by Omar Musa
step back with it
and cash it out the side of the chain net.
Body –
feel the blood,
the vein and breath,
the moving, floating parts,
sweet stink of armpit
and sweaty forehead,
hear coach yelling,
‘It’s all in the legs, Solomon!
get em right and everything else will follow.’
Feel toes and heels and fingers,
feel it all atomise
and become one with an incandescent sky.
I lean against the hoop’s supporting pole
with my forearm,
breathing hard.
There’s graff on it,
nicely mixed red stainer,
letters dripping down like blood.
‘ROZA’ I think it says.
Melbourne boys always mixed dope stainer,
back in the day.
I hear a voice.
Toby.
He’s with a mate,
an audacious, thick-set boy with snaggle teeth.
‘Who’s this?’
Toby looks at his feet. ‘A friend.’ He pronounces it fwend.
He doesn’t hear so good
and has a speech impediment.
Was he born that way?
‘What’s your name, cuz?’
‘Muhammad. I wanna learn that shot,’ says the boy with a surprisingly deep voice.
I squint at them.
It’s not so hot today and there’s a nice breeze.
Why not?
‘Orright. Warm up first. Otherwise you’ll bust yaselves.’
I get em to run around the court
then stretch.
I stretch with them.
Jesus.
My muscles feel like rubber bands left in the sun.
‘All right. Layups. Both hands.’
They do that for a few minutes,
then I get them to play one-on-one.
Muhammad’s a natural –
quick first step, mongoose-like reflexes.
He lords it over Toby and I see Toby’s face cloud up.
‘Relax boys. It’s just for fun. You boys need more bounce. You should get skipping ropes.’
‘Like girls?’ Muhammad’s face lemony sour.
‘For your feet! Give ya a good leap. Quickness. Boxers use em.’
‘Like Anthony Mundine?’
‘Yer, Mundine. Roy Jones Jr. Muhammad Ali.’
‘Muhammad. See!’ says Muhammad to no one in particular.
I start dancing around them like a young Cassius,
shadowboxing their ears.
Soon they’re laughing and squealing,
avoiding the mock hooks and jabs.
Muhammad scuttles off to dinner,
practising flicking his wrist the way I taught him.
‘Can you shoot it from half-court, Solomon?’ asks Toby,
Big wide eyes and a weird puckering of the lips.
Poor kid just doesn’t want to go home.
I slap him on the back –
‘Let’s go, big fella. I’ll walk ya home.’
His house isn’t far away.
I stand in the driveway and
as he turns into the govvo flat,
he waves but isn’t smiling anymore.
Not a single plant in the yard,
but there are vines growing out of
a washing machine on the patio.
At home,
Mum’s not there.
Working a late shift,
as usual.
I ice my knees with a bag of frozen peas.
Then, as I shower,
I slowly turn the water from
scalding hot to cold,
and it swirls pink at my feet
from the sneaker cuts on my heels.
hot – cold – hot – cold
Delicious torture.
Letting on
‘I heard like ninety per cent of rappers in NZ are Samoan.’
‘That’s true,’ she says.
‘I always dug Kiwi rappers.
King Kaps and Che Fu are all-time greats, I reckon.
Mareko too.
What ever happened to Scribe? He was dope.’
‘He’s around.’
‘My bro Jimmy never liked him,
cos of the accent thing.’
She rolls her eyes,
holding her cocktail with both hands.
A constellation of light freckles
over shoulders, cheeks and nose.
The dark hair unscrolled over one collarbone.
She has small expanders in her earlobes,
a subtle nose ring and pristine fingernails.
She’s wearing a white singlet
and a gold chain,
and as she twists to the side
I can see a tattoo on her ribs of a sailboat.
She watches me watching her. We drink.
‘So tell me a story, Scheherazade,’ I say at last.
‘Like what?’
‘Where’d you grow up?’
‘Well, until I was fifteen, South Aucks. Papatoetoe.’
‘Like David Dallas?’
She laughs easily. ‘Exactly. My parents owned a dairy. Not heaps of money, but pretty middle class. But my folks always stressed – said that the kids in South Aucks were a bad influence. So when they got enough cash, they moved me away from all my friends, to Parnell, insisted I go to a private school, which I hated. Wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor. Typical Asian father, you know? But then, I started winning portraiture prizes, and he didn’t seem to mind that. Nothing like success to change an Asian dad’s mind, I guess. I picked up the tattoo gun at uni – practised it on friends, you know, then for a bit of money on the side, before I got properly registered. I always loved Samoan and Maori tattoos. Even attended some tattooing conventions, and met masters like Su’a Sulu’ape Alaiva’a Petelo.’
‘You said that like an expert. Sure you got no Islander blood?’
‘Nah. Mum’s grandparents came from China during the goldrush. Dad’s straight from Singapore. You ever been to Auckland?’
‘Nah.’
‘It’s the best.’
‘So why’d you leave?’
‘Just . . . things. Became too much.’
‘Things do that. But why Oz?’
She eyes me warily and seems to decide on an answer.
‘I followed a woman here, I guess. Photographer from Sydney I met at a gig. As soon as we got here, I knew it was a mistake. She was so jealous.’
‘My ex was like that. Made me delete all my other exes on Facebook.’
‘Exactly. Same here. But like an idiot, I tried to make it work. One day, I decided I’d had enough. Moved here to the Town.’
‘Good move.’
‘I guess so. Not exactly the Australia I’d dreamed of. Boring, mediocre suburbia, quarter-acre blocks, roundabouts. I wanted red sands and rainforests and highways.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Roundabouts. Always the roundabouts. That’s the least of our problems. Plus, it’s bloody beautiful here, actually – the lake, the bushland.’
‘Jeez. Relax. Was just saying.’
I’m always talking shit about the City and the Town but hearing criticism from an outsider stings. It’s like when I hear people paying out Jimmy – only I’m allow to do that. I let it go, though. ‘So, what were you were saying about your ex?’
She wrinkles her nose and continues. ‘The next few months were hell. She called everyday, alternating between sweet, morose and threatening, before just stopping altogether.’
‘Did you love her?’
She grins but her eyes squint strangely. ‘Love? Nah. Never been in love.’
‘Me neither,’ I say.
2
A rectangle of sky, seamless and cyanic.
A bird hangs against the lidless sun, turns, wheels and turns back before disappearing. Half an hour lat
er, a reef of water-coloured clouds drifts across, then a distant plane, like a fugitive, carving the blue in half with its contrails.
Aleks looks down.
The remand yard is full of men in jailhouse greens, squared off behind chain links and razor wire with barbs as long as an arrow’s fletching, sharp enough to chop a line of coke. Past that is the high wall, a century old, patrolled by armoured guards trained to shoot out a man’s brainstem if necessary. All around is a murmur, the intermittent thud of ball and boot, the march of pacing feet. Most of the men are in river-like lines, walking briskly as if they have somewhere to be, trying to burn off energy before they head back into their cells.
It is his second day inside. Aleks is at a slight remove from the rest, people he knows from the outside, who are sweating and gritting their teeth against the sun and the exertion of boxing, sit-ups and push-ups, an effort as much about forgetting as penitence. One of them, a raw, bent-nosed petrol station robber, walks over and hunkers down. ‘Hot as fark.’
‘Bloody oath.’ Aleks draws a vague swirl in the dust at his feet with the tip of his index finger. He doesn’t look up.
‘Chemtrails,’ the man says, looking at the white lines dissolving in the sky. ‘Government uses that shit to control us, ay. Like crop dusting’
‘Yeah, probably,’ says Aleks. The silence sits.
The man is desperate for conversation. ‘Heard about the terrorists’ yard? Crazy cunts. Training like the army in there. Muscly as clouds.’
‘None of my business.’
‘Yair, they’re gonna make it our business, but. Wanna kill the infidel, they reckon. Gonna get us all one day.’
‘If they don’t, something else will, brother,’ says Aleks.
‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ The man laughs and looks over the yard. ‘First-prize shithole. Number one. Least you get a good feed here, but.’
‘Not holding my breath.’
‘Nah, serious! They feed us well, bro. Lessens the chance of a riot. Heard what’s going on out there in Shellfish Bay?’
‘Nah. What’s up?’ Aleks is interested for the first time.
‘A riot. Abos, Aussies, Lebs, Sudis, Islanders. No one getting along. Hard to tell what the fuck happened. You’re not in here long, anyway, ay?’
Aleks wants to ask more about the riots but instead replies, ‘Nah. Not too long.’ Thank god for Mr Chuckles.
‘Been in before, haven’t ya?’
‘How do you know that?’ Aleks says, still not looking up.
‘Dunno. Just sorta . . . ya, know?’ The man spits aside nervously. ‘Heaps of people been in before. That’s all.’
Aleks turns his moonface to the man and grins, remembering a quote from a movie. ‘You’re right. I have been in before. But this time I’m innocent.’
The man guffaws and slaps him on the back, then stands and claps dust off his knees. ‘Aren’t we all, ay? Aren’t we all. You’re a good cunt, bro. You’ll be right.’
Aleks had not been afraid when he arrived at the jail and stepped from the paddy wagon. A tiny cold burn of nervousness at first, a little dampness in the armpits as he was processed and strip-searched. He’d walked high shouldered through the dank, dismal hallway, alert, aware of the ambiguous shapes and voices bouncing off the paint, flitting among the bars of light that filtered in through the roof. An unnamable thrill had run in him as he walked through dark, light, dark, light. Then he’d thought, This place is ugly. It has been designed to be hideously ugly. He’d thought of the goodbye, the lie to his daughter that he was going to the Gold Coast for two months for work, her disturbing eyes.
An inmate with a Swastika tattoo strides past in the yard at a distance and nods. Aleks nods back grimly, then looks away. Crouching and standing and smoking discreetly, the inmates are all arranged in attitudes of conspiracy, desperation or malevolence in their listless faces. He studies them, wondering which of this shifting hive could resolve into the shape of an attacker. He cracks his knuckles then erases what he has drawn in the dust.
He claps the dirt off his knees and stands up. Two men are now having a push-up competition. The sun warms Aleks’ face and he smiles to himself. In his first day in the remand yard, prisoners began calling out to him, words that moved and clung together in an unrecognisable mass, like bees, before solidifying into two words: ‘Mr Janeski.’ And the truth was, as much dirt as he’d done, he’d also done a lot of favours on the street.
He spies a tall, dark figure, alone on the other side of the yard – his cellmate, the Sudanese man. Did he say his name was Gabe? He had been very abrupt. Fuck him.
Aleks had met Gabe the night before, after being ushered into the cell by a massive, dough-faced guard. The cell was old stone, smelling of sweat and Ajax. He placed his stuff in the cupboard before realising there were eyes on him. A very tall black man was lying on his side on the bottom bunk, limbs gathered together loosely like driftwood. Yellowed eyes. Aleks realised he’d never met a Sudanese person before. He offered his hand. ‘Aleks.’
The man took it gingerly and his voice seemed to rumble up from his belly. ‘Gabriel. Gabe.’ Then silence.
After a moment, Aleks said, ‘It’ll make it easier if we get along, brother.’
Silence and eyes.
‘No worries,’ said Aleks, turning back to his belongings. ‘No worries, at all.’
Two months, just two months. It could be a hell of a lot worse.
* * *
Aleks had been to jail once before, in Macedonia.
That cascade of events had started on a brisk day in September, in the town square. The wind was fleet-footed, as if it knew that winter was at its heels. Aleks was discussing chestnut-picking with his friends when a man approached and showed him a Yugoslavian pistol with a silencer.
Aleks was only fifteen and had been back in Macedonia for six months, on his father’s insistence, and already he was in trouble because of two incidents. One was a fight, where he had beaten a schoolmate badly for making fun of his Aussie-accented Macedonian. The second was graffiti. To get his mind off such things, Aleks walked through the cool gullies and hills – the silent tapestry of trees. There was nothing as beautiful to him as autumn in Ohrid as the leaves were changing colour. Chestnut trees had been planted on either side of a gully and the nuts rolled down to a certain area where they could be collected and then sold for a good price. As breath smoked out his mouth and he told his friends about the chestnuts, he thought of Jimmy and Solomon. He knew neither of them had ever seen snow.
The man’s black eyes had an extinguished quality, and the lower half of his face was disguised by a thick beard. He showed them a gun at waist level. It was light, a Zastava M70, easily concealed. The boys admired it and Aleks got a thrill out of holding the silencer, which was as thick as a ballerina’s wrist. Aleks handed it back and the man disappeared into the market. Minutes later they heard screaming, and he came back past them over the cobblestones, not looking at them, the front of his shirt bloody as if he’d just slaughtered a pig.
With NATO in town and a peaceful image to uphold, authorities rounded up all local troublemakers and criminals and put them in a big holding cell, especially those who’d been seen in the town square. In the three days inside, Aleks was unfed and thirsty. He was pissed on, made to admit he was a homosexual, forced to walk on hands and knees by the private interrogation company.
All he could remember now was the smell of dozens of bodies, killers and crims, the freezing cold wind that wrapped around his bones like a tongue. And the terror.
3
Relationship and Communication Relationship and Communication Relationship and Communication.
Jimmy mouths the words like a mantra as he puts in eye drops. He hears a drumroll of feet and Mercury Fire bounds in from the other room, turning in circles, jumping up and down. Jimmy holds his shoulders and nuzzles his forehead into the dog’s snout, letting the paws pad on his belly. For a moment, man and dog are welded into something missh
apen but brand new. Jimmy then says the mantra backwards, grinning into his dog’s face.
‘CommunicationandRelationshipCommunicationandRelationship CommunicationandRelationship.’
He lets Mercury into the backyard. ‘Lucky I’ve got one, ay,’ he says aloud, sitting on the stairs and tossing a ball to the far fence. There is a fierce determination in the dog’s limbs. His speed and agility have Jimmy shaking his head in wonder. They repeat the activity for twenty minutes before the hound seems to get bored and overheated. Panting, it squats down on the unmown grass to take a shit. Jimmy wraps a plastic bag around his hand, picks up the cigar of turd and sniffs it. The dog watches him with his head cocked. Jimmy talks to him, telling him not to poo on the floor of the house, as he pours water into an empty ice cream tub. The dog drinks, sloshing it onto the concrete.
He’s taken two days off to get used to the hound. Can’t believe fucken Solomon kept the poor bloody thing locked up in a flat with their mum, leaving it alone on hot days while he went out chasing women. Jimmy thinks of something he read on the internet. Must’ve been hard to even get the dog onto the third level. Greyhounds hate stairs.
For the rest of the afternoon Mercury sleeps, so Jimmy cleans the already spotless house, then falls into an internet spiral. He watches a Tom Thum beatboxing video, a B. Two DJing video, Joe New’s rappertag, then finds some rare Prowla songs. Hearing the chopped samples reminds him of when he first got into Aussie hip hop and a wave of inspiration hits him. He begins to make a beat on the MPC, but he can’t find the right drums. He wonders where Plutonic Lab or M-Phazes get theirs from. After a frustrating hour, he gives up.