Perilous Adventures
spacer
line decor
line decor
spacer

Pandora

sponsored by

Olvar Wood Writers Retreat

 
 

The Rebel Within

Nick Smith
 

The first time I met him, she put her hands over my eyes and led me into the kitchen. From the way she was all breathy and excited, I thought she was going to introduce me to the new vibrator she’d talked about maybe buying. I pictured it pink and bulging, standing to attention on the marble counter-top. I was a little breathy and excited too.

But then she took her hands away and there was this little Asian guy, sitting at the kitchen table, eating fried chicken.

‘Tada!’ she said, flinging her arms wide. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘You can’t tell anyone. This is a secret!’

I waved cautiously at the guy and he nodded back between bites.

‘This,’ she said, walking over to put one hand on his shoulder, ‘is Mr Ba Tha Din of the Karen People’s Liberation Army. From Myanmar.’ I noticed he was wearing a shirt that I left at her place three weeks ago. To be totally honest, I wasn’t really on board with the whole idea at that point.

‘And Ba, this is the man I told you about. This is my fiancée Adam.’

We shook hands. He had greasy fingers.

‘Adam, Ba is wanted by the Burmese authorities for high treason and acts of quote unquote terrorism. He’s in Australia because if the Junta catches him, they will torture and kill him. Ba, Adam is a Senior Associate at Miller Kemp the tax specialists. We’re getting married in September.’

I am this close to making partner.

‘Adam, Ba will be staying with me for a little while. In the other bedroom that I mostly use for ironing. I’ll have to do the ironing somewhere else, of course, but I’ll think of something. You don’t mind, do you? He has nowhere else to go.’

To be completely honest, I was not that keen on the idea, at first.


Later, when Ba was watching Wimbledon on the spare TV in the ironing room, Cass explained it all to me in the living room. I may have raised my voice a little at the time – Cass tells me I did and I have no particular reason to disbelieve her– but I grew to accept it after a little while.

‘You know how I was looking to make a difference? Well,’ she said, clapping her hands together, ‘I joined Justice for Burma! You remember? I gave you the T-shirt Aung-Sun-Su-Kyi for President. You never wore it.’

‘Sorry, I thought it was some local government thing. I never get involved in that. Just mow the lawns and fix the drains, I say.’

Cass rolled her eyes and shook her head. Sometimes she says I’m not worldly, which is untrue. I’ve been to LA, London and Bali. I’ve seen how the rest of the planet does business. I’m just a little more focussed on things that matter. I concede that does sound kind of selfish. But I’m not saying wicker villages full of water buffalo and brown kiddies on the banks of the Irrawaddy don’t matter. Of course they do.

Cass was impressed that I knew where the Irrawaddy was, so I didn’t have the heart to tell her it had been on the label for my new Kathmandu Gore-Tex rain slicker with the detachable hood.

‘So, Adam, I need to do this. I need to protect Ba from, you know, the authorities.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘OK, if this is so important to you, well then you have my blessing.’ She hugged me tight, pressing me into her sweet neck.

‘Oh, I knew you’d understand, I knew it!’ And then she went off to make Ba a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich.

*

To tell you the truth, however, I was a little hurt.

It’s like our relationship started out in fifth gear, racing up the highway and then it’s been down-shifting ever since. I kept waiting for reverse to kick in and I thought maybe this was it.

We met speed-dating. After wading through various hippies, drop-kicks and trolls, I found Cass. We were each the other’s only pick for the night. In a flagrant breach of protocol, we met up immediately. We talked and talked, stretching the initial three minutes into six hours. I floated into work the next day, exhausted but jubilant.

That very night, we met for dinner, moved to a bar for drinks and then had sex, briefly, in her apartment. She insisted that I couldn’t stay the night and I, a gentleman, made a graceful exit, bare-footing it out with my brown English brogues in my left hand. One month later, I presented her with a modest but tasteful diamond. She resisted at first, suggesting that it was maybe too soon – and I felt fear in my mouth like a fistful of vomit – but then she came round, allowing me to slip the ring over her knuckle.

Cass seemed pleased with the ring, would show it off demurely when asked but she never really took the wedding bull by the horns and throttled it to the ground. I expected her place to disappear under a tsunami of bridal magazines and invitation envelope samples but it didn’t happen. She seemed content with the notion of the wedding but was in no hurry to bring it into being.

I pushed and prodded, gently, here and there. Showed her pictures of the kind of clapped-out rural chapel that I thought would be right up her alley, talked up obscure Malaysian beaches as honeymoon destinations. But it never really clicked. Time passed and we grew no closer to setting a date.

And then there was the strangest aspect of all. Her apartment. It’s an attractive ground-floor three-bedroom affair in Darlinghurst, in the corner of a small art deco block, with a little garden and under-ground parking. I had no difficulty imagining our life together in that place.

But imagination is pretty much all I had to go on. After nine months together, I’ve only spent three nights there. It’s unbelievable. Once for my birthday, some kind of extra special treat; once during a power failure when she was scared to be on her own; and once when I was puking my guts out after a night of excess – and even then I got the impression she was waiting to see if the sick held off long enough to bundle me into a cab. It was only by pretending to pass out on her Persian hall runner that I got to see the dawn from her living room sofa.

So you can imagine how I felt when she invited Ba, this guy she didn’t know, this mysterious Asian warlord, to move right in.

I felt hurt is how I felt.

Hurt.

But I didn’t, you know, want to say anything.

*

Two days after I met him, I saw him again in Cass’ apartment. She went out to buy milk. I wished she’d told me she was out because then I could have got some on the way. Instead of sitting on the floral-print three-seater across from Ba who was in an arm chair, leafing through Gourmet Travellers. It could have been worse. We could have been sharing the three-seater with a no-man’s-land of awkward cushion between us.

I could see Ba was deep in an article: ‘22 Awesome Winter Puddings’. I didn’t know if he could read or was just looking at the pictures of self-saucing goodness. I didn’t know if he even knew what puddings or winter were.

It took me seven minutes to think of an opening line. I know because I timed it.

‘So. Have you been in Australia long?’

He replied with some words that sounded like they’d been drowned in pudding and then hit with a hammer.

‘Sorry?’ Eventually I realised he’d been saying ‘not long’. I swear it sounded like ‘key-hole’.

Three minutes later I was ready with my next line: ‘So. Do you like it here?’ But then the words choked in my throat. Because he’d been here – Cass’ apartment – longer than I have.

Luckily, Cass came back with the milk and I could leave it there. Ba pointed at a pudding and Cass was nodding. I had to get up and go outside for a while.

*

‘I know,’ I said, as we drove to tennis on Sunday morning, ‘I know Ba is traumatised and that he needs help but why, why you.’

Cass threw her hands into air and exhaled loudly.

‘Well, it’s a funny story. The convenor of our chapter of Justice for Burma! left, so someone else had to take on the job. Although I haven’t been in the group that long, I thought I would be a good convenor. I have good people skills. But the deputy convenor, Karen, just assumed that the job was hers. Well, I got a bit stroppy. And then she just stared at me and said: ‘And what have you done for the group?’ Which is unfair because I only joined recently. And then someone else said there was a fugitive-KLA-guy who needed help – there was this awful silence when everyone looked at me. I had no choice. Really, I just had no choice.’

I put my hand on her bare knee, covering a clutch of freckles. I could see her jaw jutting out and that her upper and lower incisors were grinding a little.

‘That must have been awful,’ I said.

She looked out the window.

‘Well, I did feel a little trapped at first. Wondering how to get out of it. I mean, a strange man living in my house, even for a short while. But then I became quite taken by the awesome responsibility of it all.’

I had to take my hand off her knee to change gears and then I didn’t put it back again for the rest of the trip. About eight minutes.


I tried with Ba. I really did. Cass told me he was actually a Major-General in the KLA. So I joked with him that he should make me an honorary Colonel. That would mean I could outrank Michael Woijech at work who’s a major in the Army Reserve and always showing pictures of himself on top of an armoured personnel carrier or telling stupid stories about what happened to jumped-up Lieutenants who tried to get into the officers’ mess without the proper uniform.

‘So how about it, Ba? Could you make me a Colonel?’ I had to ask the question three times. I wanted to bail after the first repetition but he had this very earnest face and he kept asking me: ‘say again pliss’. And then finally he understood and spent twenty minutes explaining why I couldn’t be a Colonel in his liberation army.

Cass was smirking the whole time. But I could tell he was wearing a bit thin with her. I nearly gasped when I saw Ba put his feet on the vintage coffee table. (Cass winced but said nothing.) In fact, I’m surprised that he had his shoes on at all in the house.

She saw my raised eye-brow and responded.

‘I know, I know but its instinctual with him. He was raised with the need to bolt out of the house and into the jungle at a moment’s notice if Government soldiers approached. It’s not something we can really understand.’ Apparently not.

*

Tonight, Cass texts me to invite me for dinner. I nearly say something sarcastic but I don’t. Maybe not tonight? I’m feeling tired. But she texts back that she really wants to see me and I find it hard to say no.

I get there and he’s gone, disappearing as quickly as he had come. The whole place just seems different immediately, something in the air. (Not that I’m suggesting I can no longer smell him. I’m not saying he smelled. I mean, he did, a little, but it was nothing offensive.)

We sit on the couch together, facing each other diagonally and making a little triangle with our knees, our four hands folded together, folded tightly, at the apex.

‘Oh, Adam,’ she says, ‘oh Adam. I feel so ashamed. I’ve resigned as Deputy Convenor. I thought I could put the needs of Burma ahead of my selfish home-owner desires but I just couldn’t. The whole time he was here, I was just on edge. The way he wiped his hands on the tea towel, the way he fogged up the window with this breath and then wrote on it with his fingers. And then I caught him drinking from the milk carton. I tried to gently tell him about my hygiene expectations in a constructive tone but I just came across as a scold. He looked like a sad puppy. I felt like such a jerk.’

‘I know, I know.’ I lean in and place her face into the crook of my neck. ‘I know, I know.’

Cass confesses her full list of crimes against house-hold tolerance. I feel the words against my skin like tiny buzzing insects, ticklish but delightful. She looks up at me, staring with her green eyes round and wide.

‘So I rang and said I just couldn’t do it anymore. Karen came to get Ba and she just said nothing about it. Was unfailingly polite. No filthy looks or anything. Like she had never expected anything from me in the first place. I mean, my god he was here for more than half a week. That’s not nothing! Is it?’

‘It’s not. It’s not nothing at all.’

‘And then she left with Ba. And the way she said ‘Bye,’ with a poker face and her arms folded. It was so. Cold. It was so: and we won’t be seeing you again at Justice for Burma!’

I sigh in sympathy.

‘Do you hate me too, Adam?’

‘Of course not, of course not.’

‘You know the funniest thing of all, Adam?’

‘No. What?’

‘It’s made me look at you, at us, differently. Every time he dropped clothes on the floor or left dirty cups on the table, I’d think: Adam wouldn’t do that. Adam wouldn’t treat my place like that.’

I pat her cheek softly, burning with pride.

‘I think, I think, it’s brought us closer together,’ she says. I nod and put her face back into my neck. ‘I can see us living here. Together. I like the idea.’

I nod again, feeling tears winking at the corners of my eyes. We hold each other, tightly for a long, long time. Saying nothing, just being together on the sofa. I’ve never felt so happy.

We remain like that until there is the sound of a number of feet scuffing the brick paving out the front and a pounding on the door.

‘Police. Open up.’

I just wish she’d told me her decision a few hours earlier before I had a chance to ring the National Security hotline.

 

About the Author

Nick Smith is doing a Creative Writing PhD at the Australian National University. He has previously been published in Westerly, Kill Your Darlings, McSweeneys, Australian Short Stories, Harvest, Block, fourW and Redoubt. If he could be summed up in a single sentence, it would be this one. Or this one.

 

issue 11:01 | archives by category | archives by author

 
Site by Olvar Wood