I decide to walk with Inisiya back to the flats where she lives. I’m feeling all brave and big and bold, because giving a circus class is so much better than giving some old things that now I don’t need to so feel useless in the face of all that she’s been through. Maybe Inisiya feels it too, because suddenly, without me even trying, we’re talking about her life in Afghanistan. It started because I asked her about her parents.
‘You know, in Afghanistan my father work in the post office and my mother is a teacher before the Taliban. When the Taliban come to rule, they lose their jobs and my dad has to go out on the streets and sell sugar. Mum could not work at all.’ She leans forward and kicks an ice-cream stick on the ground, then she twists round to face me, her eyes dark and large.
‘They take my cousin and they torture him. After many weeks they leave him on our doorstep. He is almost dead. That is when my uncle tells us we must leave Afghanistan or we also will be killed.’
I close my eyes and I’m shaking my head as if a very sharp rock had just entered it. Something inside me shrinks in the face of it – of torture and danger and death – as if it’s too distant, too disturbing for me to understand, but I am looking back at Inisiya in a huge and wild way because I’m shrinking and stretching all at once. I want to be big. I want to say the right thing. I want to make a difference even though I know I can’t.
‘I can’t imagine how terrible that must have been. Were you scared?’
‘Of course.’ She jerks her chin up, and to me she looks proud and brave. ‘I am really scared. We sell everything to pay a smuggler to get us out, and then we have to travel for a very long time, always moving at night and then locked in hotels in the day. Sometimes we do not even know what country we are in. It is exhausting, you know, always always moving. Never going outside in the day. My mum, she is crying a lot.’ She paused and then shuddered. ‘The worst is when we are on an island somewhere, and we could not sleep at all because of these bugs that bite us all the night. I cannot tell you how bad it is to be sore and itchy all over.’
I take a big breath in. ‘How long did you travel like that?’
‘Four months. Then we are in Indonesia and there is a small boat to take many families like ours to Australia. The boat has two engines. Half way there, the main engine stops and the captain of the boat says we will have to turn back because the boat cannot make it to Australia with only one small engine. But all the families on board say that since we will be sent back to Afghanistan if we return to Indonesia, we will all die or be killed anyway, so we take our chances to make it to Australia. The captain has to go on with one engine, moving for two hours then stopping to give the small engine a rest. That is when we have to throw all our belongings in the sea. But still the small engine also dies and then we are left in the middle of the ocean, thinking that now for sure we die. You know, people start to pray. It is awful.’
‘Did you think you would die?’
‘Yes, we all did. But maybe the prayers are answered because then there is a helicopter and you should see how happy we are. We wave and stand up and shout and the helicopter has sent an Australian naval ship, which takes us aboard. It is so great. They have a big crate of green apples. We are so hungry, we are all so excited, we crowd round the apples, eating, crying…And then I have my first shower for many months. There was even shampoo and soap.’
When she described this, she was so alive and intense that it seemed the relief was still inside her. It made me feel it too and I suddenly wanted to cry.
‘What happened then? Where did the ship take you?’ I said, trying to steady myself.
‘Oh, after that, they put us in Baxter detention centre. We are there for a year and then we are released into Adelaide. No one helps us there, and we do not know anybody. So we move here. Mr Abutula picks us up from the bus station and we stay with him until we are allowed to move into the Housing Commission flats in Collingwood. You know he is a good man, Mr Abutula. He is always helping new refugees from Afghanistan who arrive in Melbourne.’
‘But where was your dad?’ I say. ‘When you arrived I only saw you and your brother and mother. Did he stay longer in Perth?’
She looks down and shakes her head.‘No.’ Then she looks at me and all the excitement has vanished from her face. It’s as if a window that was once open and bright has suddenly slammed shut. ‘He is killed by the Taliban before we left.’
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ I feel it hit me in the chest. It makes me close my eyes. ‘My father died too,’ I say, ‘in a car accident.’
She looks at me and her eyes are sad and wide, and for a minute we both stop walking.
‘I am sorry for you too,’ she says.
My heart starts to wobble and then there are tears in my eyes, which I blink away. I can’t tell if I’m sad for her or for me, but I feel as if the sore part inside me has opened up because I can join Inisiya there and she can join me, and even if it’s only in a small way I feel we have leant our hearts together; made a sheltering place in which we can both be together for a minute.
In fact, looking back, I guess that moment was like the first firm stone laid in a house that friends build to shelter their friendship, because somehow it seemed there was a reason that we had met, and we could, after all, share something that was huge and hard and real.