Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Be careful around her.’

  ‘It’s not my arm I’m worried about,’ I say.

  We enter the sallyport into Delta compound.

  Captain Rahmatullah speaks into his radio. ‘Bravo 720, please advise.’

  Inside the manufactory, the eyes of every man on the line lift as I return to my station. Hassan smiles behind his mask. He passes a fresh pair of gloves across the divider wall and a fresh face mask. I slip them on. When I step on the anti-fatigue matting the productivity alarm engages with a triple beep. I look up at the monitors. Down on the daily target by fifty per cent. Hassan is watching me.

  ‘I was worried,’ he says in Dhivehi.

  ‘It’s fine. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘What did they want?’

  ‘I had a visitor.’

  He laughs. ‘Right. Sure.’

  A pile of TabaPet shells has banked before my workstation. I take a pink one by the neck and begin fitting a motor.

  ‘You know,’ I say. ‘I’ve been thinking about the palm tree.’

  ‘What safer place to be in a flood?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘He can climb, my boy can. I bet they find him eating coconuts. He’ll be suntanned all right. But he’ll be okay, God willing.’

  ‘He is. I know it. I can feel it.’

  ‘He’ll be thin.’

  ‘Thin but well.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hassan says and fits a motor. ‘I just hope they send him here. Don’t send him to Sri Lanka. Send him here.’

  I fit a motor and power home the screws.

  Truthfully, Hassan’s son is dead. We both know it. He drowned with all the others. Four hundred thousand of them. Hassan knows it better than anyone else. He knows it in the creases of his bones and the cracks of his heart. Still, his son’s body was never recovered, which has left him with this wild, improbable hope that somehow he lived. I play along, and it’s a relief, in fact, to talk this way. It’s a relief for both of us. A relief to think that maybe, somehow, someone else has survived the tsunami.

  Many close to me died. My father, locked in his cell on Maafushi. My mother, painting our ceiling. My aunt. My uncle. Gone, all gone. Washed into the sea by an unholy wave. That loss seems lessened whenever I consider Hassan’s son, his mouth turned towards the rain, his belly full of ants and lizards and coconut.

  ‘He’ll be thin,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but what a story he’ll have to tell.’

  ROYAL COMMISSION INTO THE EAGLEHAWK MIGRANT TRAINING CENTRE RIOT

  THE HONOURABLE OSCAR AMBROSE IPP AO QC

  PUBLIC HEARING

  DAY 12

  TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS AT HOBART

  ON THURSDAY, 16 MAY 2075 AT 10.00 A.M.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Ms Nguyen.

  MS NGUYEN: Thank you, your honour. I recall Rin Sakurai.

 

 

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Yes, Ms Sakurai, can you hear us well enough?

  MS SAKURAI: I can hear you.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: You’re still under the oath you gave yesterday. I won’t require you to swear another oath, as long as you understand—

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: —that the oath is still in effect.

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Thank you. Ms Nguyen, if you will.

  MS NGUYEN: Thank you, your honour. Ms Sakurai, you’ll remember from yesterday that I was asking for clarity around what your former company referred to in emails and documents at the time as the ‘Maldivian Opportunity’.

  MS SAKURAI: I remember. Yes.

  MS NGUYEN: You testified yesterday that your mother, Alessandra Michaela Braden—

  MS SAKURAI: She’s not my mother.

  MS NGUYEN: No, I beg your pardon. You said yesterday that Alessandra Michaela Braden spoke to someone inside the Department of National Integrity about the possibility that Maldivian Internally Displaced People might be resettled in Australia, didn’t you?

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  MS NGUYEN: Are you okay, Ms Sakurai? Do you need some water?

  MS SAKURAI: I’m fine. I’m fine.

  MS NGUYEN: Do you know who she spoke to and when?

  MS SAKURAI: His name was Jack Slaton. They exchanged messages between 10 and 25 October 2072.

  MS NGUYEN: I call attention, your honour, to the emails entered as evidence at J13S. Ms Sakurai, can you explain where the Internally Displaced People had come from?

  MS SAKURAI: The IDPs came from submerged islands or islands where the water table became contaminated with salt.

  MS NGUYEN: Because of sea-level rise?

  MS SAKURAI: Yes.

  MS NGUYEN: And these people were resettled on Hulhumalé—sorry my pronunciation is not—

  MS SAKURAI: Hulhumalé.

  MS NGUYEN: Thank you. Resettled on Hulhumalé Island, next to the capital city, Malé. Why would Cabey-Yasuda Corrections be interested in the future of Internally Displaced People in the Maldives?

  MS SAKURAI: The IDPs to start with, yes, but they planned to exploit the entire population.

  MS NGUYEN: You think they had plans for the entire population?

  MS SAKURAI: I know it for a fact. There were over a hundred habitable islands above sea level early in the century. Before the August disaster, there were eight—the eight the country could afford to protect with sea walls. Nearly all the habitable land across the archipelago was underwater. The whole population was at risk from de-territorialisation.

  MS NGUYEN: To be clear: you believe that Cabey-Yasuda intended to exploit the entire population of the Maldives?

  MS SAKURAI: Absolutely. Cabey-Yasuda had a policy of identifying at-risk populations and negotiating an exit strategy for them. Generally, at-risk populations were transitioned through the Migrating with Dignity program operated by the Australian government.

  MS NGUYEN: Transitioned?

  MS SAKURAI: Yes. Transitioned. Brought to Australia.

  MS NGUYEN: What value could Cabey-Yasuda find here?

  MS SAKURAI: The company had an opportunity—secure a workforce of men and women who couldn’t leave, or who couldn’t be forcibly deported either, since there’d be no country to where they could be sent legally.

  MR KELLY: I have to object, your honour. Ms Sakurai is offering her own speculations as fact.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Hardly speculations, I think, Mr Kelly. She was an executive vice president at the corporation in question, was she not?

  MR KELLY: Her purview was always Japan. Ms Sakurai never dealt with detention in Australia. She was not privy to those conversations.

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: I’m prepared to let her talk about decisions taken at the management level, given that she held a management position and given that she is the daughter of the CEO.

  MS SAKURAI: I’m not her—

  JUSTICE AMBROSE: Proceed, Ms Nguyen.

  Rin

  She’s had a silver nameplate fixed to the wall since I was last here. Alessandra Michaela Braden, CEO. Just in a simple font, nothing outrageous. It looks tasteful. Then again, the whole place is so goddamn tasteful these days, made respectable with the cash from manufacturing. Her office sits in the middle of two glass slabs on the building’s outer edge, where she can look down on the streetscape. We’re about a block and a half from the public library here, overlooking Fifth Avenue. Yeah, it’s too tasteful for an utterly tasteless company like Cabey-Yasuda Corrections. The bronze sun hangs in the window so that my mother is profiled in black. She’s speaking to someone on a call, probably someone in Tokyo, someone connected to the Yokosuka project. That’s all she thinks about—Yokosuka. And because it’s all she thinks about, it’s all I’m supposed to think about too.

  Today, my mind runs in other races.

  This conversation is going to be knotty and if there was any other way, any other hope, I’d take it. F
or about the fifth time, I straighten my jacket and check my makeup in the glass. Problem is, she guards every gate and holds every key. When my eyes refocus, I can see Alessandra through the window cupping her fingers to make a point to whoever’s on the call, that same old gesture, as if she’s cinched the argument—the same thing she does whenever she’s trying to get her way. I check my hair, I check my makeup. I say knotty because I need the right outcome here and I’m not sure she’s going to like it. Meanwhile, I’m also trying to keep the asshole grin off my face but it’s hard. Yamaan is alive. Alive! He made it out, God only knows how. All I want to do is scale Alessandra’s desk and kick off my shoes and sing for her. She might understand the feeling, too. She just might. She loves a good show of passion.

  Then I remind myself of the months and months I spent believing Yamaan was lost, when the list of the drowned was two thousand pages long; I remind myself of that night with the hair dryer and the bathtub and how much I wanted to cease existing; I remind myself how Hoshino slid his hand along my thigh last week in Kabukicho while he drank sake from a naked woman’s navel; I remember these pains in order to keep the needle on what needs doing, because it’s time I started taking a better course.

  She comes to me with arms out.

  ‘Oh, my gorgeous girl,’ she says.

  We hug.

  I’m trying to keep calm by breathing deep. It’s not working.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she says.

  ‘Fine. Better.’

  ‘You seem different.’

  ‘Do I?’

  She steps back. ‘You look different.’

  Probably true. I wasn’t taking care for a while there. I lost a lot of weight. Drinking too much. Suicidal ideation.

  ‘You still seeing that therapist?’

  ‘Occasionally,’ I say.

  A total lie. I only saw the therapist once and never went back—mostly because she told me that I ought to feel more grateful for my life. We’re in no man’s land here. A bomb could go off right under our feet.

  ‘How come you look so happy?’ she says. ‘What’s up with you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘You’re just happy to be here.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And what?’ she says.

  ‘And I’ve missed New York,’ I say. ‘I’ve missed being home.’

  ‘We’re nearly done with Yokosuka,’ she says. ‘You’re doing great. This is good work. We’re close to putting this to bed.’

  ‘I did everything you asked,’ I say and breathe to calm myself.

  ‘It’s great, Rin. Really. It’s better than we hoped.’

  She slides on her glasses, blinking. I do the same. There’s nothing in her office but a shelf where she keeps her ancient bonsai tree, and a slab desk. I don’t know that she ever uses that desk for anything except somewhere to fuck her personal assistant, Landon, every now and then. So, it’s always a weird feeling when I put on glasses in her office and see how much digital stuff she has scattered around. She’s pinned live feeds from the big news channel to the walls, she’s placed functioning scale models of the Yokosuka and Port Lincoln facilities near the windows, she’s got the dresses and suits and skirts she’s thinking of buying racked up on hangers, there’s a ginger cat sleeping on the floor, there’s a toucan in a cage, there’s a basketball hoop and a rack of balls … She wouldn’t let many people see this side of herself—probably only me and Landon. It’s a mess but an instructive mess.

  She sweeps away an internet window and pulls the Yokosuka contract drafts from the company cloud. I stand with my hands folded at my waist while I watch her read. She chews her lip. She frowns. My heart is running so hard I need to breathe to slow it.

  ‘Do you have anything to drink in here?’ I say.

  Right now, I could use some courage.

  ‘God,’ she says. ‘Get some cocaine or something. Don’t drink.’

  ‘Try entertaining Hoshino without drinking,’ I say.

  The mention of his name causes her face to flatten. It’s an expressive face, theatrical, framed by a feminine bob with side-swept bangs. My grandmother, Maria, came from Acapulco and that’s where Alessandra gets her dark hair. There’s a band of grey in it that I call her racing stripe. As her expression flattens, I realise what I said probably sounded like a complaint.

  ‘Did he touch you again?’ she says.

  ‘Don’t worry. I can deal with it.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’

  ‘You ever drink sake from someone’s navel?’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a place in Kabukicho where the girls lay out on benches and you drink sake from their navels.’

  ‘You drank sake from someone’s navel?’

  ‘Not me. Hoshino.’

  Alessandra raises her eyebrows. ‘That sounds expensive.’

  ‘Three million yen,’ I say.

  ‘Did they suck his dick as well?’

  ‘He got a lot more than that. He was happy as a pig in a mud puddle.’

  The ginger cat walks a figure eight around my ankles. We had a real cat once. She was white, so Alessandra called her Blanco. For fun, I used to lock Blanco in the bedroom closets and listen through the door as she went crazy in the darkness. Blanco hated me a lot. This is a story Alessandra tells whenever we start talking about the rough times I had growing up, so I know exactly why she’s suppressing a smile as the ginger cat moves between my ankles.

  ‘Tell me where we are right now on Yokosuka,’ she says.

  ‘I know you wanted ninety per cent,’ I say. ‘But the minister looked at Chiba, he looked at Niigata, and he saw facilities running at fifty per cent capacity. You were asking him to guarantee ninety per cent occupancy for one prison. Ninety. When he has facilities running at less than fifty.’

  ‘We knew that going in.’

  ‘Right. I made it clear you’d accept eighty-five if it came with a loosening of oversight. Annual safety inspections changed to biennial. The removal of maximum cell occupancy rates. The removal of mandated dietary requirements.’

  Alessandra highlights the profit and loss sheet from my report. She’s circled the cost projections for this scenario. ‘That’s our road to making eighty-five profitable.’

  ‘Fish is mandated once a day for Japanese inmates. Red meat three times a week. I told them you wanted those minimums removed entirely.’

  ‘We’d save millions.’

  ‘I’ve included numbers for fish as low as once per week, just like you asked. Push it that far and you recover the difference between eighty-five and ninety within four years.’

  ‘They can eat vat meat,’ she says. ‘Tofu. Whatever.’

  ‘Hoshino seems to think that Japanese prisoners are mollycoddled anyway. You won’t have much trouble convincing the minister to remove the minimums.’

  She flips page after page, checking the numbers. The numbers, you’ve got to understand, are what she’s best at. She made it to where she is today because of an unholy skill at making numbers turn in her favour.

  ‘This is great,’ she says. ‘I think we can nail this shut.’

  Cabey-Yasuda wasn’t always in the migrant training business. Years ago, we used to be a cheap and nasty private prison operator. The prison business is basic—warehouse the crooks and the government pays you per inmate, with some minimum guarantees. We still have a lot of contracts in this area, like the one I’m working on with Hoshino. Trouble is, private prisons don’t make you much. Your profit comes from the measly percentage you scrape away by cutting costs and finding efficiencies that a government-run facility is too humane to allow. Humanity? That won’t get you far in the corrections game. Which is why Alessandra is worried about occupancy rates. Pack them and stack them. She made the company profitable by worrying about tiny numbers.

  So that’s where the Australian facilities come into the picture. Alessandra started looking for a new product, one th
at had better margins, better growth potential, and a more investor-friendly pitch. What better pitch than helping the refugees of the world? Who doesn’t want to help refugees, right? The five Australian facilities—Wollongong, Ballina, Port Lincoln, Bunbury, and Eaglehawk—are immigration detention centres, sure, but they’re also manufacturing plants. That means two revenue streams for one facility. And we also clean up our image. We’re not just a corrections company anymore—now, we’re building communities, we’re saving lives. It’s fucking clever, you have to admit.

  ‘We’re nearly done,’ she says. ‘You’re doing great.’

  ‘Great. I’ve had about enough of Yokohama.’

  ‘It’ll be great to have you back here.’

  Not really. I might come back to New York, it’s my home, I love it, but Cabey-Yasuda is a dog house that’s giving me fleas. No—my time at CYC is nearly finished.

  ‘Dinner tonight?’ she says. ‘Why don’t you come over?’

  Normally, she always wants me to stay over when I’ve been in Yokohama for a while. It’s just the two of us. Always has been. Never once has she married or even lived with a guy. There have been boyfriends, a fiancé once, and plenty of guys like Landon. Really though, she doesn’t trust men. Do you blame her? Her assets come in at eight hundred million. You can bet people want a piece of it. I’m the only person she really trusts in the world, I guess. When I come over, she’ll have her chef fix up something I like, something I can’t get in Japan. Tostadas. Ceviche. We’ll eat and we’ll talk. We’ll sit by the window and look out at Central Park where the trees are naked for the winter and the lake has lost its ducks. At home, she softens a lot. This is what normally happens.

  But I’m about to drop a bomb.

  ‘Listen,’ I say and it comes out weakly. I clear my throat. ‘So, I went to Tasmania.’

  Her expression changes. ‘What were you doing in Tasmania?’

  For a moment I want to hug her. This is the happiest I’ve been in years. That’s enough reason to hug. Instead, Alessandra crosses her arms.

  ‘I found Yamaan. He’s alive.’

  ‘Oh my God.’

  I nod.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says again. I think she’s actually shocked. ‘He’s alive?’