On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  Irfan Shah stared openly at the spectacle. ‘What happened to your hands, brother?’ The man looked up at him, didn’t answer. Whatever his background, he clearly didn’t feel the older man’s authority.

  ‘You have no hands. Have you maybe lost your ears as well?’ Again the man ignored him and continued to fumble the rice around. Roya felt a helpless anger stirring inside her. This was an exchange between adults—none of her concern. And it was not as if it was new to her, seeing someone missing a hand, an eye, a foot. A person could be damaged, just as a building might be: ruptured by an explosion and left with a stairwell that went nowhere, or a balcony that hung by twisted rods of steel. But the problem here, the man trying to eat, could be fixed so easily.

  A bigger feeling had been working away at her for some days now—a feeling of boldness, the loosening of old rules with so much adrift. Without even glancing at her mother for permission, she scuttled across to where the man sat and pressed the spilt rice into a clump on the palm of her hand. Then she placed the clump delicately on his forearm. It felt daring. He barked at her and she withdrew, but then he lifted the arm to his mouth and got the rice in.

  ‘Be gone, little girl! Have you lost your manners?’ Irfan Shah was outraged. One of the sons muttered something that Roya missed. The old man stared at the amputee and asked again. ‘So what happened?’

  Again there was no answer. Mucus trickled from a dark hole, the ghost of a nostril. ‘Were you making a bomb? Looks like it blew up in your face.’ He shook his head in mock pity. ‘Hazaras. Dumb as donkeys, the lot of you.’

  The man’s tongue appeared, cat-like, and slowly licked the remaining rice grains off his forearm before he spoke.

  ‘Shut up, you old fool.’

  Roya was knocked down as the two younger men rushed forward, piled onto the man and tumbled him backwards. Other men threw themselves into the fight and women screeched at them: in seconds a crowd had formed around them on the deck, voices shouting in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Dari, drowning each other out. The amputee couldn’t grapple with the young men, and they quickly overpowered him, pummelling his face with their clenched fists. The back of his head resounded against the boards of the deck as they hit him.

  ‘Wadrega!’ The single word from the old man Irfan Shah brought the brawl to a halt. ‘Aluddin! Mahmud—bas! Remember your place.’

  Calm was restored but nobody moved off. Roya saw a wisp of hair on the captain’s head lifting in the breeze made by the boat’s progress. He was watchful, that captain, secretive. Moments like the fight—and there had been a few along the way—were nobody’s fault. Yes, Irfan Shah had taunted the no-hands man. But he had done that because he was bored and worried and tired. He’d probably never had to speak to Hazaras in anything but the most passing manner. Now he was stuck among them.

  Within minutes, a mother was anxiously brushing her children’s hair ‘so they look nice for the officials’. A man commented to Roya’s mother that it was bad to travel without a husband.

  The whole boat was on edge.

  Roya liked to go to the front of the boat, to the point where the curve of all the timbers led, and one great heavy timber joined them together and pushed vertically through the sea. If she lay at the very point of the boat and looked down she could see the whitewater curling either side of that timber, the swoop of an old man’s whiskers. From here, the sea stretched out in every direction like a wide plain of moving grass—and they were passing through it in a great caravan that trailed streamers and glittered in the sun and rang with the sounds of tambor and cymbals.

  There was a boy lying there this morning. He wore shorts, like she thought an American boy would. And he had glasses, with thick lenses. She had never met a child with glasses before; she’d only seen them on television. He shuffled across without comment, offering her space. He had his chin on his knuckles as he peered over. His assumption of ownership irritated her.

  ‘You are from Afghanistan?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re sitting in my place.’

  He rolled from one side to the other, checking the timbers. ‘There’s no sign here.’

  ‘I’ve been in this spot for days,’ Roya insisted. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘What’s so good about it?’ the boy asked, calm as a glass of water. ‘It’s no good without a friend.’

  Roya sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘You’re very annoying.’

  ‘No, I’m Hazara. Same as you, I think.’

  He was smiling at her. She concluded that he could be both annoying and Hazara.

  ‘Are you travelling with your parents?’ she asked him eventually.

  ‘Don’t have any. My uncle is that man over there.’ He pointed down the line of the starboard side, where a man with a dark moustache sat cross-legged and silent, lost in his own thoughts. ‘That was funny, wasn’t it—the fight?’

  ‘No it wasn’t, it was awful. That poor man…’

  ‘I know, but at least something interesting finally happened. This is very boring.’

  She looked at him sceptically. ‘What happened to your parents?’

  ‘My father had a helicopter,’ he said gravely, ‘and a tank, a massive one with rockets and guns. My uncle sold them so we could go on the boat.’

  ‘He did not,’ laughed Roya, though anything was possible, she supposed.

  ‘It’s true. He was the commander of all of Kandahar.’

  ‘The whole city? Pffft. So where is he then?’

  ‘They killed him. Hung him at the football stadium.’

  Roya caught her breath. Would anyone make such a thing up? Maybe there really was a helicopter and a tank.

  They watched a distant landmass slowly growing on the horizon, listened to the wheezing and banging of the engine below them. The boy spoke again without prompting.

  ‘I’m going to be a chef in Australia.’

  ‘Really?’ She was beginning to like his grand statements, true or not.

  ‘Yes, and I’m going to learn to swim.’

  Roya considered this. ‘But we will be in camps, won’t we? I don’t think you can learn to swim there.’

  He shrugged. ‘That’s okay. Just play computer games all day long.’ ‘Will you really be a chef?’

  ‘Why not? Their food is simple, and you can cook it on television and become famous. That’s what I’m going to do. You will hear them say “Hamid” on the television and you will look up and it will be me. I’m going to own two restaurants, or three or four, and everyone will know me.’

  ‘Can you actually cook?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Not yet. But I’m only eleven. It can’t be too hard.’

  ‘Well I hope you are successful.’ She got up to leave. She needed to check on her mother.

  He rolled over to look up at her. ‘I will see you again, Roya,’ he smiled.

  ‘Um, yes,’ she responded, stifling a laugh. ‘We’re on a boat.’

  She found her mother where she had left her, sitting alone against the cabin wall on the shaded side of the boat. Shafiqa smiled as she saw her daughter approaching, and took her hand lightly. ‘I saw you talking to that boy.’

  Roya blushed. ‘Hamid? Hmph. He is ridiculous.’

  ‘Do you like him?’

  ‘Mother! Stop it. No I do not. He tells tall stories and he has funny glasses.’

  ‘Yes, just as I thought. You do like him. Very well, the two of you have my blessing.’ She laughed a little, then mocked a frown as she saw that Roya was cross with her. ‘Oh honey, I’m just…’

  ‘I’m not talking to you anymore!’ Roya put her hands on her hips and stormed away. She knew that when she was angry her bottom lip would stick out, and that would make her mother laugh and there was a risk that her mother laughing would make her laugh, so she put her head down and didn’t look back.

  She would hate it if she really didn’t talk to her mother anymore.

  She walked uphill, straight to the bow. Hamid was still there, looking out to sea through a pair of toy
binoculars blobbed with army camouflage colours. For a fleeting second she considered that he must have brought these with him all the way from home. That he might have a bag of treasures, as she did. He lowered the binoculars when he heard her approaching.

  ‘Ah, you are back! Come and join me!’

  Roya stood there, hands on hips again. Her irritation and worry boiled over: she aimed a swift kick at the binoculars in his hand and watched them spin from his grip and over the edge of the boat. She erased the image of his shocked face by flicking her hair and turning her back on him, but she saw enough of that look to know how cruel she’d been.

  SATURDAY MORNING

  Indian Ocean, south of Sumba

  Isi wasn’t particularly prone to superstition but time on boats gave you a feeling for trips that worked and trips that didn’t, and an eye for which kind you were on. She was steering the Java Ridge between the two small islands off the southern tip of Sumba when she first felt a shiver of misfortune hovering. She shrugged it off. She had a group that would have preferred Joel, that was all.

  The passage between the two islands—Halura to the north and Manggudu to the south—was less than two miles wide but the water was deep off the edges of the atolls, and it would give her a chance to show her guests some scenery after the monotony of the overnight crossing from Bali.

  She slowed the Java Ridge as the colours of the reef on Halura’s southern side rose from the blue. The powerful diesels burbled at low revs and the bow-wave became sluggish and loud. The boat pitched and rolled with the swells passing under it. In the distance they could see the thatched roofs of the village on Halura’s western tip. On the steep hills behind the houses, the jungle was so thick that nothing—not a fence, an aerial or a roof—disturbed it.

  Sanusi appeared with a heavy tuna rod, slightly taller than he was, and offered it to the surfers as they lounged on the shaded front deck.

  ‘Good here.’ Sanusi pointed along the edge of the reef.

  Leah folded her paperback face down on her towel and dropped a water bottle next to it. She stood to take the rod. Isi, watching the exchange from the wheelhouse, had decided she liked Leah—her physicality and her lack of airs.

  ‘You want big lure,’ said Sanusi. A statement, not a question. He disappeared below decks and returned with a colourful plastic squid that trailed streamers and two large treble hooks. He looped the line over his cracked index finger and tied the lure on, then handed the rod back to Leah. She sat herself on the bow, directly in Isi’s line of sight, and flicked the lure out towards the reef until the line extended well wide of the boat, then snapped the reel into gear. Sanusi took himself halfway down the same side and sat in the shadow of the cabin with a handline and a cigarette both sprouting from the same fist. Between them was an open stretch of deck, the wide timber boards slick with seawater.

  Isi could see them both without leaving the captain’s chair. If she looked out wide she could even see the surface disturbance made by the lure. Nothing much happened for a while. But then as the Java Ridge mounted a swell, the rod whipped down and Leah strained her arms to keep it under control. The reel fizzed with each bounce of the rod tip and she stood, thighs braced against the rail so that it left white marks in her flesh, winding the reel and working the fish towards the boat as Isi backed off the throttles.

  Isi could see the silver flank of the fish making urgent circles down deep in the clear water. Ordinarily Sanusi would be up and waiting with the gaff hook to haul it in, but she could see that he hadn’t moved. Maybe he’d fallen asleep in the sun. She considered calling out to him but thought better of it. Fishing was Sanusi’s department, and he wouldn’t welcome the intervention.

  Leah had wrestled the powerful fish to the bow of the boat, and now she was trying to winch it vertically through two metres of air to get it to deck level. It was a Spanish mack, long and slender. The graceful tail sliced at the air as Leah wound the reel and walked back, shrieking with excitement. Isi could see the eye of the fish screaming panic behind the wolfish rows of its teeth.

  With a final heave, Leah lifted the fish over the rail. It thunked down hard on the timbers and began to thrash wildly. In an instant the lure had been tossed free and the mad convulsions of the fish had pointed its head down the deck. Leah dropped the rod and groped at it, trying to keep her fingers clear of the ferocious mouth. Then the Java Ridge mounted a new swell and the bow lifted so high that the bowsprit pointed at the sky, and the mackerel began to slide.

  Isi could see what was unfolding but was powerless to intervene. She flew to the window and yelled Sanusi’s name as loudly as she could. He woke, looked around and immediately took in the heavy fish sliding towards him. Rising to a crouch, he began to leap away but the last part of him to move was his left hand. The gaping head of the mackerel slammed into it and he cried out in pain. The impact deflected the fish, speared it through one of the deck scuppers and it was gone.

  Isi ran down the gangway to find Sanusi’s hand was sliced through the large muscle at the base of his thumb, as cleanly as if someone had slashed it with a scalpel. It was bleeding freely. He held the arm over the rail to allow the blood to run off, talking to himself fast and low in Bahasa: Isi followed enough to know he was cursing his own carelessness. A circle gathered around him—Neil Finley’s long fingers appeared over the hand and the others withdrew. Isi went and found the two plastic tubs Joel kept in the main cabin: the one marked Medical that she’d used only on coral cuts, sunburn and ailments of overindulgence; and the one marked Surgical, which she had never opened and never wanted to open.

  She set them up on the table in the lounge and Finley brought Sanusi in. Within minutes, and with barely a word to anyone, he’d washed the wound out, jabbed it with lidocaine and stitched it up. Half an hour later, Sanusi was seated in exactly the same position, smoking away sedately with his left hand wrapped in bandages. Finley brushed off his thanks: such tasks were often the lot of a doctor on a surf trip. Even Leah’s apologies eventually abated—Sanusi was clearly self-conscious about the whole thing. But Carl must have assumed he had some licence in respect of his cousin’s girlfriend.

  ‘What were you fucking…what were you doing?’ he sneered.

  Leah looked back at him, her mouth open in surprise. Then, just as a retort might have formed, she changed her mind, smiled and turned her back.

  But the incident stayed with Isi for hours: the tiny misjudgment and its consequences. Would it have happened on one of Joel’s trips? Maybe, she decided eventually. But he wouldn’t have told her about it.

  SATURDAY MORNING

  Canberra

  Cassius pushed hard to catch the bunch as it sped northeast on the Federal Highway. The last of the houses at Watson fell away behind as he reached the other riders. He took the stragglers first: the unfit ones, the ones on cheap bikes. The firm silence of carbon fibre and the wind under his helmet whispered predation: the feeling of taking down the weak, a finger raised on the bars in greeting as he passed. He stood on his pedals, pumping harder as the road steepened ahead of him. He could work past anyone on this ride: he knew them all. He could run cadences that would ruin them utterly, could push until he threw up if he had to. But the reality was he never had to.

  The incline was slowing him now. He returned to the saddle, thumbing through the rear cassette until he had his revs right. More of them falling behind him, and the bunch up ahead on the crest. He directed his thoughts through his thighs, disengaged his mind from his arms.

  And there at the rear of the bunch he could see his quarry, bony arse high over the saddle, chewing extravagantly as his stringy legs pumped. Ron Smedley: his departmental secretary. A nothing in a suit, and a sub-nothing in lycra. Cassius powered up to him and hung quietly in his slipstream, banking energy. A quick glance over Smedley’s gear confirmed so much about the man that was irritating. He was rolling twelve grand’s worth of space-age touring machine, emblazoned in green with the manufacturer’s logo. Nice bike, but perc
hed on it in an Italian racing jersey he looked like a poser. He was still using Look cleats after all these years—rocking them, Cassius smirked to himself—despite how they made him walk. Skittering through cafes like a yearling on a frozen pond. And none of the headgear—the rainbow-tinted plastic shades that wrapped gigantically around his cheeks, the aero helmet—could conceal it: Smedley had a weak chin. Cassius slipped round from behind him and pulled alongside.

  ‘Ron.’

  ‘Cass.’

  ‘Pulling hard mate. You’re a little out of breath.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Mm. Hey, did you see my announcement the other day?’

  ‘Yes of course.’

  ‘What’d you think?’

  They’d crested the hill near the New South Wales border now, and Smedley shifted through the gears to set himself for the downhill. He gave it a dozen firm cranks—Cassius matched them easily—then held the pedals parallel to the road.

  ‘Not up to me to think, is it? Just there to carry out your commands.’

  ‘Must have an opinion.’

  ‘Look, Cass, if they drag me in front of Senate Estimates, I’ll defend it to the hilt. But privately…’ He looked down at the asphalt blurring past under his pedals, then jabbed at his Cateye with a gloved finger. ‘Privately, I think you’re courting disaster.’

  ‘Why?’

  The Minister for Environment and Conventional Energy drew level with them and began to pull ahead.

  ‘Boys.’

  ‘Bob.’

  ‘Bob.’

  They waited until he was clear.

  ‘Because I have a kind of old-fashioned insistence on the government doing its own dirty work.’

  ‘Oh come on mate, this is a much cheaper option. The BIU and the navy are out of harm’s way. And we don’t have to front the media and explain what they’re doing.’