by Trent Dalton
‘Tell me about it,’ she says. ‘All right, you can go to the pool but you two better have your homework done by the time I get home.’
No problem. But we get to Jindalee pool and it’s closed because the owner is laying a new lining across the empty fifty-metre pool.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle barks.
Teddy is in the driver’s seat because he owns this 1976 olive green Mazda sedan, a mobile kiln even in spring, with hot brown vinyl passenger seats that stick to the undersides of my thighs, August’s too, because he’s wearing the same grey Kmart shorts.
Teddy looks at his watch.
‘We gotta be at Jamboree Heights in seven minutes,’ he says.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle says, shaking his head. ‘Let’s go.’
We pull up outside a two-storey house in Jamboree Heights. The house is made of yellow brick with a large aluminium garage door and a staircase running up the front of the house to a landing where a young shirtless Maori boy, maybe five years old, is furiously skipping on the spot with a pink plastic jump rope. It’s so hot outside that the road bitumen through my car window shimmers with glassy mirage pockets of hot air.
Lyle and Teddy pause for a moment to scan the landscape, look into the car’s rearview and side mirrors. Teddy pops the boot. They exit the Mazda at the same time and walk to the back of the car. Close the boot.
Lyle walks back to his front passenger door carrying a blue plastic chill box and leans into the car.
‘You two just sit here and behave yourselves, all right?’ he says. He goes to shut the door.
‘You gotta be kidding, Lyle.’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It must be fifty degrees in here,’ I say. ‘We’ll be fried in ten minutes flat.’
Lyle sighs, takes a deep breath. He looks around, spots a small tree by the footpath.
‘All right, wait under that tree over there,’ he says.
‘And what do we say when the neighbour comes out and asks us why we’re sitting under his tree?’ I ask. ‘“Just makin’ a quick drug deal, mate. Don’t mind us.”’
‘You’re really startin’ ta piss me off, Eli,’ he says, shutting his door hard.
Then he opens the door on August’s side.
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘But not a fucking word.’
We pass the kid with the skipping rope and he watches us, yellow snot resting at the bottom of his nose.
‘Hey,’ I say, passing.
The kid says nothing. Lyle knocks his knuckle against a security screen door frame. ‘That you, Lyle?’ comes a call from the dark living room. ‘Come on in, bro.’
We enter the house. Lyle, then Teddy, then August, then me.
Two Maori men are resting on brown armchairs beside an empty three-seat couch. Smoke fills the living room. The men have full ashtrays on the armrests of their chairs. One man is skinny, with Maori tattoos across his left cheek; the other is the fattest man I’ve ever seen in my life, and he’s the one who speaks.
‘Lyle, Ted,’ he says by way of greeting.
‘Ezra,’ Lyle says.
Ezra wears black shorts and a black floppy shirt and his legs are so big that the fat around his thighs spills over his kneecaps so the middle of his legs look like the faces of walruses without tusks. It’s not the size of the man that I dwell on, though, it’s the size of his black T-shirt, big enough to be a shade cover for Teddy’s Mazda parked outside in the sun.
The skinny man is leaning forward in his armchair, peeling the jackets off a bowl of potatoes on a portable tray.
‘Fuck, Lyle,’ Ezra says, smiling as he looks at August and me. ‘That’s some prize parenting right there, my friend, bringing your kids to a drug deal.’
Ezra slaps his leg, looks at his skinny tattoo-faced friend who says nothing: ‘Papara of the Year, ’ey cuz!’
‘They’re not my kids,’ Lyle says.
A woman enters the living room. ‘Well, I’ll take ’em then if they’re not yours, Lyle,’ she says, smiling at August and me as she sits down on the couch. She’s barefoot, in a black singlet. A Maori woman with a tribal tattoo ringing her upper right arm. A line of tattooed dots runs across her right temple. She carries a portable tray of her own filled with carrots and sweet potatoes and a quarter of a pumpkin.
‘Sorry Elsie,’ Lyle says. ‘They’re Frankie’s kids.’
‘Thought they were too handsome to be your tamariki tane,’ she says.
She gives August a wink. He smiles back.
‘How many years you been looking after these boys, Lyle?’ Elsie asks.
‘’Bout eight, nine years I’ve known them,’ Lyle says.
Elsie looks at August and me.
‘Eight, nine years?’ she echoes. ‘Whaddya reckon, boys? Reckon it’s fair enough to say you’re his kids now?’
August nods his head. Elsie turns to me for a response.
‘Reckon that’s fair enough,’ I say.
Ezra and the skinny man are engrossed in a movie on TV featuring a hulking bronzed warrior at the head of a great ancient feast.
‘What is best in life?’ says a man on the screen dressed like Genghis Khan.
The bronzed warrior has his legs crossed, muscles like iron, a headband like a crown.
‘Crush your enemies,’ says the bronzed warrior. ‘To see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.’
August and I are temporarily spellbound by this man.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask.
‘That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, bro,’ Ezra says. ‘Conan the Barbarian.’
Arnold Schwarzenegger is mesmerising.
‘This motherfucker’s gonna be huge,’ Ezra says.
‘What’s it about?’ I ask.
‘It’s about warriors, bro, and wizards and swords and sorcery,’ Ezra says. ‘But most of all it’s about revenge. Conan’s travelling the world trying to find the bastard who fed his dad to dogs and chopped off his mum’s head.’
I spot the video cassette recorder sitting beneath the television.
‘You got a Sony Betamax?’ I gasp.
‘Of course, mate,’ Ezra says. ‘Better resolution, high-fidelity sounds, no fuzz, improved contrast, improved luminance noise.’
August and I dive immediately to the carpet to stare at the machine.
‘What’s luminance noise?’ I ask.
‘Fucked if I know,’ Ezra says. ‘That’s what they wrote on the box.’
By the television is a bookshelf filled with black Betamax tapes with white sticky labels marked with movie titles. Hundreds of them. Some titles have been crossed out with blue ballpoint pen and other titles have been scribbled in beside them. Raiders of the Lost Ark. ET the Extra Terrestrial. Rocky III. Time Bandits. Clash of the Titans. August points his finger at one cassette in particular.
‘You got Excalibur?’ I holler.
‘Shit yeah, bro?’ Ezra beams. ‘Helen Mirren, man. Smokin’ hot that crazy witch.’
I nod heartily.
‘Merlin,’ I say.
‘Crazy bastard,’ Ezra rejoices.
I scan the videos. ‘You got all the Star Wars!’
‘What’s the best Star Wars?’ Ezra asks, with a tone that suggests he already knows the answer.
‘Empire,’ I say.
‘Correct,’ he says. ‘Best bit?’
‘Yoda’s cave in Dagobah,’ I say without contemplation.
‘Oh, shit, Lyle, you got a deep one here,’ Ezra says.
Lyle shrugs, rolls a cigarette from a packet of White Ox in his pocket.
‘Dunno the fuck yer talkin’ ’bout,’ he says.
‘Luke finds Vader in the cave and kills him and then the mask blows open and Luke’s looking at himself,’ Ezra says mystically. ‘Strange shit, bro. What’s this one’s name?’
Lyle points at me.
‘That’s Eli,’ he says. Points at August. ‘That’s August.’
‘Hey Eli, what’s up with that cave shit?’ he asks. ‘What’s that shit mean, litt
le bro?’
I keep looking at the video movie titles as I talk.
‘The cave’s the world and it’s like Yoda says, the only thing in the cave is what you take in there with you. I reckon Luke already senses who his old man is. He already knows deep down. He’s shit-scared of meeting his dad because he’s shit-scared of the stuff that’s already inside him, the dark side that’s already in his blood.’
The living room goes quiet for a moment. August shoots me a long look. He nods knowingly, raising his eyebrows.
‘Cool,’ Ezra says.
Lyle places the blue chill box down by Ezra’s chair.
‘Got you boys some beers,’ Lyle says.
Ezra nods his head to the skinny man, which is communication enough to cause the skinny man to hop up from his armchair and open the chill box. He digs his hand deep into the box filled with beer bottles and ice. He pulls out a rectangular block wrapped in a thick black plastic bag. He passes it immediately to Elsie. She screws up her face.
‘You can check it, Rua, for fuck’s sake,’ she says.
The skinny man looks at Ezra for guidance. Ezra is engrossed in the movie but he allows time for one eye to dart towards Elsie, followed by a head nod towards the kitchen. Elsie hops up from the couch in a storm of sharp movements and snatches the black block from Rua’s hand. ‘Fuckin’ dumb fucks,’ she says.
She summons a smile for August and me. ‘You boys want to come choose a soft drink?’ she asks.
We look at Lyle. He nods approval. We follow her into the kitchen.
Rua passes beers to Ezra, Lyle and Teddy.
‘When you Queenslanders going to get another beer other than bloody XXXX Bitter?’ Ezra asks.
‘We do have another beer,’ Teddy says, sitting back in the three-seat couch to watch Conan the Barbarian. ‘We got XXXX Draught.’
*
It’s almost 1 p.m. when we’re eating potato scallops at a snack bar along the Moorooka Magic Mile, the stretch of road in Moorooka fifteen minutes’ drive from Jamboree Heights, where people across Brisbane come to buy their cars from a strip of dealerships that range in quality and prestige from ‘All our cars have airbags!’ to ‘All our cars have windscreens!’
We sit around a white round plastic table eating from a ripped-open brown paper parcel of battered potato scallops, beef croquettes, seafood sticks, large bright yellow dim sims and hot chips made from old oil so they look like bent cigarette butts and taste about as good.
‘Who wants the last beef croquette?’ Teddy asks.
Teddy’s the only one who’s been eating the beef croquettes. Teddy’s always the only one who eats the beef croquettes.
‘All yours, Teddy,’ I say.
August and I sip from purple cans of Kirks Pasito, our second favourite soft drink. Slim put us onto Pasito. He drinks nothing but Kirks soft drinks because they’re from Queensland and he says he knew an old bloke who worked for the original Kirks company, which was actually the Helidon Spa Water Company, which made a name for itself in the 1880s bottling the restorative spring waters of Helidon, near Toowoomba, which local Aboriginals said gave them the strength they needed to fend off any greedy souls who might want to exploit the benefits of their personally significant spring water supplies. I’ve never tasted the natural spring waters of Helidon, but I doubt they match the sweet, restorative powers of an ice cold sarsaparilla.
‘Elsie had Big Sars,’ I say, selectively biting my potato scallop in an attempt to create the shape of Australia. August’s biting his so it looks like a ninja star. ‘She had a whole shelf of small soft drink cans. She had the whole Kirks range. Lemon Squash. Creaming Soda. Old Stoney Ginger Beer. You name it.’
Lyle’s rolling himself another White Ox.
‘You see anything else, Captain Details, when you went with Elsie into the kitchen?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say. ‘She had a whole pack of unopened Iced VoVo biscuits in the fridge on the shelf above the vegetable trays. I reckon they must have had Ribbetts last night because there was a silver takeaway box on the shelf above the Iced VoVos and even though the takeaway box had a lid on it and I couldn’t see inside it I knew it was Ribbetts because I could see the Ribbetts barbecue sauce spilling over the edge of the box and there is no barbecue sauce like Ribbetts barbecue sauce.’
Lyle lights his rolled smoke.
‘Any details you picked up that weren’t related to what Elsie had in her fridge?’ he asks, turning his head to the right to avoid blowing smoke over the potato scallops.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say, shoving three chips into my mouth, cold now and losing their crunch. ‘There was a Maori weapon hanging on the wall above the kitchen bench and I asked Elsie what it was and she said it was called a mere. It was a big club shaped like a leaf and made of something called greenstone and it was passed down through generations in her family. And she stood at the sink carefully cutting the wrapping on your heroin block on the kitchen sink bench and levelling a set of kitchen scales and as she did this she told me about the horrible things her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Hamiora, did with this club. Like once there was this chief named Marama from another tribe who was always bullying and intimidating Hamiora’s tribe and when Hamiora visited this rival chief’s HQ . . .’
‘I don’t know if ancient Maori chiefs had HQs,’ Teddy says.
‘His hut, the big rival chief’s hut,’ I clarify. ‘When Hamiora visited Marama’s hut the rival chief began to laugh at the size and shape of Hamiora’s mere because it looked so unthreatening, like a stone rolling pin or something you might use to roll out your biscuits and Hamiora was in the centre of all these rival warriors as Marama was making jokes about him and encouraging his people to laugh and joke about Hamiora’s family weapon and Hamiora started laughing along with them and then Hamiora, quicker than you can say “jam drop biscuit”, struck Marama across the head with his ancient family weapon they’d all been laughing about.’
I pick up a small dim sim.
‘Ol’ Hamiora could wield this greenstone club the way Viv Richards wields a cricket bat and he specialised in this forearm thrust move where he hit someone in the temple but at the point of impact he gave the club a sharp twist.’
I break the top third of the small dim sim off in one tear.
‘He knocked Marama’s whole skullcap off in one blow and the rest of the tribe was so stunned by the scene that they didn’t have time to draw their weapons when the rest of Hamiora’s men – all distant relatives of Elsie’s as well – sprang from some bushes and attacked the dumbstruck rival tribesmen.’
I drop the skullcap end of the dim sim in my mouth.
‘And as Elsie’s tellin’ this story she’s carefully unwrapping the gear and not really looking at where my eyes are and I’m saying things like, “Yeah, really?” and, “No wayyyyy!”, like I’m really engrossed in the story but at the same time my eyes are looking all over the kitchen for details. The right eye’s where it should be but I got that loose left eye darting about all over the place, taking things in.’
Lyle and Teddy sneak a brief look at each other. Lyle shakes his head.
‘When August and I duck down to look inside the fridge at Elsie’s collection of Kirks soft drinks she doesn’t realise I’ve actually got a busy eye looking at her at the bench with the gear and she takes a sharp knife and slices a few edges off the smack block like she’s shaving thin slices of cheddar from a block of Coon. And she gathers these shavings into a little one-gram ball and she scrapes it into a small black plastic photographic film canister with a grey lid. She puts this canister into the pocket of her jeans and then she wraps the block back up and takes it out to you guys in the lounge room and you guys have got your heads glued to Conan the Barbarian and she says, “All good”, and nobody says shit back to her.
‘Then she comes back into the kitchen and she finishes telling me this ancient yarn about great-great-great-great-grandfather chief Hamiora and dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb chief Mara
ma and I’m seeing all these details, like there’s a bunch of mail by their phone, letters from the council and bills from Telecom and then there’s a piece of paper with all these names and numbers on it and your name and number is on there, Lyle, and Tytus’s name was on there and then there was a Kylie and a Mal and a number next to someone named Snapper and another number next to a Dustin Vang . . .’
‘Dustin Vang?’ Teddy says, turning to Lyle, who nods his head, raising his eyebrows.
‘Makes sense,’ Lyle says.
‘Who’s Dustin Vang?’ I ask.
‘If Bich Dang was Hamiora, then Dustin Vang would be her Marama,’ Lyle says.
‘He’s good news,’ Teddy says.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Healthy competition,’ Teddy says. ‘If Bich isn’t the only importer on the block, it’s good news for Tytus because Bich will have to start offering more competitive prices and maybe she won’t take such pleasure any more from fucking us in the arse.’
‘Not good news for Tytus, though, if Ezra is thinking about going direct to a new supplier,’ Lyle says. ‘I’ll have a chat to Tytus.’
Teddy chuckles.
‘Not bad, Captain Details.’
*
Nothing connects a city quite like South-East Asian heroin. This glorious month of Saturdays with the Jindalee pool shut for renovations find Lyle, Teddy, August and me crisscrossing the city of Brisbane between every cultural minority, every gang, every obscure subculture my sprawling and hot city nurses in its sweaty bosom.
The Italians in South Brisbane. The collar-up rugby crowd in Ballymore. The drummers and guitarists and the buskers and the busted bands of Fortitude Valley.
‘You can’t say a word about this to yer mum, ya hear,’ Lyle says as we pull up outside the Highgate Hill–based State headquarters of a national neo-Nazi group, White Hammer, led by a softly spoken and thin twenty-five-year-old man named Timothy who is open enough to tell Lyle during a genial exchange of cash and drugs that he does not actually shave his skinhead but is, in fact, naturally bald, which makes me silently consider what struck him first along his unique philosophical journey, the notion of white supremacy or that of white male pattern baldness.
