Read Online Underground by Andrew McGahan - Free Book Online Page A

were not her own—those were presumably still lying on the road where the AFP had dropped them. Instead she seemed to be wearing a man’s clothes, several sizes too big for her. Her wild white hair was tied back into a bun, revealing a pale, narrow neck, lividly bruised.
    ‘That’s not my name,’ she said, staring at the floor.
    ‘You’re not Nancy Campbell?’
    ‘Not anymore.’
    ‘Oh right, you’ve got that other fancy Muslim name.’
    Her head lifted. ‘Aisha.’
    And the hate still smouldered there, amidst the blood and the cuts. She might have looked like a waif in those clothes, but only a fool would have considered her to be harmless or beaten. There was no one called Nancy in there, that’s for sure.
    ‘Okay, Ay-eesha, do
you
know who these guys are?’
    She shook her head, unblinking.
    She was in shock, I supposed. After all, it was only her first time being kidnapped or ambushed or otherwise caught up in an assault, while this was my third. And her compatriots were dead. Gunned down right in front of her. She had been right on the verge of death herself.
    ‘Are you okay?’ I heard myself ask, amazingly.
    In answer she rubbed savagely at the wounds on her face, raising fresh blood, then lifted her reddened hands, her eyes on me all the while. My incipient pity died. She was telling me she didn’t give a fuck about pain or death or sympathy.
    ‘You really
are
crazy,’ I told her, and left her alone.
    For a while anyway. But hour followed hour, without any distraction, and there was no ignoring her presence. An albino terrorist on a green velour beanbag. At the most, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old. Hell, my own eldest daughter was twenty-eight. And the only things Rhonda seemed to be interested in were money and clothes and parties with her friends. The world might be going to hell and new wars breaking out every day, with half of Australia locked down for security’s sake, but she had a social life to get on with. The spitting image of her mother, in fact. (Okay, maybe the spitting image of her father, too. Even though she made it clear that she despised me, and men in general—her rampant promiscuity aside—and I’ll be needing that cheque
now
, please, Daddy.)
    But this Aisha creature. I couldn’t see
her
hanging around with my daughter’s crowd. Parties would fall silent as soon as she walked into a room, and most boys would run screamingfrom those eyes. All right then, she was a different sort of youth. Someone very serious and very angry. But where on earth had she come from? I watched her as surreptitiously as I could. She didn’t fidget or squirm or yawn. Once she rose and went to the toilet, but otherwise she just sat there. Was she meditating? Was that even the right religion? And that was another puzzle. She wasn’t of Middle Eastern descent, that was for sure. She had to be pure Viking stock, cursed to live under a burning Australian sun. So where did Allah come into it?
    The silence got to me in the end.
    ‘Don’t you have to pray or something?’
    She glanced my way as if I were a silverfish.
    ‘You’re a Muslim, right? I thought you guys prayed five times a day. Don’t you have to get down on the floor and face Mecca every now and then?’
    No answer.
    ‘Not that you could tell which way Mecca was down here, right?’ I was rambling on for my own amusement as much as anything else. ‘It’s in Saudi Arabia, isn’t it? So from Australia I guess you just face roughly north-west? Yes?’
    She rolled her eyes, in an ‘are you really so stupid’ sort of way, and for a split second she
could
have been my daughter.
    Still, she had me there. On this topic, I was pretty stupid indeed. Not that she was the first Muslim I’d met. Back in the old days, before the camps and the ghettos, I’d dealt with investors from the Islamic community often enough. I’d even schmoozed the occasional international Arab banker. And as far as money and business went,