A drop in the lake. Mum is asked to be on the organising committee for the school fete that must meet every Saturday for the next month. She wants to do it because she never does that stuff. She hates all those Parents and Friends cows but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to feel like one of them every so often. Then Slim’s chest starts playing up and his piss turns the colour of rust and his doctor tells him he has pneumonia. He’s holed up resting in a small rental unit in Redcliffe on the other side of Brisbane to us. Mum and Lyle don’t have a babysitter to watch over August and me on Saturdays.
Spring, 1986. I’m a high school kid. As opposed to looking out the windows of Darra State School, I take the bus each day with August now to look out the windows of Richlands State High School in Inala. I’m thirteen years old and like any self-respecting Queensland teenager with a deeper voice and bigger balls I want to experience new things, like spending this next month of Saturdays with Lyle on his heroin runs. I subtly remind Mum about August’s and my burning fascination with burning things whenever we don’t have adult supervision. Why, just the other day, I mention, I’d watched August set fire to a petrol-covered globe we found dumped beside a Lifeline charity bin in Oxley. ‘Gonna set the world on fire!’ I hollered as August held his magnifying glass over Australia and a hot apocalyptic dot of magnified sunlight descended over the city of Brisbane.
‘I’ll take ’em to Jindalee pool,’ Lyle says. ‘They can have a swim for a few hours, Teddy and I will make the run, then we’ll grab them on the way home.’
Mum looks at August and me. ‘What do you have left on your homework?’
‘Just the Maths,’ I say.
August nods. Same as Eli.
‘You should have done the Maths first, got the hard stuff out of the way first,’ Mum says.
‘Sometimes life doesn’t work like that, Mum,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you just can’t get the hard stuff out of the way first.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she says. ‘All right, you can go to the pool but you two better have your homework done by the time I get home.’
No problem. But we get to Jindalee pool and it’s closed because the owner is laying a new lining across the empty fifty-metre pool.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle barks.
Teddy is in the driver’s seat because he owns this 1976 olive green Mazda sedan, a mobile kiln even in spring, with hot brown vinyl passenger seats that stick to the undersides of my thighs, August’s too, because he’s wearing the same grey Kmart shorts.
Teddy looks at his watch.
‘We gotta be at Jamboree Heights in seven minutes,’ he says.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle says, shaking his head. ‘Let’s go.’
We pull up outside a two-storey house in Jamboree Heights. The house is made of yellow brick with a large aluminium garage door and a staircase running up the front of the house to a landing where a young shirtless Maori boy, maybe five years old, is furiously skipping on the spot with a pink plastic jump rope. It’s so hot outside that the road bitumen through my car window shimmers with glassy mirage pockets of hot air.
Lyle and Teddy pause for a moment to scan the landscape, look into the car’s rearview and side mirrors. Teddy pops the boot. They exit the Mazda at the same time and walk to the back of the car. Close the boot.
Lyle walks back to his front passenger door carrying a blue plastic chill box and leans into the car.
‘You two just sit here and behave yourselves, all right?’ he says. He goes to shut the door.
‘You gotta be kidding, Lyle.’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It must be fifty degrees in here,’ I say. ‘We’ll be fried in ten minutes flat.’
Lyle sighs, takes a deep breath. He looks around, spots a small tree by the footpath.
‘All right, wait under that tree over there,’ he says.
‘And what do we say when the neighbour comes out and asks us why we’re sitting under his tree?’ I ask. ‘“Just makin’ a quick drug deal, mate. Don’t mind us.”’
‘You’re really startin’ ta piss me off, Eli,’ he says, shutting his door hard.
Then he opens the door on August’s side.
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘But not a fucking word.’
We pass the kid with the skipping rope and he watches us, yellow snot resting at the bottom of his nose.
‘Hey,’ I say, passing.
The kid says nothing. Lyle knocks his knuckle against a security screen door frame. ‘That you, Lyle?’ comes a call from the dark living room. ‘Come on in, bro.’
We enter the house. Lyle, then Teddy, then August, then me.
Two Maori men are resting on brown armchairs beside an empty three-seat couch. Smoke fills the living room. The men have full ashtrays on the armrests of their chairs. One man is skinny, with Maori tattoos across his left cheek; the other is the fattest man I’ve ever seen in my life, and he’s the one who speaks.
‘Lyle, Ted,’ he says by way of greeting.
‘Ezra,’ Lyle says.
Ezra wears black shorts and a black floppy shirt and his legs are so big that the fat around his thighs spills over his kneecaps so the middle of his legs look like the faces of walruses without tusks. It’s not the size of the man that I dwell on, though, it’s the size of his black T-shirt, big enough to be a shade cover for Teddy’s Mazda parked outside in the sun.
The skinny man is leaning forward in his armchair, peeling the jackets off a bowl of potatoes on a portable tray.
‘Fuck, Lyle,’ Ezra says, smiling as he looks at August and me. ‘That’s some prize parenting right there, my friend, bringing your kids to a drug deal.’
Ezra slaps his leg, looks at his skinny tattoo-faced friend who says nothing: ‘Papara of the Year, ’ey cuz!’
‘They’re not my kids,’ Lyle says.
A woman enters the living room. ‘Well, I’ll take ’em then if they’re not yours, Lyle,’ she says, smiling at August and me as she sits down on the couch. She’s barefoot, in a black singlet. A Maori woman with a tribal tattoo ringing her upper right arm. A line of tattooed dots runs across her right temple. She carries a portable tray of her own filled with carrots and sweet potatoes and a quarter of a pumpkin.
‘Sorry Elsie,’ Lyle says. ‘They’re Frankie’s kids.’
‘Thought they were too handsome to be your tamariki tane,’ she says.
She gives August a wink. He smiles back.
‘How many years you been looking after these boys, Lyle?’ Elsie asks.
‘’Bout eight, nine years I’ve known them,’ Lyle says.
Elsie looks at August and me.
‘Eight, nine years?’ she echoes. ‘Whaddya reckon, boys? Reckon it’s fair enough to say you’re his kids now?’
August nods his head. Elsie turns to me for a response.
‘Reckon that’s fair enough,’ I say.
Ezra and the skinny man are engrossed in a movie on TV featuring a hulking bronzed warrior at the head of a great ancient feast.
‘What is best in life?’ says a man on the screen dressed like Genghis Khan.
The bronzed warrior has his legs crossed, muscles like iron, a headband like a crown.
‘Crush your enemies,’ says the bronzed warrior. ‘To see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.’
August and I are temporarily spellbound by this man.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask.
‘That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, bro,’ Ezra says. ‘Conan the Barbarian.’
Arnold Schwarzenegger is mesmerising.
‘This motherfucker’s gonna be huge,’ Ezra says.
‘What’s it about?’ I ask.
‘It’s about warriors, bro, and wizards and swords and sorcery,’ Ezra says. ‘But most of all it’s about revenge. Conan’s travelling the world trying to find the bastard who fed his dad to dogs and chopped off his mum’s head.’
I spot the video cassette recorder sitting beneath the television.
‘You got a Sony Betamax?’ I gasp.
‘Of course, mate,’ Ezra says. ‘Better resolution, high-fidelity sounds, no fuzz, improved contrast, improved luminance noise.’
August and I dive immediately to the carpet to stare at the machine.
‘What’s luminance noise?’ I ask.
‘Fucked if I know,’ Ezra says. ‘That’s what they wrote on the box.’
By the television is a bookshelf filled with black Betamax tapes with white sticky labels marked with movie titles. Hundreds of them. Some titles have been crossed out with blue ballpoint pen and other titles have been scribbled in beside them. Raiders of the Lost Ark. ET the Extra Terrestrial. Rocky III. Time Bandits. Clash of the Titans. August points his finger at one cassette in particular.
‘You got Excalibur?’ I holler.
‘Shit yeah, bro?’ Ezra beams. ‘Helen Mirren, man. Smokin’ hot that crazy witch.’
I nod heartily.
‘Merlin,’ I say.
‘Crazy bastard,’ Ezra rejoices.
I scan the videos. ‘You got all the Star Wars!’
‘What’s the best Star Wars?’ Ezra asks, with a tone that suggests he already knows the answer.
‘Empire,’ I say.
‘Correct,’ he says. ‘Best bit?’
‘Yoda’s cave in Dagobah,’ I say without contemplation.
‘Oh, shit, Lyle, you got a deep one here,’ Ezra says.
Lyle shrugs, rolls a cigarette from a packet of White Ox in his pocket.
‘Dunno the fuck yer talkin’ ’bout,’ he says.
‘Luke finds Vader in the cave and kills him and then the mask blows open and Luke’s looking at himself,’ Ezra says mystically. ‘Strange shit, bro. What’s this one’s name?’
Lyle points at me.
‘That’s Eli,’ he says. Points at August. ‘That’s August.’
‘Hey Eli, what’s up with that cave shit?’ he asks. ‘What’s that shit mean, little bro?’
I keep looking at the video movie titles as I talk.
‘The cave’s the world and it’s like Yoda says, the only thing in the cave is what you take in there with you. I reckon Luke already senses who his old man is. He already knows deep down. He’s shit-scared of meeting his dad because he’s shit-scared of the stuff that’s already inside him, the dark side that’s already in his blood.’
The living room goes quiet for a moment. August shoots me a long look. He nods knowingly, raising his eyebrows.
‘Cool,’ Ezra says.
Lyle places the blue chill box down by Ezra’s chair.
‘Got you boys some beers,’ Lyle says.
Ezra nods his head to the skinny man, which is communication enough to cause the skinny man to hop up from his armchair and open the chill box. He digs his hand deep into the box filled with beer bottles and ice. He pulls out a rectangular block wrapped in a thick black plastic bag. He passes it immediately to Elsie. She screws up her face.
‘You can check it, Rua, for fuck’s sake,’ she says.
The skinny man looks at Ezra for guidance. Ezra is engrossed in the movie but he allows time for one eye to dart towards Elsie, followed by a head nod towards the kitchen. Elsie hops up from the couch in a storm of sharp movements and snatches the black block from Rua’s hand. ‘Fuckin’ dumb fucks,’ she says.
She summons a smile for August and me. ‘You boys want to come choose a soft drink?’ she asks.
We look at Lyle. He nods approval. We follow her into the kitchen.
Rua passes beers to Ezra, Lyle and Teddy.
‘When you Queenslanders going to get another beer other than bloody XXXX Bitter?’ Ezra asks.
‘We do have another beer,’ Teddy says, sitting back in the three-seat couch to watch Conan the Barbarian. ‘We got XXXX Draught.’
*
It’s almost 1 p.m. when we’re eating potato scallops at a snack bar along the Moorooka Magic Mile, the stretch of road in Moorooka fifteen minutes’ drive from Jamboree Heights, where people across Brisbane come to buy their cars from a strip of dealerships that range in quality and prestige from ‘All our cars have airbags!’ to ‘All our cars have windscreens!’
We sit around a white round plastic table eating from a ripped-open brown paper parcel of battered potato scallops, beef croquettes, seafood sticks, large bright yellow dim sims and hot chips made from old oil so they look like bent cigarette butts and taste about as good.
‘Who wants the last beef croquette?’ Teddy asks.
Teddy’s the only one who’s been eating the beef croquettes. Teddy’s always the only one who eats the beef croquettes.
‘All yours, Teddy,’ I say.
August and I sip from purple cans of Kirks Pasito, our second favourite soft drink. Slim put us onto Pasito. He drinks nothing but Kirks soft drinks because they’re from Queensland and he says he knew an old bloke who worked for the original Kirks company, which was actually the Helidon Spa Water Company, which made a name for itself in the 1880s bottling the restorative spring waters of Helidon, near Toowoomba, which local Aboriginals said gave them the strength they needed to fend off any greedy souls who might want to exploit the benefits of their personally significant spring water supplies. I’ve never tasted the natural spring waters of Helidon, but I doubt they match the sweet, restorative powers of an ice cold sarsaparilla.
‘Elsie had Big Sars,’ I say, selectively biting my potato scallop in an attempt to create the shape of Australia. August’s biting his so it looks like a ninja star. ‘She had a whole shelf of small soft drink cans. She had the whole Kirks range. Lemon Squash. Creaming Soda. Old Stoney Ginger Beer. You name it.’
Lyle’s rolling himself another White Ox.
‘You see anything else, Captain Details, when you went with Elsie into the kitchen?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say. ‘She had a whole pack of unopened Iced VoVo biscuits in the fridge on the shelf above the vegetable trays. I reckon they must have had Ribbetts last night because there was a silver takeaway box on the shelf above the Iced VoVos and even though the takeaway box had a lid on it and I couldn’t see inside it I knew it was Ribbetts because I could see the Ribbetts barbecue sauce spilling over the edge of the box and there is no barbecue sauce like Ribbetts barbecue sauce.’
Lyle lights his rolled smoke.
‘Any details you picked up that weren’t related to what Elsie had in her fridge?’ he asks, turning his head to the right to avoid blowing smoke over the potato scallops.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say, shoving three chips into my mouth, cold now and losing their crunch. ‘There was a Maori weapon hanging on the wall above the kitchen bench and I asked Elsie what it was and she said it was called a mere. It was a big club shaped like a leaf and made of something called greenstone and it was passed down through generations in her family. And she stood at the sink carefully cutting the wrapping on your heroin block on the kitchen sink bench and levelling a set of kitchen scales and as she did this she told me about the horrible things her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Hamiora, did with this club. Like once there was this chief named Marama from another tribe who was always bullying and intimidating Hamiora’s tribe and when Hamiora visited this rival chief’s HQ . . .’
‘I don’t know if ancient Maori chiefs had HQs,’ Teddy says.
‘His hut, the big rival chief’s hut,’ I clarify. ‘When Hamiora visited Marama’s hut the rival chief began to laugh at the size and shape of Hamiora’s mere because it looked so unthreatening, like a stone rolling pin or something you might use to roll out your biscuits and Hamiora was in the centre of all these rival warriors as Marama was making jokes about him and encouraging his people to laugh and joke about Hamiora’s family weapon and Hamiora started laughing along with them and then Hamiora, quicker than you can say “jam drop biscuit”, struck Marama across the head with his ancient family weapon they’d all been laughing about.’
I pick up a small dim sim.
‘Ol’ Hamiora could wield this greenstone club the way Viv Richards wields a cricket bat and he specialised in this forearm thrust move where he hit someone in the temple but at the point of impact he gave the club a sharp twist.’
I break the top third of the small dim sim off in one tear.
‘He knocked Marama’s whole skullcap off in one blow and the rest of the tribe was so stunned by the scene that they didn’t have time to draw their weapons when the rest of Hamiora’s men – all distant relatives of Elsie’s as well – sprang from some bushes and attacked the dumbstruck rival tribesmen.’
I drop the skullcap end of the dim sim in my mouth.
‘And as Elsie’s tellin’ this story she’s carefully unwrapping the gear and not really looking at where my eyes are and I’m saying things like, “Yeah, really?” and, “No wayyyyy!”, like I’m really engrossed in the story but at the same time my eyes are looking all over the kitchen for details. The right eye’s where it should be but I got that loose left eye darting about all over the place, taking things in.’
Lyle and Teddy sneak a brief look at each other. Lyle shakes his head.
‘When August and I duck down to look inside the fridge at Elsie’s collection of Kirks soft drinks she doesn’t realise I’ve actually got a busy eye looking at her at the bench with the gear and she takes a sharp knife and slices a few edges off the smack block like she’s shaving thin slices of cheddar from a block of Coon. And she gathers these shavings into a little one-gram ball and she scrapes it into a small black plastic photographic film canister with a grey lid. She puts this canister into the pocket of her jeans and then she wraps the block back up and takes it out to you guys in the lounge room and you guys have got your heads glued to Conan the Barbarian and she says, “All good”, and nobody says shit back to her.
‘Then she comes back into the kitchen and she finishes telling me this ancient yarn about great-great-great-great-grandfather chief Hamiora and dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb chief Marama and I’m seeing all these details, like there’s a bunch of mail by their phone, letters from the council and bills from Telecom and then there’s a piece of paper with all these names and numbers on it and your name and number is on there, Lyle, and Tytus’s name was on there and then there was a Kylie and a Mal and a number next to someone named Snapper and another number next to a Dustin Vang . . .’
‘Dustin Vang?’ Teddy says, turning to Lyle, who nods his head, raising his eyebrows.
‘Makes sense,’ Lyle says.
‘Who’s Dustin Vang?’ I ask.
‘If Bich Dang was Hamiora, then Dustin Vang would be her Marama,’ Lyle says.
‘He’s good news,’ Teddy says.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Healthy competition,’ Teddy says. ‘If Bich isn’t the only importer on the block, it’s good news for Tytus because Bich will have to start offering more competitive prices and maybe she won’t take such pleasure any more from fucking us in the arse.’
‘Not good news for Tytus, though, if Ezra is thinking about going direct to a new supplier,’ Lyle says. ‘I’ll have a chat to Tytus.’
Teddy chuckles.
‘Not bad, Captain Details.’
*
Nothing connects a city quite like South-East Asian heroin. This glorious month of Saturdays with the Jindalee pool shut for renovations find Lyle, Teddy, August and me crisscrossing the city of Brisbane between every cultural minority, every gang, every obscure subculture my sprawling and hot city nurses in its sweaty bosom.
The Italians in South Brisbane. The collar-up rugby crowd in Ballymore. The drummers and guitarists and the buskers and the busted bands of Fortitude Valley.
‘You can’t say a word about this to yer mum, ya hear,’ Lyle says as we pull up outside the Highgate Hill–based State headquarters of a national neo-Nazi group, White Hammer, led by a softly spoken and thin twenty-five-year-old man named Timothy who is open enough to tell Lyle during a genial exchange of cash and drugs that he does not actually shave his skinhead but is, in fact, naturally bald, which makes me silently consider what struck him first along his unique philosophical journey, the notion of white supremacy or that of white male pattern baldness.
I don’t know what I expected from drug dealing. More romance, perhaps. A sense of danger and suspense. I realise now that the average street grunt suburban drug dealer is not too far removed from the common pizza delivery boy. Half these deals Lyle and Teddy are making I could make in half the time riding through the south-west Brisbane suburbs on my Mongoose BMX with the gear in my backpack. August could probably do it even faster because he rides faster than me and he’s got a ten-speed Malvern Star racer.
*
August and I do our Maths homework in the back of Teddy’s Mazda as we cross the Story Bridge from north to south and south to north, the bridge of stories, stories like the one about the boys who beat the fire, stories like the one about the mute boy and his little brother who never asked for anything but the answers to the questions.
August holds a ten-digit scientific pocket calculator he got for his birthday, tapping numbers and turning the calculator upside down to form words. 7738461375 = SLEIGHBELL. 5318008 = BOOBIES. He taps another bunch of numbers. Proudly shows me the calculator screen. ELIBELL.
‘Hey, Teddy,’ I ask. ‘At a school carnival twenty out of eighty tickets sold were early admission tickets. What percentage of early admission tickets were sold?’
Teddy looks into the rearview mirror. ‘C’mon mate, for fuck’s sake, how many twenties go into eighty?’
‘Four.’
‘So . . .’
‘So twenty is a quarter of the tickets?’
‘Correct.’
‘Quarter of a hundred is . . . twenty-five per cent?’
‘Yes, mate,’ Teddy says, shaking his head, stunned. ‘Fuck me, Lyle, don’t leave your tax return up to these two, all right.’
‘Tax return?’ Lyle says, feigning puzzlement. ‘That one of those algebra principles?’
The drug runs must be done on Saturdays because most of the third-tier drug dealers Lyle sells to have day jobs during the week. Tytus Broz is first tier. Lyle is second tier. Lyle sells to the third-tier drug dealers who, in turn, sell to the man or woman on the street or, in Kev Hunt’s case, the man or woman out at sea. Kev is a trawler fisherman who has a side business as a third-tier drug dealer supplying many of the users in the Moreton Bay prawn trawling scene. He’s out at sea most weekdays. So we make a drive out to his place in Bald Hills on a Saturday just as he likes it. It’s good business. Lyle adapts to his clients’ needs. Shane Bridgman, for example, is a lawyer in the city who has a side business as a third-tier drug dealer for the George Street legal set. He’s always at work and never at home during the week but he sure doesn’t want any drug deals taking place in his office, three buildings down from the Queensland Supreme Court. So we make a drive out to his place in Wilston, in the inner northern suburbs. He makes the deal in his sunroom while his wife bakes blueberry muffins in the kitchen and their son bowls medium pacers at a black bin in the backyard.
Lyle is masterful in these Saturday deals. He’s a diplomat, a cultural ambassador, a representative of his boss, Tytus Broz, a conduit between the king and his people.
Lyle says he approaches a drug deal in the same way he approaches Mum when she’s in a bad mood. Stay on your toes. Stay alert. Don’t let them stand too close to the kitchen knives. Be flexible, patient, adaptable. The buyer/angry Mum is always right. Lyle bends his emotions to the buyer’s/Mum’s feelings at any given moment. When a Chinese property developer bitches about council red tape, he nods his head empathetically. When the head of the Bandidos motorcycle gang bitches about the poor quality of the revving in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, Lyle nods with what looks to me like genuine concern, and this is the same look he gave Mum the other night when she was bemoaning the fact that Mum and Lyle never make an attempt to befriend any of the other parents at our school. Just make the deal, kiss the woman you love, take your wages and get out of the room alive.
*
On our last Saturday drug run Lyle tells August and me about the underground room with the red phone. Lyle built the room himself, dug it out from the bottom up, dug a hole deep in the ground beneath the cramped space under the house that August and I were never allowed to crawl into, and up into the house. A secret space built from thirteen hundred bricks bought from the Darra brickworks. The secret room where Mum and Lyle could store large boxes of weed in their formative dope-dealing days.
‘What do you use it for now you’re not running weed?’ I ask.
‘It’s for a rainy day when I need to run away and hide,’ he says.
‘From who?’
‘From anyone,’ he says.
‘What’s the phone for?’ I ask.
Teddy looks across at Lyle.
‘It’s connected to a line that goes straight to another red phone just like it in Tytus’s house in Bellbowrie,’ Lyle says.
Lyle looks into the back seat to gauge our reactions.
‘So it was Tytus we were speaking to that day?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, Eli.’ We share a long look in the rearview mirror. ‘You weren’t speaking to anyone at all.’
He steps on the gas, speeds on to our last job.
*
‘I felt something today I never felt before,’ Mum says, forking spaghetti onto our dinner plates at the dinner table, the same laminated green Formica table with metal legs that Lyle ate cherry babka at as a boy.
Today was the school fete. For eight hours beneath a hot Saturday sun Mum was in charge of three sideshow alley stalls on the Richlands State High School oval. She ran the fishpond game where, for fifty cents, kids were tasked with hooking flat Styrofoam fish with a curtain rod and string; underneath these fish was a colour-coded sticker that corresponded with a colour-coded novelty toy prize worth approximately the value of the pony shit I stepped on today by the ‘Uncle Bob’s Barnyard’ animal display. The most popular game of the whole sideshow alley, by some way, was an original game that Mum developed herself, piggybacking on the irresistible pull of Star Wars to raise much-needed funds for the Richlands State High School Parents and Friends Association. Her ‘Han Solo Master Blaster Challenge’ asked potential saviours of the galaxy to dislodge three of August’s and my Imperial stormtroopers balanced on stands placed at increasingly ambitious distances, using a large water pistol she painted black to resemble Han’s trusty blaster. She placed the target stormtroopers masterfully, putting the first two at more than achievable distances, thus filling her largely five- to twelve-year-old customers up on the addictive lustre of early success, but placing the third and final stormtrooper at such a distance that a child would need to access and bend the powers of the Force to land a long and arcing single prize-winning water pistol shot. Mum was also, however, in charge of the fete’s least popular attraction, ‘Pop Stick Pandemonium’, one hundred pop sticks – ten marked with prize-winning stars – in a wheelbarrow full of sand. She could have promised the very meaning of life at the end of every one of those pop sticks and she still would have made $6.50 over eight hours.
‘I felt like part of the community,’ Mum says. ‘I felt like I belonged, ya know.’
I watch Lyle smiling at her. He has his right fist to his chin. All she’s doing is dumping large spoonfuls of her bolognese sauce with extra bacon and rosemary onto our plates, but Lyle is looking at her, wide-eyed and awed, like she’s playing ‘Paint It Black’ on a golden harp with strings made of fire.
‘That’s great, hon,’ Lyle says.
Teddy calls from the kitchen: ‘Beer, Lyle?’
‘Yeah, mate,’ Lyle says. ‘In the door shelf.’
Teddy’s staying for dinner. Teddy’s always staying for dinner.
‘That’s real great, Frankie,’ Teddy says, entering the living room from the kitchen. He wraps an arm around Mum’s shoulder unnecessarily. Holds her unnecessarily. ‘We’re proud of ya, matey,’ he says. All buddy buddy like. I mean, like, gimme a fucking break, Ted. Right here at Lena and Aureli’s table?
‘I might be mistaken, but is there a new little twinkle in those blue eyes?’ he says. He rubs his right thumb across Mum’s cheekbone.
Lyle and I share a glance. August shoots a look at me. Get a load of this shit. Right here in front of his best friend. I’ve never trusted this fuckin’ guy. Comes across all nice as pie but it’s those nice as pie fucks you really gotta watch out for, Eli. I can’t tell who he’s in love with more: Mum, Lyle or himself.
I nod. Hearing you, brother.
‘I don’t know,’ Mum shrugs, a little embarrassed by her sunny disposition. ‘It just felt good to be part of something so . . .’
‘Boring?’ I offer. ‘Suburban?’
Mum smiles, holding a spoonful of bolognese mince in midair as she thinks.
‘So normal,’ she says.
She dumps the mince on top of my pasta and gives me one of those quick and beautiful half-smiles that she can send down a one-way corridor of devotion directly to the person she is aiming at, a tunnel of lifelong love invisible to all others, yet I know August has a tunnel just like it, and Lyle does too.
‘It’s great, Mum,’ I say. And I’ve never been more serious in my life. ‘I reckon normal suits ya.’
I reach for the Kraft parmesan cheese that smells like August’s vomit. I sprinkle cheese flakes across my spaghetti and I dig my fork into Mum’s pasta and twirl the fork twice.
Then Tytus Broz walks into our living room.
The top of my spine knows him best. The top of my spine recognises all that white hair and that white suit and the gritted white teeth in his forced smile. The rest of me is frozen and confused but my spine knows that Tytus Broz really is walking into our living room and it shivers from top to bottom and I shudder involuntarily like I do sometimes when I’m taking a piss in the troughs of Lyle’s favourite pub, the Regatta Hotel in Toowong.
Lyle’s mouth is full of pasta when he sees Tytus, watches him, stunned, as he paces into our house, somehow finding his way in from the back door beyond the kitchen past the toilet.
Lyle says his name like a question. ‘Tytus?’
August and Mum are facing Lyle and me across the table and they turn their bodies around to see Tytus walking in, followed by another man, bigger than Tytus, darker eyes, darker mood. Oh fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck me. What’s he doing here?
Iwan Krol. And two more of Tytus’s muscle goon thugs walking in behind Iwan. They wear rubber flip-flops like Iwan Krol, tight Stubbies shorts and tucked-in button-up collared cotton shirts; one of them is wiry and bald and the other is heavy with an upturned smile and three chins.
‘Tytus!’ Mum says, slipping immediately into host mode. She hops up from her chair.
‘Please don’t hop up, Frances,’ Tytus says.
Iwan Krol rests a hand gently on Mum’s shoulder and something in the gesture tells her to sit back down. It’s now that I see he’s carrying an army-green duffle bag, which he drops silently onto the living room floor by the table.
Teddy is holding a fork in his right hand. He has two paper towels stuffed into the neckline of his dark blue Bonds shirt, and his lips are red with bolognese sauce, like a clown who smudges his lipstick. ‘Tytus, is everything okay?’ Teddy asks. ‘You want to join us for . . .’
Tytus isn’t even looking at Teddy when he puts a forefinger to his mouth and says, ‘Sssshhh.’
He’s looking at Lyle. Silence. Maybe a whole minute of silence or maybe it’s just thirty seconds but it feels like thirty days of thunderclap-loud-as-fuck silent staring between Tytus and Lyle. Vantage points and details, a single moment stretched to infinity.
A tattoo on the wiry goon’s left arm. Bugs Bunny in a Nazi uniform. August gripping his pasta spoon, nervously thumbing the handle. This moment from Mum’s point of view, sitting confused in a loose peach-coloured singlet, her head darting between faces, searching for answers and finding none but the answer on the face of the only man she has ever really loved. Fear.
Then Lyle mercifully cuts the silence.
‘August,’ he says.
August? August? What the fuck does this moment have to do with August?
August turns back around and stares at Lyle.
And Lyle starts writing something in the air. His right forefinger flows swiftly through the air like a quill and August’s eyes track the flurry of words that I can’t make out because I’m not facing him and I can’t spin them around properly in my mirror mind.
‘What’s he doing?’ Tytus spits.
Lyle keeps writing words in the air, swiftly and surely, and August reads them, nodding his head in understanding with every word.
‘Stop that,’ spits Tytus.
Tytus screams. ‘Stop that shit!’ He turns to the heavy goon and through gritted teeth, he furiously screams, ‘Please stop him doing that fucking shit.’
But Lyle, trance-like, keeps on scribbling words that August registers. Word after scribbled word until the heavy three-chinned goon thug’s right forearm connects with Lyle’s nose and he is thrown back off his chair onto the floor of the living room, his nose erupting with blood that runs down his chin.
‘Lyle,’ I scream, rushing down to him, hugging his chest. ‘Leave ’im alone.’
Lyle gags on a glob of blood in his mouth.
‘Jesus Christ, Tytus, what’s—’ Teddy stammers, stopped immediately by the blade point of a sharpened silver Bowie knife that Iwan Krol whips to his chin. This blade is a monster with teeth, it’s alien-like and gleaming, hissing on one sharp slicing side and shrieking with a serrated opposite edge, evil metal teeth for hacking things I can only imagine – necks mostly.
‘You shut the fuck up, Teddy, and you might survive this night,’ Iwan says.
Teddy recoils cautiously in his seat. Tytus looks at Lyle on the ground.
‘Get him outta here,’ Tytus says.
The wiry thug joins the heavy thug standing over Lyle and they drag him along the living room floor for two metres with me hanging onto him around his chest.
‘Leave him alone,’ I scream through tears. ‘Leave ’im alone!’
They pull Lyle to his feet and I drop off him, hard to the ground.
‘I’m sorry, Frankie,’ Lyle says. ‘I love you so much, Frankie. I’m so sorry, Frankie.’
The wiry thug drives a fist into Lyle’s mouth and Mum rounds the living room table with a bowl of her spaghetti bolognese that she cracks over the head of the sucker-punching goon.
‘Let him go,’ she screams. The caged animal that’s spent a lifetime inside her and has only seen daylight three or four times wraps its arms around the neck of the heavy thug, Mum’s monster digging its full-moon wolf fingernails deep into his cheeks and face, so deep the thug’s skin comes off in scratches of fury and blood. She’s howling now like she did when she was locked away for all those days in Lena’s room. Banshee wails, terrifying and primal. I’ve never been so scared in my life, of Mum, of Tytus Broz, of Lyle’s blood on my hands and face as he’s dragged on down the hallway of the house.
‘Stop that bitch,’ Tytus says calmly.
Iwan Krol rushes around the kitchen table, Bowie knife in his right hand, and August rushes around the table from the opposite side and meets Iwan Krol at the start of the hallway. He raises his fists like an old 1920s boxer. Iwan Krol instantly swipes the blade at August’s face and August ducks this attack, but it was only a diversion for Iwan Krol’s swift left leg kick that sweeps August’s feet off the ground so he lands heavily on his back. ‘Don’t you two dare fuckin’ move,’ Iwan Krol barks at us as he rushes down the hall behind Mum.
‘Mum, behind you,’ I shout. But she’s too rabid to register, desperately clutching at Lyle’s arms, trying to drag him back down the hallway. Iwan Krol switches the Bowie knife into his left hand and, with two impossibly quick and hard backhand thrusts, drives the knife’s handle butt into Mum’s left temple. She drops to the floor, her head hanging loosely over her left shoulder, her right calf bent back behind her right thigh like she’s a crash test dummy who’s hit one too many walls.
‘Frankie,’ Lyle screams as he’s dragged out the front door. ‘Frankiiiieeeee!’
August and I rush to Mum but Iwan Krol meets us in the hallway and drags us back to the dinner table, our spindly thirteen- and fourteen-year-old legs not powerful enough to get a firm grip on the ground to fight back against the force of the killer’s furious dragging. He’s pulling me so hard my shirt’s popping up over my head and all I can see is the orange cotton blanket of the shirt front, and darkness.
He throws us onto our dining table chairs. Our backs are turned to Mum, who’s lying in the hallway unconscious, or worse, I don’t know.
‘Sit the fuck down,’ Iwan Krol says.
I’m struggling to breathe in the fear and the violence and confusion. Iwan Krol takes a rope from the army-green duffle bag. In a flurry of movement he wraps the rope around August three times and ties him tight to his dining chair.
‘What are you doing?’ I spit.
Tears and snot are pouring through my nose and I can barely stay upright on my seat, but August just sits quietly on his seat with a closed-mouth snarl directed at Tytus Broz, who is staring back at August.
I’m heaving deep gasps of air between tears and I can’t seem to get enough in my lungs and Tytus is bothered by it.
‘Breathe, for fuck’s sake, breathe,’ he says.
August reaches his right foot out and rests it on my left foot.
It calms me but I don’t know why. I breathe.
‘That’s it,’ Tytus says. He snaps a sharp look at Teddy, sitting stunned at the head of the table. ‘Leave.’
‘They don’t know shit these boys, Tytus,’ Teddy offers urgently.
Tytus is already staring back at August when he addresses Teddy’s words.
‘I won’t say it again,’ he says.
Teddy hops to his feet, rushes out of the living room and down the hallway, stepping over Mum’s unconscious body along the way. Even through all my fear and concern for Mum in the hallway and for Lyle, who’s been dragged to hell knows where, there’s still room enough in my thoughts for the notion that Teddy is a gutless prick.
With August tied to his chair, unable to move his arms, Iwan Krol stands directly behind me, the Bowie knife in his right hand by his waist. I can feel him behind me, smell him behind me.
Tytus breathes deep himself. He shakes his head, frustrated.
‘Now, boys, please allow me to fully illuminate the unfortunate situation you two find yourselves in,’ he says. ‘If, through the course of this discussion, it appears I am going too fast for your youthful ears it is only because, in roughly fifteen minutes, and as soon as I exit this miserable house, two senior police detectives will enter this house through the front door to arrest your mother, supposing, of course, she remains in the land of the living, for her significant role as a courier for the head of a growing outer-western Brisbane heroin supply ring run by Lyle Orlik, who, as of approximately two minutes ago, has mysteriously vanished off the face of the planet.’
‘Where are you taking him?’ I shout. ‘I’m gonna tell the police everything. It’s you.’ I’m standing up now and I don’t even realise it. I’m spitting now. I’m pointing now. ‘It’s you. You’re behind everything. You’re fucking evil.’
A hard slap from Iwan Krol across my cheek drops me back into my chair.
Tytus turns and paces across the living room. He comes to a cabinet and picks up an old figurine of Lena’s, a Polish salt miner made out of salt from a cavernous salt mine Lena’s ancestors helped build in southern Poland.
‘You are right and you are wrong, young man,’ Tytus says. ‘No, you will not tell the police everything because they will not speak to you. But, yes, I am indeed as you describe. I came to terms with that fact long ago. But I am not so evil as to drag children into the works of evil men. I’ll leave that to men like Lyle.’
He places the salt mine figurine back on the cabinet.
‘Do you boys know what loyalty is?’ Tytus asks.
We don’t answer. He smiles.
‘That’s a kind of loyalty in itself, your not answering,’ he says. ‘You remain loyal to a man you do not know, a man whose disloyalty to me has placed you in the position you now find yourselves in.’
He turns on the spot, clears his throat, thinks some more.
‘Now, I have a question to ask you boys and before you answer it, or choose not to answer it, I simply ask that you briefly consider not putting the loyalty you have for Lyle before the loyalty you have to yourselves because, as cruel fate has so tragically determined, yourselves are precisely all you two appear to have now.’
I look across at August. He doesn’t look across at me.
Tytus nods at Iwan Krol and, in an instant, Iwan Krol has a firm and immovable grip on my right hand. His forceful arms plant my palm on the green top of Lena’s dining table, right next to the bowl of spaghetti I was eating before the world collapsed in on itself, before the mountains crumbled into the sea, before the stars fell from the sky and formed this terrifying evening.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I can smell his underarms. I can smell his Old Spice cologne and his clothes smell like cigarettes. He’s leaning over me with his weight on my right forearm and his big hands have bones of iron and they are trying to spread my right forefinger out, my lucky forefinger with my lucky freckle on my lucky middle knuckle. My hand instinctively makes a fist but he’s so strong and he’s wild on the inside and I can feel that through his hands, his black electricity, his lack of reason, no emotion other than rage. He squeezes my fist hard and my forefinger pops out, rests flat on the table.
I’m going to be sick.
August looks across at my finger flat on the table.
‘What did he say, August?’ Tytus says.
August looks back at Tytus.
‘What did he just write, August?’ Tytus asks.
August feigns a puzzled look, confused.
Tytus nods at Iwan Krol behind me and then the blade of the Bowie knife is touching my forefinger, just above the bottom knuckle.
Vomit. In my stomach. In my throat. Time slowing.
‘He scribbled a message in the air,’ Tytus spits. ‘What did he say, August?’
The blade comes down harder into the finger, draws blood and I draw breath.
‘He doesn’t talk, Tytus,’ I scream. ‘He doesn’t talk. He couldn’t tell you even if he wanted to.’
August keeps staring at Tytus and Tytus keeps staring at August.
‘What did he say, August?’ Tytus asks.
August looks at my finger. Iwan Krol presses the blade down harder, so hard now it’s cut through all my skin and flesh and is lodging into my finger bone.
‘We don’t know, Tytus, please,’ I scream. ‘We don’t know.’
Dizzy now. Frantic. Cold sweat. Tytus stares deep into August’s eyes. He nods again at Iwan Krol and he pushes the Bowie knife down harder. Old Spice and his breath and that blade, that endless blade digging into my bone marrow. My marrow. My weak marrow. My weak fingers.
I howl in pain, a wail so unbridled and raw it rounds out with a high-pitched squeal, from white pain and shock and disbelief.
‘Please don’t,’ I howl through tears. ‘Please don’t do this.’
The blade goes deeper still and I roar with agony.
Then a voice joins the sounds in the room from a place I can’t register.
A voice to my left that I couldn’t hear properly over my screams but this voice makes Iwan Krol ease the pressure on the knife. A voice I’ve never heard before in my conscious life. Tytus leans closer to the table, closer to August.
‘Come again?’ Tytus says.
Silence. August licks his lips and clears his throat.
‘I have something to say,’ August says.
And the only thing to tell me I’m not dreaming this is the blood running from my lucky forefinger.
Tytus brightens. Nods his head.
August looks across at me. And I know that look. That slightly upturned half-smile, the way his left eye squints. That’s the way he says sorry without saying sorry. That’s the way he says sorry for something bad that is about to happen that he is no longer in control of.
He turns to Tytus Broz.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren,’ August says.
Tytus smiles. He looks at Iwan Krol, puzzled. He chuckles. A face-saving chuckle designed to mask something I never expected to see on his face in this moment. There is fear across his face in this moment.
‘I’m sorry, August, could you please repeat that?’ Tytus asks.
August speaks and he sounds like me. I never knew he would sound like me.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren,’ he says.
Tytus scratches his chin, takes a deep breath, thin eyes studying August. Then he nods at Iwan Krol and the blade of the Bowie knife smacks against Lena’s table and my lucky forefinger is no longer attached to my hand.
My eyelids close and open. Life and the blackness. Home and the blackness. My lucky finger with the lucky freckle resting on the table in a pool of blood. Eyelids close. The blackness. And they open. Tytus picks up my finger with a white silk handkerchief, folds it up carefully. Eyelids close. The blackness. And they open.
My brother, August. Eyelids close. And open. My brother, August. Eyelids close.
The blackness.