Two days later my plans for a family picnic are ruined when the phone rings very early and my commanding officer tells me a boat is approaching the shore, and I must immediately report for duty. The unit truck picks me up and as we drive I am informed that a drone malfunction has allowed the refugees to land and evade all border protection measures. By the time we arrive, their rickety little boat is abandoned on the beach, and no-one is to be seen. We fan out with our machine guns ready and push through the bush behind the dunes. Soon I hear a splatter of shots and screams a couple of hundred metres away, so I know they can’t have gone too far. Every cell in my body yearns for me not to find anyone.

Not too long after the first shooting I hear another, then all is quiet for a long time. I stray farther from the other troops until I am well out of sight and can breathe a little easier. This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday. I lower the gun from my shoulder and wander slowly through the undergrowth. I hear a distant yell and more gunshots, and then very close a stick snaps loudly. Nooo! I try not to look at anything, but I can’t help seeing a young woman behind a tree a few metres to my left. Her long, black hair is full of leaves and her almond eyes are full of tears.

For a few moments both of us are motionless, until she whispers to me with utter desperation,

“Please don’t kill me! I have a baby. Please don’t kill me. I’ll give you money, anything. Please!”

Oh, Jesus! It’s too much for me. I do not have the strength for this. There is no way I can shoot her. I’m going to have to hide her.

“Okay. Come here,” I hiss. With a thudding heart, I drag her west, where the vegetation gets very thick. We’re almost running and I charge through the tangled branches until we reach the hidden ti-tree creek. I point to a decrepit jetty in the distance on the other side and whisper in her ear,

“Swim to that jetty. Don’t let anyone see you. I’ll meet you there in a few hours.” Her eyes are wide.

“I can’t swim.” Now my eye are wide. And my teeth clamp together.

“You’ll just have to learn. It’s mostly shallow. There is no other way.” She nods quickly, once, then slips into the water and crawls along the creek bed. I can’t watch her. I crash back through the trees and resume my pretend search.

After over an hour and several more shootings, the captain radios in that the mission is over. We muster at the parking lot with the bodies, make our reports and the company is dismissed for the remainder of the weekend. I try to appear calm, but I’m not the only one shaken up after this operation. The refugees very rarely make it ashore, so our battles are typically fought at much greater distances. Seeing the faces up close is not something we are used to. Many of the soldiers want to go to the club, but I tell them I’ve made arrangements with my kids and I catch the bus home.

Fortuitously, the bus is nearly empty this Sunday, so I stay on it for two stops past my house without arousing suspicion. I alight and attempt to look casual as I stroll up the street. As soon as the bus has turned the corner, I run back and in between two houses to the overgrown path to the jetty. Nobody spends time at the creek these days. They are too busy fighting wars or scrounging for food. There are no fish left here, so there is no reason for anyone to come, but I used to swim and skim rocks at this place as a child.

The path completely disappears after a while, but eventually I find myself at the water’s edge. There is no sign of the refugee, so I step out carefully onto the old jetty to look down the creek. It is more like a lagoon than a creek at this point. I know there are some deep places, and I’m quite worried that she has drowned, although that would simplify things for me. I can’t see anything so, very gingerly, I sit down on the edge of the pier. A few minutes go by before she makes herself known. She steps out of the bushes behind me, drenched and shaking. I give her my camo jacket, and look for something in my backpack to dry her. All I have is a handkerchief. I try to make her look as normal as possible, then we creep back along the path to the road.

Quickly and silently, we walk along the suburban streets to my house. There are very few people around and those that we see are too busy with their own problems to pay attention to us. Even so, I expect an officer at every turn, and my stomach churns with anxiety. At last we arrive at my door and I turn the handle with an unsteady hand. We enter and my family look up from the video box. They all appear confused when they see the refugee, but Victor’s expression quickly turns to fear, then anger. I say nothing and usher her hastily into the bathroom where I tell her to shower and give her a change of clothes. Victor is waiting in the hall when I come out, and we go to the bedroom and close the door.

“I’m sorry Victor! I just couldn’t kill her. She begged me and I didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger,” I whisper.

“Great! So what are we going to do now? Do you want to hide her!? Where is she going to sleep? How do you think we can feed her?”

“I don’t know! It wasn’t a plan. It just happened. Maybe we can find her a job and she can get a flat? She speaks English.”

“Oh my God!” He rubs his scalp with both hands. “We’re all going to get killed.” I hear a noise in the hall and open the door. Dylan and Cindy look up at me like little wallabies in headlights. “Why are we going to get killed?” asks Cindy. I hold them, one arm around each. “We’re not going to get killed. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry,” I say, with no sincerity. “We’re going to have a guest for a few days, but it’s going to be a secret. A very big secret. You are not allowed to tell anyone at all, okay?”

From the doorway Victor adds, “If I find out either of you have told anyone, believe me, you’ll be extremely sorry.”

“Who is she?” Dylan demands. How can I tell him I don’t even know her name?

“I’m going to explain it all later, but first I have to talk to her for a bit,” I say, as the bathroom door opens. Victor takes the kids back to the video box and I bring the visitor into the bedroom and close the door again. We sit on the bed.

“So,” I begin, “who are you? What is your story?” She tells me her name is Angela Chan, and she is from Fiji. Her island, like mine, has been inundated with refugees, battered with cyclones and ravaged with disease. Of course, the smaller size of that island has concentrated the problems, and racial conflicts have been added to the mix. People of Chinese descent, such as Angela’s family, are now persecuted savagely. After she gave birth to twin girls, somebody threw a rock through the window of their house and killed one of the babies. In despair, she and her husband made the decision to take their surviving child on a terrifying ocean voyage with the impossible hope of escaping to Australia. The rest of their families were already dead. They left behind their house, their café, which had been robbed so many times it was virtually empty, and their friends, who were no longer able to help them.

The journey was unbearable, but somehow they bore it.

They passed through a storm, which was fortunately not quite severe enough to sink their small boat. There was not enough food, but they were all seasick so they couldn’t eat anyway. The baby cried continuously. However, on the final approach to Australia they had the incredible luck to be unseen by any drones, air patrols, coast guard boats or ground troops. Her husband had the baby in a sling as they splashed into the water and ran across the sand and under the trees. They held hands and crept over the leaves, without any knowledge about where they might be going. Soon they heard the shouts of my unit arriving and not long after that, footsteps which were much too close. There were two decent-sized trees near them, and they crouched behind one each.

The rustling got louder. Paralysed with fear, Angela saw a soldier appear through the branches and then she heard the familiar, heart-wrenching sound of her daughter’s whimper. Naturally, the soldier also heard the sound and immediately pointed his gun at the tree and slowly walked towards her family. Her husband pleaded for his life, as she had done, but on that occasion there was no mercy. The soldier grabbed the baby with one hand and shot the man in the head with the other. He looked at the tiny girl, as if unsure about what to do for a moment, before throwing her on the ground and shooting her as well. Her mother almost passed out, but through some kind of miracle, managed to stay quiet and undetected throughout this nightmare. The soldier stuffed the baby in his backpack and returned to the beach dragging her father behind him. Angela stumbled through the bush mindlessly until her encounter with me.

After the story we both remain silent for a while, stunned by the horror of this life. She begins to cry and I hug her with arms that have never felt so inadequate. My mind is utterly devoid of ideas about what to say or do next. At that moment Victor opens the door, so I leave Angela sobbing on the bed to whisper to him in the hall. I give him the synopsis of her history and tell him I don’t know what to do and that I am sorry. So sorry. He stares at me in disbelief and says, “Well it’s done now, and I guess we have to deal with it.”

Returning to the bedroom, I introduce Angela and Victor. I know we must make some sort of plan of action. “You can sleep on our couch for a few days. Maybe we can say you’re a friend from Sydney? Will that work? We’ll have to find you a job,” I say, thinking aloud. “What about this story? Your husband has just been killed fighting in Indonesia. You had to leave Sydney because of the bad memories. You want to start a new life here, so we’re helping you out for a little while. We met you…. where?”

“How about when we went to Sydney to get your passport, for military service?” Victor says, in a monotone.

“Angela showed us the way to the Embassy in town and we ended up staying the night with her and her husband. What was his name?”

“Alfred,” she says in a barely audible voice. Her tears splash on the floor.

“We’ll call you… Amber and Michael… Lao? So, now we’re repaying your kindness, and helping to find you work.”

Angela inhales deeply and wipes her face with her sleeve. “I’m a chef,” she offers. “I used to work in a big resort in Suva.”

“In the Harbourside Plaza in Sydney,” I correct her, “which was destroyed in the ’48 cyclone.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. And that’s the story for the kids as well. Everyone got it?” asks Victor. We all nod and go to disturb the children from the television to try out our fiction on them. We tell them it’s a secret, because Angela is very sad, and doesn’t want to talk about what happened. They accept it without comment, and after gaping at our guest for a few seconds, their eyes return to the screen.

The following day I don’t have to work, so I help Angela to write a believable employment history and take her around to the local restaurants. There are not many left, but there are still a handful of extremely wealthy people left in this town. The few who invested in weapons or prisons around twenty years ago, or those high up in the drug cartels, have reaped the benefits and they support a small hospitality industry in the main street. I wait outside while she asks for managers and hands out résumés. She is wearing my only good dress, which is too short for her long legs.

Her English is impressive, but her accent is clearly not Australian and this causes a fair amount of suspicion.

However, there is a ray of hope in the end. A waiter at the Vietnamese restaurant tells her there may be an opening for a kitchen hand and they take her number, which is of course my number. He says the manager will be in later. After that, there is one more place to try, unsuccessfully, until we have been to every dining establishment in town. Next we stop at the op shop to buy Angela some better-fitting clothes and then head home.

As we step off the bus in my street, I stop breathing and my heart starts to bang at my rib cage as if it wants to escape. Lieutenant Colonel Nolan, my commanding officer, is walking straight towards us. I shoot Angela a meaningful glance and turn back to attempt to greet him cheerfully. He barely acknowledges me before demanding, “Who is this?” I repeat the story we have rehearsed with the children. His piercing, green eyes never leave her face, as he extends his hand for shaking. Now Angela comes up with her own brilliant improvisation, and I could kiss her. She shakes his hand, then croaks and mimes that she has lost her voice. Hastily, I explain that she has the ‘flu. His suspicious expression makes me feel faint, but I tell him that I will see him tomorrow and wave goodbye. We proceed down the road towards my little house.

Once inside, we hug briefly, and as our pounding hearts return to normal, I make us a pot of tea. “That was great- the lost voice thing. You should keep that up with everyone,” I say, “except if the Vietnamese restaurant call back. I think they’ll be okay.” The kids and Victor return home and, although once or twice they peer sideways at our visitor, they are all generally on their best behaviour. Evening approaches, and Angela insists on cooking for us, so she investigates the garden while I take a shower. I appreciate the break from kitchen duties. While she makes dinner, I actually get the kids to do their homework for a change. I begin to think having Angela around could be a blessing for our family. Maybe she is our tower of hope.

She is really a creative cook, and manages to make an inspiring meal from our simple ingredients. We all eat ravenously as always, but with far more pleasure than usual. Just as we are finishing, my phone rings and it is the manager of the Vietnamese restaurant. He assumes I am Angela and asks if I’m available to come in for an interview tonight. I don’t bother to correct him and agree to meet him in an hour. When I relay the message she looks so nervous that I offer to go with her and Victor does not argue, which is a pleasant surprise. He supervises the after-dinner clean-up while Angela changes into the interview outfit we bought for her a few hours before.

I walk with my new friend into the cool, suburban darkness. The stars are out, and as we wait for the bus, Angela tells me about the splendour of the infinite skies which she saw on the clear nights of her sea voyage. On one particularly memorable evening dozens of dolphins appeared, sparkling with blue phosphorescence and racing each other in the bow-wave of the boat, and the refugees clung to the hope that beauty could still be found in this world. We are silent on the bus, as the other passengers look at us curiously. When we approach the bright lights of the main street most of the stars are no longer visible. The restaurants are busy with rich people getting drunk, and Angela asks me to come inside with her to her appointment.

The interview does not go well. It is her voice that is the problem. Accents used to mean “just off the boat” which was a very undesirable thing. These days different accents are simply never heard, particularly in small regional towns such as this one. When the manager hears Angela speak he looks up sharply, then glances around to see who else is listening. She tells him she immigrated to Sydney on a plane when she was young, which is possible though not very likely. He barely looks at her résumé and only asks a couple of questions before saying he will be in touch if they need her. Afterwards, I don’t know what to say. The mood on the bus ride back is dejected and as soon as we arrive home, Angela collapses on the couch and I retire to my bed, where I spend hours trying to think about dolphins and keep the tower from falling.