1001 Nights Cast

On a March evening in 2006 I stopped by the Rose Bay newsagent in Sydney to purchase a copy of the Herald. As I was waiting in line to pay, there were voices behind me, behind an array of books.

—Your name?
—Paul McGeough.
—You want a book by Paul McGeough?
-------
—Oh, your name is Paul McGeough?

Later that evening on my way to work I stopped in at a kebab joint. But I had a feeling I was being followed, someone from the Death Squads perhaps, or Baghdadis wanting their artefacts back.

A NATO Harrier jet screamed overhead and there was a sonic boom as the aircraft broke the sound barrier. A flock of pigeons wheeled around, like thrown gravel.

I stood by the classic portico of the Art Gallery of New South Wales between the two large equestrian statues. The offerings of war and The offerings of peace. As I approached the arches of the vestibule I turned around, and saw shadows disappear behind the hoardings. For a moment I sensed movement. For there was a noise. The massive horse arrested, one hoof in the air one minute, seemed to have come down to rest. And something clattered onto the marble steps. It must have been a rat scampering across the gutter from the construction site. I noticed small dust devils swirling newspaper along the street. Then I looked down and saw a six-inch sacrificial knife made from obsidian and I looked up at the equestrian rider.

Inside the enormous lobby the vestibule was dark, the galleries and mezzanine were dark and empty, the floor lamps were set on low, and everything looked mysterious: the unattended security desk, the glass of the vitrines with their marble fragments and gold funerary goods and animal bones, the almost extinguished red in the enormous lobby. Everything was dark, on every floor, except for the white marble and the white gardenias in their dark vases. There was nobody there. I must have mistaken the date. But the long rooms and corridors under the high-vaulted ceilings, echoed with the rebounding sound of my footsteps, and felt like whorls and lobes as if the place itself were the very ears of Ibrahim Sa‘ad Al Jabouri.

When I went outside I felt weak.

I have woken up in the middle of my life to find myself alone in what for a second I take to be a movie theatre. But there are no walls and no ceiling. There is the city emitting a steady clatter of traffic noise and air-conditioning units, a lone car alarm and the bass patterns from cruising dashboards. It seems to be 2am on a summer night in Samarrah in the early years of the twenty-first century.

The late-shift taxi drivers lounge against their cars or fetch tea from urns with Carnation milk. Bored soldiers lean on rifles. The card players cluster under awnings of blue and green. I sit on a straw-plaited blue chair staring at the pewter lustre of the river and while leaning against the sandstone I notice a rust-stained hole. In the rust-stained holes you can see endless grainy footage of a city. The city is all khaki stucco and grey cement. In the centre is a huge tree, and next to the tree a little cage painted in red with a pair of blinded finches. An adagio of gypsy children weave through the crowd and across the shadows cast from the wrought-iron bars of the long windows. The hole becomes an echoing charter terminal. The fateful bus awaits at the far end. There is the tin throttle sound of motor-scooters. Over the PA major misinformation seems to be entering the semicircular canals of the soldiers asleep on the benches. Names of places and departure times sound like 27 phones ringing. One drunk lies shoeless: his shoes are placed beside him on the greasy floor.

An aged and bony lady comes towards the bus, her striped frock and swinging bodice oddly festive in contrast to her veiled face. She looks like old Angel Midnight on a Friday Night in the Cosmos. She can appear and disappear in a blink. It’s a freakish gift.

There is a silence as one senses the dead roll on through the village streets. Bodies stolen from tile morgues, in cell blocks, in lock-ups, in trunks of cars, in ghetto stairwells, in loading dock doorways, in cross-alleys, in attics. The dead are gluttons for flesh and blood, light and faces and body heat. And along the way they gloat on hair cream, prams, women in summer dresses, dogs in convertibles, baklava stands, inspecting the surface of living things. As if with their forward movement, they hijack your vision and plough a little ahead of you. And you perch on the rusty fender of the bus itself, steering over the potholes along the road, some shimmering beautifully with petrol-green pools.

Then that night…

First it was just a sense of the bed trembling and the image of a slightly swaying road experienced from the interior of a moving bus, along with the newsreader’s (perhaps, yes, Mary Kostakides’) words…‘an earthquake in Sydney’. And I hardly paid attention because I knew it must be a dream because I kept falling asleep.

Then there came a sound somewhere between the skittering of leaves in the courtyard and the rhythmic drumming of the rain or rat feet like sifted gravel on the drainpipe and it got louder and louder along with a stronger shaking of the bed until it was right by my head, and by the time I was brushing it away with my hand and throwing off the covers and shouting, ‘Hey!’, it rapidly receded as I turned on the light.

Then I heard the old couple upstairs. It was 3am in the morning, and they were moving about awake: in itself an unusual occurrence.

Had my ‘Hey’ awakened them, or had they the same experience?

Was it like, a visitation? Periodically, the old building, shuddered in recollection. The basement had been used by Prime Minister Howard’s military tribunals to mollify the refugees who escaped from Woomera.

I looked out the window and saw prisoners in handcuffs being led by police into vans.