Refuge

by Jackie French

  The man who was his father met Faris’s eyes. ‘I am a doctor. Even here, where I drive taxis, I am still a doctor. I was one that day too. I kneeled to help him. Another man called to me to bring him inside. And then another yelled to run, run, the soldiers were coming.

  ‘I left him. Even though I am a doctor, I left my patient. I ran to the hospital. But there was blood on my jacket. I took it off, put on my white coat. But others had seen it. I saw it on their faces. I knew one, at least, would call the police.

  ‘I did my rounds. I went home. I told Jadda.’ He shrugged. ‘You know the rest. Jadda sent you out. We waited for the police to come. Jadda didn’t tell you of this?’

  Faris shook his head. ‘She said I should know nothing, so I could say I knew nothing, if I was asked. So it was all a mistake?’

  His father looked at him steadily. ‘I should have been at that demonstration. I should have had the courage to say: “These things must change.” But if I had known more, I might have told the police when they beat me, might have led them as they hoped to other rebels when they let me out. So perhaps it is best that I did not protest that day, or any other. But I am sorry. So sorry to have brought you to this.’

  Did he mean to this small poor room? Or to Jadda’s death, the years of fear?

  Faris said nothing. The man who was his father waited for him to speak. ‘It’s all right,’ he said at last.

  ‘I … I am glad to see you. You have grown so tall. Your English is so good too.’ The man tried a smile. ‘You will have no trouble at school, I think.’

  Faris thought of the wave, of the battle with his friends to keep the doorway open, of Jadda dying as she breathed the word ‘love’. No, school would be no trouble, after that.

  Nothing here matters, he thought.

  Yet it was real. And it was all he had.

  CHAPTER 29

  Gibber’s Creek, Australia, three years later

  His school shirt was too tight. Faris stared at himself in the mirror. In his first two years in Australia he had hardly grown at all. Now he was sixteen it seemed as if his body had finally accepted he was safe and could spare the energy to grow.

  It had been a good year. The only year in his life so far that he could say, ‘This has been good.’

  He tried to forget his first year in Australia. It was easy to forget. Every few weeks there had been change, too much for his shocked mind to take in. It had been easier to slip through life, letting it happen around him, not to think or feel.

  The bare flat, the empty nights, with his father either working or studying, no Jadda in the kitchen laughing, no smell of cake, no Australian buffet breakfast, just cereal from a cardboard packet, sweet and tasteless stuff that his father had grown used to eating … or perhaps it was all that they could afford.

  The greatest emptiness had been with the man who was his father. Neither had mentioned Jadda, not then, nor in the three years since. Neither spoke of the past at all, just of what had to be done now — buying bread, taking the garbage out. Just sometimes they talked about the future, when his father might be allowed to be a doctor again, what subjects Faris might take at school. It was as though a sheet of glass separated them. They could see each other, but never really talk.

  A school of tired teachers, where it seemed almost every other student was like him — bewildered — and too many who could not speak English. No friends. Too few school computers and even those often didn’t work.

  Loneliness that bit deeper than a shark.

  Faris walked to school and to the supermarket. He studied and he watched TV. Thanks to Jadda, he already knew most of what they studied in his year at school.

  This was Australia. Not the Australia that he had dreamed of, the Australia he had longed for when he walked through the door. This was not the Australia of the golden beach and laughing games.

  But it was real. And like Susannah said, real things can change.

  His father passed the medical exams. He was a doctor again. But he was still a stranger, still tired. Another move, away from the smelly flat, to a town even further from the sea.

  It was a good house. Not a beautiful one, but Faris had his own bedroom. Sheep stood like rocks up on the hill: grey sheep, not like the cloud-like white ones in Billy’s fields. These paddocks were brown, not green. Faris still had yet to see a kangaroo, except on TV.

  A doctor in a country town, it seemed, worked as much of the day and night as a taxi driver in the city. The phone might ring at five am and his father still be absent when Faris poured cereal for breakfast. But this kitchen smelled of food, not cockroaches, because of Mrs Purdon, who came for two hours each afternoon, who cleaned and made stews, which were not the ones he’d known. She made cakes too — not Jadda’s cake but ones with fruit or jam and cream.

  Doctors made more money than taxi drivers. A new laptop for his birthday. Ten-dollar notes slipped into Faris’s hand so he could buy chocolates after school, and remember David, and the way Susannah carefully nibbled the filling from her chocolate on the beach.

  School was different here: older, colder buildings, but students laughed here. To his surprise Faris found that he was doing well.

  There were only four boys in his advanced maths class: Joel, who flushed whenever a girl came near; Alex from Belarus, who collected facts and recycled jokes from the previous night’s TV shows, which was annoying; Walter, whose family owned most of the grey sheep and who knew everything about aviation, from how far a helicopter could fly to how to land a Harrier jet on a computer simulation, and who liked to order them around, though he just grinned when anyone objected. Faris thought Billy would have got on well with Walter. Or maybe not. Maybe they were too alike.

  There was a place outside the library where the four of them sat at lunchtime, to talk about computers and new games, to eat their lunch then go into the library to see if they could land a Harrier jet too. When at mid-year they started to hang their lunchboxes on the tree outside the library — too high for anyone else to see — Faris realised that somehow they were friends.

  Not friends that you could tell everything to. Walter and Joel could never understand the terror in the night, living so you never turned round when you heard a stranger’s tears, how you readied yourself to always drop at the sound of gunfire.

  Perhaps Alex knew. But neither he nor Faris spoke of what they had come from, only what the next weeks or years might bring.

  Even Alex, he thought, would not understand a refuge that wasn’t really there. Faris knew he was already different enough from the other students without being thought crazy.

  He looked at the young man in the too-short school uniform in the mirror.

  Was he crazy?

  Back in the smelly flat, when Faris woke one night screaming after a nightmare about a wave, his father had explained ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, told him how your body got used to being scared and imagined other terrors to explain the chemicals inside you that kept the terror there.

  Had the fear chemicals of his body created the illusion that he had once known a small golden beach? Had he imagined the friendships there as well?

  If only he could talk to them now, or even text or email them. Would he ever find friendship with that depth again?

  Even now, after three years, he longed for his friends so deeply that he could shut his eyes and almost feel that they were there. Billy, shouting with laughter; Juhi, running bare-legged up the beach; Susannah, watching and caring for them all.

  Did that mean he had imagined them?

  He had tried, many times, to find some clue that they might have actually existed, to discover what had happened to them. He’d Googled their names, hunted for telephone numbers. But there were thousands of Higgses, and Murphys too. He didn’t even know the others’ surnames, nor had he been able to find any mention of a girl from Sri Lanka called Nafeesa. Only Susannah knew all the names, knew where each was from — if she had even been real herself.

  Perhaps
Nafeesa was far in the future. Perhaps she and the others were made from his mind’s chemicals and would never be there to find.

  Faris looked at the boy in the mirror wearing the school uniform. Today he would eat cereal for breakfast, go to school and laugh at lunchtime with his friends.

  This was real life. And it was good. Not wonderful. But good.

  Mrs Purdon was polishing the bookcases when he came back from school. Mrs Purdon loved polishing. She cleaned the floors like it was a duty, did the washing too, but any spare minute during the two hours a day that Faris’s father paid her for was spent polishing. There wasn’t much wood in the house, but what there was gleamed.

  ‘Good day at school?’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t tell her that he had topped the class in chemistry. Mrs Purdon’s niece was in his class. Faris suspected Mrs Purdon resented, just a bit, this stranger coming to her town and doing better than her family.

  ‘That’s good. Letter for you on the table,’ said Mrs Purdon, as she turned her back, still carefully polishing, obviously intensely curious.

  ‘For me?’ He had never received a letter before. Official letters were sent to his father, not to him. No one from his past life before the refugee camp would dare to write to him, in case it put them in danger too.

  He picked up the letter, looked at the name on the envelope and frowned. The Sisters of St Joseph. He opened it.

  Mrs Purdon looked at him, polishing cloth in her hand. ‘Who’s it from?’

  ‘A woman who says she’s my sister Margaret-Mary.’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t have a sister.’

  Mrs Purdon took the letter. She read the single paragraph quickly. ‘She’s a nun, love. Nuns are called “Sister”. You wouldn’t have them, would you, not where you come from? The St Joey’s Sisters used to run a school here, years ago.’

  She smiled at the memory. ‘That’s the school I went to, and my mum and dad too. The state school wasn’t here then, just this little two-roomed place. Sister Therese and Sister Mary-Catherine, dressed in these long black habits with white wimples about their faces.’ Faris had seen nuns like that in movies. He nodded as she continued. ‘Handy with the cane sometimes, but we got the best education in Australia from those nuns, I reckon.’

  And so you clean my father’s house now, thought Faris.

  Mrs Purdon looked at him sharply, almost as though he had said the words. ‘I reckon half the government was taught by the St Joey’s nuns. They took kids who’d never had a chance, got them scholarships to university.’ She looked down at the letter. ‘This Sister Margaret-Mary wants you to go see her in Sydney. Have you met her somewhere?’

  ‘I’ve never met a nun.’ The faces from his first year in Australia had blurred together, but he was sure none had been dressed in black robes with white wimples.

  Mrs Purdon smiled at him. ‘You mightn’t know you had. They wear clothes like anyone else now, with just a cross around their necks, or a special pin or ring. They do a lot of work with refugees. She probably wants to know how you’re getting on.’

  It was possible. He thought of the many women he had met, women across desks, the women who had appeared with a big pot of soup and pastries the day after he had arrived at his father’s tiny flat, the school uniform they’d brought him too — second-hand, which made him cringe, but better than no uniform at all. There were many women he had forgotten, because his mind had been too full.

  He supposed that she was one of those.

  ‘Well, will you go?’

  He had no wish to meet again any of those whose lives he had passed through in his first year in Australia. His mind had carefully kept the world a blur, because if he looked too close the loss of Jadda, his friends and the beach would be too hard to bear.

  But he would like an excuse to go back to Sydney. Not the Sydney of the smelly flat, but to try to find the Sydney he had seen on the internet so many years before, the harbour and a thousand small white sails, tourists smiling from the stairs of the Opera House, holding dripping ice-creams in their hands.

  Maybe he and Joel and the others could take the train up together, and stay at a hotel.

  ‘I might,’ he said.

  ‘Can I go, Dad?’ The word ‘Dad’ had once felt strange. But it had seemed right to give this new father a new name, the name that an Australian boy would call his father.

  His father looked at the letter again. ‘If you like. I could take a weekend off. A holiday.’ He said it in the tone of a man who hadn’t taken such a thing for ten years, had perhaps forgotten exactly what it was, but knew that it existed.

  Faris stared. It had never occurred to him that his father would have the time to go to Sydney, would even want to. Being with his father would mean awkward silences, instead of laughter with his friends. But he couldn’t bring himself to say, ‘I don’t want you to come.’

  ‘It would be good to meet those who speak my own tongue again,’ said his father.

  Faris looked at his father in surprise. Faris even thought in English these days. It hadn’t occurred to him that his father might miss the language he had grown up with, want to see people from his own land. His father hesitated. ‘We could go to the zoo.’

  ‘I’d rather go to the Apple Store,’ said Faris. He had read about it: all glass and gadgets. You could see anything online, of course, but there it would be real.

  ‘The Apple Store then. And perhaps a concert.’ His father looked at Faris almost warily as he added, ‘I have always wanted to hear a concert in the Opera House.’

  Would the music at a real concert have the magic of David’s playing? For a moment his mind slipped back to the magic world of beach and laughter.

  ‘It will be fun,’ his father said, bringing Faris to the present. The word ‘fun’ was said tentatively, as though it was as odd to him as ‘holiday’.

  OK, thought Faris. Apple Store. Opera House. Worth a trip to Sydney even if it came with his father’s company and a meeting with a strange woman whose life had once touched his, so she thought she knew him. ‘Can we go to Bondi Beach too?’

  ‘Of course! We can swim in the baths …’

  ‘No,’ said Faris quickly. He had managed to swim in the school pool. Just. The school pool smelled of chlorine, not of salt and fear. His body still rebelled at the thought of touching the sea. ‘I’d just like to see an Australian beach.’

  Small waves and blue sky, he thought, and hot sand on my feet.

  CHAPTER 30

  Sydney, Australia

  The rain gusted across the beach. Out on the grey waves two surfboarders in black wetsuits twisted and balanced, like human performing seals.

  It should have been depressing — grey sky again, grey sea. Instead Faris felt strangely content. Real life, he thought. Tomorrow the sky might be blue again. The grey was temporary, no longer a stain across his life.

  ‘Lunch?’ suggested his father. He wore a new shirt with his grey work trousers.

  Faris nodded.

  The restaurant perched above the beach. They sat cautiously, facing each other. Faris wondered if the waiter and the other customers could tell that he had never sat at a table with a thick napkin and heavy cutlery like this. He glanced at his father and realised he was also uncertain. But there was a hint of defiance too, as though this man wished to declare that once he had eaten often in expensive places like this, and now he would again.

  His father picked up the menu. ‘Flathead tails in beer batter with tartare sauce, matchstick potatoes?’

  ‘Stuck-up chish and fips,’ said Faris automatically. It was what he’d have said to Joel and the others. He looked up to find his father grinning.

  He couldn’t remember his father grinning before.

  The bread rolls were good. Faris had forgotten how bread could taste, after the sliced packaged stuff he had eaten for three years in Australia. The fish was wonderful, the chips nothing like the frozen ones Mrs Purdon heated.

  The waiter placed a salad bowl on the table.
Faris bit into lettuce sharp with onions and the sweet crunch of pomegranate seeds.

  Jadda had made salad like this. Suddenly he couldn’t swallow. He put his knife and fork down politely, pressed his lips together so he wouldn’t cry, and stared resolutely out the window.

  ‘Faris?’ He felt his father’s hand light on his arm. ‘I’ll pay the bill.’

  A minute later his father was back. ‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’

  They sat on a bench, facing the cloud-swept sea. The tears slid down, cold on his face. Faris hoped no one would notice.

  He had yet to speak Jadda’s name to this man, his father and Jadda’s son. In three years nothing important had passed between them. Their life was only now, not then.

  The silence stretched. The waves danced grey lace across the sand.

  ‘It’s my fault.’ The words from the man beside him seemed cracked, as though they had to break to get out of him. ‘Everything that has happened to you, to Jadda. All my fault.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. It has been.’

  And it was. Of course it was. If his father had acted differently, they might all be as they had been, with no thought of ever coming to Australia. Without the years of fear, the journey and the shipwreck, Jadda might not have had a stroke, or had a smaller one that she could have survived.

  The wind gusted from the sea. It smelled of sunscreen and frying chips. It smelled of memory and the sea. The sheet of glass between him and his father shattered.

  Suddenly he heard Susannah’s voice. We can only do what we think is right.

  ‘Do you think you did what was right? Stopping to help that man?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word came with no hesitation. ‘The only thing I did wrong was not staying with him, trying to get the police to take him to hospital, even if they took him to prison later. I am a doctor. A doctor’s duty is to help. Even when I was a taxi driver, I was a doctor.’

  Faris shrugged. ‘Well then.’

  ‘You mean that you forgive me?’

  Faris watched the waves. No, he thought, I don’t forgive you. You did a doctor’s duty to a bleeding rebel. You failed in a father’s duty to your son, a son’s duty to his mother.