‘Get the hell out of my room, Eli!’ she screams. Her teeth are gritted so tight I see the creases in her top lip, breathing hard, breathing deep.
‘Who are we kidding?’ I shout. ‘Watch my language? Watch my language? We’re fucking drug dealers. Drug dealers fucking swear. I’m sick of all these bullshit airs and graces you and Lyle go on with. Do your homework, Eli. Eat your fuckin’ broccoli, Eli. Tidy this kitchen, Eli. Study hard, Eli. Like we’re the fucking Brady Bunch or somethin’ and not just a dirty bunch of smack pushers. Give me a fucking bre—’
Then I’m flying. Two hands grip my underarms from behind and I’m flying, hurled off Mum and Lyle’s bed, shoulders first, head second, into their bedroom door. I bounce off the door and drop to the polished wooden floorboards in a bone heap. Lyle looms above me and kicks me in the arse so hard with his Dunlop Volleys – his going-out shoes, one step up from his rubber flip-flops – that I belly slide two metres across the hallway floor to the bare feet of August who gives a curious This again? So soon? look to Lyle.
‘Fuck you, druggo cunt,’ I scream, rabid and groggy, trying to get to my feet.
He kicks me in the arse again and I dive this time across the living room floor.
Mum’s screaming behind him. ‘Stop it, Lyle, that’s enough.’
Lyle’s got the red-mist rage I’ve had the misfortune of encountering thrice before. Once when I ran away from home and slept a night in an empty bus in a wrecker’s yard in Redlands. Another time when I stuck six cane toads in the freezer to die a humane death and those hardy and uneasy-on-the-eye amphibians survived in that sub-zero coffin all the way through to Lyle’s after-work rum and Coke and he opened the freezer to find two toads blinking on his ice tray. A third time when I joined a schoolmate, Jock Whitney, on a neighbourhood doorknock fundraising drive for the Salvation Army, except we were really fundraising to buy ET the Extra Terrestrial on Atari – I still feel rotten about that, the game was a piece of shit.
August, dear, pure-of-heart August, stands in front of Lyle as he approaches for a third arse punt. He shakes his head, holding Lyle’s shoulders.
‘It’s all right, mate,’ Lyle says. ‘It’s time Eli and I had a little talk.’
Lyle brushes past August and he hauls me up by the collar of my opportunity shop polo, then pushes me out the front door. He hauls me down the front stairs and along the path, through the gate, still holding my collar, his big streetfightin’ fists pushing against the back of my neck. ‘Keep walkin’, smartarse,’ he says. ‘Keep walkin’.’
He takes me across the street, under the streetlight outshining the moon above us, into the park opposite our house. All I can smell is Lyle’s Old Spice aftershave. All I can hear is our footsteps and the sound of cicadas rubbing their legs, like they’re excited by the tension in the air, rubbing their legs the way Lyle rubs his hands before an Eels preliminary final.
‘What the fuck’s got into you, Eli?’ he asks, forcing me on across the cricket oval grass, unmown so my shoes keep kicking up the black fur of the tall paspalum grass shoots onto my pant legs. He walks me to the centre of the cricket pitch and he lets me go. He paces back and forth, fixing the buckle on his belt, breathing in, breathing out. He’s wearing his cream-coloured slacks with his blue cotton button-up shirt with the white tall ship cutting full mast across it.
Don’t cry, Eli. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Fuck. You pussy, Eli.
‘Why are you crying?’ Lyle asks.
‘I don’t know, I really didn’t want to. My brain doesn’t listen to me.’
I cry some more with this realisation. Lyle gives me a minute. I wipe my eyes.
‘You all right?’ Lyle asks.
‘Me arse stings a bit.’
‘Sorry about that.’
I shrug. ‘I deserved it,’ I say.
Lyle gives me another moment.
‘You ever wonder why you cry so easy, Eli?’
‘Because I’m a pussy.’
‘You’re not a pussy. Don’t you ever be ashamed of crying. You cry because you give a shit. Don’t ever be ashamed of giving a shit. Too many people in this world are too scared to cry because they’re too scared to give a shit.’
He turns and looks up at the stars. He sits down on the cricket pitch for a better angle, looks up and takes in the universe, all that scattered space crystal.
‘You’re right about your mum,’ he says. ‘She’s way too good for me. Always has been. Far as I’m concerned, she’s too good for anyone. She’s too good for that house. She’s too good for this town. Too good for me.’
He points to the stars. ‘She belongs up there with Orion.’
I park my tender arse down beside him.
‘You want to get out of here?’ he asks.
I nod, stare up at Orion, the cluster of perfect light.
‘So do I, mate,’ he says. ‘Why do you think I been doing the extra work for Tytus?’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it. Extra work. I wonder if Pablo Escobar calls it that.’
Lyle drops his head.
‘I know it’s a hell of a way to make a buck, mate.’
We sit in silence for a moment. Then Lyle turns to me.
‘I’ll make you a deal.’
‘Yeah . . .’
‘Gimme six months.’
‘Six months?’
‘Where you wanna move to? Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York, Paris?’
‘I want to move to The Gap.’
‘The Gap? Why the fuck ya wanna move to The Gap?’
‘Nice cul-de-sacs in The Gap.’
Lyle laughs.
‘Cul-de-sacs,’ he says, shaking his head. He turns to me, deeply serious. ‘It’ll get good, mate. It’ll get so good you’ll forget it was even bad.’
I look up at the stars. Orion fixes his target and he draws his bow and he lets his arrow fly, straight and true through the left eye of Taurus and the raging bull is silenced.
‘Deal,’ I say. ‘Under one condition.’
‘What’s that?’ Lyle asks.
‘You let me work for you.’
*
We can walk to Bich Dang’s Vietnamese restaurant from home. The restaurant is called Mama Pham’s, named in honour of the stocky cooking genius, Mama Pham, who taught Bich how to cook in her native Saigon in the 1950s. The Mama Pham’s sign on the front is written in blinking lime green neon against an eastern red backdrop, but the neon ‘P’ is busted and dulled so the restaurant, for the past three years, has looked to passersby more like a pork and bacon–based restaurant named ‘Mama ham’s’. Lyle holds a six-pack of XXXX Bitter in his left hand and opens the Mama Pham’s front glass door for Mum, who slips past him in the red dress and the black heels from beneath her bed. August walks past next with his hair combed back carelessly and his pink Catchit T-shirt tucked into shiny silver-grey slacks, bought from the Darra Station Road opportunity shop seven or eight shops past the TAB down from Mama Pham’s.
The inside of Mama Pham’s is as big as a cinema hall. There are more than twenty round dining tables with lazy Susans spinning for eight, ten, sometimes twelve people per table. Beautiful Vietnamese mums with made-up faces and immovable hair and normally quiet Vietnamese dads loosened and laughing heartily on