The Hilton Bombing by Imre Salusinszky

Author:Imre Salusinszky [Soutphommasane, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

The tiny Canberra jagriti was run on a shoestring. Sometimes there was not enough money to cover the rent. Evan begged Newtown for extra resources, but as usual there were none available. He needed a job.

Reviving his Commonwealth Public Service application from Hobart, he went for a job with the Department of Foreign Affairs and was promptly hired in the personnel section. Figuring it would carry some risk to conceal his Margii affiliation, Evan was open about it, even plastering his desk with Margii stickers. It didn’t matter. Less than a year after he’d attempted to assassinate the prime minister of India in Sydney, Evan was welcomed into the inner sanctum of the agency in charge of Australia’s external relations. He sailed through an ASIO security check and was given clearance up to ‘secret’ level.

Even to him, it felt ridiculous and negligent. But as he worked there through the summer of 1978–79, rubbing shoulders with ordinary public servants, chatting to them about their weekends and holidays, their kids and their mortgages, it began to affect him in unexpected ways. This was as far as he’d drifted from the Margii mothership in two years. He was wearing normal clothes and eating a normal cut lunch with normal people. There was no Naciketa whispering in his ear about the evils of the secular world.

These harmless human contacts began to nourish him, while they reminded him how isolated and lonely he’d become. He was now earning enough money to make the India trip a reality. But as he mingled more freely in the daylight human world of office gossip and flexitime, that ambition started to fade into the background.

What came into the foreground was Carmel. He still loved her.

Now qualified as an LFT but without a posting, Carmel, or Kaevalya, was zealously beavering away at Newtown headquarters. She was one of the staunch ones. She was at every day of the committal proceedings for the Yagoona Three and dutifully attended protests in their support outside the Metropolitan Remand Centre. In September, she had been removed from the visitors’ gallery of the House of Representatives after throwing leaflets into the chamber protesting the harassment of Dada Abhiik by Immigration.

Evan was conflicted, because if he resumed a relationship with Carmel he wasn’t sure if he could conceal from her what he’d done, or even if he’d want to: perhaps not concealing anything, having someone who knew and understood all of it, was part of what was driving him back to her. Taking a risk, he wrote to her via the Newtown office early in the autumn of 1979. Her reply took a few weeks to arrive, but when it came it caught him off-guard and made him feel small and cowardly and shallow. The letter said she had never stopped loving him and had been waiting for this moment.

Carmel arrived in Canberra late one evening in April. She had cut her hair short. As he embraced her, Evan noticed again how thin she was and that she was wheezing: there hadn’t even been enough money at the Newtown office to buy Ventolin.

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