Free How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling by Martin Chambers Page B

a few moments before. Palmenter had given him a job on the station so he could pay off his debt but, like all of us, unless there was a muster going on, his actual tasks were a bit ill-defined.
    â€˜Dunno,’ one of us would say, and Palmenter would storm off.
    Arif prayed several times a day, kneeling down on a special little rug he had. In the canteen he would often talk about God, or Allah, about worship, about how our lives needed to be spiritual. Not in a way that was seeking to convert us, more that he was interested. It was a question. He was a recent immigrant and wanted to know about the dreamtime, the sacred places, and he thought we would know about them. He wanted to be taken to see them and he refused to accept either that we didn’t know where they were or that we were not allowed to go there. How could a site be sacred if you couldn’t go there? Sacred was where you went with reverence; you paid respect by going there. A place couldn’t be sacred if you never saw it.
    Of course, I know now that Arif came in on a boat that Palmenterhad organised and that he must have come in with a much larger group that landed while I was out on a bore run. He had no family, no one in Australia and if anyone back where he came from knew he was alive, they certainly didn’t know where he was. Palmenter had probably given him a job solely because of that, no one would miss him, he could not complain about wages or conditions or anything, but this was a subtlety lost on Arif. He complained about everything.
    Arif had been quite vocal from the moment he arrived. About how things were, about how long it was all taking, about money, the food, everything. By then I knew how Palmenter operated and I knew he would make some sort of offer to Arif, put him on the payroll, give him a job. But even that didn’t stop him complaining. The food wasn’t halal. There was nowhere to pray. We were all godless infidels who would burn in hell. We generally ignored him or avoided him, or sometimes we goaded him if we were bored and feeling like some sport. Mostly that was Cookie, who’d stand at the counter with the hatch open while we were eating and say something like ‘all men of god’ or ‘that halal enough for you?’ in a voice of genuine concern.
    As we drove off, Arif was talking about the justice of Allah and sacred things. I wondered if perhaps Palmenter was going to show us some lesser site, make up something to keep Arif happy. It was one of Palmenter’s things he would do, tell you of bigger things and get you thinking of the greater picture, the greater good. He liked saying things like ‘Son, the Great Spirit is watching over you’, or he would tell you things about the ancient land and culture, make you feel both insignificant and yet somehow wanting to be important, wanting to play your part. It was all bullshit, of course. It was just his way of getting what he wanted. Other times, it would be ‘fuck the land’, or ‘fuck traditions’ or whatever it was that was in his way.
    I realised Arif must be leaving because he was haranguing Palmenter about how he was expected to survive in the city now that Palmenter had taken all his money. How much he was owed for working there. Then he was talking more generally, about all of the imports, how Palmenter has been ripping them off. Arif wanted to know why some people had paid several thousand dollars morethan others for basically the same thing, to be bundled on a boat with a small amount of rice and a place to sit, then smuggled into the station to be sent off with only a map and a dodgy campervan. I took it from his tone that Arif must have paid a lot more than others. I was pretty sure that Palmenter charged whatever he could: if he thought you had more, you paid more. It was how he operated.
    â€˜In business, you charge what you can get away with,’ he told me once. ‘It’s got nothing to do with how