How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  The next few days got back to the routine of station life but for me it felt more like the pointless and futile shuffling of deckchairs. The muster crew left, the canteen was quiet at mealtimes and things were more relaxed. Palmenter drove off before dawn one morning as he usually did and the only difference was his white 4WD missing from the shed and a palpable lack of tension around the place. Margaret must have left with him so I began seeing Lucy more often. Spanner warned me a couple of times.

  ‘Don’t go there.’ Or, ‘If he finds out he’ll be furious.’ What would he do, sack me? Of course there was also bravado – I don’t care look at me I’m not scared of Palmenter – and also a showing off: I got the girl and you blokes didn’t. But who was I kidding? Palmenter scared me. When he was away everyone just went about station life and ignored us, so Lucy and I spent most afternoons and evenings together, but always there were Spanner’s words in the back of my mind.

  After the heat of the day we would walk around the settlement, out around the firebreak that took us on a circuit behind all the buildings. It was like walking around an island, the waves of spinifex and scrub washed the shores of our paradise and we talked of lifeboats and rescue, of many things. I didn’t find out much about her but I do know she had lived near the sea because I remember that island thing. The spinifex was an unswimmable ocean and a voyage across would lead to either freedom or certain death. It depended on your state of mind.

  The girls weren’t allowed to eat in the cafeteria, a rule that for some reason persisted even when Palmenter wasn’t around because I don’t think anyone would have cared. After dinner Lucy would sneak out to my room and we would make love, or sometimes I would take a blanket and we would go for midnight walks and lie together and talk of stars and other worlds and life and infinity. A few times, we borrowed a car from Spanner and went for a picnic or a swim down at the waterhole but it was difficult to do that because Palmenter strictly rationed the fuel.

  Funny how time is. The weeks after I first arrived I was kept busy, the hours passed quickly but the weeks dragged. It seemed like a lifetime but in fact it was only a few months after I first arrived that Lucy and I met. Now, with Lucy, the days dragged but the weeks flew by. I stopped thinking so much of home and I remember Palmenter commenting to me that I seemed to be enjoying the place more. A muster and an import were due. He had arrived: the first sign was his car was in the shed, and suddenly everyone seemed on edge. The tension at mealtimes came back. Spanner drank a few more beers each day and preferred to stay by himself in the shed. No one said anything, but you just knew it was down to Palmenter. Lucy and I kept seeing each other but she didn’t stay in my room overnight and we didn’t make love anymore. She said it was because she had a lot of work to do but I knew it was something else, something she couldn’t talk about. She wasn’t herself on our evening walks. Occasionally she would let me hold her hand, but it was fleeting, cautious. I felt we were like misbehaving children.

  The last time I saw her was three days before the muster. We all knew a muster was coming. Cookie had to do extra food, Spanner was busy, Charles arrived with the truckload of vans, and Palmenter himself was forever coming and going, roaring into the compound in a cloud of dust. He would make calls on the satellite phone while standing on the verandah and would glare at anyone who dared to come near him. One morning, without warning, Palmenter called me over and told me I was to do a bore run. Spanner would organise a 4WD van for me and a map of the tracks I was to follow. He wanted me to leave that day, after lunch. I tried to find Lucy to tell her but every time I went near the homestead Palmenter was there, he seemed to be watching me. Why was it so urgent to suddenly do a bore run? I’d done them before but now I needed a map, had to go further, all the way out along the eastern boundary. Why? Was this some sort of punishment because of me and Lucy?

  The night before, Lucy and I had met by the water tower. It was all innocent enough, I wanted her to spend the night in my room, I missed waking next to her, I said, feeling her warmth and softness during the night, I wanted to lie all night curled together with her. She said soon, not tonight, and then when she saw Palmenter watching us from the verandah she hurried away.

  Stupid. I shouldn’t have cared. I should have gone after her but Palmenter was watching and in my head I was thinking what Spanner had said and also that if Palmenter found out he would be furious and although Lucy and I might walk together as if we didn’t care, in truth I was scared. I busied myself about the base of the tower, pretending to do something with the valves and water outlets. I could say that I was trying to protect her by not being too obviously with her, but that would be a lie.

  When I looked up he was gone and so was Lucy.

  For the first time since I got to Palmenter Station I drove out that afternoon by myself and it was a freedom I had dreamed and yearned for but now it was all sour because I had gone without saying goodbye to Lucy. I worried she might think it was because I wanted to sleep with her that night and she said no, that she would think I had known I was driving the bore run before I talked to her, that I wanted a tumble with her before I took off. What would we say to each other when I returned in two weeks? I thought about her a lot, but did we love each other? Was this love? Or just sex? Or something to hide our loneliness? After all, what did we really know about each other? We made love and talked of the stars and other worlds, of the sky and planets and we laughed at imaginings and fantasy and we never talked of our own world or family or of our own dreams or what had come before or was to come or of how it was that we both came to be here at the end of the world.

  As I drove off I was disappointed I had not said farewell to her but knew I’d be back soon. It didn’t occur to me that the girls never stayed beyond a single muster or, if I had noticed, it was one of those things I didn’t think about too much. Margaret and the girls were just one of the things that happened at the station and only later did it seem odd, only later when I knew more.

  And now here I was alone in the office with Spanner while he went on about cruise liners and romance and I was thinking again about Lucy who I had tried not to think of, and with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight suddenly saw some things I should have seen before. Like, how the pine smell I found so comforting and vaguely familiar in Palmenter’s car was the same as the perfume of Lucy and it was the same clean smell of the homestead. Like how Spanner all along had been my friend. Did he know that Lucy had been arrested and sent to a detention centre? Or did Palmenter drive out with Margaret and all the girls and then deposit Lucy at a police station? I never found out if he did know but if Spanner had not told me to back off I might be with Arif right now.

  I had got back from that bore run and Lucy was gone and I knew immediately it was a deliberate plan of Palmenter’s. I was furious, but I knew not to confront him. Instead I went to him with a carefully worded speech. I had decided, I said, that station life was not for me. I reminded him that I was promised a ticket home after six months. At first he seemed obliging.

  ‘Sure, have to be after the wet. Roads are all closed, but soon as then, if you still want. We’ll see if you want to leave then, Son.’

  I asked him if I could use the phone to call home as I hadn’t heard from my family for six months. I knew he had a phone in his office and he also had a satellite phone.

  ‘Phone calls are expensive out here. Company doesn’t allow private calls, Son.’

  ‘Just a short call,’ I pleaded.

  He refused, but said I should write them a letter.

  ‘I’ll make sure it gets out with the next chopper. Take a bit of time to get delivered, arrive home about the time you do.’

  He said it with such derision, as if wanting to contact my family was the thing of a weakling. Despite my carefully worded request and calm forethought I saw red. I called him an arsehole and stormed off. I was so furious that I might have done anything but Spanner told me to play it cool, to take it easy.

  ‘He’s right, the roads are
all closed. Plus, he’s just not worth it.’

  He didn’t say she’s not worth it, but that Palmenter was not worth it.

  Of course I didn’t leave after the wet and I know now that my letter never got delivered. I think what happened to Arif soon after was a plan by Palmenter to keep me tied into his schemes and make it so that I could never leave. He made a decision who to keep, who should go. I was useful to him. I looked tough but I was a weakling who could do the books and keep the paperwork in order.

  I am sure I owe my life to Spanner because he calmed me down.

  7

  It was the build-up to the wet. Everyone was short-tempered and even the smallest thing irritated. Palmenter and Arif were walking towards one of the vans and Arif was talking and jerking his arms for emphasis. Palmenter was listening, or at least he appeared to be listening, as he motioned towards the car. When he saw me he signalled me to come too.

  ‘Come on, let’s take a drive.’

  I didn’t know what was going on. I could tell that, like me, Palmenter disliked Arif’s in-your-face way of talking. Arif would look close at you, stare straight at you as if to challenge. It was annoying.

  I knew my way around the station pretty well by now and I couldn’t think where we might want to drive to at such short notice. It was three hours to the roadhouse and town was an overnighter. Not that I’d ever done it. Cookie and Charles were the only ones who ever got to leave the station. I thought perhaps Palmenter was going to show us something to do with sacred sites.

  Arif had asked about these and we all knew there were sites. Most were so sacred we were not allowed to go near them. Recently, when Spanner said something about sacred sites, I had asked him where they were. He answered that no one knew and I wondered why he had mentioned it.

  ‘They’ll let you know if you get too close,’ he added.

  He was referring to the muster crew, who sometimes made reference to the special places they had charge of in a way that made it clear they were sacred. The crew lived a fairly traditional life on the station somewhere but I had no idea where. From my bore runs I had discovered just how big the station was, and it was no real surprise that after the muster they could disappear as if melting into the land. I wished I could have stumbled upon a group and that they’d take me in, not only to escape Palmenter but so they could show me some of their old ways, share some of their secrets. Because there was something more out there, something spiritual. The longer you were out there the stronger it felt.

  Out on the bore runs I would park on a rise and see in every direction: spinifex and grassland and shrubs and the snake path of trees along a watercourse, a shimmering endless view where even the tiniest bit of glass, a car, a movement or smoke from a campfire would have shown up as a beacon. I could never see them, but I was certain they would know where I was. At muster time they appeared as if by magic in their beat-up old cars and descended on the homestead, crowded out the canteen drinking our beer, then disappeared as quickly when it was over. And I knew, even before Spanner said it, that if I had come close to a place I was not supposed to go they would be there to stop me.

  Arif was a Moslem. Palmenter called him a raghead.

  ‘Where is that thieving raghead?’ he’d ask, as though Spanner or I were supposed to know. Thing was, we usually did, we’d have seen Arif heading someplace a few moments before. Palmenter had given him a job on the station so he could pay off his debt but, like all of us, unless there was a muster going on, his actual tasks were a bit ill-defined.

  ‘Dunno,’ one of us would say, and Palmenter would storm off.

  Arif prayed several times a day, kneeling down on a special little rug he had. In the canteen he would often talk about God, or Allah, about worship, about how our lives needed to be spiritual. Not in a way that was seeking to convert us, more that he was interested. It was a question. He was a recent immigrant and wanted to know about the dreamtime, the sacred places, and he thought we would know about them. He wanted to be taken to see them and he refused to accept either that we didn’t know where they were or that we were not allowed to go there. How could a site be sacred if you couldn’t go there? Sacred was where you went with reverence; you paid respect by going there. A place couldn’t be sacred if you never saw it.

  Of course, I know now that Arif came in on a boat that Palmenter had organised and that he must have come in with a much larger group that landed while I was out on a bore run. He had no family, no one in Australia and if anyone back where he came from knew he was alive, they certainly didn’t know where he was. Palmenter had probably given him a job solely because of that, no one would miss him, he could not complain about wages or conditions or anything, but this was a subtlety lost on Arif. He complained about everything.

  Arif had been quite vocal from the moment he arrived. About how things were, about how long it was all taking, about money, the food, everything. By then I knew how Palmenter operated and I knew he would make some sort of offer to Arif, put him on the payroll, give him a job. But even that didn’t stop him complaining. The food wasn’t halal. There was nowhere to pray. We were all godless infidels who would burn in hell. We generally ignored him or avoided him, or sometimes we goaded him if we were bored and feeling like some sport. Mostly that was Cookie, who’d stand at the counter with the hatch open while we were eating and say something like ‘all men of god’ or ‘that halal enough for you?’ in a voice of genuine concern.

  As we drove off, Arif was talking about the justice of Allah and sacred things. I wondered if perhaps Palmenter was going to show us some lesser site, make up something to keep Arif happy. It was one of Palmenter’s things he would do, tell you of bigger things and get you thinking of the greater picture, the greater good. He liked saying things like ‘Son, the Great Spirit is watching over you’, or he would tell you things about the ancient land and culture, make you feel both insignificant and yet somehow wanting to be important, wanting to play your part. It was all bullshit, of course. It was just his way of getting what he wanted. Other times, it would be ‘fuck the land’, or ‘fuck traditions’ or whatever it was that was in his way.

  I realised Arif must be leaving because he was haranguing Palmenter about how he was expected to survive in the city now that Palmenter had taken all his money. How much he was owed for working there. Then he was talking more generally, about all of the imports, how Palmenter has been ripping them off. Arif wanted to know why some people had paid several thousand dollars more than others for basically the same thing, to be bundled on a boat with a small amount of rice and a place to sit, then smuggled into the station to be sent off with only a map and a dodgy campervan. I took it from his tone that Arif must have paid a lot more than others. I was pretty sure that Palmenter charged whatever he could: if he thought you had more, you paid more. It was how he operated.

  ‘In business, you charge what you can get away with,’ he told me once. ‘It’s got nothing to do with how much it costs. It’s all about how much people will pay.’

  ‘How do we survive in Sydney with no money?’ Arif said. ‘How we pay for food, for fuel to get us there? Maybe we be better in Villawood, they give us someplace to stay, feed us until we get a visa. They say it’s not so good in there but I think maybe it’s not so bad. Not so bad as this with no money, no food, you take everything then send us away. You give us some money back,’ Arif demanded. ‘You pay me for work I do.’

  Palmenter shrugged. I got in the back. If Arif could resign, perhaps I could too. But not now. I would have to wait until Palmenter was in a better mood.

  ‘This old van, I think he break down on way. We no get to Sydney, how we gunna fix with no money, eh?’ Arif kept talking as he got in the front. ‘If we get stopped by police, I must tell all about you.’

  ‘You lucky to get this far, Son. You now in the lucky country. You lucky to come here with me and not one of those leaky boats. Sink on the way. How far can you swim, Son? You keep on like this, you upset everyone. Everyone els
e is happy to be here and you just making trouble. You talk to the police, you won’t even end up in Villawood and everyone knows how bad that is. No, Son, you’ll be sent to Maribyrnong. That’s right, on the army base, and let me tell you, that is real hell. You’ll be left rotting away for years. Throw away the keys, leave you to rot. Don’t come running to me for help when that happens.’

  Palmenter was driving us out towards the highway.

  ‘You know how bad it is there? People go mad, commit suicide. They die rather than stay there. You don’t want to go there, Son. You’re best off with me. I do the best for you. You come to a new land because you want the good life and I am the one who got that for you. I got you here. Don’t throw it away.’ He was speaking in short fragments and I knew underneath he was seething. ‘You ragheads all the same. No gratitude.’

  But Arif kept on.

  ‘The van is old. You sell us an old car, if he break down maybe someone ask us where we from. I think the police ask us where we from, ask for passport, I no got. No one got.’ Arif was looking around the interior of the van as he spoke, pointing to faults. ‘This not working. This broken. Look.’ He pointed out the interior light, the taped-up side window, holes in the seat.

  I kept quiet in the back, wondering where Palmenter was taking us. I knew that Spanner had these vans working reliably and it would be unlikely that any of them would break down. The interiors he did not bother with, but the motors and gearbox, good tyres, they would be reliable. Not worth whatever outrageous price Palmenter charged for them, but then, what was the alternative?

  ‘They not all happy, not like you said. Everyone is complaining, about you, about the boat and the food, about how you take take take, and we have no money left, nothing left. We come here for a better life and now we have nothing, there is nothing.’ He gestured at the wide barren sandplain and as Arif made his gesture I could see what he meant. From the homestead the track sloped down towards the highway and we had a grand view. Even the highway was only that in name, and beyond that the land disappeared in a blue haze. ‘There is nothing. They ask me to speak for them, they say for me to tell you we don’t mind this Villawood, you can’t scare us with that. You give us some money back so we can live when we get to Sydney.’