Rage was coming off Lyle like a bad cologne. Our room was the safest place to be, our cramped sanctuary decorated by a single long-faded McDonald’s promotional poster showing team photos from the 1982–83 Benson & Hedges World Series Cup one-day cricket competition between Australia, England and New Zealand, with a special cock and balls ink tribute August has added to the forehead of David Gower in the front row for the Poms. We didn’t get dinner. We didn’t get a single word, so we just went to bed.
‘Fuck this, I’m gettin’ somethin’ to eat,’ I say a couple of hours later.
I tiptoe down the hall in darkness, into the kitchen. Open the fridge, a corridor of light filling the kitchen. There’s an old wad of plastic-wrapped deli luncheon meat, a tub of ETA 5 Star margarine. I close the fridge door and turn left towards the pantry and bump into August, already laying four slices of bread on a cutting board on the bench. Luncheon meat sandwiches with tomato sauce. August takes his to the front window of the living room so he can stare up at the moon. He reaches the window and immediately hunches down in a panicked effort to stay out of sight.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
He waves his right hand downwards. I duck down and join him beneath the window. He nods his head upwards, raises his eyebrows. Have a look. Slowly. I raise my head to the bottom of the window and peek out to the street. It’s past midnight and Lyle is out on the kerbside, resting on the brick fence by the letterbox, smoking a Winfield Red. ‘What’s he doing?’
August shrugs, peeks out alongside me, puzzled. Lyle wears his thick roo-shooting coat, the thick woolly collar up, breaking the midnight chill against his neck. He blows cigarette smoke that floats against the dark like a grey ghost.
We both drop down again, chomp into our sandwiches. August drips tomato sauce onto the carpet beneath the window.
‘Sauce, Gus,’ I say.
We’re not allowed to eat food on this carpet now that Lyle and Mum are all drug-free and house-proud. August wipes the drops of sauce up from the carpet with his thumb and forefinger, licking the recovered red sauce from his fingers. He spits on the red stain left on the carpet and rubs it in, not enough for Mum not to notice.
Then a loud popping sound echoes across our suburb.
August and I immediately hop up, eyes peeking out through the window. In the night sky, about a block away, a purple firework whizzes into the darkness above the suburban houses, rising and fizzing with a corkscrew velocity before reaching its peak elevation and exploding into ten or so smaller firework strands that umbrella-pop into a briefly luminous and vivid purple sky fountain.
Lyle watches the firework flare out then he takes one more long drag of the Winfield and drops it at his feet, stubbing it out beneath his right boot. He puts his hands into the pockets of his roo-shooting coat and starts walking up the street in the direction of the firework.
‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I whisper.
I stuff the rest of my luncheon meat and tomato sauce sandwich into my mouth so it must look like I’m eating two large marbles. August stays beneath the window eating his sandwich.
‘C’mon, Gus, let’s go,’ I whisper.
He still sits there, processing like always, running the angles like always, weighing the options like always.
He shakes his head.
‘C’mon, don’t you want to know where he’s going?’
August gives a half-smile. The right forefinger that he just used to wipe up tomato sauce slashes through the air, scribbling the invisible lines of two words.
Already know.
I’ve been following people for years. The key elements to a successful follow are distance and belief. Distance enough from the subject to remain undetected. Belief enough to convince yourself you’re not actually following the subject, even though you are. Belief means invisibility. Just another invisible stranger in a world of invisible strangers.
Cold out here. I give Lyle a good fifty-metre start. I’m just past the letterbox when I realise I’m barefoot in my winter pyjamas, the ones with the large hole over my right arse cheek. Lyle marches on, hands in his coat, drifting into the darkness beyond the streetlights that line the entrance to the Ducie Street Park across the road from our house. Lyle turns into a shadow, crossing the cricket pitch at the centre of the black oval, climbing up a hill that leads to a kids’ playground and the council barbecue that we had a sausage sizzle on for August’s thirteenth birthday last March. I’m creeping softly across the oval grass like a phantom, walking on air, ninja quiet, ninja quick. Snap. A thin dry stick breaks beneath my bare right foot. Lyle stops beneath a streetlight at the other side of the park. He turns and looks back into the park darkness engulfing me. He’s staring right at me but he can’t see me because I have distance and I have belief. I believe I am invisible. And Lyle does too. He turns from the park and walks on, head down, along Stratheden Street. I wait until he turns right into Harrington Street before I sprint out of the park darkness and into the exposed streetlights of Stratheden. A sprawling mango tree on the corner of Stratheden and Harrington provides the visual protection I need to watch Lyle, clear as day, take a left into Arcadia Street and into the driveway of Darren Dang’s house.
Darren Dang is in my grade at school. There’s only eighteen of us Year 7 students at Darra State School and we all agree that handsome Vietnamese-Australian Darren Dang is by far the most likely of us to become famous, probably for killing all eighteen of us in a classroom machine-gun massacre. Last month while we were working on projects about the First Fleet, making British ships out of Paddle Pop sticks, Darren passed by my desk. ‘Hey, Tink,’ he whispered.
Eli Bell. Tinkerbell. Tink.
‘Hey, Tink. Bottle bins. Lunchtime.’
That translated to, ‘You best come by the large yellow metal bottle recycling bins behind groundsman Mr McKinnon’s tool shed at lunchtime if you are at all interested in continuing your modest Queensland state school education with both of your ears.’ I waited for thirty minutes by the bottle bins and was thinking, with false hope, that Darren Dang might not make our impromptu rendezvous when he crept up behind me and gripped the back of my neck between his right forefinger and thumb. ‘If you saw ninjas, you’re seeing ghosts,’ he whispered. It’s a line from The Octagon. Two months earlier, during a Physical Education class, I’d told Darren Dang that I, like him, believed the Chuck Norris movie about a secret training camp for terrorist ninjas was the best movie ever made. I had lied. Tron is the best movie ever made.
‘Ha!’ laughed Eric Voight, Darren’s roly-poly empty-headed muscle from a family of roly-poly empty-headed mechanics who run the Darra Auto Transmission and Window Tinting shop across the road from the Darra brickworks. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shit his little fairy pants.’
‘Shat,’ I said. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shat his pants, Eric.’
Darren turned to the bottle bins and dug his hands into a collection of Mr McKinnon’s empty spirits bottles.
‘How much does this guy drink?’ he said, clutching a Black Douglas bottle and sucking down half a capful of liquor resting at the bottom. He did the same with a small bottle of Jack Daniels, then a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘You good?’ he said, offering me the dregs of a Stone’s Green Ginger Wine.
‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Why did you want to meet me?’
Darren
