I sat down cross-legged. I knew Frank didn’t want to hurt me. He growled and paced and then sniffed me again. I reached out and Frank flinched. I stroked his chest. His skin was loose and I could feel his bones. He calmed down. I kept patting him and saying nice things. Then his tail started to wag.
I unhooked him from the chain and held him by the collar and led him out to Steve’s car. Dane got in the front with Steve and I sat in the back with Frank. Mark had already left in Brodie’s ute. We drove off. Frank whined and sniffed at the gap in the window. I patted him and held him. At one point he yelped, and I saw that his paws were blistered from being chained outside on the hot bricks.
When we were a few streets away, Dane clapped his hands and laughed.
‘I thought that little bastard was going to piss himself!’ He turned and looked at me. ‘And you! Hell of a kidney punch, kid. And I tell you what, you’re braver than me. That was some real Crocodile Dundee shit back there. I thought this dog was going to bite your fucking hand off.’
I saw Steve watching me in the rear-view mirror.
‘Don’t let that thing drool on my upholstery.’
‘He needs to go to a vet.’
‘Not my problem,’ Steve said.
Teneille was waiting outside her house when we arrived. Frank got excited when he saw her. He barked and clawed at the window. I let him out. He ran straight to Teneille and jumped on her. She hugged him and fell down on the lawn. She laughed and then she cried.
‘Thank you so much. You have no idea what this means. Oh my God! I got my boy back. I got my boy. I’m not letting you go, ever again.’
She really loved Frank. It made me tear up. I looked away and pinched the skin on my arm so that I wouldn’t cry in front of Steve or Dane.
On the way home, I remembered that Mark had put something in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was Brodie’s wallet. There was a hundred and thirty dollars inside. I took out the cash and threw the wallet out the window.
Medicine
I trained in the backyard every day. My joints and my muscles ached all the time. I tried to eat as much as I could, but I still wasn’t putting much weight on. I didn’t look anything like Dane.
Everything was harder than ever. It was hard not to worry about Vic. It was hard not to send Aggie a message. It was hard not to watch clips of Julia Child. It was hard not to steal clothes and make-up and get dressed up at night. It was hardest to be what everyone wanted me to be.
One afternoon, I heard Whippy pull up out the front and I went outside to talk to him. He was still in his Kwik Traffik Courier Service van, messaging on his phone.
‘Hey,’ I said and waved.
He didn’t notice me. I knocked on the window and startled him. He wound down the window.
‘Jesus Christ, gave me a fuckin’ heart attack.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
Whippy kept texting and I waited. When he finished, he opened the door.
‘What do you want, mate?’
I suddenly felt too nervous to tell him. Instead I blurted out a question.
‘How come they call you Whippy?’
‘Mr Whippy. It started as Mr Whippy.’
‘Like the ice cream truck?’
He rubbed the door of the van.
‘I bought this old girl off an old Serbian bloke when I was twenty-three. Bright pink it was.’
I looked at the van and saw how the panels had been repainted.
‘You sold ice cream out of this?’
‘Mr Whippy’s Specialty Cones. I used to park her up and down the coast all summer. I sold soft serve and drinks and slushies and about five ounces of weed a week. Fucking crushed it. There were queues down to the water. That was the problem though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘After a few summers, everyone knew I was dealing out of it.’
‘So the police caught you?’
‘Nah. Got robbed by a couple of French backpackers up at Trigg. Pricks hotwired it and drove off while I was halfway through a choc dip back there. Shit went everywhere. They parked behind a warehouse and beat the shit out of me. Took my stash and about three grand and said au revoir. They ditched the van back at the beach though, which was nice of them. But that was my last day serving ice cream. It’s a shame. It was a solid set-up. Girls in bikinis, I could surf when the swell was good, and it was a fucking good laundry.’
‘You washed clothes in there too?’
Whippy laughed.
‘No, different kind of laundry. I make dirty money, which means I can’t tell the government how I get it. So I need ways to disguise it. Whenever somebody bought a bag from me, I rang it up as ice cream or drinks or frozen bananas or whatever. That way the cash looks clean on paper.’
‘Is that why you’re a courier now?’ I asked.
‘Kind of. It’s a registered business, and I do legit jobs so the fake invoices don’t draw attention. But it’s mostly good because I’m on the road all day doing other deliveries. Cops don’t generally pull over couriers to do vehicle checks. Can’t clean much money through it though.’
‘How come?’
‘You need a cash business. Service industries are best because you don’t need to fuck around with stock orders and inventories and permits and inspections. So when I’m not driving around delivering parcels, I’m a very successful Kahuna massage therapist.’
‘What’s a Kahuna massage?’
‘I have no fucking idea. But as far as the tax office is concerned, I’ve given thousands of them.’
‘Oh, I get it. That’s smart.’
Whippy seemed really proud of himself.
‘Key to it all is just keeping your head down and staying ahead of the game. I swear, most of the dickheads around here carry on like they want to get caught. Anyway …’
He started to get out of the van.
‘Wait,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I want to try something.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean … I want to buy something off you. I have money.’
I showed him the hundred and thirty dollars from Brodie’s wallet.
‘Put that away,’ Whippy said, then he looked over at the house. Once he was sure nobody was watching, he turned back to me.
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, well, how do you want to feel?’
‘Um, I don’t know. Like, I want to feel like not me … that probably doesn’t make any sense. I want to be able to sleep better. I want my brain to stop. And to not have butterflies all the time. I just want to forget everything, I guess. I don’t know. Sorry.’
Whippy looked at me hard. I thought I was in trouble. Then he went through his bag on the passenger seat. He held up two rolled cigarettes.
‘Put these in your pocket. I’m trying out a new hydro guy. It’s pretty smooth and it’s a nice mellow high. No nightmares here, alright?’
I took them. They smelled spicy and musty.
‘How much?’
‘You can have those, but do me a favour and smoke them in one of these vacant houses or something. If you get caught, don’t tell anyone shit, don’t admit to anything, and you certainly didn’t get it from me, understood?’
‘Okay.’
‘If you like it and you want more, come see me. But don’t ever ask in front of Steve or Sarah. And if you want to try anything else, let me know.’
‘Really?’
‘You’re gonna try it at some point, and I’d rather you had gear you can trust. I was selling and using at your age, and I’ve had no problems. You can do whatever the fuck you like. It’s your body, nobody has the right to tell you what to do with it. Just don’t smoke in your bedroom, alright?’
‘Okay.’
‘This your first joint?’
‘Um, yeah.’
‘You’re gonna cough a lot, and you’ll probabl
y giggle like an idiot. You might see some stuff that isn’t there. Just go with it. Don’t panic. Just lie back and float outside your body.’
‘That’s what I want,’ I said.
I waited until sunset, then I walked down the cul-de-sac to an empty beige brick house. All the doors were locked, but one of the windows around the back was broken. I pushed the rest of the glass out with a stick and climbed through.
It smelled bad. There was dust and rat droppings everywhere. I looked in all the empty rooms to make sure nobody was there, then I sat on the floor in the master bedroom and took out the two joints. I put one between my lips and lit it up. I breathed in. The smoke was hot and it tasted bad. I coughed a lot. My chest felt really tender.
When I could breathe again, I smoked some more. I kept coughing and smoking until the whole joint had burned out.
I was light-headed and my mouth was dry. The sun was down and the room was dark. I heard noises which made me worry, then I felt something brush against my leg. I slapped at my calf and stood up and backed away. I thought I saw a rat and I stamped my feet.
I quickly left the house the same way I came in. I stood in the middle of the street rubbing my legs and looking around to see if the rat was following me.
I knew I couldn’t go back home for a while, so I walked a few blocks to a park. There was nobody else around. I sat on a swing in the playground and lifted my legs up so the rat couldn’t get me.
I started to swing back and forth. I felt weightless, like I was flying. I leaned right back and looked up at the stars. My mouth was wide open. I let go of the chain and stretched my arms out and I fell off straight away. Sand went into my mouth. I spat it out and rolled onto my back. Then I started laughing, harder than I ever had. My stomach was sore and my eyes were wet.
I lay there for a long time. I made a sand angel by moving my arms and legs. I listened to crickets and cars going past.
A lady came walking through the park. She stopped and looked in my direction. I lay as still as possible so she wouldn’t see me. Slowly, she came closer. She was older, in her fifties, and wearing a tracksuit.
‘Hello? Are you alright? Hello?’
I kept lying as still as I could, staring at the sky. She kneeled down and shook me and I didn’t respond. She gasped and started breathing fast. She got her phone out.
‘Hello? Hello? Yes, I need an ambulance. I’m at the Henry Morley Reserve in Hamilton Hill. I’ve found a teenage boy here who is unresponsive. No, I don’t know if there’s a pulse. What? No, I don’t know. Please hurry.’
I could see her face in the light of her phone. She was really worried. I realised that this was what would happen if I died. A stranger would find me and call someone who would come to pick me up and take me away and put me in the ground and that would be it. It made me sad, but it also made me feel relieved.
The lady held her fingers against my left wrist.
‘I’m okay,’ I said.
She shrieked and backed away.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Oh! You gave me such a fright! I thought you were dead!’
‘I know. I’m not.’
‘Are you okay? Did you pass out?’
‘No.’
‘Then what the bloody hell are you doing lying down here?’ I sat up and felt embarrassed. Her mood had changed and she was angry now.
‘Don’t you have a home to go to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘What?’
I stood up and walked away. Behind me, I heard her apologising to emergency services on the phone. I started laughing again.
I shook all the sand out of my hair and my clothes before I got back to the house. Nobody had noticed I had gone. I was really hungry. I made four slices of French toast and ate them with strawberry jam in my room.
Then I laid on my bed and closed my eyes and when I opened them it was the next morning.
For the next couple of weeks I trained during the day and went to the vacant house in the evening. The only time I didn’t go down there was when I helped with Steve’s collections. Sometimes he dropped me off to do surveillance near somebody’s house or work. If they were confronting someone, it was my job to go through the rest of the house to look for valuables and make sure nobody else was home. I didn’t have to punch anybody again, and I made enough money to buy more bags of weed from Whippy. He gave me a little chrome pipe to smoke it with.
I spent hours down at the vacant house. I sat on an old plastic chair that I found on the side of the road and I lit some candles in the bedroom so I wouldn’t get afraid in the dark. I started taking water and sandwiches with me because I knew I would get thirsty and hungry. I smoked until my body and my brain went numb, then I watched old movies on the tablet. When I came back home, my mum never asked where I had been. I wanted her to, but she never did.
She had changed so much. She was really thin and her skin was almost grey. Her hair was dry and flat. She smelled like cigarettes. She never put on nice clothes anymore. But it was who she was inside that was the most different. Even when she was right next to me, she had never felt so far away.
There were times when she came back to life. She would smile and she would be cheeky and funny and she would have some energy. But her mood would slip really quickly. She had fights with Steve almost every day, and it was always about the same thing.
I looked up Fentanyl on the tablet. I didn’t understand a lot of what I read. It sounded like it made you feel really good, but it was addictive and dangerous because it was easy to overdose and die. Maybe Steve was doing the right thing by making sure she didn’t take too much. But she was right to be angry too, because he had introduced her to it and now she couldn’t quit.
There didn’t seem to be an answer. Even if Steve was stopping her from having too much at once, she was killing small pieces of herself every day anyway. The more of it she had, the less of her there was.
One night when I was at the vacant house it started raining. I stood at the window and watched it pour down from the roof like a waterfall. It made me feel lonely, so I sat down to look at Aggie’s Instagram.
There was a new post. It was a photo of a piece of paper that Aggie had written on.
It was a letter for me.
Sam,
I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, but I don’t know how else to contact you. Vic was taken to the hospital in an ambulance today. I thought you should know.
Aggie x
I felt a horrible sick dread in my stomach. For a moment I couldn’t swallow or breathe right.
I read the note again. It was only a few hours old. That meant Vic might still be at the hospital. I quickly hid the bag of weed and the tablet inside a roll of old carpet. Then I blew out the candles and I ran out into the rain. I stopped outside our house. Steve’s car was gone. I didn’t have any money for a bus or a taxi, and I couldn’t ask my mum to help because she didn’t want me to see Vic again. I started to panic. I didn’t know what to do. I ran down the street and I didn’t stop until I came to a main road. I waved down a car.
A lady with blonde highlights pulled over. I banged on the window and she wound it down.
‘I need to get to the hospital.’
‘Why? What’s wrong?’
‘Can you take me?’
I tried to open the door, but it was locked. The lady got angry.
‘Get your hands off my bloody car!’
She drove off.
I was soaked through. I tried to flag down other cars but people kept slowing down and then driving away from me.
I started running again, but I didn’t know where I was going. It was windy, and I was tired. The rain stung when it hit my face. My throat burned. My legs suddenly went rubbery and I collapsed next to a bus stop.
A car pulled up beside me and honked. A lady in the passenger side wound down her window.
‘Are you okay?’
I looked up at her from the kerb.
‘I need
to go to the hospital.’
‘Is it that bad? Have you hurt yourself?’
I stood up.
‘No, my … my grandpa has been taken there. I need to see him.’
The lady looked at her husband, who was driving.
‘Which hospital?’ he asked. ‘Murdoch?’
‘I think so. Is that the closest one to here?’
‘Get in,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
I got in the back seat. There was a toddler in a baby seat and a small boy who shuffled across to let me in.
‘I’m really wet, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s alright, love,’ said the woman. ‘What’s wrong with your grandpa?’
‘I don’t know. He coughs a lot. I would have gone with my parents but my mum is still at the office and my dad is out at sea. He’s in the navy.’
‘Oh yeah? My brother’s RAN. What unit is your old man in?’
‘I’m not allowed to say. I think it’s classified. He doesn’t talk about it much. He’s pretty high up.’
The man and woman gave each other a strange look. They didn’t ask me any more questions. My legs were bouncing up and down. I wanted to tell the man to drive faster. Their son kept staring at me then looking away.
We arrived at a big hospital and they dropped me off at the emergency entrance. I thanked them and jumped out and went through the doors. I ran up to the administration desk and told the receptionist I was looking for my friend. She told me to calm down. A security guard walked over and stood next to me. I told her Vic’s name, and she typed it into her computer and stared at the screen for a long time. Then she made a phone call. I was worried he was at another hospital, or something worse had happened.
‘Okay, he’s in the respiratory ward,’ she said.
‘Is he alright?’ I asked.
‘I can’t give you that information. He’s in room twelve B. I’ll show you how to get there.’
She wrote down directions on a piece of paper. Then I ran down the ward and I slipped over because I was so wet. Everybody in the lobby turned to stare and the security guard yelled at me to be careful. I took the elevator to the right floor, but I didn’t know which way to go and I got lost. I found a cleaner at the end of a hall who didn’t speak much English, but she led me all the way to 12B.
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