The Marsh Birds (19 page)

He had left Mr Hosni's money and presents behind. He had left everything that had anything to do with Mr Hosni. It felt good.

III

D
hurgham sat across from Mr Johns, the immigration official sent to interview him. His first glimpses of New Zealand had been of an impossible green, and his heart had jumped. Mountains, red flowering trees, a glittering white-washed city. So green. Unlike Australia. Utterly unlike. But he could not afford to hope. Just to express himself clearly. The interview rooms were demountables on the wharf. They had no windows and had cream-coloured impermanent-looking walls. He was in an evanescent non-place that he recognised. This was not yet New Zealand. He was not yet there. Not yet. He stared at the dictaphone in the middle of the table.

‘Now, Mr … Samurai, tell me again what you told Ms Matehaere,' Mr Johns said, leaning forward.

Dhurgham was silent for a moment, the much-practised phrase suddenly eluding him. He blushed.

Then it came, in his most perfect English. He spoke with the rhythm of an incantation, the same he would use in Arabic for seeking refuge from Satan.

‘I seek protection under the 1951 Convention and Protoc-c-col. I am a refugee.'

Mr Johns noticed the blush. The boy was very young. Maybe eighteen at the most, although with these kids you couldn't tell. Wiry and ancient at twelve. A dark, closed, secretive face. An ugly, almost obsequious manner.

‘What is your nationality?'

‘I am from al Iraq.'

Yes
, Mr Johns thought.
Probably malnutrition, military exercises, probably a hard life
.

‘Where did you learn English?'

‘In Australia.'

Mr Johns sat up, bewildered, and eyed the boy. Dhurgham said quickly, stumbling,‘I am refugee from Australia. Australia treat me very bad. No human rights.' He paused. ‘I have fear of persecution in Iraq and in Australia. I am double refugee.'

Mr Johns laughed out loud and Dhurgham blushed again.

‘An escaped criminal from Australia, more like,' he said, still smiling. Dhurgham didn't smile or respond. Didn't protest. His skinny hand on the table began to shake.

Mr Johns made a mental note of it. What to do? The Arab had said the right things, had obviously studied the right things to say. Hell, he probably
was
a refugee from Iraq. Everyone who left, just about, would be, from the scum on the streets to the, well, merchants, thieves, belly-dancers or whatever. But Australia. You had to laugh.

‘You are the first,' he said slowly, ‘to
ever
ask to be protected from Australia!' Dhurgham in front of him smiled a strange inward smile, and Mr Johns saw for a moment the face of a very beautiful young boy shine through the shifting, hunched cunning. Dhurgham had begun to shake all over, then began to speak in a rush, raising his dark eyes for the first time to Mr Johns' face.

He leant forward over the dictaphone and said loudly, ‘Four years in p-p-p-prison with only one T-shirt. I am from a good family, with good clothes. They treat me like a criminal. They say I am liar, use filthy words. They tie me.' He held out his wrists in an eloquent gesture, the base of the palms pressed together, and Mr Johns noticed scabby scars on both wrists.

‘Tie me. Tie me!' There was no reaction that Dhurgham could see and he struggled to find more words. ‘No trial! No hope! Prison for the life! In Australia no human rights!'

The man in front of him looked blank. Not smiling anymore. Dhurgham felt like crying and then suddenly he was. Even though he could see that this made Mr Johns dislike rather than pity him, he couldn't stop. He was tired. He had escaped and in this green green land he could tell that it was going to be no different. The old feeling of self-disgust rose up in a wave and washed over him. Those who left the camps in just a few months, those were the truly good people, no blemish on them. Chosen people. Even al Haj was among the chosen people. All his bravado and false confidence washed away and he knew that he could not speak another word of English.

Mr Johns watched the thin shoulders bowed in front of him, the scruffy black hair. It could not have been an easy trip. Yachts are not comfortable, even the big ones, and staying undetected in a forward hatch under folded sails until the last day would have been extremely difficult. He was still more than a bit suspicious of the skipper. The fact that the man was a Queen's Counsel made it hard to accuse him, though. He felt dizzy. It was ludicrous really. Australia had good reasons for the imprisonment of illegal immigrants, convention claimants or otherwise. Very good reasons, what with September Eleven and all. This boy had obviously been rejected as a refugee and had lived in limbo. No western country, no signatory to the Convention, would forcibly deport someone to certain persecution, so Mr Samurai would have been a bit stuck. But as soon as Mr Johns thought this, he felt dizzy again. It was ludicrous. He found himself staring at the scabs circling the boy's extended wrists. Four years. And Mr Johns knew that Australia excluded refugees from invoking her protection obligations on technicalities a lot of the time. Safe third country clauses, seven-day rule and all that.

‘I'll refer you to have your case for refugee status considered,' he heard himself saying. He closed the interview, pressing the stop button on the dictaphone. He got up, almost throwing his chair down behind him, and left the room without looking back, his head spinning. He could see the headlines. He could suddenly see himself losing his job, Janine quiet and bitter, furious and drawn with worry. The mortgage and Carrie's education.

But for one second he had seen Dhurgham as a boy arriving by boat in Australia. Just an ordinary boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen. Maybe if they were lucky, he was a criminal and could be returned to serve his term. But Mr Johns knew that Dhurgham was right in one thing at least. He had never been tried or convicted. That was not what Australia, or New Zealand for that matter, spent tax payers' money on in handling convention claimants. Dhurgham was a boy imprisoned without trial indefinitely in Australia and would be immediately imprisoned if he were deported back there. He also knew that by escaping, Dhurgham had now broken Australian law and would probably go straight to an ordinary prison, not even a processing centre. All the words running through his head began to turn and present ugly faces. Term of his natural life. No trial. An imprisoned minor. Refugee. A boy who was swallowed and his future gone until, probably with some bravery, he escaped and fled to New Zealand. If you looked at it from the point of view that Dhurgham was a boy who knew only what he had seen and experienced, and was not a unit in a growing batch of failed convention claimants who were from a country to which they could not be returned, then it was not a comfortable sight. For a moment Mr Johns had seen black, intense eyes filled with the awful vulnerability of too much confusion and too little hope. Eyes you shouldn't see on a kid. He wished Dhurgham had stayed shifty, not looked up. Because suddenly even shifty could be explained on a boy imprisoned for years in a strange, hostile country with no reason that he could understand. Dhurgham's body had begged and grovelled, but his eyes had been too frank with something he had not said in words. Mr Johns had a headache. Mr Johns did not like his vision one bit.

He checked into his office and said he was going home early.

‘What?' Janine Johns was laughing. ‘Bloody cheek!

What did you do!'

‘I think he is a refugee, on the face of it. Probably on both counts.'

Janine put her hand over her mouth, her eyes popping out in glee at him. She was obviously imagining the political furore, the papers. The savage happiness a New Zealander can feel when she annoys the Australian nation. But even Janine's delight could not cheer him up. He had imagined all the same things with no pleasure at all.

‘You signed him in for a
hearing
? He's an escapee! Why didn't you just deport him!' Mr Harwood was very annoyed. ‘Of all the bleeding hearts!'

But Mr Johns was both more unhappy and more certain of what he had done having slept on it. He stood silent as his boss paced back and forth.

‘I don't like it one bit,' he said, finally, ‘but indefinite impris—'

‘Processing.'

‘—whatever, with no trial—'

‘He's not a citizen.'

‘He's not a criminal.'

‘Well you've fucked up good and proper. What are we going to do? If the media—' Mr Harwood's voice trailed off.

The media loved stirring Australia like an ants' nest. They also both knew that since the Tampa affair, New Zealand was in Australia's good books, and that the golden sun of the wheat and beef kingdom had been shining their way.

‘It's
Australia
, for God's sake!'

‘Probably what Turkey says about—' Mr Johns struggled to find a country adjoining Turkey. ‘Jordan.'

There was a silence.

‘I'll get Josie to do the hearing,' Mr Harwood said thoughtfully. ‘He speaks English, you said, so no interpreter necessary. Josie's tough. She'll catch him lying, and problem solved.'

‘He'll still be a refugee,' Mr Johns muttered but Mr Harwood wasn't listening. He already had the phone to his ear.

‘Josie's on leave? Since when? Bloody hell—'

Dhurgham slept his first night in New Zealand in a cell of Mount Crawford. This time he was not surprised that he was in a prison. The bed was clean, the room was warm and he was utterly exhausted. He curled up like a small, sick animal and drifted away on his own thoughts as soon as they locked the door.

It had been a long, cold day. He had had to leave behind the warm woollies he had worn on the yacht. He was floating, not imagining any next step. The drive from the demountable on the pier to the prison had been in a heated car. As his body slowly warmed he had looked out over the bay and marina with a feeling of intense loneliness. Which mast was the
Morning Star
? Had they sailed already, or were they eating and drinking, now, talking lovingly about him? A tear slipped down his cheek and he brushed it away roughly. Wellington at dusk was beautiful. Windows here and there up the mountain glittered with the reflection of the orange sea. The prison overlooked the strait from a small green mountain just a few minutes, it seemed, out of the city.

On that sea, just seven hours ago, he thought, I was free.

He was a world away from the yacht. It might have been a dream but for the rise and fall his body still played over and over like a favourite song.

Skipper Joe's first words.
Fuck me mother, what the blazing bejesus are you doing here?

Dhurgham smiled. Maybe he should have gone with them to South America.

EnZed will take care of you. Women in power, in Enzed.

Dhurgham's imaginary New Zealand had at that moment become a motherland.

What's your name?

Dhurgham, sir. Dhurgham As-Samarra'i.

Fuck me. Make it Tom. Call me Skipper or Joe. Now, what's the story?

Dhurgham stared up at kindly New Zealand's prison ceiling. He smiled.

Hey youse fuckers! Get down here! We've got a refugee. It's fucken raining boat people.

He had had a strange feeling on that boat that the whole time in Australia was a dream, and that he had never left the open ocean, never left the fishing boat. God had taken the boat of boys and made it sail on into happiness, transformed from fear to calm, from innocence to experience, from boys to old men, sailing on forever.

The
Morning Star
didn't resemble the fishing boat at all. Nor did it resemble the boat he had dreamed of in Indonesia. It was a small ketch, painted white on the hull and coach-housing. It was all polished timber and brass inside the cabin, which was set out like a tiny imaginary house. Green seats, a table with a lip to stop things from sliding off, a toy wooden parrot swinging over the table, brass-ringed navigation instruments, brass lanterns, ingeniously designed stowage and bookshelves lining the berth. It berthed four, but there was always someone on watch, so they never felt the squeeze of being five. Dhurgham used every berth in turn. The timbers were gold and deep red, lovingly done. The galley was quaint and stylish, and easy to use. It was stocked to the brim with food and drink. It even had a toilet and shower, called, for no reason Dhurgham could guess, a head. The whole dreamy little house was permanently tilted, permanently moving, giving it a strange self-sufficiency all its own.
This is normal
, it said,
you outlandish dill, you foolish stranger
. To Dhurgham it was like the insides of a sea creature, and they were cheery men swallowed forever by a whale. There was no happier way to be.

It was, he thought happily, his
Mayflower
. His
Endeavour
. He was, after all, a great traveller now, like Ibn Battuta.

Joe, Gino, Stan and Jim were grey, hairy irreverent men who made obscure jokes and whose professions were at first impossible to guess.
We're fucken professors, barristers and drug dealers. Now people smugglers
, Joe said, winking at him.
We're the elitist bleedin' hearts, at y' service
. Four joking men who sailed with delight and loved the sea. Dhurgham felt his nightmares wash away with waves. Each terrible memory of his other journey was taken individually, washed clean and handed back to him transformed and beautiful. He was fed well and too often. He was safe. The great swell lifted and dropped him without breaking the calm. The dolphins were to be merely admired. He sat on deck in the sun with them, tipsy on champagne and other alcohols they made him sip, drifting on in bliss.
Heaven
, Gino said, waving a drunken arm at the sky and sea,
all the fucken boredom you could ever want.

He began weeping once and told them all that he loved them. He asked them if they were married, had children.
Bloody oath. But this is time out from real life
. Joe, Gino and Stan were married, Joe divorced, all with grown-up children. Jim was, to Dhurgham's amazement, gay and said so exactly the same way the others said married or divorced. Jim lived with his lover, who hated the sea. Everything about their lives filled him with wonderment. He felt now and then that God had sent them as four angels in the forms of four exemplary men, examples of all he had not yet had a chance to encounter. Examples who made all ugliness into beauty. Examples of everything he might have become. Angels to help him make up for lost time.