While some people might have an ambition to jump out of a plane wearing a parachute harness, or to climb a Himalayan peak without oxygen, Ali saw the pinnacle of his own future achievement as beheading kufr with his Jungle Master. Maybe he could even take over from the infamous executioner known as ‘Jihadi John.’
Jihadi John was actually an ex-Londoner called Mohammad something – Ali couldn’t remember the surname. Wearing a black hood, he’d wielded a knife very similar to Ali’s Jungle Master in a string of Islamic State beheading videos. But lately, Jihadi John had dropped out of sight and there had been reports he’d been killed in a drone attack. Maybe there was now an opening in the Islamic State job market and Ali could become the new Head of Beheading.
As Ali made his way through the scrub, weaving between black, claw-like mulga branches, he fantasised about being the star of the latest Islamic State beheading clip. He saw himself out in the Syrian desert, framed by the camera lens, standing over the kneeling form of a blindfolded man in an orange jumpsuit. Behind them would be a line of hooded, black-uniformed warriors holding AK-47s. Ali’s face would also be masked and he’d be wearing the same kind of full-length black robe favoured by Jihadi John.
The condemned man might be a Syrian soldier, an American journalist, a downed Russian pilot, maybe even an academic expert in the ancient temples, statues and other symbols of idolatry which dotted the desert. The camera would zoom in on Ali’s face, just two eyes in a black hood. His eyes would burn into the lens as he said: ‘We are unstoppable! Whoever stands in the ranks of kufr will be a target for our swords. Allahu Akbah!’
‘Allahu Akbah!’ the faceless men behind him would echo. Then the camera would show Ali lifting his Jungle Master from its sheaf. ‘Death to the infidel!’ he’d shout before grabbing his victim’s hair and …
Ali was suddenly jolted back to reality. A snake! That was what it looked like, lit up in the torch beam. Long and black, lying unmoving on its belly in the dirt, but ready to spring into attack mode and sink its fangs into his leg. Ali’s heart, already pumping hard from the effects of the ice, performed a drum roll and his knees started quivering. He wasn’t scared of many things, but snakes were a definite exception to that rule.
But then, as he held the beam still, he saw that the snake was really a rippling, serpentine length of fallen wood. He gave a nervous laugh and licked his lips. Despite now knowing it was inanimate and harmless, he gave the branch a wide berth as he resumed his trudge.
A small grasshopper settled on Ali’s sweat-beaded face and he swatted it away. With the moon so high in the sky, there was now a lot of natural light and he would be able to pick his way through the scrub without the flashlight, and the bugs it was starting to attract. But like the Jungle Master at his hip, the torch beam was reassuring, so he kept it on. The lights of the houses were closer now, perhaps another half hour’s walk. On the horizon, lightning flickered. Several seconds later, there was a faraway rumble of thunder. Ali quickened his pace.
7 ROAST ROO
CLARRIE AND NOELIE had retrieved their car, which now pulled up near the group sitting around the fire. The pair got out of the Falcon and lifted the kangaroo from the trunk, then carried it down the gloomy side passage of the house.
Chaseling was feeling very relaxed from the pituri, which he continued to chew like a ruminant with its cud. In his lap he was nursing a roll of canvas – the painting by the dreadlocked man, Lester. It was called Honey Ant Dreaming and Chaseling had purchased it for $200. Now Lester had just gone off to find another canvas, titled Perentie Dreaming, that he wanted to show him. Chaseling leaned back and gazed up at the night sky. It was like a divine revelation. There, laid out for him like the dots in Lester’s painting, were all the wonders of the cosmos. The sky was alive. A shooting star made a quick, flaring journey, then disappeared. The full moon hung overhead with a yellow ring surrounding it, a giant eye gazing down.
Something flashed low on the horizon. Chaseling shifted his gaze, to the line of black clouds moving in from the east. Every second or so, there were silver flickers of lightning.
‘It’s gonna rain, better get this fella cooking quick.’ It was Noelie, his hands gripping the tail of the road-killed roo while Clarrie clutched its forelegs. The animal had been skinned and gutted and its carcase was red, wet and glistening, as were the arms of the pair carrying it. They heaved the roo onto the fire, setting off an eruption of sparks.
With Noelie presiding, they carefully roasted the marsupial, turning it in the flames with a shovel every now and then. But they only let the kangaroo cook in the fiercely-blazing fire, the dial of the stove turned all the way up, so to speak, for a relatively brief time, no longer than ten minutes. Then they rolled it out onto an old sheet of corrugated iron. A bit later, once the flames were dying down to coals, they transferred the roo back into the pit, raking the embers so the carcase was half-buried in them.
Meanwhile, Chaseling found himself purchasing the Perentie Dreaming painting, so now there were two rolls of canvas in his lap. They would make excellent companion pieces on the wall of wherever he settled in Alice Springs. A stray spark settled on the edge of one of the canvas cylinders and he hurriedly brushed it away. ‘I’m going to stash these in my bag so they don’t get holes burned in them,’ he told Lester. He got up and took the canvases to Clarrie’s car.
After he returned to his spot at the fire pit, Cookie held out a battered enamel mug like a hostess offering a guest some canapés. ‘Honey ants,’ she said. ‘We dug ‘em up this afternoon.’
In the bottom of the cup was a squirming mass of ants with enormously-distended transparent, amber-coloured abdomens, the size of small marbles. From the tips of their dark heads to the end of the swollen abdomens, the insects were two and a half centimetres long.
Seeing Chaseling’s hesitation, Cookie said, ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ She reached into the mug and grabbed the head of an ant between forefinger and thumb, then lifted the insect bottom-upwards to her mouth before tilting her head back slightly and biting off the sac of nectar. ‘Mmmm!’ She ran her tongue round her lips. Flicking away the ant’s head and thorax, she held the cup out to Chaseling again.
His hand slowly moved forward. ‘They don’t bite, do they?
She flashed a reassuring smile. ‘No, Kumina.’
Throwing caution to the winds, he reached into the can and lifted out an ant by the head. The insect’s legs moved frantically as he lifted it to his mouth. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said, before biting off the abdomen, which burst like a fragile grape in his mouth. But because he had his head angled downwards, and the honey was a lot thinner in consistency than the bee variety, most of the nectar ran back between his teeth, then down his fingers.
Licking his fingers, Chaseling got a tantalizing taste of sweetness offset by a smoky tang. He tried a second ant, tilting his head back this time to prevent spillage. Warm nectar flooded his tongue and he savoured it for a couple of seconds before swallowing it down. He gave the thumbs-up sign to Cookie.
After treating himself to a third ant, Chaseling urged her to share the delicacies around with the others gathered around the fire. Throwing the remains of the dismembered insect into the ashes, he said, ‘I was wondering what happened to the mission. When I was over by Clarrie’s car, I saw some old concrete foundations. I thought maybe that was where the mission used to be.’
‘That’s right,’ she said.
‘What happened to the mission buildings?’
‘We burned ‘em down.’ she said. ‘After the nuns and the priests cleared out. We even burned down the church.’ Looking guilty, she made the sign of the cross. ‘There’d been too much cruelty, the mission had to go.’
She told him about the frightful abuse of children on the mission by a priest called Father Mahoney. ‘He went to jail in the end,’ she said. ‘I heard he died a few years back. Some of us mob celebrated. He was the Devil.’
Noelie and Clarrie rolled the kangaroo out of the fire onto a sheet of