Neville the Less Page 7

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  The Island of Rahimi was where Afsoon lived with her parents, next to the Duchy of Daisley and west of Home Country. It could easily be reached from Home Country by passing through the banana palm forest and sliding along the side of Rahimi’s animal house. The Island was an island in some part because the people who lived there thought of it that way, but more so because of Ralph’s Folly. Ralph’s Folly was a fence - solid wood and four metres high - running the full length of the border with the Duchy of Daisley. It had been the Duke’s response, built with his own hands, to the arrival of the Rahimis, and its sole purpose, as he’d loudly and openly declared at the time, was to ‘keep out the Riff Raff’.

  The naked hostility of that declaration had quietly scandalised the neighbourhood and, unsurprisingly, had added fertiliser to the deeply rooted seeds of mistrust in the already stony soil of Mister Rahimi’s world view. For months, relations between the two had oscillated between frosty and scorching, without ever pausing at warm. No one knew where it would have ended had it not been for Afsoon. She, somehow understanding how insults could be killed, had taken up the Duke’s challenge, and begun openly referring to her father, whose name was Mohammed, as ‘Riff’.

  “Riff Rahimi! It has a gangster sound!” she’d laughed. “I think it suits him!” And happily, in the gently smiling way of relieved neighbours, others had begun following her example, even christening Mrs Rahimi ‘Raff’, though her beautiful real name was Parisa, meaning ‘like a fairy’.

  “Riff, Raff and Af!” Afsoon had crowed. “That’s us! We sound like a rock band!”

  Mister Rahimi had made a fist of joining in the laugh, but his real revenge lay in Missus Rahimi’s - Raff’s - response to Ralph’s Folly. She’d immediately planted a dozen cuttings of spiny bougainvillea along their side of the barrier and begun the process of nursing them into rampant health.

  “Bright blossoms to see,” she’d said in her sweetly musical voice, “but always the thorns beneath. For us, a most suitable reminder.”

  Thereafter, whenever his mood was down, which was often, Riff would take to pounding on Ralph’s Folly with a hammer, claiming always to be adding necessary supports for his plants. Odds had been given and bets taken throughout the neighbourhood on whether Riff’s pounding or the Duke’s robust architecture would win out. Neither option, of course, turned out to be exactly right.

  It’s worth mentioning that all three Rahimi’s had skin the colour of light fudge and eyes the colour of fresh limes and had come to Neville’s neighbourhood only in very recent times. They’d come, Afsoon told Neville, from a place called Refugee Camp. Before that, they’d come from a different place which was also called Refugee Camp and before that, they’d come from a place called Afghanistan. Afsoon had been a baby, apparently, when they started out from Afghanistan, and back then she’d had a brother called Anosh who had been her twin. He it was who the pirates had stolen on the sea, despite Riff’s vigorous drowning of a hundred or more in the ocean.

  Considering the pity that terrible experience evoked in him, Neville was shocked to learn that some people, like the Duke and Duchess, resented having fudge coloured people build their islands in Australia. Hence the Folly which, his mother had hinted obliquely, was not the only sort of barrier erected against fudge coloured people in Australia. It was all very strange and awful, Neville thought; though no part was stranger or more awful than the theft of a little boy by pirates! He particularly thought of gentle, smiling Parisa. And wondered how she had not died of grief.

  “Why would they even want a baby?” he’d once asked Afsoon.

  “You must not see it that way,” she’d explained. “I have studied on it and I see that they thought they took Nobody. Riff and Raff, you see . . . they gave my brother the wrong name. Because Anosh means ‘Eternal’ in our Dari language, you see. And nobody’s eternal. So really, in calling him Anosh, they were calling him ‘Nobody’. It is worse than death to be Nobody, Neville. That makes you exactly the kind of person the pirates want! Because if you are Nobody the whole world will ignore and trample you and then forget you. And so no one will miss you if you are stolen and kept or done away with. The only way it will be like you lived is if you do desperate things. I tell you, if you go to my home now and ask my father who the pirates took he will tell you ‘Nobody’. And he will refuse to talk more of it. All to do with names, you see. I could have gone with the pirates. I could do desperate things. But my name was not right. My name, Afsoon, means ‘bewitchment’ and that is what I am cut out to be. And that is what I will be when I grow up.”

  “You will? What do bewitchment people do?” he’d asked.

  “They channel people!” she’d declared, turning her sea-green eyes on him and opening them very wide. For someone who had learned English as a second language, Afsoon had learned some very complicated meanings.

  “What’s channel? What’s that mean?”

  “It means they go inside people’s brains, Neville! And sometimes, if they want, they can take you inside their own brain!”

  Neville’s mouth had fallen open and “Yow!” he’d said. The last thing he wanted - even less than he wanted to fall into a Mongolovian wolf hunter’s trap or have his soul stolen by a demon from the invisible world - was to discover someone - even if it was Afsoon - inside his brain.

  “Don’t worry,” she’d said, as though she was already in there, seeing the smoke of fear rise up. “I would not go in your brain without your invitation because you’re my friend. But you know, I go in Ava’s brain. And I go in Riff’s and Raff’s brains even though they don’t invite me because they are my parents and I must know them if I’m to look out for them. So I sneak around like a mouse, looking at all their secrets. And when I go there, I take Anosh with me because part of him is in my brain because he was part of me before we were born. When the bones of our fingers were formed, his hand was in mine. And though the reach is long, I have not let go. I will never let go.”

  “Wah! Does he hold onto you back?”

  “It is hard for him, I think. But sometimes, because of channelling, I think we are side by side together. Sometimes I think I am a little bit pirate with him, sharing the awful things he is made to do.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “I cannot tell you, Neville. It is too terrible. But I can tell you a secret not even Mister Shoomba knows. And that is, when they are done their terrible deeds, all the pirates go to their Island of Nobodies and you know what they do? They pretend to be others. To be just ordinary people. It is their way of hiding while they watch for more boats and more children.”

  “I think the Quiet Man might be pretending something. But he wasn’t a pirate! He was a soldier!”

  “Yes. Back in the war, he was a soldier. But now . . . who is to say? He is in Home Country, yes, but he is also far away. Somewhere lost; like Anosh. Is he not?”

  Neville had nodded thoughtfully, wondering if that was what the invisible world was - simply a mishmash of all the things nobody could understand.

  “Mum says his mind is in a jungle. And he’s trying to find his way out.”

  ‘Soon had put her hand on his arm and fixed him with her mesmerising stare.

  “You know what I wish? I wish his jungle was on the Island of Nobodies where the pirates are. Because then he might meet Anosh. And together they would find their way of escape.”

  Neville thought that a fine wish - though it would be better if it was he, Neville the Less, who helped the Quiet Man escape from the jungle, instead of Anosh.

  “Someday,” he’d said, “if he doesn’t get better on his own, I’ll go to the jungle. If it’s on the pirates’ island, I’ll go there and I’ll find Anosh too. You could come, if you want, and help with your . . . channelling. We could give Anosh a new name that means something better. And we could clear a path in the jungle.”

  “Yes. Yes, I would go with you, Neville. Anywhere, for that!”

  All this mean
t, of course, especially with Mister Shoomba’s new revelation of pirates at the boat ramp, that a journey might well be in order. Where exactly that journey would take them, or even how it would begin, he couldn’t guess. But he felt, deep down, that when it happened it might well be as dangerous as a journey into the Duchy of Daisley; as dangerous as the one the Rahimis had undertaken when coming to Australia. And he also felt that the brain-wandering abilities of Afsoon might well be a very handy tool on such a journey.