The Ink Bridge (13 page)

‘Omed. Omed.' The Snake was bent over him. ‘We have to change boats. This is Lombok Island. This is the plan.'

Omed stood. They were moored to a dock. There were chickens, goats, bright bundles of cloth, drums of diesel, baskets of fish. There were faces, bodies in bright cotton, bicycles, clusters of happy children fishing and diving into the oily water.

‘You have to get off here,' said the Snake and shoved him towards the plank connecting them to shore.

He looked at the Snake, trying to know what was going on behind those mismatched eyes. Omed was still furry with sleep.

‘Come on, you must go to the other one.' He pointed to a small fishing boat. ‘I will follow.'

Omed blinked his eyes and tried to clear his mind. The Snake was a fat twist of deceit. How could Omed trust him? But there was no one else. He walked down the plank and crossed the jetty to the other boat.

The boat was small and made of splintered wood. There were twenty people crowded onto the tiny deck. Surely it could not sail to Australia?

The man in the wheelhouse smelled of alcohol and had a dirty rag tied to his head in the manner of a turban. He was eating a tin of fish with a bent fork. These sea-people were all the same. How casually they approached their dangerous work. Was it because they had little respect for water? Or was it simply that they knew the sea, and its many moods, so well? Omed had no choice but to trust them.

The man pointed with his fork to the open deck. Omed sat beside a mother and her two little girls. She smiled at him.

‘Are you going to Australia?' she asked in English.

He nodded, thankful again for having learned these English words. Long ago, they had been an unwelcome gift from his father and the strange travellers to Bamiyan. Now, with his father dead, the gift would only ever be for Omed's ears. Even if he landed on the shores of Australia, these words would never be tested on his tongue.

‘We have travelled from Iraq. My children have not seen their father in four years. They do not remember him. In two days we will meet him.'

Omed smiled at her. He liked the way she cradled her children to her, protecting them from everything. It was the thing that every child should know.

She turned her children's heads into her breast. ‘I am scared. My husband writes that he is in prison in Australia. He warned us of this journey also. But we did not have money for a bigger boat. There were too many people to pay. Still we must go. What else can we do? The children must know their father.' She touched her girls' hair with the tips of her fingers. ‘We have been lucky so far and
insha'Allah
we shall continue to be.'

Omed thought of all the money he had spent getting to that boat. Of all the strange palms he had greased.

‘The luckiest ones travel on that boat,' said the mother. She pointed to the boat that was pulling out to sea. The boat Omed had just left. As it turned its nose seaward, Omed noticed the Snake huddled among a group of people. They locked eyes for a moment and Omed spat into the sea. If there had been bullets Omed would have sent them to him. If there had been a knife he would have thrown it. His spit was swallowed by the ocean, pathetic in its smallness. It was all he had.

The boat sailed away and the Snake became a stain, a smudge, a spot, a pinprick and then he was gone.

They had been a long time at sea when the waves became mountains. The boat was tossed like a stick in a snow-melt river. Two people were lost overboard – a child and an old man. No one dared to try and save them. Inside, all prayed for a quick death.

The boat rose on the waves, trying to spear the clouds with its sharp nose. It fell, gulping water over the decks, washing people from side to side. Fearing they would be swept overboard, Omed tied the mother and her two children to the anchor chain with some thick rope. The sea was furious. It was endless peaks and chasms. The captain was crazy, shouting into the wind. They were in his hands.

The mother grabbed Omed's shoulder. ‘Please save my girls. If I die, please save them. Help them find their father.'

Omed promised with his eyes, but they were so full of fear and water that he was sure she didn't understand. How could he promise such a thing when his own death was so near?

People were screaming. Grown men sobbed and vomited through their hands. The wind stole prayers and whipped them into the ocean. This place knew no mercy. It howled into the faces of terrified children. It knew no shame, spitting in the mouths of grandmothers. Omed had fled the Taliban for this new hell. To die so far from his home and his family.

An old woman was dragged from the deck by a wave. Her arms stretched out above her head, her hands clawed at the air. Omed saw her hair float for a moment on the top of the water before swirling under. A young boy screamed after her, jumped from the arms of his sister into the sea. The world was insane. Omed could make no sense of it anymore. The rules had been changed. Chaos replaced order. The sky became the ocean. Language was screams. Omed rocked on his haunches, his hands over his ears. He sang into his mind, into this new broken world
.
A cradle song, a lullaby. His mother's hand reaching down for him. Her soft voice. His tears, the seawater, all the same.

The boat began to break. The captain ran from the wheelhouse and dived into the ocean. He shouted at the waves. Wood tore apart. Oil ran over the decks, whipped to brown froth on the sea.

The boat's back snapped like an old tree. Water raced into the hull. The motor choked. People scrambled to abandon the deck. The mother was tearing at the knots that tied her and her children to the anchor chain. Omed's knots.
His
knots.

He scrambled towards her. The boat ducked beneath the waves. Rose again. He crawled like a crab over bodies and broken wood. Towards the mother, the children, his carefully tied knots. The deck plunged and Omed slipped forward until he was jammed hard against the side of the boat. Suddenly he was thrown free and rolled through the sea. When he clawed to the surface, it was to angry sheets of white water. The boat was gone. The anchor was gone. The children and mother were gone. Omed was alone with a thousand peaks and valleys, grey and black and white; and the howling, stinging, tearing wind.

A piece of wood became his world. On one side, the words POTONG DI SINI, that he read over and over to quieten his mind. The strange words meant nothing to him but they meant everything. They were something human to focus on. On the other side were the intricate swirls left by worms. It was layered like a biscuit. Light then dark wood sandwiched to form a piece as thick as his thumb. If he lay flat, it almost floated, but it was more comfortable to lie with his cheek against it and his body dangling into the water. Every now and then he would drag himself up to warm a piece of his body in the sun.

There was nothing to eat or drink. It would be a slow death. Unless the big fish came. Omed had heard whispers of them on the boat. They were twice as big as a man, their teeth were daggers, their skin was steel. He prayed that the big fish would take him.

The ocean was sleeping off its rage; it was as flat as his sheet of wood. The sun shone onto the mirrored sea and stripped the skin from his neck. The only sound was a light knocking as if the ghosts of the storm wished to use his raft as a door to escape the ocean.

Omed's kitchen table was a boat filled with strangers and he was a small boy locked to one side with his legs hanging below; his knees knocked like broken tree limbs and the moon was shining through his window. But it was springtime and the sun was burrowing through cloud and it touched the tips of his fingers as he paddled them in the broad still water. He was awake and asleep. He was filled with the hollow feeling of not-knowing and a thirst that he could not quench despite all the water that surrounded him and then he dived beneath dreams and people he knew were there and there were plates of soft lamb and vegetables and jugs of cool mountain water and his father was alive. He was alive. And he sang his mother's song and watched kites drift in the turquoise sky, their tails snapped in the breeze and everything was hope. He was hope. The kites were black diamonds, the sun was a ball, the clouds were goats, herded from dawn to dusk grazing on the endless blue. Everything was blue or white and there was so much light, his eyes were burnt, his lashes were stuck to each other with salt and still he looked for hope, watched for the kites.

It was then they came. He saw their dark shapes first, twisting like coils of night within the sea. He plunged his hand into the water. As she rose, Omed could see her mouth, lips turned in a smile, skin turned grey. Her hair ran behind her in a wake. Her children tugged at her toes and clung to her breast as she rose to the surface. Her lips pushed above the water and Omed heard a gasp as she took the first taste of air.

Come down with us
, she said reaching towards him with her thin fingers.
It is time to rest. Your journey is over, Omed.

I am sorry,
he called to her, but her ears, small, curled like two shrimps, were filled with brine.
I am sorry!
he shouted, touching his hand to his heart.

Her children rose so their eyes were pressed to the skin of the ocean. They had grown webs between their fingers and toes.

Come,
said the mother again, straining up with her hand to rest it on his arm. But as Omed recoiled from her touch he could see sorrow flood like a shadow into her eyes.

She said,
It is a long and difficult path you have chosen.
But remember us. Wherever there is water we will be there.

With that, she spiralled down into the depths, towing her two children behind her.

Don't go,
Omed cried. Rolling from the wood, he felt the water's cold shock. And he dropped to where it was black and there was no light and he felt the hunger and thirst falling away and the mother and her children smiled, sea lice gathering in the corners of their eyes. And he remembered long ago when he had fallen into the cold waters of Band-e Zulfiqar. And it seemed right that his journey would end this way.

And then he was rising, his body pulled above the ocean and he could see his world, his square of wood, lying flat and small on the endless blanket of ocean and he reached out his hand, but it was too far away.

And someone said in English, ‘What's your name?'

They were surrounded by the sun. They smelled of soap and salt.

‘What's your name?'

Behind them were stars and blue sky and red lines, white triangles. And faces he remembered from the boat – the captain, an old lady with weepy eyes, a small boy. But the Iraqi mother and her two children were not there. And he had tied the knots.

‘What's your name?'

I am sorry,
he whispered, but they could not hear him.