Disharmony

by Leah Giarratano

  Luke wondered what Abrafo had done to get himself kicked out of Thurston. He knew the place was full of hard-arses; he’d spent a long two weeks on remand up there on the Central Coast. It must’ve taken them two hours or more to get him out here to Windsor. Couldn’t they have waited until morning? And why wouldn’t they have briefed McNichol on what he’d done?

  Ms McNichol moved around the desk, approaching the new guy, and her eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’ll just call Matron to come up here, I think, and then we can all escort you down,’ she said. ‘You’ll be in Dorm Four for now. I think you’ll find that Mr Holt will teach you some manners.’

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and thumbed in a code.

  ‘Yes, Matron, it’s McNichol,’ she said. ‘I’m over in Admin with the new intake. Would you mind coming over to escort him down there with me? Yes, yep… I know… Thanks, Joan.’

  She rang off and dropped the phone into her pocket. She moved a little closer to Abrafo’s chair and stopped. Luke thought she looked as ill as he felt. She took a deep breath and shook her head a little. He suspected she’d be on sick report for the next couple of days. Just great, he thought: Holt would be happy. Four weeks into his sentence, McNichol had attended a week-long off-site training course, and Luke had been treated to Holt’s ‘counselling’ every day. For some reason, he’d been the senior warden’s pet project since he got here, and this woman was the only person who seemed to get in the way of his plans.

  Ms McNichol coughed and bent to unlock the cuffs around Abrafo’s wrists.

  ‘You’ve caused a lot of inconvenience tonight, Mr Abrafo,’ she said.

  Her face now seemed almost as pale as Abrafo’s, who watched her quietly as she released him from the handcuffs. He flexed his wrists, twirling them slowly.

  ‘And I don’t know why they’ve put you in these ridiculous things,’ she continued, moving awkwardly to kneel at his feet. ‘I haven’t seen ankle bracelets on children for years. Good God.’

  Suddenly, Luke felt the wave of giddiness hit him again. And right then three things happened, and everything got real fuzzy, real fast.

  This time he tried to stay on his feet.

  Ms McNichol, however, did not, which was the first of the three things to happen. As soon as she’d snicked open the cuffs binding Abrafo’s feet, she slumped to the ground, her trench coat fanned in a puddle around her.

  The second thing that happened was that Abrafo rose from the chair, his pink lips drawn back across his teeth in a wide smile. He seemed suddenly much taller than when he’d first walked in. His glowing, empty eyes locked onto Luke’s, and Luke felt a spear of agony shoot through his temple. His neck snapped back with the force of the pain and he raised his hands to his face. Vaguely, he wondered whether his eyeballs were melting.

  And then the third thing happened. Maybe. Probably not. Well, what Luke thought he saw was Zac fly. One moment Zac was on the other side of the room, furthest from Abrafo. And then he blurred. Luke blinked, and Zac had crash-tackled the white-haired kid. The two thrashed about together like some double-headed monster on the floor. Half the size of Abrafo but twice as fast, Zac’s limbs flashed furiously.

  Oh God, what do I do now? Luke wondered. He rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear them. Everything was distorted. Clearly, Nguyen had some sort of history with this Abrafo. He took a step closer to them, but they were almost fused in a frenzy of movement and he wasn’t sure he could get in there, even if he wanted to.

  Zac seemed to be throwing a hundred high-speed blows a minute, but the new kid wouldn’t stay down. He blocked each of Zac’s moves effortlessly, soundlessly. Luke could hear his own rapid breathing over the sound of the fight – he felt as though he was watching a kung-fu movie playing on fast-forward with the mute button on.

  He glanced down at Ms McNichol. She wasn’t going to be any help. He stretched out a foot and prodded at her arm. Nothing. Her rounded belly rose and fell. She was breathing, at least. But what had happened to her? Abrafo hadn’t touched her, he was sure of it. She must have had the same attack of the giddies he was having. Could there be a gas leak in here or something? Foster mother number three had told him about two kids in the next suburb who went to bed with a leaky heater on and never woke up. Yeah, a gas leak could explain this.

  He turned back to the fight. Whatever it was didn’t seem to be affecting these two. And the quietness of the fight was so weird. No grunting, no swearing. Are they even breathing? he wondered. The only sound was the whir of Zac’s hands through the air and the dull thuds as Abrafo blocked them.

  The rhythm of the duel became hypnotic – as Luke watched, the walls of the Admin room faded around him. Now there was only light and dark – the back of Zac’s black head and Abrafo’s ghost-pallor face.

  Abrafo’s eyes suddenly locked onto him.

  Luke felt his own eyes begin to stream as he fell into the frigid pools of light. He wondered dimly how Abrafo was blocking Zac’s punches. But somehow that didn’t seem important now. Luke swayed with Abrafo’s movements, his body following the taller youth’s actions. Abrafo ducked and blocked, his hands a blur, as Zac danced and spun ceaselessly, trying to find an entry point for a body blow.

  Suddenly Abrafo stopped. His eyes still locked on Luke’s, he shot out an arm just as Zac moved in again to strike. Abrafo’s forearm smacked into Zac’s neck and the smaller boy dropped.

  Luke knew he had to do something. Now. But he couldn’t move. He opened his mouth to shout out. And then, from the corner of his eye, Luke saw Zac fly again. In slow motion this time. From the floor at Abrafo’s feet, Zac sprang upwards, his sneakers suddenly head-height. His legs scissored, midair, and one heel cracked into the albino’s forehead.

  The blue eyes closed and Luke vomited all over his shoes.

  ‘Move, Luke, now!’ yelled Zac.

  Still bent double, stomach convulsing, Luke recognised the panic in Zac’s voice and threw himself sideways. He’d learned long ago that if someone warned him to move, he moved. Fast. He registered a blur of movement flashing past the spot where he’d been standing, just as his ribs cracked into the side of the desk.

  ‘Oh my God! What on earth is going on here?’ Matron stood in the doorway, her radio in hand.

  ‘Code Nine Administration building,’ she yelled into the radio. ‘Officer down! Inmate at large. Black, Nguyen, on your knees. Now!’

  Luke was happy to oblige. He allowed himself to slide down the legs of the desk. He sat back on his haunches and bent his head forward over his lap. The stench from his shoes filled his nostrils and he lurched upright again.

  ‘You stink, Black,’ said Zac, kneeling next to him.

  ‘Kill me now,’ said Luke.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have to wait long to die, dude,’ said Zac. ‘Holt should be here any minute.’

  Pantelimon, Bucharest, Romania

  June 28, 10.49 a.m.

  Mirela blew a kiss to the middle-aged woman who was red-faced and screaming at them from the driver’s seat of her dilapidated Volvo station wagon. In the rear of the car, two children in school uniform pulled faces, their middle fingers raised.

  Samantha tugged at Mirela’s bare brown arm.

  ‘Maybe if you didn’t just dawdle across the road, Mimi,’ she said, using Mirela’s baby name, ‘people wouldn’t be so mean to you.’

  ‘What are you, new?’ Mirela laughed. ‘The Gaje hate gypsies, and you know that as well as I do. They’d treat us that way even if I offered to wash that crappy car for them for free.’

  ‘Not all of them are like that,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Mirela. ‘That’s your opinion, but don’t forget – you believe in fairytales.’

  They strolled up the main street of Pantelimon, peering into shop windows. Samantha smiled for two red-haired, sunburned tourists falling over one another to take their photo. Right when they sing-songed, ‘Cheeeese!’ Mirela poked out her tongue.

  ‘What?’ she
said, when Samantha frowned at her. ‘You don’t think that’s gonna make a great photo? They’ll be back home one day, maybe ten years from now, looking at that photo of the two colourful gypsy girls. Of course, they’ll be stunned by the beauty of the dark-haired one sticking out her tongue. And then off they’ll go and pay to watch me star in a movie at their local cinema, and they’ll never know that they once almost met the most famous movie star in the world.’

  Samantha laughed and linked arms with her.

  ‘You should be a writer, not a movie star,’ she said. ‘You spin enough bull-’

  ‘Hey!’ laughed Mirela. ‘Do you eat with that mouth?’

  They walked past McDonald’s, and Mirela gazed in wistfully. ‘You wanna go in?’ she said.

  ‘You got any money?’ said Samantha. ‘No, you don’t, so I don’t want to go in.’

  ‘We’ve got some money,’ said Mirela.

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. We’re gonna use the cash your mother gave us for groceries to buy McDonald’s. That sounds like a great plan. Especially if we want to be murdered. Pass.’

  Just ahead, Samantha spotted the two happy photographers at a stall selling overpriced junk for tourists. She watched them examining a coffee mug bearing a blurry transfer of Count Vlad Dracul, the Impaler.

  ‘They can’t ever get enough of Dracula, can they?’ said Mirela.

  ‘Well, they are in Romania, his birthplace,’ said Samantha. ‘But they should wait until they get to Transylvania for their souvenirs. They can buy underwear with his name on it then.’

  ‘You talk about him like he’s real.’

  ‘Well, not everything that exists is visible, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I know. Once upon a time…’ Mirela laughed.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sam. ‘Where do you reckon they’re from, anyway?’ This was her favourite game.

  ‘Oh, who cares,’ said Mirela. ‘Texas? Sweden?’

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Yeah, whatever.’

  ‘I’d love to go to Australia,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Really? Gee, you’ve never mentioned that before.’ Mirela rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know why you want to go fantasising about riding kangaroos all day when you could be dreaming about moving to LA, baby.’

  ‘Meh,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Mirela. ‘So, where are we going, anyway?’

  ‘Now, where do you think?’

  ‘Aw, man,’ Mirela groaned. ‘Birthday Jones again? I thought you were in love with Tamas.’

  ‘You’re an idiot, you know that, Mimi?’

  Samantha couldn’t explain why she was drawn to Birthday Jones. It would be like having to provide reasons why she loved Lala. Or Mirela, for that matter. Some people just meant the world to her.

  Although Milosh’s camp travelled widely throughout Romania, they settled every year in the countryside on the outskirts of Pantelimon. And that’s where she’d met Birthday Jones. Five years ago, on the streets, where he lived.

  ‘But he’s not even Roma,’ said Mirela.

  Samantha sighed. The fence between the Roma and the Gaje was as carefully tended by the gypsies as it was by the rest of the Romanian population. She found the whole thing completely boring. As far as she was concerned, she couldn’t have cared less about a person’s nationality or culture. It made no more difference to her than whether a person preferred Coke or Pepsi. For the past two years, every summer, she’d been using the internet at the Pantelimon library and she knew that the world was a much bigger place than Romania.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘You got anything better to do?’

  ***

  They found Birthday working his favourite restaurant strip.

  ‘He is gorgeous,’ said Mirela. ‘I do understand the attraction.’

  ‘No attraction,’ said Samantha. ‘None. Zero. Zip.’

  ‘You must have it bad for Tamas, then,’ said Mirela. ‘That boy there is fine.’

  They watched Birthday Jones and his crew at work. They relied on the younger beggars to get the ball rolling. When they’d first met Birthday, he’d been eleven and the absolute best beggar. Samantha suspected it was racism at play. Because Birthday Jones was a Romanian street kid with a thick mop of shaggy, light-brown hair, rather than coarse, wiry black, he stood out from the crowd. He appealed to the Western mums and dads with kids at home being babysat by Nanna while they took their trip of a lifetime. The guilt would bite hard and their wallets would be out before they knew it.

  Perfect. The older pickpockets would take note – that’s where they kept the cash.

  But Birthday Jones had an extra secret weapon. His eyes. An amber-gold colour and yes, damn it, sparkling; he would beam those eyes into yours and all of a sudden you’d forget he was barefoot and dirt-smeared. In fact, suddenly, he looked great, and it seemed like a good idea to buy him a meal, some shoes, a bed. Sam had watched him work plenty of times, and when Birthday brought out the big guns – his dimples – the tourists started speaking seriously about adoption and the plight of Romanian street children. Sam was at once sympathetic and repulsed by that attitude. Sure, she could understand the attraction of bringing this particularly cute street kid into western suburbia. These tourists would suddenly become the Angelina Jolies of their suburb in a single post-softball weekend barbeque. But what about the smaller kids they looked right through? Andre, with the cleft palate, only eight this year, and three when Samantha first met him. He was still begging, and had three years to go before he graduated to pickpocket. And Belinda, now fourteen – Samantha hadn’t seen her once in the last two years. Word was she was in Russia now, and was owned by the mafia.

  Birthday was wearing his Invisible Outfit: black cargos, blue T-shirt, runners. Today, with his sunshine curls tamed by a black trucker cap, and those eyes hooded by its curved visor, he was just another street kid. He was making certain to keep the dimples in their holster. He didn’t want to stand out.

  ‘Can you see their handler?’ said Mirela.

  ‘Fat cow,’ said Samantha. ‘She’s right there. Stay down. She hates me.’

  They squatted by a row of concrete rubbish bins separating the mall from the street. Birthday Jones had had the same handler for the past three years. Cici Illiescu. When Samantha had seen the woman beating the kids because they didn’t bring in enough cash or food, she’d sworn in protest and tried to jump in to help them. But Birthday had yelled at her, told her she was making things worse.

  ‘It doesn’t even hurt,’ he’d said later. ‘It’s just a bit of hose. But if you get her angry, she’ll tell Drago and then we’ll really cop it. She’s nothing. We all laugh about how winded she gets just giving out five.’

  ‘We can’t sit here in the gutters all day, Sam,’ said Mirela. ‘This is getting boring.’

  ‘Chill,’ said Samantha. ‘I’ll get his attention in a second.’

  A shopkeeper on the other side of the street made a show of catching their eye and spitting onto the footpath. He swept the air theatrically with his broom to shoo them away.

  ‘Why do they call him Birthday, anyway?’ said Mirela, smiling languidly at the shopkeeper. It’d take the Gaje police to get her to move from a public street, and even then she’d give them plenty of chat.

  ‘It’s his actual name,’ said Samantha. ‘They don’t just call him that.’

  ‘For real?’ said Mirela.

  ‘Yep. He was dumped at the hospital on the day he was born. And he had no blanket, nothing. Some wise-arse at the hospital decided to memorialise the moment, I guess, and wrote down Birthday Jones as his name on his birth certificate.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Mirela, grinning.

  ‘It’s not funny.’ Samantha nudged Mirela’s foot with her shoe.

  ‘Hey! I know. It’s pretty mean.’ Mirela laughed. ‘It’s a cool name, though.’

  Samantha glowered and turned back to watch the crew work the mall.

  ‘Maybe that’s why you like him so much,’ said Mirela. ‘O
n account of… you know… how you came to us and all.’

  Samantha said nothing. She was sure that had to be part of it. When she’d first heard his story and the tales of some of the other kids out there, she’d felt guilty for having been so lucky as to have been left with Lala. Sure, there’d been some hard times growing up around Milosh, but it was nothing compared to life as a child in a Romanian orphanage. Even the streets were better than that, and that’s where most of them ended up.

  ‘Hey, get up,’ she said. ‘He’s coming this way.’

  The restaurant strip was the most upmarket in Pantelimon, and a few of the restaurateurs did their best to warn their customers – mostly tourists – about the pickpockets and beggars. The kids would stay away from these cafes, concentrating their trade around the outdoor tables of the other venues, whose owners saved a fortune buying stolen goods from the street kids – often items thieved to order.

  Right now, Birthday Jones was making his way through a cluster of people checking out the signposted menu of one of these establishments. Samantha watched him brush past a tall, slim woman in an expensive leather jacket. Waiting for a table with a shorter woman in a red sundress, she barely glanced at him, and didn’t notice that her handbag swayed slightly as he walked away.

  From their concrete hideout, Samantha grinned. She gave their whistle. Birthday looked up, spotted her instantly. Other than a slight tilt of his trucker cap, his expression didn’t change at all.

  ‘Hey, hoodlum,’ she said when he reached the bins.

  That got her the dimples.

  ‘Hey, yourself, superstar,’ he said, looking down at them. ‘Mirela,’ he added.

  Mirela nodded. ‘What’s up?’ she said, blushing.

  ‘Well, you two should know. You’re the talk of the town.’

  Samantha frowned. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘Cici will see you and then we’ll all have a very bad day. Just wait here a second. I’m gonna bail. You guys hungry?’

  ‘Always,’ said Mirela.