by Rohan Wilson
After a moment she says, ‘You know, it’s not even the worst thing that happened to me this week.’
‘What could be worse?’
‘You won’t believe it.’
‘Try me.’
‘I found my mother.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My birth mother. She lives in Akashi. She grows radishes.’
I need to say something but there are few words left in me. Her mother. Her Japanese mother—her dead Japanese mother. I look at Rin and see the white hair she keeps for the memory and I know without doubt Alessandra has hurt her dreadfully. I take her hand and interlock our fingers. Hearing this deflates me a little. For a few seconds I’d started to believe she might have wreaked all this havoc to protect me. That’s a fantasy of the ego, of course. That’s the child’s selfishness in me. The target of her anger was always her mother.
‘Can you believe it?’ she says after a long time. ‘What a gullible moron I’ve been.’
‘How were you supposed to know?’
‘I was never an orphan. Alessandra lied to me.’
‘Oh Rin.’
‘Her name is Misaki.’
‘Misaki?’
‘She loved me. She wanted to keep me.’
‘Yes,’ I say and I brush the hair from her forehead. ‘I can believe that.’
‘Still, at least I know.’
‘You know who you really are.’
‘I know I was taken. I know I have a mother.’
‘Don’t be angry. Anger will kill you.’
‘My life is finished anyway. I’ll be in prison by tonight. But at least I know the truth.’
We sit for a time just so. Our fingers are interlocked and our shoulders touch. Nothing else matters now. These may be the last moments we spend together. She’s pale and blank, a frightening blank, as if the activity of her mind has ceased. She stares at me with blank eyes. I’m reading her face, trying to see who she is. The Rin I remember or someone new? These are the thoughts of a fool, I know. They don’t befit me. She’s just one person, good and bad. Yet, my father’s stories have tinted what I see. For a moment I see someone else. I see the handi.
I wonder, not for the first time, what troubles her so deeply. I wonder at the depth of her need and the chaotic feelings it creates. A need so deep that I can never fill it. I’m thinking of the handi and the talon on the heel. I’m thinking of my father’s story. How did it end? Wasn’t the fisherman distraught when the handi left forever? That was the fear, I believe—being alone. One thing I know: if Rin is to spend twenty years inside a CYC prison because she tried to do the right thing, I will never pass a day in peace again.
‘Hey. You’re bleeding.’
She’s trying to lift my t-shirt. My bandage has leaked. ‘It’s just a wound,’ I say.
‘A wound?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like, what, a stab wound?’
‘A stab wound. Yes.’
‘What?’
‘My cousin—’
‘Your cousin fucking stabbed you? Are you kidding me?’ She punches my arm. ‘For Christ’s sake, you have to tell me things like this. You were stabbed and you didn’t tell me? You’re impossible.’
‘We passed impossible a long while ago,’ I say, quoting Anand in Fifth Tuesday of June.
‘Huh?’
‘We’re not stopped by such a small thing as impossible.’
‘Shut up and let me help you.’
The blood runs in a thin line down my stomach. She looks around the room. There are tissues and a bottle of water on the table where the DEOs left off from their last meal. She plucks some tissues and starts to unscrew the cap of a water bottle. It’s more blood than I’d realised. Perhaps the printed skin has torn. I start to tell her that the skin has torn but when I look up I see that she’s frozen in the middle of the control room. She’s staring out the window.
‘What?’
‘They’re gone.’
I stand up. The floor of the BAU is empty. The cell doors stand open and there are towels and toilet rolls and plastic cups strewn around but there are no men anywhere.
‘We need to leave,’ I say. ‘While we can.’
Every person is formed by his days, or so people in the Maldives would tell you. What has this day done to Rin and I? I’m holding her hand and I can feel the fearful tension of it, the way she grips too tightly. She fears what’s about to come. It’s not that she’s weak or easily given to terror—she’s braver than a shark, I think—but we reach now the darkest juncture of her life. With some brief talk we’ve decided that Rin will surrender herself to police custody. This is not an easy thing to do. She grips my hand and I feel in the heat and stiffness of it the unsaid anxiety she’s experiencing.
Before we reach the police, we have to cross the recreation yard. Nine hundred men of Delta compound roam the grounds here, circling the bonfires and sleeping in the dust and waving their banners. Nine hundred men who I can’t trust. As I parse the dangers, my heart aches. There’s no need to speak of any of this. She knows the peril as well as I do.
‘Don’t let the police see you with that,’ she says.
I have a pistol-style plaser in my hand. For the yard. For whatever happens. Do I know how to use it? Not really. It’s mostly for deterrence.
‘They’ll shoot you on sight,’ she says.
‘Shoot me?’
‘On sight.’
‘Okay. Good. Yes.’
‘Make sure you throw it away before we reach the perimeter fence.’
‘I’ll be throwing it away as soon as I can.’
She unlocks the control room door and the light changes to green.
We step over the jumble on the floor of the BAU, the rolls of paper, the discarded clothes. A toilet bucket from a cell has spilled and sick-looking slop creeps across the floor that we carefully step past. Rin hasn’t seen it yet but there’s someone crumpled on the floor of a cell off to our left and from the colour and shape of his face it’s plain that he’s been dead in the heat for a while. I put myself between Rin and the cell, hoping she won’t see it. I’m used to the sight of death. I know its colours. Rin, though, she’s unworldly. She may not react well.
Out the exit I see the stretch of chain-link that divides the compound, and the long drifts of smoke coming across the admin building. It’s early afternoon. I turn to tell her something and, as I do, my eye is drawn to the shadows in the far corner and I lose the thread of my thought. My mouth is open but the thread of my thought is lost because a tall man, bald, in an orange CYC jumpsuit has stepped from the darkness.
He’s blinking in the bright light. He looks unassuming, as if he might be here to clean up. There’s a certain character to the way he moves, an uprightness, overly stiff through the neck, that I recognise. Yes, and then I remember what I want to tell Rin. I want to explain that my cousin jammed a sharpened TabaPet shell into my ribs because he feared for his reputation. He feared for his community. When he jammed a TabaPet shell into my ribs, he believed he was doing a good deed. I feel oddly detached as the man in the orange jumpsuit swings his hand and reveals the yellow and black frame of a plaser. The man narrowing his eyes in the hard light is Shadi Thoriq. He turns one way, he turns the other. He seems at a loss.
‘Sobe,’ he says when he sees me. His feet are bare. He waddles like a drunkard.
‘Cousin,’ I call.
‘Him?’ Rin says. ‘That’s your cousin?’
She lifts the weapon from her belt.
‘Everything’s upside down,’ I say in Dhivehi. ‘Everything’s crazy.’
‘I don’t understand. Why is there so much smoke?’
‘It’s a protest.’
‘There’s a dead man in that cell,’ he says. ‘I think it’s Ahmed.’
‘Ahmed? From Dhaalu?’
His eyes are damp with emotion. He wipes them. ‘I haven’t eaten for three days. No one fed us.’
‘It’s crazy. We started a strike and now it’s gone
bad. Van Hooj was killed.’
‘It was the Tasmanian. He let me out.’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t believe him. I thought it was a trick.’
‘Believe him, cousin.’
Rin is pointing her weapon at Shadi. ‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s confused,’ I say in English.
‘I thought I would die in there,’ he says. ‘I was bargaining with God as if I was going to die.’
‘Come with us, cousin. We’ll find you some food.’
‘I know that woman.’
‘You remember her? From Malé?’
‘The American. Yes. The smoker.’
‘Come with us, cousin.’
‘What’s she doing here?’
‘She came to help.’
‘A woman. In this Eaglehawk. How strange.’
He wipes his eyes and stares down at the ground. I haven’t seen his face uncovered since he was a teenager and his naked chin seems a little obscene. I feel a moment of pity for him, for the boy he used to be. That boy was kind to me. When Shadi lifts his head a few moments later, he also lifts the plaser. I see a red dot on my chest. I’m looking at it, watching it dart about. Rin also lifts her weapon.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she says. ‘Don’t you dare.’
A thunderous, convulsive pain shocks me. It’s so brief that it might have been a trick of the mind. The misfiring of neurons. I lose muscle control and fall.
In the next moments many things happen at once. There’s strobing light as Rin gives fire. I hear Shadi grunt. He buckles at the knees and spreads on the floor and she stands above him firing and firing. The capacitors in the plaser whine as it recharges. I stagger to my feet.
‘No no no.’
She’s holding the muzzle trained on Shadi.
‘You’re hurting him.’
In a foolish sort of temper, I try to grab the plaser from her hand.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she says but she lowers the weapon.
Shadi has fallen quiet. In the middle of his forehead is a blackened divot where an electrical arc has struck. Around it, the skin has begun to blister and his left eye has begun to swell and blacken. I collect his weapon. He groans. He lifts his head. Like an old man, he rolls first to his knee and then unsteadily to his feet.
‘We’re supposed to look after each other,’ I say. ‘That’s what brothers do.’
‘I told God,’ he says. ‘Save me. Let me out of this cell. Let me out and I will punish Yamaan for you.’
‘It wasn’t God who let you out. It was the Tasmanian.’
‘I told Him I’d give you burihan negun.’
Burihan negun. It means flogging with a whip and then rubbing chilli paste into the wounds. A traditional punishment for the worst of men.
I stare at him for a long time. ‘You sound like a Saudi.’
We fall silent. In the distance the low blare of an alarm. The smashing of glass. Shadi is looking at me with his bruised, misshapen face.
‘I miss you, Sobe,’ he says. ‘I miss my old friend.’
‘I haven’t gone anywhere.’
We’re estranged, I’d like to explain to Shadi, not because of religion, or the matter of God, or happiness, but rather the matter of inquiry. We’re different kinds of people—one who listens to ideas and one who does not. The difficulty, of course, is that he wouldn’t listen. Instead I say, ‘You’re my brother. Even if you don’t believe it.’
He breathes out slowly. ‘Anyway, love is for children.’
The sound of breaking glass floats through the door. Yes, so much is broken.
‘Will we ever get out of here?’ I say.
Shadi gives a weak smile. ‘He said he’s getting us out.’
‘God?’
‘The Tasmanian.’
I hide my surprise by coughing. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Through the manufactory. That’s what he said. He’ll get us out if we burn the manufactory.’
I look around at Rin. She’s squatting on the concrete, watching us over her knees. The charge light on her weapon blinks green.
‘Burning the manufactory,’ Shadi says. ‘Can you imagine? Inshallah, it’ll be glorious.’
ROYAL COMMISSION INTO THE EAGLEHAWK MIGRANT TRAINING CENTRE RIOT
THE HONOURABLE OSCAR AMBROSE IPP AO QC
PUBLIC HEARING
DAY 21
TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS AT HOBART
ON WEDNESDAY, 29 MAY 2075 AT 2.10 P.M.
MR KELLY: I call attention, your honour, to the files entered as evidence at B56K. Ms Sakurai, can you see the log for Red Gate on the day and time in question?
MS SAKURAI: I can see it.
MR KELLY: That’s your name listed there at 2.18 p.m., isn’t it?
MS SAKURAI: Yes.
MR KELLY: Do you agree that it was you who unlocked Red Gate?
MS SAKURAI: No, I don’t.
MR KELLY: You can see the evidence here for yourself, Ms Sakurai. You’re saying that log is incorrect?
MS SAKURAI: No, the log is correct. I’m saying I didn’t unlock it by choice.
MR KELLY: Somebody forced you to unlock the gate?
MS SAKURAI: That’s right.
MR KELLY: Who was it?
MS SAKURAI: All of them.
MR KELLY: All of who? The detainees?
MS SAKURAI: Mostly the men from the BAU. They threatened to hurt me. I was afraid.
MR KELLY: And Daniel Howland?
MS SAKURAI: Yes. He was one of them.
MR KELLY: Did you know why these men wanted the gate opened?
MS SAKURAI: No.
MR KELLY: Come on, that defies belief. We’ve heard evidence that Daniel Howland told the men in the yard to burn down the manufactory. You must have known what he wanted.
MS SAKURAI: No, and I can tell you why. Because I was busy trying to stay alive.
MR KELLY: I put it to you, Ms Sakurai, that you knew what he wanted. Not only that, you tried to incite the same actions.
MS SAKURAI: I was afraid of being killed. That’s all. I wanted those men to understand I was a friend.
MR KELLY: Exactly. A friend. An ally. You were helping them, Ms Sakurai. Weren’t you?
Rin
I mean, the dog kennels of Thailand, the concrete bunkers of Singapore, the holding pens of Japan—I’ve seen it all in my time—but Maafushi prison was worse than anything I ever witnessed. At CYC, we built our facilities on about half a proper budget. Then we overcrowded them to save money. Then we understaffed them to save even more money. You know, these were not happy places. But Maafushi really took the cake. A lot of the places I’d been were grim or maybe even heartbreaking. Still, they had edible food and they had beds and blankets and lights. At Maafushi prison, the inmates slept on the floor and ate with their fingers and showered under buckets. I knew as soon as I set foot inside that the Maldives had lost its sense of justice.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Moosa Umair said.
‘Like a holiday,’ Yamaan said.
‘Oh ho. Remember when we went to Nairobi? What a shithole.’
‘You caught a nice case of bed bugs.’
‘At least in here, I don’t get robbed going to the toilet.’
Maafushi reflected the state of the country itself. Picture a sinking cruise ship. The wealthy guests have airlifted out but the staff are stuck on board. As each deck goes under, they climb and climb until everyone left is crammed on one floor. That sinking ship was the Maldives. The last floor? Malé and Hulhumalé. All the outlying islands had sunk and the sea just kept rising. To keep the main island dry, the government had spent everything on walls and drains and pumps and now there was no money for Maafushi prison. The government would have let it sink too, except they needed somewhere to stick men like Moosa Umair—the men who asked embarrassing questions.
‘Well, the food is no holiday,’ Moosa said.
‘And the water?’ Yamaan said. ‘Does it still come into your cell?’
; ‘On a high tide.’
‘I should complain to the warden. They need to fix it.’
‘Leave it. I’ll be out in a year. One year and I’ll be back raising hell.’
‘The hellraiser. That’s what they call you.’
‘The hellraiser. The needle in the shoe. The mouthpiece of Western democracy. They call me all kinds of things.’
‘Most of them true.’
‘True enough to leave me in a prison anyway.’
We sat around in plastic lawn chairs, probably the only chairs the place could afford. Yamaan was wrinkling his nose for the grubby, sweaty men in the visitor’s room—the smell of a jail. I knew that smell. It was the kind of smell that stuck. Even weeks later you’d pick up the coat you’d worn there and your brain would flash with images of heavy swinging doors and flick batons.
Moosa grew serious. ‘I’m close to a big story,’ he said. ‘I have a source. He can tell me everything I want to know.’
‘Is that why you asked for money?’ Yamaan said. ‘To pay him?’
‘We need a way to communicate, that’s all. We need secrecy. One of the guards here sells glasses and it’s the best I can do.’
I reached into my purse. ‘Money is no problem.’
Rules said no items could pass between visitors and inmates but I’d prepared an envelope stuffed with a few thousand US dollars and I passed it to Moosa under the table while the guards were looking elsewhere. No one used cash back home. Hadn’t for years. Only time I ever saw US bills was in the Maldives. In some countries, they’d gone as far as outlawing cash. If you track people’s spending, you track their every secret. A lot of people used altcoins. A lot used algorithms. The point was, you needed something untrackable and cash was still the best for that. I passed the envelope to Moosa and he immediately tried to give it back when he felt the thickness.
‘It’s too much.’
‘Keep it. Honestly. I spend more on lunch.’
A spasm of horror passed across his face. He looked at me a little too long. ‘She’s a wonderful girl,’ he said to Yamaan. ‘You be good to her.’
