I’m slumped against a table in the Red Compound mess hall, conscious of every second ticking by.
Ali strolls over.
“Hiii, Nick.”
“Hi, Ali.”
Ali is wearing his favourite blue shirt. It looks a lot like the shirt I’m wearing as part of my uniform. We often joke that all he needs is a decent pair of shoes and out the gates he goes. Ali looks me over, smiles and shakes his head.
“You have tension, huh? Why you have tension, Nick?”
“Oh, just … I dunno. I’m just tired.”
“If you get tension, oh, wow, think about what it must be like for clients,” says Ali.
Ali is always smiling beneath his moustache, though often there is an ironic bite to his observations, a sardonic acceptance of the madness that is detention.
“I spoke to my case manager today,” he tells me. “I said to her, ‘Do you know what I do when I get angry?’ She said, ‘Cut yourself.’ ‘No, no.’ I told her that when I get angry, I just laugh. I just laugh.”
And, with that, Ali strolls away, laughter trailing behind.
Ali is strong. He’s been here almost six months and has maintained his level. But he’ll crack. Everyone does, eventually. It happens at the precise moment that life no longer makes sense as an arc of experiences and events, when all one can think about is the illimitable misery of here, now. That’s what is so clever about detention. It comes with all the trappings of hospitality — medical assistance, TV, an allowance, food and cordial, ping pong, English lessons — and for all this hospitality we seek no money in return. We seek nothing at all, in fact, except that they wait like good boys while we do our humanitarian thing. Yet still the clients complain and protest and cut themselves and then we get to say, see, they’re just ingrates. Fundamentally bad people.
It’s sort of brilliant.