by Martin Roth
Chapter Two
A mild early-autumn breeze had changed to a sullen southerly. It was cold and gloomy, even at 6:30 in the evening.
From Grant and Melissa’s house to my apartment was just an eight-minute hobble, back down the lane, onto the Maroondah Highway and then a short cut through the smash repair’s. Actually, it wasn’t really a hobble. More a gentle swaying movement. Shrapnel does that to a foot.
Hulking green garbage bins were lined up along the footpath like rows of miniature bathing sheds, waiting for the next morning’s rubbish collection. The wind had blown a bag of food scraps from one of the bins onto the street, and a couple of stray crows were pecking at these. Under the flat glare of the streetlamps they seemed as big as hens. I paused, then made a mock lunge, but they held their ground. In the mountains of East Timor a pair of plump, sluggish birds like these would quickly become dinner for four.
What was going to happen to Melissa? I’d known her for only the year that I’d been living in Australia, but I had heard the stories. The pills, the men, the abortions, the drugs. She was as fragile as a supermodel’s ego. Only marriage to Grant held her life together.
And Grant. It occurred to me that I had been so concerned with Melissa that I had hardly thought about him.
Dead.
He had been so full of life. So on fire. The lovable larrikin. Everybody’s best mate. Mine, and Melissa’s too. Yet not with a lot of true friends.
It was Grant who smuggled me into Australia, with sixty other Indonesians, in a converted minesweeper that was meant to accommodate ten. Grant, ever hands-on, actually captained the boat himself, rather than hiring a cheap crew. We landed somewhere in a remote part of Northern Queensland - “don’t mind crocodiles, I hope, hah, hah, hah” - and when he discovered I spoke fluent English he urged me to join him in his business ventures.
I reflected on death. I had lost virtually all my friends in the mountains of East Timor, shot, napalmed and tortured by the Indonesian army death squads. They had murdered my mother, and my wife as well. Death was a constant of my life.
Now, an illegal refugee in Melbourne, I was mourning the death of my only real friend in the bondage room of a local whorehouse. I had come to Australia seeking a new life. Was it any wonder I sometimes felt dazed and confused?
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