by Omar Musa
He falls asleep and has a dream. In it he shivers. The darkness around him is absolute and unquestioned. He hears a door opening but still there is no light, just murmuring voices. He’s being guided through a corridor by a hand made out of smoke. He steps down and can tell by the uneven rocking beneath his feet and the sound of the water that he is in a boat. The boat moves swiftly, but he hears no oars or motor. He thinks to himself that there is a beauty, even a lustre, to darkness this entire.
A light appears on the front of the boat and it is soothing, diffuse, like the spoors of a dandelion. It is being cupped and protected carefully by a bearded man who seems very ancient, and Aleks thinks he might be a soldier or a priest. Surroundings are starting to appear in the meagre light and he can see small dwellings on the shore, and grapevines, and willows, and he can tell he is on a river; but which one, he can’t be sure. Is it the Drim River, which flows through Struga and is black and full of eels? Or the river in the Town where he and Solomon used to fish? Whichever it is, it’s flowing rapidly, and Aleks clutches onto the side of the boat. He is being propelled towards an enormous whirlpool, bigger than the eye of God or the throat of the devil.
He hears a sound and emerges from the dream upwards, as if from a pool, and is off the bed and on his feet. There’s a streak of movement and Aleks is ready. He sees Gabe upright and twisting with a great energy, dancing even, eyes bulging. Aleks then sees a strip of bedsheet around the man’s neck, self-tied and looped into an air vent, and how the man gurgles and fights against himself with a will to die that overtakes the will to live. Aleks leaps up and holds the man by the struggling legs, grunting. He feels very scared and tries to yell but the man hisses, ‘No, no, no’, and for some reason Aleks becomes silent. He grabs his razor from beneath his pillow and cuts the man down, who falls, gasping and crying. He pulls Gabe up and makes him drink water.
Aleks thinks to himself that somewhere, at that exact moment, someone had succeeded. But not here, not this time.
19
Toby’s mum
Grubby chin and port-sour breath.
‘What do you want with these kids, ay?’
‘I’m teaching them to play ball.’
‘Why?’
‘Just giving something back. I used to be a proper ball player.’
‘Couldn’t make it, ay?’
‘I had a bad injury.’
Toby is hovering behind her,
embarrassed and unsure.
The other kids continue to shoot.
Her pig eyes,
black and watery,
are searching my face,
but she doesn’t seem present somehow.
‘So now you teach kids?’
‘Yep.’
‘And give them presents?’
‘I gave Toby a jersey. It was a one-off thing —’
She leans in close. ‘You saying I don’t know how to look after my son?’
‘Not at all. I —’
‘Then why not buy them all presents?’
She grabs Toby by the arm
and I step to her.
She smiles a yellow, wobbly smile
and is then screaming.
‘I don’t need anyone else to look after my boy.
Especially not some fucken coconut,
some FOB cunt.’
As she hobbles away,
dragging Toby,
she yells, ‘YOU FUCKEN PAEDOPHILE.
FUCKEN KIDDY FIDDLER.’
When the kids leave,
I sit on the court,
and cup my face in my hands.
It feels like it’s gonna spill over the sides.
The next day
I get all the kids’ addresses.
Over four hours,
on foot,
I visit each house
(well, mostly flats)
and tell every parent what I’m doing,
that it’s on public property,
that it’s not illegal
and that they’re more than welcome to come along.
Most of them are single mums,
who seem confused at first,
wondering what’s in it for me,
but are generally pretty stoked.
One of them
offers to help out as an assistant.
Used to play for Queensland,
she reckons.
When I get home,
Mum’s cooking something delicious,
but I head straight to bed
and collapse onto it.
The next morning
‘I call it the Ulysses,’ says Jimmy. ‘An adventurer. Feel like an
adventure?’
‘Chur bro!’ I say in a Kiwi accent.
‘Red like fire, red like the devil,’ says Jimmy.
Red polished to a high gleam.
Headlights perfect in design and shape.
I squat,
run a finger over the bonnet with wonder,
as if the paint might still be wet.
My bro Jimmy.
Unbelievable.
Dad loved this car.
Tears in my eyes,
spliff in hand.
I’m trying to quit smoking
but this is a special occasion —
tomorrow I’ll quit.
I hold it like a dart,
puff, puff, pass to Jimmy
who holds it between curled forefinger and middle
as if he’s checking his nails for dirt,
then blows the delicious smoke
towards its brother clouds above.
Soon we’re driving,
Mercury Fire in the back,
no destination in mind,
just towards the ocean somewhere.
We pass antique towns,
places that were once rough-and-tumble outposts –
bushranger, massacre land.
The Dodge doesn’t have a proper system,
so I play tunes on my phone.
New Aussie shit –
Astronomy Class,
a Big Village compilation,
Joyride’s baritone over washed out synths,
Seth Sentry’s multi-syllabled wordplay.
It’s not Jimmy’s style but he smiles and lets it go,
seeing how I’m yelling the words.
We head towards Shellfish Bay.
It’s a coastal town that swells
during holiday season
and washes out in low season.
The southern beaches,
just out of town,
are the most pristine you’ve ever seen,
as if they’ve been forgotten by time and humanity.
‘How’s Scarlett?’ Jimmy asks tentatively. We don’t often discuss my
women.
‘Good. I think.’
‘Getting serious?’ asks Jimmy.
‘Nah, man. True playa for life.’ I laugh.
‘Don’t fuck it up, bro.’
Instead of getting annoyed,
I nod.
We pass through rain,
a fine mist,
bizarre rocky outcrops and green fields,
climb slowly up a small mountain
and are soon in cool rainforest.
We stop to smoke at a place
where a white cross is wreathed with flowers.
A little girl and her dad died here in a car crash.
As we wind down the mountain,
we can smell the ocean for the first time,
the saltwater tang.
Jimmy says, ‘The beach. That’s the true Australia.’
‘Fuck noath.’
As we approach Shellfish Bay,
we’re practically bouncing in our seats.
Jimmy is driving with one hand
and he looks at the sky.
It’s restless,
charged with electricity and moisture.
Mercury barks out the window.
We pass stores
&nb
sp; that advertise bait and the catch of the day,
scallops and grenadier and gemfish
and we grin at each other.
We cross the long bridge into town.
There are heaps of people on the streets,
mostly kids –
shaved skulls, boardies and wife-beaters or shirtless,
lean and sun-dark, pockmarked and tatted,
smoking or doing kickflips,
some with sun-bleached curls,
some grinning and skinny as skeletons,
heads ballooning and enlarged –
their faces turn to us
as we drive past and some of them yell
and we realise that we’ve passed no cars on our way here,
nor were we overtaken.
We are the only car going into town.
We see the first burned-out shop
when we get to the main street.
A middle-aged man
is leaning against the blackened doorframe,
crying or coughing.
There are burnt sneakers swinging from lampposts
like dead rabbits.
Inside the obscene shattered maws of shopfronts,
graffiti drips with no rhyme or reason:
FUCK THE PIGS
FUCK OFF WE’RE FULL
ALWAYS WAS, ALWAYS WILL BE
LISA IS A SLUT.
Cops, cops everywhere,
blue and red lights flashing on corners.
The riots.
We’d forgotten about that.
We get fish and chips regardless.
The shopkeeper is sombre.
‘Animals,’ he says,
but who’s he talking about?
Kids wandering along in groups of five or ten,
with eyes flashing from beneath hoods.
There are still fishermen along the water,
lines feeding into the black tides.
I stop a kid.
‘What’s all this about?’
The lad eyes me, then says, ‘Cops bashed a young Koori fulla. There’s
video of it and everything.’
‘You seen it?’
‘Nah, but me cousin reckons he has. Boy died this morning.’
We drive further down the coast in silence.
Take a sandy track off the main road
and at last – the beach we’re looking for.
It’s long and windswept,
subtly curved for what seems like kilometres
until it reaches a promontory far off.
The fish and chips are still warm and we eat,
watching the choppy waves.
Mercury Fire hurtles down the sand,
a grey hyphen on a white page.
We walk down the beach
and soon come across a cluster of sheds
just over the sand dunes,
fishing shacks, at least eighty years old,
made from odd bits of rusted metal.
Latrines out the back
and the smell of trapped seaweed and bait.
No one is around.
‘Look like they’re from another world,’ I say.
The stink somehow comforting.
No way this type of place will last.
‘James. Jimmy,’ I say, looking at him seriously.
‘Yeah?’
‘Trust me, bro, if he reaches out to you, don’t meet up with that cunt.
Nothing good will come of it, bro.’
Jimmy looks pained, cornered, trapped. He won’t meet my eyes and
doesn’t speak. I persist.
‘Seriously. He’s lied about everything else. What’ll be different now?’
Jimmy clears his throat and finally looks at me. ‘Now, I’m a man.’
We just sit, looking out over the choppy surf.
20
Jimmy drops Solomon at Scarlett’s house and drives to his mother’s flat. Grace has just finished a long shift at the nursing home and is methodically watering the few plants she has on the landing. She’s staring across the road at a stately, heritage-listed house when Jimmy climbs the stairs. She wraps him up in a hug.
When Ulysses Amosa had his second stroke, he lost the faculty of speech. He eventually regained it, but moved slowly and often spoke Samoan. He spent much of his time sitting on the landing. Sometimes he would play chess with Petar Janeski. The two men would speak in gentle and respectful tones to each other, punctuated by roaring laughter. They’d sit for hours talking about their plans to return to their homelands. They seemed to have a crystalline understanding of their parallel situations, of a certain type of manhood, of the centrality of the church. They’d repeated their plans like a mantra, to the point where Grace and the children would roll their eyes. Other times, Ulysses would pray, as if preparing for death. Grace fussed around him, saying he was silly for even thinking of it. Remembering his own father’s congregation, Ulysses sang hymns and his voice was a ribbon that insinuated itself throughout the flats. He didn’t know that people listened; that it moved the residents of the flats to see such an enormous figure, rocking slowly back and forth, singing.
When Jimmy enters the flat, he sees the hole in Grace’s flyscreen where a neighbour cut a circle out of it to make a veggie strainer. Her cat, Biggie, arches and sniffs Jimmy before rolling on his back and rubbing his head against Jimmy’s ankle. Biggie then leaps up onto the ledge and starts dabbing lazily at a blowfly.
‘Miau,’ says Biggie the cat.
‘Mraow,’ says Jimmy.
Grace puts an LP on her cherished record player and soon they hear Stevie Wonder singing ‘Golden Lady’. She closes her eyes in pleasure. Jimmy stares out the window, also savouring it. All the dust and haze of dusk is boiling upwards and now the sound of people returning from work, turning on televisions and microwaves and irons and the clatter of skateboards and the whir of bike wheels and the forms of cats creeping and leaping and sphinxed on fencelines. Grace talks non-stop.
‘All the air-conditioners broke at work today. Blackout. In the middle of a bloody heatwave. Four days above forty degrees. You felt how hot it was – like hell. We tried our best, James, but it was just too much. Two patients died. One of a heart attack. I had just fed lunch to one of them – Suzy. You know what the last thing she said to me was? She said, “I learned a new word today.” Isn’t that magical?’
‘What word?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
As she keeps talking, Jimmy takes his shirt off, and begins working on her broken TV. He’s always been good with electronics; in fact, he’s the only one of the boys who could ever make a half-decent beat on an MPC or a computer. He even sold a couple of them to local MCs, beats with sped-up classical samples and crispy drums. Grace watches him from the kitchen while she sprinkles red capsicum, lemongrass and onions all over the snapper. His skinny frame – all elbows and ribs, inherited from her – is caged around the television like a spider. He turns his glittering, slanted eyes to his mother.
‘I think I saw my father the other day,’ he says.
She looks up from the oven. ‘Where?’
‘Outside work.’
‘Don’t be silly. No one’s seen him in years.’
‘Yeah. I’m not even sure it was him.’
‘Well, tell him to get fucked if he says anything.’ Grace swears rarely, but the emphasis is sharp. ‘Can’t be him.’
They’re silent then Jimmy says, ‘What did you see in him, Mum?’
Grace drips some soy sauce onto the fish and then puts it in the oven. She busies herself making a gin and tonic and Jimmy thinks she won’t answer, staring deep into the glass as if there’s a shipwreck in there. Then she tongues a tooth at the back of her mouth and says distractedly, ‘I lost a filling today. Bloody nuisance. If only —’ She breaks off. When she speaks again, she almost sounds wistful. ‘Was young and dumb, I guess. Just had this danger about him . . . Stupid. I knew that I’d never be bored when I was with him, you know?’
She smiles. ‘You came of it James. You came of it.’
They hold each other’s gaze. Then he smiles and turns the television on, the picture perfect.
‘There you go, Mum.’
‘Good boy.’
‘No worries.’
He looks out the window and she continues to talk and set the table. She can’t see but he is biting into his thumb so hard he draws blood. The sun goes down like a swimmer lowering herself into a lake and one by one the stars come out.
21
REPORTER: Now a heartwarming story. A young, local man trying to make a difference in his community, through basketball and hip hop. Solomon Amosa was a star basketball player who led his high school to two championships, and even represented Australia at under-sixteen level. A promising career was cut short by injury, but now Amosa is using his skills in a different way: to coach a basketball program for local children. Solomon, what gave you the idea to start Amosa’s All-Stars?
SOLOMON AMOSA: Well . . . um . . . it just happened, really. Started teaching a couple kids how to shoot, how to dribble, then more and more started to turning up. Pretty organic, really – just word-of-mouth. Keeps them out of trouble, and me too.