The Suicide Game

by Shampa Sinha (Australia)

Making a local connection Australia

The Suicide Game Children playing at committing suicide. The phrase was written in pencil, in the margins of the manual of ICD-10 codes. It was next to the code for "Accidental Deaths". A helpfully scrawled addendum for the uninitiated, the next time a twelve-year old indigenous boy with rope marks around his neck came into the hospital and failed resuscitation. The words bring my idle browsing to a halt. Above me, the ceiling fans keep churning the soupy humid air but a sliver of ice runs through my veins. The minute I step outside the hospital's sliding doors, the Northern Territory heat sticks to me like a cobweb. I push against it with the speed of a fly coursing through honey. Out front, an elderly Aboriginal woman is sitting in the shade of an okari nut tree, her eyes, deep sad caves. She had come to clinic earlier. I had tried to test her vision with a standard alphabetical chart and the woman had just stood there silently, until slow tears poured down her face and I realised she couldn't read. I had apologised and managed to procure a chart that had shapes on it instead. I want to go back and apologise again but something keeps me from doing so. I want to ask if she has children. Do they play at committing suicide? " Absolutely horrific, some of the stories you hear." one of the local doctors says as we lumber through the bush in his four-wheel drive, past the gnarled charred skeletons of gum trees, tires grinding into the fleshy red earth, throwing up powdery dust clouds in their wake. I glance out the window at the craggy terracotta termite mounds scattered throughout the forest like shrines for some ancient pagan religion. " Child sexual abuse is rampant...it's rampant! How do you get through to them? They know how to slip through the cracks, how to game the system." Playing at committing suicide. Beth, the hospital pharmacist invites me to her yoga class on the beach. The water is a postcard-perfect turquoise, as seductive as a hug but there are "No swimming" signs posted all over. Right on cue, we spot a crocodile floating gently on the waves, its gnarled skin beaded with drops of saltwater glinting in the sunlight. Still as a lump of wood, it eyes us curiously as we nervously flow into shivassana on the sand, a few metres from its deadly jaws. Later, we sit by the mangroves, hugging our knees and sipping Esky-cooled beers while watching the sun streak the sky wild orange and pink. Beth points out a nearby Aboriginal midden strewn with empty clam-shells and the charred remnants of a fire. I wonder when the feast took place. I have not yet seen a single Aboriginal person on any of the beaches I have walked on. It's almost as though we live parallel lives, orbiting each other but never overlapping. Something shifts on the last day of our placement. Clint, my fellow medical student and I fly out to Milingimbi for the day. Peering through the cloud forest from the cockpit of light plane, I spot herds of water buffalo congregating around a billabong. During lunch, two local children run over to us and clamber up onto the picnic table, outside the clinic where we are eating sandwiches. "This your woman?" the girl, barely eight years old, asks Clint slyly jerking her head towards me. "Cheeky thing!" Clint laughs. "Can I try on your sunglasses?" the boy, asks me. " 'Eyyyy man..film-estar!!" the girl claps as the boy stands, right hand on hip, one sun-soaked brown leg on the bench, eyes peering over the top of my shades in mock-seduction of Clint's iPhone camera. They have just had a geography class on India. "We're going on a school excursion to Mumbai next year." the girl says, the pride audible in her voice. I clutch their chutzpah close to my heart as our plane takes off, carrying us back to Nhulunbuy and then onwards back to Sydney. The scabs of dried-up lakes fall away from us as though the land below has had its eyes plucked out.