In a suburban apartment in Sydney’s West, under a flight path.¹ Planes can be heard intermittently. It is broad daylight outside. This is Jane and Nadia’s bedroom. These are the clinically white walls and pristine, self-assembly furniture. This is their bedside table and these are Jane’s reading glasses and anxiety medication, sitting beside a tall glass of water.

There is an open suitcase on the queen bed. Jane is hurriedly packing by dumping in it her dresses, still in their coat hangers. Nadia’s pupils follow her as she paces back and forth between the built-in wardrobe and the suitcase. Nadia’s face is partially hidden by the large laptop screen.

“The most important thing that I ever want in life is to be loved,” Jane says, emotionally but not dramatically, “and if you can’t give me affection or attention, then I’m going to walk.”

“I’m sorry. I just… I can barely breathe.”

“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? I give you the best years of my life, and all you can say is ‘I can barely breathe’?”

Flashback. Interior. Night. Children and adults in the stairwell of an old, eight-story apartment building. Heavy artillery and machine gun fire. Shattering glass. There are children crying and broken glass everywhere: on the floor, in people’s hair, on the window sills, in the chandeliers. Everywhere.

There is a stampede of adults who are carrying barefoot little ones over their shoulders, hurtling down the stairs. Nadia’s father is carrying her as he hurries his way to the makeshift bomb shelter in the building’s basement. Walls and ceilings are in a state of collapse. Blood. Chaos. Terror.

“You know, no one in my life hurt me as much as my mother, but you, you’re a close second,” Jane’s voice rips Nadia back into the present, onto the pristine, clinically white walls, and her own rap-tap fingers, striking the Swedish, self-assembly computer desk. “You want all the privileges of a relationship and none of the responsibilities,” she snipes.

Flashback. Archival footage of Israeli warplanes bombing Beirut in the 1982 siege. Archival footage of Swiss surgeons and doctors entering West Beirut in their Red Cross jeeps. A voiceover explains the unprecedented use of Phosphorous bombs, a chemical weapon, on civilians. A civilian recounts his experience of being tainted in the yellow gunk and feeling like his skin was on fire. A Swiss surgeon explains that the shrapnel laden bodies of his civilian patients rendered many of them inoperable.

“Well, guess what, Nadia? You’re not better than anybody else,” Jane continues her charge. “We all have to put up with shit we don’t like. We can’t have everything we want, exactly the way we want it. That’s what being an adult is about.”

And here she pauses a while, waiting to see if her words are registering. “You’re not going to say anything? Don’t you miss me? Don’t you miss us?”

Flashback. Archival footage of Palestinian fighters leaving Beirut, in trucks. Archival footage of flares lighting up the skies to facilitate the slaying of a defenseless Palestinian population. The aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, perpetrated by the Lebanese Phalangists. Masked men disinfecting piles of dead bodies of slain women and children. A Palestinian woman, naked, being identified by her sister in a hospital morgue, her legs still tied up, like a mermaid, with battle rope. Words type out in real-time on a screen: September, 1982.

“Because I sure as hell miss you,” Jane kneels besides Nadia, grabbing hold of her hand. “I need you here. I want to start a family. I can’t do that if you’re not here. Where are you? Fight for me!”

Nadia’s mind is lost in an abyss. She registers words, feelings and sensations. She is aware of her surroundings, but she is in a state of dissociation. The pain would otherwise be unbearable. The grief too great. And Jane, sweet, tender Jane, has no means by which to access Nadia’s internal imagery. She has no recourse for the great grief that was unleashed in Nadia when the Vice Chancellor looked on her with cool, colonial eyes that said “you are not welcome here, professor, you cannot teach Palestine.” Jane has no access to that kind of inimical suffering, there is nothing in the realm of her life experience with which it could compare.

Find something else to teach. What’s the big deal?

You seldom know when your last goodbye, your last kiss, your last moment of intimacy with a lover will be. Some hurt more than others to remember. Others we don’t even bother to remember at all. And these two had been good to each other, and will continue to be, even in parting.

It is unusual for a love story of this magnitude to simply disintegrate overnight, for no seemingly plausible reason. No great betrayal, no lies, no mistreatment. Just a young woman suddenly waking up to find herself having become someone else. Unnerved by her lover’s indifference to her suffering, disillusioned by the sudden loss of a love that has until now been her solace and comfort in life, Jane gets up and grabs the keys to the car on her way out. She slams the front door behind her. Nadia remains unmoved. Inside her skull, her temporal lobes, the parts of the brain that are most engaged when we are watching a movie and engrossed in its world, are lit up like bonfires.

Inside her mind’s eye, she is re-living the same torturous sequence of events that led to her abrupt departure from the university. Here sits a young woman who has suddenly awakened to the realization that she is unwelcome in her own country. A country whose newspapers are filled daily with a radical, anti-immigrant discourse. A country that welcomes and colludes with unnecessary wars in places that once cradled the world’s first written languages and urban civilizations. A country whose students complain of having to read books that distress them, masking a general unwillingness to confront their own colonial history.

This is the lounge room of the Saad family home in Western Sydney, Australia. The walls are adorned with Lebanese Christian paraphernalia, you see: Jesus, Mary, the Saint Charbel, the Saint Maroun, and a black and white photograph of the family’s deceased patriarch, Dayma’s paternal grandfather.

There is a small altar in one corner of the room, on which a crucifix sits, along with candles, and another picture of the reverent Saint Charbel, with his iconic beard and downcast eyes. Arletta, Dayma’s mother, is kneeling in front of it. With her back to the rest of the room, she is praying inaudibly, holding a rosary in her hand. Dayma and Nadia enter our field of vision like thieves in a children’s cartoon, taking big, soft and silent strides across the white, tiled floor, hoping to remain undetected, as they edge their way to the front door.

They are both seventeen years old. Their school uniforms are composed of above-the-knee, gray skirts, light blue shirts and navy blazers with a crucifix embroidered on the top pocket. Arletta, who is as illiterate as she is devout, has Lebanese-mother eyes in the back of her head. Without turning around or opening her eyes, in truly uncanny fashion, she yells out, nasally, in Arabic: “Where are you going, Dayma?”

“Video Ezy,” Dayma retorts, looking at Nadia in veritable frustration.

“Will you be long?” Arletta hits back.

“No, not at all. We have to watch a movie for an assignment due tomorrow. Just going to rent it out and be right back,” Dayma responds in Arabic.

“Don’t be late!”

While Dayma was born in Sydney, Nadia has only been in Australia for six years. It is no longer possible to tell that she is not Australian-born. She has already become fluent in the language, idioms and accent of her adopted country. While it is not entirely unusual to find her on the receiving end of some form of verbal abuse or other, relating to her Middle Eastern appearance, the mid 90s are the twilight years of a tolerant era, one which ensued the renunciation of the White Australia Policy, under the Gough Whitlam government in 1973.

Little does this spacious country, which is also a continent unto itself, know, that it would experience a resurgence of settler, colonial anxiety, and fear of being overwhelmed by neighboring aliens. It would begin with a fear of “the Asians” of the Pacific, and in later years would morph into a peculiar narrative of denunciation, in which Islam becomes an imaginary foreign country, and Muslims, a race of people. But these girls, especially these two girls, pay no heed to the future troubles that lie ahead of them, largely because they are living in the country’s most vibrant immigrant center, being, for the moment, free from the burden of their otherness.

In this Edenic innocence, Dayma and Nadia both dream of becoming famous actresses.

Dayma’s father is a taxi driver. He resents his wife, who is also his paternal cousin. She resents him in return, but divorce among Christians of their culture and generation is simply not an option, it is unthinkable. They manage their relationship by seeing each other as infrequently as possible, which means that their two daughters are often left unsupervised.

Dayma’s mother, who makes a great effort to raise her daughters under her watchful eye, works at a Lebanese grocery store on the other side of town, and she can neither speak nor read English. This keeps her completely misinformed of her daughters’ lives, because she has to rely solely on their reports. Dayma frequently abuses this power by telling her mother, for example, that the school is taking them on an excursion, when no such thing is happening. In this way, Dayma is able to create for herself opportunities to spend two or three nights away from home, to do whatever she pleases, without raising any alarm or suspicion.

This is Nadia’s red, 1983 Nissan Bluebird. In actuality, it belongs to her father. He lets her take it to school. Unlike Dayma, Nadia is supervised like a baby chook. She can’t spend a night away from home unless there really is a pressing school excursion, at the end of which her father would be waiting to pick her up.

Nadia works in her parents’ convenience store on weekends and for one hour after school. Her parents put their life-savings together to run this store because by the time they came to Australia, when Nadia was eleven, no one was willing to hire a highly experienced Arabic teacher or a public health inspector, both of whom were in their late forties.

Sometimes Nadia thought to herself that maybe if someone was around to help them with their resumés, they could have become employees again. Instead, they work fifteen-hour days, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Nadia gives them a lunch break at around three-thirty when she gets home from school. Her father tells her it’s enough. His mission in life is to ensure that his children receive the greatest opportunity for comfort and success. His children and his wife are his treasures and he values little else in the world besides.

Sometime later, as twilight begins to descend, Nadia pulls over at a Telstra phone booth in a quiet, suburban street. She stands beside Dayma, who is on the phone speaking to her mother, again in Arabic.

“Yes, mama, we have to…” Dayma pauses, allowing her mother’s angry but indistinguishable chatter to flow out of the receiver, which she has pulled away from her ear. When it stops, she resumes: “It’s the only store that has it and the assignment is due tomorrow. We will watch it at Nadia’s house.”

More indistinguishable chatter. “What’s that mama? You’re cutting out, we’ll be home soon, don’t worry. Mama? Mama? Can you hear me? Wait, I’ll call you back.” She hangs up. Silence, interrupted abruptly by laughter.

The sun sets. The girls are walking arm in arm back toward the car in the McDonalds parking lot. The Stanmore McDonalds, located on the corner of Parramatta and Bridge Road, is christened at this time as a modern watering hole. The creatures of the teenage animal kingdom converge upon it, some in cars, others on skateboards, roller blades or bicycles. They smoke and drink for the most part. Young boys try to swell themselves into manhood, and young girls spread themselves thin into paper maché women. Meanwhile, those who are in between, struggle to conceal themselves in the slippages of acceptable gender ambiguity that are provided by punk rock, goth or skater fashions, avoiding, for the time being, peer brutalization.

Dayma and Nadia occasionally catch someone’s attention, someone who is somehow able to tell that the linked arms are not platonic, that these two long-haired, fairly feminine girls were in fact lovers. And every so often, they would be solicited or shouted at from across the street, from the windows of apartment buildings, from moving cars and even from inside the school gymnasium, always by a man.

“No freakin way!” Teenage Nadia exclaims.

“Wilek wallah, would I lie to you? That’s how we know if they’ve been doin’ it,” Dayma continues between chuckles, “and it gets better, one time we came home and everything in the living room, I mean everything… Mary, Jesus, Mar Charbel,” at this point she crosses herself, “Mar Maroun, were all turned face down.”

While Dayma speaks, Nadia sees the interior of the Saad family living room in her mind, except this time her eyes are panning across all the religious iconography she is so accustomed to seeing, but each one, frame by frame, is turned to face the wall, so only the back of the frame, not the pictures themselves, can be seen. The statues on the living room altar are turned to face the wall.

“How is that even possible?” Nadia asks, opening the car door and getting in the driver’s seat. Dayma follows suit.

“Who cares? They were doin’ it in the living room! We didn’t sit on that couch for a month!” The girls erupt in laughter.

They do make it to see the film for the assignment that is actually due the next day. But the film in question is not at the video store.

They sit in a semi-empty cinema theatre in the heart of Sydney’s central business district, engrossed in the visual feast that is Baz Lurhman’s Romeo + Juliet. Leonardo DiCaprio is screaming out “Juliet! Juliet!” on some Miami beach, or is it Venice?

Shortly afterwards they return to the car, and Nadia drives to a remote alleyway in the industrial part of Surrey Hills. She turns the engine off and pulls the driver’s seat all the way back. Dayma is now on top of her, a small, golden crucifix around her neck is glistening in the dim street light entering the car from above.

In full Catholic school uniform, these girls are by no means amateurs. Each knows how to give and to receive, how to take pleasure and make it her own. Nadia is deep into Dayma’s neck when the other pulls back and says, “careful, you can’t leave a mark.” When Nadia looks like she’s in danger of scaling back her efforts, Dayma grabs her forearm and pushes her hand back inside her. “Keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.”

As she is climaxing, clinging to Nadia’s neck, Dayma whispers in her ear, “I love you, I love you, I love you,” shivering with each iteration. And Nadia absorbs this seeming love, which enters her in the form of hot, quick breaths, through her ear and on to every fiber of her being. The words alone are enough to get her high.

“It’s getting late, let’s head home,” Dayma says, buttoning up her school blouse and returning to the passenger seat.

They’re driving back home in silence and Dayma is rummaging through the glove box in search of cigarettes, which she soon finds. She rummages some more and locates a lighter. She looks a little agitated, you can see it in the way she is holding the lit cigarette between her lips. They tremble slightly and it trembles with them. Nadia, who looks across at her frequently, notices this.

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine,” Dayma retorts curtly. And slowly the shadow of her personality begins to creep in and takes its seat in the center of her soul.

Taking the cigarette from Dayma for a drag, Nadia says “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” She is fishing for how Dayma feels. She is searching, soliciting the reassurance that the love she absorbed moments earlier, continues to be shared on the other side of the equation of this coupling. But Dayma proffers no such assurance. Instead, she quietly takes the cigarette back, turns up the radio and continues to stare directly ahead of her, watching the night roadway unfold, one chunk at a time.

“What’s going on? Talk to me,” Nadia says, turning down the radio.

Dayma takes a deep breath. A darkness completes its descent on her, envelops her, takes over.

“Nadia, in the year 2000 the world is going to come to an end. There are going to be seven days of darkness. You have to stay home and you mustn’t look out of the window then. Ok?”

“Uhhhh… Where did you hear that?”

“It doesn’t matter where I heard it. Just promise me, ok?”

“Why? What would happen if I looked out of the window?”

“If you’re a sinner and you look out of the window or leave the house on one of those days, Satan will take your soul.”

“Oh,” Nadia sighs, “I wish you’d just go to some regular church instead!”

“I’m serious.”

“Dayma, there is no god.”

“Stop.”

“No, I’m serious.”

“Stop.”

“Hillsong is a cult, Dayma.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

“You know every time we’re out, having a good time, you always come back to sin this, sin that, Jesus this and Jesus that…” Before Nadia could continue, Dayma grabs her by the hair and pulls her head towards her. Nadia is trying to keep her head above the dashboard so she can continue to see the road she’s still driving on. Dayma is shaking Nadia’s head angrily while she speaks. Like a maniacal orchestra conductor, Dayma motions with her clenched fist, maneuvering Nadia’s head along with it.

“I told you to stop. Did you, or did you not, hear me when I said ‘stop’? I said it three times. Answer me: did you hear me when I told you to stop? Are you going to keep going? Are you?” And in the face of Nadia’s silence, she continues: “No? Good.” She violently lets go of Nadia’s head. “Stop the car here.”

A red, 1983 Nissan Bluebird pulls over by the curbside of a quiet suburban street in Sydney’s West. The passenger door opens.

Flashback. Exterior. Day. Side of road in the suburb of Dubayeh, only a few miles north of Beirut. 1976.

There are three Lebanese Phalangists in military uniform, at a roadblock, each sporting an M-16 machine gun. The most senior of the three has a large tattoo of Mar Charbel’s iconic face – the same face with the downcast eyes that we saw in the Saad family home – emblazoned on his forearm. A beat up, red Datsun is pulled over, the driver’s door is open and a twenty-five-year-old man is standing outside of the car. The phalangist’s tattooed forearm leads to a hand that’s holding a blue ID card.

[Subtitle: Palestinian? You son of a bitch! Line him up against the wall. Come on, you gotta be kidding me!]

Acting on a nationalist fervor, which identifies Lebanon with a Christian West, the Lebanese Phalangists take to executing Palestinian civilians in a number of brutal ways. Most common among these are flinging conscious people from rooftops of their own apartment buildings, or from roadway bridges, or hacking them to death. Men, women and children meet this fate in equal measures. Women are frequently raped before being killed. Execution by short range shootings to the head, or by open fire are equally common at this time. To acquire this unfortunate fate you have to be nothing other than Palestinian, represented by your Lebanese government issued blue ID card. The intent of these purges is ethnic cleansing, fueled, as always, by a frenzy of orgiastic sadism.

The man with the tattoo of the saint pushes his victim in the direction of the other soldier, who takes him by the arm, and drags him out of our line of sight. Meanwhile, the tattooed man leans down to look through the open car door. From his point of view, a terrified young woman can be seen sitting in the passenger seat. Taking distinct pleasure in his power and her terror, he bellows at her [Subtitle: You are Palestinian too? Get her out of the car, now!].

The passenger door opens, a soldier’s hand grabs the young woman by the hair and pulls her screaming out of the car. She too is dragged, resisting, out of our line of sight.

Dayma steps out of the red, 1983 Nissan Bluebird. The exhaust pipe trembles, there is a loose screw just underneath the trunk, it’s the reason for the rattling. Nadia can hear this palpitation while the car idles, and she feels strangely immobilized by it. She is too young to know that this is abuse. At this age, she thinks of Dayma as irreplaceable.

Do you remember the person who introduced you to the exquisite pleasures of the body? Not necessarily your first lover, but the first one to teach you ecstasy? Dayma just happens to be Nadia’s first ecstasy and also her first lover. Before Dayma, women were elaborate fantasies, heavenly bodies in the quarries of Nadia’s imagination. No one had stirred their fingers inside her before this, no one had caused her entire body to tremble in this way, or to become endless fibers of electric light for hours on end.

And so, you can see, dear reader, why our young heroine thinks there is no difference between Dayma and god. For Nadia, who was not brought up on prohibition, the sexual body is the spiritual body, there is no difference between the two. To deny one is to deny the other.

We are now inside the Saad family home, a few days prior to this evening’s incident. Nadia and Carla, Dayma’s fourteen-year-old sister, are standing outside a locked bathroom door.

“Dayma! Dayma, if you don’t answer I’m going to break down the door.”

We are now inside the bathroom of the Saad family home, looking squarely at the back of the door that Nadia is trying to break open. The door jamb begins to crack, it splinters, and the girls finally break in. They see Dayma sprawled on the floor with her blood smeared on the white tiles. She is not dead at all, but simply in shock; she has made several slices with a kitchen knife on her forearm.

She rushes to Dayma’s feet, in tears. “What the fuck. Why?” She grabs a white towel to wrap around Dayma’s forearm and takes the knife out of her right hand. She is trying to stop the bleeding by compression.

Dayma and Nadia’s eyes meet, and the former recognizes the burning question in her lover’s eyes. Why? And so, quietly and softly, she moves her lips and says: “I never said ‘no.’ He said I never said ‘no.’”