Wake up. Darkness. Moonlight through the bedroom window bouncing off August’s face. He’s sitting by my lower bunk bed, rubbing sweat from my forehead.
‘Did I wake you again?’ I ask.
He gives a half-smile, nodding. You did, but that’s all right.
‘Same dream again.’
August nods. Thought so.
‘The magic car.’
The magic car dream where August and I are sitting in the back tan vinyl seat of a Holden Kingswood car the same colour as Lena’s sky-blue bedroom walls. We’re playing corners, leaning hard against each other, laughing so hard we might piss our pants, as the man driving the car makes sharp lefts and rights around bends. I wind the window down on my side and a cyclonic wind blows me along the car seat pinning August to his side door. I push with all my strength against the wind funnelling through the window and I lean my head out to discover we’re flying through the sky and the driver of this mystery vehicle is ducking and weaving through clouds. I wind the window back up and it turns grey outside. Everywhere grey. ‘Just a rain cloud,’ August says. Because he talks in this dream.
Then it’s grey and green outside the car window. Everything grey and green outside, and wet. Then a school of bream swim past my window and the car passes a forest of waving seaweed ferns. We’re not driving through a rain cloud. We’re driving to the bottom of an ocean. The driver turns around and that driver is my father. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says.
My dad’s name is Robert Bell.
*
‘I’m starving.’
August nods. Lyle didn’t give us a flogging for finding his secret room. I wish he had. The silence is worse. The looks of disappointment. I’d take ten open-palm smacks across my arse over this feeling that I’m getting older, that I’m getting too old for smacks across my arse and too old for creeping into secret rooms I was never supposed to know about; too old for squawking about finding dope bags in mower catchers. Lyle hauled us out of the thunderbox this afternoon in silence. He didn’t have to tell us where to go. We went to our bedroom out of common sense. Rage was coming off Lyle like a bad cologne. Our room was the safest place to be, our cramped sanctuary decorated by a single long-faded McDonald’s promotional poster showing team photos from the 1982–83 Benson & Hedges World Series Cup one-day cricket competition between Australia, England and New Zealand, with a special cock and balls ink tribute August has added to the forehead of David Gower in the front row for the Poms. We didn’t get dinner. We didn’t get a single word, so we just went to bed.
‘Fuck this, I’m gettin’ somethin’ to eat,’ I say a couple of hours later.
I tiptoe down the hall in darkness, into the kitchen. Open the fridge, a corridor of light filling the kitchen. There’s an old wad of plastic-wrapped deli luncheon meat, a tub of ETA 5 Star margarine. I close the fridge door and turn left towards the pantry and bump into August, already laying four slices of bread on a cutting board on the bench. Luncheon meat sandwiches with tomato sauce. August takes his to the front window of the living room so he can stare up at the moon. He reaches the window and immediately hunches down in a panicked effort to stay out of sight.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
He waves his right hand downwards. I duck down and join him beneath the window. He nods his head upwards, raises his eyebrows. Have a look. Slowly. I raise my head to the bottom of the window and peek out to the street. It’s past midnight and Lyle is out on the kerbside, resting on the brick fence by the letterbox, smoking a Winfield Red. ‘What’s he doing?’
August shrugs, peeks out alongside me, puzzled. Lyle wears his thick roo-shooting coat, the thick woolly collar up, breaking the midnight chill against his neck. He blows cigarette smoke that floats against the dark like a grey ghost.
We both drop down again, chomp into our sandwiches. August drips tomato sauce onto the carpet beneath the window.
‘Sauce, Gus,’ I say.
We’re not allowed to eat food on this carpet now that Lyle and Mum are all drug-free and house-proud. August wipes the drops of sauce up from the carpet with his thumb and forefinger, licking the recovered red sauce from his fingers. He spits on the red stain left on the carpet and rubs it in, not enough for Mum not to notice.
Then a loud popping sound echoes across our suburb.
August and I immediately hop up, eyes peeking out through the window. In the night sky, about a block away, a purple firework whizzes into the darkness above the suburban houses, rising and fizzing with a corkscrew velocity before reaching its peak elevation and exploding into ten or so smaller firework strands that umbrella-pop into a briefly luminous and vivid purple sky fountain.
Lyle watches the firework flare out then he takes one more long drag of the Winfield and drops it at his feet, stubbing it out beneath his right boot. He puts his hands into the pockets of his roo-shooting coat and starts walking up the street in the direction of the firework.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I whisper.
I stuff the rest of my luncheon meat and tomato sauce sandwich into my mouth so it must look like I’m eating two large marbles. August stays beneath the window eating his sandwich.
‘C’mon, Gus, let’s go,’ I whisper.
He still sits there, processing like always, running the angles like always, weighing the options like always.
He shakes his head.
‘C’mon, don’t you want to know where he’s going?’
August gives a half-smile. The right forefinger that he just used to wipe up tomato sauce slashes through the air, scribbling the invisible lines of two words.
Already know.
*
I’ve been following people for years. The key elements to a successful follow are distance and belief. Distance enough from the subject to remain undetected. Belief enough to convince yourself you’re not actually following the subject, even though you are. Belief means invisibility. Just another invisible stranger in a world of invisible strangers.
Cold out here. I give Lyle a good fifty-metre start. I’m just past the letterbox when I realise I’m barefoot in my winter pyjamas, the ones with the large hole over my right arse cheek. Lyle marches on, hands in his coat, drifting into the darkness beyond the streetlights that line the entrance to the Ducie Street Park across the road from our house. Lyle turns into a shadow, crossing the cricket pitch at the centre of the black oval, climbing up a hill that leads to a kids’ playground and the council barbecue that we had a sausage sizzle on for August’s thirteenth birthday last March. I’m creeping softly across the oval grass like a phantom, walking on air, ninja quiet, ninja quick. Snap. A thin dry stick breaks beneath my bare right foot. Lyle stops beneath a streetlight at the other side of the park. He turns and looks back into the park darkness engulfing me. He’s staring right at me but he can’t see me because I have distance and I have belief. I believe I am invisible. And Lyle does too. He turns from the park and walks on, head down, along Stratheden Street. I wait until he turns right into Harrington Street before I sprint out of the park darkness and into the exposed streetlights of Stratheden. A sprawling mango tree on the corner of Stratheden and Harrington provides the visual protection I need to watch Lyle, clear as day, take a left into Arcadia Street and into the driveway of Darren Dang’s house.
*
Darren Dang is in my grade at school. There’s only eighteen of us Year 7 students at Darra State School and we all agree that handsome Vietnamese-Australian Darren Dang is by far the most likely of us to become famous, probably for killing all eighteen of us in a classroom machine-gun massacre. Last month while we were working on projects about the First Fleet, making British ships out of Paddle Pop sticks, Darren passed by my desk. ‘Hey, Tink,’ he whispered.
Eli Bell. Tinkerbell. Tink.
‘Hey, Tink. Bottle bins. Lunchtime.’
That translated to, ‘You best come by the large yellow metal bottle recycling bins behind groundsman Mr McKinnon’s tool shed at lunchtime if you are at all interested in continuing your modest Queensland state school education with both of your ears.’ I waited for thirty minutes by the bottle bins and was thinking, with false hope, that Darren Dang might not make our impromptu rendezvous when he crept up behind me and gripped the back of my neck between his right forefinger and thumb. ‘If you saw ninjas, you’re seeing ghosts,’ he whispered. It’s a line from The Octagon. Two months earlier, during a Physical Education class, I’d told Darren Dang that I, like him, believed the Chuck Norris movie about a secret training camp for terrorist ninjas was the best movie ever made. I had lied. Tron is the best movie ever made.
‘Ha!’ laughed Eric Voight, Darren’s roly-poly empty-headed muscle from a family of roly-poly empty-headed mechanics who run the Darra Auto Transmission and Window Tinting shop across the road from the Darra brickworks. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shit his little fairy pants.’
‘Shat,’ I said. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shat his pants, Eric.’
Darren turned to the bottle bins and dug his hands into a collection of Mr McKinnon’s empty spirits bottles.
‘How much does this guy drink?’ he said, clutching a Black Douglas bottle and sucking down half a capful of liquor resting at the bottom. He did the same with a small bottle of Jack Daniels, then a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘You good?’ he said, offering me the dregs of a Stone’s Green Ginger Wine.
‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Why did you want to meet me?’
Darren smiled and slung a large canvas duffle bag off his right shoulder.
He reached into the duffle bag.
‘Close your eyes,’ Darren said.
Such requests from Darren Dang always end in tears or blood. But, like school, once you start with Darren Dang there’s no realistic way of avoiding Darren Dang.
‘Why?’ I asked.
Eric pushed me hard in the chest: ‘Just close your eyes, Bell End.’
I closed my eyes and instinctively cupped my hands over my balls.
‘Open your eyes,’ Darren said. And I opened my eyes to see a close-up view of a large brown rat, its two front teeth nervously buzzing up and down like a council jackhammer.
‘Fuckin’ell, Darren,’ I barked.
Darren and Eric howled with laughter.
‘Found him in the storeroom,’ he said.
Darren Dang’s mum, ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang, and his stepdad, Quan Nguyen, run the Little Saigon Big Fresh supermarket at the end of Darra Station Road, a one-stop super shop for Vietnamese imported vegetables, fruits, spices, meats and whole fresh fish. The storeroom at the rear of the supermarket, next to the meat locker, is, much to Darren’s joy, home to south-east Queensland’s longest and most well fed dynasty of obese brown rats.
‘Hold him for a second,’ Darren said, foisting the rat into my reluctant hands.
The rat trembled in my palms, inactive with fear.
‘This is Jabba,’ Darren said, reaching into his duffle bag. ‘Grab his tail.’
I half-heartedly gripped the rat’s tail with my right forefinger and thumb.
Darren then pulled a machete from his duffle bag.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘Granddad’s machete.’
The machete was longer than Darren’s right arm. It had a tan wooden handle and a large wide blade, rusting at its flat sides but oiled and silver and gleaming on its cutting edge.
‘No, you really gotta get a good grip on his tail or you’ll lose him,’ Darren said. ‘Really wrap your fist around the tail.’
‘You gotta hold it tight like you were holding your dick, Bell End, because he’ll take off,’ Eric said.
I gripped the tail tight in my fist.
Darren pulled a red cloth like a large handkerchief from his duffle bag.
‘Okay, now place him on the septic but don’t let him go,’ he said.
‘Maybe Eric should hold him?’ I said.
‘You’re holding him,’ Darren said, something unhinged in his eyes, something unpredictable.
There was a concrete underground septic tank with a heavy red metal lid by the bottle bins. I placed Jabba gently on the tank, my right hand gripping his tail.
‘Don’t move a muscle, Tink,’ Darren said.
Darren rolled the large red handkerchief into a blindfold and wrapped it around his eyes, resting on his knees like a Japanese warrior about to drive a blade into his own heart.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Darren, seriously,’ I said.
‘Don’t move, Tink,’ barked Eric, standing over me.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve done this twice already,’ Darren said.
Jabba, poor dumb rat, was as fear-stiff and meek as I was. He turned to me with his teeth rattling up and down, confused and terrified.
Darren gripped the machete handle with both hands and raised it slowly and methodically above his head, the unsubtle instrument’s cutting blade sparkling for a moment in the full sun that was lighting this hellish stage.
‘Wait, Darren, you’re gonna chop my hand off,’ I stammered.
‘Bullshit,’ Eric said. ‘He’s ninja blood. He can see your hand better in his mind than he can with his actual eyes.’
Eric put a secure hand on my shoulder to keep me in place.
‘Just don’t fuckin’ move,’ he said.
Darren took a deep breath. Exhaled. I took one last look at Jabba, his body cringing with fear, motionless, like he thought if he just stayed still we might forget he was even there.
Darren’s machete dropped down in a swift and violent whoosh and the oiled and gleaming blade dug into the septic tank lid with a brief yellow spark a centimetre from my closed fist.
Darren slipped his blindfold off in triumph to gaze upon the bloody remains of Jabba the Rat. But there was nothing to see. Jabba had vanished.
‘What da fark, Tink?’ Darren shouted, his Vietnamese accent more evident in anger.
‘He let him run!’ Eric screamed. ‘He let him run!’
Eric wrapped his arm around my neck, the foul stench of his armpit like an old swamp. I caught sight of Jabba scurrying to freedom through a gap beneath the mesh school fence into the thick scrub running alongside Mr McKinnon’s tool shed.
‘You dishonour me, Tink,’ Darren whispered.
Eric spread his belly weight over my back, forcing me flat onto the septic tank.
‘Blood for blood,’ Eric said.
‘You know the warrior’s code, Eli Bell,’ Darren said formally.
‘No, I really don’t know the code, Darren,’ I said. ‘And besides, I believe that ancient code was more of a loose guide than anything else.’
‘Blood for blood, Eli Bell,’ Darren said. ‘When the river of courage runs dry, blood flows in its place.’ He nodded at Eric. ‘Finger,’ he said.
Eric reefed my right arm back out across the septic tank.
‘Fuck, Darren,’ I hollered. ‘Think about this for a second. You’ll get expelled.’
Eric yanked my right forefinger out of my closed fist.
‘Darren, think about what you’re doing,’ I begged. ‘They’ll put you in juvenile.’
‘I accepted my path long ago, Eli Bell. How about you?’
Darren slipped the blindfold over his eyes once more and raised the machete with both hands high over his head. Eric twisted my wrist to breaking point and pushed down hard, clamping my outstretched and exposed finger to the septic tank lid. I screamed in agony under the pressure. My finger was the rat. My finger was the rat wanting to disappear. My right forefinger, the one with my lucky freckle on its middle knuckle. My lucky freckle. My lucky finger. I stared at that lucky freckle and I prayed and I prayed for good fortune. And that’s exactly when Mr McKinnon, early-seventies drunk Scotch-loving Irish groundsman, rounded the corner of his tool shed and stood, perplexed, by the scene of the Vietnamese boy in a red blindfold about to sacrificially sever the forefinger of the boy with the lucky freckle who was spread out across the septic tank.
‘What the hell’s going on here!’ Mr McKinnon barked.
‘Run!’ Eric screamed.
Darren fled, indeed, with the stealthy reaction powers of his beloved ninja. Eric was slower to lift his burdensome belly fat off my left shoulder but he evaded the clutches of Mr McKinnon’s thick sweeping left arm, which eventually found a hold on the back pocket of my maroon cotton school shorts, making me look like Wile E. Coyote running on air as I tried to beat a useless getaway.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Mr McKinnon said, his breath reeking of Black Douglas.
*
Creeping now, hunched down, to the Dang family’s fence made of tall brown timber palings with pointed ends. Lyle padding down Darren Dang’s long driveway. Darren Dang’s house is one of the biggest in Darra. Three thousand yellow bricks bought half-price direct from the Darra brickworks, shaped into a three-storey house with Italian mansion ambitions but bad-taste cheap-suburbia realities. The front lawn is the size of half a football field and lined with maybe fifty tall palm trees. I slip briefly down the long concrete driveway then peel off right among the front lawn palms to stay out of sight. Closer to the house is a trampoline surrounded by plastic princess castles belonging to Darren’s three younger sisters, Kylie Dang, Karen Dang and Sandy Dang. I scurry to the trampoline, duck behind the largest of the princess castles, a pink plastic fairytale kingdom with a brown drawbridge fashioned into a children’s slide, with castle walls big enough for me to hide behind as I watch Lyle sitting with Darren’s mum and stepdad, Bich and Quan, on a lounge suite through the sliding glass doors of their living room.
‘Back Off’ Bich Dang earned her nickname with acts of unspeakable savagery. As well as the Little Saigon supermarket, she owns a large Vietnamese restaurant and the neighbouring hairdressing salon where I get my hair cut, across from Darra train station. Quan Nguyen is more her humble loyal servant than her husband. Bich is famous in my town as much for her selfless sponsorship of Darra community events – dances, historical society show days, fundraising flea markets – as she is for the time she stabbed a Year 5 Darra State School girl, Cheryl Vardy, in the left eye with a steel ruler for teasing Karen Dang about having steamed rice every day for school lunch. Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and I never understood why Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realised Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence. Nobody knows what happened to her first husband, Darren’s dad, Lu Dang. He disappeared six years ago. Everybody says Bich poisoned him, laced his prawn and pork rice paper rolls with arsenic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she stabbed him in the heart with a steel ruler.
Bich wears a light purple dressing gown, her mid-fifties face made up even at this hour. All the Vietnamese mums in Darra have the same look: big black hair in a bun so heavily treated it can bounce light beams, white powdery foundation on their cheeks and long black eyelashes that make them look permanently startled.
Bich has her hands folded, elbows resting on her knees, giving instructions, pointing her forefingers occasionally the way the great Parramatta Eels coach Jack Gibson used to give instructions to his on-field brains trust, Ray Price and Peter Sterling, from the sideline. Bich nods her head at something Lyle is saying and then she points at her husband, Quan. She directs him away somewhere and he nods obediently, waddles out of view and then returns with a large rectangular Styrofoam ice box, the same kind the Dangs keep their whole fresh fish in at the Little Saigon supermarket. Quan places the box at Lyle’s feet.
Then a sharp and cold metal blade presses against my neck.
‘Ring, ring, Eli Bell.’
Darren Dang’s laugh echoes through the palm trees.
‘Jeez, Tink,’ he says, ‘if you’re trying to stay invisible you might want to think about changing out of your old pyjamas. I could see that pale Aussie arse all the way from my letterbox.’
‘Good advice, Darren.’
The blade is long and thin and presses hard into the side of my neck.
‘Is that a samurai sword?’ I ask.
‘Fuck yeah,’ he says proudly. ‘Bought it at the pawn shop. Been sharpening it for six straight hours today. Reckon I could take your head off in one slice. Wanna see?’
‘How would I see it if I don’t have a head?’
‘Your brain still works even after it gets chopped off. It’d be cool. Your eyeballs looking up from the ground, me waving at you, holding your headless body. Fuck. What a funny way to go out!’
‘Yeah, I’m laughing my head off.’
Darren howls.
‘That’s good, Tink,’ he says. Then, on a dime, he turns serious, pushes the blade harder against my neck.
‘Why are you spying on your dad?’
‘He’s not my dad.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s my mum’s boyfriend.’
‘He good?’
‘Good at what?’
The blade isn’t pushing so hard against my neck now.
‘Good to your mum.’
‘Yeah, he’s real good.’
Darren relaxes the sword, walks over to the trampoline, parks his backside on the edge of the trampoline, his legs hanging over the steel springs connected to the black bounce canvas. He’s dressed all in black, his black sweater and tracksuit pants as black as his bowl haircut.
‘You want a smoke?’
‘Sure.’
He moves his sword, spears it into the ground, to make room for me on the trampoline’s edge. He takes two smokes from a soft white packet with no branding, lights them in his mouth and hands me one. I suck a tentative drag and it burns my insides, makes me cough hard. Darren laughs.
‘North Vietnam durries, Tink,’ he smiles. ‘Kick like a mule. Good buzz, though.’
I nod heartily, my head spinning with the second drag.
We look up through the living room sliding doors at Lyle and Bich and Quan talking over the Styrofoam ice box.
‘Won’t they see us?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘They don’t notice shit when they’re doing business. Fuckin’ amateurs. It’ll be their undoing.’
‘What are they doing up there?’
‘You don’t know?’
I shake my head. Darren smiles.
‘C’mon, Tink. You must know. You might be full Aussie but you’re not that fuckin’ dumb.’
I smile.
‘The box is full of heroin,’ I say.
Darren blows cigarette smoke into the night.
‘And . . .’ he says.
‘And the purple firework was some kind of secret alert system. It’s how your mum lets her clients know their orders are ready.’
Darren smiles.
‘Order up!’ he says.
‘Different coloured fireworks for different dealers.’
‘Very good, Flathead,’ Darren says. ‘Your good man up there is running for his boss.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ I say. Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.
Darren drags on his cigarette, nodding.
‘When did you work all this out?’
‘Just now.’
Darren smiles.
‘How do you feel?’
I say nothing. Darren chuckles. He hops off the trampoline, picks up his samurai sword.
‘You feel like stabbing something?’
I dwell on this curious opportunity for a moment.
‘Yes, Darren. I do.’
*
The car is parked two blocks from Darren’s house in Winslow Street outside a small low-set box of a home with its lights out. It’s a small jelly-bean dark green Holden Gemini.
Darren pulls a black balaclava from the back of his pants and slips it over his head.
From his pants pocket he pulls a stocking.
‘Here, put this on,’ he says, creeping low towards the car.
‘Where’d this come from?’
‘Mum’s dirty clothes basket.’
‘I’ll pass, thanks.’
‘Don’t worry, they slip on fine. She’s got fat thighs for a Vietnamese woman.’
‘This is Father Monroe’s car,’ I say.
Darren nods, hopping quietly onto the car’s bonnet. His weight makes a dent in the car’s old, rusting metal.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Ssssshhh!’ Darren whispers, one arm down on Father Monroe’s windscreen to prop his weight as he crawls up and stands in the centre of the car’s roof.
‘C’mon, don’t fuck with Father Monroe’s car.’
Father Monroe. Earnest and ageing Father Monroe, softly spoken retired priest from Glasgow via Darwin and Townsville and Emerald, in Queensland’s Central Highlands. Butt of jokes, keeper of sins and frozen paper cups of orange and lime cordial that he keeps in his downstairs freezer and gives to permanently thirsty local kids like August and me.
‘What did he ever do to you?’
‘Nothing,’ Darren says. ‘He did nothing to me. It was Froggy Mills he did something to.’
‘He’s a good man, let’s just get out of here.’
‘Good man?’ Darren echoes. ‘That’s not what Froggy says. Froggy says Father Monroe pays him a tenner every Sunday after mass to show him his dick while he whacks off.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Froggy doesn’t bullshit. He’s religious. Father Monroe told him it’s a sin to bullshit but it’s not a sin, of course, to show a seventy-five-year-old man your bat and balls.’
‘You won’t even get it through the metal.’
Darren taps his shoe on the car roof.
‘That’s thin metal. Half rusted out. This blade has been sharpened for six hours straight. Finest Japanese steel all the way from—’
‘The Mill Street Pawnbrokers.’
Through the holes in his balaclava, Darren closes his eyes. He raises the blade high with both fists gripping the handle, concentrating on something inside, like an old warrior about to ritually end the life of his best friend, or his favourite Australian suburban getabout motorcar. ‘Shit,’ I say, frantically pulling Bich Dang’s unwashed stocking over my head.
‘Wake up, time to die,’ Darren says.
He drives the sword down and it stabs into the Gemini with a shriek of metal on metal. The first third of the blade pierces the car roof like Excalibur in stone.
Darren’s mouth drops open.
‘Fuck, it went through.’ He beams. ‘You see that, Tink!’
A light goes on in Father Monroe’s house.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I bark.
Darren reefs at the sword handle but the lodged shaft doesn’t move. He tugs hard three times with both hands. ‘It won’t come.’ He bends the top end of the blade shaft back towards himself, then forward, but the bottom end won’t move.
A window opens in Father Monroe’s living room.
‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?’ Father Monroe bellows through a half-open window.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I urge.
Father Monroe opens his front door and steams down his pathway to his gate.
‘Get off my car!’ he screams.
‘Fuck,’ Darren says, leaping off the back of the car.
Father Monroe reaches his car and sees the samurai sword twanging back and forth, its mystical shaft speared inexplicably through the top of the parked car.
Darren turns around at a safe distance, joyously waving around the Vietnamese cock he’s pulled from his pants.
‘Just ten dong for this donger, Father!’ he screams.
*
Still night air and two boys smoking on a gutter. Stars up there. A cane toad down here has been flattened by a car tyre on the bitumen road a metre from my right foot. Its pink tongue has exploded from its mouth so it looks like the toad was flattened halfway through eating a raspberry lolly snake.
‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ Darren says.
‘What?’
‘Growing up thinking you were with the good guys, when all along you were running with the bad guys.’
‘I’m not running with the bad guys.’
Darren shrugs. ‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘I remember when I first found out Mum was in the game. Cops burst through our door when we were living over in Inala. Turned the place upside down. I was seven years old and I shit my pants. I mean, I actually shit my pants.’
The cops stripped Bich Dang naked, threw her against fibro walls, smashed household items with relish. Darren was watching The Partridge Family on a large National television that detectives tipped over looking for drugs.
‘It was fuckin’ mad, stuff breaking everywhere, Mum screaming at them, kicking her legs, scratchin’ ’em and shit. They dragged Mum away out the front door and left me alone on the floor of the lounge room crying like a bitch, huge big dump in my dacks. I was so stunned I just sat watching that Partridge mum talking to her kids upside down on the telly.’
I shake my head.
‘That’s insane,’ I say.
‘That’s the game,’ Darren shrugs. ‘’Bout two years later Mum gave it to me straight. We were key players. I felt like you’re feeling now.’
He says this sinking feeling inside me is the realisation that I’m with the bad guys but I’m not the baddest of the bad guys.
‘The baddest guys just work for you,’ he says.
Paid killers, humourless and mad, he says. Ex-army, ex-prison, ex-human. Single men in their thirties and forties. Mysterious bastards, weirder than the kind who squish avocadoes between their fingers at fruit and veg markets. The kind who will squeeze a man’s neck until it squishes. All the villains operating between the cracks of this quiet city. Thieves and cons and men who rape and kill children. Assassins, of a kind, but not the kind we love from The Octagon. These men wear flip-flops and Stubbies shorts. They stab people not with samurai swords but with the knives they use to slice Sunday roast when their widowed mothers drop in. Suburban psychopaths. Darren’s mentors.
‘They don’t work for me,’ I say.
‘Well, they work for your dad,’ Darren says.
‘He’s not my dad.’
‘Oh, forgot, sorry. Where’s your real dad?’
‘Bracken Ridge.’
‘He good?’
Everybody wants to measure the adult men in my life by goodness. I measure them in details. In memories. In the times they said my name.
‘Never found out,’ I say. ‘What’s with you and men being good?’
‘Never met a good one, that’s all,’ he says. ‘Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don’t ever trust ’em.’
‘Where’s your real dad?’ I ask.
Darren stands up from the gutter, spits a jet of saliva through gritted teeth.
‘He’s right where he should be,’ he says.
*
We walk back down Darren’s driveway, resume our places at the edge of the trampoline. Lyle and Bich are still deep into a seemingly endless conversation.
‘Don’t sweat it, man,’ Darren says. ‘You just won the lottery. You’ve landed smack bang inside a growth industry. The market for that shit up there in the ice box never dies.’
Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation’s inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
‘Ten, twenty years, I’ll own three-quarters of Darra, maybe half of Inala, a good chunk of Richlands,’ Darren says.
‘How?’
‘Expansion, Tink,’ he says, eyes wide. ‘I got plans. This area won’t always be the city’s shithole. Some day, man, all these houses round here will be worth somethin’ and I’ll buy ’em all when they’re worth nothin’. And the gear is like that too. Time and place, Tink. That gear up there ain’t worth shit in Vietnam. Put it on a boat and sail it to Cape York, it turns to gold. It’s like magic. Stick it in the ground and let it sit for ten years, it’ll turn to diamond. Time and place.’
‘How come you don’t talk this much in class?’
‘There’s nothing I’m passionate about in class.’
‘Dealing drugs is your passion?’
‘Dealing? Fuck that. Too much heat, too many variables. We’re strictly imports. We don’t make deals. We just make arrangements. We let you Aussies do the real dirty work of putting it on the street.’
‘So Lyle’s doing your dirty work?’
‘No,’ Darren says. ‘He’s doing Tytus Broz’s dirty work.’
Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.
‘Hey, a man’s gotta work, Tink.’
Darren puts his arm around my shoulder.
‘Listen, I never thanked you for not ratting on me about Jabba,’ he says. He laughs. ‘You didn’t rat about the rat.’
The school groundsman, Mr McKinnon, marched me by the collar to the principal’s office. Mr McKinnon was too blind, or too blind drunk, to identify the two boys who were intending to slice my right forefinger off with a machete.
All McKinnon could say was, ‘One of ’em was Vietmanese.’ And that could have been half our school. It wasn’t out of loyalty that I didn’t name names, more self-preservation, and one week’s detention writing number facts in an exercise pad was a small price to pay for my hearing.
‘We could use a guy like you,’ Darren says. ‘I need men I can trust. Whaddya reckon? You want to help me build my empire?’
I stare for a moment up at Lyle, still discussing business with fierce Bich Dang and her humble husband.
‘Thanks for the offer, Darren, but, you know, I never really considered heroin empire building as part of my life plan.’
‘Is that right?’ He flicks his cigarette butt into his sister’s fairy castle. ‘The man with the plan. So what’s Tink Bell’s grand life plan?’
I shrug.
‘C’mon, Eli, smart Aussie mud crab like you, tell me how you’re gonna crawl out of this shit bucket?’
I look up at the night sky. There’s the Southern Cross. The saucepan, the set of white stars shimmering, shaped like the small stovetop pot Lyle boils his eggs in every Saturday morning.
‘I’m gonna be a journalist,’ I say.
‘Ha!’ Darren howls. ‘A journalist?’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna work on the crime desk at The Courier-Mail. I’m gonna have a house in The Gap and I’m gonna spend my life writing crime stories for the paper.’
‘Ha! One of the bad guys making a living writing about the bad guys,’ Darren says. ‘And why in fuck you wanna live in The Gap?’
We’d bought our Atari games console through the Trading Post. Lyle drove us out to a family in The Gap, a leafy suburb eight kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD, who had recently purchased a Commodore 64 desktop computer and no longer needed their Atari, which they sold to us for $36. I’d never seen so many tall trees in one suburb. Tall blue gums that shaded kids playing handball in suburban cul-de-sacs. I love cul-desacs. Darra doesn’t have enough cul-de-sacs.
‘The cul-de-sacs,’ I say.
‘What the fuck is a cul-de-sac?’ Darren asks.
‘It’s what you’re on here. A street with a dead end. Great for playing handball and cricket. No cars going through.’
‘Yeah, I love a no-through road,’ he says. He shakes his head. ‘Man, you want to get some joint in The Gap, that shit ain’t gonna happen for twenty, thirty years in some journalising bullshit. You need to go get some degree, then ya gotta go beg for some job from some arsehole who’ll boss you around for thirty years and you’ll have to save your pennies and by the time you’re done savin’ there’ll be no more houses in The Gap left to buy!’
Darren points up into the living room.
‘You see that Styrofoam box beside your good man’s feet up there?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘There’s a whole house in The Gap inside that,’ he says. ‘Us bad guys, Tink, we don’t have to wait to buy houses in The Gap. In my game, we buy them tomorrow if we want to.’
He smiles.
‘Is it fun?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘Your game.’
‘Sure it’s fun,’ he says. ‘You meet lots of interesting people. Lots of opportunities to build your business knowledge. And when the cops are sniffin’ around, you really know you’re alive. You pull off some huge import right under their noses and you make the sales and you bank the profits and you turn around to your family and friends and say, “Goddamn, look at what you can achieve when you act as a team and you really stick to it.”’
He breathes deep.
‘It’s inspiring to me,’ he says. ‘It makes me believe that in a place like Australia, anything really is possible.’
We sit in silence. He flicks the flint on his lighter, hops off the trampoline. He walks to the house’s front staircase.
‘C’mon, let’s go up,’ he says.
I’m puzzled, mute.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asks. ‘Mum wants to meet you.’
‘Why does your mum want to meet me?’
‘She wants to meet the boy who didn’t rat about the rat.’
‘I can’t go up there.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s nearly 1 a.m. and Lyle will kick my arse.’
‘He won’t kick your arse if we don’t want him to.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because he knows who we are.’
‘And who are you?’
‘We’re the bad guys.’
*
We enter through the sliding glass doors off the balcony. Darren marches confidently into the living room, ignoring Lyle sitting in the armchair to his left. His mum sits, elbows resting on her knees, on the long brown leather lounge suite, her husband resting back on the lounge beside her.
‘Hey Mum, I found this guy spying on you all in the yard,’ Darren says.
I enter the living room in my pyjamas with the hole in the arse.
‘This is the kid who didn’t rat about Jabba,’ Darren says.
Lyle turns to his right and he sees me, face filling with rage.
‘Eli, what the hell are you doing here?’ he asks, soft and intense.
‘Darren invited me,’ I say.
‘It’s 1 a.m. Go. Home. Now.’
I turn around immediately and walk back out the living room doors.
Bich Dang releases a gentle laugh from the couch.
‘Are you really going to give up that easily, boy?’ she asks.
I stop. Turn around. Bich Dang smiles, the porcelain white foundation on her face cracking around the wrinkles of her widening mouth.
‘Plead your case, boy,’ she says. ‘Please tell us why exactly you are out at this time in your pyjamas flashing that cute white tush?’
I look at Lyle. He looks at Bich and I follow his gaze.
She takes a long white menthol cigarette from a silver case, lights it, leans back into her lounge as she draws in her first puff, then blows it out, her eyes sparkling as though she’s looking at a newborn baby.
‘Well?’ she prompts.
‘I saw the purple firework,’ I say. Bich nods knowingly. Fuck. I never realised how beautiful she is. She might be in her mid-fifties, early sixties even, but she’s so exotic and so cold-blooded exciting she has the presence of a serpent. Maybe she’s so attractive at this age because she sheds her skin, slips out of her own body when she finds a new one to wriggle through life in. She keeps me in her gaze with that smile until I have to look away from it, drop my head to fiddle with the drawstring on my loose pyjama bottoms.
‘And . . .?’ she says.
‘I . . . ummm . . . I followed Lyle here because . . .’
My throat thickens. Lyle’s fingers dig into his chair’s armrests.
‘Because of all the questions.’
Bich leans forward on the lounge. Studies my face.
‘Come closer,’ she says.
I move two steps towards her.
‘Closer,’ she says. ‘Come to me.’
I shuffle closer and she places her cigarette in the corner of a glass ashtray and she takes my hand to draw me so close that her kneecaps rub against mine. She smells of tobacco and citrus-scented perfume. Her hands are pale white and soft and her fingernails are long and fire-engine red. She studies my face for twenty seconds and she smiles.
‘Oh, busy young Eli Bell, so many thoughts, so many questions,’ she says. ‘Well, go ahead, ask away, boy.’
Bich turns to Lyle, a seriousness across her face.
‘And, Lyle, I trust you’ll answer truthfully,’ she says.
She fixes her hands on my thigh and turns me towards Lyle.
‘Go right ahead, Eli,’ she says.
Lyle sighs, shakes his head. I keep my head down.
‘Bich, this is—’
‘Have courage, boy,’ Bich says, cutting off Lyle. ‘You better use that tongue before Quan here cuts it out and drops it in his noodle soup.’
Quan beams, raises his eyebrows at the prospect.
‘Bich, I don’t think this is necessary,’ Lyle says.
‘Let the boy decide,’ she says, enjoying this moment.
I have a question. I always have a question. I always have too many.
I lift my head, stare into his eyes.
‘Why are you dealing drugs?’ I ask.
Lyle shakes his head, looks away, offers nothing.
Bich sounds like my school principal now. ‘Lyle, the boy deserves an answer, doesn’t he?’
He takes a deep breath, turns back to me.
‘I’m doing it for Tytus,’ he says.
Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs. Lyle does everything for Tytus Broz.
Bich shakes her head: ‘The truth, Lyle.’
He dwells on this for a long moment, digs his fingernails deeper into the armrest. He stands, picks the Styrofoam ice box up from the living room carpet.
‘Tytus will be in touch about the next order,’ he says. ‘Let’s go, Eli.’
He walks out the sliding doors. And I follow him because there was care in his voice just then, his love was in it and I will follow that feeling anywhere.
‘Wait!’ barks Bich Dang.
Lyle stops, so I stop too.
‘Come back here, boy,’ she says.
I look at Lyle. He nods his head. I shuffle cautiously back to Bich. She looks me in the eye.
‘Why did you not rat on my son?’ she asks.
Darren is now sitting up on a kitchen benchtop running off the living room, eating a muesli bar as he silently observes the conversation unfolding before him.
‘Because he’s my friend,’ I say.
Darren seems shocked by the admission. He smiles.
Bich studies my eyes. Nods her head.
‘Who taught you to be so loyal to your friends?’ Bich asks.
I throw my thumb immediately to Lyle.
‘He did.’
Bich smiles. She’s still staring into my eyes when she says, ‘Lyle, if I might be so bold . . .’
‘Yes,’ Lyle says.
‘You bring young Eli back again some time, you hear, and maybe we talk about a few opportunities that have emerged. Let’s see if we can’t consider doing business between ourselves.’
Lyle says nothing. ‘Let’s go Eli,’ he says. We walk out the door, but Bich Dang still has one more question. ‘You still want your answer, Eli?’ she asks.
I stop and turn around.
‘Yes.’
She leans back into the lounge, dragging on her long white cigarette.
She nods, blowing out so much smoke from her mouth that a cloud of grey masks her gaze. The cloud and the serpent and the dragon and the bad guys.
‘It’s all for you.’