Touch the Sun

by Emily Conolan

  Dropping to your knees, you burrow under a bush and pull Jamilah in too, finding a small space to hide at the heart of the bush, pulling the branches and vines back over you like a curtain.

  Leaves crackle beneath you. Distant voices shout. It is almost totally dark inside the bush, and it smells of boggy earth, spicy leaves and stinky squashed insects. Things prickle and tickle your skin. You wait and listen, alert as a rabbit.

  Darkness falls on the jungle, and you begin to wonder how much longer you should stay hidden when you see a beam of light rake the ground between the trees.

  ‘Hey,’ calls a heavily accented voice in English, ‘where are you? Come out, kids. The police are gone. I’ll take you to Australia.’

  Jamilah’s wide, scared eyes reflect a little of the torchlight’s shine. She has both hands plastered over her mouth to muffle her coughs. Her body is shaking like a car on a rough road. Her eyes ask an unspoken question: Is it safe to go out?

  If it’s the people smuggler and you stay hidden, he might leave without you. But if it’s the police and you reveal yourselves, you’ll be thrown into jail.

  Your ears and eyes are pricked for clues, but it’s too dark to see if the man is wearing a uniform, and the accented voice could belong to either.

  What should you do?

  To stay hidden, go to scene 33.

  To climb out of the bush, go to scene 32.

  ‘I believe you,’ you whisper to Jamilah. You pick up your shoe from the ground by the door, and take out the money.

  ‘We want to go to Italy where our aunty is,’ you tell Piggy. ‘But you have to use this money to buy medicine for my sister as well, and a Malaysian simcard.’

  Piggy takes the money and leaves the room, muttering grumpily, probably disgruntled to be woken at three a.m. to be told to change the plans and buy this and that.

  Jamilah’s shoulders heave with more coughs. You sit back on the bed and wrap your arms around her, then you drift off into an edgy, fractured sleep. Piggy comes back at ten that morning. He throws a tattered box in your direction.

  ‘Medicine,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow you will go to Turkey, then Greece. You take boat, Greece to Italy.’

  He throws another bag at you.

  ‘Food. No money for simcard.’

  The box of medicine has been well used. ‘Panadol’ is written on the front. Two white tablets remain in the packet; the rest have been popped out of their foil and are gone. It’s not enough, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

  DURING THE FLIGHT to Turkey, every muscle in your body feels like it’s at snapping point. You chew on the inside of your cheek; pick at a sliver of loose skin next to your thumbnail; shift from side to side as if someone’s made you sit on hot rocks.

  You can’t shake the tight, wound-up, jumpy hope in your belly that you’ll somehow, against all the odds, be reunited with Rahama again. And, oh, what a story you’ll have to tell her when you get there. The thought makes you smile, just a little.

  The airport in Turkey is noisy and busy. You can smell food and petrol. You cast your eyes around the crowd. Piggy said someone would meet you here, but nobody stands out in the sea of dark hair and hijabs.

  Warily, you go outside. You are greeted by a blast of heat and sunshine – Jamilah weakly folds her body into yours. You wait for hours, watching taxis come and go, until you notice a guard with his eye on you.

  ‘Come on, it’s not safe to wait any longer,’ you tell Jamilah. ‘Let’s go.’

  Most of the traffic seems to be heading in one direction, so you follow it, walking along the side of the road. The street signs use the same alphabet as English, but the words don’t make any sense to you. You have no money, and no idea what to do next.

  Just then, a fancy black car screeches to a halt next to you. The driver, a man, nods at you as if to say: Get in. Thinking this must be the person who was meant to meet you at the airport, you and Jamilah climb into the car.

  IT’S BEEN NEARLY three years now, since you took that ride. You’ve asked yourself so many times, Could things have worked out differently, if we hadn’t got in? Or would he have kidnapped us anyway?

  You knew within minutes of getting in the car, that it wasn’t his intention to take you safely to Italy. You still have nightmares about it. The man smuggled you out of Turkey, drugged and bound, and passed you along a chain of criminal hands: people who make their profit by kidnapping vulnerable children. Jamilah was passed in a different direction. She could be anywhere.

  You weren’t even sure which country you’d ended up in at first – just that it was bitingly cold, with pale-faced people who spoke in guttural voices; a place where the colour seemed to have leached out of the sky. Now, you’re pretty sure it’s Russia, or one of its neighbouring countries.

  You work in a match factory. You aren’t paid. The owners say you owe the people smuggler thousands of dollars for your journey and have to work here until you’ve repaid him.

  You’ve been beaten more times than you can remember. Sometimes, your fingertips are so cold when you work the machine that you’re not even sure you’d notice if one of them were sliced right off.

  But you suppose you would still feel the pain. You’re a human: you breathe, you bleed, you struggle. Even when you don’t want to anymore. Even when Allah seems to have deserted you, and the hot, spicy-smelling streets of Mogadishu seem like a lifetime ago.

  You work, and you survive, and you keep a tiny flame of hope alive that, one day, you will find a way to escape.

  To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 28.

  You clamber out of the bush, pins-and-needles shooting down your legs. The torchlight instantly swings towards you.

  ‘Hello,’ calls the same heavily accented voice. ‘How many of you are there?’

  ‘Just two,’ you say, pulling Jamilah out of the bush, and then – too late! – you realise your mistake. If this was the people smuggler, he would already know there are only two of you. It must be the police!

  Still holding tight to Jamilah’s arm, you start to run. Vines lash at your bare arms, and the trees seem to bounce wildly in the torchlight as the man behind you blows a whistle and runs after you. The ground is a tangle of roots and holes, and Jamilah is trying her best to keep up but keeps falling heavily against your arm every few steps.

  The policeman’s footsteps are closing in, and you can hear that more of his colleagues have joined in the chase, shouting to each other in Indonesian as they run.

  You glance over your shoulder to see how far behind you the policeman is, and he closes the remaining gap in only a few bounds, his eyes and teeth shining in the torchlight, his breath loud and menacing.

  He grabs Jamilah, and she squeals and wriggles violently. You throw your full body weight at him, aiming to headbutt him in the nose, but he dodges nimbly and you miss, only clipping the side of his body and lurching face-first into the leaf litter.

  The other policemen are on you now, and they use their batons to beat you on your thighs, shoulders, back and arms. You throw your arms over your head to protect it from the beating, and then you feel a tight, cold band of metal snap shut around your wrists. One of the officers hauls you to your feet by the handcuffs he’s just placed on you.

  In the Indonesian jail, you are separated from Jamilah, and this hurts much more than the bruises from where the batons hit you, or your stomach, which aches from hunger after your long day on the boat. You are in an adult cell: a concrete room with filthy bunks and iron bars, which you share with about forty men.

  The roughest of the prisoners pick fights with the other men, steal their food, and bribe cigarettes from the jailors. They have skin laced with homemade tattoos, and their teeth are broken and brown. This prison is their den. They are known here, and feared. You try to stay as invisible as possible.

  You have only one hope to get you and Jamilah out of here: to offer the cash Abshir gave you to a jailer as a bribe. The bag you had with some food, drin
k, and the phone was taken when you were arrested. But the pen in your pocket and the money in your shoe luckily went untouched. For forty-eight hours, you watch the jailers come and go, sensing who’s brutal, who’s a soft touch, who can be corrupted.

  You pick a young jailer who you have seen reading an English-language magazine. His hair is slicked to one side, his eyes are hopeful, and his tan uniform is clean. You almost think he might be too ‘good’ to accept a bribe – but then you see him lingering dreamily on the magazine page that advertises a car. He’s poor. He wants better things.

  You wait until he comes close to the bars and then, catching his eye, you lean forward and whisper your offer to him.

  He’s tempted. You can almost see, in his faraway gaze, a reflection of a tiny car, his hand on the wheel, his arm round a girl, a sunset over the ocean as the engine purrs. But then he turns away and pretends he hasn’t heard you. Your heart sinks.

  Later that day, a different jailer takes you out of your cell for a ‘check-up’. The other prisoners watch you suspiciously. You’re frightened that you’re about to be punished for having dared to offer a bribe.

  But the jailer takes you to a tiny office room, and Jamilah is there, sitting on a plastic chair. She bursts into tears at the sight of you. Her skin and hair are filthy. Her stick-thin shoulders shake as she gives an awful hacking cough, flecks of blood staining her hand and lips. You help her to stand; you can see she’s almost too weak to walk.

  The officer who brought you to the room slams the door and strides away. You stand in the middle of the room, holding Jamilah, not knowing what to do next.

  The door opens again, and the same officer you offered the bribe to walks in. The first thing he does is check the door is locked behind him.

  ‘All right, where’s the money?’ he asks.

  You slip off your shoe and take out three hundred dollars, leaving you a hundred and fifty still hidden under the sole. But the jailer shakes his head.

  ‘Not enough,’ he says.

  So you add the final hundred and fifty. ‘That’s all I have,’ you insist. ‘Really.’

  ‘Not enough,’ insists the young jailer again. ‘Five hundred is minimum.’

  Since Piggy took fifty dollars of your money to get Jamilah a crappy box of used headache tablets, you’re fifty short of fulfilling the bribe. There’s only one last thing you have to offer: the pen.

  You look at Jamilah and know that it would spell her death to send her back inside the jail, even for a few more days. You take the pen from your pocket.

  ‘It’s real gold,’ you tell him. ‘Worth more than fifty dollars.’

  After that, the jailer moves so quickly and smoothly to get you out of jail that it’s clear he’s done this before.

  You and Jamilah are ejected onto the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia. You are homeless, penniless, starving, and Jamilah is horribly sick. Your pen is gone, you have no access to a phone, and anyone who knows you and might help is thousands of kilometres away. You don’t speak the language, and any police officer who finds you here without papers could throw you back into jail, from where, next time, there would be no escape.

  Looking around, you can see at a glance that there are lots of other people like you in Jakarta, living on a thread of hope day to day, getting by on their wits alone.

  It’s the same in every city in the world, you realise now. Maybe it’s even like this in Australia. If you take the shiny lid off, turn a city upside down and shake it, all the poor people will tumble out like pebbles.

  You look down at Jamilah. At least we’re two pebbles together, you think. You hope you’ll be able to survive.

  To return to your last choice and try again, go to scene 30.

  You breathe as slowly and quietly as you can and shake your head at Jamilah. You’re not moving until you can be sure it’s safe to come out – no matter how long it takes.

  ‘Come on, kids,’ says the voice. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  You’ve heard enough Somali folktales by now, like the one about the persuasive cat and the innocent mouse, to know that the only people who call out ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ are usually the ones who want to.

  Eventually, the torch swings around and the footsteps crunch away.

  You stay in the bush all night. Mosquitoes whine and bite your arms and legs. Jamilah coughs so much she gags. You wipe the sweaty hair and gritty bits of bark and dirt from her forehead.

  Just before dawn, when monkeys are hooting and crashing through the branches above, and cracks of pink light are slipping through the leaves, you hear another person approach. They are stomping, and muttering what can only be Indonesian curses. Then they give a shout in English.

  ‘Okay, kids! If you hear me, then come out, you bloody …’ He lapses into Indonesian swearing again. Then he shouts, in a voice wilder than the monkeys: ‘Big punch on my face! Can’t see from one eye! My car taken, and I spend the night in jail, and now I pay bloody big fine! All to come back and look for you! If you’re still here, you did very good, but come out now or I bloody leave and not come back!’

  The voice is so indignant, and the stomping so heated, you’re sure it’s your man. The police couldn’t be that good at acting. You can see glimpses of his clothes now, and he’s not in uniform, although in the dim pre-dawn light you can’t get a clear look at his face.

  Then you smell clove cigarettes.

  ‘That’s him,’ you say to Jamilah. You climb out of the bush and call, ‘Hey! We’re over here!’

  The people smuggler, who has a horrible puffed-up purple eyelid from his encounter with the police, is relieved to see you, and he actually congratulates you for hiding so well. He doesn’t get his share of the money until you reach Australia, so lost refugees mean lost income for him.

  As he helps you into his car, he tells you his name is Budi. It’s a long drive to Cisarua, the village south of Jakarta where you’ll be staying. For three days you eat and sleep in the car, until you finally reach a large white house on the side of a hill on a ramshackle, leafy street in Cisarua. Budi doesn’t lock you in a basement room like Piggy did – you are free to come and go as you wish, but he warns you against drawing attention to yourself on the streets.

  The house is full of about twenty other asylum seekers, who so far all seem to be men. Mattresses line the hallways. Everybody shares the one kitchen and toilet. When you and Jamilah go to the kitchen for some water, some pale men with thick eyebrows and dark hair sitting at the kitchen table eye you morosely. You say hello in English, but they simply shrug then go back to their card game. You wonder where they’ve come from.

  You and Jamilah return to the bedroom Budi allocated to you and sit uneasily on the one thin mattress that’s on the floor. About six more mattresses have been pulled to one side and stacked against the wall. You take out your pen and twirl it between your fingertips.

  Just then, there’s a knock at the door. You whip the pen away just before the door opens a fraction and a woman appears. She has similar features to the men who were sitting around the table, wears a navy-blue hijab, and rests one hand on her pregnant belly. In the other hand she holds a bowl of noodles with two forks. She doesn’t speak, just holds the bowl out and smiles.

  ‘Thank you!’ cries Jamilah, and the woman nods happily as Jamilah takes the bowl.

  ‘What’s your name? And what country do you come from?’ you ask her.

  She thinks for a second, working through the English. Then she whispers softly: ‘I am Maryam. My husband, Majid. We from Iran. We stay … Indonesia … two years now.’

  She looks at her belly sadly. Then one of the men from the kitchen calls something in her language, and she turns to go.

  ‘Wait!’ you cry. ‘Did you say two years?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maryam replies, turning back to you. ‘Two years, three months. We … no more money to pay smuggler. First try no good.’ Her voice is resigned, but gentle.

  You share some of the noodles with J
amilah. She’s too tired to finish eating, and her forehead still feels hot to touch. So you go out, with a few of the American dollars from your stash in your pocket, to see if you can buy more food, medicine, and a local simcard.

  Abshir will be relieved to hear that you made it this far, and maybe it’s time to call Aadan too, and tell him you’ll be seeing him soon.

  You walk down the steep street, looking at some pigs snuffling through rubbish piles, happy children running off to school, trees with unripe bananas beginning to fruit.

  You wonder how long you could survive, treading water, in a place like this before you ran out of money or met with some bad luck. Budi’s bruised eye has hinted at a violent and corrupt world lying beneath this seemingly pleasant scene.

  There’s a money-changing machine just at the bottom of the street, and a place that sells you an Indonesian simcard. It’s a relief to hear Abshir’s voice at last.

  ‘Walaal!’ he shouts. ‘Man, you’d better call your Uncle Aadan right now, before he flies over here and personally chops my head off!’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I couldn’t keep it from him – he called for you, and I told him what’s happened. But he doesn’t get it! He says I shouldn’t have sent you alone – it’s too dangerous, you know, all of that. I said, “Walaal, these kids are fighters, they’ll make it!” And let’s face it, you’d be dead by now if you’d stayed. There just wasn’t another way. I tried to tell him! But he might forgive me, at least a little bit, if you call him straight away. He’s worried sick!’

  You call Aadan, and he shouts in relief, then immediately starts firing advice and warnings at you like a bossy grandma. You have to interrupt him so you can tell him about Rahama.

  ‘Jamilah’s certain she saw her,’ you tell him. ‘In Italy, being pulled out of the sea. Jamilah had a fever and I didn’t believe her at first, but then I saw Zayd, in the very same clip.’