The Marsh Birds (16 page)

Henry

‘Deport him to Ghana, that's what Germany and Sweden do. There are Arabs in Ghana, I believe. It's all Africa.' Mr Trenoweth of AID had no patience with these hold-ups. ‘Do what you did with that Liberian—we'll drop him in Côte D'Ivoire.'

‘He's not African.' Chris Jensen had little time for Mr Trenoweth, whom he regarded as an AID go-between, although a powerful one at the Canberra end. It was such a mess. Canberra, 3000 kilometres away, made all the decisions without knowing anything about the people in the centre. At times he wished he could fly to Canberra, march into the Minister's office and say,
They are not all the same, and what one will take with a smile, another will kill himself over
. But Mr Jensen knew that if AID ordered a deportation to Ghana, he would have to authorise it. And he didn't feel good about the Liberian. The fellow didn't even speak French.

‘Doesn't matter. Give the Ghanan officials enough money at the airport and they take him.'

‘And then?'

‘Look, he's a criminal here, a criminal there. He's scum. Better off in prison. Not our problem.'

‘You're pretty sure of all that. I'm not so happy about this here, or anywhere else.'

‘You don't get it. The world has changed. “Terrorism has changed the world.” Some people, whether we like it or not, just don't belong any more. Once they start rushing about the globe, half-cocked, forum shopping, queue jumping, going about things the underhanded way, they step off the planet. And it's a cultural thing—they're all liars. Can't help it, never got anything in their lives except by lying.'

‘Don't give me that. They might still buy that crap out there on the coast, or in Canberra, but at this end it's not so simple. Face facts. We don't want them, they don't fit, so we find ways to make people happy about getting rid of them. It's not pretty close up, and I'm the one here, not you. And this one, he's been here since well before all that.'

‘You're are getting soft, Jensen. Let him go here and you'll find sooner or later he's just another potted terrorist. I told you, it's cultural. Anyway. Leave the deportation order with him. He might do something stupid and then we can put him in prison, or simply deport without qualms. It's not refoulement if he's a crim, is it now?'

Jensen sighed. He didn't correct Trenoweth. These Canberra wankers saw everything simplistically. He had a developing riot to contain and could do without the psychological games Canberra demanded he play with the inmates. And Trenoweth had a point. It was cultural. These people. He felt sorry for them, yes, but he was aware that he didn't like them. They were, generally, so devious. They lied. They were proud and brittle. They never thanked him, even when he bent over backwards for some of them. He sat staring at his overflowing desk after Trenoweth left. There were so many people to process, and here he was wasting time on a troublemaker teenager. And if, as Canberra said, Syria wouldn't have him, there was probably something wrong in the chain. Either a crim, yes, or a sensitive case; in other words, a refugee. The Minister would have to catch up with the paperwork and have the case heard again, or some lawyer would have to sniff it out for the injustices along the line. He was too tired, and sick of the many injustices that wriggled into the perfect system. He didn't like injustice.

It was cultural. They didn't fit. They were so unlike Australians. Praying and jumping up and down about pork and fasting. It would be better for them and for Australia if they went home.

He swivelled around. On the wall behind the desk there was a smiling World Vision sponsor kid from Sudan and a photo of a shy-looking young man in subtly un-Australian clothes. Underneath each was a letter prominently displayed. He and Ann had decided that they had to sponsor a third-world child, and then they also sponsored the Muslim refugee from Bosnia into permanent settlement in Australia. It was a really good move. It reassured Rachel and Luke, set a good example. And leftie kids hassling them at school in Adelaide had been forced to shut up.

He turned back to his desk He had more staff on stress leave than he had ever had, and noises were being made that it was somehow his fault. Now he had to face the task of persuading his bosses to give him more teachers. Five hundred and seventy-nine children and three teachers was crazy.

Dhurgham dialled the number on the now grubby business card he had kept in his pocket since their meeting. He had liked feeling it now and then, as if it were a charm to ward off the evil eye. He fingered the plain blue print as the phone rang. Isakowski, Dempsey and Cranshaw, Solicitors. The line crackled and a woman answered. Dhurgham stuttered as he asked for Mr Jean-Luc, and then expelled his pent breath in relief when he heard that calm tired voice, tinny and far away. He blurted out his news.

‘Deportation? No, I'll get an injunction. Don't worry about it. I'm still waiting to get Canberra's file and match up all AID records. Call me any time you need to, Thurgam.'

Mr Jean-Luc was the only person to ever try to use his real name.

The Australian
Minister for Immigration, Ross Cowell said today that 1300 of the 1600 illegal aliens in processing centres today are not genuine refugees. ‘Most are being held for deportation or appealing against deportation orders. They are exploiting pro bono lawyers to extend their stay in Australia and blocking up the courts.'

The riot started with a seemingly small event and was, among AID guards, blamed directly on Dhurgham and Abu Rafik. After the event, though, neither was charged. Other ringleaders were identified and sent down to Adelaide in handcuffs.

Wildfires of crazy rumour sizzled and flared in the dry tinder of their boredom. Any chink for laughter or frenzy and Dhurgham would have taken it, just to feel his limbs move with speed and purpose, anything to unleash himself from the sleep that was dragging at him, anything to crack through the slow crust the desert seemed to settle on them. The guards were on edge. Dhurgham could see the spring in their step and feel their excitement. He understood without consciously articulating it: some of the guards wanted the chance to stand face to face as true enemies and to beat up their hated charges with all they had.

The air was electric with expectation, the sheds whispering with rumour. The flower-covered bus was there again, visible as a tiny, brightly coloured lozenge beyond the perimeter fence, its flowers blaring for attention across the red sand, trumpeting through the wire mesh, taking the eye out and away.

‘The UN is here! The UN is here!' Maysam sang, scampering in and out among the adults. Some of the older boys took up the chant.

‘Don't be silly—all over the world the UN drives Landcruisers, not buses covered in flowers,' Mr Hong muttered crossly next to Dhurgham.

‘They are going to break us OUT! They are going to break us OUT!' screamed Maysam in his high voice, and Dhurgham started jumping up and down, waving to the faraway bus. The children began to rip off their shirts and throw them in the air, then to throw them high onto the sharp wire.

‘Free-DOM! Free-DOM!' screamed Maysam, and that one got everyone going. It began as a low growl and rose to a roar, until everyone was screaming and shaking the fence. In the distance tiny banners unfurled, saying,
We Love You, Welcome
, and then,
Freedom for Refugees
.

The people behind the fence went wild.

The Freedom Bus was joined by the Hope Caravan on the second day, and more and more tiny colourful figures with placards gathered outside the far perimeter.

The Hope Caravan and Freedom Bus were visible day and night. At night campfires, torches and gas lamps made a faraway glittering city under a canopy of orange smoke out there in what had been the blank velvet dark of the desert. By the third day, the compound was taut with tension and grief. By midmorning the number of protesters with banners had swelled again. The children threaded their fingers in the wire of the perimeter fence and stared, dreamily. Men and women wept openly, both because there were people out there who cared about them, and because their imprisonment and hopelessness suddenly became acute, stared them in the face, revealed. Mrs Azadeh sobbed on her knees in the red dust, throwing the sand in the air and then over her hair and face, wailing, ‘We are not criminals! We are not criminals!' A protester with zoom lens filmed from the outer boundary until the AID guards approached Mrs Azadeh in riot gear, tranquillised her and dragged her away. The air was thick with grief and desperation and, for the younger kids, excitement and anticipation; so, all things considered, there probably would have been a riot no matter what.

Dhurgham was inside the recreation room with Abu Rafik. Abu Rafik forced Dhurgham to continue with his lessons, focusing on the Koran as he felt the boy slipping away. Dhurgham had as a boy learned key verses of the Koran off by heart, but not all of it, and, although he knew many of the verses and phrases that are part of daily life, in many cases he still didn't know the full Sura from which they came.

Abu Rafik demanded that he learn it, and recite it. ‘Reciting the Koran is sacred. God's command “recite” brought the word of God into being. If you can recite the Koran, your soul can be free, can reach for belonging and being in Allah, in Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, and in all who have recited it before you. In reciting the Koran, you stand outside time, outside death.'

Dhurgham loved things like this, as Abu Rafik well knew, but in the week before Easter, time seemed to demand his presence and participation, and he chafed at the constraints of his lessons, chagrined that he might miss something exciting. He wanted to stand with the others and scream out his dreams at the Hope Caravan and the Freedom Bus.

Dhurgham's continuing recitation lessons were seen by the AID guards, even the sympathetic staff, as wrong and dangerous, a continuation of the banned school and an incantation directed against them and all they stood for, which some saw as AID, but others saw as democracy, the West, and freedom. More thoughtful staff, like Mr Peter, worried that Abu Rafik could not see the trouble the incomprehensible religious chant might bring, and saw the continuation of recitation lessons as unwise.

On the third day of the Hope Caravan protest, AID guards all donned riot gear as a precaution in the rising tension, and this seemed to unleash something in both the guards and the inmates. Mr James, who was an older man, generally kindly, and should have known better, marched up to Abu Rafik and Dhurgham in the recreation room. Dhurgham was dressed in a clean white qamis, quietly reciting the Surat al Rahman from the book, with Abu Rafik listening. Mr James snatched the Koran from his hands and threw it to the floor. He was so annoyed that he didn't notice all the men rise in the recreation room around him. They might have been seated without the orderly appearance of the former school, but they were all listening to Dhurgham and Abu Rafik.

‘Stop that mumbo jumbo. Learn English, and get your head and arse out of the dark ages. It fries your brains and it's driving me crazy. Can't you see all the evil in the world is coming from this?'

Abu Rafik rose, looked Mr James in the eye angrily, then stiffly got down on his knees to retrieve the book.

James Williams was never officially reported for what followed. He kicked the holy book from the old man's fingers and brought his baton down onto the back of Abu Rafik's neck and head. The room went wild. Dhurgham leapt upon Mr James, twining his arms around the older man's neck as Abu Rafik struggled to his feet and tried to pull Dhurgham off. It was as if someone had finally put a match to a huge bonfire. Every man in the room shouted at once, then one began raising a chair up and smashing it down on computers, at windows and against the walls. Within seconds everyone was armed with chairs, keyboards, broomsticks and was kicking and battering. They turned on the building, on the things around them, rather than on James Williams or the two other guards, one of whom backed out of the room and ran. Someone somehow set fire to the drawings stacked in a corner, and then thirty guards burst in with shields and batons. The centre erupted almost simultaneously from end to end, and the idea of fire seemed to have been shared by telepathy.

Dhurgham went mad with the release the riot brought. He was ripped off Mr James' back to struggle in delight and fury against the guards, screaming abuse. In the chaos he managed to wriggle his way outside, still screaming. He forgot what happened with the Koran and Abu Rafik completely, so wonderful was the explosion all around him. He was as euphoric as if the bus and caravan had driven in, busted down the fence and flown away with them into the sky. He sprinted up and down the compound screeching with adolescent happiness at the burning buildings and the advancing troops of his enemies, his arms outstretched.

He didn't even see the water cannon until it knocked him flat.

FILE NOTE RRN230:
A ringleader in the Easter riots. Strongly influenced by POZ114, who is his self-appointed religious teacher. Confined for three days. To be monitored. No charges at this time.