan parks. The surprising thing to me was that the Underground had safe houses here. If the OU was active in such a backwater, then the movement had to be a widespread thing indeed.

  ‘So how do we travel?’ I asked.

  Harry smiled. ‘We’ve got something special in mind. And we’ll need it. There are roadblocks on every road out of town, and then more on the highway all the way to Gympie. That’s about as far as they think you two could have made it.’

  ‘And if we get to Brisbane?’

  ‘We’ll move on again. We need you right out of Queensland in the end. A safe house in New South Wales or Victoria where there’ll be time for a proper debriefing.’

  A depressing thought struck me, standing there in my long socks and sandals. ‘And after that? I mean, what sort of outlook is there for either of us? How long, exactly, are we going to have to spend in hiding?’

  The smile was gone. ‘The foreseeable future, anyway.’

  ‘What’s the point then?’

  ‘The point is that until this government is gone, half the damn country has to live in hiding too. So give the self-pity a miss for a moment, okay?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Come on. Our ride should be here soon.’

  We followed him up into the house proper. The snooker room must have been a male retreat, because upstairs was a female place, going by all the frills and floral patterns. The owners were waiting in the kitchen. A wizened little old man, and a round old woman, sitting silently over their cups of tea.

  ‘Our hosts,’ said Harry, as we trooped through. ‘I won’t introduce you.’

  The old couple sipped from their cups and ignored us.

  Then we were in the living room. Harry went straight to the window and peered through a gap in the curtains. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ he told us.

  I sat on a plastic-covered couch, stared about at cabinets full of china plates, and at plastic fruit in a bowl on the coffee table, and at faded photos of children and grandchildren, and I wondered about who and what these people were, and why they were willing to help.

  Aisha was sitting on the edge of a recliner rocker, colours all clashing violently. I thought about her real name again. Nancy. At least she looked like one now.

  I said, ‘What sort of name is Aisha anyway?’

  And despite the bob and the make-up, her glance could still be withering. ‘It’s the name of the Prophet’s wife.’

  ‘Mohammed? His wife?’

  ‘Actually,’ Harry commented from the window, ‘just one of his wives.’

  ‘His most important wife,’ Aisha retorted. ‘She helped create Islam itself. After the Prophet’s death, she even led an army against the false fourth caliph. She’s the prime example of how important women are in the faith.’

  Harry was nodding. ‘But that’s the problem, isn’t it? She was part of the cause of the whole Sunni/Shiite split. A lot of Muslims hate her. She’s one reason some say women should never be involved in the high matters of Islam.’

  Aisha sniffed. ‘They’re wrong.’

  I looked at Harry. ‘How do you know all that?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve met a few Muslims in my time.’ He was still staring through the glass. ‘It’s certainly a controversial name. Especially for an Islamic convert to choose. What was your thinking behind that, I wonder?’

  But Aisha only watched him with renewed suspicion.

  Then Harry straightened. ‘Here we go.’

  I stood up. ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  He led us to the front door, and out into the first open air and sunlight that I’d seen in days. It should have felt wonderful—a big blue sky, a warm breeze with the hint of salt in it, and off in the distance the sparkle of the sea.

  Instead, I felt acutely visible, and acutely vulnerable. We were only walking out onto a front lawn in an average small-town street—houses, parked cars, pushbikes in driveways—but it was an average street in an Australia at war with terror, an Australia nothing like the old one. Every window, every closed curtain—who was hiding behind them, and wh
at could they see? And who did they report to? Everyone knows that it’s more than just the AFP and ASIO and the other security forces these days. There are informers, too. Some paid to do it, some blackmailed, others who simply like to point the finger. Report Anything Suspicious, demand the television advertisements. Anything and anyone. For the sake of freedom, for the sake of democracy. And there were Aisha and me, the two most wanted people of the hour, standing in plain daylight in front of fifty windows, with only our flimsy disguises to protect us. We may as well have let off a skyrocket.

  Then it got worse.

  An old bus came lumbering up the street. It seemed to be packed with people, they were hanging out the windows. And a big banner was slung from the side. ‘Hervey Bay Patriotic Society.’ With a wheeze of brakes the bus pulled up right in front of us. The door puffed open. And, I swear to God, I could hear the passengers inside singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  I glared at Harry. ‘You’re kidding.’

  He considered the bus happily. ‘No joke.’

  ‘The Patriotic Society?!’

  ‘Fully paid-up members, every single one of them.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s cover, you idiot. Now get on board.’

  I had a thousand more protests to make, but before I knew it we were in the bus and on our way. It was all heat and sweat inside, people standing in aisles and crammed into overflowing seats, talking, singing, and slapping me and Aisha and Harry on the back like we were the oldest of friends.

  I tell you, dear interrogators, I would have felt safer in the hands of the Federal Police. I mean, sure, the Patriots claim to be just a society for proud and loyal citizens, but even I know that they’re really in cahoots with the authorities. It was the Patriots, after all, who were demanding the detention of all Muslims, even before the Canberra bomb. It was the Patriots who lobbied to get the death penalty reinstated as punishment for treason. It was the Patriots who helped run the campaign that introduced conscription. It was the Patriots who forced Christian prayers back into every school in the nation. And it was the Patriots who orchestrated the banning of abortion. ‘Procreation, not immigration!’—that was their motto. (White babies please, not black, brown or yellow.) Even their name is a giveaway. Since when did Australians use a word like ‘patriot’? They’re my brother’s biggest fan club, running dogs and informers one and all. And now we were with a whole busload of them.