Common People

by Tony Birch

  ‘How much did you get for it?’

  ‘Nothing. Not yet. We asked for two-five each and he started complaining about cash flow or something. Whoever he works with in the city owes George. Or so he says. He’s waiting on them, and we were waiting on him. Five thousand dollars. Pat’s half is yours, Dom.’

  Dominic spat on the ground. ‘I don’t think I want the money. If Pat hadn’t been knocking cars for George, he’d be alive.’

  ‘Maybe. And maybe not. You know the way your brother was. He’d lift a car for money. And he’d steal one just so he could wind the windows down and roar along the highway at night. I don’t want to be disrespectful, but he had a death wish, Dom.’

  ‘Bullshit. The road was iced that morning. Could have happened to anyone.’

  ‘You can believe me or not. He was your brother and you need to believe whatever sits comfortable with you. I get that.’ He held up the half-empty whiskey bottle. ‘Fuck. I threw the top away.’

  Jed got up from the swing and searched the ground until he found the screw-on cap.

  ‘I’m gonna drive over to George’s yard tomorrow and tell him I’m not waiting any longer for the money. If you don’t want Pat’s share give it to your folks to help pay for the funeral.’

  ‘I better be going. Might as well get my arse kicked by the old man tonight instead of sleeping on it. Hey, why are you telling me about the money you’re owed from Barron? You could keep the lot for yourself. No one would know.’

  ‘I might be a car thief, Dom. But I’m not fucken dishonest.’

  Dominic left the playground with his brother on his mind. Until Pat became addicted to stealing cars, the Cross boys had been inseparable. They shared a bedroom at home, were only a year apart at school, and played on the same football team. Nights were taken up with a fire in the backyard, sharing stories, often ghost tales Pat had invented to frighten his little brother. But when Pat discovered fast cars and a partner in Jed, who was just as eager, he left the backyard and his brother behind. When Dominic reached the far corner of the park he turned around. Jed was laying across a swing and twirling his body around in circles the way a kid would do.

  Barron’s scrap yard sat at the end of a stretch of gravel road. Jed had borrowed his father’s truck, with the explanation that he’d picked up a landscaping job and Dominic was going to be working with him for the day. He skidded and fishtailed along the road, kicking up gravel and dust. George Barron had inherited the scrap business from his father along with a reasonable bank balance after the old man was crushed under the stock car engine he was working on. George rewarded his good fortune by drinking day and night. It took him a little over a year to run the business into the ground. Soon after, word spread through the stolen car trade that George Barron was ready to move illegal stock. Whether he’d approached the cut and shut syndicate in the city or they’d called him, he was soon open for business to anyone able to get their hands on late model cars, with imports fetching a premium price.

  The boys walked through an iron gate into the scrap yard and knocked at the open door of the shed that passed for an office. There was no answer. ‘Come on,’ Jed said. ‘Let’s go in.’ The walls inside were plastered with posters of naked women. Spare engine parts were piled on a narrow desk in one corner and stacked on shelves behind the desk, a complete V8 motor sat in the centre of the room. Dominic heard a toilet flush. George appeared at a curtained doorway hitching up his pants.

  ‘What do you want here?’ George barked, not bothering to buckle his belt. ‘Nobody comes in here without my say-so.’

  ‘I’m here for the money you owe me,’ Jed said. ‘Mine and Pat’s. You need to pay us for the Mercedes.’

  ‘Fucking Pat,’ George laughed. ‘Let’s not worry too much about having to pay Pat. He fucked himself good and proper. There’s no coin heading his way. What would he spend it on? Angel wings?’ he chuckled.

  Dominic’s feet shifted in the gravel.

  ‘Knock it off,’ Jed said. ‘This is Dom, Pat’s brother.’

  ‘Oh, pardon me. I’m very sorry,’ George said, with little sincerity. ‘I’m sorry about the business that went on with your brother. He was a good worker. I’m sorry to be losing him.’

  ‘He never worked for you and neither did I,’ Jed snapped. ‘We were in a business arrangement. And you owe us.’

  George threw his hands in the air. ‘I don’t have the money for you, son. Not yet. I’ve had no luck moving the Merc. I got it sitting under a tarp in the workshop. I told you before, I can’t pay you until I’m paid. It’s been a short couple of weeks for all of us. I’ve got a couple of beauties back there, ready to go, but business is quiet in the city. The larceny squad are sniffing around like fucken gun dogs. My pockets are empty until I move these two cars on. Be patient and give it another week. We’ll come good. Both of us.’

  ‘We dropped the car here three weeks ago. Pat reckoned you probably sold it already and you’re holding out.’

  ‘Sold it? If you don’t fucken believe me come out back. I can show you the car.’

  ‘Why can’t you pay now?’ Jed asked. ‘We’ve delivered on time. You can easy get your money when you sell the cars.’

  George reached into his mouth, pulled out a full set of dentures and studied them. ‘Look. What if I can give you something to tide you over.’ It wasn’t easy understanding what he was saying with his teeth out. He slurred and spat his words.

  ‘How much?’ Jed asked.

  ‘Five hundred. Each.’

  ‘Five hundred! You promised us five thousand dollars all up for that car. We drove it into the yard and you rubbed your hands together like it was gold. That was your exact words, George. Gold! Fuck it. This isn’t fair.’

  ‘Hey!’ George snarled. He put his teeth back in, to be sure his next comment was clearly understood. ‘Don’t you be swearing at me. You’re only a kid and I’m a fucking businessman. Show some respect. I’ve got a local Jack in my pocket, son. You behave or you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble.’ George picked up a large monkey wrench from the table and directed it towards Jed. ‘Now fucken settle down. Let me think what I can do for you.’ He dropped the wrench and scratched the side of his head with one hand and his balls with the other. ‘All right. Listen up. The best I can offer today is one thousand. On top of that, you bring me another car. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s in decent order. You do that and I’ll spot you another two grand on delivery. It’s a good deal.’

  ‘And we still have a contract on the Mercedes?’ Jed asked.

  ‘As soon as it’s shifted, I’ll pay you what’s owed on that as well.’ He dropped the wrench on the table. ‘So, we have a deal?’

  ‘Almost,’ Jed said. ‘You pay us two thousand deposit now, not one thousand, and we have a deal.’

  George nodded his head. ‘Good.’ He fiddled with the combination of the safe he kept under the desk, opened the door, counted two thousand dollars in grubby notes and handed them to Jed.

  ‘When can you deliver?’

  ‘Saturday night.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll leave the gates unlocked.’

  The following Saturday, around one in the morning, Dominic sat perched on a boulder overlooking the country club car park. Jed lay on his back in the damp grass enjoying his third joint of the night. He was smoking it on the back of the half a dozen beers he’d downed earlier and a couple of unidentifiable blue tablets handed to him by the doorman out front of the Motorhead, a vacant warehouse that passed for the town’s only nightclub.

  Dominic ran an eye over the line of cars. Not one of them had a dent or cracked windscreen. ‘Where do you reckon they get all the money for these cars?’

  ‘My guess would be that most of them are lawyers, coppers or criminals. Take your pick.’ Jed took a drag on his joint and held the smoke deep in his lungs. ‘Drugs. It’s where all the big money is. May
be we should give it a go. We deliver this second car maybe we could pool our earnings. Four grand would buy us a decent purse of tablets. We could sell them around town and double our earnings.’

  Dominic had no interest in selling drugs, and little more in stealing cars, he realised, surveying the car park.

  Jed got to his knees, fell forward onto his face, and giggled.

  ‘You sure you’re okay to drive?’ Dominic asked.

  ‘I’m good to go. I always have a beer and some weed before a job. Eases me into the work. Pat was the same. Dunno why, but I can get nervous behind the wheel. You remember driver education back at school? Safety first,’ he giggled again. He gave up the effort of trying to get to his feet, lay on his back and looked up at the clear night sky. The stars shone from one side of a dark blanket to the other, and a full moon floated above the mountain range in the distance.

  ‘You do any of that astronomy shit at school? Looking up at the sky?’ Jed asked.

  ‘Next year. Mr Macleod takes a class out camping in the hills with this telescope he’s got. It’s like a cannon.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been up there with him. Me and Pat. He ever talk to you about it? You know he was mad for the stars Pat was.’

  The news surprised Dominic. ‘Pat never mentioned any stars to me.’

  Jed raised his arm in the air, extended a finger and waved it across the sky.

  ‘Well, he liked the stars almost as much as he did cars. Problem is, you can’t steal a star. He knew the names of every one of them. This might sound dumb, but Pat decided we should pick a star each and name it after ourselves. You too. He named a star after his little brother.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Really. Don’t know which one is which now. Our stars. Most of them look the same. But I know this one.’ He pointed to a bright star low in the eastern sky. ‘You see that one way over there on its own winking at us?’

  ‘Yeah. I see it.’

  ‘Well, Macleod, he aimed his telescope at that star, lined us up and got us to take a look at it.’

  Jed sat up, wiped his mouth and straightened his back, as if he was about to make an important announcement. ‘And you know what he told us?’

  Dominic wasn’t paying attention. He was thinking Jed was in no state to break into and steal a car, let alone drive it back to Barron’s yard.

  ‘You listening to me, Dom? You know what he told us?’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘I know this might sound crazy, but the star we were looking at that night, the same star you can see up there winking at you now, it’s dead. Fucken dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘Yep. And it’s been dead for a million years. Maybe longer than that. The light you can see up there, it’s taken all that time to get here. Right now that star, where the light is coming from, it’s already dead.’

  Dominic looked up at the star, burning bright yellow at the centre with exploding orange dust at its edge.

  ‘A star as bright as that one, I don’t see how it could die. It has to be alive.’ He jumped from the boulder. ‘Too bad Pat didn’t love the stars a little more.’

  ‘What’s that fucken mean?’

  ‘It would have been a lot better for my mum and dad and me, for all of us, if Pat had got more out of looking through a telescope at the stars than he did driving cars.’ He began walking away. ‘I’m going to sort this out.’

  ‘Where you going?’ Jed yelled. ‘We got this job to do. One car and it’s the jackpot.’

  Jed dropped his pants and pissed in the dirt, throwing his head back and staring up at the sky. His eyes filled with tears and the stars blurred. By the time he’d zipped his jeans, Dominic was on the other side of the open field behind the country club, taking a shortcut through the bush, heading for the scrap yard. Jed stumbled after him calling, ‘What about the car?’

  Around two that morning Dominic Cross was perched high in a memorial tree on the side of the highway, the same one that had killed his brother. The scent of petrol filled the air. A burning Mercedes two-door sedan parked in the rear of George Barron’s scrap yard had turned the night sky blood red. Jed lay at the base of the tree, sleeping. When the Mercedes exploded, shattering the windows of a row of cars parked nearby, he woke up. A second car quickly caught fire. Then another. Jed got to his feet and looked up, in search of the death star. The sky appeared to be on fire. He looked over to Dominic.

  ‘What do we do now?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, our money, what’s owed us, you just blew it up. And you’ve probably sent George Barron broke. Somehow, I don’t reckon he’d be insured.’

  Dominic said nothing. He and Jed walked along the highway towards town. They went their separate ways at the railway crossing. The passenger train hadn’t run for years and the only goods train passed through the town once a week without stopping. Rather than return home, Dominic walked on to the cemetery. Pat had been buried alongside his grandparents. The grave was marked with a mound of clay. The floral wreaths and bouquets that had been placed on top had dried and faded.

  Dominic stood at the foot of his brother’s grave, unsure of what to do. He had no inclination to recite a prayer. He dug his hand into the earth, scooped up a handful of clay and turned away. As he walked home he kneaded the clay in his hand until he’d created a rounded ball. He stopped in front of the family home, tossing the ball from one hand to the other before pitching it into the morning sky.

  JOE ROBERTS

  Joe Roberts woke early, on his back, his arms folded across his chest. He resembled a corpse prepared for a funeral. Turning onto his side he felt a pain above his hip bone. He’d been experiencing discomfort for weeks but in recent days the pain had gotten worse. He had started to feel an additional stabbing pain when he moved too quickly. Joe turned his head and looked over to the window, a sliver of light radiating from the streetlight outside. He slowly rolled over and checked the time. The clock sat on the bedside table slightly obscured by an open packet of painkillers. The time, just after four in the morning, caught him by surprise. He never used an alarm, had a knack of waking up ten minutes before he needed to, whatever the hour. He would have preferred to lay in bed but had no choice, his bladder about to burst.

  The letter the hospital had mailed to him contained a clear set of instructions, written in capital letters. Most importantly, he was required to fast from midnight on the night before the procedure. He’d also been ordered to drink a minimum of two litres of water in the hours before bed to ensure his kidneys were flushed clean. Joe hadn’t realised it would take such effort to get the water down until he was sipping his fourth glass of the evening.

  He involuntarily grabbed his side as he sat up, swivelled and placed the soles of his feet on the carpeted floor. He stood and hobbled towards the bathroom cradling his stomach the way a heavily pregnant woman might do. As he took a slow, intermittent piss, and inspected the toilet bowl, the pain gradually eased. There was no blood in his urine, a good sign at least, he thought. He flushed the toilet and scrubbed his hands vigorously, a lifelong habit, before gingerly climbing back into bed and resting his head on the pillow. He spent the next hour looking over at the clock every few minutes before finally drifting off.

  At a quarter past six – fifteen minutes after he’d planned to be up – Joe woke with a fright, drenched in sweat. He pressed the palms of both hands against his chest as if he were trying to stop his heart exploding in his rib cage. He felt a chill in his back, awkwardly removed his damp pyjama top and let it fall to the floor. He forced himself to remain still as he concentrated on regulating his breathing. Eventually, he felt calm enough to get out of bed.

  Clutching the box of painkillers, he went into the bathroom, turned on the light, leaned over the sink and studied his face in the mirror. He took four pills out of the box and swallowed them with a glas
s of water. He could hear the woman in the flat below singing in the shower. It was the same tune each morning. The song was French and although Joe didn’t understand more than a few words, it sounded sad against his ear. He often heard the woman singing as he ate his breakfast, or a little later saying goodbye to her son before she left for work. Joe sometimes passed her on the stairway carrying heavy bags of shopping from the market. The woman had dark skin and wore printed dresses with colourful scarves. The boy was sometimes with her, trailing in her shadow.

  Having showered and shaved Joe returned to the bedroom with a towel around his waist. The room was cold and his skin was goosebumped. He couldn’t decide what to wear to the hospital and was annoyed by his indecision, a condition that seemed to accompany the pain he’d been experiencing. He laid a dark suit out on the bed, then a pair of black pants and a casual jacket. Although he never set out to impress, he liked to dress well. Joe had spent his childhood in a Boys Home wearing anonymous hand-me-downs. On special occasions, such as a visit to the Home by a government minister or prospective donor, the boys were provided with a clean white shirt and marched around the quadrangle before lining up for inspection.

  Regardless of the painful memories associated with it, Joe felt oddly clean in a white shirt. He took one from the wardrobe and slipped it on, followed by the black pants. He put on a pair of black socks and highly polished black leather shoes and examined himself in the full-length mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. Satisfied, he went into the kitchen, turned on the radio and made himself a cup of black tea, itself a prohibited substance that morning. He sat at a narrow wooden table, opened a large envelope, and again read over the information regarding his procedure.