On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  Roya and her mother, reunited, were holding each other on a day-bed in the lounge. The girl was curled into her usual protective pose, hand on Shafiqa’s belly, but the balance of their embrace expressed reciprocal comfort. The mother’s consoling touch as her long fingers drew locks of hair behind the child’s ear.

  Isi glanced at them as she passed. She felt no sorrow at all for Ali Hassan, only a fervent wish that Roya could have been spared those minutes. What kind of ten-year-old could she become after this experience? What kind of twenty-year-old? She thought about the child’s singularity, and her ubiquity. A million Royas in transit over the stateless planet, damaged and seeking a way to heal.

  Carl and Fraggle were clearing the mess out of the bunkroom, glad to be occupied after the hours of their captivity. The Takalar survivors had resumed their places on the deck, on board bags and mats, bewildered but uncomplaining. Word had spread among them that the boat was again headed for Australia, and their demeanour indicated that this suited them. They had to know about the detention regime. Their ongoing preference for it said plenty to Isi about the alternatives.

  A group of men had formed a circle on the floor of the lounge. One of them, sufficiently ancient-looking that Isi wondered how he’d survived the traumas of the wreck, was reading from the Qur’an. The others listened in patient silence, occasionally raising a deferential hand to interrupt. A discussion would ensue, then the old man would resume his reading. His voice, she thought, was meant to mesmerise them; barely more than a whisper but propelled by rhythm. He was taking them back to the comfort of the familiar, as much as he was praying with them.

  Near them Isi could see Hamid, huddled with another boy about his own age. They had taken a surfing magazine from the lounge upstairs. The open spread before them featured a wetsuit ad on the left, and on the other side a girl in a bikini laughing at the sun. They’d positioned themselves, she now realised, with their backs to the praying men and out of sight of the women. It was extraordinary to her that Hamid was now up and walking about. The only sign of his ordeal that remained was the bandaging around his head. Never before had she seen a human being in such desperate danger, and so quickly made safe from it. But the sight of him made her shudder, as the sight of her, and especially of Finley, must do the same to him.

  There was enough water and fuel. There was enough food. The boat was wounded but not mortally so. If they were careful, she told herself, they could limp south and help would come to them. She knew Tim and Leah were in trouble but she couldn’t gauge how much. As for Shafiqa, she showed no sign of distress now. The impending birth might cause the authorities to evacuate her and Roya to the mainland rather than leave them to stew in the offshore camps.

  The body. She hadn’t dealt with Ali Hassan. They’d left him there on the floor of the engine room while they attended to everything else. She wondered momentarily if she should throw him overboard, or even stuff him in the chest freezer in the galley, but she decided he wasn’t a priority. As long as the hatch remained locked, no one would have to deal with the corpse. Maybe it was a crime scene—she wasn’t sure. Some part of her worried that this was disrespectful, but so were the alternatives. The Muslims among their passengers had not asked to give him funerary rites, and she was no longer confident in her own assumption that he’d even been a Muslim.

  Luke had been running to and from the galley with a fixed grimace on his face, boiling water and carrying tea towels down to the bunkroom. When his father called imperiously for some minor assistance Luke had reacted sharply. No. I’m busy. There had been no open discussion about what had happened to Ali Hassan, although word of the killing had no doubt passed through the boat. How it affected the balance of power between Neil Finley and his son she could only guess.

  A group of women among the survivors were in the galley too, cooking rice and onions. They hassled each other loudly in one of the languages they shared, and Isi stopped a moment to puzzle over why they looked so familiar to her. Then she realised: they’d cut and tied the bedclothes from the bunkroom to make headscarves for themselves. Like the men, solace in routine.

  Isi prowled the upper decks and the lounge, avoiding the bunkroom. She knew that she had to see Finley, had to see what was being done for Tim. But she struggled to face it. The scale of the practical problems was enough on its own, but Tim’s plight was even more daunting. She locked the engine room, and went forward to check the damage to the bow. Although the plating was stove in, the Java Ridge was still watertight. She ran diagnostics on the pumps, checked that the fuel storage hadn’t been compromised by the impact.

  Then she took herself upstairs and opened the door behind the wheelhouse, the one that she never used. Radja and Sanusi’s room. She wasn’t sure what she expected to find there—or whether it was her business to be there at all. The gloomy bunkroom was the same size as hers and Joel’s, but was set up with two single bunks instead of their double bed. The beds had only plain sheets on them, and Radja’s was easily identified by the wall above it: his Man United flag and a poster from some victory. He was besotted with the club: on shore he would never be seen without the red jersey.

  She turned her attention to Sanusi’s bed, quieter and plainer without the football regalia. She understood by the difference that he was much older than Radja, something she’d never considered before. Just as Isi herself had done, Sanusi had pinned a handful of photos to the wall near where his head had lain. Some were commercial prints of flowers on cards: orchids, lotuses. There was a shopping mall booth series of Sanusi with a woman: Isi presumed she’d be his wife. But the largest image, the one that drew a sob from her chest, was of him and two boys. They were maybe ten and twelve, in neat school uniforms. He squatted on his haunches between them, beaming, with an arm draped over each. Their hair was plastered onto their foreheads, carefully combed for the photograph. Isi realised the particular context—the surfing, the wealthy tourists—was not important once you came down to this lonely intimacy. Sanusi may as well have been on a container ship: he was a seafarer, and his family were waiting for him.

  She wept for a short while, alone. Then she knew she had to keep moving. She’d done everything she could think of to avoid it, but in the end she forced herself downstairs to the bunkroom.

  The Finleys had taken ice cubes from the galley and made cold compresses with them, one on Tim’s forehead and one on his bare chest. He was shaking violently now, shivering and convulsing. Leah had been removed from his bed; she lay on the bunk above. Now it was Luke Finley’s task to hold Tim down, freeing a hand now and then to sweep back his drenched hair. A thick lather of saliva had formed at the corner of his mouth, and as Isi looked on, Luke wiped it away with a tissue. Tim ground his teeth. The saliva pooled again in seconds. The bandages were gone from the stump of his leg and it had turned a livid purple colour. She could see where Finley had lanced it, and where he’d dumped the bloodied towels in a pile on the floor.

  ‘Can I do anything?’ Isi asked.

  It was Luke who answered. ‘Not anymore.’ His words came from faraway, the voice thin. ‘Does anybody know…about us? Where we are?’

  ‘We don’t have any comms at all,’ Isi responded. ‘Far as I know, we’re on our own until we get to Australian waters.’

  ‘And we can’t go any faster?’

  ‘No. We’re on one prop, and the engines are on the verge of packing up completely.’

  ‘So,’ Luke persisted. ‘How long?

  ‘Thirteen hours or so.’

  ‘Okay Isi.’ Neil Finley’s pink, scrubbed hand lay on Tim’s wrist. Following his pulse, or maybe communicating a tenderness he hadn’t revealed until now. ‘You’d better go.’ He looked up at his son.

  Isi felt guilty at her own relief. She quietly closed the door behind herself.

  She took a brush and swept the fragments of glass and plastic off the floor of the wheelhouse, then dragged her bedding out and tried to catch some sleep. Joel had done that the first night they spent
at sea on the Java Ridge, after they’d collected her from Sulawesi. They’d hit a storm out in the middle of the Java Sea and bloody Joel thought the whole ordeal was a great adventure. He’d rolled joints and yelled at the lightning as they pitched and rolled all over the place. Eventually he collapsed in a happy, stoned slumber, and she’d spent the night stepping over his roost to get to the doorway so she could throw up in the thrashing darkness.

  They were buccaneers back then, living on borrowings in a foreign currency, lashed to the mast in an unknown sea while their friends applied for home loans and bitched about traffic. If they were in accord about their manic lives at that point, it was her who’d pulled away since, her who’d veered back towards responsibility. It was her who’d scoured the bank statements, who’d read the insurance policies, paid the workers. It was her who’d grown up, while Joel remained stuck in a Morning of the Earth idyll that bore no resemblance to reality. Even now, he could have no idea what had gone on out here. Friday night. Friday night at—she looked at her watch—at ten. He’d be six stubbies and three joints into a bear-hugging frenzy of exaggerations and outright lies, blithely certain that no one wanted the dull truth anyway.

  But she missed him. She missed his warmth, the way the sun radiated from him, as much as onto him. His indomitable capacity to laugh it off, whatever it was—to enjoy the idea that no one knows what’s going to happen next. There are so few people, she reflected, who revel in uncertainty.

  Radja didn’t. Radja sat beside Isi watching the fading sky and the great unanswering convex sea. Separated by a gulf of language, they saw the same emptiness and took from it different truths: his she would never know. He shuffled slightly, shook out a cigarette and padded silently outside on his bare feet to smoke.

  Roya slipped into the wheelhouse. She touched the captain’s chair. ‘I sit here?’

  ‘Yes, mate. Where’s Shafiqa?’ Isi asked her. Roya shuffled herself up onto the chair and swayed her hips to make it swivel.

  ‘She praying.’ Someone, maybe her mother, had tied Roya’s hair back neatly from her forehead. She was wearing a large clean T-shirt as a dress—Isi remembered Leah wearing it the first night of the voyage—and Roya’s open face seemed untroubled. Or at least accepting.

  ‘Are you all right, Roya?’ Isi asked. But the girl didn’t answer, at least not directly.

  ‘Do you want to see my things?’ she asked in return. She had slung a plastic bag by its handles over her shoulder as though it was a handbag. She delicately placed it on the floor, sat cross-legged next to it and picked her way through its contents. Isi switched on the light above their heads.

  ‘I have four, hmm. Shells. From the island,’ Roya said, placing them in a neat row for Isi to inspect. They were whelks and a cowrie. ‘I keep them to remember.’

  Her face brightened then as though she’d been struck by an idea, and she reached a hand into the bag. Her dark irises rolled upwards as her hand searched and then came forward, palm flat. A ring. A heavy signet ring made from some dark metal—brass maybe—inset with a stone. The shoulders beneath the stone were scrolled heavily, the patterns marked out in grime. ‘And this,’ she said, extending her hand, ‘this ring my father.’

  Isi looked at the ring for a long moment. Unpicking the strange grammar the child had used: this ring my father. She took the heavy thing from Roya’s outstretched hand and examined it, the scrolled curves and the red stone. She held it up to the light once, turning it over slowly, then handed it back.

  ‘Where is your father, Roya?’

  The girl looked down at her crossed feet.

  ‘He is go away. Taliban come, take him. So maybe alive, maybe… not.’ She sighed in a way that sounded older. Then her face brightened. ‘I show you.’

  She reached again into the plastic bag and this time she brought out the small traveller’s dictionary.

  ‘Is this how you learned English?’ asked Isi.

  ‘Yes,’ she said proudly. ‘Look…’ she thumbed through the thick little book until it fell open about halfway through, revealing a small colour print, washed out and creased. The edges were burred by handling: Roya’s searching fingers. The picture showed two people, a man and a woman staring fixedly ahead, their shadows stark behind them on a brightly lit wall. It reminded Isi of historical shots she’d seen; serious-faced portraits from before self-adoration became the default. Why smile, after all? The portrait is about life and this is what life looks like.

  Isi immediately recognised Shafiqa, slightly younger; tall and calm and gazing proudly into the lens.

  ‘Your mother is so beautiful, Roya.’

  ‘Yes. This is wedding day for them.’ Roya smiled at the recollection of something she’d been told so often, and with such love, that she’d built it into her own experience. ‘Dancers, very feast. All of the family and the mullah. So much food.’ She patted her own belly as though she was still digesting it. Isi was struck by how young Roya’s parents were—how swiftly life had ushered them through descriptors of joy and then loss. Husband and wife, parents; widow and refugee.

  ‘I have brother too,’ she continued. ‘But he is gone. Maybe Talibs take him to fight.’

  Her lip quivered. Presenting the ring had been the wrong decision. Isi took both her hands in her own. They were soft and warm, still clutched around the ring at the centre of their four hands. The girl’s eyes filled with tears and her shoulders shook once. She withdrew her hands and shoved the ring back into the bag. She looked at her feet and would not look up. Isi’s mind worked its way from the photograph to the ring and she felt she understood: enough of it, anyway.

  In all the lonely passages of her long journey, Roya must have pondered the possibilities for her father. That he’d been taken and tortured. Shot and pushed into a ditch. Or that her brother had been forced into military service and had simply never come home. And the unspeakable burden she’d had to assume in the engine room. Why, Isi asked herself, fucking why did this lovely child have to carry it all?

  Isi withdrew to the private cabin and peeled a photo from the wall, brought it to Roya.

  ‘My grandparents,’ she said, as Roya took the picture in her fingers and studied it. They stood close together in the picture, the man and the woman; her with hands at her sides, his left arm obscured by her clothing so that he might have had an affectionate arm around her waist. Him wearing a formal white shirt with the sleeves stiffly rolled up to his biceps, his trousers hitched high and baggy on his small belly. His exposed forearms thick from a life of labour. The woman stood slightly taller than him, thin and square-shouldered in a dress patterned with spiking ferns or flowers. She wore a cardigan, and her short, dark hair tumbled forward over her forehead. She grinned broadly: he looked less confident.

  ‘They’re from Italy,’ said Isi. ‘Do you know where that is?’ Roya shook her head, but then, with a sharp intake of air, began to peel through the dictionary. She stopped at a page and opened it for Isi—the flags of the world. She pointed a finger at the Italian flag. ‘This one?’

  Isi smiled. ‘They are both very, very old now. Lovely people. But you know, I think your English is better than theirs.’

  Roya’s mouth made a perfect O shape as she thought this through. ‘Do they speak Dari?’

  ‘No. They speak Italian. I think it’s because they still miss their home.’

  ‘I will speak English in Australia,’ said Roya. ‘But I think of my home.’ As she formed the word home, Isi saw the light catch on her lower lip. ‘My mother maybe speak Dari.’

  Isi wanted to keep listening to Roya. But the weariness was more than she could bear. The Java Ridge was staggering onwards, 192 degrees south-southwest. Straight off the bow and fifteen hundred miles away across all that darkness she imagined Joel, laughing with beer on his shoes.

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Canberra

  Cassius remained at the table for another hour and a half after Carmichael sardonically bade him good luck and left. He knew there’d be crew
s on the footpath awaiting his exit, and he wanted them to freeze for the pleasure of nailing him. He called the waiter over to settle the bill and discovered that Carmichael had picked it up. Cassius asked to have a look at the account: the receipt stapled to it was made out to a credit card in the name of the Institute of Social Justice Advocacy.

  ‘Is this account still open?’ he asked. The waiter confirmed that as Mr Calvert was the guest of Mr Carmichael, the tab could certainly be reopened. So he ordered a Japanese whisky—not his normal habit—then shortly afterwards, another. The hot alcoholic trickle muted the headache. At first he was conscious that the diners around him were still looking, were still discussing the scene from earlier on. So he thumbed through his phone, pretending to be occupied and making tired attempts at replying to its various demands. The demands were coalescing around the Joel Hughes incident already. Draft Minister’s Statement Regarding Restaurant Incident. He gave up and stared into the middle distance.

  After a while he rang Stella. He knew it was late but he also knew she’d pick up. He told her he needed printouts of the Australians’ passports. He read her the list and their dates of birth. She hesitated only for an instant—I’ll have to get Waldron’s permission—before she assured him she could make it happen. But then her tone changed.

  ‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘I want to see their social media too.’ He was looking around the restaurant, assessing the eyes assessing him. The room was nearly empty.

  ‘What, like their Facebook?’

  ‘I want to see them. I want to see them, do you understand? Not just the official shit.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ She was almost pleading with him, but he ignored her.

  ‘Cassius, what’s wrong?’

  His mind was whirling. He wanted her there beside him, wanted to collapse sobbing in her arms.

  ‘You’re supposed to refer to me as Minister at all times, you understand? Get me the printouts.’