what they used to do back then – paint the verandahs two-tone.’
James wasn’t sure how to reply.
‘Anyway, I didn’t wanna trouble ya,’ the man said, ‘but don’t you work for the council?’
James nodded.
‘Thought so. Seen ya doin’ that new footpath on Johnson Street – that’s my café over the road. Know that one? Best spanakopita in this fair city and that’s a fact. Proper Greek tucker.’ He looked into James’s eyes. ‘Tell you what I want; I need the services of a man who knows how to use an excavator and I thought, if I hire one, an excavator that is, maybe you could drive it for me? Make it worth your while o’ course. How much do ya think it’d be? For cash?’
‘Sorry mate, I don’t want any afterhours work, okay?’
The man stood in the laneway, hands on hips, and lightly angled his head. James could see his brain ticking.
‘I’d make it worth your while.’
‘No.’
‘Cash in hand.’
‘Sorry, mate.’
He didn’t want to leave. ‘Tell you what: I got the original plans to this building. Want to see ’em? Pretty amazin’. There used to be a cellar in my place, right on the corner. It used to be a butcher shop and I bet they stored all their meat under the floor. In the cellar. Pulled up the floorboards expecting to see a bloody great hole but it’s all been filled in. I’m going to dig it out again. What d’yer reckon?’
How, James asked, did he expect to get an excavator into the room? Through the side window, Nikos declared, unperturbed. Not the whole thing of course, just the bucket. He admitted it would require real skill and again implored his neighbour. Cash in hand, he repeated.
‘I wouldn’t try it if I were you,’ James warned him. ‘Too risky. Anyway, I can’t help you. Sorry.’ He stepped back and put his hand on the doorknob.
‘Right. Okay. If you change your mind you know where I am, eh?’
NIKOS CHRISTAKOS expected to score handsomely from the purchase of number 40. It had been passed in at auction and he’d made his successful offer a month later. From that moment on he told anyone whose attention he could arrest, just how rapidly his investment was multiplying, adding small increments weekly. In Nikos’s opinion it was already worth fifty percent more than he’d paid, and with the ongoing renovations – for more than a year now – its value was rising like the morning sun.
He didn’t live there himself. Instead he rented it to two tenants who had a bedroom each upstairs and a shared bathroom and kitchen on the ground floor. He’d had no trouble finding renters. He’d placed a small ad in the suburban newspaper and a dozen people turned up. Most recoiled immediately, one woman actually reprimanding him, declaring that he had no right to offer such shabby conditions to potential tenants with the advertised claim: Excellent shared accommodation – suit professional couple. But two people put some cash on the line, there and then, no contracts, no agents, no anything.
One was an Afghan, the other an Englishman. They’d eyed each other curiously on that first day as they handed a month’s rent to their new landlord. The older Englishman was tall and blond, with a narrow face and pale complexion. Pronounced pockmarks climbed up his neck and scrambled onto his cheeks. The Afghan was short and dark, his hair, beard and eyebrows as rich as black velour. He was perhaps ten years younger than his fellow renter and wore a blue, long-sleeved shirt and grey trousers. The Englishman was similarly dressed – blue shirt, grey trousers – which was something they both noticed. But their cultural differences far outweighed any coincidental dress code. Regardless, as each nodded in agreement to the landlord’s lack of terms, they tacitly accepted one another, though as neither could produce a single reference, the decision was hardly theirs to make.
WHEN ARMAN Khan took off his shoes and stepped into his new sleeping room, six metres by five, it felt as though a significant milestone had been reached. His room and his window that looked down onto the side street and onto the bright yellow roof of the taxicab he now drove. He scanned the interior and smiled at the immensity of the double bed with the sturdy steel legs and decorative headboard. He did not require it, an extravagance of space he would not normally consider, but it came with the room. So too did the freestanding wardrobe and a wooden dresser, not antique but very old and of a style not seen in Afghanistan. The dresser had a mirror affixed and Arman gazed at his reflection within its bevelled edges. He’d had his hair cut since arrival, believing it aligned somewhat with his new country, but he’d kept his full beard in accordance with the Prophet’s example. He noted in the poor light that only the whites of his eyes were apparent between eyebrows and beard. He exposed his teeth; white and straight, though a back molar sometimes throbbed. His own mirror and his own dresser.
He spent the weekend cleaning everything, starting on the right with his left hand according to Sharia law. He began with the dust high up on the picture rail and finished with a cleansing of the varnished floorboards, washing and drying them carefully with a square of towelling. From a factory outlet near Sydney Road, he bought new sheets, a pillow and bedcovers, and he had a brand-new mattress delivered.
It was upon this that he lay back on the third night and ruminated on his extremely good fortune. There had been so much tragedy that his current situation shone among past events like a jewel in the mud. He lay blissfully and gazed up at the pale blue ceiling. Such an odd sensation: alone and content in his own sleeping quarters, a single man, thirty-five and a refugee. He hated that word: ref-ugee, and the implications of it. He winced at the thought of the three years he’d patiently endured in Kabul until he could be processed. And in his mind he saw again the landscape of the motherland growing smaller through the aeroplane window, his passage made possible with the proceeds of his father’s estate: a burnt-out mud-brick dwelling on the outskirts of Paghman.
In Melbourne, he moved in with three relatives – all men – who had already settled in Yarraville. For a while it worked, but things were never quite right and Arman recollected the miserable mat they’d given him in the laundry. Without work, he’d been obliged to cook and clean for the entire male-only household. He’d undertaken the women’s work conscientiously and not without pride, but much to his chagrin, the others confirmed that his manner and physicality were perfectly suited to it. He’d felt unequal, ignored and disrespected. All that kept him going was the possibility of finding his own abode; that and becoming a cab driver, wearing a neat uniform and working alone behind the wheel of a car in an official capacity.
Lying now on his own mattress, he ruminated on the nights spent by a bedside lamp studying the Melway, memorising all the main arteries and prominent suburbs, and the tram rides he’d made to mark it all off in his mind. He rose from the bed and looked down from the window onto the roof of the company cab shining brilliantly in the generous Australian sun. At last he had escaped the critical eye of others, including those of his own family. Now he could concentrate on work, prayer and self-improvement, and life should be much easier.
BENTON HATTERSLEY’S bedroom was further to the rear on the same floor and now he was also arranging his things but with somewhat less diligence. A room was a room as far as he was concerned; he’d lived in more than he cared to remember. He put his socks and underwear loosely into the same drawer and sat down on the edge of his single bed. Where to position his computer? He frowned, the permanent furrow between his eyebrows, an index of that regular habit.
Like Arman, he had mixed feelings regarding his past, and he too had surrendered his homeland for fear of retribution. But even now, after ten years away, he still missed
