Free Demons by Wayne Macauley Page A

that what’s happened?
    Cameron looked at me blankly, though blankly is hardly the right word. Cameron looked
emptily through me. He lifted his beer and drank. He stared at a spot on the ground.
It’s none of that, he said.
    Should we open another one? said Evan. I’ve got this great Clare Valley too. Adam
shrugged: it was all the same to him. Evan got up. Ow, he said, holding his back.
    Adam opened the fire door and put a couple more logs in. He went to the window. Clouds
had covered the moon; in the car below the light was still on. He pulled the curtains
closed.
    Are you still up? said Megan. She was standing in the hallway in her pyjamas. We’ll
be finished soon, said Adam. Oh Jesus, she said. Evan was coming back from the kitchen,
holding a fresh bottle. Ad and I are just having a bit of a boy’s chat, he said;
boys only, for boys. She gave no answer. The hallway light went off; and there was
silence again. Real silence: no birds, no wind, no waves, not even that background
noise of the great surging sea. Everything was silent and still.
    Well, said Evan, easing himself back into the cushions and taking the cap off the
wine, peace and quiet. He poured them each a glass. Neither mentioned Tilly or the
light below.
    So—where was I? said Evan. Yes, there we were, me crapping on about women and fathers
and daughters and Cameron was telling me I didn’t know shit. It’s to do with my job,
he said. I asked what he meant. He said it was complicated. I said it was up to him
but I was here to listen. He thought about that ( Should I be telling my girlfriend’s
father this? ) until finally he said, again, almost defeated: It’s really very complicated.
I waited. Aria and I have had a disagreement, he said, looking up, about something
that happened to me at work. Telling you about this isn’t the problem, he said, it’s
telling you why Aria and I disagreed. I didn’t follow. Why don’t you just start,
I said.
    I work at the airport, he said, as you know, I’ve worked there for years and, as
you can imagine, there’s always been pressure to keep the undesirables out. But then
a few years ago, I mean after the terrorist thing, the pressure increased. It is
our job to keep our borders safe; nothing more, nothing less. The navy guys up north
do their job and we do ours. A border’s not a gateway, it’s a fence, with a very
small gap cut into it: I can’t tell you how many directives come down from on high
about the importance of vigilance in the protection of that gap. Emails, memos, in-service
training—one bad apple will spoil the whole barrow, they say. Look sharp, be suspicious,
never believe what you’re told. It is a heavy responsibility and we all feel it,
from the minute we put on our uniforms at the start of a shift to when we take them
off at the end. And then, on top of that, they decide to make a TV show about us.
I looked at him. He raised his eyebrows. Yes, he said, a TV show.
    So that was the situation, continued Cameron, when one morning a bit over a month
ago near the end of a long Friday-night shift, this incident happened. Let me explain.
There’d been a huge influx of Afghanis, I mean after the big NATO surge. Lots had
been supporters of the Coalition—drivers, interpreters and so on—but lots more were
illegals. Everyone who hadn’t visibly fought against us was assumed by the Taliban
to have been fighting with us and there was now a mighty rush to get out. A crazy
time. And it was our job to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’d been out late with
Aria almost every night that week and by four in the morning at the end of an insanely
busy shift I was wrecked. The TV crew had been following my team all week and this
shift they were specifically following me.
    Three quarters of cyberspace would disappear if you took away the vanity, wouldn’t
it? Point a camera at us and we’ll perform. Look at Aria and her friends. And that’s
the way it was for me: I couldn’t turn in any direction that