Here Come the Dogs (16 page)

12

Basketball playlist

Gang Starr – ‘Full Clip'

Nas – ‘Nas is Like'

Kanye West feat. Lupe Fiasco – ‘Touch the Sky'

Cam'ron – ‘Hey Ma'

Jurassic 5 – ‘What's Golden?'

J. Cole – ‘Workout'

Verbaleyes and Mute – ‘Lingua Franca'

Jay-Z – ‘Roc Boys'

The Tongue – ‘The Show'

Talib Kweli – ‘Get By'

Home Brew Crew – ‘Basketball Court'

Method Man and Redman – ‘The Rockwilder'

The Roots – ‘Get Busy'

Outkast – ‘So Fresh, So Clean'

Mos Def – ‘Mathematics'

L-Fresh the Lion – ‘One'

Muhammad's dad

A convivial Indian-Fijian shop owner

He seems to like what he sees on the court,

‘That one. A bad influence, I think. His parents.' He twirls a finger

around his temple then mimes drinking.

‘Yeah, I heard. Just needs a push in the right direction, Mr Khan.

Basketball's good for him.'

He nods,

sizing me up,

‘Get the kids some stuff they need.'

Shopping night

At the sport's store,

‘You all right?' I call out.

‘That's way too fucken small for you,' says Jimmy.

‘It's not for me, numbnuts. It's for a kid.'

‘Huh? What kid?'

‘A kid I'm teaching to play ball.'

Jimmy looks taken aback,

‘You didn't tell me about this. Watch out, bra. You might get put on

one of them lists.'

‘Shut up.'

‘Expensive present. Buy me one.'

I ignore him and go in search of sports cones.

Jimmy stares.

I pay for the jersey with my own money,

the other stuff with Mr Khan's.

I sniff the jersey on the way out

and almost wish I bought it for myself.

Fresh gear always makes you play better.

It's like Reebok Pumps –

Drinks

An outdoor bar with a Mexican theme.

Some boys I used to play ball with

are talking about Aussies in the NBA.

They're all clean cut,

‘Mate, we've got a fucken awesome national team. Bogut, Dellavedova,

Baynes. Patty Mills is crushing it, too.'

‘Yair, heard of this new guy Dante Exum? He declared for the NBA

draft and everything. Jarryd Hooper's going well at college, too.'

I feel a pang at the mention of Jarryd's name.

Then I notice Jimmy,

on the margin of conversation.

I know what's on his mind –

Then he'll think about his dad.

Every small failure in Jimmy's life

is magnified by his paranoid brain;

a massive ugly picture

Beige

At first,

Jimmy told the kids in high school

he was half-Samoan.

But one day at the interchange,

After that,

everybody began to call him ‘Beige'.

Beige Beige Beige

Jimmy was jealous of the fair-skinned Koori kids,

so proud of their culture.

Seems fucked up now,

but I loved to torture him –

ignore him at the bus interchange,

see how far I could push it,

how the smallest jibe would affect him

Hiding my own shame

at not being Samoan enough.

And Jimmy would take it

until he found hip hop . . .

and that other stuff.

I wish I could rewind it all.

Sonya

He's still got a good heart, though.

He's worried that Sonya might not be going so well,

with her health,

‘Reckon we should help somehow?'

‘Yeah, maybe. Not sure how. It's a bit awkward, don't ya reckon? Aleks

would hate that.'

‘Yer.'

As Jimmy keeps talking,

my mind drifts to the court

and my team:

Amosa's All-Stars!

Toby's first present

Toby can't seem to believe it.

He holds the jersey to his nose

and closes his eyes as he breathes in the scent,

just like I did.

Then he tears his T-shirt off

He shines on the court,

still a little clumsy,

but with gunpowder in his step now.

His jump shot like a heatseeker —

Muhammad stops acting cocky for a moment

Some Sudanese kids have turned up,

one who's nearly six-foot-three tall

Diamond in the rough,

mad potential to be a good centre.

I set up the cones

and I'm running drills with em

and finish with a proper five-on-five game.

I make sure to play music the whole time.

Most of kids are into Kerser,

but I play older shit

Each one, teach one, ay?

The point of it all

Every point

a toe, heel or ball touches,

is a point on a map.

When the kids leave

I put on my favourite album,

‘A Long Hot Summer' by Masta Ace.

Something melancholy but resilient

about the rhymes and the chopped samples.

I dribble to the beats,

and for a moment it feels

as if my muscles and bone have sheared off

and I am one with the wind,    the music.

I think about Aleks again

He'll feel betrayed

that I haven't visited him.

Sometimes I think his presence

is rupture to the music,

that negativity only breeds more of the same.

Shared history, though –

you can't just let it off

The ethereal synths of ‘Beautiful'

come on.

I tilt my head,

sniff the air –

the dusty, sherbet sky enters my nostrils,

my mouth, ears, skin.

A sign of rain?

I square up to the hoop,

jump straight up,

Swish.

13

High winds and willy willies.

Summer marches through the trees, a giant headhunter, taking off skulls. Jimmy has drawn the blinds against it. He's chopping weed in a bowl, watching Mercury as he sleeps. The room is dark but for an intermittent red light blink-blink blink-blinking from a computer screen. He lays the sticky scissors down, carefully rolls a joint on his knees and holds it up as one might an ancient conical shell found on a beach.

His eyes grow red as the orchids of smoke sink upwards and pancake on the ceiling.

He imagines optical fibre connecting him and the dog. It is taut, glowing, perfectly straight like a laser. He now tries to send shapes down the fibre with his mind – bones, balls, love hearts, race tracks, rabbits. As the smoke turns and uncoils, he stares, and images pulse down the invisible filament, growing bigger and bigger until they envelope the dog's sleeping head and soak into it.

After half an hour, the dog opens its eye and raises its head. They stare at each other.

Hello, little dog. Hello, my friend,
Jimmy says in his mind.

The dog raises its head further, nose up, sniffing the air. It doesn't open its mouth, but the reply comes. ‘Hello, Jimmy. Hello, Jimmy, my master.'

Jimmy goes for a walk to get food and Mercury trots at his side, the points of its hipbones visible behind the skinny waist. An old bloke yells from across the street, ‘Give him the chilli finger, mate! He'll run faster.' Jimmy whispers to the dog, ‘Ignore him, Mercury.'

The air is dense and smokey. At the foot of a telephone pole, Jimmy sees a dead yellow-crested cockatoo. He hunkers down and stares at it for a full minute – its outstretched wings, its open beak, claws, eyes swirling with ants, feathers a subtle grade of yellow and white. Its fellow birds, arranged evenly on the powerlines, look down in silent vigil like worshippers on a pew.

The dead bird is huge, as long as his forearm, and has already begun to stink. He resists the urge to pick it up and weigh it in his arms. He tries to send it messages and shapes with his mind, but the filament is frayed halfway and the shapes dissipate in the air. He peers down the street and can see the red sun setting across the wild ridge that borders the edge of town.

That night he sketches the cockatoo in his torn blackbook. Its wings are spread, about to land on the powerlines. Behind it he imagines a fierce blue sky. MTN 94 Azure maybe? Aspen white and Pineapple Park yellow? He sits back and admires his work. He'll get Aleks to paint it when he gets out.

He goes back the next day to see the dead cockatoo. There are now ten of them. All of them are strangely flattened, two-dimensional. Jimmy assumes it's a combination of ants and the heat that has eaten them from the inside and collapsed them. He sits for a long time, looking at them.
Hello, birds,
he thinks.
Hello, little birds, my friends.

No reply.

Trudging back to towards home, he passes the fire station, where trucks are polished to a high red, and the orange and silver firefighting gear is bunched on the wall. He walks inside and begins to touch it,
running both hands over a helmet like a phrenologist. He then takes out a marker and tags up the side of the truck. He has only done several letters when he hears a man's voice and Jimmy goes running.

The next day, the dead cockatoos are all gone.

14

‘Mr Crawford, I'm a volunteer fireman.'

‘Good for you, mate.'

‘Mr Crawford, err, our job has got harder over the last few years. I personally believe climate change has something to do with it. Surely this current spate of bushfires is as much the fault of climate change as firebugs. I mean, the fires started in early spring, six weeks out from summer. What do you say to that?'

‘I thank you for your question and applaud your good work. But let's be real about climate change. This hysteria about its authenticity has been largely manufactured. This is an economic question, not an environmental one. Fires have been a part of the Australian landscape from time immemorial.'

15

Solomon is trying on clothes and jewellery in Scarlett's room. He already has several sets of clothes there, neatly folded in the corner. There's a look of stress in his eyes as he meticulously tries on different combos. Scarlett goes to say something but instead lets the cool air from a cheap fan run over her. She checks Facebook and stares at the endless parade of social media: friends back home offering opinions about Teina Pora, something about a missing plane and Jimmy, as usual, posting graff pics and photos of the dog. She puts on the Hermitude album ‘Hyperparadise' and, as the chunky beats bump, she starts to sketch. Solomon eventually decides on a black-and-white checkered shirt, dark jeans and a pair of cool grey, black and infrared Jordans.

When they get to the City, they walk hand in hand past the merry-go-round, past the restaurants with ironic menus and pink lemonade in jam jars, past the bus interchange and straight to the noodle house. Scarlett's surprised when Solomon ushers her towards a table where a woman is already sitting. She's half lit, middle-aged, her profile leonine. She turns and her dark-brown eyes rest on Scarlett's teardrop tattoo. Then she smiles broadly, shaking Scarlett's hand and patting it with the other.

‘You must be Scarlett. I'm Grace – Solomon's mum. So lovely to finally meet you. Solomona hasn't stopped going on about you,' she says.

Solomon looks down and smooths the front of his shirt.

‘And here I was thinking he took all this time to get ready for me. I knew it – such a mama's boy,' says Scarlett.

Solomon's nervous, as if sharing a secret. He had mentioned in passing that he'd never introduced Georgie to his mother. The waiter comes over and he and Grace are soon engaged in banter about whether laksa is still Australia's Asian noodle soup of choice, or pho. ‘That is not the question,' he says with a wink, ‘the question is whether laksa is still Australia's
national dish
or not.'

Solomon squeezes Scarlett's hand under the table.

‘So how's Aleks?' says Grace.

‘Who's that?' says Scarlett.

Grace looks horrified. ‘Aleks is Solomon's best mate. Shame on you Solomona.' She turns back to Scarlett and shares the gossip in a stage whisper. ‘Aleks is in jail. He's having a rough trot. This one hasn't even visited him yet.'

Solomon coughs into his fist. ‘I need a ciggie. Order me the duck laksa, okay?'

He leaves and they can see him pacing on the street, blowing smoke out hurriedly. Grace shakes her head. ‘Samoan men. Useless with their emotions. It was difficult for me to understand as a
palagi,
until I realised there are some things that we're not meant to understand. What do you see in that boy, anyway?'

‘Dunno.' Scarlett looks at him bunching his dreds up and says, ‘Actually, he looks just like my ex boyfriend. First thing I noticed about him.' She puts a hand to her mouth, seemingly horrified, but Grace nods.

‘I know what you mean. After Ulysses passed, I kept dating men who looked just like him. No one was the same, though. Are you still in touch with your ex?'

Scarlett shakes her head and looks away. ‘So. Aleks.'

‘Aleks is a good boy, a real sweetheart, in a way. A bit of a contradiction, really. Used to cop it hard as a kid. But every morning,
he'd be up the stairs to our place, poking his moonface around the door. He'd help me with washing, with shopping. He used to say, “It's better to conduct business on an empty stomach – it makes a businessman work harder.”' They laugh. ‘I'd give him a two-dollar coin, and say he'd make a fine businessman once day. Now look. Him, those sons of mine . . .' She looks despondent, then brightens. ‘Maybe you can help Solomona a bit.'

Scarlett shakes her head. ‘I'm not his saviour, Grace. I'm not his —' She cuts herself short, again realising she may have put her foot in it. This time, Grace looks slightly offended and sips her laksa in silence. Solomon returns.

‘Hope you haven't been talking about me.'

Before they know it, it's nighttime. Grace politely declines drinks and leaves. Fairy lights are strung through the centre of town like neon kelp. Scarlett and Solomon end up at a steamy salsa club, surrounded by Latin Americans doing complicated, sensuous dance moves. Neither of them knows the music, but they start to dance. At first she leans away from the synthetic edge of his cologne; as they move, she can smell his sweat beneath it, and sees his mask falling away, just briefly, his eyes open and dark; then he seems to catch himself and the reserve builds up, then the charm.

She invites him back anyway.

‘This isn't a porno, Solomon.'

‘But last time —'

‘That's what I wanted then. But not now. Slow down,' she whispers into his shoulder.

Music plays softly, Dwele and J Dilla's ‘Dime Piece'. They kiss each other's scars as they make love, seeking them out in the dark, by touch.
There's usually a stillness in his eyes, an unwavering knowingness, but tonight he's trembling all over, almost shuddering, and his eyes are needy and warm-blooded, terrified and terrifying.

They lie breathing and the biro sketches flap on the wall. He looks to the side and sees that she has packets of medication beneath a desk lamp. He is going to ask her about them, when she says, ‘So what do you think you'll do with this basketball thing?'

‘Dunno yet.'

‘You've never applied yourself to anything, have you?' she says tentatively.

He's thoughtful. ‘Nah. Not for a long time.'

‘You can't carry on with all that macho bullshit if you're gonna be teaching kids, Solomon.'

‘I know. I know.' He sucks in a breath. ‘It's just frustrating. The injury —'

‘That's in the past.'

He rolls over and faces her. ‘Yeh . . . I guess it's not just the injury. It was this huge kind of . . . feeling of betrayal. It's stupid. I felt like Dad betrayed me, by dying, then Mum stopped sending the money back to Dad's village after he died. And then shame at feeling all that. At my body. But this team. It's a chance to be proud again, maybe.'

‘It is.' She laces her little finger in his. ‘Maybe you can get funding for it? Shouldn't be so hard. A local business could sponsor the jerseys.'

‘Now you're thinking.' He reaches over and holds up a DVD. ‘I could never get into this. Kinda boring.'

‘You don't like
The Wire
? Shit, boy. You coulda been the one.'

They smile.