Boyz 'R' Us

by Scott Monk

  Instinctively, I started running to help rescue the driver. But just as quickly I caught myself. And paled.

  I didn’t believe who I saw.

  Wheeler!

  ‘Thought I was dead, didn’t you?’ he called out from the driver’s seat, nursing his head. ‘Well, you were wrong, Mitch. I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt.’

  He smelt of dope. Lots of dope. He’d whacked his mind out and stolen a car.

  Police sirens wailed in the distance.

  ‘What have you done, man?’

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ he grinned.

  ‘Get out of here, Wheeler. The cops are only seconds away.’

  ‘No. I’m not going without you. You and me are gonna be friends, Mitch, even if I have to keep on fighting you.’ He grabbed me and tried to pull me into the Porsche.

  The doors to the station boomed open. The sergeant cursed at the wreckage across the street. ‘You!’ he shouted at Wheeler. ‘Get out of that car now!’

  ‘Get away from me,’ I said, shrugging off Wheeler’s insistent arm. He was going to take me with him, wherever that was. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I may be crazy, but I’m still the leader.’

  ‘Arrest him!’ the sergeant yelled. Two gorillas obediently jumped down the stairs, handcuffs at the ready.

  I moved away from the Porsche and ran smack-bang into the cops. Cursing, they shoved me aside as the car’s engine thundered. My mistake had given Wheeler an opening. He needed to escape. And fast. The two cops reached the Porsche at the same time the three wailing patrol cars did. But they were just short. Wheeler floored it out of there, desperate to get away. The Porsche swung hard around a corner with the patrols in pursuit. Two more joined the chase, bringing the total to five.

  The outcome was inevitable.

  The six o’clock news ran the story the following night. Pictures of the wrecked Porsche beamed into people’s TV sets as they sat down for dinner. Blood pooled on the road. Red lights flashed on the stretcher carrying the seriously injured joyrider. The back door of the ambulance slammed shut. A mother cried. Sergeant Doherty warned the public of the dangers of speeding. Paramedics said it wasn’t clear whether the driver would live.

  Nor the family of three the Porsche collided with.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘People said I’d end up in jail. It just took longer than they expected. I couldn’t blame everyone for thinking that way. I always was a loser getting in trouble with the law. The pigs were forever hassling me and judges threatening to lock me up. I never listened to them, though. I should have. If I had I wouldn’t be doing time now, eating lumpy food and showering with every murderer who’s been on the six o’clock news.

  ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s nothing like TV. Living in a cold tomb is one way of describing it. Not living at all is another. The worst thing is everything’s grey — floors, walls, doors, uniforms, meals. And especially hope. Guys go stir-crazy with the same colour staring back at them day in, day out, every day of the year. That’s why each cell’s got a window, I guess. To keep us sane. Waking up to see blue skies and white clouds outside is a depressing happiness I hope you’ll never need to find out about.

  ‘But that’s not what you’re interested in. You want to know why I’m in jail. Well, every guy’s got a story and I’ll share mine with anyone who wants to listen to the truth. I suppose it’s a good story to tell kids and keep them on the “straight and narrow” to protect them from people like me.

  ‘Now I’m not into telling you how to wipe your nose. That’s for the preachers. But I am into saving you a whole lot of trouble. Because once you’re inside you realise your life has ended just as Ned Kelly did standing on the gallows.

  ‘Or Napoleon at Waterloo,’ Barry Wheeler added, locking his eyes onto mine.

  He shifted in the plastic chair and looked over his shoulder at the prison guard leaning against the schoolroom’s chalkboard. My class followed his eyes, knowing too well that the only person protecting them was that guard. Most of the kids had never seen a real prisoner before let alone met one. There were four or five from troubled homes whose parents had served time inside but they still found the experience uncomfortable.

  ‘Back in high school,’ Barry continued, ‘there was this gang I was part of. We called ourselves the Marrickville Thunderjets. We thought we were the meanest people on earth …’

  Prison had been unkind to Barry. His face was that of a thirty-five-year-old’s, not a guy in his early twenties. He still worked out, but only to keep from going stir-crazy. No one from the old gang came to see him any more. Everyone had moved, gotten jobs, wanted to forget he existed or were spending time with him anyway. I think that hurt him. He thought gangs stuck together forever. They didn’t.

  The accident was behind him now. The family of three his Porsche collided with survived and later moved to South Australia. But the ten-year-old girl would be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

  As for Barry, he didn’t come out of the accident unscathed himself. He lost his right eye from flying shrapnel and had to have it removed. A stranger couldn’t tell though. Doctors had fitted him with a glass eye a couple of months after the accident.

  But that was a long time ago. This was Barry’s eighth year in prison and his last. He’d be out come July.

  The prospect of him being free didn’t scare me. We’d settled our differences a year or two back. We still weren’t friends but I went to see him at prison out of sympathy. None of his family ever called in to see him. I think I was his only visitor.

  I caught a coach down to Sydney twice each year to check how he was holding up. We’d talk for a couple of hours and I’d give him the rap on the old gang. Flash Jack was still working as a hire-a-DJ to put himself through TAFE; Marc banging away as a mechanic; and Peeper following in his old lady’s footsteps by training to become an electrician. In exchange, he helped me out with this talk.

  Barry had served most of his time and was allowed out occasionally on day release. Part of his rehabilitation was doing community service or working in a low-paid job. I knew someone on the prison board and arranged it so as Barry could come and to talk to my class. To tell them a few “truths”, as he put it.

  The students now listening to him were from Burragorang Lake Reformatory. It was a special school in the Blue Mountains for teenagers with discipline problems. In other words, the screw-ups expelled from around the state. It was their last chance at an education. No one else would have them.

  I never dreamt of becoming a teacher. I guess this was punishment for all the classes I’d jigged over the years and the ulcers I’d given my own teachers. Dad was proud. He’d been sober now for seven years. I’d never moved back home with him — the memories took longer to forgive than expected — but we kept in touch. Sean was proud too. I’d made something out of my life. If Elias hadn’t twisted my arm into staying on and going to uni with him, I didn’t know where I’d be right at this moment. Probably tossing rubbish bins in the back of a garbage truck.

  Elias himself was an accountant now for a small city firm. Married too. He and Mrs Cushy Little Wife were the proud parents of two cushy little children and presently working on the 0.4. I owed him a lot for everything he’d helped me with over the years. Everybody needed a friend like him.

  My kid sister, Allison, got over our mother’s death. She was thirteen, in high school and not so sweet. Boys, hormones, telephones, dates, soap operas, shopping, and Cleo’s 20-most-revealing-facts-women-should-know kept Dad up all hours of the night worrying about her.

  And finally Sean, my big brother, was completing his last year of law school. After the HSC he and The Heart Pirates took a huge risk and toured Australia, playing their songs in pubs, hotels, schools and uni bars. The gamble came up “snake eyes”. No offers for record deals materialised, and after eighteen months of living in poverty, the Pirates disbanded and returned to uni. Even Golden Boy — who I always believed was perfec
t — had his down moments in life. But he never regretted it. He followed his dreams. He gave them a shot. Took a risk. Now he had new ones.

  Sean called me last night actually. He wanted me and my fiancee, Raelee Yiu, to stop by for dinner, celebrate my engagement and talk about old times. I hesitated to give him a definite answer. The past brought up a lot of unpleasant memories. A lot of hate and hurt. The fifteen-year-old who didn’t believe the future brought hope and better times was now twenty-three, enjoying that very same future and saving up enough money to buy a Corvette. The past was the past. Let it be. Forgive the mistakes everybody made. And keep on dreaming.

  I did.

  Biography

  Scott Monk was born in Macksville, New South Wales, in 1974. He grew up in Sydney, Canberra and several country towns before landing his first job as a newspaper journalist in Adelaide.

  A reluctant reader as a teenager, Scott began writing at the age of 13 after one of his Year 8 English teachers set a “short” story assignment. Little did she expect that he would produce a 220-page manuscript — then ask her to mark it! Aged 19, he wrote Boyz ‘R’ Us, which was published when he was 21. It was followed by Raw, The Crush and The Never Boys.

  Scott presently works for a national newspaper in Sydney. On weekends, he can be found at the footy screaming for his team to rid itself of the wooden spoon, or plotting to take over the world’s chocolate factories.