Ze vaults the flimsy wire fence and pelts across the parched field, Havaiana thongs in hand. From the burred grass, his feet hit the airstrip. Roasting asphalt sears his soles and he is running through a wall of dense heat. He tells himself that he needs to beat flight take-off. Won’t admit that maybe he is still sprinting away from the gang that threatened him, blocked his entrance to the airport. Even more submerged is any acknowledgment of connection between this three hundred-metre dash and what went on with Nanda. That can all wait.

Does anyone notice the lone figure burning across the tarmac? Security? As he blazes past, an odd goat raises a head to look at him before returning to munch on the dry grass. Nobody else seems to care. In this slow-motion moment Ze registers a hyper-intense bouquet of scents: a combination of the malodorous and the fragrant. There is the salt from Dili’s north shore just behind the patch of coconut trees to his right, tar, petrol, the droppings of the goats casually grazing around the field’s perimeter, something dankly human floating from the IDP camp beyond the airport, his own expensive cologne and sharp sweat.

By now the sun overhead is belligerent. In heavy slim-cut jeans, a tight T-shirt, a backpack, and bare feet, he is not dressed for this. He is aware of the grit of dust in his mouth, burrs nipping his soles, his mum’s Portuguese chicken curry rolling around in his belly, his heart like internal thunder. But adrenaline and muscle memory propel him towards that crappy little shed. Dili’s international airport. What a joke.

Nearing the airport, Ze relaxes in the knowledge that the plane won’t leave without him. His body and the brain is reveling in the forward momentum, relishing the ease with which his legs are working, enjoying a sense of purpose, however transitory. The beginnings of a gut may be marking his age, but he is built for this; he has trained for this. An image flashes across his mind of his Broadie Timorese boys and their birds pressed against the boundary, cheering him on as he pushes down the field. His feet dancing around the ball, positioning for the showy goal. Nanda used to be there among them. Later she would have Alex and then Belinha with her. He sees the little ones all red-nosed, round and cuddly, snuggled up to Nanda and the other women. Their padded nappy bottoms and puffer jacket reinforcements against Melbourne’s chill. As soon as they could toddle around, they would kick around their own mini-soccer ball with wild jabs of their short legs, Alex hopping up and down, fists in the air, piping, “I can do it like Daddy!” Not anymore, though. Perhaps never again.

He shakes off the image of Nanda and the kids, replacing it with the white girl waiting in the airport. The one that he’d attempted to chat up all morning to ease his boredom while they waited for repairs to be made to the twenty-seater plane. He had suggested she come with him to have lunch back in Dili’s centre, promised her they’d get back to the airport on time; his tiu who works at the airport would call them. But she had said no, looked at him as if he was presumptuous for inviting her. He liked that she had made it hard for him.

Ze stumbles through the exit into the airport’s sole waiting gate and collapses into the nearest chair. It’s all flying rocks and racket and boys gone wild outside, neat rows of grey seats and the silent frustration of white development consultants inside. No one stops him, questions him, is the least bit interested in him. Breathing hard, large shaking hands cradling his head, sweat slides down his face and through his fingers. Bending over to pick prickles from his swollen soles, Ze gingerly slips his thongs back on. He notices his bleeding left shoulder. He hasn’t felt any pain until now. The wound seems superficial but the dripping blood is lurid in the sterile room. He pulls his T-shirt over his head, tying it around his arm. He’s got a zip-down hoodie somewhere in his bag.

He is evidently just in time.

“Es-cuse me, ladies and gentleman, your plane is now fixed and ready for boarding. Please have your boarding pass and passport open.” As they jostle impatiently at the airport exit, none of the other passengers meets his eye.

Except her. Becoming aware of the Aussie girl hovering above him, he glances up. The other outsider in this group who are desperate for a return to civilisation, he likes her understated dress and lack of makeup. Read with her wary demeanour, he guesses that she’s aiming for inconspicuous. He gets it. This is a place where white girls are the stuff of every boy’s wet dreams. Plastic Virgin Mary figurines sit on taxi dashboards alongside posters of old-school Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne and other random blondes in suggestive poses. He pities the girl, knowing he will not have been the only one to appreciate how the cargo pants fit nicely around her arse, how the white T-shirt moulds to her tits.

Him, he’s never been much into whiteness, preferring a lightness of complexion achieved in spite of the challenge of pigmentation. Like Nanda’s skin, or his own, in which the black Timorese is offset by the white Portuguese.

As the girl stands over him, Ze notes with some delight the look of concern on her face. She’s very flushed. Doesn’t seem to know where to look. Sucking in his stomach, he knows he looks pretty good without hisT-shirt, especially around the chest and arms. He also knows how out-of-place he looks, bloody and sweating, among the suits.

“Oh, there you are! I was worried,” she said. “But I didn’t have your phone number to call you, let you know the plane was leaving. What happened? Are you okay?” She shuts up, looks embarrassed. Earlier in the day he could barely get a word out of her. Now he’s got an in. As they say, it’s always the quiet ones. You never quite know what you’re going to get, what could be unleashed. Fishing the hoodie from his bag he stands up slowly, his powerful legs now feel weak as all hell, but she doesn’t need to know that. She takes a step back, looks away as he closes the space between them, all bare torso and grin. Easing his sore arm through the hoodie sleeve, he walks with her towards the tiny plane headed for Darwin.

*

On the plane, Ze sits in an aisle seat directly behind the girl—Katie—and leans forward to tell her the story. Their right feet hang out in the aisle, almost touching. There is almost something illicit about talking in low tones into her ear, his breath on her pale neck.

The version he tells Katie is a carefully edited narrative in which he casts himself as the courageous protagonist battling dark forces. Nowhere do Nanda or the kids appear. He leaves out any link between Nanda chasing him away and the young fucks pursuing him. He shapes his story to elicit the minimum requisite sympathy: not enough to undermine his manliness, just enough to invite her feminine care. Sympathy for the misunderstood hero, the true Timorese patriot. His performance is compelling because, during the telling, he believes every word.

“Kiss the ground every time I leave this place. I’m Timorese, isin ho klamar, body and soul. Feel it here,” he says, thumping his carefully-honed left pectoral muscle. (He is pleased to have the chance to draw her attention to it a second time.) “And this is what my country has come to. It’s fucking sad.”

*

The hundred or so metres of road stretching from Dili’s airport always seems constructed for statesmen, international dignitaries, top UN bureaucrats. It boasts bold white lines, a landscaped median strip, and bitumen of a glossy concentrate. As if these one hundred metres of perfection will lull the ema bo’ot, the big people, into complacency before they know what has hit them. Before it is too late to escape. Or, as their final memory of the place, it will wipe clean any shit that has settled on the soul.

After lunch back in Dili’s CBD with his family, that stupid road looked even more ridiculous than usual. This is the time of the fuik, the wild. Any attempts at careful urban planning have been trumped by the human spirit’s unpredictability. Since the advent of Dili’s state of crisis some seven months earlier, wildness has risen up everywhere. Logical frameworks and progressive indicators lie in smithereens. Uprooted people, known in this acronym-crazy city as IDPs, camp in the vacant, arid land around the airport. The impromptu village of white UN tents, replete with Fretilin flag, flocks of dirty, ragged children and glares of angry young men, overshadows the airport’s miniature manicured road.

Heading back to the airport after lunch, his uncle had eased his battered navy Pajero 4WD through the pot-holed roundabout leading off Dili’s main road into the mouth of this short but regal expanse.

“Fuck!” they had both said, in two different languages.

They drove straight into an urban nightmare. A battle of wannabe warriors. The kind that had been springing up all over the city for months. Gangs of young men, boys really, battling for control of shitty pockets of dusty earth and rubble. Crazy with rage, they flexed their puny muscles, staking claim to the freedom-fighter history of the new nation. Like spot wildfires, some of these mini-wars were doused temporarily by international peacekeeping forces, but the cumulative effect upon the city was devastating and out of control. Any journey in and out of the airport was risky.

While they’d been in town things had gone to shit. Facing Ze and his uncle were short skinny dark-skinned boys, T-shirts tied around their faces, lean abdominal muscles on display. The boys were running between the white tents, catapulting out of the temporary village onto the road. They yelled and whooped, strutted, chucked rocks. Some brandished barbed and hooked weapons that carried poison and curses.

After a moment of shocked inaction, Ze’s uncle crunched the gears back to first. The Pajero squealed in protest as they headed back the way they had come. They avoided entering the airport’s neat road, but the boys with boiling blood spilled onto the main thoroughfare. Ze and his tiu were surrounded by wild, yellow-white eyes and open mouths screaming at every window. The boys began to rock the car from side to side, and then the crowd parted to reveal a boy with hand raised, a rock held in  his fist.

 “Drive! DRIVE!” Ze roared. Something popped inside his uncle. He blinked three times and found the accelerator. The Pajero made contact with some bodies but the boys jumped away. The rock connected, smashing through the rear left window, sending glass flying through the cabin, showering Ze. The Pajero surged forward. Turning left at the bridge before the dry riverbed, they approached the airport from a back road. Ze jumped the fence and sprinted across the airstrip.

*

There are almost ten hours to kill between arriving in Darwin and boarding their reorganised connections to Melbourne. During the first four hours, from a cousin’s house in the suburbs, Ze has tried to ring Nanda at least ten times. The final few attempts she doesn’t even let the phone ring out, hanging up on him. He calls the Darwin Airport Resort, where Katie and the other passengers have been put up. Katie sounds sleepy and surprised to hear from him, and he uses the fact that she is off-guard to persuade her to have a drink with him in Darwin’s CBD.

On his way to pick up Katie, he cruises the flat, straight roads in a cousin’s beat-up little Nissan, complete with fuzzy animal-print seat covers. He is freshly showered and shaved, dressed casually but fashionably in knee-length shorts, a tank and a baseball cap. He has the windows down – no worries about rocks flying through the windscreen here – warm air gliding across his right arm as it rests half in, half out the car. Here, the night is well-lit.

If Dili were like this, maybe he’d still be living there with Nanda and the kids. They moved back to Timor in 2000, after the vote for national independence that saw the occupying Indonesian forces depart, leaving a trail of destruction behind them. It was Nanda’s plan; she’d got a job with the UN as a translator. He’d been surprised when she virtually accepted it before telling him about it. We have a responsibility to contribute to rebuilding our country, she had said, incensed. That’s at least how I feel about my country.

That had stung. He had asked about how they would manage with the kids. We had to leave Timor, you and me, she had replied. But we can go back now. The kids can live there. Don’t you think we owe it to them to let them get to know who they are? Where they came from? Don’t you want to go back?

Ze had had very little to bargain with. If he argued, not only would he be an unfaithful and unsupportive partner, but his very Timorese-ness would be in question. So, when Nanda had said she and the kids were leaving for Dili, with or without him, he was pissed and fumed for a few days, but relented. He loved her, and she had always made the decisions for both of them. They were like a rock-star couple in the Melbourne Timorese community, like Brad and Ange. Good-looking, glamourous. She was the brains.

He hadn’t been sure what he could contribute to the rebuilding of the country, but he knew he’d work something out when he got there. He could at least contribute to his family. His parents had already returned, were setting up businesses – coffee exporting, restaurants, a hotel catering to Australian and Portuguese expats.

Nanda and the kids went to Dili first, to set things up. When he arrived a couple of months later, five-year-old Alex was already speaking Tetun like poor mountain people, real foho-style. He’d picked it up from their neighbourhood mates. It didn’t sound at all like Ze’s Portuguese-heavy Tetun. Even little Belinha, only two years old and hardly speaking when she left Australia, was having a crack at some Tetun. Mostly attempting to boss big-brother Alex around: Come here now. Give that to me. That kind of thing. He was not pleased with them speaking foho Tetun but Nanda said that this was a new nation: democratic, equal. They had to release any ideas about being culturally superior because of their Portuguese blood.

Nanda had become weird and haughty, distant in other ways. She still exuded that intense white-hot energy he had always been drawn to. But now it was directed elsewhere. It was like some kind of forcefield; he couldn’t penetrate it. She was focused completely on her work. She worked long hours and was always tired when she came to bed. Her friends were all political, working in impressive development jobs.

The kids were happy to see him but had slipped into a routine that didn’t depend on him. There were women everywhere, relatives, to take care of them, coo and fuss over them. Belinha was occupied with the women and girls, dressed in ludicrous, frilly pink and white gowns, cocooned in a feminine domain he wasn’t a part of. Even Alex didn’t need him for a kick of the soccer ball. The boy had taken to wandering the compound and nearby neighbourhood with a gang of mates. He particularly loved it when the rains came pelting down. All the boys would strip off and run screaming through the streets, pushing through grimy water up to their knees. Ze thought it disgusting. His kid had gone a bit fuik, a bit wild. Where was the class?

Still, they squirmed happily in his big bear hugs in the mornings and evenings.

The Dili outside his parent’s compound shocked Ze. Nanda seemed grimly exhilarated about the mess around them. She felt like she had finally come home, that she had skills to offer. She was more than an interpreter, she said; she was a cultural and political translator, one of the few who could move between the worlds of the Timorese and the expats, help them understand each other, work together to build the nation from the ground up.
 
He told Nanda he felt happy to be home, but the words felt forced. He had been nine months old when his parents fled Timor; there were no memories here for him. He couldn’t remember the city before it was razed. And now Dili was little more than a town-shaped pile of rubble. It stank, especially when the rains bucketed down and the open sewers flooded. Skinny kids with shell-shocked eyes roamed the streets in dirty rags and bare feet, while huge white UN vehicles roared around. He was ashamed to realise he was a bit stunned by how dark most people were. His body wouldn’t adjust to the heat. He always felt filthy with sweat and dust. The people were so fucking poor; they would look at him with their resentful eyes and mutter malae isin bo’ot. Fucking foreigner with the big body.

Once a group of young guys set on him. One of them had a knife. They accused him of coming back to Dili to make the bucks after they had suffered the consequences of the independence struggle. Lucky they’re all small fucks. He threw a couple of punches and got the fuck out of there.

He missed Melbourne. At least he was unambiguously Timorese there.

Mostly he kept to his family’s hotel and restaurant compound, drank with his cousins and mates at night. There were girls staying there, Australian volunteers, the odd American ones. Mostly white, the occasional Asian. They were young, eager, earnest. They gathered around the hotel bar at night. Nanda would eye him suspiciously when he stumbled into bed but never said anything, not until the end. He wondered if she had been giving him tacit permission. Maybe she just didn’t care anymore.

*

After their huge fight, Nanda seemed relieved to see him go. They told Alex and Belinha that he was just going back to Australia for a little while, but poor little Belinha was inconsolable. Alex screamed at Nanda, in Tetun, that his friends would tease him about his disappearing malae father. Within a month, Ze heard that Nanda had moved out of his family’s compound and was seeing a Portuguese guy, a GNR, military police. No doubt suave and built, stocky and rectangular like the rest of those sleazes. So much for forgetting our Portuguese-ness. He hit the beers hard for a few months, stopped running and playing soccer, got a bit fat before catching sight of himself in the mirror.

But didn’t he turn it around? Didn’t he get sober? Didn’t he get serious, transfer stacks of cash so she could send the kids to the Portuguese international school? Didn’t he get a business certificate? Put together a business plan, get the finances together to open up a resort on Dili’s foreshore? And now, now that Nanda was single again, didn’t he make the grand romantic gesture she had always wanted, with a ring and all? Hadn’t he sworn off birds almost entirely for a couple of years? Well, apart from some secret fucks his Timorese network would never hear about.

Back in Dili he had tried really hard with the kids. It wasn’t easy. They had grown up so much in six years. Alex was twelve now, almost a little man. But he had found his in with both of them. He gave Alex clandestine motorbike lessons on the dirt circuit out behind Tasi Tolu. Little Belinha, nine years old, had become an artistic, serious little soul. So he bought her a digital camera and they did early morning and late afternoon shoots about town. She especially loved shooting sunsets and sunrises from Christo Rei’s and Dare’s elevated vantage points, from where the city still looked gorgeous.

And still, still, Nanda said she didn’t think so. Still she looked at him with her mouth full of distaste. Defiant. Those eyes through which he could still see her wounds in spite of her pride. She told him to go back home and wait for her answer.

*

Waiting for him in the hotel foyer, Katie is dressed simply, a clingy red singlet, knee-length skirt and sandals. But she looks good, her long, freshly-shampooed chestnut hair contrasting nicely with the red. She wears no makeup but he detects a clear gloss on her lips. Her perfume is heady and tropical and burnt-honey-sweet, probably from that bottle he saw her buy in duty-free. Her tits look good in the tight top. Compared with her brown forearms, her upper arms and legs are almost translucent white. This is the most flesh she’s flashed for months. For me.

She is nervous, self-conscious, but that defensive edge has softened. He is glad to see her relax into the furry seat of his cousin’s car, for which he has apologised, wishing he were driving the sleek black BMW holed up in his Broadmeadows garage. She waves away his embarrassment.

“It’s a luxury driving in a car rather than dodging the potholes and gangs on my motorbike. And going out at night,” she says. “It’s nice. I haven’t been out at night for ages. Too dangerous in Dili, as you know, especially after what happened to you today.”

He manages to elicit a few laughs from her as they exchange titbits and compare Melbourne with Timor, debate likely candidates for next year’s Timorese presidential election, talk about Ermera, the lush coffee-growing district where his grandparents and extended family live. There are some silences, but they aren’t awkward. She seems happy gazing out the window as they head through the night toward Mitchell Street. He is surprised and pleased by the warmth and volume of her laugh, impressed by her understanding of Timor.

In response to his prompting, she tells him about her life in Timor. The descriptive details are spare and her tone is even. But the picture she paints is painful. She tells him of the women’s organisation she works with, the older ‘counterpart’ who constantly sabotages her. Of the network of women who were high-profile political activists during the occupation. How they are seizing the moment, now, and challenging their men about the epidemic of domestic violence. Of their courage, and their territorial locking-out of younger Timorese women from the new activist space. She talks about the more mundane details; the overflowing toilets at her office, choosing a route home on her little motorbike according to what they know about current gang fights. Text message warnings from the Australian embassy, malaria, visiting friends in IDP camps.

*

Another brainy bird into politics, into contributing to social change. Nanda was always trying to make him go to independence rallies in Melbourne back in the 90s. Nanda would be there with her friends, yelling out slogans, putting on earnest little dramas about Indonesians killings Timorese, with lots of blood and costumes that looked like kid’s dress-ups. After a while he stopped going with her. Us winning on the field is the best way I know to show my Timorese pride, babe, he told her. She was hurt, confused. He could see that. So he promised to hand out flyers for end-the-occupation rallies to the opposing teams.

He usually threw the flyers away. The football field wasn’t the place for politics, not beyond good-natured sledging when his team played Croatian boys, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Africans. He was a black bastard to all but the Africans; in turn he baited the wogs. Sometimes one of them would asked him about the war in Timor, the freedom fighters. He would talk about it briefly. He didn’t have the conviction to convert casual acquaintances. The only other times he talked to non-Timorese about what was happening was when white girls showed interest in him, sympathy for him, for being Timorese.

There was one time, in 98, when he and Nanda and their mates went to hear Xanana Gusmão speak at the Tennis Centre. A short man, but handsome, charismatic, Xanana had this big, booming voice coming from somewhere deep inside him. He seemed to gather energy from the ground, from his belly, digging his chin into his neck as the bass rose out of him.

Nanda was on her feet. Her body seemed to be leaning forward at an almost impossible angle, muscles fiercely tensed, a warrior-woman pose, drawn towards her beloved hero’s orbit. She was breathing hard, concentrating intently on every word. Her face reflected the sentiment of each phrase. She emanated radiant energy, white-hot with passion and anger and love and determination. He couldn’t believe the force emanating from her body.

But his gut felt empty. He didn’t feel what she felt, not in the same way, not with the same intensity. He knew independence was right, knew what the Indonesian military was doing in Timor was terrible, but he didn’t really feel it; didn’t feel like he was personally injured by the occupation, couldn’t equate the media images with a reality that directly connected to him.

When they went home, later that day, Nanda was still filled with white-hot energy and she fucked him angrily, hungrily. Sensing that she wanted to feel the strength in his soccer-honed body, he thrust hard under her. But after she’d come, before he was finished, she pushed off him, shoved on her clothes and stalked out the house, a look of disgust on her face. She hadn’t ever explained and he hadn’t asked her to.

*

He and Katie are sitting in a café on Mitchell Street, drinking weak coffee with scalded milk and lamenting the inability of non-Melburnians to make a good latte. She is laughing at the young, drunk locals stumbling by the streetfront window, boys wearing shorts without shirts, girls wearing tiny dresses and carrying their cheap high heels.

“I think I’m having reverse culture shock,” she says. “Everyone looks naked to me. I feel like a prude. I don’t even wear singlets, usually.”

He meets her eye after she says ‘naked’ and she blushes a little, catching his meaning. He can feel the insistence of the phone’s vibration in the pocket of his shorts, and discreetly, under the café table, pulls it out to see who is calling. Nanda? No, just his cousin back in Dili. He raises a hand to the girl and turns his body slightly away from her, speaking in muffled tones.

“Yeah cuz. Ha! Nah, not now, mate. Yep. See ya.” Hangs up. “Some girl staying at my Mum’s wanted to speak to me. My cousin reckons she likes me,” he says by way of explanation.

Katie just looks at him and he wants to kick himself. Changing tack, he asks her whether she has an other half. She tells him she has been living with her Aussie boyfriend. About feeling trapped in the house with him, surrounded by gang fights and nocturnal gunfire. Has been living? he asks, picking up on the past tense with interest. Why isn’t her other half travelling with her? In that almost impassive manner, she tells him she is going back to Melbourne for some headspace, to work out what to do next. The boyfriend, some ten years older than her, has been sleeping with a foho girl, a little sister six years younger than Katie, who has been living with them. Who they sponsor to attend secondary school in Dili, who skips off to school each day in a uniform and braids with books stacked on her head.

Again, Katie reminds him of Nanda. Broken, fragile, and hurt by the failings of their men, yet proud and tough. Maybe she Nanda to harden against him, convert all of her passion into political zeal. There is shame. There is regret. There always was, always will be. And no release unless she changes her mind.

*

Ze and Katie pull up at the airport resort. There are still a few hours before their rescheduled flights. “Thanks, I had a good time,” she says, and touches his forearm briefly. Her eyes rest on the bandage on his arm, where the glass had cut him.

“That okay?” she asks, her fingers brushing it lightly.

“I could come up,” he says, “to your room.” Her eyes seem to take forever to rise and meet his.

*

All the way from the car to the foyer his phone is buzzing in his pocket. He manages a glance, sees the missed calls, scans the message.

Tiu Luis told me about airport drama – shit! Been trying to call u. Just needed some time to think. I know u’ve grown up and ur really trying. So it’s yes. I’ve told the kids u’ll be here for good – they’re so excited! Belinha did this little dance :) Cuties. Call me babe x
           
The lift opens and Katie steps inside, turning to face him. He shoves the phone deep into his shorts and crosses the black gap between the floor and the lift, where the shaft continues downwards. Touching a hand to the small of Katie’s back, he asks “What floor?” She reaches across him and presses four.

About the author

Anna Trembath is a writer, gender researcher and development worker currently based in Melbourne. She has previously lived in Timor-Leste for over five years. Her writing is inspired by her travels, work and ethnographic research in the Asia-Pacific and east African regions. Most recently, her creative writing has appeared in Peril magazine (Edition 14: Spirit Worlds) and Birdville magazine.

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