by Omar Musa
Steel, paint, chemicals, petrol. There is a big workbench jumbled with carpenter’s tools and a tall shelf behind it. Aleks picks up a ball bearing, the size of a marble, turns it between forefinger and thumb, and observes it in the meagre light, silver, before placing it on the shelf. As children, he and the boys were constantly on the hunt for ball bearings, the king cheat of marble games. He smiles, climbs on a stool, reaches up high and pulls down the gym bag.
He opens it and takes out what is inside: a 22-calibre handgun, black snout gleaming. He lays it in his lap and disassembles it, then cleans it slowly. A .22 is light and perfect for wounding, good for hits because the bullet doesn’t break the sound barrier and lodges in the brain. Guns are nothing new to him – in the Balkans, most homes would have one.
Tomorrow was going to be a dangerous day.
Once he has cleaned it, he places it back in the bag and hides it on the top shelf, then visits the pharmacy to get his father’s heart medicine. When he collects Mila from school, she leaps into the passenger seat of the Hilux. She tells him about a science experiment she did in class where they put some Mentos into a Coke bottle and the chemical reaction caused the soft drink to shoot up into the sky like a fountain. Aleks doesn’t think it sounds like a very educational experiment, but wonders whether he ought to get her an iPad to help her study. He pulls up at her ballet school and, before she jumps out, he smoothes her hair back and kisses her on the forehead, then arranges her collar, which has flicked up.
‘I love you, sweetheart.’
‘Have you thought any more about the holiday, tat?’
‘Of course. We’ll go soon, don’t worry.’
‘Promise.’ Those eyes again. She adds in an almost professional voice, ‘Could help mum get better.’
This time, he doesn’t point out that she has dropped into English, but stares straight back into her eyes and gives her hand a squeeze. ‘I promise, baby. Go on. Mrs. Hua will drop you home, all right?’
When he arrives at his parents’ flat, his father, Petar, is watching the Macedonian news. There are flags waving and a man at a podium speaking hoarsely into a microphone. Petar is a dark, lugubrious man, wearing a white singlet at a table covered in paints. A half-finished icon of St Clement is on an easel by his side, eyes staring out gravely, gold background glowing. Petar is pinching at a faded tattoo above his elbow. It reads Sloboda ily Smrt – Freedom or Death. He stands up to shake his son’s hand. His mother, Biljana, appears from the kitchen, smiling. Aleks hands her some flowers before clearing a space on the table and dividing his father’s medicine into a pillbox.
Petar Janeski had grown up in Communist Yugoslavia with a photo of Marshall Tito on his wall, like every other family. His home life in the village had been one of crushing poverty, his father a poor farmer and secret Macedonian patriot who sold vegetables in the market. One day, as they tilled the fields, his father was telling Petar folk stories and reminding him that Macedonians were descended from Philip of Macedon, and a great line of warriors and kings. Cultural and church expression were repressed; spies were everywhere. A passerby, who happened to be listening in, reported him. The family was blacklisted by the Communist Party and, as life got harder, Petar’s father became more and more harsh towards him. Petar didn’t consider his father a bad man, but he grew up knowing the discipline of knuckles and fist. The blacklisting clung to his family name like a curse, meaning he could never get a proper job, just menial labour from time to time. He dreamed of a life that would offer him more.
One day, digging up a garden for his neighbours, Petar overheard the couple talking about emigration. The Party had eased travel restrictions in the 1960s and many people were heading to Australia, where it was said you could earn great wealth. There was already a community there, and the church had sent priests to educate the Macedonians abroad, so the transition to a new country would not be so difficult. As he dug, the field in front of him changed from dark soil to sunlit sand in his mind.
Weeks later, he met a young woman, Biljana, at a dance. She too had heard of the opportunities in Australia and after several years of marriage sent Petar off to Matica, the agency for emigration in Skopje, and then to the Australian Embassy in Belgrade. After countless interviews, letters and months of waiting, he, Biljana and their boy Aleks, were winging their way from the crumbling body of Europe.
Once Aleks has divided up the pills, his father leans back, satisfied. His hands are covered in paint. How fearsome those hands had once been. Petar lights a cigarette. ‘You should quit those things,’ says Aleks, reaching for a cigarette himself. ‘Bad for your health.’
His father raises his eyebrows and says, ‘I will when you do.’ He speaks in Macedonian. Before relocating to the Town, they had lived in Wollongong. When they first moved there, Petar would have liked to learn English, but almost straight off the plane he had started working alongside other Macos in a steel factory in Port Kembla. He soon got a second job to help keep the family afloat, meaning he went years without learning a working use of English.
The Macedonian news then changes to some footage of Bitola in the summer. Petar turns to Aleks, grinning. ‘Bitola girls – good for the circulation.’
‘I heard that,’ calls Biljana from the kitchen.
‘I don’t know how women put up with us,’ says Aleks.
‘So, you know Nicko has bought his parents a new house?’ says Biljana, setting down two cups of coffee in front of the men.
‘Really? Good for him,’ says Aleks, bristling. He loves his cousin, but Nicko always seems to be two steps ahead. ‘I’ll do that for you, soon. Just have to handle my business, that’s all,’ he says, patting his mother’s hand.
‘Oh, yeah? How?’
‘Got a big job coming up. Real big.’
* * *
Once home, Aleks dreams of the blue bead on his neck.
The blue bead is obsession and power –
a frozen well,
a bullet.
He dreams it is a blue galaxy,
each gold fleck a planet.
On each planet, tableaux of moments in his life
are frozen in place like a Nativity scene.
He floats among them.
His father playing chess with Ulysses Amosa here.
His sister Jana crouched over a girl with a bloody face there.
In his dream,
he alights on the centre of one of the gold planets.
Running around him,
endlessly,
is a greyhound.
This blue bead,
forged in a time so ancient,
a workshop in Venice, by men
who were nothing but dusty whispers now,
had once been worth the soul of a man.
Isn’t that what she’d said,
all those years ago?
Before . . .
Before the moment everything changed.
‘Aleks. Aleks. Jimmy’s here.’ Sonya is shaking him softly in the darkness.
‘Fuck. Forgot about that. Let him in.’
Jimmy’s watching TV in the lounge room already and rises to embrace Aleks.
‘You hungry, brother?’ Aleks asks.
‘Starving,’ says Jimmy.
Sonya is already sprinkling salt and pepper on some chicken breasts on the marble kitchen top that overlooks the large lounge room. Aleks leaps up. ‘You leave that, baby. Go and sit with Jimmy. Fala. I’ll handle that.’ Aleks rubs her neck, kisses her behind the ear, then guides her to the couch. Massaging her with one hand, he flicks through channels, fussing over finding the right program. He decides on Chopper, a movie he and Jimmy have watched numerous times and quote endlessly. Once back in the kitchen, he knows what he is doing. As the chicken breasts fry in a pan, he throws together a salty salad. ‘Helps with a hangover, this one,’ he says, slicing cucumbers. ‘Rakia?’
‘Fuck yeh.’
‘May you walk naked in the house of your enemies, brother.’ They drain shots and
Aleks smacks his lips, then exclaims, ‘Good grief!’
Jimmy laughs. Aleks has a hotchpotch vernacular, pieced together out of rap music, woggy slang, movies and Aussie colloquialisms, but Jimmy’s favourite is when he uses old-fashioned expressions, something you might hear a grandma saying – ‘dearo me’ or ‘goodness gracious’. He says it whenever he’s about to do something dangerous or bad for his health. Aleks pours another rakia.
‘What’d you do today?’ Jimmy says, eyeing him keenly. Aleks knows what Jimmy is up to. He loves to feel in touch with the criminal world without having to partake in any of it. Aleks once enjoyed telling him, but now throws him red herrings – close to but never the complete truth. Betrayal is in the kiss.
Today he doesn’t feel like talking about crime. It’ll bring down his delicately balanced mood. ‘Ah, just painted a house on the other side of town, brother. Nothing too much. The couple were happy with it.’ He keeps his eye on the television but can see that Jimmy is scratching his Adam’s apple in disappointment. On the TV, it’s the scene where Chopper is trying to convince his mates to kidnap the prison guards and lay siege to the jail. ‘What a plan. Dumb cunt,’ snorts Aleks. ‘You’d get fucken forty more years.’
Jimmy looks at him again, trying to glean some insight from his mate’s offhand comment. Aleks places plates in front of his wife and Jimmy. ‘Pileshko,’ Sonya says shyly, gesturing at the chicken with her chin. ‘Fala mnogu, Aleks.’
Sonya is Anglo but she’s been with Aleks for so long that she speaks Macedonian almost fluently. She took immediately to the structure and Aleks’ obsession with all things traditional. He beams with pride and kisses her, then says to Jimmy, ‘Not too shabby, ay? Come on. Eat up, both of you. You’re all skin and bone.’
Sonya begins to tell Jimmy a story. He listens to her, almost childlike, experiencing each emotion as she tells it, eyes shining when hers do. Aleks knows she’s always had a soft spot for Jimmy, that he reminds her of a hurt dog she once found on the side of a street, all kicking legs and wounded eyes. She regards Solomon as flashy and shark-like, and feels as if Jimmy is someone who could flourish if given the oxygen. Or explode?
12
The hound
As I untie the leash,
I put my nose to his head.
The fine fur is almost odourless,
a scar from the muzzle on his face.
I trace a finger over it.
Cradling the long head in my hands,
I look into the lone alert eye.
It would be easy to crush his skull
with a cricket bat or a rock,
in one perfect stroke.
Fuck, what am I thinking?
I pull the leash away.
Mercury Fire pauses,
streamlined and legged
to a grass-warped shadow.
Then he dances away with the shadow,
cantering off and building to a sprint within bounds,
his spine as flexible as a bow,
body extended,
charged with blood,
with ancient chases
and deer courses in forests long gone.
Like him,
I used to run and run,
from here to the stone gazebo
on the edge of the park
and back again, to keep lean.
He’s bounding towards some joggers
on the far side of the oval,
long legs still powerful.
Contracting, extending,
contracting, extending.
Is he imagining the race?
The arena,
the ceremony of gamblers and luckseekers,
the strange smells coming to him from the stands,
the straining hounds on either side,
eager and competitive souls in their chests?
A pointless struggle,
actors in a strange tragedy
where the winner never wins,
never gets its prey.
The true winner is removed,
a tall figure in the stands
with a ticket in his hands.
When I quit basketball,
I forfeited adulation
and the weekly engagement of muscle and will.
I used to walk home
through this oval,
lie in the dew,
drunk and reeking,
thinking of the times I pured a three
or threaded a pass perfectly.
Misses,
awards,
failure.
No basketball, no dad to play for –
been rudderless ever since.
Maybe that’s why I bought the hound.
Maybe it was a reason to be responsible for something again.
I see a figure in a red polka dot dress approaching
then I look back to Mercury Fire.
He changes direction and veers towards me –
something in his sight streak has appeared.
He’s snapping after a butterfly,
bright yellow and out of reach.
My affinity with him,
my fear of him,
deeper than appreciation of speed.
We’re nothing but spray cans,
used up and thrown away,
creating something that gets painted over within a day.
He comes back to me,
panting and smiling.
The figure in the red polka dot dress is close.
‘Good boy,’ I say,
patting Mercury Fire.
‘Hi,’ says Scarlett Snow.
‘Hi.’
The gazebo
There’s no one around
and the windows are partially obscured
by bare rose bushes.
I hike her onto the stone bench
and offer my throat,
which she clasps with two hands.
I peel the red up
and the white down.
And now the consuming danger,
the fierceness of summer
riding on our shoulders,
my thumbs on her ankles,
the minutes trickling down our backs
and her black hair.
I stare at the long, trembling dusk
as I lick a bead of sweat from the side of her face.
‘Wanna meet up tomorrow?’
‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, mister.’
She’s become cool again,
almost professional,
but the danger is still hot on my body.
She kisses me quickly.
‘Seeya soon, mama’s boy.’
An argument with Georgie
She just called the Samoan guy at the petrol station ‘bro’.
No way.
‘Can you not say that, Georgie. It’s fucken annoying.’
‘What?’
‘Bro.’
‘Bro,’ she mimics back.
‘Seriously.’
‘Why not? You say it all the time.’
‘I’m a dude. It sounds ugly when a chick says it.’
‘Solomon, that’s ridiculous.’
‘I’m just saying. Doesn’t sound right. That’s a guy’s word.’
‘I’ll stop saying it if you do.’ Her lips set.
‘Fuck that.’
‘You’re a pig.’
‘Oh, yeh?’
‘And an egomaniac.’
‘That all?’
We walk in silence.
Of course that’s not all.
I clear my throat. ‘Hey, Georgie. You realise that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be one of us.’
‘One of the boys? Wouldn’t wanna be.’
‘Nah. You know what I mean.’ I cough. ‘Ethnic.’
‘Why are you saying this, Solomon?’ Her voice is shaking. My mind is perfectly clear.
‘Just letting you know. No matter how many politics courses you take, how much yoga you do, how many fucken Buddhist scrolls you h
ang in your room – you will never be.’ I snort coldly. ‘I know how you girls think. And I’ll let you in on another secret: no matter how many times you fuck me, you’ll always be white. I’m not gonna fuck some colour into ya and I’m not gonna fuck that white guilt outta ya. You will never be anything but what you are.’
She’s crying now.
That felt brilliant.
13
In Woolworths, Jimmy grabs a tin of coffee before heading to the wall of fridges lined with frozen dinners. Maybe lasagne tomorrow night. There is something about all the packets stacked up in supermarkets that he likes. In petrol stations, too. All the brightly coloured boxes, piled high and deep – the gaudiness, the abundance of it. You’re in charge, browsing where you like, and it’s all on display for your pleasure. Take what you want.
When he closes the fridge door, he turns and catches a glimpse of the girl from the travel agency, Hailee, walking up the aisle with a basket. He keeps his head down and watches out of the corner of his eye as she stands in front of the rows of pasta. When she moves on, Jimmy glides to the head of the next aisle and watches her as she chooses some rice. She’s in running pants and her hair is pulled back, and Jimmy can see what look like simple diamond studs in her ears. He can just make out a tattoo on the back of her neck – a coathanger? He shadows her again as she moves on to the deli. As he hovers by the cold shelves of fresh meat, she seems to look right at him, but offers no flicker of recognition. He pretends to be looking at Christmas crackers.
