by Rohan Wilson
My heart is thudding behind my eyes.
‘I believe we can arrange it though,’ he says.
‘Are you certain? We can’t keep these men, Jack. It’s unthinkable.’
‘I believe we can arrange it.’
‘Immediately. Today.’
‘I believe we can arrange it today. Sri Lanka owe us a few favours.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘Good.’
‘If we’re talking causes,’ Jack Slaton says, ‘the cause here is—’
‘Let’s not get too caught up in causes,’ I say.
Slaton is about to press the issue further, but the warden’s wristband flashes with a call, saving me from probably yelling at him. The warden walks to the corner of the office for privacy before answering. Jack Slaton needs to get back in his kennel. Say what you like about the Japanese, at least they respect their superiors. I blow the bangs from my forehead in frustration. It’s a childish habit, and instantly I feel embarrassed for doing it.
‘That was Van Hooj,’ the warden says. ‘He’s worried about Red Gate. They’re trying to break the locks there.’
‘Red Gate?’ I say.
The warden points out the window. ‘You can see it.’
Yeah, I can see it. A heavy gate set on rollers that gives access to the other compounds, and then beyond that to the manufactory. Cabey-Yasuda absolutely, positively, does not want clients breaking that lock.
‘He wants to make a push,’ the warden says. ‘Force them back.’
‘Jack,’ I say. ‘The drones.’
‘I’ll make the call.’
He takes several long Australian strides to the door and slams it shut behind him.
‘What do I tell Van Hooj?’ the warden says.
If it’s to be the full thing, gas and lasers and whatever they need, I’ll have to authorise it. The full thing. This is the bargain. If I want to be here making the plays, I can’t dip on the toughest of them.
‘Twenty officers,’ I say.
‘Twenty.’
‘And what, eight hundred clients in Delta compound?’
‘Nine hundred and fifty.’
‘Right. Okay.’
I fold my arms, let them fall and then refold them. Someone is going to get killed if I say the wrong thing. ‘What gear do they have?’
‘ComSec riot suits and ballistic shields. Batons. Full face helmets. Some have launchers, some have ECWs. The usual loadout.’
‘What about gas?’
‘If you need it.’
‘All right. Here’s what I want. They secure the gate. That’s it.’
‘No worries.’
‘They secure it. They hold position. Then they hit anyone near that gate with tear gas. Understand?’
‘I’ll tell them.’
‘And tell them to hogtie anyone they can. I want to start breaking this up. And tell them the drones are on the way.’
The warden makes the call and I stand by the window watching.
With their shields interlocked, with their helmets and bright black armour, the echelon looks like a centipede. It crosses the yard sticking close by the dormitories and covering the angles of approach. This is how we’re taught in training. Stay together. Stay mobile. Leave an escape route. The clients hang back a good distance and throw rocks and bottles. These bounce off the shields and spin away. The echelon crosses the yard to within twenty metres of the gate, where it forms a more aggressive stance and then, purely for intimidation, the DEOs begin beating their batons on the shields and making a racket.
This is the part that makes me nervous.
Gathered around the gate is a group of probably ten clients. I can’t tell exactly from this distance—ten, fifteen. This ten or fifteen have their faces hidden behind kerchiefs or surgical masks and they are smashing at the gate with chairs, rocks or whatever they can find. Procedure here would be to verbally warn them off, state the consequences for non-compliance, and then beat the sauce out of anyone who thinks themselves bigger. For a few minutes it devolves into a stand-off, minutes in which Van Hooj shares his demands over a bullhorn. The clients back up a small way but it doesn’t satisfy Van Hooj. After a while his men move forward. They grab whoever they can. They beat the laggards with batons. They use pepper spray and zip-tie the hands of the captured.
And I’m thinking—it’s working.
As desperately risky as my plan is, it’s working. Once we have control of the facility, calm and order, I can have them bring Yamaan to me. It won’t be long now. I should be able to have a few minutes with him before he’s taken away by Border Protection officers and deported by plane to Sri Lanka as one of the leaders of the riots (at least, on my insistence). I need to hold him, to kiss him, even just for a couple of minutes. I need that at least. It could be months before I see him again.
When I turn away from the window I see that Rahmatullah and another officer have entered the room and closed the door behind them. Rahmatullah has a zip-tie in one hand and this other guy has a plaser and they’re looking at the warden. The warden hasn’t noticed them, fixed as she is on the scene in the window. I’d forgotten about these two. They should be out there in the echelon. God knows we need everyone out there.
‘You two,’ I say. ‘Gear up. Go help your team.’
They don’t answer. They don’t even look at me. Rahmatullah says, ‘Warden, I reckon we might have a problem.’
The warden is not quite giving full attention. ‘Sorry?’
‘We’ve had a call.’
‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Did you hear me? You should be helping out there.’
‘Make sure Watto’s watching out for ones that are gassed,’ the warden says to them and points at the window.
‘We’ve had a call,’ Rahmatullah says, ‘from Dieter Brown.’
It takes a second to register. You see it in her face, the registration, the jolt, the widening eyes. She looks at them.
‘We … ahh,’ he says, ‘we’re supposed to detain Rin.’
‘You what?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what Dieter told us. Detain her. Call the police.’
The warden laughs and it’s nervous and high pitched. ‘What, lock her in a room or something? Yeah. All right.’
‘I don’t think she was joking, Warden.’
‘Well, what would we do that for?’ she says. Then to me she adds, ‘Sorry, Rin, let me just sort this out.’
‘I was told it’s a matter of urgency.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. If this is a wind-up, I’m going to suspend the both of you.’
‘No one’s winding anyone up.’
‘Look, I’m going to call Dieter. If this is a wind-up, I won’t be happy.’
Some ripple must cross my face, a twinge of fear, because Rahmatullah seems to gain confidence. He starts walking directly towards me.
‘Wait on a minute,’ the warden says. ‘Just wait there.’
‘You’d better come with me,’ he says.
I don’t move. I don’t think I even breathe.
‘What exactly is the problem here?’ the warden says. ‘Can anyone tell me what the problem is?’
He holds up the zip-tie. ‘Come on now. I don’t want to cuff you.’
My heart is whacking back and forth like a boxer’s speed bag. The thing they don’t realise is, I’m at my best in a clutch. ‘You will not touch me,’ I say. ‘Either of you.’
‘Ms Braden, I’m going to cuff you. Forcibly if I have to. This is your last warning.’
‘And it’s your last warning. Touch me and I’ll take everything you have.’
Rahmatullah works his tongue around his cheek. He doesn’t come any closer.
‘You know I can. You know I have the power.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘You don’t.’
There’s a crinkle at the side of his mouth, the first frame of a smile. Then it hits me; Alessandra knows. There’s no other way this could be happening. Only she could authorise it.
‘You’re no longer vi
ce president of anything, Ms Braden. Think you’ll find you’ve been fired.’
‘She’s what?’ the warden says.
Rahmatullah wags his thumb at the other guy. ‘On top of that, we have the go ahead to discharge that plaser. They said you might want to fight back and if you try anything, we ought to stun you.’
The other guy trains the pulse generator on my chest.
‘You people are unfuckingbelievable,’ I say.
‘No one wants a broken arm,’ he says with a smile.
I step my right foot back into a defensive hamni stance. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve done nothing to you.’
‘Look. I’m asking as one colleague to another, don’t make us hurt you. That’s the last thing we want.’
There are tears in my eyes. I’m blinking and blinking.
‘You’d better come with us,’ the captain says.
He waves me forward. His arm hangs there for a second, outstretched, and I’m looking at it, and before I can think of anything else I grab his hand and push forward into oshi-taoshi. It involves twisting by the arm until he loses balance. The captain yells as I force his shoulder downwards. Then there’s a flash, a vibration like a blow to the head, and I’m lying on my back with the ceiling tiles swirling in my vision. The firecracker smell of the plaser fills my nose. I’m pushing myself upright when I see the other guy lift the weapon and fire again.
Yamaan
The celebrated thirteenth-century poet Rumi once observed that to be in love was like letting go of life and taking a step without feet and I reflected on his words late one summer, a year before the August disaster, as I stood by the washing machine with Rin Braden’s panties wrapped about my thumb. This was the summer of the white hair. Rin and her mother had arrived on Feydhoo Finolhu for their annual holiday just the day before. The new Rin, outwardly changed. White-haired, yes, but also more sombre. Sadder, somehow. I stood sorting silks from cashmeres and wools from metallics. Some clothes I could wash, some had to be dry-cleaned in Malé. In this sorting, however, I’d hooked her sheer cotton briefs on my left thumb. I was alone in the laundry so I allowed myself to hold them a little longer than was polite. The velvety texture, the exquisite aroma. Standing there, I knew I’d found the holy Sufi love, the feetless love that Rumi described.
You have to understand, this was my fourth summer in the Braden house. Four summers washing their clothes and cooking their meals. By now I knew them well. When I’d started, Rin was just a curiosity. A small, dark-haired girl, demanding and self-assured. A daughter of money, to be certain. The proper thing would have been to cook and clean and keep my eyes down. But she would enter a room and draw my gaze with her gravitational pull. We’d watch each other. Her, perhaps eating coconut ice-cream. Me, perhaps folding linen. The moment her mother left us alone, we’d come together in a quiet corner of the house.
Rin held no fear at all of sex. The gasping cries, the thrusting hips. To her, it was another form of expression. She was quite different from the Muslim women I knew, who mostly found sex to be a suspicious act, one that had the means to ruin your life. And while I was electrified by the petite firmness of her body, sex with her often left me afraid. After all, this was my livelihood. My father was in prison and I had been forced to leave university and take this job. We both knew that Alessandra would terminate my position if we were caught. Yet, God be praised, we never were. Why? Rin was a practised liar and I had the benefit of domestic invisibility.
In the months apart, the long Maldivian dry season, the New York winter, we would send messages describing our cravings for each other. I, quoting the ancients; she, in the vernacular of lust. She sent videos of her breasts, her bottom, video of herself masturbating—any video that whet her appetite. Pornography was illegal in the Maldives of course and I took great care to delete her messages after I’d enjoyed myself. Once, in an elaborately worded email, she described how she’d fallen in love the first moment we’d met. I didn’t believe her. Love? It seemed so improbable. We had neither race, nor class, nor religion in common. And yet, I read her words again and again. I spoke them aloud when I was alone. They had a potency like opium. More than anything, I wanted to believe her.
For my reply, I picked through the poems I’d been devising, poems in the vein of Qabbani and Khalil (poems came to me whenever I thought too long about Rin). This is what I sent: ‘The crests of your sea carry me, to shining bays, and shores of white heat, and I am home.’ Subtle, I’d hoped. And then, for no clear reason, the videos stopped arriving. I continued to compose erotic poems and send them to Rin but nothing came back my way. The sense of loss this caused surprised me. I knew it was for the best, and there was some relief, but every week when I cleaned the empty house I started by visiting the places where we’d made love.
So. Standing in the laundry. Her briefs caught about my thumb and the words of Rumi in my head. It seemed to me old Rumi was the only one who’d ever understood that a woman like Rin Braden was possible. At length I tossed her briefs in the wash and set the machine to run. I was mystified by this American girl and her month-long silence. If I was to survive an entire July in her presence I needed to cure myself of the obsession. Work, I’d learned from my father, work made you whole. Work gave you purpose. I resolved to work my way free of Rin Braden.
With this in mind, I returned to the kitchen. Making lunch. Doing my job. I laid out a board and a knife and a cloth. The fridge, a huge chrome box inset with sensors, opened for me as I retrieved a lime and some tuna, and closed again when I stepped away. I would make mashuni and think of ideas. I would consider al-Farabi’s idea of perfection or Nietzsche’s idea of the abyss. Recently, I’d read about Zen Buddhism and the profound insight you gain from repetitive acts, such as raking sand or folding paper. I still hoped that I’d be able to finish my PhD thesis the following year when my father was released. Yes, this Rin of the White Hair might have a power only explained through a poetic form but she would not defeat my sense of purpose.
She was sitting in the shade of the balcony when she heard me rattling the mortar and pestle in the kitchen. Always the shade, never the sun. She kept her skin as white as a drop of coconut milk. She tucked a towel around her waist and slid the huge glass door open. I kept my eyes down. I kept my mind on other things. Rin sat herself on a stool by the kitchen counter and for a while just watched as I diced onion and chilli. I scooped this into a mortar and started pounding. She wore merely a two-piece swimsuit and this immodesty would have worried a better Muslim except that I was more liberal than most. I had to be, working for Westerners. Besides, I’m no Arab. Leave the moral panic for the Wahhabis. But when she folded her arms under her chest, the crevice between her breasts deepened and darkened and I almost crushed my finger in distraction.
‘What do you think of my hair? You like it?’
I wiped my hands on a towel.
‘Alessandra hates it.’
‘No. It’s …’
‘What? Say it.’
You have to understand, she was the only woman I knew who even wore her hair uncovered. In my mind, and probably in the mind of every Muslim man, a woman’s hair has a highly charged erotic significance. The short white hair, the bare neck. In combination, it struck me with great force. I had a vision of falling into a hole.
‘It’s very pretty,’ I said.
She adjusted herself on the stool. She looked away from me.
And so it would unfold like this for a month. The gentle provocations, the gentle unpicking of my soul. Hole, swallow me now, I thought. I fished a handful of grated coconut from a bowl on the bench and tossed it in the mortar.
‘You shouldn’t stare at the sea,’ I said.
‘Huh?’
‘Out there on the sun deck. It’ll turn your heart to stone.’
‘Who says that?’
‘My grandfather. My father. Everyone says that.’
‘I never heard anyone say that.’
‘It makes you sad. You’ll lose th
e feeling of life.’
She began twisting her hair on her thumb as she looked out at the sea. ‘God, I miss this place,’ she said. ‘It’s always good to be back.’
There was something not right in her voice. I put down the pestle and studied her. Three or four weeks a year they would fly in and this was my chief difficulty. To suddenly reorient myself to these strangers. My masters. Suddenly learn to read them again. Yet I heard in her voice the changes of the latest year, something heavier than before. A poignancy, it seemed.
‘Rin,’ I said and I frowned. ‘May I ask a question?’
She shrugged.
‘Why did you change your hair?’
She shifted in her seat. For a few moments she wouldn’t look at me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ask.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘It’s just—you can’t tell Alessandra. She thinks I’ve got problems already. She’d have a fucking haemorrhage if she knew.’
I leaned my knuckles on the counter and waited for her to speak. She pulled a few strands of hair through her fingers. It was longer at the front, jaw length, while at the back it rose high to reveal the curve of her neck. A curve of artisanal quality. ‘I mean, she wanted me to see a therapist for godsake. As if it’s me that needs help, not her.’
‘A therapist. We could all benefit from that.’
‘Come on, Yammy. She thinks I’m losing my mind.’
‘Then she doesn’t know you. Not like I do.’
She lifted a single manicured eyebrow to show her doubt.
‘I know you,’ I said. ‘Whether you like it or not.’
‘Whatever.’
I stood leaning on the bench and watching those eyes, each outlined in black mascara like ink drawings on a sheet of silk. I could not fathom why God had made such a woman. To what end? My uplifting or my down-bringing? She let go of her hair and a little frown creased her forehead.
‘So why the change?’ I said.
‘You’ll think I’m crazy.’
‘If you’re crazy, I’m crazy too. And then it makes no difference.’
She almost smiled at that. ‘It was just something I remembered.’
