On the Java Ridge

by Jock Serong

  She added to the fire anything she could find that might burn a vivid black. Wetsuits, a plastic tarp; the curtains from the lounge. All of them she threw on the pile and watched as they melted and bubbled and stank. Eventually she started to add surfboards, and even Carl no longer objected as the colourful logos blackened. He’d spent hours repairing them, but it didn’t matter now. People moving around the deck coughed as the fumes wandered over them. In the dead air the sooty column rose almost vertically to a great height, then began to spill sideways.

  The men in their tattered perahan tunban were slumped by the rail, smoking the cigarettes Radja had given them from Sanusi’s stash. They no longer talked in groups, but watched the fire in the casual way you would if it was the burning aftermath of anything—a rubbish pile or a mortar round.

  Isi went below and worked her way forward through the following eyes of the old men and the women and children to check the underside of the steel plate that the fire was burning on. It was hot to touch but there was nothing flammable in contact with it: the fire could burn for a few hours more before it presented any danger to the Java Ridge. Which only meant the sea was likely to take them before the flames did.

  As she passed back through the passageway her eye caught a movement at the corner that led to the engine-room access. Isi stopped and turned, found the huddled form of Roya, sitting with her back to the bulkhead and one hand on the door of the engine room. Isi could see the dimples in her knuckles.

  She looked up at Isi’s approach but said nothing as she slowly withdrew the hand.

  ‘What are you doing, mate?’

  There was a tear forming in one eye. Still Roya wouldn’t speak. Isi took her other hand and gently lifted her to her feet, walked her back towards the ambivalent light of the new day.

  Back on deck, the atomic burst of the thunderhead had grown taller. Eruptions of brilliant pink cloud lined its edges, clean in contrast against the perfect blue heavens behind. Some other kind of cloud lay in streaks across the base of the storm, parallel to the horizon. But what struck Isi more than the beauty of the building thunderstorm was the effect it had on the sea. The chromed water beneath the cloud was turning an impossible green.

  Darkness gathered under the cloud as it reared into the sky, and the green was intensifying. She took the first object that came to hand—a screwdriver she’d left lying on a sill, because it didn’t matter anymore—and she threw it as far as she could in the direction of the thunderstorm. It tumbled through the air and splashed briefly through the surface and the white was as she’d known it would be. Not silvery or transparent like ordinary water disturbed, but dazzling—so bright that it seemed to emit light rather than reflect it.

  This was what a thunderstorm did to the sea, its most exquisite turning of moods. And she’d become blind to it until now, preoccupied by the everyday and fearful of the future. Beneath the cataclysm in the sky, something perfect inhered.

  She’d made choices that went with the shifting atmospheres: between immersion beneath the ocean, or skimming and cutting through its surface, or just looking at it. Usually only one thing or the other would truly feel like being in the ocean. Some days nothing but the pressure of the whole sea in the coil of her inner ear could calm her. Other days it was enough to be slapped by spray and wet to the waist, and that would be an answer to the call.

  With the boards consumed by flame, the comms gear gone from the roof, Isi realised that everything identifying them as westerners was eradicated. It hadn’t taken much. They were a timber boat on the endless sea, no different from any other seafarers. She looked at Roya, who sat on the deck watching the same cloud. The storm that had consumed her boat had arrived under darkness. She might never have seen the ocean like this. The little girl was at peace as she watched. How separately that moment stood in her precarious life.

  Her thoughts shifted restlessly back to the present. Had Ali Hassan been right?

  Australia not helping boats anymore.

  Isi was thinking about Joel as she rounded the front of the cabin and saw Carl sitting on the windlass, beyond the oily flames of the signal fire. The vision of him wobbled in the heat—he was alone, lost in thought. She sat beside him on the deck, facing the warmth of the flames.

  ‘Tim was your cousin on your mum’s side?’

  ‘Stepmum’s, yeah.’

  ‘You were close, huh.’

  He laughed a little. ‘Close but miles apart. I mean, you saw us—he could be so fucking pompous about all that lefty shit. I’m not political: I’m not, like, the opposite of him or anything. I just get the shits when people start preaching at me.’

  ‘Who were—’

  ‘But I loved him, okay? I did.’

  ‘Who were your parents, Carl?’

  He uncrossed his legs and rearranged them, looked out at the faraway storm.

  ‘Dusan, my dad, he landed at Tulla in 1990. I was nine and the twins were, I dunno, still in nappies. He didn’t have a wife or a speck of English. He fed and clothed the three of us, educated us, till Margaret came along, that’s my stepmum. Never sentimental about the old country, you know? He’d only started talking about it in the last few years once the age mellowed him off a bit. And when he did talk, it was all tangled up in this kinda Euro-Coburg English. Turned out he hated the place, lived in terror of Milosevic, would’ve gone sooner if he could’ve.

  ‘And he lobbed up in the new country with nothing, had nothing but his brains and his hands. He was bloody good at making furniture, but. Started at a factory in Campbellfield, then there was a shed he put up in the backyard at home, and then one day—Christ, I remember this so clearly—we were all in the stationwagon and he pulled to a stop outside this industrial shed in Deer Park—you know Deer Park? And there was his name, ten feet high across the front of the building. And suddenly he had people workin’ for him. Slavs, Indians, Iraqis, Sudanese. He didn’t care. I think he thought that people who were down to the bones of their arse were less likely to sit on it…’

  ‘He still around?’

  ‘Nah. Asbestosis.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. You remember your mum?’

  ‘Just, just photos.’

  ‘What was your stepmum like?’

  ‘Ordinary Aussie I guess. I knew almost nothing about her before she started arriving on Saturday afternoons for beers with Dusan. She started to be a bit of a fixture, but it always felt like she had no interest in herself, you know? Like she found herself boring to talk about. If she was sick, or once or twice she lost a friend along the way, she’d almost apologise for interrupting normal programming. Dad was—umm—gruff with her. Gruff but affectionate, yeah. She was like a frightened bird around him…What?’

  Carl was looking at Isi like she’d made a comment.

  ‘Sorry. I haven’t heard you talk this way. About your family.’

  ‘You’ve never asked me about my family.’

  His face changed somehow, turned darker. ‘You know we’re people smugglers now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re taking these people across the border. Federal offence, isn’t it?’

  ‘But we’re not sneaking them in. They’re not in shipping containers. We’re looking for help.’

  ‘That’s what they always say, isn’t it?’

  ‘Carl, I don’t have the energy for that whole disc—’

  ‘That’s okay, neither do I.’ He laughed a little, and the sound cracked at the end. ‘But Tim would’ve fucken loved it.’

  He turned away from her, eyes downward to study the water under the bow. A big long tom appeared there, in the shadow of the painted timbers. The fish sliced along and across the boat’s direction of travel, then jumped out of the water and flew through the air, kinked and whipping. The eerie light flashed on its chrome flank before it splashed in again and disappeared.

  SATURDAY MORNING

  On the Java Ridge

  Thirty thousand feet above the chrome plate of the sea, a solitary objec
t sliced across the sky. The new sun glowed on its sleek white curves like a benediction, like this machine was the bright zenith of human achievement.

  It might have been an aeroplane but the wings were slender, the tail fins inverted to spike downwards. Its passengers, its cargo, were circuit boards and fibre optics. The bulbous dome that might have been the cockpit was blind, windowless, occupied by neither human nor conscience. Given to data alone.

  Miniature eyes and instruments, absorbing the information. On the belly of the machine a rotating optic: laser-milled glass; aperture and focal length. Tiny papillae measuring velocity and temperature, distance and altitude. Moving over the water and sifting number strings in search of anomaly. Reporting back.

  The machine knew what belonged here and what was foreign. It knew the surface of the ocean. It laid a grid over it to measure what was otherwise featureless. The islands, the reefs it knew. The giant seamounts beneath the surface, invisible to all but an observer at this height: it knew these too.

  The sensors bristled. There was something on the ocean that did not accord with the known.

  There was no boat there to greet them.

  Isi checked the GPS again. During the slow-motion nightmare of the morning they’d limped nearer the two-hundred-mile line and were now hanging in space over the Timor Trough. Though the ocean was physically unchanged, this was Australia’s ocean and she was convinced they’d be watched. Somehow, remotely, someone would have eyes on them.

  The gamble of going south into Australian waters for Tim’s sake had ended in futility, but Isi still believed it had been the better option. Leah, unconscious now and starved of food for two days, could still be saved. The last time Isi had looked in on her an hour ago, her face had expressed something more frightening than pain—a kind of glazed resignation—but Finley maintained that she had time yet.

  As much as Isi would normally have disliked the idea of a warship, some presence out here that indicated authority and homeland would be welcome.

  Yet there was nothing in sight but the water’s surface and the coronal haze of the sky. Water and air. The Java Ridge was the only solid object in the universe.

  She knocked the throttles back to idle so the engines stopped their labouring. No hurry anymore, no hurry. She took off her shirt and headed outside.

  The guests were slumped in various corners. The wreck survivors had mostly retreated downstairs. The separation of the two groups probably reflected nothing more than their differing ways of coping with the early morning heat. Fraggle had gone inside with them—she’d noticed he was still taking portraits of those who would allow him. Once again he was alone among others.

  On the deck next to a hammock he’d left the paperback he’d been reading—a new edition of the Indonesian surf guide they all read. She picked it up and thumbed out of habit to the index to see if the Java Ridge got a mention. But the book fell open halfway through, at a bookmark. She lifted it out: a square leaflet printed on heavy card. A black and white photograph in its centre, of a fair-skinned boy in a suit and tie. And under the image: Marlon Veal, 13/5/94—28/12/16.

  Travelling’s a way of making sure you’re not at home, he’d said. She hurriedly replaced the book where she’d found it.

  All of them were waiting here, suspended.

  From a tub near the stairs she took a facemask and stepped lightly over the gunwale into the sea. It was the temperature of her blood: she felt no change other than the thicker physics when she slipped from air into water. Her feet stabbed downwards, feeling nothingness even as they stretched. She took her hands from the mask and watched her silver bubbles slow then climb for the surface. She lay face down, waiting for the aeration to clear.

  Then she could see; she could see the great spears of light that angled down into the blue, headed for a vanishing point beyond the sight of the world. She turned her mind to her own buoyancy, spread her arms and legs so she cast a starfish shadow into the great sapphire emptiness below. Her breathing slowed, her heart slowed. She held her body perfectly still on the surface by nothing more than the gentle pressure of her fingertips.

  And ever so slowly, she allowed the air to escape her mouth so that her chest contracted and she began to sink. And Joel and the money and Ali Hassan and the asylum seekers and the carnage she’d witnessed and the destruction around her and the uncertain future that lay ahead: in this perfect moment she had sloughed it off and left it to float away.

  She descended till her lungs hurt, and then obeyed the instinct to kick for the surface.

  When she broke through she saw Roya’s face peering down in concern from the port side rail, her mother beside her. Isi took off her mask, smiled away the darkness.

  ‘Hello Roya. Would it be all right with your mother if I took you for a swim?’

  The little girl looked apprehensively at the mask, and Isi realised she would be thinking back to her time under the upturned hull of the Takalar. She placed a hand over her heart and smiled again. Roya looked at her mother, exchanged a few quiet words with her. Shafiqa nodded and kissed her gravely on the forehead.

  Roya disappeared for a moment and returned with a lifejacket and another mask from the tub.

  ‘Leave the lifejacket.’ Isi smiled as Roya sat on the gunwale, still in the oversized T-shirt. ‘I’ll hold you.’

  Looking up at Roya as she arranged herself on the edge, Isi felt a fresh wave of admiration. Whether it was nature or experience, Roya had no time for fear. She let herself tumble off the deck and into the water.

  Isi swam to her and looped an arm across her chest. She adjusted the strap of the mask over her head, as she had done four days ago.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

  Roya nodded.

  ‘Do you know how far a metre is?’

  She nodded again, and spread her hands to indicate.

  ‘Well this water is three thousand metres deep. Can you imagine that?’

  Then she let go of Roya’s chest, keeping hold of her hand as Roya laid her body on the surface in the same way she had seen Isi doing.

  Isi replaced the mask on her own face and floated beside her. They hung there motionless, two specks on the surface. There were tiny crabs, the size of a little fingernail or less, hitching rides on a broken-off sponge that floated beside them. She poked them with a finger and they scuttled to defend their holey empire. Roya’s eyes smiled behind her mask. Isi looked down and out wide, into the abyss, and then turned her head to see the little girl suspended on the surface beside her, her hair and the billowing T-shirt drifting, her eyes alight with joy and wonder.

  The operator swivelled side to side in the chair, tapping his foot on the leg of the desk at the end of each sweep. The device he was piloting was a Predator, three or four years old now and no longer the duck’s nuts for military use. At his end it was serviceable enough: he had more trouble from the desk interface than he did from the device itself. He’d never actually laid eyes on it. He only ever looked out through its eyes.

  This shift he’d taken it out before dawn, from Darwin out over Fannie Bay and over the mangroves and mudflats of the Cox Peninsula; across the Timor Sea, heading absolutely dead straight west. Hours of monotony in his darkened booth.

  The length of his attention span wasn’t the issue on a shift like this: it was the singularity of the task. He wanted to interact, wanted to run multiple devices and switch between fields. Flick and tap and scan. To sit and stare—at one thing only—required him to suppress every instinct.

  The device had reached Ashmore after three hours.

  Not his business to know why. Why would you want to tell the guy operating the device what the hell you’re doing with it? He could work at 7-Eleven and have more autonomy and as for human interaction…Well, there was the girl on the desk out front—nice eyes but as bored as he was—and a slack-arse manager who was never there.

  So there he was, a speck in the sky, looping over Ashmore for twenty minutes when Kieran knocked on the door and
brought breakfast in. With one hand he opened the lid of the burger and stuffed the fries in, gluing them firmly to the cheese. With the other hand he flew a circuit of the reef, thirteen nautical miles from end to end, admiring its roseate sunrise colours. There were waves breaking on the southern side, a few tiny islands stranded on the coral like rafts of scum in a sink. He bit into the soft mass of the burger. The ribs of a wrecked trawler lay in the shallows of the atoll like the remains of an eaten fish. A larger island, a kilometre long. He tagged it for future reference: West Ashmore Island.

  The orders came through eventually: hello faceless overlords, how’s your dark tower?

  Bearing 310 degrees. 108 nautical miles at 30,000 feet. Search all anomalies/grid 80 nautical miles square at that location. DO NOT EXCEED 108NM.

  What looked like secretive hocus pocus to them was obvious to him: 108 nautical miles was 200 kilometres—he was being sent to the territorial limit. Three-ten he had to cross-check: it was a straight line to a small island. He zoomed in. Dana. Someone’s mid-voyage between Dana, whatever that is, and Ashmore. Probably the boat he’d seen the other day.

  So the operator scratched his balls and yawned and listened to his own breath under the headphones while he waited for the device to make its way to the search area, occasionally toggling to the video stream to watch the air rushing past its belly.

  He flipped rapidly through the images as they came in. Blank sea. Blank sea. Blank sea. He pulled hard at the straw in his shake and tried to keep the slurping sound in the bottom of the cup going until he ran out of suction.

  Blank sea.

  A boat.

  Lying stricken and askew—side on to the course he’d been given—on the great reflective lens of the blank sea. He looked at it a moment, zoomed in and panned round. The phone lit up.