Do I imagine that I hear the firing pin striking the primer, the explosion of some unstable compound within, the roar of a secondary ignition, the cartridge leaving the chamber? Do I imagine that I react in the same moment that the bullet enters the barrel, surging out of my chair and pushing the man’s gun hand upwards with my left hand as my right reaches towards his face?
I wonder where my anger has gone. It’s been replaced by a terrible sadness, a bone-deep weariness. There is so much desperation in this world, played out at the margins, hardly disturbing the surface. I wonder, not for the first time, whether it really
is
possible for me to die in another’s body, or whether I’ll just wake up somewhere else, as someone else, when it’s all over.
I guess I’m about to find out.
The instant the heel of my right hand touches Franklin’s forehead, I see —
— everything that is running through his head in technicolour. The face of his exacting wife, coldly beautiful, expensively maintained; the memory of when each son was born, both now in their late teens, both taking after their brunette mother in looks, in attitude, with their constant want, want,
want
; the first dog Franklin ever owned; the funeral of the first person he ever knew to die; a marketing presentation where the audio system failed, leaving him speechless before an audience of hundreds; his first promotion; an argument with his father that resulted in blows and a rift that never healed; the moment he was fired and told to clear his desk out within the hour. There’s his fear, too, that he might be suffering some kind of stroke, some kind of seizure. Just a jumble of ordinary things; the quantum of a life reduced to mere seconds, mere flashes; a sound and light show amped up by adrenaline, by the belief that he will shortly depart this life and it will all have been for nothing.
I sense, too, the
malakh
’s misery, pain and rage as it uses Franklin as the blunt instrument of its wrath, fighting me for control of the gun.
I want to die!
it shrieks inside my mind.
Why won’t you let me die?
Weak as it is, the creature has amplified Franklin’s physical strength by a thousandfold and I almost cannot hold him back as I reply into the space behind his eyes:
This is not the way. We cannot be killed by bullets, we cannot be killed by weaponry. The body may perish, but the spirit will live on, wounded, twisted, marked by what it has seen and done. Our kind may only kill and be killed by each other
.
Set the gun down, leave him
.
This is not the way.
The three of us are locked in a physical struggle for what seems an eternity.
Though it can’t be, can it? Because it all happens in the time it takes for a gun to fire, for me to deflect the man’s firing arm away, for a bullet to lodge itself harmlessly in the ceiling above our heads.
As Franklin tries to pull the trigger again, the
malakh
howling and raging behind his eyes, I snarl into his face: ‘
Mors ultima linea rerum est
, Franklin. Death is everything’s final limit. If you do this, there will be no turning back. You condemn more than just yourself. Those children of yours; that wife you’re so terrified of failing? You end your life, then you also end theirs as they know it. It all changes in the instant. Make something more of the present, you fool.’
The gun we’re grappling over is hot to the touch and wreathed in the smell of cordite and death. I feel the
malakh
as a tornado inside Franklin, clinging on grimly to his living body. It doesn’t seem as if either of them can really hear me, both are so wounded and empty. They seem unaware of their dingy surroundings; the five other people in here that Franklin chose to take prisoner on a random, sunny, summer’s morning.
Without knowing why or how, I roar into the space inside Franklin’s head:
Exorcizo te!
And there is a blinding flash of light, brighter than magnesium when it burns, brighter than lightning come down to earth. So brief that no one in the Green Lantern takes it for more than a flash of sunlight. But I know what it is. And I know that it’s gone, the
malakh
is gone. Gone back into the wide and pitiless world to wander for eternity without respite.
Franklin drops his gun arm, drops the gun, racked by heaving sobs. I lift my right hand from his brow, let my left fall back gently to my side.
He doesn’t look at me as he wails, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’
Still weeping, he bends and wrestles the fallen gun back inside the inner breast pocket of his suit jacket, then unlocks the front door and bats his way through the plastic curtain, leaving the café as unceremoniously as he’d entered it.
Sulaiman gives me a long, level look and glances down at the watch on his left wrist. ‘It is time to pray,’ he says pointedly, standing up and heading for the kitchen. ‘Time to giveanks to God, unbelievers, for you have been spared. For now.’
The door to the kitchen swings shut behind him, and Reggie, Ranald and Cecilia look at each other, at me, with white faces.
Ranald staggers out hugging his computer bag. Not cocky or composed now, no.
He is followed in short order by Cecilia and Reggie, who each grab a hodgepodge of personal items and leave without saying when or whether they’ll be back.
I’m in the mood to talk. Near-death experiences can do that to you, I find. But there’s suddenly no one left to talk to.
I head into the kitchen, where Sulaiman is calmly rolling out a prayer mat and listening to tinny, Arabic-sounding music on a portable radio.
I don’t know where the words come from, but I say, ‘This is the
salah
that you are doing? The ritual prayer?’
He nods. ‘That is the name some give it.’
I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a devout Muslim at prayer before and I’m fascinated by the absolute stillness and devotion in Sulaiman’s face. For one so large, he moves near silently as he folds his frame down upon the colourful mat he has placed in one tiled corner of the cluttered, greasy kitchen.
I lean against the wall near the portable red fire extinguisher and the ragged poster that exhorts all who read it to:
Wash Your Hands!
‘I should think there would be an extra element of gratitude today in your prayers.’
‘What came to pass was already within His contemplation,’ Sulaiman says quellingly, his dark eyes flicking up to meet mine for an instant, ‘and so no “extra” thanks need be given. It has simply occurred.’
I shake my head and walk back towards the swing door. ‘Fatalist,’ I say good-naturedly, though it’s meant as a kind of insult.
‘Blasphemer,’ Sulaiman shoots back from his position on the mat, forehead to the ground.
I pause at the door. ‘I know plenty of . . . people like you. Who have an unwavering belief that every step in the narrow, bitter little lives of people like Franklin Murray is pre-ordained and inescapable, that free will does not come into it. If things really
are
pre-ordained, and I hadn’t stepped in to save you, then you might be dead now.’
Sulaiman exhales. ‘Ah, but your act itself — was it not pre-ordained? What sets you apart from any of us? Do not speak to me of “free will” for we will never see eye to eye. My God is a jealous god. His will prevailed, as it always does.’
I glare down at his broad back. ‘I like to think that I’m of all faiths rather than just one in which choice appears to form no part of the equation.’
Though, if truth be told, I am so blank inside that I don’t recall the tenets of my particular belief system, or whether I even have one.
Sulaiman raises himself onto his knees and gives me a challenging stare. ‘No,’ he says slowly. ‘I see into your heart, and I see that you are a person of no faith and that is how you have come to be here. Now leave me,’ he says dismissively, bending gracefully towards the ground once more. ‘For you have a habit of disturbing the peace of all those who surround you.’
I look at him sharply but his eyes are closed. And I wonder how Sulaiman can claim to know Lela so well if he’s been here just one month.
Frustrated, I head out of the kitchen, back towards the front counter.
* * *
When Mr Dymovsky returns, a box of tomatoes balanced on one hip, plastic bags of produce hooked through his sausage-shaped fingers, Sulaiman and I are barely holding off the lunchtime rush.
‘But where is Cecilia?’ Mr Dymovsky wails in his heavily accented English into my ear as he clocks his customers’ unhappy faces. ‘Reggie?’
Between orders for sandwiches toasted, untoasted, crusts cut off, cut into triangles, cut into rectangles, with tomato, without salad, on rye bread, on white bread hold the butter, on wholemeal with extra mayo, no cheese, I fill the portly Russian in on what went down in the café before noon.
‘But I can’t believe this!’ he says, taking over the till, wrapping the sandwich orders expertly and dishing them out faster than I can make them. ‘I shall ask Sulaiman. Sulaiman, he is always straight- talking.’
During a lull in trade, he intercepts Sulaiman heading out of the kitchen with another tray of warmed-up lasagne.
‘Can this be true?’ Mr Dymovsky asks, looking up into the taller man’s face. ‘There was a gun? Shooting?’
‘It is true,’ Sulaiman answers gravely, pointing at the ceiling where a little tag of plaster can be seen hanging down. ‘You see, there is the bullet hole, sir.’
Dmitri Dymovsky did not make his tenacious way in a new world by relying on the word of others. While I deal with the tail end of the lunchtime crowd on my own, turning out a succession of coffees that are possibly the worst in recorded history — too cold, too hot, not enough froth, too much of the damned stuff and not enough liquid — the Russian ascends a folding A-frame ladder and picks at the ceiling with a steak knife. When he comes back down, he’s holding the knife in his right hand and the bullet in his left palm, its cone crumpled from impact with a ceiling beam. His expression is a little shaken.
‘We shall close early today,’ he says, patting Sulaiman absently on the back as the cook passes us with another tray of hot, fried snacks that will grow sodden and unappealing inside the display cabinet. ‘You are both good and hard-working children.’
At two thirty, when there’s no one left in the café except us three, Mr Dymovsky locks the front door and hands me a mop. He wipes down the flat surfaces and puts all of the chairs upside down on the tables. Sulaiman, paying neithof us any mind, cleans up in the kitchen at his own stately pace, the faint sound of Arabic music weaving its way out of the radio he’s placed on a bench top.
Someone pushes the plastic curtain aside and taps on the glass door just after three o’clock. Mr Dymovsky squints at the dark figure with the halo of wavy hair and mutters something that sounds to my ears like ‘
Likha beda nachalo!
’, but I have no idea what that means.
When the person continues tapping and pointing inwards, he shouts, ‘We’re closed!
Closed
! Crazy Aussies, read the sign why doncha?’
I move closer with my mop and realise that it’s Justine Hennessy.
‘It’s all right, Mr Dymovsky,’ I say as the old man makes shooing motions with his plump hands, his gold pinkie ring catching the light. ‘I know her, she gets her coffee here. I think she wants to speak to me.’
He throws his hands in the air, shouts, ‘What you like!’ and moves away with his sponge and spray bottle of cleaning fluid.
I let Justine in and close the door behind her.
‘You’re finishing up early today,’ she says in surprise, peering over my shoulder at the abandoned coffee machine. ‘I was hoping for an afternoon pick- me-up.’
‘It wouldn’t be much of one,’ I laugh. ‘Because I’d be making it for you. So it’s lucky the machine’s been turned off.’
‘Cecilia’s not here?’ Justine looks around curiously.
I shake my head. ‘Neither is Reggie.’
I tell her that we had a sort of armed hold-up earlier and her face crumples in dismay. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ she says, clearly no stranger to random acts of violence. ‘I hope no one was hurt.’
‘Not in any way you could actually see,’ I say. ‘But we’re down on numbers as a consequence. Was there anything else you wanted?’
Justine hitches the strap of her black leather handbag higher on one shoulder. ‘Not unless it’s a winning lottery ticket.’ She laughs at her little joke.
Today she’s wearing a checked linen shirt over the same baggy white maxi dress. Her brown eyes sparkle beneath the purple eyeliner and green and pink eye shadow, but there’s a new bruise on her cheek, just under her right eye. The thick, stagy make-up can’t hide the fact that it’s beginning to go green around the edges.
‘I’ll walk you out,’ I say, frowning, and I shake the mop in Mr Dymovsky’s direction to indicate that I’m stepping outside for a minute. He throws his hands up in the air again in resignation then resumes wiping down the bench tops.
‘You have to stop this,’ I say. ‘It will kill you.’
‘What? Drinking coffee?’ she says brightly, deliberately misunderstanding me. ‘Everything will kill you in the end.’
I frown harder and she says quietly, ‘It’s okay, I can handle it. I know what I’m doing.’ And she walks away with a wave. She’s good at putting up a front. The best.
I walk slowly back inside, troubled. Sulaiman is hanging up his white cook’s cap and black apron in a narrow built-in closet behind the serving counter. My mop is nowhere to be seen, neither is Mr Dymovsky.
‘I have completed the cleaning,’ Sulaiman says dismissively as he shoulders a small nylon backpack. ‘Mr Dymovsky has taken the rubbish out to the laneway. He says you may go, if you wish.’
He holds the closet door open for me and I pick up Lela’s rucksack, paw through it for her bright red, patent-leather wallet, which holds a selection of notes and coins. I realise from a quick scan of the denominations that there’s more than enough there for me to head to that internet place Justine told me about before I go back to Lela’s house.
I shouldn’t get ahead of myself — there may be nothing there. Still, there’s a feeling in the pit of my stomach that’s more than nerves. Maybe it’s hope flowering there. I’m beginning to feel like I’m not floundering any more, but have to keep reminding myself that I’m just keeping to the plan.
Outside the café, Sulaiman pauses.
‘Go home to your sick mother,’ he warns me. ‘When night falls you must be away from this place. Do not get involved in the world of men. I say this as . . . as your friend.’
I parry his comment with a question of my own. ‘And when night falls, where will
you
be?’
‘At evening prayer, where else? I have many things to give thanks for. That I am alive,’ he reminds me pointedly. ‘That I am at peace with my place in the world.’
I raise one hand to acknowledge his words, but I’m already walking away. Towards the café with the grinning bowl of noodles sporting arms and legs painted on its front window, towards the bright theatre lights and the ceremonial arch in its elemental colours.
When I make a left turn into the Chinatown precinct, I look back over my shoulder briefly, but Sulaiman is already gone. Contrary to what he believes of me, I do want to hurry home to Lela’s sick mother. She’s not long for this earth, as the saying goes, and I don’t want her to die alone.