by Jock Serong
There was silence on the other end of the line: a chance to retract. He didn’t take it.
‘All right,’ she said simply, and hung up.
A couple nearby got their coats and walked out. Now he was the only patron left in the place, the staff working discreetly around him, clearing tables and restocking the bar. The waiter approached again to relay a reminder from the Comcar driver that he was still out there. Looking across the restaurant, Cassius could see the car outside the front door, where it had been moved in an attempt to draw his attention, or maybe to ward off the press. Steam curled from the exhaust—the driver had the engine running to stay warm.
Cassius mumbled his thanks and a half-hearted apology—they’d seen such things before—and crashed out through the door to the waiting car.
His restlessness stirred in the silent car: the story woven by Carmichael, the raw fury of Joel Hughes, who knew nothing of how grave—for how many people—the situation actually was. The circles of insiderness, his corresponding outsiderness, keeping him from working out what was going on. And the day that tomorrow would be; the shrugging acquiescence of the electorate—because what fool would call it a mandate?
He was tired, drunk and dizzy with pain, but his head was alive with feral creatures that barked and gouged. There was no refuge to be had in sleep. Nobody was waiting for him anywhere else: the whole universe echoed with apathy. He directed the car to the office.
It took him forever to get through security. He staggered into the reception area and peered along the corridor to ensure no one else was around. It wasn’t that he had anything nefarious in mind, but he knew how he looked. He touched a finger to his nostrils. No blood. Past Stella’s cubicle he could see that the overhead lights in his office were all out, though someone had left the table lamp burning.
Probably Stella, he thought. So considerate. He stopped at her desk and realised he had no idea how to turn the overhead lights on. He wanted painkillers. He couldn’t think straight. He rubbed the palm of one hand up and down the door jamb, hoping to hit a switch. But there was none. Everything’s fucking aut-o-mated. Every single bastard trying to make his life harder.
He stooped over her desk, ran a clumsy hand around the framed pictures of her and her family, past the pets and the pop stars, the jar of biros and the nail polish remover, the hard drives and seashells and notepaper. His eyes caught the sticky note on the wall, her loud handwriting. It reminded him of something. Then his hand came upon a remote control, and again, a connection clicked somewhere in his mind. He pressed the power button in the top corner and a green LED lit up. Then he squinted some more and found a button that said ‘activate’. And the lights came on. He grunted. Why the fuck, he muttered to no one, am I using a remote control to turn the fucking lights on?
He replaced the remote and walked through into his brightly lit office.
There, perched on the couch with his legs folded one over the other, sat the Prime Minister of Australia. He was in rolled-up shirtsleeves, tie askew and suit jacket slung over a chair. Despite the overhead lighting, the table lamp made a halo of his thinning silver hair.
The PM watched Cassius with amusement. ‘Big night, mate?’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘The working week’s done, Cass.’ He stretched extravagantly, prised himself to his feet with a hand on the arm of the couch. ‘Let’s see: you’ve got’—he bent over the bar fridge under the television—‘Crownies, sav blanc, red…how about a G&T?’
‘I don’t want a drink.’
‘Had enough? Sit down then, mate.’ He gestured towards the pale leather couches. Cassius looked at them scornfully. He knew the PM was trying to engage him on his own terms. He headed purposefully for the bar and poured himself a whisky, then took a seat at the conference table. The PM rolled his eyes.
‘They’re talking no swing against us tomorrow, mate. Maybe even a per cent or two our way. That’s enough of a mandate to do some actual governing if we can swing a deal or two. Tax, health, defence…’
Cassius glared at him. ‘Stop calling me mate.’
‘So I’m going to re-do the Cabinet, mate. Starting Sunday, top to bottom. You’ll be pleased to hear, no more Border Integrity for you, champ.’
‘Why is there no one here taking minutes?’
‘Minutes? We’re having a chat. We’re not launching a military strike.’ He pointed at the neck of the beer he’d opened. ‘See? No minutes when you’ve got a beer in your hand. Common sense.’
Cassius took out a pile of printer paper from his desk. He clicked a pen and started writing. The PM chortled. ‘This your version of minutes? You with your fucked up—what about these headaches, eh?’
Cassius stopped writing.
‘Ah, you didn’t expect that to get out, did you. Tut tut. How was the Menzies? Did you have the duck, you treacherous cunt?’
‘I get approached by a lot of activists in my portfolio.’
‘My understanding is that you approached Carmichael, not the other way round.’
Through the fog in his head, Cassius tried to see the PM for who he truly was. He was beginning to understand this method of his: the lumbering joker, a farm lad who’d brought his earthy common sense to Canberra. The bush-battler mythmaking that hid the heart of a volcanic bully, right up to the moment he erupted.
He was waiting now, building, with the beer clutched in his meaty fist like a club.
Cassius tried to light the fuse. ‘There were more overhead photos, weren’t there.’
The PM sighed. ‘You really want to go through this? Yep, every ninety minutes, throughout the whole show. But no one’s going to see ’em.’
Cassius had two fingers pinned to the inner corners of his eyes, squeezing like it might somehow hold back the onrush of agony. ‘Someone separated that land shot from its caption. There’s a caption, isn’t there.’
‘Mmhm. “We’re on an island, reffo boat wrecked…dead and injured, send help.” You know, it wasn’t like, explicit. What else do you think you know Cassius?’
‘There’s an Australian boat out there.’
‘Ah, now I don’t want to descend into hair-splitting, but there’s no Australian boat out there. There might be Aussies on a boat, but that doesn’t make it an Australian boat, see?’
‘The refugee boat was sabotaged. People acting in our name fucked with the engine…’
‘Nah nah nah. NO.’ Finally he was raising his voice. ‘I’ve got very little time for this conspiracy crap. Sabotage? It’s your department Cassius. If there’s some mysterious program, shouldn’t you be on top of it? Make yourself a little fuckin tinfoil hat. Simple fact is, there’s been a cock-up out there and some people have died.’
‘You’ve deliberately buried all this for the sake of tomorrow.’
The PM laughed. ‘Leaving aside the truth or otherwise of that proposition, the public are going to believe you did. I’ll say it again—it’s your department.’
He laughed his mirthless laugh a little more, the laugh that swept aside the fools and believers he’d had to deal with to reach high office. Then he joined his hands behind his head to display sweat-stained armpits and stretched out on the couch. His legs were apart, his balls bulging against his suit pants.
‘Let’s take it at its most compelling, shall we? You think that a boatload of illegals have sailed south from, where? Sulawesi? Heading for Ashmore Reef, right? A route no one’s used for years. But no worries, okay, they’re sailing along and they hit a reef, sink the boat and wind up on someone else’s boat—someone you and your sources can’t identify. Do you know how many people there are on these boats Cass? Do you? On average, about two hundred. So someone out there on the high seas—Australians you say—and what the fuck would Australians be doing up there? This mystery boat, this fucking magical Ark, picks up two hundred crazy fucking stranded reffoes and manages to accommodate them all, and guess what? It’s conveniently heading for Ashmore too, and somehow looks identical! A
nd where’s the evidence for the existence of this second boat? Hey? Do you somehow deduce it from the two photos you’ve seen?’
‘Someone took that photo of the bodies.’
‘Are they bodies? Is it even fucking Indonesia? Don’t go leaping to conclusions.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Where’s what?’
‘The boat. The Australian boat—the…’ he cursed as he tried to correct himself. ‘The boat with the Australians on it.’
‘Who says any such boat exists?’ He stared for a long time into Cassius’s eyes. ‘If it doesn’t exist, I haven’t done anything with it. See?’
‘Who’s Alan Veal?’
The PM frowned slightly, then recovered. ‘Who’ve you been speaking to? Is this coming from Carmichael?’
‘None of your fucking business. Who is he?’
‘Veal’s an Australian tourist. Photographer, goes by the name Fraggle. He’s a nobody. His mother’s reported him missing in Indonesia. You think you’re onto something there? Do you know how many Australian tourists are missing, hospitalised, locked up or chilling in morgues at any given time in Indofuckingnesia, Cass? I’m beginning to wonder if you might be even more naive than I thought, tiger.’
‘How’d you know all that about him if he’s a nobody?’
The PM sighed elaborately. ‘It’s my job to know lots of things.’
‘I thought it was your job to remain ignorant.’ The pain was back, a knife lodged in the crevasses of his skull. He grimaced as it sparked across his forehead, a current between poles. ‘Someday,’ he squeezed out, ‘when you’re old and senile you’re gonna realise you’re rotting from the inside.’
The PM shrugged. Then he reached over his shoulder to Cassius’s side table, the one where he stacked his memos and briefing notes, and picked up an A4-sized envelope. ‘You must be wondering why I’m here.’ He tossed the package casually at Cassius. ‘Got another envelope for you.’
There was no address on it, no identifying features at all. He tore the end off it and slid the papers out. Typed paragraphs, legal letterhead, court registry stamps. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at. And then his eye caught a series of sentences that couldn’t have come from anywhere else:
46. The Husband was always opposed to the idea of us having children. He took an active and intrusive interest in my use of birth control, and when I did fall pregnant he was aghast. He demanded, standing over me and shouting, that I obtain a termination. At that time I was in fear of him.
Cassius leafed frantically through the pages, knowing all the while that each of the affidavits would be there: Monica, all of her friends, the family doctor, Rory’s school teacher. Domineering. Intimidating. Cold. Insanely ambitious. But there was more: the report from the child psychologist who described Rory as emotionally withdrawn in response to disappointment. And in the grip of a large document clip, the panel recommendation that gave Monica custody, condemning Cassius as overbearing and incapable of practical compromise.
Cassius tried to control his face and knew he couldn’t.
‘You’re doing blackmail now?’
‘Not really.’ The PM smiled, enjoying the moment. ‘There’s nothing to threaten you over. You have no leverage. No, this is personal. From me to you. These have already gone out—to selected journos and trolls who are drooling over their keyboards as we speak. Embargoed to Monday, of course. You’re finished, Cassius. You’re a washed-up athlete who had a brief career in politics. Remembered only for leaving some Australians to die on the high seas.’
He dug around in his nose with the end of one thumb, grimacing, then regarded Cassius with contempt.
‘You know, your pathetic wobbling between pragmatism and principle—you’re exactly the reason we privatised this border bullshit. Same with the camps. We can honestly say to the punters’—he raised his open palms with the neck of the beer hooked between thumb and forefinger—‘“Sorry guys, private company, blah blah…commercial privilege, fuck off.”
‘I can look the Australian people in the eye—I’ll do it tomorrow for fuck’s sake—and say to them I do not know what went on out there and it is not my concern. Now isn’t that the best possible position to be in? Do you really think the voting populace gives two shits about whether I’m wilfully blind? Get off your pulpit Cassius, course they don’t. They’re as fucking stupid as you are. This is Joe Loungeroom, right? “Do I have to worry about brown people invading us from the north today? No I do not. The PM put it in the hands of a corporation and they fixed it.”’
He drained the beer and pushed the bottle away from himself, over the glass surface of the coffee table; studying the slumped form of Cassius Calvert, a man who thought he was bigger than politics.
‘Goodonya mate. Thanks for the beer.’ He belched. ‘Gonna grab some shuteye. Big day tomorrow.’
After he’d gone, Cassius picked up the bundle of passport printouts that Stella had somehow obtained. She’d moved fast, carried out his instructions to the letter, then presumably gone home.
The faces told him little. Carl Simic, a man with the soft mouth of a boy. Alan Veal, who did not look remotely like an Alan. Isabella Natoli, Leah Hogan, Luke and Neil Finley, Timothy Wills. From the copies he could glean dates of birth and therefore ages. The two Finleys must be father and son, not brothers as he’d originally thought. Another page appended after these told him that criminal history searches had been conducted and all were cleanskins. A small detail, but it fuelled his rage: why the fuck were they checking for criminal priors? These people were maddeningly obscure to him.
He picked up the second bundle of papers, the social media.
And there they were: the seven of them. Luke Finley playing football, mugging with mates who looked similar to him in striped shirts, beers raised. Leah Hogan on her graduation day at the academy, already the image of a junior cop who’d been the victim of something. Carl Simic on a dirt bike, trying to convey a peak moment with too many exclamation points. Timothy Wills, laying down a lecture about ethical poultry farming. Christ, more chickens.
Veal, who styled himself as Fraggle—he didn’t consider himself an Alan either—trying to build a career as a photographer. Never shirtless like the others. He’d met some famous surfers, had covered some stadium rock from side-stage for the music press. Obituaries for a family member of his. Isi Natoli, showing off the dream they were selling: holding a huge fish aloft, surfing a blue wave, lying in a white bikini on the deck of a boat. He studied the planking around her, veined by the seawater that had run off her legs. The shot was probably taken on the same bloody boat.
They were Australians, whatever that meant. They were also young people: self-absorbed, inexhaustible, ephemeral in everything they did. Happy, though they probably didn’t realise it. Not broken or cynical. All of them would be the subject, somewhere, of someone else’s concern. There would be parents in the dormitory suburbs making food or sorting through something they’d meant to attend to in a quiet moment, the quiet moment that had now arrived. Glancing at a clock at the times of day when these kids would fill the room, the parents had no cause for concern yet. They couldn’t know.
It was his burden to know, even if others had conspired to ensure he didn’t. It was his place to be the one who held these documents in his hands, somewhere remote from society. At first he’d seen that responsibility as a mere incident of the job: he was first and foremost a political showpiece for the party, a ‘leader’ in the public’s uncritical eye.
Now he understood the gravity. Now he could trace the river backwards to him at its source: the upstream accretion of blame like toxic sediment, carried from the electorate through all those minor officials to the department, the chief of staff and on to him. Him on the bed of that fucking river among the stones with a boulder on his chest.
The pile of bodies on the island, that didn’t even enter the political calculus. No, that was his personal horror: the parents, the children who didn’t know
their warm and breathing loved ones were corpses on a beach. That time would come to them—like a dark angel in their sleep—soon enough. Until then, the arms of the dead would reach to him, fail and reach again. Their voices would plead with him to speak their names to the world. And he wouldn’t. Because they’d died as they lived: on the wrong side of an invisible line.
SATURDAY, PRE-DAWN
Southeast of Pulau Dana
Tim Wills died at 3:16 a.m.
While Leah sobbed and tried to get up, they closed his eyes, gently removed his watch and the ring from his finger. They wrapped him in bedsheets and took his body upstairs to the chest freezer.
Carl took upon himself the role of pall-bearer, heaving his cousin’s swathed body up the steps from the bunkroom and through to the galley. Isi and Fraggle emptied everything but the essentials out of the freezer: fish fillets, fruit and steaks, and piled them on the counters. When there was enough room they lowered the body in, knees tucked against chest, and shuffled some of the loose ice over it.
The Java Ridge was grinding slowly south; ever more slowly. Seawater had been leaking into the engine bay for many hours, running through the broken seals around the bent prop shaft. The boat was listing more dramatically to port. Isi adjusted the steering to compensate for the bias.
All the while, the noises from the engine room became more pronounced and more pathological, even to those who knew nothing of machinery.
As the light broke, a tower of dark cloud loomed over the water. It swelled at its centre through lilac and mauve, shades that hinted at great power but held it close, concealed. Isi moved about the deck, placing buckets of seawater around the signal fire. The angle of the water in the buckets betrayed the steepening list of the boat.
She’d recruited Carl to help her stack all the board bags on the steel deck at the bow. All the luggage they could spare; clothes, towels, anything that would burn slow and smoky. They built a pyre from these items, sloshed some diesel on it and lit the whole thing up. The buckets right there in case the flames ran away from them. It was a terminal strategy, she knew. The choice you made when there was no going back. There was every chance the timber hull would catch anyway and burn them to the waterline, but she needed attention from the outside world and she needed it now.
