The Marsh Birds (23 page)

Later they sat huddled together in the double sleeping bag on the groundsheet by the fire, giggling as they ate the dreadful mush of eggs, corn and beef they had cooked. Dhurgham settled into wonder and happiness, the glory of the world before his eyes in the glowing coals, in the far starlight, in Carrie's lithe body resting against him. The stars and crescent moon had faint haloes. He felt the glory of the world rushing on the night air into his lungs with every breath. He held Carrie tighter. She breathed deeply, snuggled in close, then stunned him.

‘Do you want sex?' she asked.

‘No!' Dhurgham almost leapt up in shock. He was jolted to the core, and the alien night suddenly assaulted him. He couldn't get away.

‘Oh,' Carrie said in a small voice, and wrapped her arms about her knees. They were locked shoulder to shoulder.

The outrageous question seeped through Dhurgham despite himself and he couldn't get it out of his head. The word sank through to his heart and belly, and down to his cock and thrummed over and over. Sex. Sex. Sex. He didn't want to touch Carrie, he didn't want to have sex with Carrie, not now, but he wanted to have sex. His body was alive with it. He wanted at least to take her hand and put it where she would feel his desire. He closed his eyes, wondering, wondering about Carrie. Western girls. His groin pulsed and ached and his penis pressed painfully against his underclothes.

He thought of Mr Hosni and his desire ebbed away, leaving him feeling gross and nasty. He wanted words now, confessions, not touch. He wanted to know everything.

After a little while, he couldn't stop himself from asking, ‘How many—?'

Carrie spun on, him, glancing at him with a stabbing look, then turned away. ‘Oh! Never! Sorry I asked.' Her eyes were angry, embarrassed. She tossed her head furiously and glowered at the fire, and Dhurgham saw a tear run down her cheek, leaving a shining gold trail. His heart twisted then, and both his joy and the glory of the world returned with a rush. He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing until he felt her ribs bend. She gasped, laughing, and kissed his hair.

‘I love you!' His voice was taut with pain. Carrie sucked in her breath, and her eyes shone as she caught him in a full, swift, sideways glance.

‘That's good!' She thought for a moment, then laughed.‘“Do you want sex?”What a way to start your sex life!'

‘You always give me things that way,' he said eventually, feeling humbled. ‘You hit me with them.'

Dhurgham listened to the crackle of the fire and the rush of the river far below them. Then something ticked and scraped closer, somewhere on his arm. He saw the wild filaments of long antennae first, and, scalp crawling, he gingerly pulled his loose sleeve towards the light. He screamed, shrieked, as the giant carapace lurched on his arm. He leapt up, snatched a burning stick and beat it from him in one fluid violent move. The beast was flung across the fire into the darkness as Dhurgham caught a whiff of an unimaginable filthy smell. He stood, heaving and shuddering, staring out after it. Carrie pulled him down beside her, laughing herself almost sick.

‘Weta!' she gasped.

And that was all it took.

In Dhurgham's memory this night, like that other, stood out. This Dhurgham, like his proud twelve year old self in the marshes carrying his family's wealth, this was himself at his maximum. It was what might have been. And he felt pinned precariously to a place and time on Carrie's body and on the spinning world.

They giggled and knocked knees like children, undressing themselves and each other while trying to keep the sleeping bag up. They paused only a moment, once they were naked, staring at each other with glee. Then they shuffled awkwardly together, until Dhurgham reached his arms around Carrie's smooth sides, down, and wrapped both hands under her buttocks, pulling her towards him, reeling with the heat and wetness of her running over his fingers. Carrie hitched the sleeping bag awkwardly to her shoulder, twisting to keep it up on them both, and reached with her other hand for his penis. She laughed, gleaming darkly at him from under her fringe. He moaned as she kissed him, hard, then harder. They were clumsy lovers. Carrie frowned at him, and said ‘Ouch!' so accusingly that she had to kiss him again to unfreeze him. They were very quick lovers. It was over soon after the ouch. But Dhurgham remembered Carrie gleaming and warm and white-silver
with him
, stark and soft under the moonlight as the mountain dripped and sang around them. In his memory it was endless. He remembered the moment of shining release, in which Carrie arched in his hands, calling to him across the sky, her hands pulling at his thighs as he pushed into her beyond himself and her. They were every lover, they were young and the first, and they were as old as honey. In that moment he was empty and full, and everything was hope and glory and terror but he was the living body of freedom.

Carrie was elated to have done it. She felt mysterious, felt the exciting pull of adulthood. When she got home, a day later, she rushed to her room. She swayed her sinewy body at the mirror and glowered at herself. The image of Dhurgham naked rose again and again in her mind.

She remembered the surprise of hot sweaty skin sticking against her in the sleeping bag afterwards as the air chilled to freezing on their faces. She had been afraid for a moment that theirs was a precarious perch, and that a landslide would rip them from the mountainside and bury them in a pile of mud and rocks way below in the river. She had worried that she hadn't told her parents where they would camp, and that even her body might be lost forever. Now she was glad. He was hers and sex hadn't hurt much.

She had dated and furiously dropped a succession of boyfriends and was suddenly, now, curious about their bodies. Were they as beautiful as Tom? Did their nipples harden with their dark, musky cocks? Did they have the same smooth soft skin over firm stomachs? They would each be different, whiter, darker, stronger, weaker. Tom smelt good. Like saltwater and sunshine. What did men smell like?

She wanted to worry and tease her mother, but was shocked by Janine's surprise. Janine turned to her daughter, face clouded.

‘I didn't realise, Carrie—'

‘That I liked Tom?'

‘No. I thought … Greg, Darren, Ewan—'

‘Oh.'

‘At the end of school I'm off to Whistler, Canada!' Darren punched the air in a victory grab. ‘Skiiing! Snowboarding!'

‘I could ski!' Dhurgham said eagerly. ‘I will go with you!'

Darren looked at him, then smiled.

‘You being a refugee, Tom, you wouldn't be able to travel. You'll be living on handouts until a taxi company takes you. And that's only if they decide to let you stay.'

The others looked at Darren, shuffling but not disputing it.

‘What?' Darren looked around, his hands held palms out, shoulders up. ‘I'm only saying the truth. What?'

Carrie leapt forward, between him and Dhurgham, facing the semicircle of the others.

‘Tom's been all over the world,' she said, haughtily. ‘He's been to—' she held up her hand in Darren's face and, starting with her little finger, bent each finger down, as if to deal with a country once and for all, bring it to its knees. ‘Eye-Rak, Syria, Indo-nesia, Australia, and—' she waggled the thumb until it, too, capitulated, ‘New Zealand.'

She tossed her short black hair and flashed a dark look at Dhurgham.
That showed them
, her look said, and Dhurgham's discomfort melted away. Countries just folded under Carrie's fingertips. He was more charmed than he could say by her defence of him, and by her easy dismissal of countries. He felt a lump rise in his throat. She would too!
Iraq, (or Eye-rak!) been there, done that
, she'd say. No one would dare to touch her, because she had her confidence, her father and her country behind her. How powerful Carrie and how powerless Dhurgham! He looked down at his finely muscled arm, his wrist and hand (like his mother's but bigger). He glanced at Carrie's long white fingers threaded between each of his dark ones. He felt a wave of possessiveness, need and envy all at once.

A person should travel, see the world and return. Bring home impressions, jokes, experiences, and the richness of knowing themselves and their special place in the world
. He sat alone in the garden, later, trying to think about what Carrie had said. He housed so many lives, not visits. Iraq was home, but was imaginary, lost in his childhood. Syria. In Syria he was someone else, someone no member of his family could have known or recognised. Indonesia. Yes, just two weeks, but Indonesia itself floated evanescent on that solid ocean, that scored deck and the stale breath of boys. He had lived a whole man's life from youth to old age and the end of all things on that ocean. Twelve days as big as fifty years.

Australia. In Australia he never quite found either the calm horror of the boat or the confusion of what went before. He had never found the stillness-in-fear or the glory of the mosaic. In Australia he never caught up with himself. In Australia he imagined himself into many selves, but never Syria, never Iraq. In Australia he waited for life but didn't live it. And he never really saw Australia. Mr Jean-Luc's sweet smile floated up. Australians
were
good. They had shown it. Mr Peter had helped him by worrying about him and harrying him. Mr Jean-Luc had helped him. His rights had mattered to Mr Jean-Luc. And Joyce Collyer and Robin Tucker. They had cared about him in principle, without even knowing him. Then
time out from real life
. His angels. They had helped him by liking him and that was the most important of all. A short sail seemingly to the end of all things, to happiness, but he turned and took the long murky path, yes, he did, New Zealand, because he had not yet begun a life that took him beyond twelve. He punched the grass rhythmically and pulled at the roots of his hair, unaware that he was doing it. Each place was wrapped up like the body of a young martyr, each buried away from the others. He had no choice but to walk away from his own death, over and over again, and try to start again elsewhere, each time sealing off the dead hope behind him.

He had housed too many shifts with no return, like a scientist who has subjected himself to too many unnatural experiments. And each had thinned him, left him more remote from himself and the world. He felt sere and brittle. Old. He remembered his grandfather suddenly; saw with the clarity that he had not had as a twelve year old—an old man who would not move from his field in Samarra and the graves of his loves no matter the danger. But he, Dhurgham, had no graves to tie him to life. No person can go through so many possible lives and live none of them! Tears of rage welled from his eyes and he threw handfuls of grass and soil at New Zealand's alien grey sky.

‘You are home!' he screamed in an adolescent voice cracking with disbelief and fear.

‘Dhurgham,' he said. ‘
Dturr—ghaam
. It means young lion.'

‘Thergrarm … Dergram,' Carrie tried. She looked as though she was tasting a new food with uncertain expectations. He could see straight away that she would never say it as his name—only as an exotic item he had brought with him to show her. She frowned at his silence.

‘I can't do it, Tom. I'd feel silly trying. Tom's a sweet name, isn't it?'

Carrie's face was quiet and sad. She was thinking about how much it annoyed her when friends heard Tom call her Kiri or Curry or even something that sounded like Kelly. She tossed her hair back as unexpected tears started in her eyes. She decided to be proud of all of them (except Curry).

He kissed her. He would be Tom. After everything, how could this little thing matter?