by Jock Serong
There was nothing she could say. She hauled the pick and started the outboard again, racing the overloaded Zodiac for shore.
The sky was a furnace now, the sun high enough to hammer down mercilessly, to reach into every dark place and reveal it; to wilt the leaves and beat the birds into tired retreat. The creatures of the low tide reef had scurried for cover, closing over their shells and withdrawing their delicate filaments.
The tropical sun would not find its way into the hellish confines of that boat. No one would ever retrieve it. Nothing could intervene in the long saga of its punishment by the ocean. Until the waves beat it to pieces and its timbers split and opened new entrances to the cavity of the hull, until its fragments roamed the open seas and gathered barnacles, no light would find the dead man whose face was still there under her fingers. The invertebrates would find him first; take his eyes, his tongue and his genitals, and then start on deeper flesh. The fish and the eels would compete, would reduce him to bones. And all this before the outside world broke through.
The darkness rose from her heart, clotted her vision as she retched and vomited over the side. Looked up to see the small girl peering at her from her side of the Zodiac. As though it was her natural place to feel concern for the stranger who’d rescued her.
EARLY EVENING, MONDAY
Canberra
He’d called out to Stella three times from his desk; no answer.
With a sigh, he stood and walked to the door. She had her headphones on again, blasting fruity pop into her skull. She’d been told off in her first week for playing the music out loud and gone straight out to buy the headphones. By Friday afternoon she’d be dancing out there, literally as though no one was watching. Compulsively outgoing, she’d condemned herself to a working life in an office full of quiet, industrious people. She was mouthing the lyrics now, bobbing her head as she typed.
Cassius smiled and turned away, then grunted as the pain shot back, tendrils that crept wide of his forehead like the grip of something clawed.
He tried to concentrate on scrolling through emails on his phone, then saw the time.
Shit. Rory.
He scooped up his suit jacket and a pile of briefing notes: was stuffing them in his briefcase when Stella stuck her head around the door. It was her way of prefacing an interruption: by not presenting her whole self around the doorjamb she was only half-interrupting.
‘You’ve got the appointment at six,’ she said.
‘Which one?’ His life was nothing but appointments.
‘The one you put in the diary and you wouldn’t tell me who it was with,’ she said pointedly. ‘That one.’
He thought for a moment. Clenched his teeth as the pain surged again. ‘Ah yes, that one. Thank you.’
The appointment she knew nothing about was an appointment with a neurologist. He ran down the corridor, yelling a random scramble of instructions her way. He hadn’t told her he was supposed to get Rory. If he had, she would have reminded him two or three times by now. The obligation infuriated him so much that he’d pushed it down, buried it beneath layers of other commitments and thoughts, and eventually it had disappeared altogether.
The court orders gave him one weekend a month, Friday afternoon until Sunday night, or otherwise by agreement. It was the otherwise by agreement that regularly undid him. In the four years they’d been apart—roughly corresponding to the four years he’d been in politics—Monica had worked assiduously to create a life without him. Her instructions about Rory were delivered by text message, always curt and polite. In flippant moments he had tried to break open her defences with a joke or an anecdote about something Rory had done. If she responded to these at all, it was with a polite deflection: the same tone, he realised one day, that he himself used when communicating with the lawyer at six hundred dollars an hour.
So now she needed him to take Rory for the week. Unscheduled, and impossibly placed in the last days before a goddamn federal election. Did she not have any sense of the pressure? He was a Cabinet minister, for fuck’s sake. Did she not think at all?
On reflection he knew she had thought. She had devised this as the most exquisite torment she could deliver, one that didn’t cost her a cent. If he refused, if he took agreement literally and said no, she’d get him back: refuse him next time he asked, or save it all up for her next affidavit or their next session with June the Mediator.
Running out through the House of Reps entrance, he waved a frantic arm at the nearest Comcar in the queue. The driver eyed him caustically, unimpressed at being hailed like a taxi, as Cassius threw himself in the back seat and thumbed the phone. The flight had landed eight minutes ago. But he’d have luggage checked. The poor kid was pretty good at airport logistics—better than he should have to be in grade four.
The headache was coming on again. Down Kings Avenue and over the bridge, his mind flickering irritably back. The affidavits she’d filed, one after the other, the wounded legalese reciting the rumours her friends had circulated. Drugs, sexual encounters with perilously young interns at previous jobs. Explosions of rage and self-aggrandisement. Utterly baseless references to his mental health.
In the narrowest, most literal sense of the word, she had told the truth: she had repeated faithfully the hearsay that was reported to her by others. The fact that those others were lying—extravagantly—was immaterial. She didn’t allege anything that she herself would have to make up: no physical violence or belittlement of the boy. No personal accounts of sexual transgressions. She truthfully related the circumstances of her pregnancy: the conception they had decided, at the very least, to delay; his fury at the news, his tirades about how it could have happened. All of that was true.
And the most damaging bit, the bit they’d leant on in the mediation: him insisting she terminate the pregnancy. It creased his face, it sent the blood rushing to his head every time he recalled it. He had done that. He’d regretted the words the instant they escaped him, but they were his. It’s a pregnancy, not a person, Monica. For God’s sake be rational. Her face had fallen; of course it had. In retrospect, it was probably the moment he lost her for good, though the endgame took a few years.
He kept the affidavits in a folder, hung in a filing cabinet in his office. The legals were done now—there was no need for him to keep them, and his lawyers had copies anyway. But occasionally an odd mood settled over him—he re-read them with wounded bewilderment. Why did they need to go after me like this? The whole episode had been a cold, hard revelation. A window onto a new place where the willingness to lie was locked into escalation, like an arms race.
She had correctly surmised that he couldn’t take it to court, couldn’t put her and the people behind her in the witness box. Because of the need for him to be politically clean, he could not have this muck repeated on oath. So he’d gone to mediation, conceding everything, winding up with a weekend a month in which to be a father.
East along Morshead Drive, following the river. He looked out over the wetlands, the birds rising. Passing through shadows where the Monaro Highway speared overhead. The most sustained and vitriolic attack on his character he’d ever experienced. None of the warnings about the rigours of politics held any terrors for him after that.
The boy had grasped none of it. Which of course was the way the system was designed, and Cassius had no problem with that. But sometimes he wondered how much Rory grasped of anything. He breathed through his mouth and muttered to himself. The sole occupant of a world concealed behind cloud banks, Rory offered few glimpses of his true nature, at least to his father.
The Comcar swung into the waiting bay at arrivals, and he leapt out. Rory was there on the tiles in a Chicago Bulls singlet, his Quiksilver bag beside him. His shoulders pale, marbled by the cold. For a second Cassius wanted to wrap his jacket around the bony frame of his son. Was it the spikes of his chaotic hair that somehow made him look lonely? Airport terminals were like that, though; solitary. Rory’s mouth tilted into a half-smile at the sig
ht of his father. Cassius checked his phone.
When he’d cleared the screen, he bent down and offered Rory a handshake. The boy took the hand uncertainly, made a flummoxed imitation of a man-face. Cassius picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
‘How are you, mate?’
‘Good, Dad.’
‘Flight okay?’
‘Yep. It’s too short for a movie though.’
‘Yeah. How’s Mum?’
‘Good.’
‘School?’
‘It’s okay.’
Christ, this is going nowhere. He looked down from the great height he occupied, at the crown of his son’s hair where the cocky’s crest originated. Forced a smile.
‘So where’s Macca?’
‘They sent her to oversize again.’
‘You’re kidding. I thought your mother spoke to the airline about that.’
‘Yeah, I think she did.’ Rory shrugged. ‘Anyway…’
They walked together to the oversize baggage counter, waited for the stubbled clerk to look up from a clipboard.
‘Scuse me,’ said Cassius.
The attendant looked up. ‘Yeah mate.’
‘We’re after a chicken.’
Eyes down to the clipboard again, the attendant looked dubious. ‘Does it have a name?’
Cassius sighed. ‘How many chickens have you got back there?’
‘Security mate. Can’t let you walk off with the wrong bird.’
‘Macadamia,’ said Rory gravely. ‘But she likes it if you call her Macca.’
The attendant disappeared and returned with a pet carrier. Inside, Cassius could see the white bulk of the hen, the rubbery head jerking at the grille. The chicken glared back at him. It was turning into a hell of a week.
Rory sat in silence in the back seat next to Cassius with Macadamia perched regally on his lap. Now and then his slender hand would stroke the bird’s back, eliciting a contented sound that Cassius heard as brookle.
He stopped first at the neurologist’s, and installed Rory in the waiting room with his chook, under the receptionist’s withering stare. They’d been willing to take him straight through: nobody wants to see a minister of the crown waiting on the couches of a brain specialist.
She had nothing to offer him in any event: the latest round of scans was inconclusive. Cassius had a hatred of uncertainty that was related to his hatred of mediocrity. A result that was a wavering guess between ‘safe’ and ‘not safe’ was unsatisfactory to him. The doctor watched him from behind thick glasses, heard him out as he demanded a plan and a conclusion. It didn’t work like that, she told him. All we can do is keep eliminating things.
The medication would continue. The tests would continue. They needn’t do anything further until the election was over, but they needed to ensure there was nothing sinister going on. I’m a politician, he thought as he rolled his eyes at the ceiling. There’s sinister shit going on everywhere.
When he emerged, Rory was holding court in a large vinyl armchair, explaining the chicken’s ovulation cycle to a grandmotherly type.
Cassius found them a pizza joint in Kingston and the chook waited in the car, voicing her displeasure at being stuffed back in the cage. Rory started pulling the congealed cheese off the crust of his margherita and eating each component separately. It infuriated Cassius.
‘Mate, you’ve got tomato sauce on your cheek. Can you…’ He offered the boy a paper napkin. ‘No, the other cheek, mate.’
He sighed. The boy hadn’t spoken since the car. He sucked at the straw perched in his Coke, hollowing his cheeks. ‘You can have the rest, Dad.’
Cassius looked at the twin piles of cheese and dough. He’d planned to eat at home, later. After Rory was asleep. The boy was swinging his legs under the table, and every now and then the toe of one of his sneakers would kick Cassius in the shins.
Cassius checked his phone again. Rory watched him.
‘Mum says you’ve got the election this weekend.’
‘Yep.’
‘Are you gonna win?’
Cassius lowered the phone, tried to conceal his reluctance with a hard smile. ‘We should be okay.’
‘I saw you on the telly yesterday.’
‘Yeah? What was it about?’ Cassius knew what it was about.
Rory looked puzzled. ‘Well, you said that the boat people…that the boat people from Indonesia would be on their own from now on.’ He screwed up his face. ‘Is that right?’
‘Sort of. I said that the government won’t be getting involved anymore.’
‘So what happens if one of the boats comes?’ Rory was stretching apart a handful of cheese.
‘There’s a special company whose job it is to go and deal with it.’
‘What do they do?’
Cassius imagined himself telling Rory what they do, the boy repeating it to Monica later on, and the conversation finding its way via a kid in the schoolyard into the fucking media.
‘I don’t know. They deal with it. They’re kind of—experts—at doing stuff like that.’ Cassius made the smile again: he remembered his own parents doing it when a topic was too complex for children and needed to be closed. But the kid wasn’t letting go.
‘So why is there a company that gets rid of the boat people? Are they bad for Australia?’
‘No. Well, they can be in some situations. Mostly they’re just desperate.’ He immediately regretted that choice of word, knowing he’d opened up another avenue.
‘If they’re desperate why doesn’t the government help them?’
Cassius caught the waitress on the way past. ‘Can I have the bill please? Mate, it’s complicated, okay? We can’t let them reach Australia because there are bad people in Indonesia who’ll send more boat people if the boat people are getting through, see?’
‘Cos you’re the person in the government who does that stuff, aren’t you?’
Cassius studied Rory for a moment. He’d stopped eating now, pushed the plate aside. Cassius felt in some distant way that he was looking back at himself: the tangle of stubbornness and sensitivity he carried at the same age. But different, physically. So different.
‘What’s bothering you mate?’
Rory fidgeted with the tablecloth, rolled his eyes theatrically. ‘Got a detention.’
‘What for?’
‘A kid called you a name after you were on TV last time, so I smashed him.’
Cassius contained his shock. ‘What did he say about me?’
‘He called you a Nasty, and he did a weird-as salute like this.’
‘Mate, put your arm down. People are looking. Nazi, you mean Nazi.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, it’s an insult. Kind of old fashioned. I reckon the kid’s picked it up from his parents, hey. You mustn’t hit people Rory. It doesn’t solve anything.’
But the boy was reddening, looking down. Cassius began to panic as he realised tears were forming in his eyes.
‘I don’t like it when they do that,’ Rory whispered ferociously. ‘When they say mean things about you.’ He hawked back a great childish glob of snot. Now his thin shoulders were rocking. Cassius took his hand across the table, awkwardly.
‘Rory, it’s my job to be unpopular. With some people, anyway. It doesn’t hurt me, whatever they say, so you can’t let it upset you.’
‘But you said the company does the mean stuff to the boat people. So why does everyone pick on you?’
‘Hey, I didn’t say it was mean.’ He peered down low, trying to lock eyes with his son. ‘Who said it was mean, Rory?’
Rory was silent.
‘Was it Mum?’
Rory looked at his lap.
‘She did, didn’t she. What else did she say?’
‘She said I shouldn’t repeat stuff or there’ll be trouble.’ His lower lip shuddered as he pulled in a breath. ‘Can we go home?’
The Comcar waited under a streetlight outside, the driver reading the Daily Tele.
‘Yeah mate, let’s head off.’ He took the bill up to the counter, where the waitress took his card. She was maybe forty, dye growing out of her part and a chain around her neck with Alyssa in cursive at its centre.
‘Your boy?’ she said as she waited for the terminal to approve the payment.
‘Yes.’ Cassius was looking at the business cards in the fishbowl.
‘He looks so much like you,’ she beamed.
No he doesn’t, Cassius thought irritably. He’s got that ridiculous spiky hair and he’s shorter than I was at that age, and I was never that pale, and…
He looked around at Rory, waiting with his hands in his pockets by the door, now wearing the jacket his mother had sent with him. His reddened eyes clearing, looking straight back at Cassius with uncomplicated adoration.
‘He looks up to you, doesn’t he,’ she was saying behind him. And an unfamiliar state swept over him, like a wave of nausea.
He was not a man who often felt self-loathing.
TUESDAY MORNING
Pulau Dana
The morning sun stretched shadows from the jungle onto the water.
Isi waded into the shallows, holding her T-shirt up around her ribs and kicking little stubs of coral on the bottom as she went. Silver darts circled around her, interested but wary: they turned on their sides in the bubble trail made by her hips, visible then invisible like spinning coins. The sand was entirely made of coral grains: heavy and white, ringing with tiny metallic harmonies underfoot. On the beach it had preserved the overnight tracks of furtive creatures—the crabs and lizards, the drag marks of the Zodiac and all of yesterday’s panicked footprints. She could feel, as she rarely did, the aching, heavy air.
A group of Muslims—they seemed to be in the majority—were praying in the clearing between the tents. Someone had managed to keep hold of a Qur’an. Isi had seen an old man carrying it to the clearing: weathered and gaunt, he stooped as he walked. He had wrapped the book in a tea towel that Radja had supplied from the galley, and he bore the small bundle before him in both hands like an offering. The children avoided him, as they avoided the prayer session.
