⏱️ How Fast Can You Read? Coast to Coast, p.16ff

‘What are we going to do?’ Kate asked on the way home that evening, and the ‘we’ in her question made me love her that little bit more.

I shrugged my shoulders. Whatever we did, it would be wrong.

‘He can't stay illegal forever, but to go to the cops now …’ Kate said. She looked up at the evening sky. ‘It doesn't feel right.’

I agreed. The thought of Bashir being sent to a detention centre made me feel ill. He hadn't come all this way to be locked up.

‘We should teach him English,’ Kate suggested as we crossed the bridge to Rapid Creek. ‘Make sure he can face the difficulties of daily life in Australia.’

‘We could get into trouble,’ I told her.

‘It's too late for that.’

We didn't have a plan. The only thing we did have was time. As long as Bashir was with us, we could give him the best start to his new life in Australia. We didn't want to lose that chance.

Over the next few days, we started to get organized. We brought pots and pans to the beach hut, bottles of drinking water. We gave Bashir a bowl to wash his dishes, towels to dry them. We made holes in the wall of the hut so that Bashir could look out before leaving. It didn't matter if people saw him on the beach or in the woods, but we didn't want anybody seeing him going to and from the hut.

Kate and I became experts in secret operations. I took Bashir's clothes home regularly and washed them. Kate encouraged her dad to tidy his wardrobe and get rid of all his old clothes. We gave Bashir a CD player and headphones and some batteries for it. Kate had a lot of audiobooks like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’. Bashir listened to them around the clock. Kate borrowed a textbook on English grammar from the local library and photocopied the whole thing. Bashir did exercises during the day, and after school we went to the hut to check his work.

We told him everything he needed to know about Australia: about the cities and the land, about our history and current affairs. It was a crash course in becoming Australian, and Kate and I were the best possible teachers. It made us realize how much we loved our home. I even took my laptop and showed Bashir some rugby matches. I explained Australian Rules football to him. I didn't need to explain cricket. Bashir had already learned the rules of the game in Pakistan.

At the same time Kate and I contacted a couple of organizations we thought could help: the Refugee Council of Australia and another organization to help children who had come without their parents. We wrote them emails under a false name. We thought it was better to be on the safe side. If they knew who we were, they could find Bashir. If they didn't, he was safe.

The answers that came all said the same: ‘Being illegal in Australia is not a long-term solution. We recommend that you go to your local authorities and find out what support they can offer.’ What else could they say? No one was going to encourage us to help an illegal immigrant.

For some reason Kate and I still didn't do what they suggested. We thought that we could help Bashir better than anyone else, even if he had to live in a hut for a while. At least he had his own place and two friends who cared for him. He kept the hut clean and tidy. He cooked and studied and went fishing every day. He soaked up everything we told him. It wasn't the best of lives, but there were worse.

Life could have gone on like that forever if something hadn't happened a short time later. I was at the hut on a Friday afternoon, helping Bashir with some English grammar, when suddenly the door opened and my dad was standing there. I don't know if he was squinting because it was dark inside or because he was surprised to see me, but it took him a while to speak.

‘Coop?’

‘Dad?’

Dad hadn't been to the hut for at least a year. His private life had stopped when his campaign to become Lord Mayor of Darwin started.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, looking at Bashir.

‘Oh yeah …,’ I said. Bashir and I exchanged a look. I could see the fear in his eyes. ‘This is a mate of mine.’

Dad came into the hut, squinting at Bashir.

‘Why is he wearing your clothes?’

I didn't have a good answer to that. Bashir was wearing my old Australian cricket shirt, the one with my name on it, so it didn't make much sense to deny it.

‘What are you guys doing here?’ Dad asked, his eyes scanning the books in front of us.

‘We've got tests soon,’ I explained.

‘You didn't tell me you still came down here.’

‘Nor did you.’

Usually that would have been enough to start an argument, but instead Dad chose to ignore it. He looked at Bashir, trying to decide who he was.

‘What's your name?’

Bashir looked at me nervously. I gave him a nod.

‘My name is Bashir,’ he said. Even his accent was starting to sound Australian.

‘Bashir?’ Dad repeated as if trying to solve a riddle. ‘Do you go to school with Cooper?’

Again Bashir looked at me like a drowning swimmer. There was no way we were going to get out of this.

‘No, Dad,’ I said. ‘He's from Afghanistan. He came here on a boat. I found him on the beach.’

It was pretty direct, I know, but there was no easy way to tell him.

What followed was a silence like I've never heard before. It was deeper than the night, stiller than the plains of the outback.

The fact that it was most probably going to end in one huge explosion made it all the harder to bear. But the explosion didn't come, Dad didn't shout. He just looked at me, perfectly calm, and said, ‘We have to talk. Outside.’