The Infernal Optimist (13 page)

Farshid ran to the fence. Reza jumped up from where he was sitting and raced over as well. ‘We want freedom! We want freedom!’ they shouted, pumping them fists in the air. All the kids started chanting and lotsa the other detainees joined in, even the ones what wasn’t asylums. Azad stood like he was frozen.

Hamid jumped up but Angel clamped her little hand round his wrist and it was like he be chained to the spot. Sue placed one hand on Angel’s shoulder and another on the arm a the Burmese chick.

It took less than a second for the blues to sprint into the may-lee, what be Chinese for Big Fucken Mess, pardon me French. They was shouting ‘Cert One! Cert One!’, their code for emergencies. They was coming at the detainees from this side a the fence and at the protestors from the other. Them white trucks what they patrol the perimeter in sped over too. And then sirens told us New South Wales’s finest was on their
way. Thomas wrapped his hands round his head in that way what told us he was getting one a him migraines.

April stood up, looking dead nervous cuz she didn’t know the life like we do, what is to say she’d never been in trouble or the nick or nuffin. Her hand hovered over Thomas’s shoulder like a helicopter what didn’t know if it could land, and her eyes darted from him to Azad, what still hadn’t moved. It was like she didn’t know who to worry about more. Me, I was worrying about meself. If I didn’t get meself up off the ground I’d be trampolined by all the people what was rushing around like chooks what have them heads off.

The officer in charge a Shit House intelligence, what it didn’t have much of in factuality, ran around recording everything with a video camera. Clarence was charging past April over to where Farshid and Reza was still shouting when April grabbed his sleeve. He turned around like he was gonna deck her. ‘Back off, basket weaver!’ he barked like the dog he be.

She looked real shocked then. ‘Thomas needs a doctor,’ she goes, her voice shaking.

‘So do I,’ answered the muvvafucker. ‘Must be sick in the head to wanna work here. Find one, let me know. Now let go of me sleeve before I make ya.’ Then the bastard ran over to muscle Farshid and Reza away from the fence.

The Centre Manager came on the PA announcing that Visits was exterminated. He ordered visitors to make their way to the gate and all detainees back into the compound.

Someone shouted for people to set fire to the bins. They said if you burn plastic or rubber, the smoke protects you from tear gas, what they used on asylums in Woomera a few
months earlier. I’d wondered why them demonstrators on the TV news was always burning tyres and shit. So that was it. I was getting an education in international affairs and politics what I never had. In the end, no one lit any fires, and there wasn’t no tear gas, just shitloads a guards and a handful a coppers what didn’t even have riot gear on.

The kids was crying. Abeer’s mum, Najah, came running to get Abeer and her brother Bashir, but Abeer stuck her heels into the mud and pushed out her bottom lip and her mum had to drag her away. ‘Noor!’ She was yelling for her friend the whole time. ‘Noor!’ She ripped off her moustache and threw it on the ground.

Nassrin was inside the compound but the blues wasn’t letting anyone into the Yard what wasn’t in it already. So Nassrin just kept screaming for her boys from behind the fence, what got everyone even more worked up.

Then this long-haired hippy chick what was in the protest stepped forward. As she handcuffed herself to the outside fence, she called out, ‘We love you!’

At this point, two things happened. Azad looked at her like he be completely memorised, like the sun just came up and she be it, and cried, ‘We love you too!’. And April, what was looking all pale and not just cuz she be standing next to Thomas, shouted, ‘Marley! What are you doing here?’

‘I came down for the protest. What are
you
doing here?’ goes the hippy chick. ‘I didn’t think this would be your sort of scene, Mum.’

‘Mum’? Man, if it weren’t against me religion, that be one mother-daughter team I’d like to have a match with.

‘Besides,’ said Marley, ‘don’t you vote Liberal?’

April turned all the colours a the Mardi Gras. ‘Marley!’

Some a the other visitors stared at April like she’d just laid a cable.

A student with dreadlocks what visited Farshid and Reza saw Clarence coming. He yelled ‘Pigs!’, and went to push him, what wasn’t a good idea cuz it only took a second before Clarence got a fist around them hair-sticks. He gave them a yank what made the boy yelp, what is a yell with a P what makes it shorter.

‘Go sit on a branch, tree-hugger,’ Clarence advised the boy.

An Iranian man what been in Detention for four years and what had lost it like Bilal began screaming, ‘You shit fuck officer! Shit fuck rules! Shit fuck place!’ Clarence let go a the boy and moved in on the Iranian. That’s when I noticed Noor pushed up against the inner fence with a little blonde Aussie girl what was visiting her. They both had them shoulders hunched up like they could hide them heads that way. ‘Mummy!’ screamed the little blonde girl. Her mum ran over and snatched her away. Azad ran over to scoop up Noor and then ran with her towards the gate to the compound.

As a whole flank a blues moved through the Yard, herding the visitors towards the gate, the coppers argued with some other officers over whether or not to cut the fence where April’s daughter had handcuffed herself. The blues told the coppers to work on Marley’s handcuffs and leave the fence alone. Apparently when they was on Commonwealth land—what Villawood was—the coppers hadda listen to the blues, unless they was feds, what they wasn’t.

After Azad handed Noor to Anna, he came running back again, even though Anna was shouting at him to go inside, that it was a lockdown. He’d just hooked his hands on the inside fence opposite Marley, what was still cuffed to the outside one, when Clarence came up and clapped him on the back of his head.

‘That’s enough, Romeo. Juliet’s got a date with the police. Get inside. Now.’

Azad gave him a look what said he got a lot more passion than what he usually show. That was the last thing I knew, cuz Farshid kicked the soccer ball at Clarence, the muvvafucker ducked and I was sconed. Out like a light.

‘C’mon Togan. Lockdown. That means you. Quit mucking around. Togan.
Togan
.’

Anna’s voice was the first thing I heard. It came fluttering in on baby angel wings through a thick, dark mist. There was something big and hard and dirty and wet on me face. It was the ground. I picked me aching head up, opened me eyes and spat out some mud. I had an urge to laugh. Then I saw Thomas stumbling by, led by the nurse, his head in his hands, and outside the fence was all them cops.

‘I didn’t do nuffin, mate,’ I said. At least I didn’t think I did. I was trying to remember. ‘What’s going on?’ I had a wicked headache. I scrabbled round in the mud for me sunnies.

‘You really don’t know?’ Anna crossed her arms over her chest.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said. ‘You’re blocking the view, mate. Lemme look at me two best friends.’

‘I was gonna ask if you’re all right,’ she goes, trying to oppress a smile, ‘but that comment tells me that nothing’s wrong with you.’

‘In factuality,’ I said, thinking about it, ‘me head hurts.’ I tried to stand up but I was Dizzy Gillespie. I fell back down on me knees.

‘What’s going on, Togan? And don’t tell me you’re proposing.’

Clarence suddenly poked his ugly mug into the frame. ‘Moron got beaned by a soccer ball just as all the fun began.’

Fun? One fun thing happens in three months a detention and I missed it?

Later that evening, I got Anna to nuke some macaroni and cheese in the office microwave for me. I stood in the doorway while she filled me in on what I missed while I was eating dirt.

She told me they was keeping Thomas under observation in Medical. Abeer had stopped talking. And in all the confusion, Noor went missing. No one had noticed with all them other things going on. Then one of the Chinamen found her cuddled up in the dryer what is lucky, cuz he was about to chuck his sheets in. Whacking Co didn’t want that getting out to the media. Some a them advocates—what is people what do things for the asylums and what the government calls do-gooders, even though they don’t think they be doing good—was already making a big fuss about Noor being a small girl what was alone in Detention. In factuality, Nadia been saying that all along too, but now they was thinking a listening to her and moving Noor’s
mum to Villawood quicker. I said this was good news cuz Noor was getting old eyes like she wasn’t a kid no more.

‘Where’s Farshid and Reza?’ I asked, cuz I heard they was in the Management Unit for to punish them. She told me they’d been released but Clarence was giving them the what-for. He said they was troublemakers. He said they was wrong to encourage the protesters. They told him they done nuffin wrong, that Australia was a democracy, so they didn’t see why they couldn’t speak up for them rights. ‘They said they weren’t criminals,’ Anna goes.

‘Tsk. Criminals got rights, too,’ I said. I stirred me pasta and took a mouthful. Suddenly I remembered what I’d learned that day about me court decision and me shithead lawyer. It hit me like a punch in the guts. I put me spoon down. ‘I got a month to appeal or they’ll start deportation proceedings.’

‘You’d better get onto it then.’

‘Spose.’

I forced the rest a the pasta down and patted me belly. ‘It’s good trackydaks have them expansible waists, eh?’

‘Eh,’ said Anna.

‘I was planning on getting fit again when I got released, go to the gym, pump up,’ I informed her.

‘That’d be good,’ she goes. ‘But you can exercise in here, you know.’

‘Here? In the doorway a the office?’

She laughed. ‘No, Dumbo,’ she goes, like she knew that be me nickname when I was little on a count a me ears. ‘In the compound.’

‘Nah, mate. No point.’

She shook her head, like she didn’t get it. But ask any detainee and they’ll tell you the same thing. Azad and Hamid played soccer, and Thomas and me, we had a game a billiards from time to time, and sometimes everyone kicked a ball around, but that was about it. They had volleyball and badminton what no one used, and ping pong what the Chinese was always monopolating. But it was like the razor wire sucked the energy right outta you. It made your arms and legs heavy like they was cased in concrete.

Sometimes I thought the younger guys had it worst cuz it was sposed to be the best time a their lives. But the older men what had families Inside had it tough too. Abeer’s dad, Mohammed, was so depressed on a count a not being able to look after his family or do nuffin to help them situation that he spent most a the time lying on his bed. The mums like Najah and Nassrin, they got depressed cuz they couldn’t even cook for them kids, what was always upset. At least Najah and Nassrin got a sewing machine in the Women’s Centre what they could sew clothes on with cloth what the visitors brung them.

‘See,’ I explained, ‘all the plans we make, to get fit, study, whatever—they’re for Out.’

Anna shrugged. ‘No time like the present. You know,’ she told me, ‘my mum was a refugee. From Czechoslovakia.’

‘No sh—kidding,’ I go. ‘You looks Australian to me, mate.’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I was born here, and my dad’s a fifthgeneration Australian. Was. He died last year.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too. He wasn’t that old either. He worked pretty hard his whole life.’

I thought about how even the blues got them problems and them lives, what we normally only thought about insofar as they was a part of our own.

‘Sometimes,’ Anna went on, ‘I look at some of the regular visitors and, quite frankly, I hate them.’

‘No way.’

‘Maybe that’s too strong. It’s more like I resent them. They’ve got enough money and time to swan around here like they own the place, making snide remarks about officers like we’re too stupid to know what they’re saying, and making things difficult for us. They’re always telling us how to do our job—like they know better. And they yell at us about the kids not going to school and about asylum seekers being locked up for years and other things that aren’t our fault. It’s Immigration that makes those decisions. You know, I wanted to study and travel and have a good life too, but when Dad got sick I had to get a job so I could look after him and Mum. Someone told me there were lots of jobs in security, so I got my certificate and, well, here I am. But they’re not better than me.’ Her mouth went all tight and unhappy-looking.

‘No one’s better than you, Anna,’ I said, winking. ‘You’re the best.’

‘You’re incorrigible.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

She shook her head and gave me a half-smile. She looked cheered up some. I have that effect on the ladies. I spooned up the last a the cheese sauce and put me bowl down by me feet. I lit up a ciggie. ‘So your mum was an asylum? Like Azad and them?’

‘No, no, no,’ she said like I’d seriously dissed her mum. ‘She came here
legally
, as a refugee, after the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968.’

‘They put her in Detention?’

‘That’s the funny thing. She’d always told me she’d been taken to a place called the Westbridge Migrant Centre but I hadn’t put two and two together, you know what I mean?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That be an expression what mean four.’

Anna looked at me. ‘What I didn’t realise is that Villawood’s just the new name for Westbridge. You know the old Nissen huts between here and Stage One—you can just see them through the fence of the Visiting Yard. They haven’t been used for years. That’s where my own mum lived for a month or so.’

‘Far out. So your mum was behind the razor wire.’

‘No,’ she goes, drawing out the O like I said something insulting about her mum again. Anna looked down at her desk and straightened a stack a Detainee Request Forms. ‘She was actually shocked when I told her what it was like now. She said in her day it was an open hostel. People could come and go. There were classes on Australian history and customs as well as English, and when the refugees got job interviews the government organised a car to pick them up and take them there. They got a dollar a day spending money. She was here in summer and some days they’d get up before dawn and walk or hitch all the way to Bondi, have a swim, buy a Paddle Pop and make their way back by nightfall. That’s how she met my dad, when he gave her a lift. They fell in love at first sight.’

‘That’s romantic.’ I was thinking that She Who Loves a Good Romance would like that story. She was always reading romances. And whenever we went to the video shop, we joked that the day Hollywood makes a romantic comedy with kung fu, war and dinosaurs in, we wouldn’t have to argue no more about what we was gonna see. I decided that the next time we was choosing a video, I’d surprise her and choose a romantic comedy meself—so long as we could also get one with guns in for later. Then it occurred to me I didn’t know when I was ever gonna get to the video shop with She Who again. I put the thought into one of April’s little boxes and pushed it off two cliffs.

Just then me phone vibrated in me pocket. Anna’s cool, but no way could I let her know I got a mobile. She’d have to take it off a me. ‘Anyway, nice talking to you. I better let you get back to it.’ With me hand in me pocket, I clicked the button to answer. I’d be in me room in no time.