by Naomi Booth
I nod.
‘Absolutely no more posting. And you fucking did this at work, Alice, where someone could see you? That someone being Phil? Phil, who applied for your promotion and would just love to see you hung out to dry? You need to sharpen up, you bloody goose.’
She stands up: this meeting is over. ‘What have I always told you, Alice? You can’t clear things from the bottom up. We need to get to the top and flush the crap back down the system.’ She swoops in close to me. ‘Keep your notes, but keep them safe at home, until we can do something here.’
* * *
I was careful at work after that, but I carried on with my records. I moved the blog, but I kept on posting. I needed to keep recording everything, to show people what was going on. Because people were already moving on, already forgetting about it. After that first headline, the story of the man at the dump, people had shared things online for a while. Reports from different parts of the world, strange photographs, rumours, all of it spread in a rash on people’s media feeds and through forums. None of the big outlets were reporting it at first, so I kept on digging for info and I was already taking precautions, wearing my mask when the smogs were worst, watching what I ate. The stories people were sharing all featured unusual skin growths or aberrant scarring. And it wasn’t just affecting mouths and noses: in some of the more lurid accounts, eyelids were knitting together, ears were closing up, genitals were folded back into sealed pudenda. Blurry photographs appeared, with the ambiguous lighting of ghost-hunter pictures, purporting to show the strange outgrowths of skin. One account described a man in California whose rectum had sealed over: he’d supposedly died from fecal vomiting, choking on his own shit. I’m not sure people believed that one, not literally, but there was a kind of grim, mythic logic to it, so we circulated the story anyway. Disgusted and compelled, we were all clicking ‘share’ as we ate chow mein or rode the tram to work.
The first official responses came when the post-mortem on the dead-dump-man was leaked to the press. The report described unusual skin adhesions across the man’s mouth and nostrils, and the cause of death was determined to be asphyxiation. Journalists started unearthing other unusual deaths over the last couple of years, and there were plenty. There were suggestions of medical negligence, of a State-wide cover-up, of a global conspiracy. The newspapers caught up with the forums and started going wild then: was this a new pandemic, were all of us going to be choked in our beds by our own skin?
But this is what I still don’t get: when real evidence began to emerge, people seemed less terrified. After that initial panic, interest began to just die down. And, after a while, most people just got back to normal. The reports named the new condition, Cutis Sigillatis, or the ‘skin-sealing syndrome’. The Health Department published statistics on what it described as a small number of ‘cutis-related deaths.’ The condition was characterised by an overgrowth of the superficial epidermis, easily treated with surgery but causing serious complications if left untreated. The government called for calm: worldwide figures and patterns of emergence suggested rare, localised, abnormal skin behaviour. Surgeons in New York had already developed an effective perforation method to treat the condition: the excess skin growth was now known to be very thin and a few surgical perforations could be enough to undermine the new structure. Local cauterisation completed the procedure. There was no evidence that cutis was a communicable disease, incidences across the global population were low and were concentrated in densely populated urban areas and more remote areas with high atmospheric pollution. ‘Think of it as a skin cancer,’ a TV doctor pronounced breezily: ‘stay vigilant and seek advice from your health-care provider if you notice anything unusual.’ So, for most people, it became just one more thing among many to briefly worry about and then forget: the fires were getting worse and worse, the heat events more frequent, the rural-poor, indigenous folk, and migrants were being carted into camps every time it got too hot, there were Biblical floods on the other side of the world, our food was carcinogenic, our plastics were carcinogenic, the smogs were carcinogenic. Sometimes ash would float down through the haze, right in the middle of the city, blown in from hundreds of miles away. God knows what we were breathing. Add to that list: people’s skin was going crazy in our toxic environment.
No one knew exactly what was causing it, of course. Studies were investigating all sorts of possibilities: BPA ingestion from plastics (‘Is your baby’s bottle poisoning her?’); triclosin absorption from cosmetics and detergents (‘Is keeping clean poisoning our bodies?’); inhalation of PM2.5 in smog-saturated and polluted cities (‘Are greener cars choking us?’). For those with expensive tastes, protected food guaranteed an indoor-reared product, with minimal exposure to atmospheric pollution and chemical treatment. Those who could afford to bought the special food, bought their face masks for high-pollution days, bought their private insurance for high-spec surgery. Charity campaigns raised money for expert teams to be deployed in crisis areas, for street-children in global cities to get plastic surgery. In our city, the panic quickly died down. Small, emergency surgeries opened within bigger medical practices, and only poor people ever seemed to die from cutis – poor people far away, or poor people at home who didn’t take care of themselves. The expert reports were clear: if you stayed vigilant, if you gave your five dollars to a medical charity and looked after yourself, you had nothing to worry about. Only the feckless and the faraway had anything to fear.
I could see what was really happening, the stuff that wasn’t being reported. Something seemed to crop up at work almost every day, one way or another. An emergency housing request for a man who’d lost his job after a bodged cutis-correction to his eyes had left him partially sighted. A family who wanted to be re-housed because a child in their high-rise had ‘the skin-sealing disease’ and they were worried they’d contract it. An elderly woman who wanted to move because an emergency surgery had opened on her road and she was surrounded by queues of ‘rude kids’, and ‘Abos’ with ‘screaming babies’. Her skin was itching and she was sure she was going to catch it from ‘the dross on the road’. The worst case I came across was a man who was on our waiting list for sheltered accommodation. He’d been found dead in his bed, excrement smeared up his back, his mouth completely sealed over. I was one of the team who went to inspect his flat: the bedroom walls were covered with pornography, except the wall above his bed, on which he’d written in marker pen, I hate this place, I hate this place, I hate this place. His wife’s ashes were stored in an urn on the kitchen counter. We couldn’t locate any living next of kin. I went to his funeral, along with two colleagues from Welfare. That made three of us at the crematorium, all of us dressed in grey suits on a blisteringly hot day. Cause of death was officially recorded as starvation, not cutis. Nothing official to record this as a cutis-related death of any kind. He was a known alcoholic, awaiting assessment for schizophrenia, with a long history of self-neglect. No one knew how long he’d stayed alone inside his flat, alive, with his mouth sealed up. Those who didn’t have the nous or the desire to seek help were being sealed up alive, and no one gave a damn or even recorded it.
So I started my own reports. I noted down cases whenever I encountered them, and not just of housing applicants – I began making records of the anecdotal reports I was hearing about the immigration detention centres, too. Eaglewood fell within my catchment, and I’d sometimes meet clients who’d been detained there, moving them into emergency accommodation if they’d been granted temporary visas. They’re awful places, the detention centres, worse than prisons, because of the number of children; because of how hopeful some of the people still are, how sure they are that the way they’re being treated must be due to some mistake, that something must change, now that they’ve made it all the way here. One girl in particular got to me: I drove her to a shelter and she sat in silence most of the way. She was stiff, walked and seated herself as though she’d been injured somewhere deep inside. I didn’t want to pry about where she�
�d come from and what might have happened to her, but I wanted to make sure nothing had happened here, at the centre. They’re privately run, the centres, and, since the new laws, no one can whistle-blow. The State does an annual inspection, which involves the men in uniforms acting real nice and the detainees staying real quiet, eyeing the guards, knowing they’ll be left alone with them as soon as the suits leave. There have been scandals, of course. Up north, one centre was slammed by the inspectors: high rates of suicide, accusations from the detainees of rampant sexual abuse. The contract was given to another provider, all the staff were sacked – and then re-hired by the new company. It’s a deterrent against immigration, I’ve heard people say, knowing that our guards can fuck you up with total immunity, knowing they’re sometimes as dangerous as the people you’re trying to escape. ‘No one hurt you, did they?’ I asked that girl. ‘I mean here, at the centre?’ She bit her bottom lip until it paled, and she didn’t answer my question. ‘You can tell me,’ I said. ‘I’m nothing to do with the centre. I don’t work for them.’ She looked at me then, her eyes slow and sad, and she told me that no one had hurt her and that she was thinking about the family who had been kept in the room next to her. They had come from the same place as her, they’d travelled together, and the family had been refused temporary asylum; they weren’t even given the year that she’d been granted. They were being deported next week. And, a few days ago, the father had developed the skin disease, she said. His right ear had filled with doughy flesh. She mimed the skin poofing-up around his ear. It wasn’t life-threatening, the guards had told him, so he could access treatment back in his own country. The man hadn’t even asked for treatment, she said, but there would be nothing for him at home where the war raged on, and now he could barely hear. She put her forehead against my passenger-seat window and she cried, soundlessly.
Thank Christ, I thought, thank Christ this girl and the family hadn’t all come by sea. They’d be there still, on those island prisons we’ve made, our deadly castles marooned in the ocean beyond the reach of the law. No one inspects them: state of exception, we’re told; the government is dealing with an unprecedented crisis in illegal maritime arrivals, we’re told, which makes it like a war. People don’t get off of those islands. Not even the children. We all know what’s happening out there: cruelty will thrive on a lawless rock-face in the middle of the sea and I can guarantee that no one imprisoned there is getting treatment for anything, let alone cutis, which is costly to mend. Every so often a body washes up on the coast, too badly burned to determine cause of death. We’re outsourcing our State brutality now.
And there are plenty of other places where cutis isn’t being recorded properly, I’m sure of it. I don’t get to see the Internal Displacement Camps much – they’re mostly outside our State. But I did once ‘buddy-up’ with a colleague from the next territory, to inspect one of theirs. The camps are given idyllic names, some of them so euphoric they’re poised between euphemism and straight-up sarcasm: ‘Home Elizabeth’, ‘Rose Place’, ‘Hope Springs’. The one I inspected was called ‘Kookaburra Grove’: a new facility at the edge of a city, designed to house people displaced by heat events. Hypothetically, these camps are meant to house anyone who is at risk from fires or area dehydration. In practice, they’re for folks evacuated from public housing, lots of poor rural folk, lots of indigenous folk, all removed from vulnerable areas in the bush.
I’m not sure what I was expecting the camp to look like, but I found myself surprised by it. I guess I must have been thinking the whole affair would look more transitory, and more shambolic: perhaps I’d pictured people and their belongings chaotically crammed into makeshift shelters, supplies piled up, animals circling, children crying, rows of chemi-loos. The truth was far tidier and far more sinister: the camp was a dense grid of low, regular dwellings built from breeze-block. It looked less like the final day of a music festival and more like a scrupulously managed, large-scale battery farm. It was spotless. And very quiet.
‘Where is everyone?’ I asked. We were walking along ‘Sylvania Boulevard’ with a smartly-dressed woman, the vice-president of the company who ran the camp (Call me Linda, girls): the orange dust that powdered all the ‘streets’ was staining her pale suede pumps as we processed up and down the grid. A suspicious mind might deduce that Linda was not overused to walking around the place.
It was mid-morning and I’d only seen one person outside of the huts: an elderly man who’d cowered as we’d passed him. So I asked again: ‘Where is everyone?’
‘Well,’ said the woman, ‘the children will be in classes. We have two schools on site. And anyone of working age will be in their assigned work-place training or on voluntary work-place out in the city. We bus them out and back again each day.’
She licked her lips; the dust was sticking to her pale purple lip-gloss too.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And what about the elderly and the sick? What about anyone not of working age?’
‘We have a social facility,’ she said. ‘We can see it if you’d like? It’s on the west side of the camp. All the huts have cable: we find a lot of the elderly residents prefer to stay in their quarters and watch TV. We don’t encourage socialising in the streets or in the home. We find that the noise can disturb other residents. So we ask all residents to confine social activity to the socially-zoned areas.’
‘Like this?’ I ask, pointing at a small, stark playground: one slide, one roundabout, one set of swings, all empty.
‘Yes,’ the woman says. ‘We have one social zone per 200 residences, as per our contract. We even have several open-air social spaces, for indigenous residents who may wish to congregate in the outside.’ She looks very smug about this. ‘And we have a dry-rule: we have all sorts of shops, which I’ll show you in a moment. But no one sells liquor. Due to the…’ This is the only stumble in the script that she makes all day. ‘Due to the, um, the special problems that this demographic sometimes have with alcohol. We think it’s a safer environment for all without that particular temptation in the way.’
‘But residents can drink in their own properties, right?’ I ask. ‘I mean, they’re displaced people. They’re not in prison, right?’
Linda laughs, breezily. ‘Right. Although, all properties technically remain the property of HappyHome. And we find that they remain in better order when booze is removed from the equation.’
We walk for a while longer. I haven’t seen a single piece of rubbish the whole time we’ve been here.
‘It’s so tidy,’ I say. ‘How is it so tidy with such a dense concentration of residents?’
‘Our janitors are responsible for the upkeep of the site and for all matters of housekeeping.’
The janitor: a position half-way between a hall monitor and a chief of police. I meet these guys later on, and they’d taser you soon as see a piece of litter.
‘But people are free to go?’ I ask. ‘People have freedom of movement within and from the camp? They could leave for the city anytime they wanted?’
‘Of course,’ Linda says. ‘We do have a curfew, for the peace of mind of residents. Generally, we find that residents don’t want to seek accommodation elsewhere, when they understand the situation and what a good deal they’ve got here. The State has provided them with housing here, so they won’t be offered anything in the city. And of course, they’d have to pay back their relocation compensation if they were to leave. And why would you want to leave such a clean and orderly facility? If I’m honest with you, and I know you won’t like this coming from the State side, Alice, but if I’m honest with you, these places are better equipped than most of the old public-housing these folk have left.’
‘And what about re-introduction? How do you manage them back into their homes? When the risk of the heat event lessens?’
The woman blinks hard a couple of times. The grit is blowing up everywhere, into our eyes and our hair. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s never happened.’
I turn to my colleague, Mel
issa. ‘What does she mean? People aren’t meant to be here long-term, right? This is an interim measure?’
‘That’s right,’ Melissa says, carefully. ‘Vulnerable residents are housed here when local services need to be shut down because of the imminent risk from heat events. But, so far, the alert has stayed high in all of the areas we’ve evacuated. And just think about it from our point of view: it’s not worth resuming all of the services, healthcare, schools, social care, just for a few months at a time. In practice, we’re finding that some residents stay here for the longer term.’
At the end of the visit, Melissa is ecstatic. This is the best-run camp she’s been to, she says; she’s very happy to say that HappyHome are more than meeting their contractual requirements. She’d go so far as to say the camp is exemplary. ‘If your State is thinking about going down this route,’ she says to me, making a big show of it, ‘you should definitely come back to consult with HappyHome as a preferred provider.’ Linda from HappyHome preens.
‘I’d like to see the medical records for the camp,’ I say.
My colleague looks embarrassed. ‘That’s not part of the inspection,’ she says.
‘Yes it is,’ I say. ‘I’ve got the paperwork. It’s the State’s responsibility to make sure adequate educational, medical and care provisions are in place. And it’s my job, as out-of-State buddy, to ensure that the regulations for the inspection are followed.’
Linda looks unperturbed. ‘Of course,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d given you that information when I showed you the surgeries and schools, and I gave you the figures on medical staff? What more would you like to see, Ms Ford?’