Demons by Wayne Macauley

he dropped out and took a bureaucratic job, advising government,
boring as all hell, in a place called the Office of National Assessments.
    But, said Aiden, what could I do? I had a wife, a kid, a mortgage. Canberra had just
sort of sucked me down. We had another kid. Then, about eight years ago, late nineties,
for various reasons that I won’t go into here but let me say involved a story about
so-called illegals drowning or not drowning at sea, I took stress leave. At first
I just pottered around the garden, played in the shed, dabbled in carpentry, looked
up at Mount Ainslie, thinking nothing. I usually had my first beer around three.
I also started revisiting the campus, on the side, wandering around, eating my lunch.
I was thirty-two, going on thirty-three. My wife, Lil, was worried, I know, but she
couldn’t fix things for me. So one day I left, just like that; yes, I packed a bag
and took the bus back to Melbourne. I don’t know what came over me, really, but I
know I was telling myself that I was not running away from things but into them.
Do you know what I mean?
    I got a room off the board at Readings, a shitty room in a sharehouse up the shitty
end of Coburg. My housemates were all younger, early to mid-twenties, as was just
about everyone I hung around with in those years. I worked odd jobs: telemarketing,
delivery driving, dishpigging, and sent what money I could back to Lil. It was never
much. What was I doing? I didn’t know. But I was sure I had to keep doing it, like
when you’re running downhill and if you don’t keep going you fall.
    With the people in the house—all students—I started gravitating back to the stuff
I’d been into before; politics, I mean. I started hanging around Trades Hall, the
New International Bookshop, going to meetings, demos. I bought myself a Lenin cap
(it covered up my bald patch) and got back into theatre, amateur stuff mostly, not
very good, but I loved the camaraderie of it. And at least what we were doing had
an edge, at least it was about something . That’s what I told myself, anyway. The
beginning of 2000. A good time. Actually, everything felt good.
    Aiden got off his stool. He asked did I want another and came back this time with
a jug. Why not? he said.
    Well, the next part, said Aiden, raising his beer, starts with an image I can’t get
out of my head: my Lenin cap lying in a puddle in a lane behind the Crown Casino
on the twelfth of September 2000. The World Economic Forum. A cop had just punched
me in the head. I’d been hanging around all day with my housemates—a pretty ineffectual
bunch, really—when I thought I might wander off and see what was going on elsewhere.
I’ve always been doing that, wandering off. I walked all the way around the blockade
and back out onto the Spencer Street Bridge where I saw a group pointing and shouting.
A police barge was ferrying delegates up the river from the hotel on the other side.
Someone yelled: Down here! and everyone started running towards the voice. Without
thinking, I ran down there too.
    The lane below the bridge was empty. Buses here! Buses here! someone yelled. In the
loading dock behind the hotel were three big touring buses with a queue of men in
suits getting onto the first. They were going to try and break the line. Stop the
buses! Stop the buses! Everyone ran to the front of the first bus, and, spontaneously—magically,
I remember thinking—twenty or so people formed a chain and blocked the door.
    The queue of delegates had split when they saw us coming; some ran back to the loading
dock with their security guards following, the others madly scrambled up the steps
while the driver closed the door. I ended up dead centre, under the front window.
There was a young guy, straight-looking, on one side of me and a girl, younger, hippie-looking,
on the other. It all happened so quick. I remember the way we smiled at each other
when I raised my elbows so they could link arms in mine, as if the three of us