Here Come the Dogs (4 page)

Aleks and Solomon order chicken schnitties and mash with schooners of draft and sit inside to escape the sun. The pub had once been a notorious, sweat-reeking, liquor-soaked bloodhouse. There had even been several murders in the rooms above it. However, it had recently been renovated by a local entrepreneur and was now clean and airy, lavender scented and surprisingly, full of people. Solomon is suddenly sullen, but Aleks makes no comment, used to his shifting moods, from charismatic to brooding to street to booksmart. It is something women find mysterious and attractive, Jimmy finds endlessly annoying and contrived, and Aleks ignores. Solomon keeps looking around at the trendy decor, paintings on the wall and trim barstaff and eventually mutters, ‘It's a fucken disgrace, man. I swear to God.'

‘
Tsk
. It was a shithole, brother. It's a lot nicer now.'

‘Should've left it how it was.'

Solomon, adamant that hip hop should change and progress, is equally adamant that the Town is changing too fast, losing its working-class identity, becoming yuppified. This is his town and repository of his life's story. Aleks looks at him and thinks:
everything in the world exists with its death alive in it.
Every fire dies, every story, every star, every town. Every nation? Childhoods are macadamed beneath asphalt and paint rolls, but just for other childhoods to exist. This, the nature of change, of modernity. Buildings go up, dreamings wander in search of graves or new owners; some remnant will stir occasionally, but these buildings will one day turn to dust and float through the bushland like ghosts. Eventually, the bush would die, too.

And besides, it's not like Solomon contributes anything – at twenty-seven lazing around with a half-arsed dishwashing job, still living at his mum's place, monkey-swinging from woman to woman, feeling sorry for
himself about an injury he had almost ten years ago.
Nah, there is dignity in hard work.

Solomon cheers up after a second beer and starts telling Aleks about a perfect spot for a mission, a fuel depot on the edge of town where a piece would be seen by everyone leaving for the City in early morning traffic. Aleks is mopping up some mash and gravy with a piece of bread, nodding. He knows the spot.

When he gets back to the apartment block, the kid is working at a furious pace, painting meticulously. Must've done a good apprenticeship. If you're taught to paint badly in the first place, you'll go thirty years painting like shit. Aleks is glad he didn't take the kid with him to lunch – Solomon has complete disdain for bogans.

It is now Freddie Gibbs' deep voice booming from the radio with fuck the woooorld attitude. Aleks paints with the bassline reverberating deep within him, completely calm. They are both in a zone. Before he knows it, they're finished for the day. He switches his phone back on and gets another text from the unknown number.
Done. Seeya then.

He picks up Mila from school, takes her to ballet practice and waits outside in the Hilux, drawing in his blackbook. An hour passes, then fifteen minutes more. It has become dark. Getting tired of waiting, he gets out of the Hilux. He spies the bag in the back of the truck, among the tins of paint. The street is empty, but for an owl that swoops down onto a fence, its eyes two yellow phosphors. He is about to reach for the bag when he hears a voice.

It's another parent, a bloke Aleks calls Mr Chuckles because he can't remember his real name. The man is a lawyer and speaks with a patrician's briskness, giving off the impression of a civilised man marooned among savages, a benevolent dictator. Aleks smiles, remembering that the man is a renowned lawyer, an unscrupulous but aggressive tiger on the court circuit, and you never know when someone like that might come in handy.

He excuses himself and goes in search of his daughter. He opens the door into the mirrored light of the dance studio and sees her and ten other girls lined up, twirling around and around with varying degrees
of skill. She sees him in the mirror, and smiles at him, open-faced, then twirls again, but trips and falls onto the ground. He laughs, eyes glittering. When she's finished, he takes her sweetly by the chin, kisses her on the cheek, then hoists her onto his shoulders and carries her out.

When he gets home, his wife is just waking up.

3

Pure bogan, this one. Trying to act all classy. Look atter, ay.

Against an enormous map of the world, the woman pouts, all blonde hair and bleached teeth. Jimmy examines her nose keenly. Pinched, upturned. Unconsciously, he touches his own hawkish nose, then runs a hand over his ponytail. Here, in the City, it's public servant land, where people get paid big bucks for doing fuck all, where a sign pointing to a national institution can be found next to a sign for plastic surgery. The vain and the bored. Jimmy should know. He's worked in a call centre in the public service ever since high school and he sees it every day. The more money earned, the more capacity to trade insecurities for even more illusions. The buildings reflect it, too – trendy new bars and coffee shops striving to mimic the styles of Melbourne but falling just short. They should chuck a nuke into the whole place.

‘Nice scarf.' He smiles. ‘Where's it from?'

She touches the blue silk protectively and doesn't smile back. ‘I'm not sure. Um . . . Milan,' she decides.

‘So how does the trip go again?' Jimmy puts on his work voice, clipped and professional.

She sighs. ‘Okay, like I said
last week,
you'll fly into LAX. Then to
JFK. Then back to LAX. Then Apia, Samoa. Then back here.'

‘Great.'

‘You wanna put down a deposit this time?' The corner of her mouth twitches.

‘Yep, yep, just ah, gotta make a call to my bank.'

She sighs again. This is a game they play at least once a week. Jimmy stares at the map of the world, focusing on the blue span of the Pacific, the neat lines delineating territories, and he can just make out the name: Samoa. Samoa – such an awesome ring to it. He remembers his stepfather's descriptions of the wind singing off the sea, alive with guitar music and salt and smoke, of the laughter of families bouncing in the flatbed of trucks, of the sun setting on the western tip of Savai'i, leaving a blood-red trail on the sea. ‘God created those islands especially for the people of Samoa, James.'

One day, soon, Jimmy was gonna go there. If his lazycunt brother wasn't gonna get off his arse and do it, to pay homage to his own dad, then Jimmy would do it. Hit the sandy roads in search of a village called Fagamalo. Or maybe even seek out that real father of his and find some answers. Steady now. All he has to do is work and wait. In the meantime, it's fun to imagine he's about to escape this shithole once and for all, and to talk to the hot travel agent bitch. There's fuck-all other customers, and she's bored as, like everyone else, so she plays the game for shits and giggles. Jimmy wonders if his breath is stale from the morning shift at the call centre. He sees a wisp of hair dislodge from her tight blonde bun. Her name tag says Hailee.

‘Hey . . . you into cars at all?' he asks.

‘Yeah, I guess,' she says uncertainly, as if he's asking a trick question. ‘Why?'

‘Check this out.' He finds a picture on his phone and hands it to her. It is a 1967 Dodge Coronet, fire-engine red, white interior. His stepfather loved that car – it was one of the few material things Jimmy ever saw him covet. ‘I'm gonna buy it soon.'

She looks at it warily. ‘Sure . . . I mean, really?'

‘Yep, just saving up.'

She tilts it back and forward, as if it were a hologram. ‘Looks good. I prefer sports cars, though. My ex-boyfriend had a Corvette.'

His stomach lurches, but, thinking of what Solomon would do, Jimmy nods calmly and smiles. ‘Ah, you'd change your mind if you saw it in person.'

She smiles back, for the first time. ‘Maybe. Anything's possible, I guess.'

He brightens, then says spontaneously. ‘Hey . . . when d'you get off work?'

‘Why?'

‘Just wondering.'

‘Five.'

‘Wanna grab a drink sometime?'

‘With you?'

‘Ah . . . Yeh.'

‘No. I've got a boyfriend.' She smiles, relishing it.

‘Oh righto . . . just asking.' His voice falls into its normal cadence, rising at the end of the sentence. ‘Um, I better get going, ay.'

‘No worries. Say hi to Solomon for me.'

Solomon? What the fuck?

She looks at him, still smiling, but her eyes are impenetrable, looking just past his shoulder. What the fuck is she thinking? Maybe he doesn't want to know. He looks away, then back with hatred. He wants to grab her face and make her look right at him, magically change her opinion of him somehow,
make
her see him in a fresh light.

She looks puzzled then a little bit scared, and says, ‘We'll arrange those tickets for you soon, James.'

Jimmy tries to steady his breathing as he leaves. Walking to the bus interchange, he counts numbers in his head, from ten to one, breathing slowly. Then he repeats the Bruce Willis line from
Pulp Fiction
– ‘They keep underestimating you, Butch.'

They keep underestimating you, Jimmy.

Seven bucks twenty for a half-hour bus ride over the state border. Fucken extortion. One buck, two bucks, three bucks, four. One buck, two bucks, three bucks, more.

‘There you go, mate,' he says. The bus driver grunts and takes the shrappers. This same bloke has given the boys shit since they were eight years old and looks exactly the same – aviator shades, spade-shaped beard. He tears off the ticket and slaps it in Jimmy's palm without a word. There can't be a group of people in society as cuntish as bus drivers. Parking inspectors maybe.

‘Yeh, you're welcome, ya fucken thief,' Jimmy mumbles.

‘What's that, mate?'

‘Have a good day, buddy,' Jimmy says brightly.

The man growls and the engine growls louder. Jimmy sits down a few seats in front of two loud bogans, who are wasted at two p.m., slurping on longies. One of them says ‘right?' at the end of every sentence and pronounces it ‘rawt'. Jimmy thinks he used to work with one of them at the fried chicken shop.

The bus has air con, thank fuck, the cool air edged with cigarettes and body odour. It dries his temple sweat. On the back of the seat in front of him love memorandums and Aboriginal flags are scratched into the metal. In Wite-Out someone has scrawled a picture of a man aiming a gun at a woman with huge tits. Then he realises the barrel of the gun is a cock, veins and all, and the balls are grenades.

He starts to scratch it off with his thumb. As he does so, he looks out the window and sees Solomon's girlfriend Georgie handing out flyers, wearing a headwrap. Georgie is a bit of a pain in the arse, going on about women's rights and refugees all the time; but Jimmy doesn't mind her, unlike Aleks. Jimmy remembers her once saying, ‘I never go out with white guys. It's so boring – Australia just doesn't have any
culture
.' She's from a well-to-do farming family from western New South Wales and it's obvious to everyone (Solomon included) that Georgie is just slumming it with Solomon, having her fling with a big Islander bloke before she settles with some white cunt with a dog and a law degree. Jimmy thinks of the word white and wonders . . .

Maybe if he got a hot girlfriend, it'd prove to everyone that he's not a shit cunt. But how to make it happen? Chicks like cars, don't they? The travel agent was just playing hard to get, surely –
a bit of persistence would pay off. What was it Solomon always said? ‘Boyfriends are just details.' Jimmy knows he's none of the things his half-brother is: brawny or charismatic. But he knows he's resourceful. And determined as fuck.

The bogans are getting louder. Jimmy can smell alcohol vapours from his seat, even though his back is turned.

‘Johnno sold his Holden, rawt. Got a pretty decent price too,
ae
. Now he has wunna them Chink cars, rawt.'

Despite himself, Jimmy turns around sharply to look at them. Feral cunts in uniform: wifebeaters, flat brim caps, neck-tatts, shaggy peroxide hair. Yeh, it's deffo him. Damo Cudgell. Cruel fucker used to run trains on drunk footy chicks with his boys, piss on them and ditch them unconscious in parking lots.

‘Chink car?' Jimmy says.

‘Yer mate. What about it?' Damo can't believe his luck.

Jimmy knows he shoulda kept his mouth shut but he continues regardless. ‘Dunno. Not the type of word you should be slinging around, y'know? Not the type of word some people appreciate, y'know?'

Damo kisses his teeth and looks at his mate. ‘Ha. Well I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, rawt? No offence if you are one though,
ae
. A Chink that is.' He's staring hard at Jimmy, obviously trying to figure out what he is. He brings up two empty longneck bottles and clinks them together. His mate raises his eyebrows. ‘Chink, Chink, Chink,' they say in unison.

Jimmy turns back around. The bus driver is staring in his mirror. He's seen it all but says nothing. He looks real tired and for the first time Jimmy feels sorry for him, ferrying losers and lost souls

from one shithole to another

Jimmy puts on his headphones and turns the music up loud, Ice Cube's voice drowning out the bogans' nasal voices.

He tries to stay alert, recognising the trouble he has called on himself, but the music and the tiredness from his early shift suspend him in a hazy limbo. He watches the dry world spool by.

       Paddock – pub – skatepark – construction site – park – funeral parlour – motel – flatblock – pub.

A lot of the new buildings going up are freshly painted, completely clean, ready to be bombed with paint. He begins to imagine a new piece. A fire-red Dodge, on a tropical beach. Palm trees, blue sky. But something is missing. That's it. A gorgeous blonde, like the travel agent, sitting on the bonnet. He's never been good at painting faces, unlike Aleks, who seems to always get the proportions right. He's about to take out his blackbook and do a sketch when the bogans' nasal voices pierce his headphones.

‘Faggot, faggot, faggot,' they are saying.

Always on public transport.

He closes his eyes. He imagines locking the bogans in the bus, setting it on fire and watching them run up and down the aisle, screaming like banshees – hair, clothes, skin on fire. He turns up his headphones and keeps scratching away at the Wite-Out. He looks at his bird-boned wrists and hands. He wishes he were stronger.

He wishes he were Solomon or Aleks.

When he gets off the bus he still has a fifteen-minute walk home. As he walks, he shades his eyes, cursing himself for leaving his cap at work. The sky is a gradient of white to blue, with clouds like lonely skiffs adrift, high above the heat haze. He passes a basketball court where Solomon used to play with the older kids, its chain-link fence strangely curved at the bottom to accommodate generations of arses sitting against it. There was always a strange crosswind above the court that trapped birds, sometimes for minutes at a time, before sending them flapping and tumbling away. He crosses the court and sees a fire truck next to a small patch of smoking grass. Two firefighters are drinking from water bottles, their faces sweaty.

‘Close call, ay boys?' calls Jimmy, looking at the charred ground.

‘Bloody oath. Can't be too careful this time of the year. Bunch of idiots running around,' one replies.

‘Too right. You reckon it was kids?'

‘Probably.'

‘Keep up the good work, boys.'

‘Cheers, mate.'

Jimmy's house is a duplex made of light-coloured bricks. There is a single shrub in the front yard of dark red scoria. He lives alone. Once inside, he breathes in the scent of air freshener. There's a mounted Sin One record on the wall, from the early days, when Sin supposedly still lived with his heroin-addicted auntie. It is a standard hip hop cover, with Sin One crouched against a graffiti wall, hiding his nearly seven-foot frame. His famous green eyes ablaze. Why is it that mixed-blood Aboriginal people get the most hectic green eyes?

Jimmy looks around. Everything is perfectly in order, but he quickly wipes down the kitchen bench anyway. He has a long glass of water, which soothes the headache tolling in his temples.

The internet is one of his favourite sanctuaries – a rabbit warren of adventure. Once he has logged in to YouTube, he begins trolling well-known rappers and hip hop fans using anonymous names (he has five different fake email accounts). He does it methodically and kicks off three big arguments in a row on Facebook, the updates popping up every few seconds. His day is made when he gets an impassioned reaction from 360 himself.

The heat is a sedative. He puts on some porn and tries to have a wank, but can't get his dick hard, so he falls asleep fully clothed.

When he wakes up it's dark and he tries to wank again, but still no luck. What would he say if he ever met a real pornstar, like Kayden Kross or Jenna Jameson? Not much probably, but he reckons if they got to know him they'd like him. He's never been with a blonde girl; in fact, he's only ever been with two girls, even though he tells the lads different. One was Filo, the other was white, a redhead. Jimmy thinks of being lost in pussy, a pink-peach swirl of it, clits and tits and platinum hair.
Seriously, but. Who needs real women when you have porn, ay? Far less trouble, same result in the end.

He clicks the light on and reaches under the bed to lift out a heavy shoebox. It once held a pair of Air Max, but now it holds nothing but two-dollar coins, layer upon layer. He adds another ten coins. He's been saving twenty dollars a week for nearly four years, converting notes into two-dollars coins at a nearby laundry. The Korean lady at first gave him hell because he never washed his clothes there, but now accepts it with a shrug.

This box is how he is gonna buy the Dodge.

It represents so much energy expended, so many calls received from ungrateful motherfuckers. It is the future, the road that will lead him out of this yawn factory. Of course, the box is just a fraction of the money, the tip of the iceberg. He's not a dumb cunt. Most of it is in the bank, but Jimmy likes looking at the coins in the box, like a square of dragon hide. He's never told anyone about it, not even the boys. And he's close. He's gonna buy the car outright, call up the bloke in Sydney who sells them and wire the money straight through – no loans, no deposits. Just hard work. Unlike Solomon. Unlike his father.