3. The Cause

Sylvia ran a finger around the inside of her cup, scooping up macchiato froth. Denied a decent coffee for so long, she had made up for lost time in recent weeks, spending hours at Bo’s in Quindalup talking to students and activists from the nearby university. It was stimulating and yet unreal. The world was ending but it was always ending, and if it did end she wouldn’t be there to feel aggrieved about it after the fact.

Eli watched her and his whole body seemed to frown. “What are you thinking about?” he asked, pushing his own empty cup to one side. He squeezed her hand.

She pulled away from his soft but insistent grasp. “You just want to pick up where David left off. You aren’t interested in me.”

“Not true. I’ve always been fascinated by both of you.”

She knew what he was trying to do, that this flattery was a part of his slow seduction. She knew that at some point he’d proposition her but what she didn’t know was whether she’d rebuff him. He wasn’t the kind of man she’d normally be interested in and yet she knew she was thawing. He was earnest and never joked and you could see that he meant every word he said, which was more than you could say for almost anyone else.

“How’s your mother holding up?” he asked.

“It’s like she’s a robot,” she said. “She just carries on exactly the same.” Her mother had had the death of her husband and her daughter subsequently moving away to contend with, and yet when Sylvia had last seen her she’d seemed unperturbed. Now that he had died there was nothing to hold them together. Sylvia had felt obliged to move out once the funeral arrangements had been concluded. She suspected that her mother had been relieved. “She leaves for work before dawn and doesn’t get home until after dusk, and when she does she doesn’t have time for anything,” she explained.

“She’s not at all interested in our work?” Eli asked.

“She just says that life is hard all around. She isn’t interested in politics.”

“Life is politics,” Eli said. He pushed his chair back. “Come on, it’s time.”

She drank the dregs of her coffee and followed him out onto the boulevard, where thousands of people moved beneath shaded plastic parasols that did little to shield them from the sun’s oppression. It wasn’t far to the university but each step was a labour and by the time they retreated into the cool of the lecture theatre they were parched. Sylvia bent over a water fountain in the foyer, forgetting that new restrictions had come in, the harshest yet. If you wanted water you had to pay, so they paid, swiping their Hub-Nexus cards through the reader on the fountain.

“Eli, Sylvia, you made it,” said a smiling student in a tank top emblazoned with some obscure slogan. “We’ve got a big crowd today. Come straight through when you’re ready.”

The student wasn’t kidding. The theatre was two-thirds full, where before their seminars had only attracted a handful of listeners. Sylvia felt under-prepared, her thoughts jumbled, as she glanced up at the expectant throng.

“I knew it, it’s because of David,” Eli whispered, his eyes gleaming. As they took the podium, the lights dimmed and their presentation appeared on the 3V.

“First of all,” Eli began in his stage voice, “can I say what a thrill it is to see so many young activists here today, and what a time it is to become involved. The hour of action is at hand. One week from today, we board the buses for Yellowcake Springs and take the fight to CIQ Sinocorp’s doorstep. Tell your friends, your family, and your neighbours. We’ll put on as many buses as there are people to board them. We want to put the pressure squarely on Sinocorp and on the governments that continue to allow these foreign companies to exploit Australian workers and to pollute Australian waterways and airways with deadly, radioactive toxins. It’s time to tell them that enough is enough.” Applause.

Sylvia’s turn. Her hands trembled but she stilled them. “No doubt by now you’ve heard about the supreme sacrifice David Baron has made for our cause. Rather than allowing himself to be murdered by the quisling dogs in Canberra, he chose to take his own life. Unfazed by the treacherous actions of Clyde Owen and Patrick Crews, David demonstrated the courage of his convictions and he showed us the way forward. Now we continue the fight he started for... the cause.” Not Misanthropos. Never Misanthropos. She had to remind herself not to utter that word.

Eli took it from there, soon whipping the students into a fervour. Sylvia stood back, entranced by his rhetoric. He implored them with his hands, he beseeched them with his words, and they melted to him. The crowd roared their approval as Eli outlined their glorious future: “A future free of foreign owners who care nothing for this country and its people. A future free of traitorous politicians only interested in their own material gain. A future free for its people to determine their own destiny. Call me a ‘mental. I am a ‘mental, and so are you. Your donations are critical and I urge you to give generously to the cause, but more than that, I urge you to join us on our journey to Yellowcake Springs next Thursday. David Baron died for you. Let not his sacrifice have been in vain.”

The standing ovation rang on and on. Eli bowed his head and Sylvia bowed too.

After the presentation, the queue at the registration table stretched out the door. For what seemed like hours, she took completed forms, accepted donations and handed out packs of merchandise and promotional material. When the last of the students filed out, she collapsed into a chair next to Eli, who was furiously counting the forms they’d collected. Bits of paper and scraps of merchandise were strewn across the room.

“Eighty-six!” Eli declared in triumph, coming to the end of the sheaf of forms. “And another thirty-two without bank details.” Even he seemed stunned by this. Their best day before today had netted eighteen members and not all of those had been financial. He looked up at her and grinned.

After loading their gear into the van, including the precious cargo of membership forms, they crawled through hellish afternoon traffic in the direction of their campaign headquarters on the other side of Quindalup. Eli’s old van had air-conditioning but the air that blew from its vents on a day like today was barely cooler than the air outside. It wasn’t yet rush hour on the Eastern Freeway and yet the big queue in the Big Q never ended. It beat walking, but only because it would be suicide to walk anywhere in this heat. The van finally began to crawl up the ramp at their exit, and from her passenger seat Sylvia saw the traffic stretching to the horizon: a gleaming, metal python baking in the sun.

“You’d better book some more buses,” she said as they pulled into a street near their building.

“We’ll have to process these forms first,” Eli replied, meaning that he didn’t yet have the money for more buses. One of Eli’s more endearing qualities was that he genuinely didn’t have any capital he could draw on; in that respect he reminded her a little of another pauper she had known: Rion. But where Rion had only been concerned with his immediate survival, Eli saw his poverty as a political issue. She wondered what had become of Rion now. She still thought of him, usually at inconvenient times. He was like a splinter that could not be prised from her flesh.

They spent the afternoon processing forms and debiting funds from member accounts. Their office, if you could call it that, was a drab room in a rundown building. The space was rented through a third party and she could not bear to tell him that he might as well hang a sign saying SECRET MISANTHROPOS HEADQUARTERS out the front for all the secrecy he really had. She knew this and yet she seemed to forget all about it for hours at a time, seeing herself as a true conspirator and not the police informer she truly was. In this sense she was the ideal person for the job: the forgetful mole.

Finally it was done and their campaign account looked altogether healthier for it. Eli had been sure that they’d get a boost out of David’s death and today he’d been proven correct. He dropped her off at the entrance to her apartment complex just before five, promising dinner later. She wondered whether he wanted a kiss from her but she was too sweaty and tired for that and she hurried away. Then she was alone in the few square metres that were her own, courtesy of the Federal Government and the handsome salary they were paying her. The air-conditioner pumped out cool air and the fridge hummed at her in greeting. She had a quick shower – two minutes on half spray, which was still expensive – and lay on the bed in her towel. She didn’t think she would fall asleep, but when she opened her eyes again it was dark outside and the only lights came from the kitchen and from the street below. She reached over and picked up the fliptop, its battery nearly empty as she’d forgotten to charge it. A message from Eli asked her to call him, and there was a second from him telling her to call him urgently. She put on her dressing gown and rang.

“You had a rest?” Eli asked. “I called a while ago.” He wore a tuxedo, which looked wrong on him.

“I fell asleep,” she said. “Why the suit?”

“We’ve got that fundraiser, remember? I thought I mentioned it earlier.”

Her mind went blank. “Maybe you did.”

Eli sighed, starting to say something and then seemingly thinking better of it. “Look, I’d love for you to come if you can,” he finally said. “I’ll give you the address. It isn’t far from your place.”

“I’ve just got to get dressed. Where is it again?”

Like Eli said, it wasn’t far, and she needed the exercise. Six weeks out of prison and she could already feel herself starting to slip into her old ways. It wasn’t safe for a woman or indeed anyone to be out alone after dark, but if she kept to the main streets she felt sure she’d be all right. She wore a thin coat over her dress and kept her head down, but she’d barely reached her stride when she heard someone calling her name.

“Sylvia, a word,” the voice said, and she made the mistake of turning toward the voice. The street was well-lit and she saw a familiar face, that of Lyncoln Rose.

“I’m busy right now,” Sylvia said, but now the Superintendent was alongside her and a couple of men stood by an unmarked cruiser on the verge.

“We’ll give you a lift,” Lyncoln Rose said, ushering her into the back seat. “It isn’t safe for you to be wandering around by yourself at night.”

“You wouldn’t want your precious hardware damaged, would you?” Sylvia replied, but she got into the cruiser.