by Jock Serong
‘I know you’re asking questions, you cunt. You want a…a… fucking point here. Trying to be fucking cute. Well I’ve been playing these games a fuckload longer than you have, son.’
Cassius looked down at the photos again, to avoid the PM’s belligerent stare. ‘So the boat’s underwater and the bodies are buried. What do these pictures prove?’
‘What they prove, you turd, is that you’re listening to the bleeding hearts, and you’ve forgotten about doing your fucking job.’ He was leaning even further forward, his spittle landing on Cassius’s arm where he’d laid it on the desk.
‘Why do you say I’m in bed with these people? I’m just trying to adopt a healthy scepticism towards this…whatever it is.’
‘No. NO. Scepticism is what I’m doing. Hosing down conspiracies. So there’s a boat, going south, right? It shelters in a lagoon, in their waters not ours. It sinks in a storm. Fortunately the whole thing’s captured by our private contractors on un-manipulated images, see? It walks like a duck, Cassius. Quacks like a duck. IT’S JUST A FUCKING DUCK, you moron.’
He turned sidelong, regarded Cassius with open contempt. The stabbing finger again.
‘I don’t like you. Fucking jacked-up Henry. Who the fuck rows boats? People with no ball skills, Cassius; that’s why you ride bikes too. And you don’t like me. We can both live with that. But I’m fucked if I’m going to let you derail this campaign because you want to float some self-indulgent, half-arsed thought bubble.’
It took him three deep inhales to settle. Cassius waited for them.
‘There’s something wrong about this. I don’t think that boat is an asylum seeker boat. I don’t acc—’
‘THERE IS NO ONE OUT THERE, CASSIUS!’
The PM’s volume was sufficient to silence all normal conversation in the hallway outside. It ripped the oxygen from the room like an incendiary device.
But Cassius had retreated somewhere too deep for these antics to scare him. ‘I don’t accept that those people just went to the bottom or got buried. Be reasonable—if someone buried them, then where are those people? And who took the other bloody photograph?’ Cassius knew his voice was rising.
The PM watched him, his face scarlet and veined. ‘If you wanna make moral judgments, put ’em on Twitter you credulous little fuckbag. Otherwise, stay out of my way.’
‘I’m not going to get in your way but I am going to find out what happened. You can’t afford to pick a fight with me in public—not now. You can’t afford to dump me. Fact is, you can’t move and we both know it. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got work to do.’
The PM scooped the photographs off the desk in a furious lunge, arched his back and threw them at the wall. They fluttered towards the floor, and by the time all of them had landed he was gone. Cassius regarded the random arrangement on the carpet: pieces of a puzzle.
And this, Rory, is what your father does for a living.
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
Savu Sea, West of Pulau Raijua
The air began to circulate in the bunkroom as the vessel gained speed, and the crushing humidity thinned. Separated from their supply of codeine, Tim and Hamid moaned and writhed until a search turned up a foil of painkillers in someone’s bag.
The Australians had dragged clothes out of their bags so that the men could lie on the floor, though most preferred to stand. Groups of women and children sat on the bunks. Very soon the children were restless, scrapping and playing, hustling for space and complaining when they were outmanoeuvred. As there had been on the island, there remained a polite distance between the Australians and the survivors of the Takalar.
A boy watching the porthole said, Man is coming. The latch turned and Ali Hassan was there, standing well back with Roya again under his arm and the knife held close to her face. In front of them, arranged on the steps, were bottles of water and buckets of fruit. As the men moved them into the bunkroom, Isi called to Roya.
‘Ask him how many revs he’s doing.’ Roya looked puzzled and Isi thought harder. ‘Roya, I can hear the engine. Tell him he’s going too fast.’
The girl reached for her dictionary, alarming Ali Hassan at first before he saw what she was doing. She worked her way through a number of pages, deliberately mouthing the words to herself before she felt ready to speak. When she’d done so, he fired back a short and irritable burst.
‘He say it is not…job for you. He drive boat now.’
But Isi wanted to keep the pressure on him. Even cooped up in the bunkroom she was responsible for the boat—as surely as if she’d been in the wheelhouse.
‘Roya, ask him if he’s keeping a lookout.’
The girl translated again, and was answered with a sarcastic laugh and another spray of invective.
‘He say he is drive boats longer than you.’
‘I need water!’ Leah yelled over the top of the crowd. Ali Hassan nodded disdainfully at the buckets that had held the fruit, and spoke again to Roya.
‘He say keep buckets for toilet.’
Ali Hassan took Roya back to the wheelhouse and sat her again on the low bench behind the captain’s chair while he studied the screen in front of him and scanned the horizon. The afternoon was getting old now, the light shattering into white glare in the west and fading to pastels in the east.
Roya could see land to their right. From the exchange between Isi and Ali Hassan she imagined this must be Raijua. But it was of no interest to Ali Hassan. He had pushed the big steel handles all the way forward, making the boat rise high above the water. The sound of the engines grew louder. His eyes were locked on the horizon.
After a long time had passed in silence, Roya began to ask him questions. Simple ones, conversational, like whether he had a wife and children. At first he didn’t answer, just stared glumly ahead. But after several minutes, his demeanour changed and to her surprise he spoke softly.
‘I am sorry I struck you.’
A slow conversation emerged across the awkward divide of their two languages. He did have a wife, he told her, and four children. All girls, her age and younger. He fell silent again for a while, lit a cigarette. Beautiful, he muttered as he flicked the lighter’s wheel. He didn’t want…what had happened, he said. But everyone needed to find money somehow. You must understand, yes?
She asked him what would happen to all the people on the boat. He frowned, pulled at the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. The ones from the shipwreck would have to find their own way once they reached land, he said. He would be going on. He would keep the westerners as hostages until he knew he was safe. Maybe ransom, he said. She said she thought he wasn’t a bad man, and that he wouldn’t hurt the Australians. She knew she shouldn’t speak to an adult like that, but she wanted to hear his assurance. His eyes became hard and cold at that point. They meant nothing to him, he said.
‘Where do you come from?’ she asked him. Since she’d been travelling, she’d found that people liked to discuss their home. But Ali Hassan weighed the question, searched it for traps.
‘Baghdad,’ he said eventually. ‘Shi’a like you, but my family were communists. Both my parents teachers…professors. At the university.’ He took his eyes off the sea, looked directly at her. ‘You understand that word, university?’
She nodded.
‘I was going to go to the university too. But then Baathists, they come and take my parents from the house when I am sixteen.’
He was choosing his words carefully so she could keep up. They were more terrible for their simplicity.
‘They torture them. Too much, they could not take it. Some soldiers come to the house and tell me to come get the bodies or they throw them out.’
The afternoon cooled outside. The breeze slipped through the open cabin door.
‘They arrest me three times, beat me up, make me sign papers because my neighbours are telling stories. See?’ He lifted his lip and pulled it back to reveal the dark cavity beneath his pink gum. ‘Hit me in mouth with a rifle, teeth gone.<
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‘Then I escape in mountains. So cold for a long time, nothing to eat.’ He patted his stomach to demonstrate, as though he was talking to someone much younger. ‘Walking, trucks, more walking. Kurdistan, Turkey. Four years in Turkey, very bad.’
‘You have travelled a long time,’ she said.
‘You are travel too,’ he replied. ‘Most people are travel.’ He swept an arm at the smothering dusk outside. ‘Most people want…going somewhere. Not many people already are home.’
He studied her face intently. ‘These people,’ he jerked a thumb at the bunkroom. ‘You think they worry for you? You mistake. They worry for no one but themself. That is my warning.’
He didn’t want to talk anymore, though she tried to encourage him. An hour passed that way; her trying to coax his attention again, him locked and bolted by the grim reality of the situation. She decided some time during that hour that he didn’t want to be in charge of a boat full of hostages, that this was all a terrible accident. She decided Ali Hassan liked her and would do nothing to harm her. But she was convinced the Australians were in graver danger than they knew. She tried again.
‘How do you come from Turkey to Indonesia?’
His face indicated surprise that she’d followed the geography. ‘Plane to Malaysia, then boats, buses. Long way.’
‘How do you know how to drive the boat?’
He stuck out his lower lip, like it was no big deal. ‘I work on fishing boats. Learning, learning…’
‘You learned Bahasa too,’ Roya ventured. ‘You live a long time now in Indonesia.’
His face said she’d overstepped. ‘Long enough,’ he muttered and would say no more.
When the sun went down, he picked up the knife and held it to her throat again as if their conversation had never happened.
He took her once more to the door of the bunkroom and again he removed the fire extinguisher that wedged it shut. He called out for Radja and took him to the galley, where he instructed him to cook rice. Radja took two huge stock pots and filled them from a water drum, then set them on the cooking range and lit the gas jets. He looked questioningly at Ali Hassan, who told him to stay put until the cooking was done.
The Java Ridge cut lonely miles into the night, fast enough for those trapped in the bunkroom to know that it was labouring hard. The small quantities of water in various containers had been collected into one bottle which Leah gulped desperately. She had climbed into the bunk next to Tim and was holding his head in her arms, their expressions remote: somehow they had departed together, joined in circling mortality.
Isi had her face pressed to the skylight. She could see that Ali Hassan had not turned on any of the exterior lights; not even the port and starboard lanterns. The sky was rapidly darkening, the sea a pool of faintly reflected light. She strained her neck to find the first of the evening stars.
Yes, he was still bearing dead north. There was no land he could hit in that direction, not for many hours yet, but that gave her little comfort.
Finley had unwrapped Tim’s leg, and now he tapped Isi on the shoulder. She could see by his torchlight that there was a problem. The stump, the shocking termination of an ordinary leg, was now shiny, the skin crimped and puffy like rotten fruit. A rope of pus had squeezed from the line of sutures, braided with slender streaks of blood. Tim’s eyes were filled with fear. Unthinkingly, Isi laid a hand on the shin just above its sudden end. It was hot to her touch. She sniffed the air as discreetly as she could, but couldn’t tell whether there was any addition to the general stench of their confinement.
‘What do we do?’ she asked Finley.
He looked back at her in sadness, looked at Tim and then at the floor.
‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘We can’t do anything now.’
Ali Hassan cursed loudly when the banging started on the bunkroom door. He looked over his shoulder towards the sound and then turned his back on it. The note of the engine rang higher and more urgent. Roya could smell the rice cooking now. Radja had been left by himself in the galley to cook it, after Ali Hassan made clear to him that if he tried to assist the others, the knife would be used on Roya.
It was dark outside now, nothing left of the sun’s afterglow. Ali Hassan opened the small vent window in the wheelhouse door, and the warm air rushed in, displacing the cooking smells. Now Roya could smell only the sea.
The banging continued. Roya could see Ali Hassan’s jaw churning. Finally he turned away from the controls, grabbed her sharply by the shoulder and rushed her through the lounge and down the steps to the bunkroom door. He stood at the top of the steps and waved the tip of the knife at her, indicating the door.
She pulled the fire extinguisher out of the way and unlatched the door. As she swung it back, the reek of confined people hit her like a headwind. She recoiled from the hot, wet air; the stink of shit and piss and vomit. But Ali Hassan stood firm at the stop of the steps, waving the knife.
‘What is wrong please?’ she asked into the darkness.
Isi came forward when she saw Roya’s slight figure in the doorway. There were people pressing against the doorjambs, gulping fresh air, and she had to push them aside to reach the girl. Shafiqa was calling mournfully for her daughter, but Roya did not try to enter the room. Her face was graven with responsibility. Isi found her eyes: she pointed back at Tim, who lay on a bunk near the door.
‘We need water very urgently. And Tim’s leg is infected. We need to bring him upstairs.’
Roya struggled to translate, trying to pluck some Arabic or Bahasa word for ‘infected’ from the strands of vocabulary she’d acquired. But Ali Hassan had heard enough to understand. He looked past Roya and Isi to Tim on the bunk, racked by new agony. He answered Roya irritably, and made a dismissive wave in Tim’s direction. He would not be moved.
Before Roya could translate, a voice came from the back of the bunkroom, an aggressive rejoinder that was coming closer. Sanusi had heard the exchange and was berating Ali Hassan, rushing forward up the passageway through the bunkroom, stepping over bags and small children. Isi smelled his breath, sour from the last smoke he’d blown through the skylight, as he went past.
Roya caught phrases and unscrambled them as the argument built between the two men. Isi’s eyes shifted to her, and Roya repeated what little she understood.
‘Sanusi say boat not for him,’ Isi had caught that much in Bahasa. ‘He say put knife down and do…do something help. Ali Hassan say no. He tell him stop or he kill. Oh no…’
Sanusi had stepped past Roya in the doorway. No negotiation, no strategy: he was mounting the steps, rushing up towards where Ali Hassan stood with the knife raised. From back in the bunkroom Irfan Shah roared at him to return at once, but he was gone. Ali Hassan was screaming at him, gesticulating wildly. Sanusi, coming from below, never had the advantage but he charged up two steps at a time and was upon him before anyone could react.
There were shouts and swift movements from several directions, too fast and chaotic for Isi to process. The knife came down and stuck high in Sanusi’s upraised arm. It wedged there: Ali Hassan wrenched at it, pulled it free and swung again, this time punching the blade vertically into Sanusi’s armpit. Ali Hassan was screaming as he did it, a high-pitched shriek of distress that issued from deep within him. For an instant he was other than a man who could do this, could open someone’s artery—for a second he was a man who would shrink from such a thing. But it had happened.
Sanusi never said another word.
They appeared to wrestle briefly before he folded at the knees and fell down the steps, ending in a crumpled heap in the doorway. He knocked Roya over as he landed. She struggled to her feet, covered in his blood, and turned to face Ali Hassan, coming down the stairs with the knife raised again. But he ignored her completely and hauled Sanusi out of the doorway then kicked the door shut. The blood was everywhere now, all over the three of them and the doorway.
Sanusi’s head hung limp on his neck. His eyes fell on Roya, beseechi
ng her, and she reached a hand out to touch his hair. Ali Hassan spoke harshly: she withdrew the hand and he dragged Sanusi away.
Isi rushed at the door and pressed her face to the small window as the latch slotted home. She could see Roya cowering and the small man struggling to drag the body up the steps by his blood-soaked clothes. He’d tucked the knife into the waistband of his pants. Ali Hassan looked up and met her gaze: he dropped the inert form of the engineer and rushed at the door, slapping a bloodied palm on the window and thrusting a finger at Isi.
‘No more! No more! You next!’ The hate on his face, the sobs of fear and panic were like nothing Isi had ever seen. He returned to Sanusi, manhandling him up and over the top of the steps. Isi could tell from the turn of his hips that he was moving him towards the door, towards the deck outside. The deck and the rail and the limitless ocean.
There was a loud bang which she recognised as the sound of the galley door being slammed shut. If Sanusi had had any hope out there, she realised, it was Radja. Now he was isolated. She ran back to the skylight and pressed her face into the opening. Women were screaming now in the crowded space, toddlers crying; grief and mayhem that would answer to no single voice and would have to run its course. She stood again at the base of the bunks, beside where Leah lay gripped by small spasms of pain and nausea.
Ali Hassan’s legs appeared on deck, close to Isi’s head. He was working his way backwards, heels first as his hands appeared, clutched around Sanusi’s wrists. Dragging him. It was dark out there—Ali Hassan had extinguished all the exterior lights—and she struggled to make out the shapes of the two men. But she could see Sanusi’s outstretched arms, the spill of blood that had soaked through his shirt now, his mouth shaping a word she couldn’t hear.
Ali Hassan’s near foot—so near that Isi could almost reach out and grab it—came down beside Sanusi’s neck. It slipped in the blood that still seeped from him, and Ali Hassan came down hard on one hip. He dropped the body, rolled over and cried in pain. The long smear from his slip reached almost to the lip of the skylight. Sanusi’s head was turned away, though his face still moved.