1001 Nights Cast

For months we heard rumours: they will come at night, they will speak no English, their voices and bodies are light, girlish even, but they are ruthless, brutal. At Uni young men chattered breathlessly: give them whatever they want, don’t be a hero, but don’t act scared. Stay close to your home, stay in touch with your neighbours, take care of your sisters. Tough it out. The peacekeepers will come.

There was a whistling sound, Michael said something was wrong with the air-conditioning, but someone else said it was feedback from microphones and that all of our offices were bugged. We heard rumours that they were watching our internet use, keeping files on the websites we visited. We had always worked in separate offices but shortly after the air-conditioner-whistling we were moved together into what had once been the student gym. It was ridiculous, thirty of us in a wooden floored gymnasium. The acoustic so bright that smallest sounds clattered like skittles in your head, no one could work, everyone started wearing ipods, listening to music so loud that a cacophony of tinny beats and shimmery voices sizzled thick in the air. Irritation incarnate.

The television was the first to go, but they kept the radio and the internet. The ABC was still on air. At first markets and shops, buses and schools all pretty much worked as usual, but then they started blacking the city out from midnight to dawn, then they stopped public transport, and then they closed the University, in a bad way, and then they blocked off the CBD altogether.

One night a young man came to the door. Polite, he apologised for interrupting my evening. Behind him in the garden another young man lingered awkwardly. They both wore khakis, machine guns hanging down their backs. They were the age of my students. The young man explained he was from the Resistance and, as I may have understood, they needed houses in this area for storage and accommodation, (he spoke English very well, a slight American accent if anything). He asked if I wanted him to arrange accommodation for me, or if I had someone I could stay with.

I flashed on a meeting I had had two weeks before with a post-grad student, at which I lamented: Young people have no politics these days!

‘I have somewhere I can stay’. I said. I asked how long they would need my house for. ‘Perhaps until the liberation’, he said. ‘When do you need to move in?’ I asked. ‘Maybe later tonight?’ He looked at me with concern. I asked him if the trains were running. He said no. ‘I need to get across the city’ I said. Then he looked really worried, turned his head to his mate in the garden, then back to me. ‘Oh dear, isn’t there someone you can stay with nearby?’ he asked. ‘Not close by’, I said. ‘Perhaps you had better go to the temporary accommodation’, he said, ‘in the University’. ‘No’ I shake my head ‘I used to work there, I don’t want to go there again.’ ‘Ah’, he nodded sympathetically. ‘But the city is very difficult,’ he said.

Difficult is the word.

In that instant I decide I will walk across the city. I will swim across the river below the railway bridge and walk ‘round the lake to Southport, then I will walk up Fairbairn Road and find the boys. Fuckit. Fuck them all. Walking at night, I am invincible. I always have been. ‘I know!’ I say, ‘I will stay with my friends in Maidstone’. He gives a bright smile, ‘Oh yes!’ he says ‘Maidstone is nearby!’

I never get to Southport. I am shot climbing out of the river.

There is a shout, a man’s voice, but high, musical. It rings out over the water. I can’t see anything. At first I run for cover in a Casuarina grove but then I turn and run wobbling, back down to the water. I shout out:

Hallo! HallO!

I strain to hear something. There is only water lapping at the gravel. But then a sound comes out through my chest like a firebomb, a cry in a voice not mine.

There is a tortoise sitting in the stormwater drain. I sit next to it and put my fingers out to touch its shell. It doesn’t move. I hug my knees to my chest with my left arm. I cannot spend a whole night in a storm water drain alone, shot, with a tortoise, while at home soldiers sit on my couch and eat from my kitchen. Surely.

The end of things comes very slowly.

A dull ache behind the eye, a sinking feeling in the whole head, body leaden and cotton at the same time.

One of my students was a dancer, he danced with a crew in a hip-hop club in the city, the one where all the Islanders went, downstairs. I went one night and watched him spinning, pivoting on the palm of one hand, little jumps in the air using the hand to push off the floor, his whole weight pounding down on his wrist, but he looked like he was made of paper, perfect origami boy.

A great breath of air sighs out of me, and I snap back to my body. Where had I been? Somewhere better than this. I try and curl onto my side, but my hip jabs the concrete, I roll onto my stomach, fold my arm under my wet head. My tortoise friend has gone. I look out over the water hoping to see light touch the horizon, but it’s black as pitch. One thing to be said for the end of electricity, the night sky is back. Big time.