by Jock Serong
Ali Hassan, the man who called himself the captain, was one of the three Iraqis on the boat, but he was fearsome to her in a way the other two weren’t. His eyes were barely visible under his angry brow. He never smiled, never stopped moving—checking, issuing instructions, tugging at a rope, pushing a crate, smoking, smoking, smoking. She wondered if perhaps he wasn’t a bad man, but that something was burning inside him, causing him pain he couldn’t hide.
His pace quickened as he approached behind the two boys, then he was on them, barking rapidly. He grabbed one by the back of the basketball singlet he wore, and cuffed the other one hard across the face. They were too shocked to react, open-mouthed and still dripping. She could feel it in her own mouth, the need for that water, and she watched one of the boys, even as he was being shamed, stuffing the hem of his singlet into his mouth to wring the last of it from the fabric.
Roya moved down the gunwale to where the edge was closer to the surface of the ocean. With her knees on the slimy deck and her elbows on the wooden rail, she reached down into the blackness because she wanted to know about the water. She tasted some from a cupped hand and spat it in alarm—she hadn’t expected that. She peered down again. How deep was it, she wondered. What was on the bottom? Were there lost cities down there? Places like home that had been swept over by the mighty sea? And if that had happened, what had happened to the people?
She’d thought about this as they’d travelled. So many people out there, out the windows of buses and on the streets. So many different people, fighting with each other over the complex disagreements they had. Maybe the only way it could all be sorted out was by the rise and fall of terrible things. The war was a terrible thing, so probably there were other terrible things, like maybe a great upwelling of the ocean that smothered a whole country. It would be sad for all the children, because they weren’t involved in the war. And it would be sad for their parents, because they would miss their children. It made her feel confused, paralysed, to think of all this: such thinking surely wasn’t the way of the Prophet.
The sea slid past the slimy timbers of the hull, slower now but still moving away behind them. Roya wanted something else to think about, and nuzzled closer to her mother. She held her hand to the great belly and her mother pressed it there. ‘This little person in here is for you. Your sister, I think.’ She smiled. ‘And wherever you go from now on, you will never be alone. There will be me, but I will become old and tired and slow. But here inside me is someone who will always be with you, as long as you both live.’ The murmured words floated over her, soothed her. ‘You will know each other’s ways as closely as anybody can ever know another. Do you feel her? Move your hand a little, up, up. There. Your sister.’
She fixed her eyes urgently on Roya. ‘You must look after her, though. An older sister is always responsible. She watches out, sees danger. It will be a burden sometimes.’ She stroked Roya’s hair slowly, stopping at the foot of each stroke to run the strands of hair between her thumb and fingers. ‘But you are my wise little one, hmm? My special one…and this will be how everything starts again. A whole new family of you and me, and this little girl in here.’
Roya understood. She knew what it all meant and why her mother was saying it. Her hand still rested on the warm, hard dome of her mother’s belly, feeling the tiny insistent thubbing, the bumps and kicks that could be the pulses of a heartbeat itself.
I am here for you, she whispered inside.
She must have slept; her mother too, because when she woke the day was under way. She was aware of a new sound but not its origin.
The world had changed: the sky was glowing a sickly green like there was something poisonous under the clouds. The boat was rolling high and low, the tops of the waves slapping hard into the hull. People were skidding and falling as they tried to keep their balance. Roya had become accustomed to the way the swells rolled across the sea towards them, coming from ahead and to their right. But their silent rhythm was gone, replaced by a mass of angry chop: chaotic triangles peaking and disappearing. Her eyes tried to predict their passage but they lurched and hid in all directions. Sometimes the nose of the boat would spear high over a hollow so the belly came down flat from a height, causing everyone on board to jolt and groan.
The man in charge, Ali Hassan, was moving around the deck. He had a small wooden box under one arm, steadying with his free hand as the boat tried to upend him. ‘You have lifejackets?’ he said in Arabic to the cluster of bearded men nearest to Roya. They nodded, held them up. He jabbed an impatient finger at them. ‘Put them on!’
One of the men was yelling at him again in Arabic, pointing and waving his arms. She couldn’t catch it all, but it was something about the broken engine, the storm, the money he’d paid. His voice rose higher as the captain argued back, trying to reason with someone who had long since passed that point.
‘I can’t swim!’ the man insisted. His friends joined in—they couldn’t either. Nor could Roya, but surely it wasn’t going to come to that. The captain turned his back on them and looked down into the box as Roya watched. There was a delicate instrument of some kind in the box and he was trying to keep it level as he studied it.
‘Where are we?’ the men demanded. ‘Where is Australia, you thief?’
He snapped the lid shut over the box and fixed them with a glare. ‘We passed Sumba hours ago. We go southeast, so two days’ sailing to Pulau Pasir…what the Australians call Ashmore Reef. It is their territory. So Australia, see? I have stolen nothing!’
His voice had failed to convince even him. There was a burst of sarcastic laughter from the group at the captain’s feet. ‘This piece of shit won’t make it that far!’
‘There are supposed to be islands out here. If I can find one that has a lagoon, I can steer us in and get out of the weather, make repairs. If you want to be useful, look out for land.’
He staggered his way back to the wheelhouse. As he did so, the boat dropped into a trough and Roya’s empty stomach lurched. She clutched at her mother without thinking, and stirred her awake. A wave topped the gunwales and came spilling over the deck, washing over their feet and sweeping away the congealed remains of the old man’s vomit. The wave was met by screams from the women and children. All sorts of loose objects came sliding down the deck from the bow towards the stern, bouncing when the hull slammed on the water, rolling when the deck pitched. The plastic water bottles that everyone carried, random tools and fittings, even a large steel bolt that tumbled painfully into a woman’s knee before dropping through a hole in the deck.
Roya willed herself away to her home, mapped her way around it. Sunshine, warmth, ground that didn’t shift under her. The high stone wall that surrounded the block, keeping out the windblown sand and the rubbish that scattered in the wind. The kitchen with its kiln, and the water fountain under the almond tree. She tried to picture them eating together again, the four of them, on the rug her mother kept specially for dining. Some kabouli, beef and rice or maybe a little bread. She and her brother would drink water from plastic cups, while her parents sipped tea and spoke about complicated things, things she tried to follow but couldn’t. The smell of the bread was still with her. The dry grit of flour under her fingers.
And then the damp reality of the present.
Quietly at first, one of the men was saying something specific. He had wide Hazara cheekbones like Roya and her mother, and he was speaking Dari. He was looking out to sea: others began to look at him and to follow his gaze out from Roya’s side of the boat.
‘An island! I see an island!’
Roya turned over again and looked: there in the gloom between sea and sky lay a thick black line on the horizon, humped at one end into a little peak. In front of the black shape she could make out a zone of white and she understood enough now to know it was breaking water.
And beyond the whitewater, something else. She thought it was a building at first, a hut maybe. But as she stared and let her eyes work on it she recognised th
e lines, familiar to her now. It was a timber boat.
A boat just like theirs.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Canberra
Cassius sometimes thought of Kevin Waldron as his punishment for being insufficiently mediocre. Mediocrity, he’d realised quite early, being generally rewarded by things like, to take a random example, getting to choose your own damn chief of staff. Not having a duplicitous turd like Waldron foisted on you by the PM’s office.
In a world where ages were not discussed, Cassius placed Waldron somewhere north of fifty, but there was little damage to indicate he’d seen much of the sun. His skin was soft-looking, barely lined, and his frameless lenses glinted on the soft pillows of his cheeks. He was neat and contained, a veteran of the role and a still point in the chaos. Maybe he liked to watch birds. Or club fur seals. Where his true allegiances lay, Cassius had no idea.
Now, on one of those crisp, clear Canberra Sundays when normal people were stripping the shelves at Bunnings, Waldron was leading someone into Cassius’s office. The rooms were all empty but for the three of them: the press people, the staff room, reception, all of it deserted.
‘Ron’s sent Nigel up to have a word,’ Waldron said. ‘Can’t wait, apparently.’ His expression betrayed no opinion about Smedley’s known tendency to brief compulsively on sub-crucial developments.
Nigel had turned up before. One of Ron Smedley’s new graduates, media studies major with a tech game; a few tiers down but rising. Neat beard, lacquered hair—Smedley’s crew were made in his image, well-presented even on the dog shifts. It depressed Cassius to think that Smedley had an army of these pop-outs coming after him.
This one’s job was to liaise with Australian Signals Directorate over specks and dots in the sky. Right now he looked edged with grime, like he’d been working in the same dull suit through the dark hours of Saturday night.
‘Coastwatch have picked something up sir. The assessment is that you need to be informed.’ He placed a briefing folder on Cassius’s desk. Stepped back from it. Cassius made no attempt to pick it up. He was tired of being made to read what the person in front of him knew in detail.
‘What does it say?’
‘Indonesian boat approaching our waters. It’s probably a phinisi, big timber fishing boat. They come from up round Sulawesi mostly. We can have the Core Resolve people fly over it to get a better look, but at this stage we’d be saying it shouldn’t be where it is. In those latitudes, sir, if it isn’t people smuggling, it’ll be trochus poaching.’
‘Do you know how many on board?’
‘No. And that’ll be the difference between fishing and illegals.’
‘All right. Is that all I need to hear?’
‘It is, sir.’
‘Hm. Keep it classified for now. Don’t write it up. I’ll talk to the PM.’
Waldron had watched their exchange in silence, but his face betrayed mounting unease. The man turned to leave, then reconsidered. ‘There’s one other matter sir…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s, it’s not making much headway. Not quite dead in the water, but…the weather’s nasty out there at present.’
Cassius paused, chewing his lip. ‘Do we need to be concerned?’
‘Well, at a technical level, no. Under the new protocols, their welfare is Indonesia’s problem right now.’
‘Do we know what they’re doing about it?’
‘No. We’re chasing that up.’
The man left the folder and Waldron walked him out. Cassius closed the door behind him. Ringing the PM was an ordeal at the best of times. On the weekend before an election it was going to be all but impossible. He started the process, calling one number to be diverted to another to be told to call back another. Like Maxwell Smart passing through endless slamming doors. Cassius’s star was still bright enough, his portfolio high-profile enough, that he stood some chance of getting through on a Sunday. Others, he knew, weren’t so fortunate.
He was told to wait for a call back. He checked his emails: polling numbers, talking points for Monday, social media petitions from lefties…messages from the electorate office. A sticky note from Stella on his monitor: Pollwise want you to use the word ‘strikeforce’. Papers on the side table, waiting for him as always. One item caught his eye—a heavy bundle of documents emblazoned with the British royal coat of arms. Above the lion and the unicorn, a with-comps slip was stapled to the front sheet:
Warren Carmichael, Policy Director, Institute of Social Justice Advocacy.
A hard-left think tank created to feed ideologues into the Senate: the IPA with better haircuts. The crossbenchers—bumblers and eccentrics though they might be—were for Cassius less of a danger to democracy than these institute-raised faith healers. And they were not much different on either side, he was fairly sure.
On the with-comps slip, Carmichael had scrawled in fountain pen: Do your people send you this stuff?
The bundle of papers was headed Report of the Whittaker Inquiry into Core Resolve UK PLC—and no, Cassius hadn’t been sent a copy. The document would have meandered through the departmental system and eventually got diverted into one of Smedley’s information billabongs: not something the minister needs to see.
He’d known of the inquiry’s existence for over a year but it was news that the report had come down. The institution formerly known as the national press, now the national clickbait, was so demoralised by sackings and funding cuts that it didn’t follow overseas inquiries anymore. Not unless they related to gruesome acts of terrorism. No one had asked him a single question about the British inquiry. No one had thought to inquire about the fact that a company now responsible for critical Australian government functions was under investigation overseas, and might be the subject of prosecutions. It made some aspects of his job easier than they should have been.
He studied the index, unsure what he was looking for.
Cartel Conduct
Deaths in Transport Van
Employee Safety Breaches
Failures of Reporting
Human Rights Violations
Of course, these were the acts and omissions of a different entity: a separate subsidiary of a global parent company. Even if the rump of local journalism looked into it, they lacked the ticker to put him under any real pressure. It was ordinary human curiosity that prompted him to open the bundle at ‘Deaths in Transport Van’.
The deaths of fourteen asylum seekers on the Albania/Macedonia border were deliberately concealed from investigators until their occurrence could no longer be denied. This Inquiry notes that the concealment first took the form of active hindrance of local police, and then moved to a bureaucratic setting, whereby officers and agents of Core Resolve sought to invoke commercial privilege to resist disclosure of documents relating to the fatalities. Coupled with that resistance, there were proven instances of the seeding of misinformation in both traditional and social media.
Such was the effectiveness of this strategy that it is no longer apparent to this Inquiry whether the deaths were the result of deliberate acts or mismanagement or a combination of the two.
The misdeeds of a faraway body. Executives he would never have to deal with. Distasteful, nonetheless.
He checked his emails on the phone: it was loading faster than he was deleting. Something from Monica. His finger hovered over the delete button. Subject line: Rory.
Cassius: as we discussed you will need to take Rory this week as I’m enrolled in a professional development course in the city. I am booking him on the 5pm flight tomorrow—you can see flight details in the account here. Please avoid a repeat of last time—be there punctually to meet him and do not use babysitters/nannies etc. You remain his father and he is your responsibility when he is with you.
The phone lit up and the PM was talking before Cassius had the handpiece to his ear. He was still thinking about Monica’s email manners, still wondering what the hell he was going to do with a nine-year-old during the worst week of the entir
e three-year electoral cycle.
‘Where is it?’
Cassius scrambled up to pace. ‘Coastwatch can give you the lat and long, but it’s basically southeast of Sumba and about a quarter of the way between there and Ashm…’
‘Anywhere they can land?’
‘No. Well…there’s a couple of little islands, just reefs basically. Even smaller than Ashmore.’
‘How far are they from the line?’
‘Territorial? Don’t know exactly but they’ve got a fair way to go yet.’
‘Well, what’s “a fair way” mean? Overnight? A week? We’re six days out from a federal election, Cassius. I don’t need a bunch of illegals crashing the party.’
‘I know, I know.’
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. ‘Is Core Resolve onto it?’
‘I believe they are.’ Cassius knew this would end the conversation.
‘Look, this is why we wrote the fucking protocol. So the Indonesians can sweat on it for a while. And if they can’t deal with it, then Core Resolve will. With the greatest respect, I don’t know why we’re even discussing it.’
The line went dead. Sometimes the job left him precious little room to move between Smedley’s mealy-mouthed worrying and the PM’s bullishness, but this was the first time Cassius had ever been on the receiving end of the PM’s famous brand of displeasure.
Had he done something wrong? No, he hadn’t.
The PM was standing on the brink of electoral reckoning, with a plummeting personal approval rating and a photo finish on the two-party preferred. Cassius was right to tell him: he needed to know there was a potential problem floating around out there, just as he’d need to know if there was a sex scandal or some shitty little expenses problem. They were all of a species: distractions that made the job of selling the government to the punters that little bit harder.
