On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  The foot was right there, where Isi’s fingers gripped the edge of the skylight. Within reach.

  She didn’t even try it. She knew he would only chop at the hand with the knife. And there was Roya, still out there.

  Ali Hassan didn’t get up from where he’d fallen. He sat on the deck with his back braced against the cabin wall and pushed with his bare feet, pushed Sanusi to the lowest wire beneath the rail. Pushed him under it. It took several determined efforts, the clumsiness of it only increasing the horror. The last Isi saw of Sanusi was the pale underside of his left foot as he lurched, finally, over the edge and was gone.

  Roya, slumped in the stairwell, had not moved throughout.

  She cried quietly for Sanusi, and then in flooding succession for all the misfortunes that had befallen them. She wept for her home, the courtyard with its worn stones and its flowers in pots, the smell of her father and the sound of his weary wisdom, the cries of the food vendors on the street and the children of the neighbourhood running in the dry air, the teasing and the gossip that mattered so much between them and so little now. She wept for her brother, wherever it was they’d taken him. And for her mother on the other side of the door, carrying her sister to who knew where.

  LATE NIGHT THURSDAY

  Canberra

  Cassius walked the streets of Barton under a mist of light rain.

  Voicemail: Stella, saying Waldron wanted to know why he had Border Integrity people trying to get through to Cassius’s confiscated phone. Stella again: Waldron was hassling her about Cassius’s whereabouts. Rory, bored and wanting takeaway for dinner, then holding the phone to the chicken, which appeared to vote for Thai.

  He swept the speckles of rain off the screen each time he punched delete. Corners, streetlights, nature strips. Barton’s stubborn trapezoid pointed, like everything, at Capital Hill. He walked faster with the phone in his pocket until it rang. The department.

  ‘We have the results. Grid survey, high altitude, two-hundred-kilometre range over Dana—that was right, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He swept the moisture from his hair with his free hand. Waiting.

  ‘We’ve found a vessel. Heading north. It’s timber, probably another phinisi, but if it is, then it’s going at top speed.’

  ‘North?’ It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Yes.’ Cassius could hear the small sound of a mouse on a desktop in the background. ‘The heading would take them…straight between Sumba and Raijua, into Indonesia.’

  ‘Okay. What else?’

  ‘So this was a Core Resolve job: we asked them, like you said, to run a thermal scan…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Thirty-eight people. Based on body mass you’d say about four of those are children.’

  Something horrible was occurring out there. There was no way of explaining this that didn’t add up to horror. His mind wouldn’t clear. He stepped onto the road and nearly into the path of a taxi hissing over the wet surface.

  ‘If you draw a line back to the south—you know, if you extend the course backwards, where have they come from on that heading?’

  ‘Stand by.’ Insouciant humming on the line, more mouse noise. ‘Bullseye. Dana.’

  Shit.

  His heart was hammering, his hand trembling. He couldn’t think what to ask. The boat was going deeper into Indonesian waters, further from his jurisdiction. This was good, this was good…but it also wasn’t. All they could do was watch from the sky.

  ‘Oh, sir?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I’ve been requested to log this call and to report all communications with you to the PMO.’

  During the course of the call he’d received a text from the PM—I’m watching you Cassius—and an email from his press office, peppered with delirious exclamation points. The major dailies would be syndicating a feature story on Cassius in the morning, alongside an editorial line recommending the government be returned. The headline: Mr Unshakeable.

  He climbed the stairs in a daze. His legs were twitching warmly in his rain-soaked pants by the time he opened the door of his apartment. He was briefly shocked to find the hall light on and the heating running.

  Rory.

  The nanny was asleep in an armchair. She was older, this one, came from an agency that Stella had tracked down. He fumbled and patted his wet pockets, found he had no cash. She reminded him that the agency would send an invoice. Cassius thought he saw her smirk.

  When she was gone he headed into the spare room and sat on the edge of Rory’s bed. The digital clock said 11:48. He hadn’t shopped for days, hadn’t arranged the Thai like Rory had asked. What had he eaten? His skull was ringing again and he felt nauseous. He couldn’t remember if he’d eaten either.

  The light was out but the room was coloured by the sugary glow of the digital displays on the treadmill: Rory must have been playing on it again.

  Something wasn’t right. It took him a moment to register it: there was a plastic laundry basket wedged up high in the bookshelves beside the bed. He lifted it down and found the chicken stirring irritably on a bed of Rory’s clothes. It clucked once or twice and turned its back. There was a note on a piece of printer paper wedged among the clothes. He took it out, recognised Rory’s careful hand:

  DEAR DAD IN CASE YOU FIND THIS THEY LIKE TO SLEEP UP HIGH

  He lifted the chicken out of the basket and placed it on his lap. His hands, he saw, were still shaking. The chicken made a noise that was vaguely like a purr as he ran his palm along its white back, tracing the stiff lines of the quills with his fingertips. He moved his hand up to the bird’s neck, closed his thumb and forefinger around it gently, gently. He marvelled at its delicacy, at the bird’s tiny fibrillations. Its life, between his fingers in fragile staccato. Dark inchoate thoughts surrounded him, until his tired focus lengthened to the boy in the bed, the covers high under his ears. He was only complex from the outside. From within, Cassius suspected, Rory’s adoration of him was as close to uncomplicated love as a human could manage.

  He replaced the bird in the basket—it rrrooked at him tetchily—and put the basket back where he’d found it. Then he sat himself down on the foot of the bed, below the ridges made by Rory’s feet.

  And the boy slept so wonderfully, unburdened by anything at all. His mop of hair, rubbed by his movements on the pillow, was spiked into chaotic peaks. His mouth open, top teeth visible below his upturned lip. The deep rhythm of his breathing, his pure, unmarked skin. What had he ever done for his son? Cassius was crying, silently. His love for Rory was a call down lonely wires, over an empty landscape. Maybe the boy knew he was loved, maybe he desperately wanted it to be so. Probably he idolised his father, but how many years of that could there be left? And then, the torrent of adolescent disdain for the busy narcissist who’d flicked him morsels of his time.

  The chance to be a worthy father would only come once in his life, and it was slipping away from him.

  Cassius stepped quietly from the room and stood in the kitchen with the door shut, the light hurting his eyes. He had the phone in his hand, weighing an idea briefly as he rolled down the contacts to C.

  Carmichael.

  The minute he dialled, he would become the traitor that the PM believed him to be. So he savoured the last untainted seconds of his career and poured himself a glass of wine; then dialled anyway.

  MIDNIGHT, THURSDAY

  Savu Sea, West of Pulau Raijua

  There was no warning when the Java Ridge struck the log.

  The cries after Sanusi had gone overboard had gradually subsided and the thick, barometric silence of the tropical night pressed against the racket of the straining engines.

  In the bunkroom, Finley had arranged his patients in the bunks nearest to the door. Tim woke infrequently, the change in his consciousness signalled by stifled grunts of pain. Leah had become confused: she gripped the rails of the bunk as though the vessel’s motion was now unbearable to her. Shafiqa bore her exhaustion without complaint, only her terr
or for her daughter etched in her face. Finley had negotiated to have the buckets of human waste removed. Ali Hassan, relenting after Sanusi’s death, had brought in new water and rice. The water was offered first to Leah, then both were passed through the bunkroom in small cups and bowls, after which Radja was dumped back through the door to join them. An atmosphere of weary acceptance now prevailed.

  It was into this torpor that the giant impact suddenly asserted itself.

  The front of the boat slammed into something solid, shuddered massively and lurched, the entire hull riding up high and over the object. There was a loud sawing sound below the bunkroom, the props screaming in the air then gnawing into the thing. Crockery smashed loudly in the galley, and in the bunkroom, everything and everyone tumbled forward, collecting each other and striking random objects as they went, until they were piled in an ungainly heap against the door, Tim screaming with pain underneath them, Shafiqa struggling to breathe. Isi was aware of smaller characteristics within the cacophony: metallic clanks and thumps that indicated secondary damage, damage to machinery. The boat pitched downwards then corked around before it settled. Amid the cries of surprise and pain in the room, Isi listened intently to diagnose what had happened.

  ‘He’s either run us aground, or we’ve hit something,’ she said to Leah, who had wound up beside her on the floor.

  The engines, the engines. They were still running hard; the vibration through the hull told her that. But some kind of asymmetry had emerged, something rolling or spinning off-centre. The beautiful rhythm of the boat’s heart was syncopating; each cycle of the engines marked by a sharp off-note, like a coin in a washing machine. The diesels were breathing harder, working harder, and the isolated clangs were multiplying into a chorus of clatters.

  ‘Turn them off!’ she yelled, but she knew it was futile.

  She focussed again: a subtle list to port told her they were drifting sideways. So it was either the rudder or one of the props, and they weren’t aground. The most likely culprit was a log. Joel had often talked about near misses out here, about his preference for anchoring at night so he wouldn’t have to chance it. The illegal loggers who towed barges between the remote islands would lose giant lengths of timber—in storms, out of carelessness or under pursuit—which would drift endlessly just below the surface. A decent-sized container ship might plough through them, but not a phinisi.

  And Ali Hassan might have lessened the damage if he’d been cruising at a reasonable speed. As far as Isi could tell, he couldn’t have hit it harder.

  Roya was back in the wheelhouse with Ali Hassan when the crash happened. She was watching him rubbing his arms to remove the drying blood on them. The flakes were falling as a dark dust on the damaged counter in front of him.

  One second it was the two of them: him standing, watching out the window, and her seated behind him on the chair, the dim lighting making her eyelids heavy. The next instant they were on the ground, crumpled together. Her ears were ringing, and for a moment she thought he’d attacked her.

  But he picked her up and looked her over to ensure she was all right. Then he took her firmly by the arm, the knife in his other hand as always, and led her once again to the bunkroom steps.

  He didn’t bother with translation this time: he yelled to Isi to come out. Carl tried to follow her and Ali Hassan angrily waved him back.

  ‘No you,’ he said. He pointed at Luke Finley, who stood silently in the shadows: ‘Him.’

  There were gasps among the people in the room as Isi and Luke moved forward; a collective fear that they were about to meet the same fate as Sanusi. But Luke showed no emotion as he closed and latched the door behind himself, and he and Isi followed Ali Hassan and Roya to the engine-room hatch.

  Isi didn’t often come down here. It had been Sanusi’s domain almost exclusively. On rare occasions he would show Joel something that needed replacing, or the two of them would hammer and swear at a seized mechanism. She loved the sense that it was a world within the world of the Java Ridge, a greasy tabernacle that was not the business of strangers. Everything was crowded together, everything was steel. Illuminated by bare bulbs caged in wire grilles, it was a space without any kind of human adornment: fuel filters, gauges and hoses, exposed hull timbers, the din like the life force of the Java Ridge.

  The noise was deafening as they entered, and even to an untrained ear the discordant clamour indicated something amiss.

  A steel mesh gangway led between the two great engines. Under their bare feet, flowing beneath the grille, a slick of diesel-stained water sloshed in the bilge. Isi and Luke began to look over all the obvious inspection points on the engines: it was a surprise to Isi that Luke knew where to turn his attention. He was combing along the port side while Isi searched on the starboard.

  It took Isi only moments to see the problem: the rev counter was pushing deep into the red, and she could see the exposed head of the driveshaft where it exited the gearbox and passed through the stern—it was spinning without resistance, far too fast. She looked across at Luke: the engine in front of him was vibrating madly on its base. Most of the metallic battering sounds were coming from the port engine. She knew what had happened.

  ‘IT’S STUFFED—’ she yelled over the noise, cupping her hand around her mouth. Ali Hassan looked at her without comprehension, looked at Luke, who shrugged.

  ‘The starboard side’—Isi pointed, because the term would mean nothing to Roya—‘has lost its propeller. Lost it completely,’ she said slowly, then waited patiently while Roya figured out how to translate. ‘The other side has a bend in the driveshaft.’ Ali Hassan’s face was skewed with suspicion. ‘But there’s no extra water in the bilge: we haven’t put a hole in her.’

  Again, the wait while this sank in for Ali Hassan.

  ‘You can’t push it any further. It’s over,’ she said firmly. She locked her eyes on Ali Hassan’s while Roya translated. His eyes widened as the words crossed the barrier between them.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘You trick, fucking pelacur!’ He rattled off a barrage of high-speed Bahasa and Arabic in Isi’s face while Roya tried to keep up.

  ‘He saying you fix or he kill me.’ Roya’s voice was calm and steady. Ali Hassan brought the blade high under her ear.

  ‘He knows it’s fucked,’ Isi groaned. ‘What are we supposed to do with a driveshaft out here?’ Sensing it was rhetorical, Roya didn’t translate.

  ‘I know,’ said Luke. ‘But he expects us to do something, right?’

  ‘Okay. Turn the motors off and we can take the shafts out and look at them. Yes?’

  This was enough to satisfy Ali Hassan. He spoke in Roya’s ear and she translated: ‘We go cabin.’ Then he took her again, up and out the hatch, which he locked behind himself.

  When the racket of the engines stopped, Isi muttered to Luke: ‘I can’t do anything with this. I don’t even know why we’re doing it.’

  His face indicated he’d resolved something, found a strength Isi wouldn’t have guessed was there. ‘We give him what he wants for now, and when we get an opportunity, we take it. Agreed?’

  She nodded; went to work unbolting the covers that protected the two driveshafts. As she’d suspected, the starboard side was slack and loose in her hand. She could do nothing with it, nothing but hope that the whole shaft didn’t drop out of its mounts and allow the inrushing water to flood the engine bay. The port side was intact, she thought, but the bend in the shaft was severe.

  The wall of the stern was cracked where the shaft passed through the timber and fibreglass. Isi knew it was unlikely that the port-side prop had escaped undamaged. Even if she could straighten the shaft, they would be limping from now on. Great time to call in a tow, she thought. If only we had some fucking comms.

  She searched among Sanusi’s carefully ordered tools and found a long wrench. She jammed its head against the driveshaft, picking the spot where she might lever the bend out of it.

  As soon as she applied pressure she could tell
it was useless. She’d seen the logs they towed around out here, the damage they caused when they broke loose. The mass involved was enormous—she wasn’t going to undo its work with her own arms.

  Ali Hassan and Roya returned, and the cramped space became even harder to work in. Ali Hassan had given up using Roya as his interpreter, and was now haranguing them directly, his agitation building again.

  ‘No try!’ he shouted at Isi. He pointed the knife at Luke. ‘He do.’

  Ali Hassan watched intently as Luke took the handle of the wrench and heaved down, leaning back to sling the weight of his whole body from it. He clenched his teeth and sweat ran along his jaw, but the shaft gave no greater indication it would bend than the wrench did.

  Isi could see that Roya was now accustomed to the presence of the knife. Ali Hassan pointed it at her from down low with his outstretched left hand. He was concentrating on Luke’s effort; barking instructions, wanting him to change angles, to pull harder. Isi watched Roya. Roya’s dark eyes were downcast, focussed on that left hand…

  Jesus, Isi, what are you thinking? They were already expecting too much of the girl. The more they all burdened her, it seemed, the more capable she became, but this was a child for God’s sake.

  Ali Hassan was shouting at Luke now, pointing and shaking his hands in the air between them. Finally the frustration boiled over and he pushed Luke violently off the wrench. He took the handle in both his hands and funnelled all his rage into it. His left hand still held the knife—the blade pressed hard against the wrench as the muscles of his arms coiled and gleamed and he crushed his eyes shut with the effort.

  For Isi, the seconds opened into orbiting worlds—the struggling man, the wrench and the knife. Luke stood close by him in the small space by the engine block, his back against the shelving that was built into the hull. Ali Hassan drove his face against the top of the wrench handle as he poured the will of his entire body into it and when he shifted his grip, Isi could see the sweat from his forehead glistening on the steel.