On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  Finley was applying pressure to something as she spoke, and without warning his hand slipped forward.

  ‘Fuck!’ He looked around in frustration, saw his son. ‘Luke, take the f—Luke! What’s wrong with you? Take the foot outside and bury it. I do not want him to see it when he comes round. You,’ he gestured at Isi, ‘get the tequila bottle and splash my hands again.’

  She poured the spirit over his hands as he watched Luke’s departing back. ‘Fucking hopeless,’ he muttered.

  He looked at Hamid, holding his hands back, then took hold of the boy’s head, peering intently into his unseeing eyes. ‘Shit.’

  His fingers searched through the wet hair, pressing occasionally. He looked back at Tim, at his unfinished work. Checked Hamid’s pulse, his eyes again.

  ‘Shit. Why did this have to happen right now?’

  He exhaled loudly, pressed his hands to his temples. They left a slick of alcohol on his skin. ‘Your Indo boys. Is one of them an engineer?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Isi. ‘Sanusi.’

  ‘He’s got tools, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Tell him I need a cordless drill and a hole thingy…um…’ he searched for the word, his face racked by the effort to cut through the static. ‘Spade bit. About twenty mil. And a water bottle, drink bottle. Quickly.’

  ‘What’s going on, Neil?’ she pleaded.

  ‘Intracranial bleeding, an extradural.’

  Finley had already returned to Tim’s leg before Isi left the tent, working feverishly and looking back at Hamid as he did so. She could hear him berating his son as she left, telling him to pull himself together.

  Sanusi was on the beach. He understood the order for the drill, and if he was puzzled it didn’t show. She came with him in the Zodiac out to the Java Ridge so she could search for a water bottle, wondering all the while how Joel would have responded in this situation. He was good in a crisis: a present-tense, resolvable crisis. It was the life issues he ran from. This fucking mess, she reflected, was a little of each.

  She had the drill and the water bottle back to Finley before she had given any thought to what he was going to do with them. When she returned, Luke had the water boiling in the pot outside again, and on hearing her footfalls, Finley yelled out to her to put the drill bit in the pot. She watched it tumble in the bubbling water, still not understanding. When she entered the tent, she found to her relief that the severed foot was gone. But Finley looked ragged: bright red in the face and sweating freely. He’d closed the amputation wound and was dressing it.

  ‘Well done,’ she ventured.

  He focussed on her as though he hadn’t seen her come in. ‘Well done, you reckon? Well done? You fucking idiot—I’ve got nerves and vessels and shit all over the place in there that I can’t even find, and he’s going to wake up this way, and you come up with well done?’

  He snatched the drill from her and gave it a rev to ensure it worked. Hamid hadn’t moved throughout, and he didn’t move now as Finley took a disposable razor and shaved the side of his head. Despite his manic state, his strokes were sure-handed and efficient. Before long he had a clear patch shaved away without a nick. He worked over the bald area with the alcohol wipes and sat back for a moment.

  Behind him, Tim continued to stir. The sound of his breathing was more pronounced now, and his movements looked more like the process of awakening than the involuntary spasms brought on by the drug.

  ‘Roll him into a recovery position, facing me. You do know what that is, right?’ She ignored the barb and rolled Tim over onto his side, bracing his back with a pile of rolled-up towels. The stump of his leg remained elevated on the plastic tub.

  ‘And scoop some boiling water from the pot into the water bottle. Slosh it out thoroughly and then fill it again. Don’t touch anything.’

  She did as she was told. When she returned, Finley had laid out his tools on new sheets of cling wrap beside Hamid’s head. He waited for her to put the water bottle down, then took up a scalpel and cut a half-moon into Hamid’s scalp, right over the abrasion. The blood flowed fast over his hands and down the side of Hamid’s head, into the corner of his jaw and around the back of his ear. It dripped on the mat under his head and grew into a pool. Finley took up a pair of silver forceps and pulled downwards on the flap of skin he’d created.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Put some gloves on and hold this.’

  Once she had the forceps in her hand and the flap of skin was pulled clear, Finley squirted liberally from the water bottle, clearing the blood away for long enough for Isi to see the skull revealed beneath. Tim’s movement behind her was urgent and frightening. She wondered how Finley could focus on what he was doing.

  ‘Luke!’ he yelled. His son reappeared from wherever he’d been. ‘Get the spade bit out of the water and bring it to me. Don’t touch it with your hands under any circumstances.’

  Isi was starting to understand now.

  But faster than she could process it all, Finley had fixed the bit into the drill, had gunned the trigger. He was up on his knees now, with one hand pressing down on the poor boy’s head and the other holding the spinning drill.

  Luke crawled back to his place against the wall of the tent, again sat with his head in his hands. Without warning—without energy—he vomited all over the front of himself. Tried to wipe the mess off his chest with disgusted fingers.

  Neil Finley appeared not to notice him. He was thinking. He was thinking hard and sweating and muttering to himself. ‘Fuck. Fuck. He’s nearly gone.’

  Why hasn’t he drugged him? Isi wanted to ask. But she knew the answer. There was no ketamine left. Hamid had descended far from consciousness anyway.

  The drill was screaming at full revs. Finley had the trigger clamped under the finger of his gloved and bloody fist.

  And now Tim was bellowing behind them because he’d woken up and he was still off his face but he’d found the stump and Luke was weeping with his head in his hands and Finley wasn’t even looking up as he pressed the spade bit into Hamid’s skull and the blood sprayed around them in a perfect circular arc and Isi cursed Joel and all his profligacy and tried to summon the comfort of Roya’s night-dark eyes, and wished to God she’d never left home.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT

  Pulau Dana

  When Roya woke up she found night was falling. The Indonesian men from the Java Ridge fed her some rice and fish they’d kept aside, along with greens from the pots on the boat. She ate hungrily with her hands, squeezing her eyes shut so she could think about the flavours. When she mixed the greens through the rice with her fingers it reminded her of the sabzi challow her mother made at home. It was the best thing she had eaten in a long time.

  The survivors had placed themselves around a separate fire in murmuring huddles of three and four: men talking to men the same way they would sit outside their houses in Kabul, trading libels while the prayer beads slid between their fingers; women withdrawn among themselves too. The Afghans were with the Afghans, though the Hazaras stayed among their kind. The Tajiks sat together and, at a remove from them, the Iranians and Iraqis kept their counsel at opposite ends of the huddles.

  Slowly they drifted off to sleep, but Roya found she wasn’t tired: the long doze through the afternoon had left her restless and fully awake. She sat for a while with Hamid, who had now been moved out to the camp under the tarp, where the Afghan women had made him a bed of towels and clumped leaves. He was responsive, his head heavily bandaged, but confused and in pain. Soon enough he fell asleep, and Roya found herself alone. She went back to her mother, but Shafiqa was also tired. When she’d been pregnant with Roya she would have been able to seek shade during the hottest part of the day. Here the luxury of shade was fiercely held territory, and the tepid seawater offered little refreshment.

  Once her mother had fallen asleep, Roya wandered irritably down to the beach. She sat herself on the damp sand at the edge of the lagoon, thinking and watching the tiny bursts of activity in the wat
er that had been invisible until the light was extinguished.

  She had so rarely been alone: if her mother was working she would play with her brother. If he was in classes she would be working alongside her mother; washing clothes, preparing food, cleaning the house. At nights her father’s presence had filled the place: stern, sometimes playful, but always dominant. Visitors came and went in a steady flow because of the high esteem in which her parents were held. Her parents referred to some of them as relatives, although Roya didn’t think they really were—sometimes she quizzed their children and usually found there was no connection at all. It was about politics. The Taliban had picked up the scent: too many visits and the eye of that sleeping dog opened.

  Once the Talibs took back Herat, they guarded it closely. They watched for movement, for the tiniest symptoms of insurrection, real or imagined. Her parents had made a poor secret of their politics, and weaker people needed something to trade: a name would do. So the darkness descended over their home. The neighbours ceased to deal with them, ceased even to greet them in the street. It was like they were marked in some way. Children were scolded by their parents for playing with Roya and her brother. The school asked their parents not to send them anymore. It all pointed with grim certainty towards the night they came.

  A heavy scrunching tread approached across the sand behind her. Roya didn’t need to look up to know it was her mother.

  ‘Are you all right, Roya jan?’

  ‘I’m all right. Just sad.’ Roya pushed her toes into the delicate edge of the water, watched them change shape with the ripples.

  ‘What are you sad for?’

  The moon had lit the edge of a heavy cloud in front of them. The surface of the lagoon was sleek and reflective, but here and there a coil of ripples rolled out from the rise of a fish, wobbling the moon’s light as they went.

  Roya was thinking, unsure how to respond. ‘Everything went bad when the boat sank. I feel there’s worse coming, Mother. I don’t know how this will end.’

  ‘These people are kind…’

  ‘Yes,’ Roya said without conviction. ‘Some of them. Mother?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it all right when I speak English? With you, I mean?’

  ‘Of course it is. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  Shafiqa leaned down and placed one hand on the sand beside Roya so she could lower herself into a sitting position. The small noises that came from her in this slow process made Roya smile a little. Finally she was down, and she settled herself so that her crossed legs faced Roya’s. She unfolded a closed hand to reveal a pale stone.

  ‘I found some pumice,’ she said. ‘I think it washes up on the beach. Here, give me your feet: we can have a hammam.’ She took one of Roya’s feet and began to rub the sole with the pumice stone. Roya giggled a little and flinched. ‘It tickles.’

  ‘Yes, but nice?’

  ‘Nice.’

  Shafiqa continued her work, buffing the sides of Roya’s heel as though she was polishing a shoe. Roya was crying a little. She tipped forward against her mother’s breast, clutching at her forearm.

  ‘So what do we have left, you and me?’ Shafiqa stroked her daughter’s hair as she spoke. Roya didn’t respond, but began to draw swirls and dots in the sand between her mother’s knees with the tip of a finger. One tear fell among the shapes she’d made.

  ‘We have stories, you know. I’m carrying lots of them. Do you want a story?’

  Roya nodded silently.

  ‘Arabian Nights? I don’t think I’ve told you about The Fisherman and the Demon.’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Roya. Laughing among the muffling of her mother’s chador because Shafiqa had indeed told her this story, many times.

  ‘All right then.’ She paused, drawing the story together in her mind as her long fingers worked their way through the girl’s hair. Roya was watching the sand, transfixed by the tiny sparks of light on the heavy grains.

  ‘So. This is one of the stories that Scheherazade told the king in order to save her life.’

  Roya’s hands pushed the sand into hills and valleys. With each completed scoop, the grains fell away from her small fingers to leave them clean. The night was dense and still and heavy, the moon and the fish holding back the darkness.

  ‘In former times, in the country of the Persians, there was a certain old fisherman,’ Shafiqa began, as she always did.

  Roya had taken up a shell fragment and was using it to draw on her mother’s calf as Shafiqa continued with the tale. The poor man who couldn’t feed his family and the net that came up every day with fewer fish; the strange object caught one day in the net; his excitement as he unwrapped it to find a beautiful brass jar capped with an ornate lead stopper.

  Fish were gathering where they sat, where the sand dropped away to deeper water. Roya could faintly make out the shapes of their backs as they circled; as the poor fisherman prised open the jar with his bait knife.

  ‘And what came from the jar,’ breathed Shafiqa, ‘was the strangest thing you could ever imagine: a wisp of smoke, which became a column, then a great cloud. The smoke kept coming until it towered over him like a thunderstorm. Finally it gathered and took shape and there in front of him was a demon: a terrible huge creature with a head like a tomb, fangs…’

  ‘…like pincers.’ Roya did a ferocious voice.

  ‘A mouth…’

  ‘…like a cave.’

  ‘A throat like an alley and eyes…’

  ‘Eyes like lanterns!’

  ‘And the demon demanded of the fisherman: “You who have released me, tell me how you wish to die.”’

  Here, at the delicious climax of the story, Roya sometimes felt she could see the demon’s point. Imprisoned by the prophet Solomon and stuffed into a jar for nearly two thousand years. Making all sorts of promises about what he would do for any man who eventually released him…

  ‘He promised he’d make them rich. But nothing happened. He promised he would make them king…’

  ‘…but nothing happened,’ they chimed together. Shafiqa smiled down at her daughter.

  ‘Hundreds of years went by. He grew angry, snorting and stomping and pounding the insides of his jar. He told himself that whoever released him, he would put them to death, giving them only the choice as to how they died. And so that person, of course, was the fisherman.’

  Roya squinted at the mark she had made on her mother’s leg: a fine white vapour trail on the brown skin, like the one she’d seen across the sky yesterday.

  ‘But the fisherman stayed calm, even as he realised he might die, and that he might not see his children again. He thought hard, and he remembered that even though the demon was terrifying, he had the advantage of human reason. So he tried applying reason.

  ‘“Demon,” he said, “If I ask you one question will you answer it truthfully?”

  ‘The demon was in a hurry to get it over with, because he’d been in the jar a long, long time, so he replied: “Okay, okay, just make it snappy.”

  Roya giggled as she always did at her mother’s bad American accent.

  ‘“Here is my question then,” said the fisherman. “Did you really come from inside that jar?”

  ‘“Of course I did,” said the demon.

  ‘“It’s just that I can’t see how you could have,” said the fisherman. “It’s not even big enough for your hands and feet. I think you have been lying to me.”

  ‘The demon was furious! “Of course I was in the jar!” he fumed. “Look!” And he turned himself back into smoke and swirled around the fisherman and, little by little, poured himself into the jar.

  ‘“See?” he demanded from within. “You fool! There is ample room in h—”

  ‘And quick as a flash, the fisherman slammed the stopper back into the jar and rolled it into the sea. Then he carved a sign on a piece of driftwood with his knife, saying NO FISHING HERE. And he returned to his family, who greeted him with tears and hugs and kisses.’
/>   ‘So the lesson is,’ Roya intoned solemnly, ‘that we can defeat the demon with reason.’

  But her mother’s voice dropped in a way it had never done when she’d told this story before.

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe that the demon still waits in the jar.’

  THURSDAY MORNING

  Pulau Dana

  The fourth day on the island dawned bright and relentless. There was an unspoken consensus that it was time to go: Tim and Hamid were both stable, the bodies were buried and the dysentery cases were under control. Any longer and drinking water might become an issue.

  Isi felt a glimmer of optimism at last, knowing that if conditions favoured them she could have the boat at Ashmore Reef shortly after sunset. It was reasonable to assume that the reef was closely watched by Australian authorities, given its reputation as a landing point for asylum seekers and border-hopping fishermen. Friendly or otherwise, there’d be someone there to meet them.

  She plotted a course in the wheelhouse, ran the engines to get the pumps and the aircon going, soothed herself with the familiarity of routine. Outside, she could see Carl and Leah struggling to carry Tim across the beach and into the Zodiac. Leah, at the head end, had the bulk of the load and Carl had responsibility for the leg that ended nowhere. He cradled the thigh carefully, and in this, at least, he was useful: a practical task that didn’t challenge any of his fixed positions. He was trying.

  They were preparing the Zodiac. Leah sat on the beach, arranged herself under Tim so that his head was resting on one of her thighs. Even at this distance Isi could tell that Tim was in a stupor, the effects of the ketamine still wearing off. No matter how she tried, Isi couldn’t grapple with the notion of going to sleep with an injury and waking up with an amputation. The overheard exchange between surgeon and patient had been brutal:

  Your foot was ischaemic. The blood supply was stuffed because of the crush injury and the end of the limb was dying.

  Tim’s half-conscious mind, all snarled in shock and chemical residue, appeared to have no room for the logic.