The Marsh Birds (8 page)

The
Hibiscus
stank of fish and fuel of some kind. Its upper deck was spattered with grey stains—fish blood and grease. The lower deck was clearly new. It was filthy but the timber was a light, faint gold.

Dhurgham assumed that there would be men who would take charge, who would see to the supplies and the boat in general. Men had loaded them all on. By the time land was almost out of sight and lunchtime hunger had set in, he realised that there were no men on board the
Hibiscus
. The boat was full of older boys from Afghanistan, boys from Iraq, small boys, scared boys. What was it, that their boat had only boys? There were maybe fifteen children younger than Dhurgham; the rest, all boys, mostly older. Hundreds of boys. His unease increased. He scanned the beardless faces and the tiny moustaches, stared into the eager, unsure eyes, some Arab, some Asiatic, but all the same. Even the helmsman couldn't have been more than eighteen and had an uncertain look and a habit of waving 360 degrees when asked their direction.

The three Indonesians wore futas, making them look older, old-fashioned, or maybe just different from the boys, but Dhurgham eyed them surreptitiously—they looked no more than eighteen or nineteen as well. Older than him but not confident. It was surreal, frightening. What had happened to the world while he was in Syria? Who would send sons away like this? What had happened that it was safer to set precious boys adrift rather than keep them home?

Supplies were, given their numbers, minimal. They had fifteen plastic tubs of water, a cooking oven, some unpleasant-smelling oil, two bags of oranges, several filthy pans and a large sack of rice. No one seemed to be in charge. One of the Indonesian boys lit the burner and began cooking rice. Then they took turns cooking in shifts, without thinking, as rice had to be cooking almost all the time to feed them.

On the third day, with no land in sight, they stopped cooking. There was no more rice. The oranges were long gone. The water was more than half gone and the boys each separately thought about rationing, but none felt himself to be able to put it into action.

One of the bigger boys began rationing water too late, guarding it fiercely with a big stick. They all dropped back into their boyhoods, nursing their hunger and thirst but relieved.

The helmsman put a young Afghan boy at the wheel and went to sleep curled up on the deck.

The journey, gentle and all erasing, seemed too dreamy to be real. Dhurgham could feel the strength of the ocean each time it lifted the boat, then its boredom as it dropped it. He stared down into the sliding sea and could see only a starburst of waterlight, following, maybe even made by, his eye. It was constant;there with its vanishing centre whenever he looked. He couldn't see the bottom. Looking into the sea made him feel blind. He couldn't see a thing that had a meaning. He could hear someone weeping through the wooden slats of the cabin near his right shoulder, and he could hear sandals slapping and sneakers shuffling on the grey wooden deck as older boys and small boys passed back and forth, stepping over him as they made their way to the bow.

A cry rose up from the front and, looking down, he saw it too, speeding across the fluttering lines of light and giving the water dimension again. A dolphin. A giant fish. As it broke the water he wondered idly what it would be like to live in water. To breathe it. To break the surface and crash through it again, home. Then he wondered what dolphin tasted like just as a hundred other boys had the same thought and began to throw things at it in desperate excitement. Then it was gone.

Juicy white flesh, huge amounts of it, breaking away from the bone in handfuls, slabs, sweet and flaky. A burning fire and solid ground, and a feast of fish, scented lightly with coriander, lemon and chilli, garlic-glazed, gripped in the hand with strips of soft, layered fenugreek-sprinkled flatbread. Fish!

He huddled around his stomach longing for rice and stared again into the water. Those radiant lines were not reaching out from a point but leading to it in the far far deeps.

The weather held. The sea stayed blue and mountainous, the sky whisked with high cloud. The sea was infinitely variable and infinitely boring. Dhurgham sat long hours in a kind of slow-motion shock. Could this be what Mr Hosni intended and what Mr Leon planned? Could this be the orderly world of adults, finally revealed to be something else: uncertain, frightening, life-sapping, life-threatening? Could they really be as vulnerable as they seemed? What would his father think about this final journey that his son was making? If his mother, if Nura could see him now, they would scream in terror—why? Why? He could not find his centre, find his peace, find any rock on which to ground himself and calm the electric jolt that coursed through him. He gripped white-knuckled to the flaking gunwale.

His unease slowly quieted as he watched the water. He let go and put his hands flat to the scored whorls of the warm grey timber on which he sat. He shivered in the heat and felt his mind and heart go numb. He huddled in a self-protective bubble; not thinking, not feeling.

Most of the boys were ill and so weak they could not make it to the side to dry retch. The smell and the heat below deck were intolerable. Some of the older boys fought over leadership. Some played games of strength and skill. Most made small, weak bundles and fell silent. It was all too dreamy for Dhurgham to do more than look on. He became vaguely aware that the engine was no longer going just as there was an uproar over it. Nothing touched him. He watched three bigger boys drop a dead Afghan boy over the side but was as blank as the sea, feeling nothing more than the flickering of light in his eyes.

He had a lot of time. Slowly, as his panic settled, he began to think. His mind worked slowly and increasingly methodically through his memories. There could be no doubt that there was something wrong with him. There were such impenetrable fog banks not so far back. He could follow himself as a small, luminous figure, a feeling, seeing centre, rich in days and nights and countless memories, right up to the brink of fog, and then … nothing. Fear and horror. A van. Marsh birds. He could barely remember the safe house as it had been before it was destroyed, but he could almost see it, at the very edge of that fog. And way back before the fog, he still had something of his childhood with him. Nura. Ahmad. His father. Mother. Colours and vague experiences. A whole world that he would retrieve if he could but travel back through that fog and dispel it. It seemed so simple.

He stared at the waves. Each was different. Each was identical. He watched the light play through and over them. It was as though an altogether different light played from within the waves, and sunlight itself was the lesser, more fickle light. The deep blue far under each wave had something to say. The waves lifted and curled and folded, over and over; each simple and each so detailed, intricate in its lines and shadows, in its form and sliding myriad colours, that it would take him his lifetime to paint them. This blue slide here, amazingly fringed in liquid pink, repeated here, here, here! This green line, again and again. This silver; this gold.

The waves, for all their motion, resembled the mosaic.

He flooded with grief and grace at the same moment. He alone, in all the world, was the living point at which such a truth could be made manifest, for he was the only creature ever to absorb both into his being.

The sea now stilled to a silken shimmer. The boat slid along the ocean on an unseen current. To Dhurgham it seemed as if it were hovering, rocking on slow wing beats, carrying him as if by accident and yet by such design! The lift of the boat, the buoyancy that held him in the air, seemed charged with its glory and purpose. How funny that he had wanted it to have pennants and insignias when of course it had to be this plain, this battered, this invisible to others!

The boys had slowly retreated from one another and entered their own private dreams. Some had rigged up small shade cloths; others just slipped to the deck, backs to the gunwale, and stayed there.

Dhurgham's father's voice flowed suddenly from the boy slumped next to him, ringing and clear.

‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful: when the sun ceases to shine; when the stars fall down and the mountains are blown away—'

Dhurgham began to weep. His huge happiness bubbled up and he joined his cracked whisper to that beautiful voice.

‘—when camels big with young are left untended, and the wild beast are brought together; when the seas are set alight and men's souls are reunited; when the infant girl buried alive is asked for what crime she was slain; when the records of men's deeds are laid open, and heaven is stripped bare—'

The whispers crackled and sighed and warmed up until the whole upper deck was quietly murmuring.

‘—when Hell burns fiercely and Paradise is brought near: then each soul shall know what it has done.'

His father's voice faded and vanished into the blue. Nura stepped lightly over the supine boys towards him.

‘Don't mind Dad. He sees Judgement Day in everything. We are going to the West and he thinks it's the end of the world!'

Dhurgham laughed. Dad did, he really did. It was so funny!

Nura dropped down next to him.

‘When the embargo ends, let's travel the world—'

‘And the Two Seas—'

‘We'll go to America—'

‘And see bears—'

‘And Russia, France and Australia. Let's go to uni in a different country every year, and wear different clothes in each place. Chic clothes.'

‘We'll go on roller-coasters.'

‘We'll have two freezers that can't break down.'

‘We'll have a garden that never withers because it will have a spring, and it'll be full of birds of every colour!'

‘Watered by running streams; eternal are its fruits and eternal are its shades—'

The boys around him listened closely, murmuring sibilantly with the slap of the water against wood. Now their murmur swelled:

‘—there shall be two other gardens of darkest green. Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?

‘A gushing fountain shall flow in each. Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?

‘Each planted with fruit trees, the palm and the pomegranate. Which of your Lord's blessings would you deny?'

A boy staggered onto the deck and said in Arabic, then in Dari, ‘We are sinking.' A few boys clambered to their feet. Dhurgham felt a faint breath of annoyance at them for moving, then nothing again. He sought out the verse again and rode it onward to its conclusion.

He felt utterly still.

The great grey Australian ship neared. Dhurgham felt for a moment that his peace was broken. Then he felt relief and, slowly, slowly, in drips and drops, elation. The boys around him broke cracked lips open and waved, it seemed to him, far too fast. The ship's inflatable dingy bumped against the
Hibiscus
, jolting its rhythm, breaking its endless hovering, its eternal motion.

He stood, slowly, his back bent, supporting himself with one hand against the gunwale. ‘Itnashr yawm!' someone croaked, weeping. Yes, if he thought about it, he knew they had been at sea twelve days. But he had lived a whole life in his head and there really was not much need for more.

The beautiful navy officers, their faces shocked, tried to hug him and to carry him, but once he had stood up his body hurt too much to be touched.

The bus slowed into a small village just after dawn and turned off the highway. A fortified camp was visible in the distance almost straight away, but before it there was a very high metallic barrier across the road. This was soon clear as a set of gleaming double gates standing in the middle of nowhere, topped with coils of prison-like wire. No fence stretched to either side. These fortified open wings, standing there alone, marked an invisible border, a gateway to nothingness.
A-I-D
the sign said. And underneath:
Australian Immigration Department
. Then, in big block letters:
WELCOME TO MAWIRRIGUN ALIENS PROCESSING CENTRE
. Along the bottom of the sign was a cryptic imperative in a nicer, slanting font:
Advance Australia Fair
. Dhurgham saw that rolls of jagged wire lay at periodic intervals on the ground to either side, marking out a new perimeter fence line. Steel pylons lay in heaps, gleaming against the red earth, waiting to be erected. It was a half-built place and had something clandestine, makeshift, about the mix of unbuilt gleaming wire and the high inner fence. Work crews moved languidly in the middle distance. A golden-haired workman, bare torso copper in the early sun, stood by the sentinel gates and stared up at Dhurgham as the bus passed him. His deep-set blue eyes were inquiring, uncertain. His stare was so intense that Dhurgham felt something was demanded of him personally. He raised his hand. The beautiful young man involuntarily lifted his own, then dropped it to his side and frowned. They passed through a second perimeter fence, this one thoroughly solid, topped with barbed wire, and entered the dusty compound.