The engine revs, working hard, giving the occasional cough. Jamilah’s body leans up against yours; she is conscious, but so weak and feverish now that you hold her tightly to stop her slipping into the ocean.
‘I wonder if Aunty Rahama was scared when she crossed the ocean too,’ she whispers to you.
‘She probably was,’ you acknowledge. ‘But being brave doesn’t mean you never get scared. Brave is when you know you’re afraid but you do it anyway.’ You draw Jamilah close. ‘She’ll be so proud of us when we finally see her again,’ you say.
Jamilah falls asleep, but you stay awake so you can keep holding her safely, the thought of Rahama burning in your mind like a candle of hope through the night.
DAWN ARRIVES, AND the waves die down. The sea looks almost beautiful, pink and golden, but you know it’s still as hostile as a desert. The boat’s little engine chugs on.
The passengers begin to organise themselves. The people smugglers have packed cakes of dry noodles and plastic drums full of water to last you the journey, and the boat has a small camping stove that the fishermen usually cook their dinner on. An agreement is reached that one of the men, a muscly young guy from Afghanistan called Ali, will cook all of today’s noodles in one big batch and share them out.
Ali crams the noodles into a large pot, reaches for the plastic water drum and sloshes a large amount of water over the noodles.
A sharp, toxic smell fills the air. Some other passengers shout, ‘Whoa whoa whoa!’ and jump to stop him. But it’s too late – Ali has just tipped petrol, not water, all over the noodles.
A wild shouting-match starts up. Ali waves his arm at the drums, defending himself, and you can see that the water drums and petrol drums do look just the same.
An older Afghani man slaps Ali’s face, and his wife grabs his arm to calm him down, but many of the other passengers just stare out to sea, eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun and water.
The problem is now not only hunger, because you have petrol in your noodles, but also fuel, because you have noodles in your petrol.
Some of the passengers begin diligently draining as much of the petrol back into the drum as they can, carefully using a rag to filter out the swimming noodle strands. The fishermen mutter angrily and exchange worried calculations, clearly considering whether you’ll still have enough petrol for the journey. But if they do reach a conclusion, they don’t share it with you.
The sun is relentless. People take turns drinking from the black plastic cap from the water drum, careful not to spill a drop. The fishermen produce a single blue tarpaulin and string it up between the wheel-house roof and one of the sides, to act as a shade-cloth. People take turns to cram under the shade-cloth and into the stifling but shaded hole below deck. Children and the elderly are given special consideration.
The day slowly passes, the gnawing hole of hunger in your stomach dulling off to a background moan, as you’ve found hunger does if you ignore it long enough. The waves slap the hull and the engine putters on.
Night falls, and you endure another long night by dreaming of life in Australia. Another scorching day, another night, and then a third day go by, yet there’s still no sign of land.
There was enough water in the large plastic drums on board for all the passengers to share sips for three days, but now the last drum is getting low and light. You wonder if this means not enough water was packed, or that you have become lost.
People have fallen, for the most part, into an anxious, haggard silence. There is nothing left to do but wait, and pray.
Darkness falls once again, the wind picks up, and you manage to sleep for a while under the tarp with Jamilah.
When you wake up, the boat is … you search your mind for the English word you heard on the plane to Malaysia … experiencing turbulence. The waves are so steep that your bum rises right off the deck and seems to hang in mid-air before plummeting downwards again.
Jamilah is so weak that you have to hold her as the boat smacks the surface, to cushion her from flopping forwards and smacking her face on the deck. People are starting to moan; many are vomiting again. Spray hits your face. The fishermen are looking tense, both gripping the steering wheel.
People start pouring out from below deck – water has started forcing its way through the cracks in the hull. A human chain is formed to bail the water out with a bucket. The wind rises to a howl. The human chain can hardly keep up, using only their single bucket.
You hear a groaning, wrenching sound, which can only be the boat’s timbers starting to tear apart and nails squealing away from wood in pointed rows. You clamber to your feet. The deck’s surface is slick with brine. Nausea builds in your throat from terror and seasickness.
You are holding Jamilah up, both of you trying to stand upright as the boat bucks your bodies around. You are so drenched by the waves that it takes you a while to notice that the deck is now ankle-deep in water. The boat is going down.
The fishermen have given up trying to steer and are now shouting at their passengers in Indonesian, but no one can understand them. Then they use their radio to send an SOS distress call. Some people are praying loudly – you recognise the word ‘Allah’, shouted to the stars. You pray that you’re close
