Underground by Andrew McGahan Page B

matters of Islam.’
    Aisha sniffed. ‘They’re wrong.’
    I looked at Harry. ‘How do you know all that?’
    ‘Oh, I’ve met a few Muslims in my time.’ He was still staring through the glass. ‘It’s certainly a controversial name. Especially for an Islamic convert to choose. What was your thinking behind that, I wonder?’
    But Aisha only watched him with renewed suspicion.
    Then Harry straightened. ‘Here we go.’
    I stood up. ‘Now?’
    ‘Now.’
    He led us to the front door, and out into the first open air and sunlight that I’d seen in days. It should have felt wonderful—a big blue sky, a warm breeze with the hint of salt in it, and off in the distance the sparkle of the sea.
    Instead, I felt acutely visible, and acutely vulnerable. We were only walking out onto a front lawn in an average small-town street—houses, parked cars, pushbikes in driveways—butit was an average street in an Australia at war with terror, an Australia nothing like the old one. Every window, every closed curtain—who was hiding behind them, and what could they see? And who did they report to? Everyone knows that it’s more than just the AFP and ASIO and the other security forces these days. There are informers, too. Some paid to do it, some blackmailed, others who simply like to point the finger. Report Anything Suspicious, demand the television advertisements. Anything and anyone. For the sake of freedom, for the sake of democracy. And there were Aisha and me, the two most wanted people of the hour, standing in plain daylight in front of fifty windows, with only our flimsy disguises to protect us. We may as well have let off a skyrocket.
    Then it got worse.
    An old bus came lumbering up the street. It seemed to be packed with people, they were hanging out the windows. And a big banner was slung from the side. ‘Hervey Bay Patriotic Society.’ With a wheeze of brakes the bus pulled up right in front of us. The door puffed open. And, I swear to God, I could hear the passengers inside singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
    I glared at Harry. ‘You’re kidding.’
    He considered the bus happily. ‘No joke.’
    ‘The Patriotic Society?!’
    ‘Fully paid-up members, every single one of them.’
    ‘But—’
    ‘It’s cover, you idiot. Now get on board.’
    I had a thousand more protests to make, but before I knew it we were in the bus and on our way. It was all heat and sweat inside, people standing in aisles and crammed into overflowing seats, talking, singing, and slapping me and Aisha and Harry on the back like we were the oldest of friends.
    I tell you, dear interrogators, I would have felt safer in the hands of the Federal Police. I mean, sure, the Patriots
claim
to be just a society for proud and loyal citizens, but even I knowthat they’re really in cahoots with the authorities. It was the Patriots, after all, who were demanding the detention of all Muslims, even before the Canberra bomb. It was the Patriots who lobbied to get the death penalty reinstated as punishment for treason. It was the Patriots who helped run the campaign that introduced conscription. It was the Patriots who forced Christian prayers back into every school in the nation. And it was the Patriots who orchestrated the banning of abortion. ‘Procreation, not immigration!’—that was their motto. (White babies please, not black, brown or yellow.) Even their name is a giveaway. Since when did Australians use a word like ‘patriot’? They’re my brother’s biggest fan club, running dogs and informers one and all. And now we were with a whole busload of them.
    Madness. But Harry shepherded Aisha into a miraculously spare seat halfway along the bus, and then ushered me onward, to where another two empty places waited. He took the window seat for himself, and then forced me down. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘This is our best shot to get you through the roadblocks. You and Aisha are just two faces in a crowd now.’
    ‘But how can you trust these