by Alan Duff
It’s your head, lightened by the freedoms; so you go to a bar to celebrate, and since it’s a morning they release you, it’s an early-opening bar. You want to start celebrating, but your body can’t take it, the beer, into the system when it’s had a year or two going without. So your judgment goes, and all the dudes and old pals are coming over to you shaking your hand, Welcome out, Sonny, patting your back, hugging you welcome to freedom, so naturally you buy em drinks.
Come the night, you don’t know where the hell you are, you’re half expecting a screw to order you to your cell, but instead you have freedom, and your head is spinning from the beer. You feel sick, then someone shoves a joint in your hand and next you’re floating. Not knowing what the hell you’re doing, except you’re at the bar buying beer for everyone cos it seems like one big party that ain’t ever gonna end, then someone’s hitting you up for a loan, only till Thursday, doleday, and you’re not minding helping an old friend out, after all he was very warm in his welcoming you to the outside.
Then the smoke has you seeing the people around you as a confusing then upsetting seethe that is getting too much. Next you’re out on the street and you can’t believe it’s dark already when it seemed like only a few hours ago you were striding along the same street and into the bar, Tavistocks bar, the good ole Tavi, and now it’s dark. Outside and in your mind as well. Taxi … where’s a fuckin taxi …? You wake up at some pub pal’s place, and your money’s damn near all gone. You’ve woken to freedom, meant to be, cept it’s not; it’s a fuckin nightmare. Of yourself. How you’ve fucked it once again. One day and you’ve fucked it. A nightmare cos it’s yourself that’s the problem. Not anything but yaself. And there ain’t no escaping yaself, is there?)
Sonny startling at the sound of someone coming in. Bit like being caught masturbating as looking at yourself in the mirror. Of being caught in the act of wanking off. So Sonny ready with a smile and a greeting to the old fellow who came in, How’re ya, Pop? But the old man just looked at Sonny, brushed past him, muttering I fought a bloody war for the likes of you. Come on now, sir, I wasn’t even born when your war was on. The old man turning a full-scowling face to Sonny. No. No, you weren’t born then by the looks of you. A pity you were now. Hey, come on, mate. And the old man hissing at that, don’t you dare call me mate. I’m no mate of the likes of you. Now off with you before I call the police. Sonny shaking his head, a little hurt, somewhat disturbed by the old man’s hatred. (Same as Jube: he’s on permanent A for angry.) You call the fuckin cops, grandad. Oh I will! I will, don’t you worry about that! the man as he held his cock fountaining urine. Sonny walked out chuckling away his hurt.
Dope-dealers, Jube announced before Sonny even sat down. That’s what we gonna be now we got the capital to buy bulk. Oh? Don’t gimme that oh business neither, Sonny Mahia. This is the biggest chance of our lives. No way, Jube. Not for me. Ya mean, not for you? Ya smoke the stuff, don’t ya? I do. So whassa difference? Bout five years – in the can. Five years? Man, what you and I’ve done in the last week’ll get us a minimum seven at any rate. And who says we’ll get caught? Jube with the legend, the question on every crim’s lips before he answers it for himself by going right out and committing the crime.
That’s what they all say, Jube. – That’s what they all say, Jube. Fuck what they say. Jube thumbing his own chest, his loud-shirted chest with the spider-web tattoo conspicuous the more with the colour contrast, It’s what I say, okay? Okay, Jube. But speak for yourself. Oh, I get it, you’ve all of sudden hit the front moneywise and you’re thinking it’s gonna last forever? Nope, I ain’t. But I ain’t doing no drug-dealing. It’s only grass, Mister Goody-goody – Don’t call me that, if you don’t mind. I get sick of you calling me that. Well ya are. I’m not, and nor’m I gonna be selling dope. Suit ya black self then, man, cos I am. Up he got. Come on, this joint sucks too.
Marching along the street. Three, four, five fucking grand a week – a week – they make, and here’s you telling me you don’t wanna know? Nope, I don’t, Jube. Son, I know one dealer makes ten g a week. That right? What’s his name? He – Hey come on, smart-arse, you trying to take the piss again? Nope, just wanted to know his name, and how come I haven’t heard of him? We live together, don’t we? Yeah, and more’s the pity. Suit yaself. I fucking will. Yeh, so will I. A gap opened between them, Jube creating it by striding out.
In the car. Where to, Jube? Fuck-nowhere, bud. You’re on your own and so am I. Come on, man. No fucking come ons. You wanna stay a burglar nobody, that’s fine by me. Me, I wanna be someone. Turning his face to Sonny. Telling him in a quavery voice, I wanna walk into places and have people say, Hey, that’s Jube McCall the big-time dealer. Ya hear? I wannem looking at me – at me – everyone, and eating their rotten lil hearts out at what I got that they ain’t. Women, I want women crawling all over me for my bread, for my being the bigtime dealer that no-one but no-one fucks with. Ya hear? I want to buy the fire power, brother, so any arsehole fucks me around they’re history. Ya hear? I hear, Jube, loud and clear. But that ain’t what I want, Sonny in a quiet voice. I know, Sonny, I know you don’t want what I do; ya never have. And now – looking hard at Sonny – I realise you and I, bud, are on different wavelengths.
Jube starting the car and pulling out into the traffic. Where you taking us, not Tavistocks I hope? Oh no, not the Tavi, Sir Sonny. How about the Regent? Or perhaps the Hyatt? Or would sir prefer somewhere in Parnell perhaps? Up your black arse, Sonny Mahia. Man, is it a crime to not wanna go to that fuckin same bar? But Jube was away again, sulking, brooding, whatever process it was that lurched him from one mood to another.
Drop me off here. Jube braked sharply. Glad to oblige – sir. With his door half open, Sonny was struck by something out of the blue. Jube? Jube, them photos you got … of, you know, her. The woman of the – Nope. They’re mine. And you ain’t havin em to wank your little brown cock over. Who said anything about – Well why else’d you wannem? I – Sonny didn’t know. The question’d just come out of nowhere. And still it pressed within him. Okay, Jube, but then I’m claiming the other pictures, the drawings ones, if it’s finders keepers. Up to you. Jube’s glare visible even through the tinted sunglasses. Nope, not a threat, but fair’s fair. What, so you’ll swap the porno drawings for the porno photos? Yeah. Though I wouldn’t call the photos porno. No? No. What, three photos of the wife starkers, and sitting in their own little envelope in the hubby’s undies drawer, and he with his stack of Penthouses and the filthy drawings, and you saying it ain’t porn? So what you think the bloke is doing with all this stuff – research? Nope, but the photos aren’t porn. So what do you wannem for? To look at, man, Sonny getting embarrassed about it. To look at, or wank at? Look, Jube. Look, and then wank? No, just look. You’re a liar, Son. Am I?
Jube sighed, lifted his rump to get out the photographs. Here. Have the fucking things. But the drawings are mine. Passed them across still in their envelope, and Sonny’s heart skipping a beat thinking of that woman’s nakedness exposed behind just a thin wall of paper. His hands trembled slightly when he took them. Now get outta my sight, Sonny-fucking-Mahia. Ya make me sick. And don’t come looking for me at the Tavi cos I won’t be there. Oh? Where – Mind ya business, Jube with a crooked smile. Oh, hey, Jube? What? You couldn’t lend me ten bucks for a taxi home, could ya? Sonny with his best innocent face till Jube’s look of outrage had him breaking out laughing. I’ll pay ya back on Thursday, cuz.
Jube revved his engine up, but with a small smile on his dial as Sonny got out. On ya bike, Sonny Mahia, Jube chuckling softly through the passenger down window. Then he was gone. In a roar and burning of rubber.
8
Mightn’t be barely enough room to swing a cat in, but that hadn’t stopped Sonny setting up his bedroom with half the stolen stuff from the burglary: stereo, with compact disc player, television and video recorder; he’d even grabbed one of the Persian rugs and spread it out on his bedroom floor. Wow, now lookit that. The image pleased him
almightily. I feel like I got class (hahaha). He had to juggle the bed around to get things in and looking reasonably orderly, though to his eye they didn’t fit: room’d been too much of a crash-pad, a place you slept, and now and again brought a woman, some lowlife scrubber picked up from Tavistocks, or who’d attached herself to you because some of them scrubbers’re like that, they just latch onto someone they think is an easy mark, get free drinks off him all night and make promises with their eyes.
Comes home because she ain’t got nowhere to stay, her old man’s kicked her out, or she’s been booted out by a landlord for not paying the rent at her mysterious somewhere, which she’ll only ever state in vague terms. You get home and she’s the most unromantic thing you ever knew, and never mind them wild promises in her eyes the long, horny night; she can’t kiss, she can’t respond to foreplay, she can’t do nothing to you in return, she won’t even talk cept to say, I’m tired, Sonny, I wanna go to sleep. The morning, eh? Yeah, yeah, the fuckin morning. So morning comes and you’re nuzzling up against her, Hi, hi, you sleep okay? But she spins away, tells you to fuck off. Gratitude, eh?
So the room didn’t look right with its expensive insertions. The wallpaper was peeling, curtains old and faded and thinned by years of sunlight, a dull green, more yellow. Set of three drawers, a big wardrobe with an oval mirror and a small table by the bed, and that was it. My world.
Sonny looking at it not only in its new light but how it was before, and how long he’d lived like this, in flats all over town, in between prison sentences … Anyway, not a time to be thinking like that. He dug out his wad of money, kissed it, spread it out on the bed cover in two rows, chuckling. I oughta play a game of patience with it, hahaha. Cept every face was the same: a fifty. He wondered why the guy would keep a money tin with six grand in it in his desk drawer, whether it was for emergencies, but why’d a rich lawyer have an emergency involving money? Or for his son, the Oliver guy in the note that’d given Sonny and Jube the first grand. And then to find this … Shaking his head in sweet disbelief, and still with that old familiar feeling that it’d get taken away, that some mistake, some fuck-up on his part, or else it’d be Jube fucking up, either way would have the law getting hold ofem first. Then, almost inevitably, the courts sending them both to prison again. With a stern lecture from the bench, of course. Justifies the judge’s highly paid existence.
Maybe the money’s a cash job the lawyer wasn’t paying tax on? Who knows? Sonny rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, So where does it go now it’s in our hands? Didn’t take an instant for the answer to come back: on booze and dope and running round in cars, that’s where all crooks’ stolen money goes. And, not for the first time but with more clarity than ever before, the sheer waste of it struck Sonny.
He gathered the money in, back to a pile again. Promised himself he wouldn’t waste it, but then again how not to? For it was a world there in front of him at his fingertips: I can buy clothes, eat whatever I want, drink in better bars than Tavistocks; I can be anything I want. But I ain’t gonna be no drug-dealer, no way. They suck, drug-dealers. Ain’t got no morals, no principles; they’d steal from their own mothers. And as for the types they supply, they’re worse. Just dopeheads and crims wanting to be out of it the whole damn time. (Like me. How I used to be. But why? Cos it dulled that constant pain in my heart in every crim’s heart. Cos we’re, all of us, part or wholly broken. From our childhood. But hell, I dunno. Maybe it’s just that we’re weaker than everyone else, or everybody from rotten childhoods’d end up criminals. We’re just nature’s rejects.) He clapped his hands together, there I go again, thinking doom and gloom even when I got all this bread, these new things in my room. I’m no different to Jube: no matter how good the going is I’m still angry. So enough of that, brother Sonny. Get with it.
He cracked a can from the six pack he’d bought. Opened a packet of cashew nuts – not peanuts. Cashews, bro. Hahahaha. He’d grabbed not one packet but two and, while he was at it, some other nuts that’d long intrigued him whenever he went into certain liquor outlets that sell the other bits and pieces for parties. He ate a mouthful of the cashews then opened a bag of pistachios, had a little difficulty getting the part-opened shell off. But, man, it was worth it, he’d never tasted anything like it. He ate several more. Sat down on the bed and consumed the lot, the last nut as good as the first. Unbelievable, Another dimension to the world, there in front of his nose every day he and Jube went into the Green Bottle liquor store on the way home. Oh, and that’s right, I forgot, the photos. He pulled out the envelope, but shook his head, no. Let it keep. Save her for later.
Instead, he sorted through the video tapes. Some were bought jobs, like different operas with a photograph of what must be the set, or others had a single photograph of mostly a guy with a beard and a foreign name, Pavarotti. Others were obviously home-made, off some TV programme, with the details scrawled in either the guy’s hand or his wife’s. Delicate but precise writing, Sonny had an idea it might be the woman. But Sonny wanted the Russian dancing one. He found the tape, read it: Georgian State Dancers. TV1 ’85. No photographs, just the neat writing on white inner paper. He was feeling excited.
After he’d got the tape readied to play, Sonny went back to the box, in case there was something of more interest than even the Russian dancers. Might be a blue movie as jube’d first predicted. But ya never knew. But nothing of title on the spines of each tape suggested some pornographic secret about to be revealed of one Gerald Harland, lawyer, of Wellington. Then he found another home-made job, labelled: Penelope and Antonia playing piano duet. 20 mins.(Ants aged 11) 1989. Sonny figuring from the photograph atop the piano in that house of the woman and her two kids, that the Ants was Antonia and she’d now be aged, what, fourteen or fifteen?
He switched the light off after pushing the play button and sat on the side of the bed in the dark. His heart rate was up, and his hand rested on the envelope containing the photographic images of the woman who now had a name: Penelope, in the form of any man’s fantasy – naked.
Began with the piano sitting there on its own. Sonny leaned forward open-eyed at seeing the familiar, like his mind was on replay of being in that house. He saw the floor-to-ceiling windows beyond, glanced down at the rug his feet were on, but too dark to know if it was the same pictured in this screening. Then two figures came on screen from opposite sides of the picture. The woman. The daughter. Fumbling for his cigarettes, not wanting to miss a moment. He found them and lit one. Stayed glued on the screen.
… Hello, hello! Mrs Harland was smiling serenely to Sonny. Hello to you too, Mrs Harland. Sonny bright-eyed with disbelief. My daughter and I shall play a piece by Liszt … Her perfect teeth in this most extraordinary of smiles. Sonny could see her eyes were green, and she had unusually dark eyebrows for someone with brown hair. Her speaking voice was sort of English, like on – I know: Upstairs and Downstairs. And she is definitely upstairs. He could but shake his head in awe, and draw hard and frequently on his cigarette.
And I’m Antonia, the girl came in. This is, in case you weren’t aware, my dear mother. Smiling at her (dear) mother, then back at the camera. (It must be the father videoing it.) The image faded for a moment then came back from a different perspective: of the pair viewed from the other side. Daughter in the foreground, and a lovely picture she made; even at eleven a man could see her womanhood not far below the surface. Again, shaking his head in mute admiration; as well, a sense of pitiful comparison coming on.
The mother began playing first. And her voice, just slightly deeper than normal, somehow became mirrored in the notes she was running off her fingers. That the piece was good or bad, Sonny had no idea; just his raw instincts and untrained ear telling him he was hearing something pretty good. The daughter came in, down at the deeper note end. Sonny had plunked out a few notes himself on that very instrument. In that very house. (Why, I have even seen that woman there in the nude. Photographically.) Yet it seemed inappropriate that he turn on the light and ta
ke pause of what Jube called the evidence, stolen from her, her bedroom, her own bedroom. He just watched.
And a spell got cast. Which did not break till long after the piece was ended and the smiling images had gone and the screen was just a fuzzy white glow. Piano notes played on in Sonny Mahia’s mind and he felt confused. Damn near crying.
Light on. Now what? The Russian dancers? Sonny in a bit of a daze, as well as ashamed of himself for getting so emotional over a video recording of a couple of snob bitches, mother and snotty daughter, playing their fuckin piano. So fuckin what? No need to cry about it, Sonny the Wimp. Magine what they’d say at the Tavi they caught you not only watching this but crying over it as well? I need another can.
But sitting down on the end of his bed, Sonny recalled more than a few times of fellow prison inmates, cellmates, exposing their true selves. Specially when they were asleep; teeth-grinding and whipping around in their sperm-ridden blankets, groaning and crying out from troubled mind; the child in each and every crim wanting not vengeance but love. Sonny’d long figured that of himself and ilk. Bawling. In their sleep and bawling, whimpering, Leave me alone! Leave me alone! … Uh, love … love me, eh darl? Love Ted … Ya like that name? Could ya love Ted?