Here Come the Dogs

by Omar Musa

  He goes back to the computer and scrolls through pictures of his favourite pornstars. At the moment, his favourites are Kayden Kross, Nikki Benz, Christie Mack, Stoya, Rachel Starr and Lisa Ann (in that order). He once even got a response from Christie Mack on Twitter. He’s rearranged the list every few weeks since he was fifteen. He stops on one picture and stares at it for a whole minute, imagining that his body has become particulate and is floating through the screen to where Kayden Kross is lying, enamelled fingernail pulling her glossy lower lip down, blonde hair in a perfect swirl. For some reason, today it doesn’t turn him on. He bends about his jellied dick for half a minute then has an idea. He types ‘how to pick up a stripper’ into Google and finds a blog that gives instructions.

  1) Find out her real name

  2) Befriend the bouncers

  3) Don’t look at their tits or pussies when you get a lap dance: look them in the eyes.

  He takes note.

  He’s about to have a nap when he gets a call from Aleks in jail, who asks him if he can take Mila out to play somewhere. He beams at the responsibility. Aleks had asked him, not Solomon.

  ‘I’ll take her out with Mercury Fire, bra, no worries.’

  ‘Is it safe around kids?’ Aleks sounds distant.

  ‘Of course, bro. Greyhounds are awesome around kids. In fact —’ He’s about to launch into a spiel of his newly acquired knowledge but Aleks says, ‘Gotta go,’ and the line falls silent. Jimmy looks at his phone and smiles.

  That afternoon Mercury Fire shits on the carpet and Jimmy steps in it, the turd squelching between his toes. Jimmy yells and hops on one foot, admonishing the dog, dragging him by the collar and rubbing his nose in his mess. Then he remembers the mantra and he adopts a conciliatory tone as he repeats ‘relationship and communication’ again and again, switching delivery and emphasis on syllables like a rapper experimenting with flow. The dog looks betrayed and stares sadly, but Jimmy keeps speaking to him in a soothing, calm tone and the dog is frisky again in no time. Jimmy puts the radio on as he cleans the carpet. A voice says that there have been race riots somewhere down the coast. He recognises the name of the commentator from somewhere – Damien Crawford. ‘In these times of disorder, we need to name people for what they are – thugs.’ Jimmy’s paying no attention, though, fascinated by the way Mercury is chewing on a rubber bone. ‘You’ve still got the spirit of a puppy, ay, boy?’ he says. The dog looks up and right at him, as if he understood.

  He then sets off on the bus from the Town to the City. He walks confidently and with purpose, avoiding the travel agency. He goes to a hardware shop and buys some lengths of PVC pipe, PVC cement, a hacksaw, a hand-drill, and all manner of wood screws, hitch pins and fittings. As he walks back to the bus interchange with his precarious load, Jimmy sees a door open at the community centre where Solomon used to attend b-boy battles. Tables are laden with delicious-looking cakes and curries and he mistakes it for a market or a food fair. Jimmy hasn’t eaten anything the whole day. He leaves his load outside the door but, once inside, he realises that it’s a local Muslim community’s Friday prayers.

  He starts for the door but a man gestures vigorously for him to sit down. He pours Jimmy cardamom tea and serves him a piled plate of saffron rice and curry. There are splinters of cinnamon throughout the yellow rice and it smells delicious. The man’s name, it turns out, is Amjad. He looks familiar to Jimmy somehow. He says that he is a cabbie, and begins to talk about Australia.

  ‘This place is biting . . . ah, eating me. Being away from my family. These Aussies, they talk so much, always talking. So lazy, but they get paid so much. This one bastard ask me – which boat you come on? I tell him I come on a plane. I am doctor back in Pakistan. I tell him you think I wanna be here? Driving you around? That bastard left his phone in the cab. He call me, says where is the phone? I tell him, you’ll find it on the bottom of the lake, so get some scuba. I threw it in the lake. My cousin tells me he is a cabbie in New Zealand. People are kind, money is shit. Here, the people are arseholes, but the money is good. What a choice.’

  Another man sits down and begins to talk to Jimmy about God, about attending next Friday’s prayers. Jimmy makes an excuse, picks up his stuff and leaves.

  He finds that buses have stopped running and has to pay sixty bucks for a cab from the City to the Town.

  * * *

  The next day he wakes up early remembering he has to pick up Mila at twelve. He cuts the PVC into various lengths and begins to make a baby gate so that Mercury Fire can’t get into the living room and mess up the carpet or sofa while he is out. He puts some albums in his CD player – Kings Konekted, Jehst, Fluent Form, Fraksha. He raps along to the albums as he saws, trims, glues and fits the gate, using detailed instructions he found on the internet. A few hours and several albums later, he stands back, dusting his hands off. He coaxes Mercury Fire into the hallway to see it. Mercury observes it momentarily then leaps over it in one bound.

  * * *

  The weather has turned strange.

  Still no rain, no clouds, but the sky has been changing colours all day, from wine dark to lemon light and back every hour.

  Jimmy knocks on Aleks’ door and Sonya answers. Usually she has a smile for him, but today she’s out of it, her eyes almost closed and her mouth ajar. He tells her that Aleks wants him to take Mila out and she nods, but he could swear she’s sleepwalking.

  Having the hound makes hanging with an anklebiter easier. Mila does most of the talking, patting Mercury, her hands fitting between his pointed hipbones. She’s a bloody sharp one, heaps like Jana. Jimmy wonders whatever happened to Jana’s girlfriend from all those years ago, whose neck Aleks had snatched the bead from. Maybe she went back to Malaysia.

  Jimmy pushes his floppy hair back and wipes his hand on his shorts. The park is strangely bare, but for a single tree that stands far off, its branches against the sky like cracks on a plate. A few youngsters in the cricket nets – what a shit sport, ay. Mila throws a tennis ball towards the tree and Mercury Fire goes bounding after it. He retrieves it and drops it at their feet, panting, pink tongue out.

  ‘What do you do, Uncle Jimmy?’

  ‘I work in an office.’

  ‘My dad’s never worked in an office. I don’t think, anyway.’

  Jimmy smiles. ‘Nah, different strokes for different folks.’

  Mila mouths the words a few times, as if making sure she will remember to use the expression later. Like father, like daughter. Aleks has a keen talent for mimicry and at times gives off the impression that he had a far greater education than he ever actually had. Much of his vocabulary he cannot spell. In a life of rupture – back and forth between living in Macedonia and Australia several times in his teens – this talent, combined with quick-wittedness, has served him well.

  ‘Look at Mercury, Uncle Jimmy! He found something . . . Does your dad work in an office, too?’

  ‘My dad? He was . . . He’s a chef.’

  She seems uninterested. ‘When’s my dad coming back?’

  ‘Soon. He’s working. Your dad is a hard worker – everything he does, Mila, he does it for you.’

  She smiles broadly then looks thoughtful. ‘Are you a hard worker, Uncle Jimmy?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I am,’ he says with more force than necessary.

  He looks up and can see a man sitting cross-legged in a flower garden across the road. His face is in shadow. The man is very well dressed, even wearing gloves, watching Jimmy throw the ball to Mila. A bus passes, and when Jimmy looks again, the man is no longer there.

  4

  There is ferocity in Solomon’s game, as if he can outplay the Reaper for his father’s life. He practises jump shot after jump shot until the hoop feels as big as a sinkhole. But during games, he never lets his fury take hold. He siphons it into his body until he becomes a blur of motion, a dervish spinning to the hoop, unfuckwithable. Yet his face remains placid, almost impassive. Teammates begin to call him ‘The Iceman’, referring to th
e great scorer George Gervin – supreme calm and a bone-dry shirt – but soon they rename him ‘The Mask’. The mask unnerves opponents and teammates alike. There is arrogance in his game, the crossovers and dancing feet designed to humiliate, the smouldering intensity a slow knife intended to torture the opposition throughout the game. The truth is that he put the mask on much earlier.

  When Ulysses Amosa recovered from his first stroke, his obsession with church and tradition became fervent. Solomon resented going to church and didn’t understand the fa’aaloalo, respect for elders, that Ulysses constantly went on about – Solomon saw Aussie kids treating their parents as equals. Wounded, he began to speak less and less at home. Despite this, behind the mask, Solomon seethed with love for his dignified, sick father. His mother, Grace, would take Ulysses in his wheelchair to watch his prodigious son. Though he couldn’t articulate it, Ulysses loved to watch him dance on the blonde hardwood as if the ball was attached to a string. The man and the boy barely exchanged words, but Ulysses knew that Solomon was playing for him.

  5

  Hail bursts suddenly out of the cloudless sky.

  Solomon, Scarlett and the kids seek shelter in a bus stop, watching hailstones as big as fists crack windscreens and dent letterboxes, bouncing metres high off the asphalt and racing over the street like runaways. A complete fury of white. Several minutes later, it is over and the sky is blue. The sun shines again, bright and furious. They spend ten minutes kicking hailstones into the grass, where they lie like blind eyes, melting.

  Solomon gets the boys, who now number five, to tie their laces tight. ‘Okay, listen, boys. Dribbling’s bloody important, all right? Especially for you two – Toby you listening? You’re quick but not that big. If you learn to dribble, people won’t be able to take the ball off ya. You’ll be able to get anywhere on the court, get to the basket. Understand?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘You need to master the ball, control it. I wanna see you pound it hard on the ground, like this. Keep your head up, too.’ All five boys are staring at Solomon, trying to imitate his every move, magnetised, as he directs them.

  ‘That feels weird.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it. Don’t worry about fucking up, all right? That’s gonna happen. One minute now – hard.’ Toby begins to bounce the ball on the blacktop, concentrating. Solomon has a new gadget, a cylindrical set of speakers with Bluetooth. He puts it on and a Ta-ku beat thuds out. ‘Keep it up. It’s all about rhythm, like music, like dancing.’

  ‘Dancing?’ gasps Charlie, a chubby blond kid.

  ‘Don’t knock dancing, mate. It’ll help you learn balance.’ Solomon toprocks niftily and strikes a pose. They all laugh breathlessly, still bouncing the ball.

  ‘You gotta keep calm. Keep your composure. In this world, there’re plenty of people trying to get you angry. Make you lose it. Never give in to em.’

  Scarlett takes out an artist pad and starts to sketch with a biro. The shapes of trees, backboard, powerlines, fence, children of various colours and sizes in different attitudes of exuberant movement, all begin to appear. Here Toby driving to his right, there Muhammad in mid-air with the ball just leaving his fingertips, in the bottom corner Charlie catching his breath with hands on hips; at the top a bird caught in a crosswind. Solomon at the centre, directing everything. With assured, gentle scrapes of the biro, slowly depth and shade and life appear on the paper.

  Scarlett looks up. Solomon is next to her, smiling thoughtfully.

  ‘A pretty raggedy crew,’ he says. ‘But maybe enough for a team.’

  Even though the day is darkening now, he has shades on, and she looks away briefly before standing up. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls singlet and his skin is almost luminous with sweat. She runs her hands over his shoulders and kisses him quickly.

  Some lads turn up and start shooting on the other net. They’re loud and cocky, all donning Bryant and James and Griffin jerseys, shades and caps backwards. Solomon seems to know one of them from a long time ago and his demeanour changes. He continues talking to the kids in a low voice but his eyes keep returning to the men, as if sizing them up. One of them, clearly the leader, calls out. He’s tall and muscular with a shaved head and a goatee, and by the way he moves appears to have played at a high level. He has a scornful smile on his face. ‘Oi, Amosa. Wanna play with someone your own age? We need an extra player.’

  Solomon’s expression is hard to read. ‘Yeh. I’ll have a game.’ He turns to the boys. ‘Okay, you got some free time, lads. Practise lay-ups and shooting, just like I showed you. With both hands. Might seem boring, but I promise it’ll be worth it; all right?’ He looks like he is about to tousle Toby’s hair, then seems to think better of it.

  The game is physical from the get-go.

  The man with the shaved head is guarding Solomon closely, reaching in, shoving him, hand in his face, setting hard screens. Solomon’s brow darkens as he plays and he flicks the man’s hand away with his left as he dribbles with his right.

  ‘Stop reaching, cunt. You’ll get burned that way.’ Solomon threads the ball through his legs easily.

  ‘Psssh. The only thing getting burned is your cock, playboy.’

  ‘Now, now. Envy’s an ugly trait, mate. Pussies get no pussy.’ Solomon is still sizing him up, facing right up to him, dribbling dizzyingly fast for a man of his size.

  ‘Ugly motherfucker,’ the guy says. ‘Tana Umaga-looking motherfucker.’

  ‘You mean Sonny Bill, ay?’ Solomon does a spin move and hits the guy hard in the chest, sending him bouncing back into position. Solomon head fakes but the guy is all over him.

  ‘Nah, cunt. You heard me. Fat cunt. Has-been.’

  ‘Better than a never-was, mate. Bank.’ Solomon flicks a fadeaway up but it hits the front of the rim. Ugly. He looks up to see that the kids have stopped their drills and are watching.

  ‘Bitch, please. Let’s see how that ankle works.’ The man shimmies and shakes off Solomon, who grasps for his arm as he passes. ‘Cash. And one,’ the man says, neatly scooping in an up-and-under. He runs backwards past Solomon, wagging his finger Dikembe Mutombo style. The angrier Solomon gets the worse he plays, well aware that Scarlett and the kids are watching. He can’t seem to help himself. Eventually, after a light foul, he drops the ball and pushes the man against the pole supporting the backboard, holding him by the throat. The man grins as his friends pull Solomon away. Solomon walks to the fence, spitting.

  When he looks back, Scarlett is gone.

  6

  The men somehow manage to avoid each other, despite the confines.

  Aleks has his back to the wall, reading a book called The Secret. He mouths each word as he reads, rolls them around his mouth like barley sugar, tasting them and thinking hard. He realises he already knows many of the words, but he can only read a page at a time before his head and eyes hurt. He hasn’t read a book since early high school. Every now and again he catches Gabe watching him in the stainless-steel mirror as he washes his hands or stands up to get something out of the cupboard. The man has a regal bearing and Aleks is intrigued. Is it that he’s never been so close to an African before? Is it the man’s astonishing height or the numerous books he reads (in English). He thinks he can smell the man, and wonders if his black skin holds sweat in a different way. He’s wondering whether he ought to talk to him when the lights go out.

  An hour passes.

  The man begins to makes a curious sound – not a snore, more a croak or a wheeze. It seems he’s fallen asleep, but in the darkness Aleks can’t be sure. His first instinct is violence, the rage that flows into the fists and explodes like dynamite on chin or cheekbone. He breathes slowly and imagines three points of light, a triangle, on the century-old ceiling arched, above him. He stares at it and it pulses. After minutes, his wife’s sleeping face resolves in the centre of it. She is in deep slumber, and he momentarily envies her. She is then replaced by his mother, sweeping the kitchen in the flat, her eyes giving the impression of someone w
ho fears nothing but God: not fists, not death, not fear itself.

  The triangle expands with each of Gabe’s wheezes and croaks. Aleks feels a strange, cool breeze. Now there are shimmering shapes lighting up on the ceiling. Candles and crucifixes and, strangely, peacocks. He sees a boy walking over cobblestones, chasing the peacocks, then looking out over the whole of Lake Ohrid, the water and light from this height like shot silk. The boy walks into the dank rooms of St Naum Monastery, carefully placing votive candles in a sandbox at the entrance. The boy is him, aged fifteen, when he first returned to Macedonia. He is looking around at the frescoes of an ancient room, saints and scenes from the Bible. The air is damp and cool, the skinny candles throwing irregular patterns on the brickwork. He can smell the water flowing somewhere beneath, or over, old stone.

  Gabe coughs and the triangle disappears.

  In the darkness, Aleks’ mind again turns to violence, how he would like to make the guy shut the fuck up. Instead he focuses on the thought of the room and its wet, ancient smell, and how it reminds him of God. Peacocks and candles and God’s mystifying deliberations. What was his place among it all? What part played by God or the Devil?

  He wonders if his life would turn around if he moved back to his homeland. He often hears Macos saying they want to, but they rarely do. Australia has never taken him seriously, though he has tried to fit in. He remembers, at school, a teacher telling him how lucky he was to be here, how violent and animalistic the Balkans must have been. He had stayed quiet then, but he now knew that Australia was the scene of great crimes. Make a nick in the corner of the country, peel back the facade like possum skin, and the truth beneath would be hideous.

  When he finally does sleep, he sees the monastery’s inner sanctum again, but this time the fresco is made flesh. Women are lamenting and pulling at their hair, angels are weeping, and a single face is speaking. Aleks can’t hear a word the face is saying, only a resonant singing, as if from deep within a mountain or a lake.