by Clare Moleta
This is Rich, Safia said. He’s okay.
I was a medic. In the army.
Nobody said am anymore. Almost nobody.
Safia said, He’s the one that got you out. The relief medic gave you oxygen, she got us water to cool the burns, but Rich did the rest. Kept it all clean, measured out the doses. He’s the reason she left us medical supplies instead of handing you over to XB Force.
The man, Rich, let Safia vouch for him. Li could feel him breaking up the air close to her but he didn’t try to touch her again.
Where are we now?
Port Howell, Safia said. The industrial zone. They won’t find us here if we’re careful.
Port Howell was where the boats came in from West. Where Li and Matti had landed three months ago. Half a day’s walk from makecamp.
Rich said, They set up a holding centre.
She faced him blindly. Where?
Bout twenty clicks north of the port. Anyone who didn’t get away got taken there for processing.
The black noise receded a little. Li grabbed onto this place where Matti could be. Afraid, waiting for her to come, but fed and hydrated. Sleeping inside, with a blanket, with other children, while someone in a uniform guarded the door.
She kept her face turned towards Rich’s slow, easy voice. I need to get there before Agency does. If she gets processed without me, she’ll be an unaccompanied minor. I don’t know where they’ll send her.
Safia said, They might have already processed by now. And if you turn yourself in and she’s not there, they won’t let you out again.
Then I won’t go in the front gate.
Rich said, You never seen a holding, have you? It’s not makecamp.
She hadn’t but she knew the difference. There was no fence around makecamp, you could come and go as long as you didn’t make trouble. A holding was built to contain. She’d need to get close without being seen, need something to cut through the fence. It was so hard to think through the drugs.
We have a phone, Safia said. We could arrange for you to call someone inside, find out if she’s there before you turn up at the gate.
Why was Safia helping her? The question slipped away. She nodded. That’d be good.
So you gunna let me do this now? Rich asked. Find out if you can see before you start making plans?
Okay.
Okay. He did her eyes first. His hands smelled of alcohol. He was careful, deft, but she could feel a tension in him, something coiled. This was just a precaution, he said. You burned your eyelids and maybe your corneas, too, but we couldn’t have a proper look because of the bucket of shit we were in at the time.
He loosened the last bandage and lifted off the padding. One eye, then the other. Some kind of gel pasted into the hollows so the fabric wouldn’t stick but it still felt like removing a skin. Nothing to stop her from opening her eyes now, except the fear that nothing would change when she did. And fear was a waste of time.
When she opened them the action felt complicated, mechanical. The light broke in and then in a little while she could see. His eyelashes first, each one. Then his face near hers. Bearded. Intent on the job. Behind him, layer after layer of light, back and back, as though that skin coming off had brought everything into relief.
You right?
She squinted, nodded slowly. She didn’t remember him from makecamp but people came and went.
The swelling’ll start going down soon, he said. You’ve lost your eyebrows and your eyelashes and you’re gunna have some scarring. He held her chin lightly and turned her face to the side. You got a couple of nice blisters there too; they could still get infected. I’ll put a new dressing on. He lifted her chin to inspect her neck. This looks okay. Lucky you were wearing so many clothes.
She wasn’t wearing them now, just her singlet. The way Matti had slept in the tent on the road to Valiant, when they could keep clothes on her at all.
Safia said, We had to cut most of them off you. I’ll go and get your pants.
It crashed back in, the terror of Matti in the world without her. Without Frank. Li pulled free of Rich, sucking air. For a few seconds she couldn’t even think. Just blind, useless panic. Then she forced it back down and made herself look at where she was. An old factory. They were in an alcove at the back; she could see metal roller doors across a space broken up by floor-to-ceiling pillars and old packing boxes and what was left of conveyor belts after everything useable and portable had been salvaged. There were three other people in the alcove, apart from Rich and Safia, but she was pretty sure she’d heard more voices than that.
What is this?
This? Rich glanced around and back at her. This is our reward for waiting nicely.
Frank used to do that, she thought, offer a joke like a small present. Rich was unravelling her hands, now, inspecting. They felt tender in the air.
Wiggle your fingers, he told her. Make a fist?
It was sharply painful when the skin stretched across the back of her hands. Her fingers looked okay though. He rubbed antibiotic cream lightly onto the burns.
These’re healing up pretty good, he said. I got some gloves for you.
How do they feel? Safia was back with her pants and boots.
I can use a phone.
We’re going to need your help first.
Li focused on this woman she knew the same way everyone in makecamp had known her, through trade. Safia had given her credit on ready meals when she and Matti first got to makecamp. She said, I need to use the phone.
Not yet.
They’d got her out alive, treated her with medicine they could have traded. Drugs that had stopped her seeing what was obvious. She kept her eyes on Safia.
Phone doesn’t work, does it?
Safia didn’t flinch. Adam found it on a salvage run. We think it’s patchable.
Li had done a few patches for her in the first weeks in makecamp, mostly phones and radios, to clear her debt. Then three men had come to her tent. One of them took Matti outside while the others explained that patching was already staked out and she was interfering with trade.
Who would I call?
There were some older kids in makecamp who had a phone.
Safia must have seen in Li’s face how unlikely this sounded.
They kept it quiet. Mostly rented storage in the shop, but they had it when XB Force came in. We saw them get put on the buses to holding. I can give you the number.
If I patch.
If you patch.
Li’s head was clearing and the whole deal felt thin, stitched together. They needed her till she patched the phone. How did she know anything on the other side of that was true? What if holding was bullshit and Matti was still waiting right where she was supposed to, back at the Kids’ Tent?
I want to see makecamp first.
Safia shook her head. She’s not there, Li. Nobody’s there.
Rich said, Camp’s finished, you understand? They demolished it. Bulldozers, the whole thing.
I understand. Did you see my daughter get on a bus?
Rich sighed.
Then I’ll start at the camp, Li said.
* * *
She remembered the early dark. The two of them zipped in together, Li’s body cupping Matti’s, the sleeping bag tangled around them. Smell of mould and her own sour breath.
She listened to makecamp waking – tent zips tugging down, quiet prayers, radios, someone pissing in the dirt close by, footsteps and low voices in multiple languages as people joined the food queue.
Matti said, I miss Dad. He always woke us up.
It felt like a slap. Matti hadn’t talked about Frank since the night they left Valiant, huddled together in the crush on the deck of the fishing boat. Almost two months.
Ask me what else do I miss.
What else do you miss?
Matti breathed, thinking. His voice. And the fun stuff we used to do, like when he swang me round and round and threw me on the couch. And when we played the Best Place, l
ike if I rolled a five or a three or something, he always gave me chances.
Harder not to remember in the dark. Matti scrambling up off the couch and launching herself onto Frank. We’re gunna wrestle and there’s no Stop It!
Li rolled away and tugged down the zipper, letting the cold in. Come on. Breakfast.
They waited in the queue while it got light and then they kept waiting. The kitchen van was relief-run on donations, but there was no movement from inside yet. There wasn’t always food. She was worried about Matti’s toes and fingers, the raw spots on her skin, about the small bones she could trace in her back. You couldn’t see them under the oversized jacket but she’d felt them in the dark. The cold season had barely started and already it was hard to stand for this long. How bad would it be here in a month? Li saw how Matti leaned forward slightly, leading from her nose. Their place in the line was okay – they should get millet, maybe beans too – but there was the queue and then there was everyone around the queue. She was tense all the time watching them, especially the younger men, trying to gauge who she could face down. She held her body stiff, elbows ready, and tried to cover all the angles.
Do you know how seconds work? Matti asked, looking up at her. So, you count to sixty and when you get to sixty it’s not seconds anymore, it’s one minute! And then you keep counting and it’s seconds again! And when you count to however many minutes are in an hour, it’s hours!
Eight years and two weeks old. When you taught your kid at home, around everything else, it was easy for things to slip. Matti had learned time here in makecamp, where the days kept passing and passing and nothing happened.
Makecamp was an unsanctioned waiting room between unshelter and shelter. It came and went – set up, got cleared out, resurrected itself as close to the XB as possible, on the unused scraps of land that floated between Port Howell’s jurisdiction and Sumud’s. It was somewhere people could get to.
This makecamp had lasted fourteen months. It had its own newspaper in five languages. There were communal cooking areas and portable toilets, three food shacks and a bakery, the ready shop for basic supplies, places to rent tools, get a haircut or a translation or a bucket shower. There were prayer tents, koffee shops, a library van. All the usual Trade services at inflated prices but there were relief groups that came and went too, blurring the line between what you had to pay for and what you could get for free.
The camp hugged Sumud’s perimeter fence, always in sight of the highway where trucks carried goods to and from the unsheltered regions, through a checkpoint about fifty k south of Port Howell. The checkpoint was the only official break in the fence and it was guarded twenty-four hours by XB Force. Come too close on foot and you risked getting detained or shot. Every truck was searched. Driver IDs and customs paperwork vetted, cargo checked, undercarriage swept for jumpers.
From the checkpoint the highway ran inland through the No Go, straight to the XB’s southern gate.
Li looked past Matti to the perimeter fence. They could always see it, wherever they were in the camp. High, spike-topped welded mesh panels, stretching out of sight in both directions. Warning signs repeated in pictures and languages. She wondered if Angie and Carl had stood in a queue like this, looking at the same stretch of fence, if it had got them anywhere.
The fence was just Sumud’s first line in the sand. On the other side was the No Go – the same grey scrubland but with hills in the distance. Beyond the hills, out of sight, was the XB itself, the wall around the precinct of Sumud. People said there were only thirty or forty ks between the fence and the wall, but in that open ground there were XB Force patrols and no presumption of innocence.
Li said, Don’t go out there again.
But Sulaman’s dad lets him go, he just says be very careful.
If Sulaman gets shot that’s his dad’s business. I don’t want you playing in the No Go.
Matti looked down. I wish I never told you.
Yeah, well. Li took a breath and let it out, watched it fade in the air. I’m glad you told me.
The queue shuffled forward a step. Matti said, You know what?
What?
Me and Shayla and Sulaman, in the No Go, we found a big tree that was dead. And there was a big stripey lizard living inside it. This big.
Huh. You see any other animals out there?
Rabbits. And pigs. I mean, I didn’t see any pigs but there was poo everywhere. I thought there might be horses in the hills, but probably not.
Something started taking shape in Li’s head. Something tradeable that no one had staked out yet.
I don’t really want to go out there again anyway, Matti said, because of the Takeaway.
It brought Li back sharply. The Takeaway was an old terror, she hadn’t heard Matti talk about it in years.
Matti looked at her, pupils expanding. Li remembered her on the boat, twisting and crying through sleep while they crossed the Gulf. Because of Frank, she’d thought. But the Takeaway came earlier, back in Nerredin. Was Matti already afraid of losing them, of being lost to them, then? Before everything was consumed and nothing was left standing and nobody came to help and they had to walk. Like all the others.
Frank would have said something right but Frank was gone and Li didn’t know how to answer these fears. Tell her the dark was benign and no one would hurt her?
She said, Just stay outside the fence.
All the way back to makecamp Li kept having the same unfinished thoughts. Rich had volunteered to show her the safest way after dark – a long slow circuit from the factory through Port Howell’s industrial zone, avoiding security patrols. The third night since the camp was cleared. She kept groping for action, decision, a way to claw back the time. Over and over her mind dragged her back to the fence with Matti on the other side.
Mum, look!
But she wouldn’t think about that. There was nothing there that would help her. She needed to pull herself together, work out the next step. There had never been any records of who was in makecamp, but someone must have kept track of the eviction, checked off status numbers before people were transferred to holding. There were always parents or reliefers at the Kids’ Tent to break up the fights and hand out the stuff. Someone would have made sure all the kids got out.
She kept looking across for Frank, to say these things out loud or ask what he thought, kept forgetting it was Rich. He was nothing like Frank, except for some economy in the way he moved. And the joking where there was nothing funny. He’d given back her flint and steel and her knife in its sheath, but her sharpening stone was gone. It wasn’t clear to her yet why he was helping her. He didn’t seem to care about the phone.
All the times Matti ran away back in Nerredin, they’d only lost her once. Not even in Nerredin. They’d gone to Warrick for a Mynas home game, three families in Kit and Ivan’s van. In the crush out the front afterwards Li let go of Matti’s hand to reach for her wallet.
The backs of her hands hurt through the gloves. Rich had said she should keep them on as long as she could but they were too white, too visible. They were on open ground now, between the highway and the perimeter fence, with nothing but scrub for cover. Rich kept pace beside her, alert in all directions. He’d offered her a ready bar. Told her there was a fence around makecamp now, too, right around the site, to stop people going back in. That there were patrols. After that he seemed to know enough not to keep talking.
They’d found her at home, after loudspeaker announcements and searching the grounds with dozens of volunteers. When Li got back to the house after dark, frayed and panicky, the radio and all the lights were on. Matti had fed the chooks and washed herself and she was trying to make pikelets. A taxi driver leaving for Nerredin had recognised her and dropped her home. Her face was a mess of snot and flour and she looked up at Li without forgiveness. You shouldn’t have let go of me, she said.
They stood at the western edge of the camp and looked through the new fence. They weren’t far from the main cluster, where she
and Matti had slept. Safia and Rich had said makecamp was finished, that there was nothing to see, but she could see everything. There were the food shacks, there was the ready shop, the stinking toilet block, the rows and rows of tents with their tarp extensions and washing lines and murals and cooking fires and solar hook-ups. Over there was the patch where Sulaman’s family had tried to grow food. There was a relief truck, or maybe it was a water truck, and then it all collapsed in on her and turned to ash. The truck was a metal hole, black and buckled, and the queue had moved somewhere else.
And right in front of her, on the other side of the mesh, had been the Kids’ Tent, where the reliefers handed out pencils and vitamins and jumpers and old shoes; where parents took classes with donated books. Those kids Matti ran with didn’t queue at the Kids’ Tent, they mobbed and wheedled and grabbed. Got done by Medical for scabies and fungus and footrot. Matti came back all hours and not often empty-handed. Fruit sometimes, or bottled water, a toothbrush, a balloon, a lice comb.
You ran straight at that tent, Rich said. I had to drag you back.
A capful of bubble mix, once, that she’d saved so Li could blow it with her. That was a good day.
You seen enough?
She could hear in his voice that they needed to be gone, but she held onto the wire with her gloved hands and kept looking at the place where the Kids’ Tent had been, where she’d told Matti to wait for her.
The Takeaway is a man and he’s way up high and if a kid goes somewhere without a grown-up, he’ll reach down and grab you up and take you.
Rich said, Kids got out. I saw them.
And she had to believe him because she didn’t believe Matti was dead. Maybe those other kids, not Matti. Matti was smart. She was little and she was fast and she knew when things were going wrong. She knew how to get out.
There were lights along the highway, a vehicle moving towards them.
We have to go now, Rich said. He put a hand on her shoulder and she felt that tension in him again. Twisted free and rammed her elbow back into his ribs. He breathed out explosively. When she spun around, he was bent over, hands on his knees, and she waited, with her hand on the knife, for that coiled thing to snap. Then he laughed quietly and raised his head.