The Marsh Birds (17 page)

The week after the riots and fires, a pall hung over the centre, smelling of smoke and ash and failure. The dongas were in silent lock-down and the solitary confinement cells in Paradise were full. Dhurgham was released from confinement to his donga almost immediately once lock-down ended, but he couldn't go and see Abu Rafik, who stayed two weeks in confinement as a ringleader. A few men were sent away to prison in Alice Springs to await trial as the ringleaders proper, even though two of them hadn't done more than shout. For some reason Abu Rafik wasn't chosen. The day he was released, Dhurgham, hearing the news from Mr Peter, made his way immediately to Ammu's donga.

He knocked but there was no answer. However, there were the tiny noises that a thin house makes with someone in it, so Dhurgham pushed in.

Ammu was hanging from the fan, dangling between the bunks, slowly turning, face away. Dhurgham felt his heart die and for a moment couldn't move. Ammu's hands and legs moved in pain and the fan slowly turned him face to face with Dhurgham. His eyes stood out in his bruised-looking skull, and his lips moved as his fingers flicked outward urgently. Dhurgham saw the cold soundless lip-mouthed words fall like stones to the floor even as he found his own limbs again and surged forward as if in a dream to grab Ammu's legs, brace himself against the bunk beds and lift. When he laid Ammu on the bed he could not look at him.

Get out. Get out. Leave me. You…are…not…my son.

Later, Dhurgham sank onto his bunk, watching his own fan go round and round. His body ached and buzzed. His neck and shoulders were so tight he couldn't turn his head properly. Ammu's face turned again and again towards him, cracked white lips moving. He felt as though he had been slashed open. He could barely breathe. Then suddenly his memory cleared for a split second and he saw his father, kneeling in the starlight beside the black hump of a backpack, praying. His uncle stood, body restless, murmuring to his huddled family. Nura and his mother were embracing the women, the children, kissing them, and his uncle was moving away in the darkness. They had all already kissed him. He could still smell their perfumes and face cream pressed into his skin. Their backs were to him, then they were gone. His father rose, shouldered the pack and stared upwards. Dhurgham latched onto that face, those shining eyes, the black moustache, the glint of white teeth. This was it. He would see it all, and know. His heart raced. He would finally see the blood, the terrible wounds, the writhing, the cracked lips, the last words that his memory had shut away from him. He would finally know if it was capture or murder, and what his mother and father and sister gave him in their last glances. He tried to still his heart in case it dislodged this, shook it loose and he lost it again in the depths. His father turned and spoke, softly.‘My darling, my life, this is it. Princess, come to me.'And for once Nura let herself be hugged, so Dhurgham rushed up to them both, his father and sister, and wrapped his arms around their ribs. He could smell them both, smell Nura's hair and his father's sweat. He could hear his mother wheezing behind them.

‘Freedom and safety, then,' his father said.

‘Shhhh,' his mother gasped, breathing noisily.

They all held hands and stepped out into the low marshlands. His hand was in Nura's on one side and his father's on the other. Then he lost them utterly as if they stepped out into the ocean and sank out of sight.

Abu Rafik's attempt to kill himself shattered some spell. Something in Dhurgham was to that point still so sunny that he didn't often question his own importance, especially to those who cared for him. Without ever making the thought conscious, he had felt that he gave Abu Rafik as much life as he got from him, and this was true. But Dhurgham had seen this as a young child would. And Abu Rafik's words shamed him. Of course he was not Ammu's son! Did Ammu think he was a baby? Did Ammu try to kill himself to get away from Dhurgham?

Dhurgham writhed. He
had
assumed that he was the centre of Abu Rafik's universe, and the thought that Abu Rafik could desire freedom more was very terrible to him. It was far worse than Marwa.

Dhurgham slipped into a depression that began with pique but from there unravelled him.

Dhurgham stopped attending any classes. Ammu was gone, sent to a psychiatric hospital in Adelaide, and Dhurgham's heart flooded with desolation and abandonment. Why was he alone? It was not a question that could be answered with the loss of his parents, the suicide attempt of Ammu, the utter absence of Nura, the parting with Mr Hosni, with all the real or imagined reasons for these. It could not be answered by his memory abandoning him. Why was he alone? His fellow inmates were not. They yearned for family who longed in return for a word, or sight of them. They had family, children to scream at, to cuff, and then weep with. They had cousins, brothers, husbands, living in Australian cities, waiting every day for their release. He had had Ammu, but when he asked a guard if he could phone Ammu in hospital, the guard said, ‘Fuck off, poofta.'

Dhurgham was alone. The crust stiffened over him, stilling his heart, and he found that he could not drag himself out of his bunk to queue for breakfast, and didn't care if he missed the queue for lunch. The centre was changing rapidly, but he found he was unable to take any pleasure in the novelty of Nintendo and Foxtel, newly painted murals, fake lawn or anything else. He had Mr Jean-Luc's card in his things. He had the memory of a sweet smile, and the invitation to call the phone number any time if he was worried, but he couldn't bring himself to ask a guard for phone time, even though there were now far more phones and no longer the restrictions and discomforts of being ‘accompanied' during the call. Mr Peter came to drag him to school, with gentle words and cajolements, with promises that he could have more time in the art room, that he could stay when the little children had their class, just to do something to keep his mind alive. Dhurgham came quietly, a few times, more out of love and respect for Mr Peter than anything else, and he did find himself distracted, even happy at school, but the next morning he found again that he couldn't move. Mr Peter bought him a sketch pad and some pencils to use in his room, something that was sternly forbidden, and Dhurgham sometimes drew, trying not to remember the beautiful pictures he had drawn for Mr Hosni, or the paintings Mr Hosni had done, saying Dhurgham was the inspiration.

He began cartoons and, slowly, these took over.

Chris Jensen told Peter that Dhurgham was eighteen or older and not to bother with school if he didn't turn up. Only kids under twelve were really supposed to get lessons.

Mr Peter forced him to see a doctor and he was prescribed tablets for depression and tablets to make him sleep. He said out loud to himself later, on his bunk: ‘Give me freedom, or torment me, but don't torment me and then give medicine to treat the symptoms.' Ammu had said that. Those very words. If only he had remembered and said them to the doctor!

‘Tom.'

Dhurgham looked up from his bed. He was alone in the donga and, in the glaring light of the open door, he couldn't make out who was there, only that it was a guard. He sat up. Officer Anders stepped in awkwardly, glanced behind him and shut the door, taking his hat off. Dhurgham stiffened.

‘RRN 230, to you, sir,' he said quietly.

Officer Anders sat down on one of the bunks, looking at his dusty shoes. Then he looked up. ‘I'm sorry, Tom, about what happened with—' He looked down. He had nice ears, red now, Dhurgham thought. But nice. Shapely around his young, close-cropped head. With his blond dome bowed low, he looked as though he might be praying.

Officer Anders looked up again, and met Dhurgham's gaze.‘I am leaving today. I feel bad, because —Look, mate, I'm sorry for calling you a refusee.'

Dhurgham held his gaze, feeling out this changed relationship, almost savouring it for the long-ago person he could have been in it, not sure quite what to say. The walls ticked in the heat around them. He smiled without warmth at Officer Anders' blushing young face.

‘Fuck you,' he said.

Chris Jensen was tired, but he couldn't sleep. Rachel's words played over and over in his mind.

‘Dad, you would know him better than me—he was in your processing centre for two years.'

He wished he hadn't asked her what Aziz was like. He had been thrown.

Rachel had rushed in from school. ‘Dad, you know those boys from the news, Aziz Abdul Something and Mohammad Basri? They're going to our school! Aziz is in my class!'

He had said then that he didn't know the boy— there were so many. He knew that Rachel knew that he lied.

He had felt a wave of strange fear. It was too close to home. What if the boy knew that Rachel was his daughter?
Of course
the boy knew that Rachel was his daughter—everyone in the school knew that Rachel was his daughter. He had had a hard job, a terrible job, running the centre, and it wasn't personal. But you never knew what they said to each other—and what if one of them took it personally?

He did remember Aziz. He remembered himself saying to a defiant dark face, in a moment of stress and anger, ‘I'm personally going to make sure you NEVER get a visa.'

He couldn't remember what Aziz had done to provoke it.

Then, suddenly, as he sat on the toilet at 1 am, the memory flooded him with the smell of shit.

Aziz had smeared the solitary room with his own excrement. He had written Arabic words all over the walls in a stinking rage. The prisoners Chris called in to clean it up had clucked their tongues in disapproval, but smirked quietly to themselves, and Chris had just lost it.

What if, in the end, they all got out? Dhurgham Samurai, Aziz's best friend? Mahmoud al Haqqi?

In the dead of night Chris Jensen finally thought it—he had only done his job, and he had done it well, but he didn't want most of these long-term desperadoes out and around his family. It was a revenge culture after all. Even the quiet, meek ones, the ones who had been good, the ones he'd helped. You could never really know what they were thinking. Their meekness was no more than a strategy. At 2 am he was regretting helping any of them.

Then he thought of Irshad. He had adored that bright, warm-hearted little boy, with his archaic, little-old-man manners. So had Ann. So had the guards. They had all done everything they could for Irshad. Ann even helped get the Minister to intervene and release him.

He couldn't sleep.

The question rang on and on into the predawn: did it all really depend on whether you were loved, lovable?

Chris Jensen left suddenly. He was replaced by Donald Riordan. Overnight new policies regulated everything, from the order in the queue for lunch to the interactions between all staff and inmates. All inmates suddenly stopped receiving their usual volume of mail and phone calls.

Some of the older men complained and Mr Donald himself came to give them a lecture in the prayer donga.

‘You were probably much like us once, but centuries of Islam have cultivated the worst in you.

You have all the human traits we have, and vice versa. But where your first inclination would be violence, ours would be forbearance; where yours would be revenge, ours forgiveness. Do you see what I am getting at? You are primitives. You don't value your kids enough. You kill women when you feel dishonoured by them. And you people have no proper control of sexuality, and are driven to imprison women because of it. All your crime and terrorism comes from that. Like little kids. It's a mess. You see what I mean? We are both basically the same, you and I. But your culture has fucked you up.'

Angry murmurs spread through the men and women in front of him.

It was a grim time in the centre, even though the centre itself had never looked better. The population was down. The letters and flowers and presents from the Australians somewhere beyond the horizon no longer came, except for those who had established friendships across the vast stretch of desert, and even these dried to a trickle. All certainties withered. Guards who had been friendly became unapproachable. Staff who had been gentle became brittle, exhausted and disappeared with the same suddenness and at almost the same rate as the inmates. The long-term inhabitants seemed unable to go near anything sharp without slashing themselves, or near anything chemical without drinking it. It was in the air, in the culture of the centre. If you could, you did. It was a relief. Someone discovered that you could cut yourself in the corner capping of the jaunty new dongas, and soon everyone was doing it and the dongas had to be redesigned. Some of them had begged, by now, to be deported to face their chances in Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan, and the general despair increased when even these men and women stayed.