I am sitting on a deckchair. It is so humid even the air feels moist on your skin. It doesn’t take long before the waves become heavier and the ocean is howling. I am on a cruise to K’gari island. I am not a swimmer. I fear deep water.

While the cruise ship’s engine starts, a woman points out the safety jackets. Her voice echoes — with the sound of the heavy water, it comes like a duet. Adventure is not my thing. The biggest adventure in my life was passing an exam and receiving a scholarship to come here to study my Master of Counselling. That was two years ago. My father bought my ticket, my 32nd birthday present. Standing beside my mother’s bed, listening to wheezing from her tired lungs, watching my father administer Ventolin, I felt him pull my arm. “Go, live your life.”

The ocean throws foamy waves and catches them, again and again. I stare at them but soon feel dizzy and leave them and go below decks.

After I received my degree, I started working. So far, I have had three clients and all three of them are refugees, boat people, some people call them. My first client was a seventeen-year-old girl.

I asked her, “Do you remember your mother?”

“No. She died when I was a baby.”

“How did she die?”

“On the sea.”

This was make-believe. She was three years old when with her father and another hundred and twenty people took a perilous journey from Indonesia. Her father has received a temporary visa three times and while they are still living here in this country, her mother and sick brother are stranded in Indonesia.

Our tour guide is a young man. He tells us he is a marine biologist. There are tourists from everywhere; you can hear many languages other than English. But when we talk to someone who is not our friend or part of our group, we speak English too. The crew members only talk in English to everyone. One of them is now telling us that soon we will walk on the longest sand island in the world. People are taking photos. My mind is swimming inside the ocean. Towards a mother with her baby in her arms.

The tour guide is talking about flora and fauna of the island. What remains in my mind is his description of Melaleuca quinquenervia trees. He says these trees are probably the tallest melaleuca trees in the world. During our walk through the rainforest, every now and then, he stops to elaborate about the importance of a special tree or water way, or tells us about different species. He talks about how the forest declines as soil fertility declines. He also introduces to us a dog-like animal: dingo. “Do you know the story that a dingo stole a baby?” he asks and some tourists say they do. “Dingoes are protected here.” He tells us if we want to have the most amazing life experience, we have to come from July to November, the time to see migrating humpback whales.

In the office where I worked, everyone talked about taking a cruise holiday. Cruise here, cruise there, they talked as if they were going on pilgrimage. And now, I am here, in front of the rusted bulk of the Maheno shipwreck. People take photos in front of it. Its rusted metal leaves traces on my fingers. Our tour guide gives us twenty minutes for walking bare foot on the sand and to take photos. I like to sit, facing the ocean. Every now and then I see rotten planks sticking out from the waves; they look like dead mermaids.

My meetings with the young woman cultivated a ceaseless restlessness within me. I could barely sleep. Her voice returns as if from a seashell.

Visual and auditory hallucinations. This is the highlight of the reports from six years of counselling done by other counsellors. There is more than that in her. An undercurrent I can’t define. She drowns me in her when she talks to me, the soft voice describing horror. Her experiences decay in me.

In my last session I asked the refugee girl, “When did you see the possum?”

“First, I didn’t see her, I heard her.” She said there was a possum in the house. She told her father. Nights followed with noises in the walls, short and low, little invasions. Then in the middle of one night, a heavy thump and high-pitched screams. “My father said possums are mainly active at nights. But there were noises during the day too, hissing and clicking.” She said that even after her father put a motion sensor light in the backyard, the possum still came down from the roof, inhabiting the walls of the house.

“Then my father called a possum catcher. But the possum catcher told my father that it was possible she would return. He put the cage on the passenger seat, as if this noisy little creature was like his wife, or daughter. I could see the face and those big ears.

“‘What do you mean?’ my father asked.

“‘I can’t release her far from her home.’

“‘But this is my home. The noise at night doesn’t let us to sleep,’ my father said. My eyes were still fixed on this creature, somehow; I was expecting she would speak for herself. The possum catcher explained that according to the law he had to release the possum no more than a hundred and fifty metres away from the capturing point. ‘Which means I will release her at Memorial Park.’

“She came back. I could hear her. We found each other at night, this possum and me. That night, I was painting the last details of Roc and The Elephant. It was my father’s mural but he let me help him finish it. The Roc’s claws were holding the elephant. I had finished her long, thin, forked tongue sliding out between pointed teeth. Some colours were needed for her tongue, yellow, red flesh, I thought, then I heard the noise.

“First, it sounded like a child playing with something like a ball, rolling something. It was late at night. I turned the light off and stood still. The sound ceased. I turned the light on and started painting again. She started playing again. I banged the brush on the wall. She shifted and made a noise and stopped. This went on for a while as if two prisoners were communicating in morse code. I took green, and then red and that was too much and I reduced the intensity by adding white. My father had trained me how to mix the colours. I was using a washing brush. I don’t know if it was the touching of the wall or the smell of the paint that triggered movement in the wall wherever I touched it. In my mind I was trying to see her, her shape, her teeth, and those big ears. Soon my wall was covered with the heads of possums, as if the possum’s painting was overlapping mine; she was painting over my painting and that made me very angry.”

Her father’s report indicated that the house was silent after the possum was caught and taken away. But his daughter insisted not only had she seen the possum’s face but she could hear her all the time.

First night of the tour, we went to our motel early. “Have a good sleep,” the young tour guide said. “We are going to have a long day tomorrow.” Our motel was a series of houses, probably owned by the tour company. In our tour pamphlet it said we were going to have the best cruise experience with a family-owned business. The night started tranquilly with the sound of the ocean and the smell of sea salt but soon changed when some young people from another group in the camping area started drinking. When my sleep was cut into pieces, I decided to sit outside and listen to the ocean. With the SkyView app on my phone, I searched for hidden stars and galaxies in the blue sky. During our tour, our guide suggested an app. “The Oceanic+ is amazing. If I was a millionaire, I’d want to be an underwater tourist for the rest of my life,” the guide said. Anything underwater frightens me. Even watching documentaries about the aquatic life makes me feel dizzy.

In one of our earlier sessions, I asked her about Lahore.

“I remember Lahore very well. I liked the life we had there. We lived in an art studio run by a Pakistani artist. Days smelled of rose petals. All ceremonies were covered with rose petals: weddings, engagement parties. Everything. My father was a student, learning Mongol miniature style. The Pakistani artist was his teacher. I like my father’s painting but I was more fascinated with the Pakistani artist’s work. Gigantic murals of the mythical Roc. This Pakistani artist was passionate about Mongol-style miniatures and he loved mythology too. He joked with my father, called him Sindbad Bahri, the great sailor, because our surname is Bahri. The Pakistani artist told my father that he first fell in love with mythology when he was a child and his father, who was a sailor, told him stories of the voyages he had as a young man. He told us about the famous Roc, related to the Garuda of Indian mythology. “Did you know that the Roc was so gigantic that he could lift an elephant? Even Marco Polo talks about this bird.”

“This is the painting your father did on the wall in your home, isn’t it?”

“Yes. How do you know that?”

“It is here, in your father’s report. He told his counsellor that he decided to make a big wall painting in the house. He says it helps you and him to relax and concentrate on good things. Do you agree?”

“Yes, I like painting.”

“So, tell me about that. How did you lean to paint, did you learn painting from your father, or this Pakistani artist?”

“None of them. I learnt by just playing around them when I was little. I always had paints and brushes around me. My father allowed me to paint whatever I wanted to paint.” She suddenly asked me, “Do you have children?”

I was shocked. Does it show on my face how desperate I am to be a mother, to have a child? But I had decided never to get married and I wasn’t strong enough or brave enough to have a child without having a partner. “No. I don’t have children.” I hoped this self-disclosure about my longing would help prompt her to reveal more about her past. “Let’s talk about the time in detention centre. You were there three years.”

She explained that she had watched her father crying twice because he received rejection letters. I asked her if she had any experience of hearing noises. She said she couldn’t remember.

“Your father said in his session that there are no noises in the walls anymore but you say there is.”

She said I was wrong. “Not in all the walls, only in one wall in my room, the Roc and the elephant wall.”

I asked her about their journey to this country. Did she remember how they arrived here? She said by boat. “We didn’t come directly from Lahore. We came from Indonesia.” I asked her how she handled it and she said she was sleeping most of that time.

“Tell me about that Christmas.”

“It was my birthday. I was born on Christmas Day. One of the security guards brought me cake. He was big guy. My father didn’t like him. My father had received the second rejection. He cried the night before, quietly, I knew he was crying because we were rejected. We could hear some music and laughter coming from their office. When the guards came to check on us, they looked drunk and funny, especially with those jingle bells hats. The case officers were cheerful too. Although they had just delivered a rejection letter to many people. Then the banging sound started. People started banging on the walls of their cells. The guards started running around and suddenly I hear that screaming and shouting was coming from the roof. The noises were coming from every corner, all the cells, all the walls, all corners of the detention centre. And then shouting started.”

Here, I thought, this is the revelatory moment where the severity of the trauma becomes manifest in time, space, and voice.

“The day after, a case officer came and gave us a date for medical and police check. The Pakistani artist congratulated my father and said that it means we will get a visa. But he himself didn’t receive any letter.”

Our tour guide asks me many questions which I don’t know the answers to. Perhaps he asks me and not the others because he sees that I am not busy taking selfies or asking people to take my photo or he sees that I am a lone traveller. During our walk in the rainforest, I answered one question. I was the only tourist who knew a staghorn fern. I had a small one on the wall on my flat’s balcony.

In the bus driving back to our rooms, I sat in the window seat, the sea becalmed, white foam on the water, many different languages agitated around me. I reminded myself that beneath it lie sunken cities, ships and the drowned.

I had another three sessions with her and with all my honesty I should say I didn’t help her. Still the possum, the Roc and the Elephant were the major things in her mind; the possum noise still coming from somewhere deep. One thing remained with me. Every night, I dove into the chilled ocean to visit a mother and baby.

“There was a small boat with forty life jackets. We were hundred and twenty. It was like deathless death. Someone said in the boat that even pearls cry for you. You know in the sea, in the middle of the night, under the light of the blue sky, you see an island, but that is just a gigantic whale. At first, nobody died. We all sat next to each other. My father and his artist friend and I. Close to us were some people who spoke with my father. There were Afghans, Iraqis, and Pakistanis too. It was night, but because it was the first night, we didn’t feel the heaviness. It was dark and the water was roaring but we were sitting calmly because we still were hopeful, a full bucket of hope. Even I, as a nine-year-old could feel it. In my mind, I could see that soon we will be in a paradise and then my father would bring my mother and my sick brother. My father called me his lucky-charm girl. People gradually started talking, talking to one another, to people of their own group. Sometimes, small things shared, an apple or a biscuit. Because we were still hopeful. To keep the mind busy, my father started telling stories, stories about his painting, the Roc, the giant bird who was so big he could lift an elephant. Those who understood his language listened. The other groups were talking in Arabic, or Dari, or Urdu. There was a young husband and wife with a baby, right beside us. She had a life jacket and held her baby beneath it. She looked emaciated. Her husband held her hand. They both leaned against the boat’s wooden body. Gradually the ocean’s roaring became stronger, heavier, the movements so severe that it pushed us from one side to the other. I had a life jacket, my father didn’t. When we entered the boat, the guy said, ‘Life jackets are for women and children.’ ‘How about the elderly,’ a young woman said, sitting beside her old father. She gave her jacket to him. He wore it clumsily. The waves were like a gigantic black cat, jumping on you from void dark air. The salt, oh that smell of heavy salty sea water makes your lungs heavy. Now the roaring was so high we couldn’t hear the boat’s engine, although we were sitting close to it. All of a sudden, the man with the wife and baby started shouting. He was shaking his wife, pulling the corner of her life jacket. The baby was like a stick in her arm. He kicked and started shouting and saying things in Arabic. We all just stared at them. Finally, two men from his group came and pushed him away. One of them shook the mother but the wooden mother and the baby fell as if they never had body, or soul, or breath. After that, everything changed, a dark energy surrounded us, like a snake sliding in close to you. Two men, Iraqi men, came towards the husband who was almost motionless and said something to him and he started shouting. They started touching the body of the dead woman. The husband tried to push them away but he couldn’t. One of them took the life jacket off the body and put it on a boy. The boy wore it without looking at anyone. Day came, with that gigantic sun. The light which eats away the ocean. I don’t know how many days we were there. Do you know how the long voyage with hungry stomach splits you? The sea sickness thickens with sea salt air and makes the soul to become heavy. And the empty stomach, a hungry stomach becomes so heavy that it shifts the soul to the other side. And as my father told me the story of the sailors who could see islands which didn’t exist, the day storm was even more frightening than the night.

It is the last night of our tour. The night is heavy with moisture. During the day, in the tour bus, we were lucky to spot two dingos. The tourists take photos of them. Difficult to envisage that the night howling belongs to these dogs, they look surprisingly small and calm.

“Australia’s only native canine, descended from south Asian wolves,” our tour guide says. I find this so fascinating. Imagining something so unique to Australia comes from somewhere else. We had half an hour free time to take photos and enjoy the scenery. I took some photos of coffee rocks, formations of sand grains cemented together by plant remains. On the colour sand beach site, I watch children playing with the shapes made by mud bubbler crabs. Tomorrow morning, we will cruise back to home but if I could stay longer here, I would.