‘Thanks for the offer, Darren, but, you know, I never really considered heroin empire building as part of my life plan.’
‘Is that right?’ He flicks his cigarette butt into his sister’s fairy castle. ‘The man with the plan. So what’s Tink Bell’s grand life plan?’
I shrug.
‘C’mon, Eli, smart Aussie mud crab like you, tell me how you’re gonna crawl out of this shit bucket?’
I look up at the night sky. There’s the Southern Cross. The saucepan, the set of white stars shimmering, shaped like the small stovetop pot Lyle boils his eggs in every Saturday morning.
‘I’m gonna be a journalist,’ I say.
‘Ha!’ Darren howls. ‘A journalist?’
‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna work on the crime desk at The Courier-Mail. I’m gonna have a house in The Gap and I’m gonna spend my life writing crime stories for the paper.’
‘Ha! One of the bad guys making a living writing about the bad guys,’ Darren says. ‘And why in fuck you wanna live in The Gap?’
We’d bought our Atari games console through the Trading Post. Lyle drove us out to a family in The Gap, a leafy suburb eight kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD, who had recently purchased a Commodore 64 desktop computer and no longer needed their Atari, which they sold to us for $36. I’d never seen so many tall trees in one suburb. Tall blue gums that shaded kids playing handball in suburban cul-de-sacs. I love cul-desacs. Darra doesn’t have enough cul-de-sacs.
‘The cul-de-sacs,’ I say.
‘What the fuck is a cul-de-sac?’ Darren asks.
‘It’s what you’re on here. A street with a dead end. Great for playing handball and cricket. No cars going through.’
‘Yeah, I love a no-through road,’ he says. He shakes his head. ‘Man, you want to get some joint in The Gap, that shit ain’t gonna happen for twenty, thirty years in some journalising bullshit. You need to go get some degree, then ya gotta go beg for some job from some arsehole who’ll boss you around for thirty years and you’ll have to save your pennies and by the time you’re done savin’ there’ll be no more houses in The Gap left to buy!’
Darren points up into the living room.
‘You see that Styrofoam box beside your good man’s feet up there?’ he asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘There’s a whole house in The Gap inside that,’ he says. ‘Us bad guys, Tink, we don’t have to wait to buy houses in The Gap. In my game, we buy them tomorrow if we want to.’
He smiles.
‘Is it fun?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘Your game.’
‘Sure it’s fun,’ he says. ‘You meet lots of interesting people. Lots of opportunities to build your business knowledge. And when the cops are sniffin’ around, you really know you’re alive. You pull off some huge import right under their noses and you make the sales and you bank the profits and you turn around to your family and friends and say, “Goddamn, look at what you can achieve when you act as a team and you really stick to it.”’
He breathes deep.
‘It’s inspiring to me,’ he says. ‘It makes me believe that in a place like Australia, anything really is possible.’
We sit in silence. He flicks the flint on his lighter, hops off the trampoline. He walks to the house’s front staircase.
‘C’mon, let’s go up,’ he says.
I’m puzzled, mute.
‘What are you waiting for?’ he asks. ‘Mum wants to meet you.’
‘Why does your mum want to meet me?’
‘She wants to meet the boy who didn’t rat about the rat.’
‘I can’t go up there.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s nearly 1 a.m. and Lyle will kick my arse.’
‘He won’t kick your arse if we don’t want him to.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
‘Because he knows who we are.’
‘And who are you?’
‘We’re the bad guys.’
*
We enter through the sliding glass doors off the balcony. Darren marches confidently into the living room, ignoring Lyle sitting in the armchair to his left. His mum sits, elbows resting on her knees, on the long brown leather lounge suite, her husband resting back on the lounge beside her.
‘Hey Mum, I found this guy spying on you all in the yard,’ Darren says.
I enter the living room in my pyjamas with the hole in the arse.
‘This is the kid who didn’t rat about Jabba,’ Darren says.
Lyle turns to his right and he sees me, face filling with rage.
‘Eli, what the hell are you doing here?’ he asks, soft and intense.
‘Darren invited me,’ I say.
‘It’s 1 a.m. Go. Home. Now.’
I turn around immediately and walk back out the living room doors.
Bich Dang releases a gentle laugh from the couch.
‘Are you really going to give up that easily, boy?’ she asks.
I stop. Turn around. Bich Dang smiles, the porcelain white foundation on her face cracking around the wrinkles of her widening mouth.
‘Plead your case, boy,’ she says. ‘Please tell us why exactly you are out at this time in your pyjamas flashing that cute white tush?’
I look at Lyle. He looks at Bich and I follow his gaze.
She takes a long white menthol cigarette from a silver case, lights it, leans back into her lounge as she draws in her first puff, then blows it out, her eyes sparkling as though she’s looking at a newborn baby.
‘Well?’ she prompts.
‘I saw the purple firework,’ I say. Bich nods knowingly. Fuck. I never realised how beautiful she is. She might be in her mid-fifties, early sixties even, but she’s so exotic and so cold-blooded exciting she has the presence of a serpent. Maybe she’s so attractive at this age because she sheds her skin, slips out of her own body when she finds a new one to wriggle through life in. She keeps me in her gaze with that smile until I have to look away from it, drop my head to fiddle with the drawstring on my loose pyjama bottoms.
‘And . . .?’ she says.
‘I . . . ummm . . . I followed Lyle here because . . .’
My throat thickens. Lyle’s fingers dig into his chair’s armrests.
‘Because of all the questions.’
Bich leans forward on the lounge. Studies my face.
‘Come closer,’ she says.
I move two steps towards her.
‘Closer,’ she says. ‘Come to me.’
I shuffle closer and she places her cigarette in the corner of a glass ashtray and she takes my hand to draw me so close that her kneecaps rub against mine. She smells of tobacco and citrus-scented perfume. Her hands are pale white and soft and her fingernails are long and fire-engine