by Jock Serong
Leah was singing something with a few of the girls in the shade. Their words were a linguistic muddle but the rhythms of clapping and slapping thighs were universal. Isi felt a warmth towards her: she’d folded herself up to reduce her intimidating height, her long legs crossed in front of her, and the traumatised children were responding to her smile. Two thin girls with hollowed eyes and sores on their arms. A toddler who giggled and cried alternately. Another girl with the scars of terrible burns over her face and neck. Leah’s chanting game wasn’t the most obvious thing to do in this situation, but it was a kindness nonetheless.
The Finleys had set up a makeshift field hospital in one of the tents, and the survivors were now huddled in the other tents for the shade. Tim was lying under the hunched form of the surgeon, his foot raised on a tub and draped with a T-shirt, a legrope wound tightly around his calf as a tourniquet. The small dark feet of the injured boy Hamid were visible next to him. He was conscious—his hands were moving about—but he was quiet. Finley must have found drugs to deal with their pain.
Two boys stood toe to toe nearby, fighting listlessly in the heat. Their ribs flared as they puffed and grunted, twisting arms, seeking advantage. The bigger one got a hand free and shot his fist into the other’s mouth, rocking his head back. Blood appeared on his chin but he didn’t cry, just kept twisting and writhing, more determined than ever. No one got up to intervene. No one appeared to know what they were fighting about. One of the men interrupted his praying to shout at them: the older boy kicked out once at his opponent and sent him tumbling backwards. They both sat themselves down in sullen silence.
And as these things went on around her, Isi was watching the lagoon. It had been thirty hours now since the boat foundered, and according to Finley the corpses would be on the move. It was serene just now. But one dark hump marred the tranquillity, halfway between her and the reef.
She took the Zodiac, alone this time, and made a direct line towards the shape. She backed the outboard off, and as the Zodiac settled next to the shape she realised it was a woman’s shoulders. Isi leant over the side and took hold of her clumped garments, turned her over and pulled her onto the side of the boat. A gasp escaped her before she could contain it: the woman’s face was pulped, smashed beyond recognition. The injuries were bloodless now, the torn muscle and skin softened into trailing skeins of white. The sea lice had taken her eyes overnight.
Isi had to think for a minute. She took the dive float that was always kicking around in the Zodiac and clipped it to the woman’s clothing, then released her back into the water. She looped around to head towards the Java Ridge, but had to swerve to avoid ploughing straight over a pink tangle of limbs suspended under the surface, beyond her reach. Shreds of clothing, an eye turned wide to the heavens.
They were rising, as Finley had predicted.
Next was a naked boy of eight or nine. His neck was broken: as she lifted him from the water, his head lolled back. His mouth was open, the way children’s mouths fall when they sleep, in other places, in safety. He had kept his eyes overnight but they were wide with terror, staring back at her, green as the lagoon under the sun. His body was so slight that she was able to lift him easily over the side of the Zodiac.
She ran the body in to shore. Fraggle waded out with a bedsheet and took the boy from her. She whispered when she spoke to him, like some instinct in her had been tricked into believing the boy was merely asleep.
At her next attempt she made it to the Java Ridge without encountering another body. On board, she collected all the plastic bottles she could find and tied a long rope to each. On the other end, a weight: a heavy pot, a spare anchor, a dive lead, whatever she could find. She loaded all of these into the Zodiac and located the mask and a new snorkel. Then she motored out into the centre of the lagoon, nearest to where she could remember seeing the tangled bodies under the surface.
She anchored the little red boat, flopped over the side and waited for the bubbles to clear.
And there they were, gathered in a crowd like a dozen strangers on a railway platform. The hours and the current had brought them together by gravity in the deepest part of the lagoon. Some resting on the sand, some tangled in the limestone that speared out from the bottom. Some were starting to lift away, levitating in mid-water with their clothing in swirls. The fish sparkled among them, making spirals around the foreign shapes. They pecked occasionally, flashing in the sunlight as they turned on their sides.
Isi waited on the surface, treading water slowly and looking down at them. They’d been crushed together on the boat, she imagined, then torn away from each other by the storm and the wreck. And now they were together again, randomly collated by misfortune. She dropped one of her floats to mark the position and returned to the Zodiac.
There were humps appearing everywhere now. She motored from one to the next, tying on the bottles, dropping the weights. When she had finished with those on the surface she swam a series of straight lines across the lagoon, checking for any more bodies that hadn’t surfaced. She climbed on top of the cabin of the Java Ridge and scanned the water for any she’d missed.
Lastly she launched the drone and swept high over the lagoon, watching the bird’s-eye perspective on her phone. It was so bloody beautiful it made her eyes hurt. But no more of the dead reappeared.
She recruited Sanusi and Radja to help her gather the bodies she’d found. The survivors on the island were assembling on the shore, looking out over the glimmering field, the bodies with their little floats attached. Some of the women were wailing, perhaps recognising a shape in the water. Isi felt the pressure now, to get the bodies to shore before grief turned to hysteria.
The three of them took turns driving the Zodiac and swimming, hauling the victims out and driving them inshore. Sanusi had tied a plastic bag over his hand and secured it with rubber bands. He never mentioned it, never even looked at it. Luke Finley and Fraggle took the bodies onto the beach on surfboards, working patiently through the crowd that would gather around each new arrival. For those people there could be no prospect of good news—either the body was their loved one, or their loved one remained missing.
Hours after she’d begun, Isi ran the Zodiac up onto the beach and collapsed in the shade. She could not erase the images she’d seen: what the violence of the wreck and ravenous nature had done to fingers and lips and eyes and scalps and viscera. But the lagoon was emptied of its ghosts and now the dead lay in a neat row on the beach. The sun had dried them, and already the insects were noisily investigating what the ocean had delivered.
An old man with a pointed white beard, eyes agape and chin jutting in some kind of defiance. Children, a baby, two toddlers. Young women who might be their mothers. Young men—by far the most numerous—those merely drowned, those subjected to various traumas by the boat and the reef: head wounds, mangled faces, broken limbs that poked up like the disorderly roots of mangroves. Crushed and cut and torn flesh of every imaginable kind.
Isi walked the length of the row in silence, her feet scrunching in the sand. The heads rested near the edge of the grasses beyond the high tide line, yet the beach was so narrow that the feet of some of the taller ones lay within inches of the lapping water. Towels and sheets had been laid over their bodies where the ocean had ripped away their modesty. She saw the boy with the green eyes and felt a sadness for him that she knew was disproportionate. The line of corpses was a bottomless well of such pity, but the boy was deep at its centre.
Twenty-three humans.
And standing, sitting, lying around the tents where the Finleys were now working, the survivors.
Isi hadn’t counted them yet, but Roya had counted fifty-six on board the Takalar, she said, so these silent figures must number about thirty, along with the injured boy. A handful might still be missing, but the odds on their survival were so faint that Isi thought it reasonable to focus on those living and present.
Radja had been back to the Java Ridge and brought ashore food, water and
towels. He was methodical, efficient: no sign of the disbelief and panic that wrenched at Isi. In the shade she found Fraggle, head in hands and dreads spilling over his bare knees.
She sat beside him. ‘Was it you who laid out the bodies?
He was silent a long time. ‘Yeah.’
She could see his hands shaking. He still hadn’t looked up. ‘We’re going to have to bury them at some point. Or the birds’ll…’
He finally met her eyes. His were red from crying, fingers fidgeting with the latches of the camera case on the ground beside him. ‘We should, like, identify ’em first.’
He opened the case and lifted out a camera body, chose a lens and clicked it into place. She walked with him along the row as he carefully composed a shot of each corpse. Where they thought some distinctive mark might identify the person—a broken tooth, a scar—they photographed that as well. It took a long time, and the heat rammed down on them as they worked. The insects had been keeping up their piercing whistle throughout, but it was only when they’d finished that she noticed how loud the sound was.
Fraggle rolled the thumbwheel on the back of the camera body, checking through the images. Once he was satisfied, he looked around again. At the bodies. At the flat lagoon.
‘I’ve gotta go back to the boat and radio this in,’ said Isi.
‘Yep,’ muttered Fraggle distractedly. He was moving left and right in the short scrub behind the beach, leaning against the trunks of the palms. The dried undergrowth crackled under him as he trod heavily. ‘I just wanna get a shot that…explains this, y’know.’
When he’d found the perspective he wanted he squatted down on his haunches, heavy sunburnt knees swelling from the legs of his boardshorts. He pressed the camera to his face and Isi crouched behind him, seeing what he was seeing.
The Java Ridge was far off to one side, out of shot; lying quiet at anchor.
What Fraggle had framed was the flat lagoon, turning glorious indigo against the hard light; the overhanging coconut palms, the reef in the distance with the upturned boat amid the settling blue surf. And in the foreground, the nightmarish line of the dead, mottled and broken, their eyes unblinkingly fixed on the sky.
The photographer’s hands made a few tiny adjustments to the lens, then he pressed the shutter.
Isi and Luke were fitting a hand pump to the plastic tub of drinking water she’d brought over from the Java Ridge’s main tank.
‘Much water left after this?’ he asked her.
‘Yeah, we’ll be fine. Ten thousand litres or something. You need a shower?’ She smiled at him.
‘It’s just, I’m not sure if we should use it all on…’ He stopped himself. He looked tired and distressed. ‘I’d never seen a dead person until yesterday.’
‘Me neither. How’s Leah dealing with Tim?’
‘Coping. Probably one of those people who always copes. It’s her job.’
‘What’s she do?’
‘Cop, she said. Senior conny at Bankstown.’
Isi looked at her sorting through a heap of personal belongings that had washed up, making a list of identifying details in a notebook. Beyond her, Neil Finley was visible in the shade of the tent, examining the pregnant woman. Her daughter, the girl called Roya, sat next to her, gently stroking her mother’s hair.
He called from the tent.
‘Leah, can you…er, the lady wants a screen in here. She doesn’t want a man to do it.’
Leah scooped a towel that was drying on a tree and took it into the tent. Her attention diverted, Isi hadn’t noticed that Luke had slumped beside her with his hands on his knees, the irregular shade of the palms making jagged patterns on his back. His head was covered in sweat and his face was red. Isi put a hand on his shoulder.
‘How you feeling about that medical career?’
He laughed drily.
‘Hey, where’s Carl?’
Luke stood straight and shook his head in disgust. ‘That fucking idiot. Have a look.’ He pointed at the reef.
There, incredibly—Isi had to peer harder to believe what she was seeing—sat a surfer, bobbing between the perfect blue walls that had arrived with the passing of the storm. ‘What an arsehole,’ she muttered.
‘You wait,’ said Luke, and his vehemence surprised Isi. ‘He’ll have some reason for it. He’ll have it all mapped out, the fuckwit.’
Fraggle was sitting in the shade, hunched over his camera.
‘Tryin’ to get the colours right on that shot,’ he said, though she hadn’t asked.
‘Which shot?’ She sat down next to him.
‘The one of the lagoon and the bodies.’ He returned to fiddling with the controls. ‘You can do a lot of the editing on the camera itself these days. Cool, huh?’
He proffered the camera. She looked at the display but could only see the awful reality of the dead.
‘Did you raise anyone on the radio?’ he asked.
‘Nah. The VHF can do thirty-five or forty miles in a straight line, but the only thing within that range is Raijua. There’s a couple of villages there that might’ve picked us up, but there’s another storm between us and them. You can just see it—’ She pointed northeast where a thick pile of cumulonimbus lumbered behind the haze. ‘The HF goes longer—we reached Korea once—but it’s a bastard to tune. I’ve done a basic message a few times over but no one came back.’
‘So no one knows?’
‘Nope. And there was no radio in the console of their boat, so they haven’t told anyone where they are.’
‘Shit.’
‘But our government watches this area pretty closely. We’re near the edge of Australian waters, so you never know. They might be onto us.’
They watched Carl in the distance, hurtling free with the spray from a wide glossy barrel. She hated him specifically for that pleasure.
‘I was thinking maybe that rock in the middle of the island,’ said Fraggle. ‘I know it’s a long shot, but we could take a phone up there. I mean, it’s nice and high…’
Carl picked off another one. Even from this distance Isi could see that he surfed with the kind of aggression that revealed irritation, annoyance. His turns were flicked rather than drawn, like he was swiping at bugs. She’d seen enough surfers to know that, for better or worse, something flowed out of their souls and through their feet.
‘Sure,’ she said eventually, ‘why not?’ She stood up, brushing the leaves off her backside. She wanted to do something about the situation, however speculative it might be.
They picked their way through the undergrowth, slapping at insects. Isi wished she’d brought the machete from the boat, as she tore at the great tangles of vines and dead foliage. There was no path, only a vague sense of where they needed to go. The leaves on the larger trees had looked brilliant and delicate from a distance, but were in fact quite massive, some of them sharply serrated. And between those trees was a morass of cane, strap and fibre; tangled and aimless, in varying states of growth and decay. Even where bare rock protruded through the greenery, the plants would take hold in any fracture, clawing at the hard surface as though to crack it open.
The sand underfoot turned to tough, matted soil, and the soil to rock as the ground began to rise. Thorns picked at their clothes; unseen irritants raised itchy welts on their flesh. Eventually the deep scrub and the heavy canopy of trees broke clear as the way became steeper and the view opened up around them. At the screaming peak of the sun’s fury, the light had now turned the sea to silver. The birds hung in the air like wet laundry. She watched their lethargic forward motion as the sweat ran down her back, the resentment in their slow flapping. Only the intrusion of these rare humans had compelled them aloft at all.
The summit of the rocky hill was unmarked: a bare red boulder, small lizards scurrying away. They sat and drank tepid water and Fraggle produced his phone.
‘Nothing,’ he groaned.
‘Well, that was a nice walk,’ Isi said cheerfully.
Tiny electric-blue wrens
darted about in the twigs at their feet. Isi adjusted her position as a column of ants advanced on her. Far below, they could see the tents, the fly-speck humans, even the lines of the dead. Out in the lagoon, banded in yellow to green to deep blue, the two boats were juxtaposed in savage irony.
The Java Ridge, sleek and proud at anchor, and the dead belly of the wreck on the reef. Wide of it, a tiny black blemish in the vast expanse of ocean. Carl Simic.
Fraggle held the phone up again, circled it at arm’s length around his head. ‘Thought I had something there for a sec.’ He started fiddling with the camera again.
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I can Bluetooth the shots to the phone. That way if we get any signal I can fire them off. Or at least fire one off—they’re bloody big files.’
‘Why don’t you just type out a message about what’s happened?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m a photographer. I work in images.’
They watched in silence for a moment as a sea eagle swept in from over the lagoon with a big lizard in its talons. It settled on the boulders below them and smashed the reptile against the rock with a few sharp blows of its beak.
‘Well if you’re going to send a shot, can I suggest you don’t send the dead people? Maybe that one with the boat on the reef.’
‘It’s got bodies in it anyway,’ he countered, thumb-typing into the phone. ‘Okay, how’s this: We are on Dana island west of Raijua SE of Sumba. Boat, probly refugee, aground here. Many dead, 2 sersly injured. Pls send help URGENT.’
‘Good. Who you sending it to?’
‘I’ve posted it to Vipe.’
‘Holy shit Fraggle, is that going to find anyone? What about sending it to the authorities?’
‘Well, which authorities? You know the number for the rescue guys?’
‘Nope.’
‘Yeah, well it’s Vipe or I’m emailing it to my mum.’
They waited in silence for a while, Fraggle revolving with the phone like he was shooting a panoramic, squinting at the screen.
