Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

  Loretta’s still staring at the double-story blond brick in the rearview when the side of the car clips their recycling container. The large dark-green bin teeters and then falls over. The yellow lid flies open and empty Lite White milk cartons, an orange juice bottle, a Carman’s muesli box, a stack of newspapers, and a clutter of toilet rolls spill out. Loretta pulls onto the curb, brakes. She looks up and down their street again. The blinds of her and Sam’s bedroom haven’t moved. All the other houses are still. She pulls back out onto the road, leaving the mess strewn across their front lawn.

  Forty-five minutes later, Loretta pulls in near Fairfield Station and checks the clock. Twelve past nine. She opens the car door. “Fuck.” She’s overshot the parking space by almost a meter. Again. She still drives as if she’s steering her old car. Last year, on the evening of her thirty-third birthday, she’d gone out to the parking lot after work, and her Ford was nowhere to be seen. A zippy black Mazda was parked in her spot; Sam was standing next to it, jangling the keys. Loretta had smiled and squealed, responding like she thought any normal person would, but what she’d wanted to say was, “I love that car. Where the fuck have you put it?”

  The Falcon’s vinyl seats had needed towels draped over them in summer because she could never find covers to fit. The car was too wide for most city parking spots, and a real workout to turn. But it had been hers. She and Billy Leung made out on the backseat during the dry Northmead summer between years eleven and twelve. Billy’s Coke-bottle glasses had fogged up with shy anticipation, his thin, sweat-drenched fingers trembling as they climbed their way up inside her cotton shirt. The Falcon had driven Loretta to her first day at university, her father’s funeral, her job interview at the center, and her graduation ceremony.

  Loretta reverses a little, grabs her bag, steps out, and beeps the door locked. Sam’s been telling her not to leave the car around this area, ever since the hood was keyed a few months ago. Loretta doesn’t blame them, whoever did it—shiny new car like hers.

  The Nelson Street bakery’s already filled with people. Loretta squeezes into the crowd, the smell of freshly baked Afghan flatbread stirring a growling in her stomach.

  “Hungry, are you?” the man next to her laughs, his wide smile lighting his bronze face. A round, mustard-colored hat is pulled down over his gray curls. He makes space in front of him, gestures for her to jump the queue.

  “Nah, nah, I’m fine. Not in a hurry.” Loretta wonders how he even heard her tummy rumble above the order taking, paper-bag rustling, and general banter of the bread shop.

  “That stomach of yours is going to eat you alive if you don’t give it something. Besides, the center is opening pretty soon—if you’re on visiting duty.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks.” Loretta moves forward, smiles at him. She has no idea who the man is. A relative of one of her clients, maybe. Or perhaps he works in one of the other local shops. She racks her brain, but still can’t place him.

  Ten minutes later, Loretta carefully steers into the parking lot, taking furtive bites of the warm, spicy-smelling flatbread from the paper bag on her lap. She pulls up right next to the red-and-white Villawood Immigration Detention Center sign, brakes, turns off the ignition, picks up the flatbread with both hands, and tucks in.

  There’s a crowd gathered at the other end of the parking lot. Loretta rolls down her window, leans out to see what’s happening. Gathered by the wire back fence of the Detention Center is a throng of reporters and camera crews. Loretta watches them elbow each other, jostling like primary-school kids in a cafeteria line. Their voice recorders clink against each other as they fight for audio. Loretta rolls up her window, blocking out the muddle of raised voices. She doesn’t want to know. She just doesn’t want to know.

  Loretta glances at herself in the rearview mirror, wipes the crumbs from around her mouth, tucks back her still-damp hair and pushes an escaping bobby pin back into her curls. She rubs her right forefinger across her teeth a few times, grabs her bag and jacket from the backseat. The day’s turning dark, gray clouds slowly rolling in from the north. She hopes it rains, that the heavens open and they’re forced to abandon ship with their press conference. Huh. Abandon ship.

  Loretta thinks of the overturned recycling container on her and Sam’s lawn. When it rains, the toilet rolls, newspapers, and cereal boxes strewn across the grass will sog to gray pulp. They’ll look like old vomit on the manicured jade verge. Loretta beeps her car door locked and strides across the parking lot toward administration.

  * * *

  09:56:26. Asanka scans the library room shelves. They’re mostly lined with magazines about cars or nature, or religious books. His eyes rest on a stack of Kingdom of God leaflets. The Jehovah’s Witnesses came here once, during visiting time. Asanka was stuck for things to count, so he’d listened to their whole spiel. Nineteen minutes and thirty-eight seconds exactly. No fractions. On the Kingdom of God leaflet, a smiling brown-skinned girl and a blond-haired boy are holding hands, surrounded by all manner of animals: lions, bears, dogs, ducks; it even looks like there’s some kind of long-necked furry camel in there. All of the animals look cuddly and friendly.

  Asanka saw a lion once. Two of them, in fact, at Dehiwala Zoo with his father. They were pacing the cage, rage in their eyes. They did not look friendly like this. A rainbow stretches through clear blue sky above the impossible animal scene. Printed across the rainbow in pink lettering are the words: GOD LOVES ALL LIFE. Blood is slowly soaking through the leaflet. Asanka does not know where it’s coming from.

  09:57:33. Asanka glances at his wristwatch. He’s put it on too tight. The buckle’s pinching the skin of his wrist. He folds the leaflet in half vertically, smooths the top corners into triangles, folds those triangles to the center crease. The paper’s so wet with red that it’s tearing in places.

  “Hey, that’s supposed to be reading material, not craft material.” Big Belly pokes his head in the door as Asanka flies the animal-printed paper airplane across the room. Big Belly does not mention the blood that is dripping onto the gray-blue carpet.

  10:00:01. The visiting hour bell. Asanka gets up from his chair, wipes his hands on his jeans, walks out of the library. He can never remember what day it is here. Everything is jumbled and confused. Sometimes Asanka imagines he catches sight of people from home, only to find that the bounce in his brother’s walk belongs to a Sudanese man in the Blaxland Unit, the upward crinkle around his mother’s eyes to one of the center staff.

  Sometimes, when the room checker comes to wake him, and his head is still full of sleep, Asanka is fourteen years old again, awoken by whispering. There is a gun to his father’s head.

  “Your son must come with us,” they say. “He must come with us and fight.”

  “No,” his father says. “He’s too young. Come back in another year and I’ll send him with you.” Everybody in the room—Asanka’s mother, himself, the three soldiers—they all know his father is lying through his teeth.

  “You are a Tamil,” says one of the soldiers. “We Tamils are tired of the government treating us like dogs. No?”

  “He is too young.”

  “And so, we must all make sacrifices. Your family must send somebody with us to fight, and you are too old.”

  “I’m not too old to fight.”

  “Who is it going to be? Your wife or your son?” The man with the machete had smiled at Asanka’s mother.

  “I’ll go with them.” The voice hadn’t sounded like Asanka’s.

  Tears streamed down his father’s face as Asanka put his shoes on.

  10:02:03. Asanka walks with his head down, staring at the light blue linoleum. The corridor leading from the library room past the common kitchen area and into the visiting area is eighty-nine footsteps long. Toe to heel. Wearing shoes. There are three long windows set into the wall. Seventy-one, seventy-two, seventy-three. Asanka looks behind him at the neat row of bloody footprints.

  Asanka has to stop counting, has to stop seeing the blo
od, has to start breathing again. Or they will put him in the Blaxland Unit. The Blaxland Unit is only for the men who are very sad, or very monstrous, or very ill in the head. Sometimes, they are all three. Big Belly calls the Blaxland Unit hell. “C’mon,” he’ll say when he comes for Asanka and tells him to bring his things. “Today, you are going to hell.”

  Chaminda told them. Chaminda told them he’s just a boy. But the Immigration, they don’t believe. Asanka knows why they’re doubtful. He is not a boy. Not after what he’s done, what he’s seen. But Chaminda said they should only judge him by the time he has been out of the womb; they should only take note of the time he has lived.

  Seventy-six, seventy-seven. There are eight fluorescent lights set into the ceiling of the corridor. Asanka wants to scale the wall and crawl onto the ceiling, wants to walk wrong side up and measure the distance between the light fixtures. Toe to toe. With shoes on. He cranes his neck upward. The fishermen of Kathaluwa are crouched on the ceiling, upside down. How they’re balanced there, he doesn’t think to wonder. Clutching onto their stilts, they hang down so low from the ceiling that their heads almost touch his own. Their fishing rods reach almost down to Asanka’s waist. He abandons counting footsteps, and ducks and weaves to avoid them.

  * * *

  The waves break against Asanka’s back at even intervals, thumping him so hard he loses his breath. The water is cold: blue-lips cold, toe-numbing cold. Chaminda and Ponytail are holding the ends of the rope, leaning down over the side of the boat, peering at him. The center of the rope is looped under Asanka’s arms, knotted to him. When his bowels open, his whole body buckles against the pain and he can no longer hold on to the rope with his hands.

  There is only one toilet on the boat, and Asanka’s stomach has been so bad that he’s not been able to move away from it when the other men need to go. Then Ponytail said he should not go in that place anymore, as the rest of them might get sick too.

  Asanka’s not worried—about the sharks, or the waves, or being sliced up by the underside of the boat. He just drags in the water, being pulled along behind the boat, limp, with his shorts and underwear off, letting the putrid mess float out of his body to the water’s surface, watching it drift past him.

  Asanka’s head lolls back. He opens his mouth.

  “Don’t swallow the water!” Chaminda yells down at him. But Asanka’s been drinking only fish blood for nearly two days. His body wants water. His mouth won’t close. He tries, but it won’t shut. He gulps in the salty seawater. He swallows and swallows, until he doesn’t feel thirsty anymore.

  * * *

  Loretta signs in at the front desk, pushes through the first security door. She places her handbag on a blue plastic tray and pushes it toward the woman working the scanning machine. The woman scans Loretta’s bag through the machine, the blue light of the monitor lighting up her face. She leans in to the screen, motions Loretta through the body scanner and over to the other side of the table. Sighing in frustration, Loretta unzips her handbag and empties the contents into the tray.

  “Sorry, miss,” says the woman. “There was an incident recently.”

  Heat rises in Loretta’s cheeks. Viv had left a message for Loretta the day the center got the news. Chaminda had been one of Loretta’s cases.

  “Yeah. I heard about that,” she says. “As you can see, I’m a real danger.” She gestures to the contents of her bag.

  The woman picks through the items with gloved hands: Loretta’s purse, a stack of envelopes, her car keys, a notepad and pen, some deodorant, her mobile phone, a few bobby pins, dental floss, some tissues, a packet of sweets, several paper bags full of flatbread.

  The fluorescent light above them flickers then glows brighter. The woman puts Loretta’s mobile phone and keys inside a Ziploc bag, seals the bag, hands over a clipboard. “You can collect these on your way out. Write your name here.”

  While Loretta’s scrawling down her details, the woman puts aside the packet of Minties, the flatbread, and the aerosol deodorant. “And please leave these here.”

  “You’ve gotta be joking. The bread and sweets? What are you worried about—they’ll commit suicide by diabetic coma?” Irritated, Loretta picks up the blue tray containing her remaining possessions, tips them back into her handbag.

  “Sorry. No liquids or edibles.”

  * * *

  10:05:21. Asanka pauses at the door to the visiting area, wonders if they’ll let him in like this—blood all over him, his T-shirt ripped at the shoulder by the fishermen’s hooks. He shuffles into the room, sits down on a plastic chair, watches the door on the other side of the room, scanning the trickle of outside visitors entering. He only knows to look for the hair. She will be able to help him, Chaminda told him so. But Asanka’s not even sure that he could ever stay alive outside of here, with all that space. He’s grown used to being able to touch the sides of the potato chest, used to being just three rope lengths away from the boat. Asanka doesn’t know what’s out there, beneath the ocean.

  10:11:54. Asanka counts: one, two, three, four, five, six . . . There are thirty-six chairs in the visiting area. All made from orange plastic, even their legs. Metal legs could pierce the chest, if you upturned the chair and jumped from high enough. Outside, through the sliding glass doors, there are five wooden tables, long benches attached to either side. The tables are made of heavy wood: too heavy to lift, too heavy to drag over to the one tree in the visiting area yard. Asanka imagines himself standing on one of the tables, knotting a sheet to the tree, swinging in the wind.

  There’s one picture in the visiting room, stuck on the noticeboard: an aerial shot of the world. Asanka walks slowly over to it. Some of the visitors are staring at him. Asanka crosses his arms, tries to cover up the stains on his shirt. The blood is there. Everybody is looking.

  The picture of the world wasn’t here last week. Neither was the lawyer woman. Asanka can make out Indonesia, the Cocos Islands, Sri Lanka, the Indian coast. The tiny distance between Galle and Australia does not seem like thirty-seven notches on a bench.

  10:12:37. Asanka traces a finger around the circle of the world. When Asanka was a little boy, his father was a high school art teacher in Dehiwala. His dad had showed him a painting of Atlas, the Greek god who carries the world on his shoulders. “Strength is everything, Asanka,” his father had declared. “With enough resolution, the impossible becomes feasible.”

  Such foolish optimism. The weight of the world is too heavy for even a god to bear. No matter how strong, how resolute, Atlas will eventually be crushed beneath it. His muscles will slowly slacken, spine bending ever lower. His tired eyelids will weigh shut. The globe will tilt, teeter, and slowly roll down his vertebrae.

  * * *

  “Pull yourself up! Help us pull you up!” Chaminda and Ponytail are gesturing frantically over the side of the boat.

  The monster that is the ocean is pulling at Asanka. It is tugging at his legs, dragging him down: it wants to eat him. Asanka wonders what it might be like, being sucked inside the cavernous belly. Warm, he thinks. Quiet, maybe.

  The two men are desperately pulling at the rope. Asanka can’t hear them now, over the monster’s roar. But he catches the look in Chaminda’s eyes and his body suddenly feels electric, come to life. Asanka does not want to die. He kicks and kicks, grabs hold of the rope with both hands, winces as its coarse wetness burns around his waist. The raw skin on his hands stings in the salty spray.

  On the way up to the boat, Asanka’s body bangs into the hull. He is so numb he only vaguely feels the bruising. When he is high enough, Chaminda and Ponytail grab hold of him. He teeters on the edge of the boat, then thuds onto the deck. The men crowd around him. Asanka is so cold he is burning. Every breath he takes is ice-fire.

  “What were you doing?” Chaminda sounds angry. “You were supposed to go to the toilet and wash off. Then we pull you back in.”

  “Sorry.” Asanka genuinely is. Seeing Chaminda angry with him makes him short of breath
. “I was just—we were talking. I was talking to them.”

  “To who?” Chaminda sounds confused.

  “To them.” Asanka points over the side of the boat to where the fishermen are balanced, wet rags tied over their heads to shield them from the hot sun, fishing bags full, ready to dislodge their stilts from where they’re wedged into the reef and ferry their catch to shore. “I was talking to the stilt fishermen.”

  “Oh.” Chaminda and Ponytail exchange strange glances. Asanka shivers at them, wonders when the two became such close friends.

  “Uhhh . . . what did they say?” asks Ponytail.

  “That there’s a boat coming for us.” He points in the direction the fishermen had shown him. “And there’s land. Over there.” Asanka’s legs won’t stop cramping. He straightens them, then flexes them at the knee, stretches them out again on the wet, salt-crusted deck.

  Ponytail stares at Asanka for a moment. “He needs water,” he says to Chaminda. “He needs water. We need to get him fresh water.”

  Chaminda looks like he’s going to cry.

  * * *

  “I’ll get it stamped and post it on Monday.” Loretta picks up an envelope and carefully copies the address from the scrap of paper she’s been given.

  “You will post it.” The man holds her freckled right hand in his tanned ones, smiling into her face, nodding. “You are a good girl.”

  Girl. Usually she would bristle at that—at the sheer condescension of it—but right now she feels like a small child: helpless, insignificant. Besides, when this man uses that word it doesn’t sound patronizing. The man raises her hand to his lips, kisses it quickly, and walks slowly out through the door of the visiting room, calling a casual greeting to someone as he passes them.