Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  With moody indifference, he lit a cigarette for me and we smoked and watched the schoolkids kick about in the water. There were signs here that showed a girl in a bikini with a red cross through it. Still, some of the girls, the younger ones, left their hair uncovered and some had their shoulders exposed. Shadi watched them over his mirrored sunglasses. It was hard to tell if he was outraged or titillated.

  ‘Life is hard for an ugly man,’ he said.

  Ah, so that was the trouble. Girls.

  ‘You, Sobe, your life will be easy. Just look at you.’

  Sobe—little brother. I liked it when he called me Sobe.

  ‘Dogs are ugly,’ I said. ‘You’re not ugly. You have character.’

  This was the truth. His eyes were perhaps too wide apart but he was tall and proud and carried himself in a way that showed authority.

  He looked at the swimmers again. After a while he said, ‘I want to be relieved of the sordid necessity of living for them.’

  It sounded serious this time.

  ‘She laughed at me, Sobe.’

  Aishath, he was talking about. The stubby, cute waitress at Half Moon Cafe. He’d been circling around Aishath for weeks, looking for the courage to speak to her. I almost laughed as well because I was young, yes, and couldn’t fathom his terror. It seemed unknowable. How could a girl, any girl, cause such agony?

  ‘I said to her, you’re so pretty it gives me butterflies.’

  ‘You said that?’

  ‘I asked if she wanted to come for a ride on my bike. She laughed. Then she said, I’m too busy to play with children.’

  Perhaps we said more. I don’t remember. What I remember is sliding closer to him and placing an arm around his shoulders. It was all I could think to do. We sat watching the waves burst on the sand and it stays with me, even today, that feeling. The feeling of brotherhood. We’ve never been as close as we were that time.

  When Rin tells me—as she has many times—that she fell in love at our first meeting, I always think of my cousin. He may have felt a similar thunder strike. He may have felt it, but clearly Aishath did not. When I think of my cousin that way, my lanky, loose-eyed cousin, my unlovable cousin, my heart beats with tenderness for him. He took a beating in his youth that smarter men might have known to avoid. He was never smart. You’d need to be mean-spirited to wish that pain on him though.

  The Behavioural Adjustment Unit.

  I palm the sweat off my forehead and look about. A low concrete warehouse, a tin roof, a rack of floodlights. It has the coarse cheapness of a military building. It sits apart from the rest of Delta compound, fenced off, as if even the Australians fear the place. The heat curls off it like petrol fumes. We hear the stories from the ones who come back about ten or twelve men being packed into a cell with only paper cups to piss in. Or worse, left alone in a cell for days on end.

  ‘In there,’ Rin says.

  ‘In there,’ I say.

  Howland doesn’t hear us as his mind is elsewhere. Beyond the chain-link, beyond the recreation yard, the admin building is a crag of smoke and flame. Part of the roof has fallen. Somewhere in the yard the body of Van Hooj lays in a strange pose on its stomach, the armour melted into a sort of black obsidian. You have to picture it to understand the look on Howland’s face, the swivelling of his head as he takes it in, the medusa cords of his hair stiffly bouncing, the upturn of his lips close to a smile. The work of Daniel Howland. All of it. He’s satisfied.

  ‘Open the door for us, there’s a good girl,’ he says.

  ‘I told you. The power’s gone. They cut it off.’

  He scratches his balls. He grunts.

  ‘What?’ Rin says.

  ‘How hot do you reckon it is?’

  ‘Would you just burn the lock?’

  ‘And these mongrels shut off the power,’ he says and he ignites the blowtorch. He looks at me. ‘We’re sheep to these people. To be shorn or—’

  ‘Slaughtered,’ I say.

  ‘Or slaughtered,’ he says.

  ‘You say that a lot.’

  ‘Cause it’s true.’

  There’s a gate, a fenced sallyport, and then a security door. He starts on the gate and we step away as the sparks start to scatter.

  Rin is not faring well. She’s sweating. Her hair is frizzy from where she runs her hands through it over and over. From the way she looks at the BAU, with a notch between her eyes, I suspect she’s afraid of entering. She ought to be afraid. Many of the inmates are violent. They’ve raped other men. They’ve attacked the DEOs. After what happened to her in Houston, I’m sure she knows what some men can do.

  ‘You hear that?’ she says.

  She squints up at the bright sun. I lift my eyes too.

  An aircraft floats over the forested hills like a fat blowfly. It seems to move slowly for a plane but, as it comes closer, I can see how all four rotors are tilted upwards and it drifts more in the fashion of a helicopter. I’ve never seen an aircraft like this. Within moments it passes right over the compound and I have to narrow my eyes in the dust it kicks up.

  ‘Who is it?’ I yell.

  ‘The AFP.’

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Yeah. Anti-riot team. Remote-operated drones. They’re here to retake the facility.’

  We watch the tiltrotor disappear behind the dormitory pods.

  ‘This is dire,’ I say.

  ‘Drones,’ she says. ‘Tear gas. Tactical weapons. Dire is right.’

  Howland kicks open the gate. ‘You want to see dire, take a look in here.’

  The glowing parts of the lock buckle and break and the door creaks in. A wave of heated air blows past us. The power is out and the air-conditioning units are off. It must be fifty degrees inside.

  ‘Now that’s dire,’ he says.

  We stand, anxiously staring into the dark, a dark cut through with a long shaft of skylight sun. From somewhere come loud cries. The cries of men still shut in their cells. Rin presses her sleeve over her nose.

  ‘Look at all you poor bastards,’ Howland says.

  We step through the door and it smells like a rubbish dump. I feel certain there’ll be a body in one of these cells. What else could cause that stink? As our eyes adjust we see along both walls a series of doors, each identical, each with a port for the passing of food. The ports are open. The men are yelling through them in English. Let us out. Let us out. Water. Water. Please. Rin grabs my arm.

  ‘Keep walking,’ she says and pulls me along. ‘Don’t look at them.’

  I suppose they see me because they start to call in Dhivehi. Brother, they call. Brother. God help us. Water. Bring us water. Let us out. Let us out. Who is she? Who is she? What’s going on?

  Rin can’t understand any of it. She pulls me along. The men hammer on the doors of their cells so that the floor of the BAU is filled with clattering as loud as hail on a tin roof. It’s so hot in here the air burns my throat. Let us out. Let us out. They reach their arms through the food ports and grab for our clothes and Rin doesn’t even look at them. I see their eyes in the slots, the sad, pleading eyes. Should I pity them or fear them? I can’t be certain.

  Behind a pane of perspex at the far end of the block is a control room. Rin pulls me along to this room. The DEOs must have left quickly because there are sandwiches on the desks and toppled chairs on the floor. I’m so hungry I think about picking up a sandwich to eat until I see the flies wriggling on it. She drops to her knees. She crawls under a desk.

  ‘Rin?’

  ‘There should be a switch,’ she says. ‘Back-up power.’

  Something thuds into place. The lights in the room come on. The air-conditioners rattle and wheeze. She reappears with her hair hanging in her face.

  ‘Alessandra always said I needed to know this shit.’

  ‘I suppose she was right.’

  ‘She’s going to regret being right this time.’

  Hanging on the wall is a steel cabinet. Rin does something with her hands, moves some virtual obj
ects I can’t see, and the lock spins and a green light winks. The cabinet springs open. It’s full of weapons. She starts to remove them one by one and pile them on a desk.

  Up until now, I have been disconnected from reality. Since Van Hooj caught fire and I watched him burn, since then I’ve been dazed. There’s a distance, a befuddlement. I imagine this is what being drunk might be like. I can’t quite make sense of everything that’s happening. I keep thinking about the way Van Hooj grovelled across the dirt. The image of it invades my thoughts over and over. But something changes as I watch her pile rifles and pistols and gas cans on the desk. I snap awake. I snap into command.

  ‘You just fire it the same way you fire a gun,’ she says.

  Suddenly, everything is real.

  She turns over an electrolaser, unclips the battery pack, blows dust from the anodes and refits it. She flicks the power switch and the weapon makes a voltaic whine. The batteries attach on a rail under what you might call the barrel, the plastic housing for the lenses and electrodes. The whole thing is black and yellow. Like a wasp. The colours of danger.

  ‘You get it? Point and shoot.’

  She aims at the floor. There’s a strobe of blue so bright it hurts my eyes. A cracking report. The power of it startles me.

  ‘This is crazy,’ I say. ‘This is violent.’

  ‘That’s why we need protection.’

  ‘No. I mean, you shouldn’t be in here. What are you doing in here?’

  She reaches to her back and tucks the weapon in her belt.

  ‘I can take you out,’ I say. ‘Let me take you to the police. Please.’

  ‘Yammy,’ she says and she squeezes her fists closed. ‘Trust me. That’s the very last thing I want to do.’

  He has a sense of theatre, I will say that. Howland walks in and draws up in front of me. His mouth works side to side under his beard. I can see that something is wrong from the tension in his forehead.

  ‘I reckon you better get out of here, old mate,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  There’s a monitor on the desk and Howland begins tapping at the squares onscreen, numbered squares, lined up in columns.

  Rin says, ‘Don’t touch that.’

  ‘Take your Uncle Howler’s advice. Get out while you can.’

  ‘What are you doing? Don’t touch that.’

  He taps more of the squares.

  Rin tries to grab his arm but he simply holds her off.

  ‘Stop,’ she says. ‘No.’

  There’s a noise. A steady drumbeat. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. I look out through the perspex. I see lights over the cells changing colour. One after the next, they switch from red to green. He’s opening them. I stand transfixed at the sight. Perhaps the men inside the cells do not quite believe it because for a time nothing happens. I look at Rin. She has both hands cupped over her mouth.

  Some of the cells begin to open. The prisoners stumble forward and pause and blink in the skylight sun. Men in company-issued orange jumpsuits. They’re bare-chinned and bare-headed because on arrival at the BAU they’re shaved down. For lice, they say. In truth, it’s a form of punishment. A way to debase these men before God. The DEOs love finding new ways to debase us. The men stagger from their cells and look around. They start towards the control room.

  ‘Yammy,’ she says. Her eyes are huge and dark.

  I shoulder the door closed. A light blinks in the lock and the bolt shoots home. Just in time. They try the handle. They kick and thump. You left us here, they call. You shut off the power. You tried to kill us. That woman, she works for the company. Send her out. Send her out. She tried to kill us.

  Howland cackles like a parrot. ‘You should see your faces.’

  ‘This isn’t what we talked about,’ Rin says. ‘The deal was we find the weapons. That was the deal.’

  He snorts even more.

  ‘I swear I’ll walk out of here.’

  ‘Past that lot? You’re going to walk past that lot?’

  ‘Lose me and you’ll have nothing to keep the anti-riot drones out. No bargaining power. Nothing. They’ll retake the facility before dark.’

  ‘Your choice, princess.’

  What is it? Perhaps I know him better than Rin does. Or I piece it together quicker. The way he looks out at the prisoners. The incline of his head. I see in these things a larger importance. He inhales, his body swells, and I already know what he’s going to do. He starts lumping the non-lethal weapons in the crook of his arm. Electric rifles and side-arms. He takes the biggest of them, the most prominent.

  ‘Wait a second,’ Rin says. She moves in front of him. ‘No. No way.’

  He looks along the sights of a plaser with one eye closed.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding. No way.’

  ‘Watch me.’

  ‘You want to get people killed?’

  ‘When your company harms people,’ he says, ‘that’s justified. That’s business as usual. When we do it, you call it murder.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘You want to know the future?’ he says. ‘I see it already and I can tell you.’

  ‘You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.’

  ‘A few months from now, some wealthy corporate hack will sit in a court room and say those detainees were cruel men, they hurt people. And that’s all he’ll need to say. That will justify anything the state does, any force, any depravity, because the state has the monopoly on violence. It’s not even called violence when they do it, it’s called policing or security. The moment we stand up to the corporate agenda, the state calls it violence and starts locking us away.’

  ‘If you hate this place so much, then help me. We have demands, remember? We want MWD restarted. We want better conditions.’

  Howland thumbs the power switch. The plaser whines.

  ‘Or we try to get Yamaan deported,’ she says. ‘We have to try something. We have to help him.’

  She still doesn’t seem to understand. I want to tell her to stop.

  ‘I won’t leave him here,’ she says.

  Howland is watching her. He seems to make an assessment. His eyes range over her tailored suit, the CYC pin on her lapel, the messy state of her hair. ‘You’ve really done your nut over him, haven’t you?’

  Rin crosses her arms.

  ‘He’s a good-looking young bloke, I suppose. That must cause a certain wetness of the panties—’

  ‘My panties? Is that what you want to hear about?’

  ‘I’m sure your boy would.’

  ‘Think about what getting shot in the dick will feel like before you start asking about my panties.’

  Howland scratches his crotch. There’s a particular defiance in the way he scratches and the way he snorts. I should have known it would come to this. He’s not a man who’ll be controlled. I remember talking to him late one afternoon, before the leaks, before the riots, talking to him about Dr Nazeem and the theocrats in the camp. He had many opinions about them. Considered opinions, educated opinions. He said I should think about what Nazeem wants: freedom for all or control for himself? The answer was obvious, of course. Then I asked him why he spent so much time thinking about power. A truly sensible man will think of nothing else, he said. When you’re dealing with authority, he said, you have to understand that they can only take what you let them take.

  Howland was not a man who gave things away.

  ‘You’ve got about an hour,’ Rin says, ‘before the drones break in.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ he says.

  ‘For what?’

  He bundles the weapons in his arms and turns towards me.

  ‘Plenty of time for what?’

  ‘Making sheep into lions,’ he says and motions me out of the way.

  I remove my weight from the door.

  ‘Come on,’ Rin says. ‘Be real. We need each other.’

  Howland looks at me with concern. ‘Mate, for her own sake, take her out of here.’

  He leaves. Through the persp
ex we watch him pass among the crowd of jump-suited men as they part around him. His ropey hair sits high above the bald heads of the inmates. He calls them together and men come forward to shake his hand and they hug him and listen to what he says. Grateful, I suppose, for being set free. We can’t hear but we can see how he talks. He strides up and down. He points his finger to emphasise, to convince. After a while he starts handing out the weapons.

  This should fill me with fear. Here he is, the wild man who made a riot and put the facility into madness, now arming the centre’s worst men. It should fill me with fear, yet I’m glad that he’s gone. Moosa Umair would ask: which is the bigger problem, a thousand enemies outside your house or one inside it? But as I watch inmates giving him their fullest attention, I’m struck with a conundrum. The Tasmanian is an idealist, he’s dangerous, and yet I find myself admiring what he can do. I find myself hoping he’ll succeed.

  Now that is a thought to fill me with fear.

  ‘We may be in some trouble,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah. Well. I’m in every sort of trouble there is.’

  There’s a catch in her voice as she says it. I look at her for a long time, trying to read her thoughts. ‘The police,’ I say.

  Rin lifts her glasses and rubs the bridge of her nose and replaces them.

  I feel a gnawing in my stomach. ‘You leaked that information.’

  ‘Yeah. What else could I do?’

  ‘And they know it was you.’

  ‘Yeah. They know.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘Industrial espionage. Twenty-year mandatory minimum.’

  It takes a moment to register the weight of this bare fact but as the weight settles, I’m overcome by the need to sit on the floor. She sits with me and pulls off her glasses and presses her hands to her face. And while the heaviness tugs on my insides now, as I think about why Rin liberated those emails it grows heavier and heavier. She did it for me, to save me from being kept here for years. I look over at her. Is that really what happened? The troops of my Heart want it to be true. And yet, if it is true, she’s certainly going to jail.