Do your time before it does you. Before it does the roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden on Harrington Street. Before it peels the paint off Bi Van Tran’s yellow Volkswagen van, still parked like it always is on Stratheden Street.
Time is the answer to everything, of course. The answer to our prayers and murders and losses and ups and downs and loves and deaths.
Time for the brothers Bell to grow up and for Lyle’s stash of heroin to grow in value along the way. Time puts hairs on my chin and my underarms and takes its time putting hairs on my balls. Time puts August in his final year at school, with me not far behind him.
Time makes Dad a half-decent cook. He makes us meals most nights he’s not drinking. Chops and frozen vegetables. Sausages and frozen vegetables. A good spaghetti bolognese. He roasts mutton that we eat for a week. Some mornings, while the rest of the world is sleeping, he’s waist-deep in the mangroves of Cabbage Tree Creek, in seaside Shorncliffe, catching us mud crabs with claws that bulge like Viv Richards’ biceps. Some afternoons he walks halfway down to the Foodstore supermarket to get the groceries and he comes back with nothing and we don’t ask why because we know he got the panics, because we know his nerves now, how they ruin him, how they eat him alive from the inside where his arteries and his veins carry all that memory and tension and thought and drama and death.
Some days I join him on the bus because he asks me to watch over him as he travels. He needs me to be his shadow. He asks me to talk to him. He asks me to tell him stories because they calm his nerves. So I tell him all the stories Slim told me. All those yarns about all those crims from Boggo Road. I tell him about my old pen pal, Alex Bermudez, and how those men inside wait for only two things in life, death and Days of Our Lives. When the nerves get too much, he gives me the nod and I press the bell for the bus to stop and Dad takes his breath by a bus stop and I tell him everything is going to be all right and we wait for the next bus back home. Small steps in our Dunlops. He gets a little further each trip out of the house. Bracken Ridge to Chermside. Chermside to Kedron. Kedron to Bowen Hills.
Time makes Dad cut down on his drinking. Mid-strength beer comes to Queensland and Dad stops flooding the toilet with piss. They’ll never measure these things but I know more cartons of mid-strength beer in Bracken Ridge mean less Bracken Ridge mums presenting before Dr Benson in the Barrett Street Medical Centre with split eye sockets.
Time puts Dad in a job. He soups up on enough Serepax to get him outside the front door and onto a bus that takes him into a job interview at the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory on Kingsford Smith Drive, Hamilton, not far from the Brisbane CBD. For three weeks he works on a factory line cutting lengths of aluminium into various shapes and sizes, earning enough to buy a small bronze-coloured 1979 Toyota Corona for $1000 from his loose Bracken Ridge Tavern mate, Jim ‘Snapper’ Norton, on a payment basis of $100 every payday for ten weeks. He smiles when he opens his wallet on Friday afternoon and shows me three grey-blue money notes, the ones we never see, the ones with Douglas Mawson on them standing in a snow jumper, the Antarctic cold freezing the many hairs on his iceberg-sized balls. I’ve never seen Dad more proud and he’s so proud this night he actually laughs more than he cries on the piss. But in the fourth week of this wondrous paid work, his foreman berates him for something he didn’t do – someone plugged in the wrong numbers on a line of metal sheeting and $5000 worth of metal came up five centimetres short – and Dad can’t absorb the injustice so he calls the foreman ‘obtuse’ and the young foreman doesn’t know what that means so Dad tells him. ‘It means you’re a freckle-faced cunt,’ he says. And on his way home he stops into the Hamilton Hotel, off Kingsford Smith Drive, to toast what he might have made of that wondrous paid work with eight pots of full-strength XXXX. And pulling out of the Hamilton Hotel driveway he’s stopped by police who send him to a judge for drink-driving and the judge takes away his driver’s licence and sentences Dad to a further six weeks’ community service and August and I have very little to say when Dad informs us that his court-ordered community service will be carried out assisting the aged and ailing groundsman, Bob Chandler, at our very own Nashville State High School. I have even less to say when I look out my classroom window in Maths A class to find Dad beaming proudly up at me, standing beside the giant ELI! he’s mowed into the manicured grass lawn that fronts the Mathematics and Science block.
Time makes the phone ring.
‘Yeah,’ Dad says. ‘Okay. Yeah, I understand. What’s the address? Okay. Yep. Yep. Bye.’ He puts the phone down. August and I are watching Family Ties and eating sandwiches with devon and tomato sauce.
‘Yer mum’s gettin’ out a month early,’ he says. And he opens the drawer beneath the telephone, pops two Serepax, and walks on down the hallway to his bedroom, sucking those nerve lollies down like Tic Tacs.
*
Time makes the soft red roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden turn hard, makes them grow into themselves like Dad did after that brief and colourful moment in the spring sun of the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory line.
I walk past Khanh Bui’s house on the way to Arcadia Street in Darra. I remember what Khanh Bui’s front garden looked like when it won first prize in a neighbourhood garden competition as part of a Darra State School fete celebration five years ago. It was like a lolly shop of colour then, a mix of ornamental and native plants that Khanh Bui would hose every morning we walked to school, standing in his blue and white pyjamas. Some mornings his wrinkly old dick would be sticking unassumingly out of the fly in his pyjamas but Mr Bui would never notice because his garden was so damn enchanting. But it’s all gone dry and dead now, straw-coloured and bristly like the grass oval in Ducie Street Park.
As I turn into Arcadia Street I stop on the spot.
Two Vietnamese men are sitting in white plastic garden chairs at the top of Darren Dang’s driveway. They wear black sunglasses and they sit in the sun in Adidas nylon tracksuits with white sneakers. The tracksuits are navy blue with three yellow stripes running down each side of their jackets and pants. I approach the front driveway slowly. One of the men holds his hands up to me. I stop. Both men stand from their chairs and reach for something out of view behind Darren’s large and secure front fence.
They are now holding large and sharp-looking machetes when they approach me.
‘Who are you?’ asks one of the men.
‘I’m Eli Bell,’ I say. ‘I’m an old friend of Darren’s from school.’
‘What’s in bag?’ the same man spits with a thick Vietnamese accent.
I look up and down the street, look up into the living room windows of the two-storey houses surrounding us, hoping nobody nosy is sticking their nose into this smelly business down here.
‘Well, it’s kinda sensitive,’ I whisper.
‘What da fuc’ uuu doin’ here?’ asks the man, impatient, his default facial expression being a snarl.
‘I’ve got a business proposal for Darren,’ I say.
‘You mean Mr Dang?’ the man snaps.
‘Yes, Mr Dang,’ I clarify.
My heart is racing. My fingers grip the straps of my black backpack.
‘Business proposal?’ the man asks.
I look around again, take a step closer.
‘I have some . . . ummm . . . merchandise . . . I think he might be interested in,’ I say.
‘Merchandise?’ the man suggests. ‘You BTK?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You BTK we cut your fuckin’ tongue out,’ the man says, his wide eyes suggesting he might enjoy said cut.
‘No, I’m not BTK,’ I say.
‘You Mormon?’
I laugh. ‘No,’ I say.
‘You Jehovah’s Witness?’ the man spits. ‘You trying to sell fucking hot water system again?’
‘No,’ I say.
I briefly ponder what kind of strange parallel universe Darra I’ve walked back into. BTK? Mister Darren Dang?
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I say. ‘Look, I just came to say g’day to Darren . . .’
The Vietnamese men move closer, their hands working over the wooden handles of their machetes.
‘Pass me your bag,’ he says.
I step back. The man raises his machete.
‘Bag,’ he says.
I pass over the bag. He hands it to his offsider who looks inside. He speaks in Vietnamese to the man who appears to be his superior.
‘Where you get this merchandise?’ the superior asks.
‘Darren’s Mum sold it to my mum’s boyfriend a long time ago,’ I say. ‘I’ve come to sell it back.’
The man looks at me silently. I can’t see his eyes through his black sunglasses.
He pulls a black two-way radio transceiver from his pocket.
‘What’s your name again?’ he asks.
‘Eli Bell,’ I say.
He talks into the transceiver in Vietnamese. The only words I catch are ‘Eli Bell’.
He puts the transceiver back into his pocket, beckons me closer.
‘Come,’ he says. ‘Arms up.’
I raise my hands and the two Vietnamese men frisk my legs and arms and hips.
‘Gee, security’s really picked up around here,’ I say.
The superior’s right hand fidgets around my balls. ‘Gentle,’ I say as I squirm.
‘Follow me,’ he says.
We don’t go up into the house where Lyle once made his deals with the exotic ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang. We pass Darren’s large yellow brick house down the left side. It’s only now that I realise the house’s high wood fence is lined with barbed wire. This is less a backyard than a fortress. We walk to a granny flat behind the main house that is more like a council toilet block made of white painted concrete blocks, a good place for drug dealers, or Hitler, to strategise. The gate man knocks once on the peach-coloured door of the bunker and says a single word in Vietnamese.
The door opens and the gate man leads me into a hallway lined with framed black and white photographs of Darren Dang’s family members back home: wedding photographs, family functions, one shot of a man crooning into a microphone, another shot of an old lady holding a giant prawn by a brown river.
The hallway leads to a living room where a dozen or so Vietnamese men stand in navy blue nylon Adidas tracksuits with yellow stripes down the sides of their arms and legs. They all wear black sunglasses like the men on the gate. These men in blue tracksuits stand around one man who sits in a red nylon Adidas tracksuit with white stripes running down his arms and legs. He sits at a sprawling timber office desk, running his eyes over several documents on the table. He does not wear black sunglasses. He wears mirrored aviator sunglasses with gold frames.
‘Darren?’ I say.
The man in the red tracksuit looks up and I see a scar running from the left edge of his mouth. He takes his sunglasses off and his eyes adjust to my face. Eyes squinting.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asks.
‘Darren, it’s me,’ I say. ‘It’s Eli.’
He puts his sunglasses down on the table, reaches into a drawer beneath the desk. He pulls out a flick-knife and the blade snaps into view as he rounds the desk and approaches me. He rubs the bottom of his nose, sniffs sharply two times. His eyeballs are pulsing like lightbulbs losing power. He stands before me and runs the blade along my right cheek.
‘Eli who?’ he whispers.
‘Eli Bell,’ I say. ‘From school. Fuck me, Darren. It’s me, mate. I used to live just down the road.’
He puts the blade up to my eyeball.
‘Darren? Darren? It’s me.’
Then he freezes. A smile explodes across his face.
‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ he hollers. ‘You see your face, bitch!’ he screams. His friends in navy blue tracksuits howl at my expense. He adopts a thick Australian outback accent. ‘You hear this bitch?’ he says to his audience. ‘“It’s me, maaaate. It’s meeeeeeeeeeeee, Eeeeloiiii.”’
He slaps his thighs then wraps his arms around me, blade still fixed inside his right fist. ‘Come here, Bell End!’ he laughs. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? You don’t call, you don’t write. I had big plans for us, Tink.’
‘It all went to shit,’ I say.
Darren nods in agreement. ‘Yeah, a whole bunch of runny ol’ Eli Bell shit,’ he says. He grips my right hand, lifts it into view, runs his finger across the pale white nub of my missing finger.
‘You miss it?’ Darren asks.
‘Only when I’m writing,’ I say.
‘No, I mean, Darra, dumb arse, you miss Darra?’
‘I do,’ I say.
Darren walks back to his desk.
‘Can I get you anything?’ he asks. ‘Got a fridge full of soft drink in the room there.’
‘You got any Pasito?’
‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘Got Coke, Solo, Fanta and Creaming Soda.’
‘I’m good,’ I say.
He leans back in his desk chair and shakes his head.
‘Eli Bell is back in town!’ he says. ‘It’s good to see you, Tink.’
His smile goes flat. ‘That was fucked what happened to Lyle,’ he says.
‘Was it Bich?’ I ask.
‘Was it Bich, what?’ he replies.
‘Was it Bich who ratted on Lyle?’
‘You think it was Mum?’ he asks, perplexed.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘But was it?’
‘She considered Lyle a client, just like Tytus Broz,’ he says. ‘Aside from the fact rattin’ is bad business, she had no reason to rat about any side business she had goin’ on because she was just doing business, Tink. If Lyle was dumb enough to start tradin’ with her behind his boss’s back, that was his business, not hers. His cash had the same numbers printed on it as anybody else’s. Nah, man, you know exactly who ratted his arse out.’
No. No, I really don’t know. Not exactly. Not at all.
Darren looks at me, mouth open, dumbstruck.
‘You really are one sweet kid, Eli,’ Darren says. ‘Don’t you know the biggest rats are always closest to the cheese?’
‘Teddy?’ I say.
‘I’d tell you, Tink, but I don’t eat no cheese,’ he says. Darren’s friends nod.
Piss-weak fucksack so-called friend Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas. The fuckin’ cheese eater.
‘Where is your mum?’ I ask.
‘She’s up in the house resting,’ he says. ‘She got the Big C about a year ago.’
‘Cancer?’
‘Nah, cataracts,’ he says. ‘Poor Bich can’t see no more.’
The gate man drops my backpack on his desk. Darren looks inside.
‘You still importing for Tytus Broz?’ I ask.
‘Nah, that pussy has gone to Dustin Vang and BTK,’ he says. ‘That incident with your precious Lyle didn’t help relations between Mum and Tytus.’
Darren sticks his knife in the bag, pulls it back out with its tip holding grains of Lyle’s high-grade heroin.
‘What’s BTK?’ I ask.
Darren inspects the gear on his knife like a jeweller inspecting the clarity of diamonds.
‘Born To Kill,’ Darren says. ‘It’s the new world, Tink. Everybody’s gotta be gang-affiliated now. BTK. 5T. Canal Boys. The exporters back home have all these rules around shit now. Everything goes through abracadabra Cabramatta down south and all the heads in Cab were forced to split into sides when all the heads back in Saigon split into sides. That punk bitch Dustin Vang went BTK and my mum went 5T.’
‘What’s 5T?’
Darren looks around at his friends. They smile. They all chant something in Vietnamese. He stands and unzips his red nylon Adidas jacket, pulls down a white singlet to reveal a tattoo on his chest, a large numeral ‘5’ with a ‘T’ in the shape of a dagger, stabbing into a throbbing black heart emblazoned with five Vietnamese words: Tình, Tiên, Tù, Tôi and Thu.
The 5T gang chant in unison. ‘Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge’.
Darren nods. ‘Fuck yeah,’ he says approvingly.
There’s a knock on the door of the bunker. A young Vietnamese boy, maybe nine years old, dressed in his own navy nylon Adidas tracksuit, enters the office area. He’s sweating. He hollers something at Darren in Vietnamese.
‘BTK?’ replies Darren.
The boy nods. Darren nods his head at a senior gang member to his right, who nods in turn at three other members who rush out of the bunker.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Fuckin’ BTK crew walking down Grant Street,’ Darren says. ‘They’re not supposed to be walkin’ on fuckin’ Grant Street.’
Darren is frustrated, impatient. He looks down at my bag again.
‘How much?’ he asks.
‘Sorry?’ I say.
‘How much?’ he repeats. ‘What are you asking?’
‘For the gear?’ I clarify.
‘No, Tink, for you to blow my Charlie dick. Yes, how much you askin’ for the gear?’
‘That’s the gear your mum sold Lyle almost four years ago,’ I say.
‘You don’t say,’ he says, dry and sarcastic. ‘I thought you might have started up your own import business out at bumfuck Bracken Ridge.’
I make my sales pitch. I rehearsed it six times in our bedroom yesterday, but there weren’t fourteen intimidating Vietnamese men in sunglasses staring at me in my bedroom.
‘I figure with the focus Queensland Police have put on the heroin trade of late that prices for gear of that integrity . . .’
‘Ha!’ laughs Darren. ‘Integrity? I like that, Tink, sounds like your sellin’ me an English butler or something. Integrity.’ The gang members laugh.
I soldier on.
‘. . . gear of that quality, I figure, would be tough to come by and so I’m thinking, for the amount we have in that bag there, a fair price would be . . .’
I look into Darren’s eyes. He’s done this before. I’ve never done this. Five hours ago I was drawing my stick portrait as a knight holding Excalibur in the heat mist on Dad’s bathroom shower door. Now I’m making a heroin deal with the sixteen-year-old leader of the 5T gang. ‘Ummmm . . .’ Damn it, don’t say ‘ummmm’. Confidence. ‘Er . . . $80,000?’
Darren smiles. ‘I like your style, Eli,’ he says.
He turns to another gang member. Talks in Vietnamese. The gang member rushes into another room.
‘What’s he doing?’ I ask.
‘He’s grabbing you your $50,000,’ Darren says.
‘Fifty thousand?’ I echo. ‘I said $80,000. What about inflation?’
‘Tink, the only inflation I can see right now is the hot air blowing up your arse.’ Darren smiles. ‘Yes, it’s probably worth at least $100,000, but as much as I love you, Eli, you are you and I am me and the problem with being you right now, aside from the fact you can’t bowl a cricket ball to save yourself, is the fact you would not have the faintest clue where to take that gear anywhere beyond that door behind you.’
I turn around and look at the door behind me. Fair point well made.
Darren laughs. ‘Aaaaah, I’ve missed you, Eli Bell,’ he says.
Three gang members burst back into the office barking frantic words at Darren.
‘Fuckin’ gook cunts,’ Darren barks.
He barks at his gang members in thick Vietnamese. The gang members all rush to an adjoining room and re-emerge just as fast carrying machetes. Another gang member emerges from a separate room holding my $50,000 in three brick-shaped blocks of $50 notes. The men with machetes file down the hallway with military diligence, clanging their machetes excitedly against the hallway walls as they exit the bunker.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I ask.
‘Fuckin’ BTK have broken the peace agreement,’ Darren says, opening a long drawer in his desk. ‘They’re about two minutes from my fuckin’ house. I’m gonna cut their fuckin’ BTK heads off like the catfish cunts they are.’
He brings out a gleaming gold-coloured custom-made machete emblazoned with the 5T logo.
‘What about me?’ I ask.
‘Oh, yeah,’ he says.
He leans back down to his drawer and pulls out another machete, tosses it to me.
I fumble for the handle and the blade nearly lodges into my foot on its way to the ground. I quickly pick up the weapon.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean, we need to finish the deal.’
‘Tink, the deal’s fuckin’ done,’ he says.
His helper hands me my backpack. The drugs have disappeared from the bag and been replaced with blocks of cash.
‘Let’s go,’ Darren says.
Darren rushes down the hallway, a warrior’s bloodlust across his face.
‘I think I’ll just wait in here till you guys are all done,’ I say.
‘’Fraid not, Tink,’ he says. ‘We got enough money in this bunker to feed Big Rooster to the people of Vietnam for six months. We gotta lock this joint up.’
‘I’ll just slip out over the back fence,’ I say.
‘We got barbed wire walls on all sides. Ain’t no way outta here but through that front gate,’ he says. ‘What’s wrong with you anyway? These BTK fuckers wanna take over our crib. They want all the Darra territories. You gonna let these fuckers take over our hometown? This is our turf, Tink. We gotta defend it.’
*
The battle starts much like any other throughout history. The heads of each opposing clan exchange words.
‘I’m gonna cut your nose off, Tran, and stick a key ring through your nostril,’ Darren calls from the front of his house on the cul-de-sac of Arcadia Street, standing in the centre of a group of 5T members that has now swelled to about thirty.
At the entrance to the street stands the man who I guess is named Tran, before his gang of fidgety BTK barbarians who do indeed appear to have been placed on this earth for the sole purpose of ending the lives of others. Tran holds a machete in his right hand and a hammer in his left, leading a group that outnumbers Darren’s by at least ten.
‘I’m gonna cut your ears off, Darren, and sing the Marching Song into them every night before supper,’ Tran says.
Then the clanging starts. Gang members on both sides clanging the metal weapon of the man next to them. A rhythmic clanging that escalates in intensity. A call to war. A song of doom.
And something inside me, my own lust for life, my own quest for peace perhaps, or maybe just my innate fear of having a machete lodged into my scalp, makes me push through the huddle of 5T members from my position behind them.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I walk into the centre of Arcadia Street, the very centre of the divide between these two bloodthirsty groups. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ I call. And the clanging of machetes halts. Silence fills the street and my shaky voice echoes across Darra.
‘I know there’s no reason why you should listen to me,’ I call. ‘I’m just some idiot who dropped in to see his mate. But I really feel an outsider’s perspective might help you guys resolve any grievances you may have against each other.’
I turn to each side. A look of profound befuddlement can be seen on the faces of Darren and Tran.
‘Sons of Darra,’ I say. ‘Sons of Vietnam. Was it not war that forced your families from their homelands? Was it not hate and division and miscommunication that brought you to this beautiful suburb in the first place? There’s a strange land out past the borders of Darra and that place is called Australia. And that place isn’t always nice to newcomers. That place isn’t always welcoming to outsiders. You guys will face enough fights out there, out there beyond this sanctuary of home. You need to fight together out there, not against each other in here.’
I point to my own head.
‘Maybe it’s time we all started using a bit more of this,’ I say.
And I raise my machete.
‘And a bit less of this.’
I slowly and symbolically place my machete flat on the bitumen of a motionless Arcadia Street. Darren looks at his men. Tran lowers his arms for a moment and looks across at his soldiers. Then he looks back at me. Then he raises his weapons once more.
‘Tan coooooong!’ he screams. And the BTK army charges forth, machetes and hammers and crowbars raised to the Brisbane sky.
‘Kill ’em all!’ screams Darren, as the merciless 5T army sprints forward, rubber shoes rushing on the street and metal clanging in anticipation. I turn and sprint to the side of the street just as the two rabid armies meet in an explosion of flesh on flesh and blade on blade. I leap over a knee-high fence and into the front garden of a small cottage home, four doors up from Darren’s house. I fall to my belly and crawl across the cottage home’s front lawn, praying a BTK member hasn’t spotted my escape. I crawl to the side of the house and find shelter behind a white rosebush from where I take one last look at the Great Machete Battle of Arcadia Street. Blades whistling through air, fists and elbows finding foreheads and noses. Legs kicking into stomachs. Knees meeting eyeballs. Darren Dang leaps briefly and triumphantly out of the melee on an arcing flight towards some unsuspecting rival warrior. My hand reaches to the bottom of my backpack to feel for the fifty grand still sitting in there. And I thank the gods of war for remembering the sixth ‘T’. Turn and run.