by Paul Haines
She exhales gustily, silent, and smoke spills from her nose.
“It isn’t for data, you know. It’s so we know we’re always being watched. We’re the aberrant cultural cells in the larger body of Australia. Everything else is neat and orderly, and we’re the cancer, and they’ve got their eye on us, to make sure we don’t get out of hand.”
“You sound like Agent Smith.”
I return the cigarette. “It isn’t neat and orderly. It’s never been neat and orderly. This is Australia.” The smoke has coated my teeth and they’re tacky against my tongue.
I hate this place; the cold and the mud, the stagnant air infected with stewing sewerage and old steam from the mess hall, the emptiness of trees, the absence of all I’ve taken for granted—loose leaf tea, magpies stalking me on the nature strip, fog over the railway tracks, hot soft-boiled eggs, overheard laughter, running water, light switches that work, colour, colour, colour—I hate this temporary third-world country. I might be in shock.
“Why aren’t there any Australian Cultural Zones, anyway?”
I never did fit in the Asian Cultural Zone. To everyone else, I was Asian enough to be labelled ‘Asian’, but to all Asians, I was white. The looks I’d get as I left the railway station at Box Hill varied from surprise to hostility. I didn’t belong, and if they must be segregated, then they didn’t want me there.
There was never a question of whether I would be placed in a British Cultural Zone.
No one belongs in here either, and there is an equality in that misfitism like a balm on a burn.
Kim squints at me. “You haven’t even been here a day.”
“Don’t tell me I have to earn my bitterness.”
She laughs again, and some of the tension slides from my neck.
* * *
Colin is in the mess hall. Why is Colin in the mess hall? Too late, I’ve made eye contact. He parks himself at our table, the plastic chair stammering across the lino, a forced casualness in his white knuckles and clasped hands, that ticket inspector paranoia waiting to be challenged.
“Soooooo.” He can’t help but fill the silence he’s created. “Tess- I can call you Tess, right? You’re not Malaysian, and you’re not Chinese. What are you then?”
“Fuck off,” Kim suggests.
“I’m Australian.”
To his credit, he does not say yeah, but what are you really? “Your family, then.”
“It’s all in my file.”
“I’d rather hear it from you.”
The sound Kim makes could be at Colin, or at her carbonara.
The look he directs at me, this government-sanctioned bully, this clueless boy, this ordinary guy, unhinges my jaw. He’s all expectation, eager and open-minded, and trying so hard.
Okay then.
“Mum is white Australian. Her Mum came over from England, and her Dad is seventh generation white settler.”
“Then your Dad is Malaysian.”
“Yes. No.” I poke my carbonara with equal distaste. “He’s Chinese-Malaysian, which means the family is Chinese, but they live in Malaysia. Not Malaysian, though. Different cultural group. Sorta.”
“Doesn’t that mean he’s just Chinese?”
Dad, tucking into rendang and sneering at the group at the table opposite. “From northern China,” he said. “You can tell from the sallow skin and the pudgy faces.”
Mum met my eyes and we shared a shrug.
“Really?”
“Yeah.” A disapproving sniff. “You can tell.”
“Yes. No. He’s never been to China, and the family has been in Malaysia for generations. There’s geographical cross-pollination of the culture.”
Colin’s mouth puckers in thought.
“Like all the Greeks here, who’ve never been to Greece,” I add.
“But there aren’t many of them.” He dismisses them with an easy wave that floors my appetite faster than the cafeteria food. Kim glances at me, resignation in the slope of her mouth.
“There are enough to make several Mediterranean Cultural Zones.”
“Yeah, but not that many—”
“Do you think Australia is white?”
Finding himself suddenly pinned between us, he stalls. He knows the answer he wants to give will be shot down, and we know it too. He knows we’ll sniff out any dishonest reply, and we know he knows that too.
“The majority is,” he offers lamely.
Kim curls her lip. “I’m white. What the fuck am I doing in here?”
He raises his hands helplessly. “It’s not my call, you know, I’m just trying to get a fix on Tess here, you see. Your Dad, I mean.” He can’t change the subject fast enough. “If he were deported—”
“Not ‘were’. He has been.” Thirty-nine missed calls. Seventeen messages. Mum standing alone in the kitchen with the dogs sitting in the hallway, waiting for Dad to come home. “You didn’t even give me enough notice to get to the airport and say goodbye.”
Colin raises his hands again, against the accusation in my voice. “That wasn’t me personally, come on now, I’m trying to understand.”
Which is more than most DREOC officers do, I’ll give him that. I bite down the tired tirade stirring on my tongue.
“So, since he was deported from here for not being Australian, will he be deported from Malaysia for not being Malaysian?”
I tell myself I could answer, if I chose to.
“Would they send him to China? Would China take your family?”
“It’s a detention centre,” Dad said, weeks ago, a weak connection forcing his voice under water. “For everyone who gave up their Malaysian citizenship to live overseas. There’s not enough space. There isn’t any running water. There aren’t any beds. They won’t let any of your uncles contact me. They don’t want us—” He cut himself off, but not before I heard the catch in his voice. When he continued, he was steady, collected, even had a weak laugh. “And the squat toilets are just holes in the courtyard. They’re not screened off. You should have seen the queue after they served curry for dinner. What a mess. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.”
He was pretending to be okay.
The battery in his phone died, and that was the last I heard of him.
“Sorry. I know you don’t know, I shouldn’t be asking. Um.” Colin’s eyes dart to my plate. “Are you going to eat that? No? Thanks.” He grabs the plastic fork from my hand and shovels tortellini in his mouth. “It must be hard,” he says, cream sauce thickening the saliva strings between his teeth.
“Jesus—” A touch on Kim’s arm and she quiets.
I could stop here. I could. I could get up and walk away.
“How do you justify it?” I ask, keeping my voice level.
“Pardon?”
I swallow, control cold and hard in my throat. “You kick people out of the country and divide up families and make people live where you say they can live. DREOC is destroying lives. Destroying us. How do you justify it?”
Chewing slower, he shrugs uncomfortably. “I’m not destroying anything, I mean, it’s only temporary stuff. I don’t have any say in it, you know. It’s just a job. All the higher ups make the decisions. We just get told what to do.”
I swallow again, control getting harder to hold. “You have to pay the bills?”
“Exactly!”
“Pretty sure that’s what a lot of the guards in the World War II Nazi concentration camps said.”
“What, hey! That’s not fair!” Flecks of pasta spray from between his teeth and he clasps a hand over his mouth, chewing and swallowing hastily. “We’re not going around killing anyone, Jesus! This isn’t ethnic cleansing, or, or, genocide, or anything like that, it’s not permanent, it’s just, just—”
“Bringing some order?” Kim suggests.
“Tidying up?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Tidying up. That’s all.” He looks down at the plate, oil congealed around the bacon.
I lean forward. “Tidying and cleansing mean the same thing.”
“It’s not like that and you know it!”
His shout echoes across the mess hall, a sudden quiet focus unfurling in its wake.
“Do I know it?” I hiss. “Do I fucking know it? Do you? Do you know how it really is then? If you do, then please, by all means, educate us!” I can’t keep it down. “Have you had men in uniform drag you out your door and throw you in the back of a truck and haul you away without telling you where to? How about being told you are no longer allowed to associate with your friends and family because they’re white and you’re not? Has your father been kicked out of the country? No? Are you coming to terms with the fact you may never see him again? No? I bet you still live at home and none of this has ever occurred to you, you take it all for granted, you pathetic whitebread fuck!” He looks away, wavering protests silenced. Horrified I said it, horrified I meant it, but not enough to stop, I don’t stop, I can’t stop, I won’t stop. “How about this place, then? This prison camp, don’t pretend this shit hole isn’t a fucking prison. Have you just been thrown into a scungy-arse portable with no water and no power and no privacy and nothing, nothing, and told you can’t leave because you might contaminate the rest of the fucking state?!”
It’s a roar an eruption a nova whiting out the mess hall and snarling in my ears. It shakes me and shakes me, my fists on the table, Colin wide-eyed and flinching. There isn’t enough air in me, but still it comes out, this final razor opening everyone within earshot.
“Despite being born here, and having lived only here, have you been told you are not Australian?”
I can hear nothing. There is nothing to hear. No one says a word. No one can speak over the answering roar in their own hearts. It has shaken me, and I am shaken, frightened by the violence in my blood and bones, but I swallow, taste bile, and swallow it down.
After a long pause spent probing a grey crescent of mushroom with the tip of his fork, Colin shakes his head.
“It’s just a job,” he repeats, barely a whisper.
“Just a job,” I repeat.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Kim murmurs.
“Yes,” I lie.
Colin draws in a shuddering breath and looks up, the muscles in his neck taut against his spine, raising his head in rusty wincing judders. There is nothing he rests his gaze on, no safe place to look here, among us, until he meets my eyes. I don’t know what he sees, but in him I see a hunger.
“I’m just . . .” His breath is heavy with cream and garlic, which doesn’t hide the rank cold sweat. “I want to help.”
I loosen my fingers. “We don’t want help,” I say, and my voice carries, clear and calm in the aftermath, addressing not just him and Kim, but everyone, all the misfits and oddballs and mongrels and mixtures.
“We want change.”
This isn’t fury. This is an offer.
The realisation widens his eyes and parts his lips. Is the breath he draws laden with hope? With anticipation? I can see right through him and watch that first spark catch and light up. All he needs is one last push.
His eyes are so clear, so bright.
I will change that.
“Tell me how the Psychic Waypoint Towers work.”
This enemy, this ordinary person, he doesn’t want to be the bad guy.
I won’t let him.
II.
There’s no escaping the smell.
It saturates the air, lends it a fullness that sits heavy in the lungs and coats the back of the throat. We cover our faces with rags and masks already carrying the stench. It wends its way into all closed spaces. It seeps into the skin and hair. No one is carefree with the air they breathe. No one gets used to it.
Melbourne’s birds, the magpies and seagulls and crows, have grown fat and torpid. They need never hunt, they need never compete. There is more food than they can eat, and they waddle about the streets, complacent and lazy, not even pausing to peck at a thumb rolled into a gutter, the fingernail hanging loose and ready to fall.
Occasionally, when there is a lull in hostilities, new fires are lit. Whether once revolutionaries or DREOC militia, nearby bodies are collected and heaped. In burnt-out ambulances. In florist kiosks. In derailed trams. Ruins given a new purpose. The dead drape careless arms across each other. They all look the same. Precious fuel and they burn and the smell changes. We don’t linger.
We need food, and we do what we must to have it.
And no matter what it is—spam, tinned asparagus, vegemite, a jar of anchovies, a can of mock turkey—when opened, when cooked, when that first bite hits the tongue-
It tastes like the dead.
It’s come down to this.
“It’s not worth it,” I say, sitting on the roof of the municipal hall on Ruckers Hill, binoculars pointed towards the city, the sunset in my eyes. Last night, DREOC made an enormous push and took back the Atherton Gardens housing blocks in Fitzroy, despite our best efforts.
Colin rubs his thumb on my hairline, behind my ear, making a clean patch in the grime. “You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
This was, in another life, my favourite view of Melbourne. It was a grand surprise opening up beyond the petrol station and houses without warning. I’d take long looping walks, always culminating on this hill, with the sun gone, and the city rising graceful and clean into the night sky. Full of glass, full of light, full of determinedly individual architecture, each building making a unique statement, each building clashing with its neighbours.
Now the glass is broken and crumbed on the streets, the buildings blasted, and everything is smoke and dust and smoke and dust.
The DREOC militia have wasted no time. A fresh Psychic Waypoint Tower, gleaming clean and orange in the sinking light, is growing on the commission block roof, amid the air-conditioning vents and mobile phone towers. If they complete it, they’ll have a live feed into Melbourne once again. They’ll be able to see us. They’ll be able to find us.
They’ll know our plan.
“We’re not finished. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Later, you’ll see you’re wrong.” There is a conviction in his voice that wasn’t always there. I haven’t seen uncertainty in him for a long time, not since that first day, back in the camp, standing in the ruins of the first Psychic Waypoint Tower destroyed, rag-tag army of misfits and mongrels around us and the camp’s director kneeling at my feet. I pulled the trigger, and watched the spark within him become an inferno.
The wind changes, and smoke obscures my view. Burning tyres, burning houses, burning petrol stations; every sunset is spectacular.
“We were a minority.” I lower the binoculars. They’re dropping smoke flares around the roof to mask the tower’s construction, and on the ground mounds of trash are set alight to screen their movements.
I doubt we’ll miraculously stumble across any rocket launchers before they bring the tower online. We have to make our move now, even if we’re not ready.
“Maybe,” I say, thinking back to a camp of cheap temporary housing on an industrial site in the far western suburbs, one camp out of an entire state, and I wonder where Mum is, if she got out with the rest of the refugees, or- no, don’t think about that. “Maybe we should have been left to suffer so the majority could live in peace.”
He leans in close, close enough I can hear him swallow, throat tight and tense and dry. “It’s too late,” he says through clenched teeth. “To change your mind.”
It’s never too late to change, I think, but do not say.
A scuffle on the ladder, and Kim pops up through the trapdoor. “Slop’s up. Pickled dace and marmalade, picked it special just for you, Col.”
“We should eat before we meet the others.” I stand and head back to the trapdoor. He’ll follow. He always does.
* * *
What signs there are read Bonds Warehouse and warning condemned building do not enter and asbestos hazard All Personnel Must Wear Protective Clothing. A derelict storage warehouse in Thomast
own, all grime-coated gutters and stone-broken windows, dribbles of rust and pigeon shit caked down the walls. That wet taste of old metal and cold stone in the vast empty spaces surrounding it. A chain-link fence with a crusted gate and padlock sealing off a bare concrete courtyard spackled with weed.
This is not DREOC’s primary research facility. That one is signposted, advertised, and even ran guided tours on the weekends.
This is DREOC’s real research facility.
Before, all transmissions from every Psychic Waypoint Tower in the state came to this site. Everything read in the unconscious, nocturnal and waking conscious wavebands came silent through the sky to an antenna array concealed within the structure. The neighbourhood died from the psychic pollution, although no one knew it at the time. The thoughtfog broke everyone, eventually.
The complex extends beneath the surface, surprisingly far down, safe from the poisonous space it created. We have only the original planning blue prints. We could be wrong about a lot of things.
And we certainly are.
When we reach the twelfth sub-level, when we turn the corner and see the featureless corridor terminate at a cell door bearing no name or number, when we finally reach our objective, my hands are still clean, but I am not. I am uninjured, my breathing even, but something inside me cannot stop howling.
With such operations, I like to guess how many years of therapy it would take to undo the evening’s actions. The answer is always: none. I don’t like counsellors. If I can’t absolve myself of this, then no one can.
“Stay here.” Kim nods, and Colin leaves the team guarding the stairwell and joins me at the door.
“Just a swipe card?” he asks. The reader flicks to green and the passageway echoes with the thunk of the bolt flung back. I don’t let my relief show. The swipe card cost too much for doubt.
I push the door open.
Small, square, unornamented. Empty walls, no carpet. One hospital bed, devoid of extraneous medical equipment. In it, one girl, beneath a doona. A floral doona. With bees. Heavy leather restrains all her limbs with only minimal slack for movement. The smell of piss and shit.