Legal Aliens - a short story by Patty Jansen

This story was originally published in Semaphore SF, a Sceince Fiction and fantasy magazine in New Zealand. It was also published in their 2010 Year's Best collection.

Legal Aliens
Patty Jansen

The bell goes ding-dong over the murmur of the waiting room and a red number A54 flicks up on the wall display. A woman rises amidst the poor, the desperate and the hopeful. Whole families sit here for days, clutching forms most cannot read.
Behind his desk, Peter yawns. Glances out the back window into the smoggy Jakarta air. He’s tired and he doesn’t know why. This day at the office seems to last forever.
He stares at the woman now approaching his cubicle. She’s tall like a basketball player, she’s bronzed like a Swedish tourist, and has golden tresses like a fairytale princess. Definitely not a local.
‘Uhm,’ he says and clears his throat, and then again, ‘Uhm – how can I help you?’

Up north on the coast, and I mean really north, like Port Douglas, there is a place called Turtle Beach. It’s not much of a town, just a few fishing shacks and a couple more flashy holiday houses – that’s the fibro ones in case you were wondering. There’s a general store, which sells life’s necessities like bait, milk, bread, beer and yesterday’s paper, and that’s about it.
If you’d go to Turtle Beach, which I know you won’t, and if you asked for Tom Barretts, no one would show you the way to his house. ‘Cause, you see, anyone who’s important to him knows he never uses his name, and his shack is not worthy of the word ‘house’. But if you asked for Goanna, the bloke who runs the general store will stop watching the cricket for long enough to tell you where he lives.
‘Just down the beach, mate. Can’t miss it.’ Guess you could have figured that out for yourself. Turtle Beach is that sort of place.
If you went down there, Goanna might just sit you down by the fire with a stubby or two, and tell you of the night he sat in that very same position, on that very same milk crate, when a woman ran out of the darkness where waves crashed on the sand. She was tall, slender, golden-haired and completely naked. She was also incredibly pregnant, and from the way she was talking, she was about to drop the kid.
Goanna ran off to his ute to call the ambulance on the two-way, and while he was doing that, she crouched on the sand and gave birth to a baby girl.
The ambulance came and that was the last he saw of them.
But I know you won’t get to ask him, so he’ll never tell you. He’s not good with women and he’s rather embarrassed about the whole thing anyway.

Peter stares at the woman, and drowns in her eyes. They’re blue like the ocean. He swears he can see waves and fish, the ocean and coral reefs.
‘Yes, you can help me,’ she says. Her voice reminds him of singing dolphins.
Peter blinks, swallows and blinks again.
‘Uhm.... Uhm. If you want to apply for a visitor’s visa to Australia, you need this form.’ He pushes the piece of paper over counter, not looking at it.
Her arms are pale and if she moves, it looks like the light reflects off her skin, like the scales on a fish.

I ask you: how much do you really know of our vast unpatrolled coastline? Do you know what’s going on out there? Have you been to Horn Island?
No? I’m suggesting you should go there and talk to Peta Johnson. Yes, I know she’s huge and very black, she swears like a trooper, and she smokes while filling drums with fuel, but if there is anything to know about boats in the Torres Straits, she knows it. She could tell you that one day, about twenty years ago, she spotted a dinghy adrift on the currents. Not being averse to finding, and selling, spare dinghies, she set out to retrieve it. Imagine her surprise when she found a woman asleep in the bottom of the boat. She was tall and had tresses of golden hair that shone like the actresses on tv. She was naked and incredibly pregnant. Peta towed the boat to shore. While she waited for a doctor to come on the ferry from Thursday Island, the woman gave birth to a baby girl on the couch in Peta’s living room. Peta didn’t take the cigarette out of her mouth the whole time.
But I’m guessing you will never go to Horn Island and you will never hear that story.

The young woman laughs.
‘No, I’ve been told I don’t need a visa to come to Australia.’ Her sing-song accent is captivating.
‘I don’t know where you got that information, but all tourists travelling to Australia—’
‘I need to apply for a passport.’
‘A... passport?’ Peter is sweating by now. Never mind Monica and the kids in his air-conditioned house in the expat compound; is there a way he can ask this heavenly creature for a date?
‘Yes, I was born there.’

Well, I guess you know where this is going, but I feel I should tell you the story of Mike Sullivan, Sullo to his mates. He’s keen to talk, but he’s one of those bushies who have gone just a little... overboard. He likes telling tourists to watch drop bears and hoop snakes and he manages not to bat an eyelid when they believe him. To their credit, some of the tourists get that he’s taking the mickey, but after telling those gabs, what hope does Sullo have to be believed?
So even if you went to Wyndham and took a joy flight in his sea plane, you would never believe his colourful tales. He would tell you the amazing story of when he flew out to deliver mail to some of the remote outposts on the Kimberley coast, and he spotted a group of people on the beach. He decided to put the plane down to see if they were OK, because that’s the sort of thing people do in areas as remote as this. But you’d fidgeting and wondering when he was going to come to the punchline.
Then he would tell you that there naked women on the beach, about thirty of them, lazing about the sand. Some were suckling tiny babies, some were very pregnant.
Like turtles, he would tell you. And you would conclude that this was the bit he’d made up, but like the bushie you were pretending to be, you would just shrug and tell him to pull the other one.
Of course, you might just check the birth registry for the town of Wyndham on 20 August 1989, and find that no fewer than thirty mothers registered their newborns on that day. Not bad for a town of only a few hundred. Then again, you wouldn’t believe it, so I’m wasting my time.

The woman pulls out a piece of paper, a Western Australian birth certificate. Peter squints at the rubbed print.
‘Wyndham? There’s not a lot of people up there. What was your mother doing there? Where is she from?’
She just smiles, and he can feel himself drowning again. ‘It’s true that I can get a passport, right?’
‘It is.’ Peter opens a drawer and gets another form, substantially thicker. He pushes it over the counter and watches her hands as she takes it and clutches it to her bosom. Her skin shimmers. Like a fish.
‘It will probably take you a while to fill all this out, but we’re open again tomorrow at nine. If you need any help...’
‘That’s not necessary. I have help, plenty of it.’ She winks at him.
And then she’s gone. Peter stares, but sees only the crowd of waiting Indonesians. He shakes his head.
‘I need some coffee.’