How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (11 page)

Noroz said something in another language that Zahra must have understood.

‘True,' she said, and then something directly to Noroz who listened carefully and answered.

Their conversation was slow and I understood they were using what little of some common language they had including the occasional English word but I understood nothing of what they were saying.

‘Do you speak English?' I asked Noroz.

‘A little,' he said.

‘He says he must also send money back for his family,' explained Zahra. ‘Like me, he is the oldest. We only had money for me. My
sister is ten. When I make enough money in Australia I will go back to get her.'

‘Oh,' I said. I thought it was odd that she would make this trip with the plan already in place to do it a second time with her sister. To leave her family, to spend years away simply to save enough money to do it all again. It didn't seem like the plan of a genuine refugee. ‘What about your parents?'

‘They kill our parents. My brother is twelve when they take him. They don't kill him but they kill our parents. My sister and I hide in the house, look after ourselves. People give us food. We sell mother's jewellery, I carry water to houses of the old people and they give some food. Then the foreign workers find us, move us to camp and give us food but we run away, go back home. But it is gone. Burned. Chickens and goats gone, all gone. But the money we hide under a rock in the chicken pen is still there. We take it and go to the refugee camp where some people tell me about this trip, how they find a way to go to Australia. I ask if we can go with them to Australia, but it costs money, they say. I don't want anyone to know we have money, but they tell me it is one of the workers at the refugee camp who knows how to get a bus, then the boat, then to here. I only have enough money for me, so my sister will wait there for me. It takes all the money for the bus and the boat, but now I am here I will get good job and money for my sister.'

She spoke the whole story without emotion, as if she were describing the plot of a movie, and I wondered if someone had put her up to it.

‘Where are the people you travelled with? You know you just can't come and go from Australia like that.'

She looked at me for a moment as if to say, ‘Well, you are driving us to Melbourne, aren't you, so it's working so far?' and she was right, except that Palmenter Station was now closing down. I suppose that with enough money people can do what they want. Same the world over.

She had said she would go back to get her sister. I idly wondered if there might be a need for an exit trip soon. All these illegals who make good and then desire to leave, go back home wealthy. Full boats both ways. Or maybe, more likely, they discover Australia is not so good after all and want to leave.

‘They go with another boat,' she said eventually, in answer to the first part of my question.

She served the food. Although by her story I guessed she must only be fourteen or fifteen she showed all the signs of having been the homemaker for some time.

‘Where is home?' I asked.

‘Home is gone. Burned.' She said it as if clarifying something for the inattentive listener to a story.

As she spooned the rice and beef onto plastic plates I handed them around and looked carefully at each of them. I saw again that they were quite different, that they were obviously from different places. Up until then, despite all the groups of imports I had seen come across the dirt into the homestead, all the vans leaving full of expectant faces, they all looked the same because I never looked at them. I never, or rarely, spoke to any of them. What country were they from? Did they all leave loved ones back home? What horrors had they fled? Or were they just well-scripted players in some queue-jumping system that Palmenter had orchestrated? Up until then they were all from some unnamed war-torn country like Iran or Afghanistan, or from Africa, itself just a single starving country full of black-skinned refugees fleeing violent war lords or famine.

The food was good. I was about to say so when Noroz spoke again. Zahra translated for us.

‘He says that his father sold their last cow to get the money for this trip, to send him, and he must send money back to them.' Noroz spoke again, pausing long enough for Zahra to translate. ‘His mother cannot walk and it is too far to the refugee camp. His father walks for two days there and then two days back with whatever he can carry, whatever they can give him. He walks there and back once a week so he can feed her. They have no milk now. The rains don't come so there are no crops.'

We ate in silence. It just didn't seem right to say that the food was good, but it was. Cookie had done us proud. The beef was from our own cattle. The tomatoes and garlic and capsicums, chilli, eggplant, were from the vegetable patch under the water tower. It's easy to grow stuff in the desert, all you need is water and sunshine. I wondered if all their stories were bullshit and if they thought I was some sort of underground immigration worker
whose evidence would be used to verify their story later on or, if true, I wondered how they felt about eating big delicious meals under a star-clustered outback sky while Noroz's mother and father huddled starving under a rainless African sky.

I finished and noticed that Emma was eating slowly, picking at the food and eating only the rice.

Noroz looked at me and shook his head.

‘Emma doesn't talk much,' Zahra said to me, then said something to Emma, who looked up at me, then the others one by one.

‘I'm not supposed to eat beef.'

Sometimes it takes just some simple action like the slow eating of plain rice when hungry for you to realise that what people are telling you is the truth. She didn't have to act this out. There was no point in any of them continuing any act for my benefit.

‘Sorry,' was all I could say. Cookie had provided us ample food, steaks, stews, cold meats. All beef. Tomorrow at the roadhouse I would buy something else.

I let them sleep in the back of the van that night. I rolled my swag out but didn't sleep. I lay awake thinking of stars and destiny and what it took to change the course of things. These were the same stars Lucy and I had seen that night on the grader bonnet. Each of the stars was different in just the way each person was different, and they didn't shine or fall because of the place they were in, they carried it within them and the more you looked the more those differences showed, until, like Tariq, you saw that one of them is a chief and will always be a chief and then you began to wonder which star you were and then you know that if you were in a different place you would not shine any brighter. If I were in their place and they in mine I could not have made their journey. They were made of better stuff than I. Perhaps if we had been in each other's places they would have succeeded in escaping from Palmenter Station and Palmenter would be alive and not lying dead and buried under this selfsame field of stars.

All through the night I lay as the stars wheeled around the sky and the longer I thought about it the more everything seemed to be in the right place. Humans have no more say over the flow of destiny than they do over the arc of the stars. As bad as their life had been there was nothing I could do about it. We each have our
own journey to travel, our own destiny, and if I could help a little and offer kindness that was all it was. It was right that I was here looking after Tariq the chief, just as it was right that Palmenter was gone.

I guess it was a bit much to expect that Lucy would rush to meet me, that she would throw her arms around me and we would hug and kiss and make up. In truth, we only knew each other for a few weeks. I had recently arrived at the station, I was naive; she was on the run from something, desperate and vulnerable. And a long time had passed, three years. Three long years or three very short years. Looking back, it seemed as if those three years had dissolved into nothing and along the way I had come so far. I was now a rough and ready outback jock who knew more about some things and almost nothing about other things that I should have. I had seen and done things that people should just not do but it had all happened so gradually, incrementally, with each next step no big remove from the last. When you stand at the end of those three years and look back, you think, ‘My God, what have I become?'

Lucy too had her own three years. Of life in detention. A long slow wait while unknown, unseen people decided her future. A wait that weighed on her and those around her as they tried to forget their stories – but that, and the food, the small attempt at a garden, the English lessons, that was all there was to talk about. So there was no forgetting, no new life, and no identity other than a case number.

We are all who we are because of our history and if we forget one part of it we lose our sense of self. It was years later when I visited Sierra Leone and Guinea that I understood how we absorb our homeland and why the Aborigines say they get sick if they cannot live on their country. They say they belong to the country, not the country belongs to them. But on that day sitting with Lucy I thought that it would be necessary to lose both history and country in order
to start again and that they could be as easy to shed as dirty clothes.

She didn't rush to meet me. She didn't know how hard it had been to get permission to see her. Funny how hard it was to get into a place where all those inside wanted to do was get out.

‘Hello,' she said, suspiciously.

‘Hello.'

I was standing near the table and she was holding onto the door as if deciding whether to come in or go out of the room. For a while I thought she was about to turn away but suddenly she came in and sat at the table. That was all there was in the room, a table and two chairs arranged as if it was an interview. I sat down opposite. We didn't speak for some time.

‘How are you?' I tried to soften my voice. ‘Are you okay?'

It was a mistake to come. Unlike here, there was no time limit on visits and now I was going to have to talk and make conversation and then make some reason to leave and it was going to be awkward.

‘Did HE send you? I haven't said anything. Please leave me alone. Is this because I come up for review next week? If you do anything to stop that–' she was getting angry, demanding, but then she changed, began pleading. ‘Please, please, I didn't say anything. I promise, I not say anything. Never. Please, please,' she sobbed.

‘Whoa, slow down, Lucy, Lucy.' I remained seated. I had an overwhelming desire to rush around and hug her. But I thought she might hit me, or scream, or something. She seemed to be blaming me for something. ‘What's the matter? I won't hurt you. I promise. Never.'

She sat quietly sobbing. What had this place done to her? She was different than I remembered. She spoke differently. Was it possible she didn't remember me?

‘It's Nick. Remember? Nick.'

She nodded.

‘Yes. I remember. Did he send you?'

‘Who? Palmenter?'

She nodded again.

‘Why would he send me? I came to see you. I came myself, I wanted to see you. I didn't know what had happened to you, you left without saying goodbye, no note or letter or anything. You had gone and until, well, until now I didn't know you were here.
I thought you had ... I dunno.' Truth was until I read that file with Palmenter's handwritten note I didn't know how or why she left. Had Palmenter removed her? How? Perhaps Arif had not been the first. Perhaps those five who perished on the south perimeter track were not the first. A little fearful thought that I refused to let out niggled at me sometimes. But thinking it would have made me insane and there was some small part of me that knew that if it were the case, the best thing for me was not to know and not to think down those lines. But now I could admit to it: I had been afraid that Palmenter had shot her and buried her out at the pit and that was why it was so important to see her again. To verify that Palmenter was a bastard who deserved what he got. What I gave him.

Lucy stopped sobbing and looked at me. ‘My case is being considered next week.'

I'm not sure if she fully trusted me, but she looked at me longer and I must have been looking entirely confused because she began to talk. ‘My family is waiting for me to get them out, to bring them here. I must get out of here next week so I can do that. Palmenter said if I spoke anything about him he would hurt my family. I think he could do that.'

I looked around the room. It was bare. Plain gyprock walls, no pictures or mirrored walls or phones or fancy light fittings to hide a secret microphone. If Immigration recorded conversations and then used the information word of that would run around the camp like wildfire. But I couldn't help myself from checking.

‘Why would he say that? Why would he hurt your family?' I didn't doubt that Palmenter's net extended all the way back and that if someone did the dirty on him he could, and would, extract revenge. It was a risk to the operation that one of our imports might say something – reveal even by accident the name of the station, how it all worked, the boats, the chopper. In case of that, I was sure Palmenter would have made it known his network stretched far back into the countries these people had come from. If caught and if ever tempted to cut a deal – information about the people-smuggling operation in return for guaranteed residency – Palmenter's threats would have been remembered. I didn't think Immigration worked like that but it might not stop someone from trying it and I wouldn't trust Immigration not to string someone along.

Spanner and I had the philosophy that people would not kill the golden goose, that if we did the right thing by people they would do the right thing by us. Most people had someone back where they had fled from who they wanted to bring out later. The story told by Zahra and Noroz, and Lucy, was one we would hear time and time again. We knew that they would require our services again and that closing us down would not be in their interests. That is an important lesson in business. Look after your customers and you will get repeat business. Hell, until we were running the operation, no one had any desire for anybody to actually succeed in getting to Australia. We changed that. But something always in the back of our minds was that if caught, when desperate, people would do anything to survive.

Obviously Palmenter had been a bit more upfront about prevention, it would be his style to threaten people so they would not reveal anything when put under pressure or offered a deal. His deal was worse.

‘I ... I say I not want to do it no more.' She was crying again but she looked up and saw I didn't understand.

‘Sex. We were supposed to give sex to the people.' I must have looked stupid. ‘Even you, Nick.'

Did she say that to hurt me? I sat there open-mouthed, gutted. All we had been was nothing. She was told by Palmenter to screw me, that was why she had come out to me and found me on the grader bonnet and she fucked me. But all the other times? After? Was it all done because she was told to, because she lived in fear of Palmenter?

‘But...' The brain knows something but the voice still has to act out, come running along behind like a dimwitted cousin trying to catch up with what the brain has been hiding, what it knew all along but didn't reveal. The body is even further behind.

‘He raped us, Nick. He makes all the girls work in brothels in the cities but before that he takes us off the boats and away from any people we know and puts us at that house. Girls who are healthy. She made sure we are healthy, gives us health checks and then sees if we can work, first on the people there.' And the brain showed a little more of what it knew all along, of Lucy when Palmenter was home and how she was different than other times.

‘Palmenter?'

‘Whatever he wanted. Whenever he wanted. The more you
fought the more he wanted it. Him, then everyone else. You too. Margaret told me to go to you.'

‘You and I...'

‘I said I was not going to do it any more and he said I had to pay. He demanded more money. I said I haven't got any. He said I already owe him too much and that I would have to pay it off working in his house in Melbourne. That is where all the girls go. He sends them all there or to other houses, he and Margaret would discuss it in front of us. But I say I no want to do that, that I had paid for the trip already and could leave anytime. He was very angry. I say I go, and if he not let me, I tell about what he doing. I meant with the girls, not the boats, I never meant the boats but he got even more angry and hit me, rape me, lock me in room. Then I hear Sami screaming, screaming. I know it was her. He was hurting her so I could hear, so we could all hear. Then nothing.

‘Next day the police came and took me away, took me to here, but before they came he told me he was letting me live so I could be a lesson to others. He told me if ever I say anything my whole family dead. He said he knew everyone everywhere and the police were his friends and even if I did speak they wouldn't believe me but he'd still kill my family and then he would kill me.'

‘Palmenter is dead. I shot him,' I said.

She looked at me in disbelief. Her dark eyes held mine. ‘You don't have to say that.'

‘It's true. He's gone. You don't have to think about him anymore. He can't hurt you anymore.'

There was not much to say after that. When I left she was crying. I was too, but we were two different people and we had to cry alone in our own way. Our love wasn't real and there was nothing I could do to help her. Kindness, that was all there was. I could have offered that but I was also struggling to cope with my own world. I had shot Palmenter. I was a murderer. It was a relief to discover that Lucy was alive and yet I found myself wondering why he had not shot her and buried her in the pit, and as I thought that, I knew that it was I who should be locked up and she who should be free and, in the face of that, I ran because denial is the easiest form of freedom.
Palmenter had been supplying girls into brothels in Melbourne and everyone knew the brothels of Melbourne were the front for the big crime gangs, front door to the underworld. I wondered if he owned the brothels and if that might complicate or simplify his going missing. The deeper you live in the underworld, if you live and die in the underworld, that same underworld is not likely to come to the surface looking for you. There might be some serious shit to go down or Palmenter's disappearance might cause not a whisper. I prayed it was the latter.

I did toy with the idea of not going back. I had promised Spanner I would return in time for the final muster but if I didn't turn up what could he do? I could make myself impossible to find. I wouldn't go home, but I could drive out west, get a job on the mines. Problem was, except for a small amount of cash, I had nothing. No job, no money, no home. I had never been paid for any of my time at Palmenter. Bastard had never paid anyone. ‘Sort it out when you leave, Son. Too difficult up here to bother with weekly pay and you don't need cash while you are here. You'll save a packet, Son. I'll look after you.' Bastard.

Also, all that money was in the safe at the station and I wanted my share.

On the day I left Melbourne I drove to my parents' home. It was early and the street was quiet. The garden wasn't as lush as I remembered and the lawn was overgrown. Dad was always so proud of the garden. I had forgotten the weekly suburban ritual of rubbish day, wheeling the bins out, three bins each house – rubbish, greenwaste, recyclables – and these stood in clusters waiting for collection. Nothing had changed, but it was not as I had remembered.

I parked outside and watched the house. I knew Lucy and I had no future but inside me something was hollow. Now, after meeting with her and realising my youthful foolishness and then seeing this small crowded street where I grew up and remembering the childish way I left, the emptiness inside me grew. I saw that this was not my world. This small crowded street was empty. I began to long for the healthy space of the outback, where you can sit on a bluff and see the distance, the red-yellow earth and ivory sky and for as
far as you can see, so far, you see both everything and nothing. You are an invisible speck on a timeless landscape but somehow, you are important. Here in the city, in this street and all other streets exactly the same, there was clutter filling up the meaninglessness of lives lived trapped on a lonely planet.

I couldn't go in. If I had, I would have broken down and cried and told everything including about Palmenter and eventually that I shot him and I would have not been able to leave, and what with the rubbish truck clattering by and its arm lifting and rolling and then burying all within, it reminded me of the pit, of rolling that van in with five poor men in it, or us rolling Palmenter's car in and Spanner pushing loads of sand over it. Of Palmenter contemptuously kicking sand over Arif as he lay still warm and I regretted not for a moment that I had shot Palmenter.

I didn't go in. I sat there in the van for a while and the forlornness of the early morning street must have rubbed off on me because then I began to think of Cookie and how he had said, ‘We are all trapped on this planet.' Kind-hearted Cookie, the only one who had risked the wrath of Palmenter to visit me, bring me food. I at least had to say goodbye to him.

The funny thing is that, at that moment, with that choice, I felt the most in charge of my life that I had ever been.