Underground by Andrew McGahan

Allah, girl, if you want,’ Agent Spencer said.
    She spat out blood. ‘I hope your dicks rot off.’
    ‘Squad, take aim.’
    I looked away again.
    Shots spluttered out, even though no one had said ‘fire’. Then there was screaming, male this time, and more shots. Something exploded and I was thrown to the ground. Looking up, I caught a glimpse of figures leaping down from the top of the cutting. Federal agents were falling, bloodied and agonised, and smoke was billowing into the air.
    Fuck, I thought, in a kind of weary amazement, three times in as many days.
    Here I go again.

EIGHT
    I really wasn’t born for such excitement.
    Me, a child of the placid 1950s.
    Mind you, in my youth, we did have the cold war. And looking back, that really
was
a war. Two monolithic powers, evenly matched, slugging it out for control of the whole world . . . or at least the mutual destruction of it. It was a different scenario from today, believe me. The Russians were something to truly fear, an enemy who actually had the capability to win. Who would have thought that, sixty years later, the evil empire would be long forgotten, but we’d all end up twice as terrified of nothing more than a few thousand stateless terrorists? Or that, in the name of eradicating them, we’d be fighting a dozen different shitty little wars across the globe? Stalin would have been thrilled to cause half as much alarm, and he had a fully equipped army five million strong behind him.
    I’m sure that my parents, securely enclosed in the great swathe of white middle-class Australia, and fighting the good fight against the red peril, had no idea what oddities the future held. We had the house in suburbia, we had the picket fence, we even had Mum waiting on the couch with a cocktail for Dad to come home from work. We were proof that democracy worked, and we knew that, once the Russians finally admitted defeat, all would be right with the world.
    What on earth did Islam mean to any of us?
    This was Melbourne. We lived in Camberwell. Leafy streets, green lawns, and a ‘dry’ zone. Not even a pub in sight to disturb the peace, let alone a mosque. (In fact, last time I visited the suburb nothing much had changed, the odd AFP checkpoint notwithstanding. When Camberwell gets rowdy, well, that really will be the end of western civilisation as we know it.)
    My father? He was a public servant, Department of Mines and Energy, upper middle grade. My mother didn’t work, and Bernard and I were the only children. The good life was all ours, so much so that looking back it seems like a fairytale now. Actually, a rather boring fairytale, for very little of my earliest years seems to stand out in my memory. Playing in the backyard, watching TV, walking to primary school, holidays at the beach. Bernard was always there too, of course. Did we get along then? I don’t recall hating him. But not really liking him either. He was my brother, he was just around all the time.
    But as we grew older, to about age nine or ten, two things became clear. Bernard was more timid than I was—quieter, less adventurous, less daring. But on the other hand, he was far more stubborn than me. Say there was a gang of us kids throwing rocks at the windows of an empty factory over Collingwood way. I’d be in there amongst it, and when the windows were all broken I’d be the first to suggest we creep inside and see whatever secrets there were to see. But Bernard, if he was tagging along, would frown at the rock-throwing,and refuse point-blank to break and enter. Even when the rest of us mocked him and called him a girl and chanted other horrible things at him, he still refused. Shaking his head all the while and growing red in the face—but red with angry defiance, not embarrassment. He never ran away, or burst into tears, or backed down.
    And it’s not that he was simply law-abiding. He wasn’t at all. He could be downright sneaky when it came to disobeying our parents. Stealing biscuits, or