by Trent Dalton
I shake my head.
‘That’s insane,’ I say.
‘That’s the game,’ Darren shrugs. ‘’Bout two years later Mum gave it to me straight. We were key players. I felt like you’re feeling now.’
He says this sinking feeling inside me is the realisation that I’m with the bad guys but I’m not the baddest of the bad guys.
‘The baddest guys just work for you,’ he says.
Paid killers, humourless and mad, he says. Ex-army, ex-prison, ex-human. Single men in their thirties and forties. Mysterious bastards, weirder than the kind who squish avocadoes between their fingers at fruit and veg markets. The kind who will squeeze a man’s neck until it squishes. All the villains operating between the cracks of this quiet city. Thieves and cons and men who rape and kill children. Assassins, of a kind, but not the kind we love from The Octagon. These men wear flip-flops and Stubbies shorts. They stab people not with samurai swords but with the knives they use to slice Sunday roast when their widowed mothers drop in. Suburban psychopaths. Darren’s mentors.
‘They don’t work for me,’ I say.
‘Well, they work for your dad,’ Darren says.
‘He’s not my dad.’
‘Oh, forgot, sorry. Where’s your real dad?’
‘Bracken Ridge.’
‘He good?’
Everybody wants to measure the adult men in my life by goodness. I measure them in details. In memories. In the times they said my name.
‘Never found out,’ I say. ‘What’s with you and men being good?’
‘Never met a good one, that’s all,’ he says. ‘Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don’t ever trust ’em.’
‘Where’s your real dad?’ I ask.
Darren stands up from the gutter, spits a jet of saliva through gritted teeth.
‘He’s right where he should be,’ he says.
*
We walk back down Darren’s driveway, resume our places at the edge of the trampoline. Lyle and Bich are still deep into a seemingly endless conversation.
‘Don’t sweat it, man,’ Darren says. ‘You just won the lottery. You’ve landed smack bang inside a growth industry. The market for that shit up there in the ice box never dies.’
Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation’s inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
‘Ten, twenty years, I’ll own three-quarters of Darra, maybe half of Inala, a good chunk of Richlands,’ Darren says.
‘How?’
‘Expansion, Tink,’ he says, eyes wide. ‘I got plans. This area won’t always be the city’s shithole. Some day, man, all these houses round here will be worth somethin’ and I’ll buy ’em all when they’re worth nothin’. And the gear is like that too. Time and place, Tink. That gear up there ain’t worth shit in Vietnam. Put it on a boat and sail it to Cape York, it turns to gold. It’s like magic. Stick it in the ground and let it sit for ten years, it’ll turn to diamond. Time and place.’
‘How come you don’t talk this much in class?’
‘There’s nothing I’m passionate about in class.’
‘Dealing drugs is your passion?’
‘Dealing? Fuck that. Too much heat, too many variables. We’re strictly imports. We don’t make deals. We just make arrangements. We let you Aussies do the real dirty work of putting it on the street.’
‘So Lyle’s doing your dirty work?’
‘No,’ Darren says. ‘He’s doing Tytus Broz’s dirty work.’
Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.
‘Hey, a man’s gotta work, Tink.’
Darren puts his arm around my shoulder.
‘Listen, I never thanked you for not ratting on me about Jabba,’ he says. He laughs. ‘You didn’t rat about the rat.’
The school groundsman, Mr McKinnon, marched me by the collar to the principal’s office. Mr McKinnon was too blind, or too blind drunk, to identify the two boys who were intending to slice my right forefinger off with a machete.
All McKinnon could say was, ‘One of ’em was Vietmanese.’ And that could have been half our school. It wasn’t out of loyalty that I didn’t name names, more self-preservation, and one week’s detention writing number facts in an exercise pad was a small price to pay for my hearing.
‘We could use a guy like you,’ Darren says. ‘I need men I can trust. Whaddya reckon? You want to help me build my empire?’
I stare for a moment up at Lyle, still discussing business with fierce Bich Dang and her humble husband.
‘Thanks for the offer, Darren, but, you know, I never really considered heroin empire building as part of my life plan.’
‘Is that right?’ He flicks his cigarette butt into his sister’s fairy castle. ‘The man with the plan. So what’s Tink Bell’s grand life plan?’
I shrug.
‘C’mon, Eli, smart Aussie mud crab like you, tell me how you’re gonna crawl out of this shit bucket?’
I look up at the night sky. There’s the Southern Cross. The saucepan, the set of white stars shimmering, shaped like the small stovetop pot Lyle boils his eggs in every Saturday morning.
‘I’m gonna be a journalist,’ I say.
‘Ha!’ Darren howls. ‘A journalist?’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna work on the crime desk at The Courier-Mail. I’m gonna have a house in The Gap and I’m gonna spend my life writing crime stories for the paper.’
‘Ha! One of the bad guys making a living writing about the bad guys,’ Darren says. ‘And why in fuck you wanna live in The Gap?’
We’d bought our Atari games console through the Trading Post. Lyle drove us out to a family in The Gap, a leafy suburb eight kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD, who had recently purchased a Commodore 64 desktop computer and no longer needed their Atari, which they sold to us for $36. I’d never seen so many tall trees in one suburb. Tall blue gums that shaded kids playing handball in suburban cul-de-sacs. I love cul-desacs. Darra doesn’t have enough cul-de-sacs.
‘The cul-de-sacs,’ I say.
‘What the fuck is a cul-de-sac?’ Darren asks.
‘It’s what you’re on here. A street with a dead end. Great for playing handball and cricket. No cars going through.’
‘Yeah, I love a no-through road,’ he says. He shakes his head. ‘Man, you want to get some joint in The Gap, that shit ain’t gonna happen for twenty, thirty years in some journalising bullshit. You need to go get some degree, then ya gotta go beg for some job from some arsehole who’ll boss you around for thirty years and you’ll have to save your pennies and by the time you’re done savin’ there’ll be no more houses in The Gap left to buy!’
Darren points up into the living room.
‘You see that Styrofoam box beside your good man’s feet up there?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘There’s a whole house in The Gap inside that,’ he says. ‘Us bad guys, Tink, we don’t have to wait to buy houses in The Gap. In my game, we buy them tomorrow if we want to.’
He smiles.
‘Is it fun?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘Your game.’
‘Sure it’s fun,’ he says. ‘You meet lots of interesting people. Lots of opportunities to build your business knowledge. And when the cops are sniffin’ around, you really know you’re alive. You pull off some huge import right under their noses and you make the sales and you bank the profits and you turn around to your family and friends and say, “Goddamn, look at what you can achieve when you act as a team and you really stick to it.”’
He breathes deep.
‘It’s inspiring to me,’ he says. ‘It makes me believe that in a place like Australia, anything really is possible.’
We sit in silence. He flicks the flint on his lighter, hops off the trampoline. He walks to the house’s front staircase.
‘C’mon, let’s go up,’ he says.
I’m puzzled, mute.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asks. ‘Mum wants to meet you.’
‘Why does your mum want to meet me?’
‘She wants to meet the boy who didn’t rat about the rat.’
‘I can’t go up there.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s nearly 1 a.m. and Lyle will kick my arse.’
‘He won’t kick your arse if we don’t want him to.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because he knows who we are.’
‘And who are you?’
‘We’re the bad guys.’
*
We enter through the sliding glass doors off the balcony. Darren marches confidently into the living room, ignoring Lyle sitting in the armchair to his left. His mum sits, elbows resting on her knees, on the long brown leather lounge suite, her husband resting back on the lounge beside her.
‘Hey Mum, I found this guy spying on you all in the yard,’ Darren says.
I enter the living room in my pyjamas with the hole in the arse.
‘This is the kid who didn’t rat about Jabba,’ Darren says.
Lyle turns to his right and he sees me, face filling with rage.
‘Eli, what the hell are you doing here?’ he asks, soft and intense.
‘Darren invited me,’ I say.
‘It’s 1 a.m. Go. Home. Now.’
I turn around immediately and walk back out the living room doors.
Bich Dang releases a gentle laugh from the couch.
‘Are you really going to give up that easily, boy?’ she asks.
I stop. Turn around. Bich Dang smiles, the porcelain white foundation on her face cracking around the wrinkles of her widening mouth.
‘Plead your case, boy,’ she says. ‘Please tell us why exactly you are out at this time in your pyjamas flashing that cute white tush?’
I look at Lyle. He looks at Bich and I follow his gaze.
She takes a long white menthol cigarette from a silver case, lights it, leans back into her lounge as she draws in her first puff, then blows it out, her eyes sparkling as though she’s looking at a newborn baby.
‘Well?’ she prompts.
‘I saw the purple firework,’ I say. Bich nods knowingly. Fuck. I never realised how beautiful she is. She might be in her mid-fifties, early sixties even, but she’s so exotic and so cold-blooded exciting she has the presence of a serpent. Maybe she’s so attractive at this age because she sheds her skin, slips out of her own body when she finds a new one to wriggle through life in. She keeps me in her gaze with that smile until I have to look away from it, drop my head to fiddle with the drawstring on my loose pyjama bottoms.
‘And . . .?’ she says.
‘I . . . ummm . . . I followed Lyle here because . . .’
My throat thickens. Lyle’s fingers dig into his chair’s armrests.
‘Because of all the questions.’
Bich leans forward on the lounge. Studies my face.
‘Come closer,’ she says.
I move two steps towards her.
‘Closer,’ she says. ‘Come to me.’
I shuffle closer and she places her cigarette in the corner of a glass ashtray and she takes my hand to draw me so close that her kneecaps rub against mine. She smells of tobacco and citrus-scented perfume. Her hands are pale white and soft and her fingernails are long and fire-engine red. She studies my face for twenty seconds and she smiles.
‘Oh, busy young Eli Bell, so many thoughts, so many questions,’ she says. ‘Well, go ahead, ask away, boy.’
Bich turns to Lyle, a seriousness across her face.
‘And, Lyle, I trust you’ll answer truthfully,’ she says.
She fixes her hands on my thigh and turns me towards Lyle.
‘Go right ahead, Eli,’ she says.
Lyle sighs, shakes his head. I keep my head down.
‘Bich, this is—’
‘Have courage, boy,’ Bich says, cutting off Lyle. ‘You better use that tongue before Quan here cuts it out and drops it in his noodle soup.’
Quan beams, raises his eyebrows at the prospect.
‘Bich, I don’t think this is necessary,’ Lyle says.
‘Let the boy decide,’ she says, enjoying this moment.
I have a question. I always have a question. I always have too many.
I lift my head, stare into his eyes.
‘Why are you dealing drugs?’ I ask.
Lyle shakes his head, looks away, offers nothing.
Bich sounds like my school principal now. ‘Lyle, the boy deserves an answer, doesn’t he?’
He takes a deep breath, turns back to me.
‘I’m doing it for Tytus,’ he says.
Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs. Lyle does everything for Tytus Broz.
Bich shakes her head: ‘The truth, Lyle.’
He dwells on this for a long moment, digs his fingernails deeper into the armrest. He stands, picks the Styrofoam ice box up from the living room carpet.
‘Tytus will be in touch about the next order,’ he says. ‘Let’s go, Eli.’
He walks out the sliding doors. And I follow him because there was care in his voice just then, his love was in it and I will follow that feeling anywhere.
‘Wait!’ barks Bich Dang.
Lyle stops, so I stop too.
‘Come back here, boy,’ she says.
I look at Lyle. He nods his head. I shuffle cautiously back to Bich. She looks me in the eye.
‘Why did you not rat on my son?’ she asks.
Darren is now sitting up on a kitchen benchtop running off the living room, eating a muesli bar as he silently observes the conversation unfolding before him.
‘Because he’s my friend,’ I say.
Darren seems shocked by the admission. He smiles.
Bich studies my eyes. Nods her head.
‘Who taught you to be so loyal to your friends?’ Bich asks.
I throw my thumb immediately to Lyle.
‘He did.’
Bich smiles. She’s still staring into my eyes when she says, ‘Lyle, if I might be so bold . . .’
‘Yes,’ Lyle says.
‘You bring young Eli back again some time, you hear, and maybe we talk about a few opportunities that have emerged. Let’s see if we can’t consider doing business between ourselves.’
Lyle says nothing. ‘Let’s go Eli,’ he says. We walk out the door, but Bich Dang still has one more question. ‘You still want your answer, Eli?’ she asks.
I stop and turn around.
‘Yes.’
She leans back into the lounge, dragging on her long white cigarette.
She nods, blowing out so much smoke from her mouth that a cloud of grey masks her gaze. The cloud and the serpent and the dragon and the bad guys.
‘It’s all for you.’
Boy Receives Letter
Dear Eli,
Greetings from B16. Thanks, as ever, for your correspondence. Your letter was the best thing about a month I was glad to see the back of. Worse than Northern Ireland in here lately. Few blokes have gone on hunger strike, prote
sting about cramped conditions, overpopulation in the cells, not enough activities for rec days. Yesterday, Billy Pedon got his head dumped in the 4 Yard shit bucket for giving a bit too much lip to Guigsy, who was bitching about the cold outside. Now they’ve put a little rim inside all of the shit buckets so they’re too small to fit a human head inside. I guess that’s what ya call progress? Big scrap broke out in the caf on Sunday. Old Harry Smallcombe drove a fork into Jason Hardy’s left cheek because Hardy took the last of the rice pudding. All hell broke loose and, as a result, the screws took away the television from 1 Yard. No more Days of Our Lives. Take a Boggo con’s freedom, take his rights, take his humanity, take his will to live, but for God’s sake, please don’t take his Days of Our Lives! As you can imagine, the boys went apeshit over that and started dropping shits throughout the prison like they were apes. I wonder if that’s where apeshit comes from? Anyway, all the boys are keen on hearing any updates outworlders might have on Days, so any insights would be greatly appreciated. Last we saw, Liz looked like doing a lag for shooting Marie – dumb slut she is – even though it was an accident. She still hadn’t found the silk ‘C’ scarf that I reckon will be her undoing. My shitter broke on Tuesday because Dennis had the runs from a bad batch of lentils they fixed us. Dennis used up his toilet paper ration and he had to start using pages from an old copy of Sophie’s Choice we had lying around. Of course the pages didn’t break down and just choked the shitter so the whole of One Division could smell Dennis’s inner demons. Did I tell you about Tripod in the last letter? Fritz found a cat creeping through the yard a while back. Fritz has been behaving well lately so the screws let him look after the cat during day rec. We all started keeping a bit of food from lunch to feed the cat and now it skips on through our cells at its leisure during day rec. Then one of the screws accidentally closed a cell door on the cat and the poor blighter had to be taken to a vet who gave Fritz’s little kitty a troubling ultimatum: expensive surgery to have a leg removed or it was a bullet between the eyes (not quite what the surgeon said, but you get the picture). Word spread round about the crippled cat and we passed a hat around and we all put our month’s wages into surgery for Fritz’s bloody kitty. It had the op and came right back to us walking around on three legs. Then we had a lengthy discussion about what we were gonna name the cat whose life we all saved and we all settled on the name of Tripod. That cat’s become bigger than The Beatles in here. Glad to hear you and August are doing so well at school. Don’t slack off on your studies. You don’t want to end up in a shithole like this because you don’t want to find yourself all souped up on chloral hydrate and butt-fucked through the laundry fence by the Black Stallion because that’s what can happen to kids who don’t keep on top of their studies. I’ve told Slim to keep me posted on yours and August’s report cards, good and bad. In answer to your question, I guess the best way to know if a bloke is wanting to knife you is by the speed of their steps. A man with a killin’ on his mind starts to show it in his eyes, there’s an intent to them. If they’re carrying, you’ll see them approach their victim slowly, eyeballing them like a hawk from afar, then, when they get closer, they’ll quicken their steps. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. You want to be coming at the victim from behind, shove the shiv in as close as you can to the kidneys. They’ll drop like a bag of spuds. The key is to shove the shiv in hard enough to get your point across, but soft enough to avoid a murder charge. A fine balance indeed.