Here Come the Dogs (13 page)

4

There is ferocity in Solomon's game, as if he can outplay the Reaper for his father's life. He practises jump shot after jump shot until the hoop feels as big as a sinkhole. But during games, he never lets his fury take hold. He siphons it into his body until he becomes a blur of motion, a dervish spinning to the hoop, unfuckwithable. Yet his face remains placid, almost impassive. Teammates begin to call him ‘The Iceman', referring to the great scorer George Gervin – supreme calm and a bone-dry shirt – but soon they rename him ‘The Mask'. The mask unnerves opponents and teammates alike. There is arrogance in his game, the crossovers and dancing feet designed to humiliate, the smouldering intensity a slow knife intended to torture the opposition throughout the game. The truth is that he put the mask on much earlier.

When Ulysses Amosa recovered from his first stroke, his obsession with church and tradition became fervent. Solomon resented going to church and didn't understand the
fa'aaloalo,
respect for elders, that Ulysses constantly went on about – Solomon saw Aussie kids treating their parents as equals. Wounded, he began to speak less and less at home. Despite this, behind the mask, Solomon seethed with love for his dignified, sick father. His mother, Grace, would take Ulysses in his wheelchair to watch his prodigious son.
Though he couldn't articulate it, Ulysses loved to watch him dance on the blonde hardwood as if the ball was attached to a string. The man and the boy barely exchanged words, but Ulysses knew that Solomon was playing for him.

5

Hail bursts suddenly out of the cloudless sky.

Solomon, Scarlett and the kids seek shelter in a bus stop, watching hailstones as big as fists crack windscreens and dent letterboxes, bouncing metres high off the asphalt and racing over the street like runaways. A complete fury of white. Several minutes later, it is over and the sky is blue. The sun shines again, bright and furious. They spend ten minutes kicking hailstones into the grass, where they lie like blind eyes, melting.

Solomon gets the boys, who now number five, to tie their laces tight. ‘Okay, listen, boys. Dribbling's bloody important, all right? Especially for you two – Toby you listening? You're quick but not that big. If you learn to dribble, people won't be able to take the ball off ya. You'll be able to get anywhere on the court, get to the basket. Understand?'

‘Yeh.'

‘You need to master the ball, control it. I wanna see you pound it hard on the ground, like this. Keep your head up, too.' All five boys are staring at Solomon, trying to imitate his every move, magnetised, as he directs them.

‘That feels weird.'

‘You'll get used to it. Don't worry about fucking up, all right? That's gonna happen. One minute now – hard.' Toby begins to bounce the ball on the blacktop, concentrating. Solomon has a new gadget, a cylindrical set of speakers with Bluetooth. He puts it on and a Ta-ku beat thuds out. ‘Keep it up. It's all about rhythm, like music, like dancing.'

‘Dancing?' gasps Charlie, a chubby blond kid.

‘Don't knock dancing, mate. It'll help you learn balance.' Solomon toprocks niftily and strikes a pose. They all laugh breathlessly, still bouncing the ball.

‘You gotta keep calm. Keep your composure. In this world, there're plenty of people trying to get you angry. Make you lose it. Never give in to em.'

Scarlett takes out an artist pad and starts to sketch with a biro. The shapes of trees, backboard, powerlines, fence, children of various colours and sizes in different attitudes of exuberant movement, all begin to appear. Here Toby driving to his right, there Muhammad in mid-air with the ball just leaving his fingertips, in the bottom corner Charlie catching his breath with hands on hips; at the top a bird caught in a crosswind. Solomon at the centre, directing everything. With assured, gentle scrapes of the biro, slowly depth and shade and life appear on the paper.

Scarlett looks up. Solomon is next to her, smiling thoughtfully.

‘A pretty raggedy crew,' he says. ‘But maybe enough for a team.'

Even though the day is darkening now, he has shades on, and she looks away briefly before standing up. He's wearing a Chicago Bulls singlet and his skin is almost luminous with sweat. She runs her hands over his shoulders and kisses him quickly.

Some lads turn up and start shooting on the other net. They're loud and cocky, all donning Bryant and James and Griffin jerseys, shades and caps backwards. Solomon seems to know one of them from a long time ago and his demeanour changes. He continues talking to the kids in a low voice but his eyes keep returning to the men, as if sizing them up. One of them, clearly the leader, calls out. He's tall and muscular with a shaved head and a goatee, and by the way he moves appears to
have played at a high level. He has a scornful smile on his face. ‘Oi, Amosa. Wanna play with someone your own age? We need an extra player.'

Solomon's expression is hard to read. ‘Yeh. I'll have a game.' He turns to the boys. ‘Okay, you got some free time, lads. Practise lay-ups and shooting, just like I showed you. With both hands. Might seem boring, but I promise it'll be worth it; all right?' He looks like he is about to tousle Toby's hair, then seems to think better of it.

The game is physical from the get-go.

The man with the shaved head is guarding Solomon closely, reaching in, shoving him, hand in his face, setting hard screens. Solomon's brow darkens as he plays and he flicks the man's hand away with his left as he dribbles with his right.

‘Stop reaching, cunt. You'll get burned that way.' Solomon threads the ball through his legs easily.

‘
Psssh.
The only thing getting burned is your cock, playboy.'

‘Now, now. Envy's an ugly trait, mate. Pussies get no pussy.' Solomon is still sizing him up, facing right up to him, dribbling dizzyingly fast for a man of his size.

‘Ugly motherfucker,' the guy says. ‘Tana Umaga-looking motherfucker.'

‘You mean Sonny Bill, ay?' Solomon does a spin move and hits the guy hard in the chest, sending him bouncing back into position. Solomon head fakes but the guy is all over him.

‘Nah, cunt. You heard me. Fat cunt. Has-been.'

‘Better than a never-was, mate. Bank.' Solomon flicks a fadeaway up but it hits the front of the rim. Ugly. He looks up to see that the kids have stopped their drills and are watching.

‘Bitch, please. Let's see how that ankle works.' The man shimmies and shakes off Solomon, who grasps for his arm as he passes. ‘Cash. And one,' the man says, neatly scooping in an up-and-under. He runs backwards past Solomon, wagging his finger Dikembe Mutombo style. The angrier Solomon gets the worse he plays, well aware that Scarlett and the kids are watching. He can't seem to help himself. Eventually, after a light foul, he drops the ball and pushes the man
against the pole supporting the backboard, holding him by the throat. The man grins as his friends pull Solomon away. Solomon walks to the fence, spitting.

When he looks back, Scarlett is gone.

6

The men somehow manage to avoid each other, despite the confines.

Aleks has his back to the wall, reading a book called
The Secret.
He mouths each word as he reads, rolls them around his mouth like barley sugar, tasting them and thinking hard. He realises he already knows many of the words, but he can only read a page at a time before his head and eyes hurt. He hasn't read a book since early high school. Every now and again he catches Gabe watching him in the stainless-steel mirror as he washes his hands or stands up to get something out of the cupboard. The man has a regal bearing and Aleks is intrigued. Is it that he's never been so close to an African before? Is it the man's astonishing height or the numerous books he reads (in English). He thinks he can smell the man, and wonders if his black skin holds sweat in a different way. He's wondering whether he ought to talk to him when the lights go out.

An hour passes.

The man begins to makes a curious sound – not a snore, more a croak or a wheeze. It seems he's fallen asleep, but in the darkness Aleks can't be sure. His first instinct is violence, the rage that flows into the fists and explodes like dynamite on chin or cheekbone. He breathes slowly
and imagines three points of light, a triangle, on the century-old ceiling arched, above him. He stares at it and it pulses. After minutes, his wife's sleeping face resolves in the centre of it. She is in deep slumber, and he momentarily envies her. She is then replaced by his mother, sweeping the kitchen in the flat, her eyes giving the impression of someone who fears nothing but God: not fists, not death, not fear itself.

The triangle expands with each of Gabe's wheezes and croaks. Aleks feels a strange, cool breeze. Now there are shimmering shapes lighting up on the ceiling. Candles and crucifixes and, strangely, peacocks. He sees a boy walking over cobblestones, chasing the peacocks, then looking out over the whole of Lake Ohrid, the water and light from this height like shot silk. The boy walks into the dank rooms of St Naum Monastery, carefully placing votive candles in a sandbox at the entrance. The boy is him, aged fifteen, when he first returned to Macedonia. He is looking around at the frescoes of an ancient room, saints and scenes from the Bible. The air is damp and cool, the skinny candles throwing irregular patterns on the brickwork. He can smell the water flowing somewhere beneath, or over, old stone.

Gabe coughs and the triangle disappears.

In the darkness, Aleks' mind again turns to violence, how he would like to make the guy shut the fuck up. Instead he focuses on the thought of the room and its wet, ancient smell, and how it reminds him of God. Peacocks and candles and God's mystifying deliberations. What was his place among it all? What part played by God or the Devil?

He wonders if his life would turn around if he moved back to his homeland. He often hears Macos saying they want to, but they rarely do. Australia has never taken him seriously, though he has tried to fit in. He remembers, at school, a teacher telling him how lucky he was to be here, how violent and animalistic the Balkans must have been. He had stayed quiet then, but he now knew that Australia was the scene of great crimes. Make a nick in the corner of the country, peel back the facade like possum skin, and the truth beneath would be hideous.

When he finally does sleep, he sees the monastery's inner sanctum again, but this time the fresco is made flesh. Women are lamenting and
pulling at their hair, angels are weeping, and a single face is speaking. Aleks can't hear a word the face is saying, only a resonant singing, as if from deep within a mountain or a lake.

Flakes of gold paint are falling from the face of a saint, falling on him like sunlight.

‘When did that shit get to Oz, anyway? Fucken tidal wave.'

‘World War II, bro. The Japs used to be high on the shit.
Shabu,
they called it. Kept em rampaging. Every army done that shit, throughout the ages. Nazis had amphetamines, too.'

‘Nah, nah, it was the gay bars. Early nineties, mate. The faggots used it first for parties, then it got into other clubs.'

A semicircle of ten men, all white, most of them smoking. Aleks is in the Aussie yard. There's the Islander yard, the Aboriginal yard, the Lebanese yard, the Asian yard, the Terrorist yard and the Boneyard for people who need protection: dogs, rapists and informants. The heat waves unspool in great ripples, and through it the inmates walk in lines with the jerky movements of marionettes. High winds today. Aleks feels as if he is in a dream within a dream, marooned somehow in a place as lonely and desperate as a space station.

‘It's our version of crack. Three generations hooked on the fucken shit. Dirty as,' says Clint, an old crook Aleks knows from the outside.

‘Don't knock it till you tried it.'

‘Sucking a glass dick? Fuck no.'

‘Remember when it first come out? Big bags of shard-like diamonds.'

Aleks has another story. ‘They call ice
kamche
in the Town. Rock, little pebble. That meant Macos first brought it here.'

‘Nah, nah, no way!'

Another voice cuts in, and everyone goes silent, even Aleks. ‘If some cunt is dumb enough to buy it, then I'm gonna be smart enough to sell it. This is Australia, mate. Race or get erased.'

Torture Terry is a redhead with a square jaw and a loose bottom lip.
A Queenslander, he slowly drifted down the coast making a piecemeal existence from armed robbery. But since getting inside, Terry has become infamous for the rape of new inmates. ‘I do it till they start liking it, mate – then I get a new one,' he had whispered to Aleks early on. He knows the justice system inside out – sly enough to slip out of a few years here and there, but way too far gone to ever go straight. Mostly his tatts are homemade, probably done at a young age with a protractor and Bic ink, but on his wrist he has a delicate tattoo of a swallow in flight, the only beautiful thing about him. When asked about it, he is rumoured to point at the swallow and say, ‘This is what I make em do.'

Aleks looks at his knees, scratches his throat then looks back at Terry. For all intents and purposes, this animal is considered his equal: same uniform, same yard, same company. Aleks feels ashamed. To people outside they were both to be demonised; or, even worse, pitied. Aleks wonders why Terry isn't in the Boneyard or why nobody has put a hit on him. Then again, death is almost too good for this animal.

Terry is now holding court. ‘It's the fucken Asians, mate. They're the ones bringing it in. Ruining our country with drugs and whores. They take our jobs, too, mate. And they don't even speak English.'

Some of the men nod. Aleks speaks jovially. ‘Oh, yeh. Suppose you got a degree in medicine, ay? They took that day job you had working in an office too, did they?'

The men laugh nervously.

‘But this is my country, mate,' says Terry, smiling with lightless eyes.

‘Oh, yeh. You a Mabo, are ya?' Aleks is still smiling, too, but the tension is palpable.

‘Fuck that! Look, I grew here, they flew here.' For a tiny moment, every man is perfectly still, like statues or pieces on a chessboard, waiting for some divine revelation, when suddenly Clint nudges Aleks, breaking the tension.

‘Hey, I got something to talk to you about, mate. Business opportunity.' He offers Aleks a ciggie and jerks his head.

Aleks takes the ciggie and turns with Clint. They walk away and fall
in step with the river of pacing men who are all discussing crime: how they got caught, how they might succeed next time.

‘Bloody Terry,' says Clint. ‘Don't worry about him. Always carrying on like a half-sucked cock.' Aleks laughs. He's surprised to see Clint inside. The odd jobs they had done together were simple, a bit of cash on the side.

The sky is inescapable and there's smoke on the wind, most likely from a bushfire somewhere. Aleks remembers a story Ulysses Amosa had told him when he was a child.

In the story, a beautiful woman is about to be burned at the stake for murdering a baby. Just as the flames are about to close around her, she sends a message to her brother far, far away, who sends spirits in the form of bats to flap out the flames with their wings. When the astonished villagers see her alive, standing untouched among the cinders, she says to them, ‘We meet on the crossroads of life.' Aleks finds himself saying these words to Clint, who looks at him strangely. They smoke and pace.

‘So. How you going for cash, mate?' asks Clint.

‘All right. Businessman like me always has a Plan B.' Aleks grins but he's lying. He had paid his lawyer ten thousand dollars straight off the bat and might have to pay another ten grand soon. He left Sonya a few grand in their bank account but it won't last long. What if he gets more time? Plans need to be made. His family would help her, of course, but they didn't have all that much either. Then there was the mortgage to worry about. If his trial went badly and he had to go back inside, the whole bloody thing would fall to pieces.

He feels a pang, wishing that Sonya could get up out of bed and work. She's a smart one with a medical science degree. He once knew a man hooked on Xanax who thought the government had turned his eyeball into a video camera. The man stared at the sun for three hours to try to burn out the retina.

‘Well, never hurts to have a bit more cash,' says Clint. ‘And this is a good one, like the old days.'

They laugh. They're both thinking of the same scam, something they'd done a few times. They would sit on a hill thirty kilometres from
the City and watch the bushland. If they saw a car go down a certain road, then switch its lights of halfway, they knew it was where a weed plantation was being watered. They'd wait an hour for the car to leave, and then hit it. Easy money, especially if you make the weed a bit heavier. One occasion, as they had gathered the weed, Aleks had seen an old kangaroo bone on the ground, a perfectly clean femur with a big ball on the end. It glowed white in the moonlight. Aleks had picked it up and surreptitiously slipped it through his fly and told Clint to look over. He then tipped the enormous, moonlit appendage up through the zipper and Clint's look had been one of sheer horror.

‘Anyway, just think about it. Not much risk. Just money. Get ya back on ya feet once you get out,' says Clint.

‘Yeh, or put me back in here.'