On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  He lost the boy, felt a stab of wild panic and found him again at the colourful racks of NRL merch, darting round the aisles looking for a scarf. Cassius tried not to betray the fear that had shaken him.

  ‘Hold on a minute matey. Don’t you need a jersey?’

  Rory’s eyes widened. ‘Well, yeah but…’

  ‘Come on. Pick one out. What size are you, a ten?’

  ‘Maybe an eight. Mum says I’m small for my age.’

  ‘No you’re not, fella. You’re fine. Try the ten.’

  Rory wrestled himself into it. It fell to his mid-thighs, cuffs flapping beyond his fingertips.

  ‘Okay, maybe the eight.’

  Rory stood mesmerised in the jersey. He plucked at the price tag. ‘Dad, they’re pretty expensive…’

  ‘It’s fine, Rorkers.’

  ‘It’s got the badge dad. It’s like, official merchandise.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the real thing—exactly what the players wear, just shrunk down a little. Now it’s gonna be cold—what about one of those beanies?’

  ‘Serious?’

  He smiled indulgently. ‘Go on. And you better get two scarves—one for you and one for me.’

  A sales assistant wandered up and smiled as Rory studied himself in a mirror.

  ‘You guys going to the game?’ She was looking at Cassius like she knew his face but couldn’t place him. Old enough to vote, he estimated, but the kids these days couldn’t care less. She probably wasn’t even enrolled.

  ‘We sure are.’

  She raised her voice a little so Rory would hear. ‘Go Raiders!’

  He booed back at her, a little self-consciously, then laughed. His teeth stuck out everywhere. Cassius felt the fierce jolt of his love for the boy, there under the shop lighting.

  He checked his phone again. Nothing from Monica.

  Stella had arranged a pile of papers on his desk, neatly stapled bundles of twenty-two pages. Each was headed Border Integrity (Unauthorised Disclosures) Regulations: Ministerial Order.

  ‘Stella!’ he yelled at the doorway. As usual, the mimicry started instantaneously, from several corners of the office. Stella! STE-llaa! He had no idea why it was funny.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What am I doing with these? There’s…’ he started counting. ‘There’s dozens of them.’

  ‘They’re the orders you make that stop people saying stuff in the media about boat people. You called ’em gag orders.’

  ‘Who are these people?’ He turned to the second pages of the first few documents, studying the unfamiliar names. ‘So we’re really doing this now. I thought it was a bluff.’

  ‘They’re mostly journos, some whistleblowers inside departments. There’s one from Core Resolve, couple of random nuffies. They came from the department and they’ve been through the PMO. The department had the AGS check each one individually. So they’re all advised and clear. They just need your signature. Follow the tags.’

  She had indeed placed plastic tags next to each signature line. He followed them through and with a few swoops of his pen (With Gratitude from the Australian Olympic Committee) he had silenced the baying mob.

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  Pulau Dana

  The voices woke Isi shortly before dawn. Foreign words, slow and quiet.

  She’d slept in a board bag, the plastic lining sticky against her legs. The tents were taken up by Finley’s makeshift hospital and the women and children among the survivors. The rest of them—mostly men—were still sleeping under a long blue tarpaulin, propped up in places by sticks speared into the sand. There were so many lengths of high-density foam on the Java Ridge, for lying on, for padding fragile gear, that it was easy enough to improvise some sort of bed for each person. Another tarp had been laid over the bodies further along the beach, pinned down with chunks of coral. The dead beneath it were reduced to formless mounds.

  She turned over onto her belly and watched quietly for a moment. A tiny blue curl of smoke drifted from the campfire, and past it, through the trees, she could see the first glow of green in the eastern sky. When she’d woken during the night, she could see the reflected light of the storms wandering like malevolent drunks to the north. Another good reason, she thought, to run south.

  The lagoon was still, the Java Ridge quiet at anchor.

  She could hear the crunching of adult steps through the scrub, a pause, then the hiss and crackle of someone pissing. The steps returned, approaching from behind her, and Finley appeared in the gloom. He stepped past and went to the washing drum, splashing his face and making an elaborate effort at washing his hands. He’s probably been up all night, she thought.

  Shaking the water from his hands, he noticed she was awake and came to squat beside her.

  ‘How was your night?’ she whispered.

  He sighed, ran a hand over his stubbled scalp, setting off a spray of fine droplets.

  ‘I don’t like where it’s going,’ he said. ‘That ankle of Tim’s is a mess. Circulation’s going to be compromised if we don’t get on top of it. So normally, as I said, you’d open it right up, get a good look at it, maybe fix the bones with pins and wires. Clean it up, staple it and plaster the limb. Injuries like that, they never quite come good but you can get a reasonable result.

  ‘But here, see, things are different. Nothing’s sterile. Your surgical tub isn’t bad, but I don’t have the gear I need. I don’t even know what ketamine’s like as an anaesthetic. Never used it that way. What if I’m in the middle of it and it starts to wear off? Do I have to ask Luke to hold the poor bastard down?’

  It was all rhetorical, she realised. He was rehearsing his own capabilities out loud. He wasn’t expecting her to respond.

  ‘So the second line of defence is, I need to make sure it doesn’t get gangrenous. And I’m watching the pulse in that foot last night, and at some stage it just bloody disappeared. Toes are white, dorsum’s mottled…I really just…’ He hesitated. ‘I really don’t know what to do.’

  He looked at her with a stricken honesty she’d not yet seen in him.

  ‘Can you imagine doing an amputation on a moving target with bush tools? I didn’t sign up for this.’

  She felt ridiculous engaging in this discussion while lying in a surfboard bag. His hand had returned to rubbing his head.

  ‘To try to fix it, I’d have to knock him out, obviously. For that, I need a second person to do the airway while I work, and I guess that can be Luke, but I have to do the sums on the ketamine so I make him unconscious but not—well—dead.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And there’s more to it than that. The boy with the head injury—I mean, no X-rays, right? He could have a skull fracture under there for all I know. Or a bleed. He vomited last night. He’s lucid…slept okay without slipping right under, but shit, he gives me a bad…feeling.’

  The blur in his speech made her look up at him. He was swaying, and his eyelids were coming down. The horizon was turning orange now.

  ‘Neil?’

  He awoke with a start. ‘Mm.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  He turned his palms upwards in sorrow.

  She thought hard. ‘There must be a rule for situations like that.’

  ‘Juss, jussa rule of logic: save the person most likely to survive.’

  She didn’t want to know the answer but she had to ask the question. ‘And who’s that?’

  ‘Don’t know. Either of ’em could live, either of ’em could die.’ He absently brushed the large grains of sand from the top of a foot. ‘Can you get me something?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I need a green coconut. Not a ripe one.’

  Over the next few hours, as the sun appeared and the palms cast their long shadows over the camp, Isi returned as much of the gear as possible to the Java Ridge and started to prepare her for sea.

  A group of the survivors had taken every implement Isi could muster—pots, pans, buckets, even ladles—and were digging a ma
ss grave in the clearing where the camp had been. The going was difficult for them—there were tangled skeins of roots running in every direction through the sand—but they were gradually making a wide hollow in the ground. Isi had allowed them to take the rest of the drinking-water drum to perform ghusl. A separate group were now washing the bodies, the women braiding the dead women’s hair.

  Isi sat on the gunwale of the Java Ridge, transfixed. The tenderness of the washing. The attentive hands closing eyes and jaws, placing hands prayerfully across chests. She had given them every sheet she could find on board and they had taken these, along with the towels and tarpaulins, and were using them to wrap the bodies. Right side first, then left side. Lastly the oldest of the men walked along the row of wrapped bodies, binding the shrouds with short lengths of rope; once around the head, twice around the body, once over the feet. Ritual guided their every movement: it effected economy and grace. Their world had gone mad, but these people still had their pieties.

  Once the bodies were all wrapped, the groups came together in a huddle to discuss something. Two of the men walked away to approach Luke, who was squashed into the hospital tent beside Tim. He climbed out of the tent and waded halfway out to the Java Ridge.

  ‘Mecca?’

  She darted into the wheelhouse and punched it into the GPS. Back on deck, she pointed in a line towards where the wreck had been, in the centre of the reef. The direction was acknowledged by a faint wave from the morticians, and they began lifting the shrouded bodies into the grave, placing them on their right sides. Sometimes the body would not yield to easy placement: they would consult and shuffle it as best they could, the hard light reflecting off their sweating foreheads. Each time they laid a body in position they would recite a phrase, somewhere between speech and song, which would drift over the water to Isi: Bismillah wa ’ala millati rasulillah.

  When the bodies were all in the grave, they dispersed into the scrub and came back with palm fronds, which they laid carefully over the top until no trace of the towels and sheets could be seen. The old man who’d tied the shrouds walked around the perimeter of the grave, shifting a frond here and there until he was satisfied.

  The women withdrew and sat in the shade with their backs to the grave. The men each took handfuls of sand and tossed them over the palm fronds, chanting once again. Then they began the long labour of filling it back in, scooping sand back from the piles they’d made with the pots and pans. The women rose from where they’d rested and began to wander the beach, dipping an arm into the shallows once in a while. At first Isi couldn’t work out what they were doing, but soon she could see they were collecting rocks. They would confer in little clusters; reject one, keep another.

  These people don’t even know each other, she thought. The living don’t know the dead, the men don’t know the women, the women don’t know each other.

  Finley was whistling at her.

  He’d emerged from the tent, waving her over. She stood and dived from the deck, and as her body cut clean through the water she wished she could remain below and never have to surface.

  But the world returned as she stepped onto the beach and hurried to the tent. Under the survivors’ tarpaulin she could see Shafiqa sleeping alongside some of the older women. Finley had gathered the others: his son, Fraggle, Carl and Leah. Isi could see the bitter resentment all over Carl’s face: somehow, even in the face of this extremity, he was seething with wounded entitlement. Behind them, in the darker interior of the tent, she could hear Tim faintly groaning. There was no sound from Hamid.

  Finley was about to speak when the Iraqi man appeared. He had Roya at his side, and he pushed her roughly forward, barking a command. Between her fingers she clutched a small, thick dictionary, its pages swollen and curled by having been wet then dried. She looked scared.

  ‘This man name Ali Hassan. He is c-captain that boat.’

  She pressed her little mouth into a formal smile and continued haltingly. ‘Ali Hassan…is want to know what is this island please?’

  Isi directed her reply to Ali Hassan, looked calmly into his glittering eyes. ‘Dana.’

  He leaned over Roya’s shoulder and spoke to her rapidly again.

  ‘He ask where we going.’

  ‘Tell him we go to Ashmore Reef.’ She hesitated. ‘He would call it Pulau Pasir. Australia.’ She was puzzled by her own words. There had been excisions: it was Australia for her and the other Australians on board, but not for the people they’d rescued. Would the nature of the coral atoll change depending on who stood on it?

  Roya started to translate, but he had heard the word and was already shouting. Forgetting himself, he pointed at the northern horizon and jabbed his arms at the sky before he remembered language and shouted at Roya in Arabic. She cowered from him and took a moment to find something in her dictionary.

  ‘He say Australia navy’—that was the word she’d been looking for—‘say no. Push us back. He say go to Indonesia now.’

  Isi was confused. ‘But his boat was going to Australia, wasn’t it?’

  Roya did not translate this to Ali Hassan. She was thinking hard, her dark pupils unfocussed.

  ‘Now can-not go to Australia. He in tr-trouble now.’ Those dark eyes darted towards the gravesite. The message was clear.

  Ali Hassan grabbed her roughly and shook her, talking fast. He knew she’d added something. His voice rose sharply and without warning he slapped her hard across the face. Someone yelled in shock. Carl jumped up. Tears came to Roya’s eyes but she said nothing. Ali Hassan muttered a furious curse and stormed off. Leah began to shout something at his departing back but stopped herself. A stunned silence enveloped them: Ali Hassan’s sudden aggression had shaken them in a way that the slow hours of suffering and death had not.

  A calm voice placed itself deliberately in the silence.

  ‘Can you all listen please.’ It was Finley. Any hint of the doubt that Isi had heard from him before dawn was gone. ‘I’m going to do a further procedure on Tim’s foot. I believe there’s some kind of vascular compromise in there and it’ll get worse if I don’t go in and try to fix it. I’m going to put him under this time. I’ve spoken to him about it and he consents. Tim, can you confirm that please?’

  Tim’s voice came from inside the tent, a hiss of agony. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not seeking your consent,’ he said, addressing the rest of them. ‘I’m telling you that that’s what I’m doing. We’re too far from medical help to leave it without surgical intervention.’

  A small voice rose. ‘Please. What happen to Hamid?’

  They’d forgotten about Roya, who had sat down on the spot when Ali Hassan hit her.

  ‘Hamid. Oh, the boy, the head injury. He’s all right at present but I have to keep watching him.’ It was clear from Finley’s voice that he was unsure whether he was addressing Roya or the whole group. ‘Anyway, Tim’s foot, it’s messy surgery and it requires more equipment than I have here. There’s flies and bacteria and he stands the best chance if we get moving quickly after I’ve done it. Okay?’

  Carl spoke first. ‘What do you want us to say?’

  ‘I don’t want you to say anything. This is all pretty irregular, as you can imagine; I need to ensure it’s witnessed.’ He turned his back on them and returned to the tent.

  Roya watched the tent from a distance, studied the shapes made by the sunlight passing through it, the shadows of the people moving around inside.

  When the doctor came out to wash something, she stood and crept into the tent, picked her way past Tim and sat down next to Hamid. He was breathing fast, his glasses long gone and his eyes brightly attuned to some dreamscape she couldn’t picture. She took his hand, laying her plump brown knuckles over his upturned fingers. He cried softly and she wanted to cry with him. She wanted to hear his tall stories again, to know that the spark in him wasn’t extinguished. Seeing him there, it seemed more likely he was just some ordinary boy with a home and a family and a school, but that didn’t h
elp her. She couldn’t bear the thought of them grieving for him, nor him grieving for them. No one had come to claim him when the people brought him in from the water. Maybe the ‘uncle’, whoever he was, had died in the storm.

  There was a sickly sweet smell in the tent. She’d smelled death before, but death was outside, buried under the sand. This was something else, death that stalked the living.

  She had to be strong like her mother would be. Did he watch football? All the boys she knew liked to watch football. They’d crowd the café windows to see the screen, scuttle away from the raised hands of the men as they tried to concentrate. Maybe he had a bike. He was old enough to have a bike.

  She reached out her fingers towards the long angry bruise that had grown above his ear. She dared not touch it, but she wished she could erase it with her fingers, like it was drawn in pencil.

  The doctor came back, bent low to enter and resumed his work. Either he hadn’t seen her or her presence didn’t register. She watched him making his preparations as she held onto Hamid’s hand.

  He’d put the other man’s injured foot up on a plastic tub, flipped over to create a stable base. Above the Australian man’s head he’d put a coconut in a string bag and hung it from the roof of the tent. Now he stuck a clear plastic tube into it, and the tube snaked its way down to a medical-looking plastic bag. From there, her eyes followed another tube that led down to a needle, which the doctor slid into the back of the Australian man’s hand, fixing it there with some tape. He was talking low and steady, reassuring the man, calling him Tim.

  She couldn’t imagine what the coconut did. She’d thought Australian doctors might have better ways of doing things than getting coconuts involved. Her left foot was going to sleep under her bottom. She moved it carefully so as not to disturb Hamid.

  The doctor took a roll of cling wrap and tore off five or six long sheets, laying them delicately on the floor of the tent bedside him, next to Tim’s hip. He lined up all sorts of objects on the cling wrap: some of them, like scissors and scalpels, Roya recognised. Some of them were unfamiliar to her, and looked terrifying. A strange steel instrument like a pair of fine scissors, with the curved beak of a bird. Whatever the implement was, she knew it belonged to a secret world and that terrible pain was its companion.