I’m tasked to Brown Compound. When we return from our lunchtime mess duties, Grace is talking with Kylie, the two sharing war stories from the time they worked together as prison guards. Somehow it gets around to Rasa and the brawl from the other week. Turns out Kylie was in the control booth the night it all happened. She reviewed the surveillance footage. Not once, not twice, but three times Rasa smashed a chair over an Afghani man, before attempting to kick his head in when he was on the floor. All of it caught on camera. I’m so stunned, so incredulous, that I ask Kylie if she’s sure.
“Oh yeah. It’s clear as day.”
“I just can’t believe he’d do that,” I say.
“See, you think because he’s everyone’s friend and the officers like him that he’s not going to do anything stupid. But he’s a ticking time bomb, like all of them. You’ll learn soon enough that everyone loses it, just takes some of them longer. Even the nice ones. You wait till a prisoner calls you over then throws a handful of shit in your face. That’s a good way of learning not to trust them.”
“Did that happen?” I ask.
“Of course it happened!”
“But, I mean, here?”
“No no, that was at the prison. But it’s the same thing. Here they don’t throw shit like monkeys, they slash-up and make nooses. It’s attention. They all want the attention. They want to get in your head.”
“I just don’t get Rasa, though; he’s already got his positive. What’s he so angry about, you know?”
“They’re big babies and they want everything now. And when they don’t get it they throw a tantrum. That’s all it is. A tantrum.”
It’s got to be more than a tantrum, more than attention-seeking. Nevertheless, my confidence in Rasa — my sense of the sort of person he is, the sort of Australian he would be — is shattered. Is he intrinsically volatile? Is he prone to bursts of extreme violence when he feels threatened? Is he so mentally ill that he has turned violent? Ultimately, is he the sort of person I want in Australia?
Quincy listens to the conversation without saying anything. When Kylie leaves, Quincy and I sit on the bench out the front of the office. He tells me about some of the unsavoury detainees he’s had to deal with in his time at the centre. There was one man who was an unapologetic woman-hater, verbally aggressive and sometimes violent. The day after he received his positive decision, something snapped and he burned down a building in the compound. He’s now in a federal Australian prison. When he gets out, he’ll probably be deported. I know he must have been through some shit to end up like that, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Arsonists are not welcome in my Australia. Nor are highly violent convicts. Or chauvinists. Or religious zealots. No one who we fairly suspect has less to give than what they seek to take.
I still feel sympathy for Rasa, but when I see him walking through the compound that afternoon I wave and keep walking. I don’t judge him for what he did, because I can’t presume to understand the mind of a man whose life is an accretion of circumstances beyond my wildest comprehension. But nor do I have that intended conversation. Perhaps tomorrow, I tell myself.