freckle who was spread out across the septic tank.
‘What the hell’s going on here!’ Mr McKinnon barked.
‘Run!’ Eric screamed.
Darren fled, indeed, with the stealthy reaction powers of his beloved ninja. Eric was slower to lift his burdensome belly fat off my left shoulder but he evaded the clutches of Mr McKinnon’s thick sweeping left arm, which eventually found a hold on the back pocket of my maroon cotton school shorts, making me look like Wile E. Coyote running on air as I tried to beat a useless getaway.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Mr McKinnon said, his breath reeking of Black Douglas.
Creeping now, hunched down, to the Dang family’s fence made of tall brown timber palings with pointed ends. Lyle padding down Darren Dang’s long driveway. Darren Dang’s house is one of the biggest in Darra. Three thousand yellow bricks bought half-price direct from the Darra brickworks, shaped into a three-storey house with Italian mansion ambitions but bad-taste cheap-suburbia realities. The front lawn is the size of half a football field and lined with maybe fifty tall palm trees. I slip briefly down the long concrete driveway then peel off right among the front lawn palms to stay out of sight. Closer to the house is a trampoline surrounded by plastic princess castles belonging to Darren’s three younger sisters, Kylie Dang, Karen Dang and Sandy Dang. I scurry to the trampoline, duck behind the largest of the princess castles, a pink plastic fairytale kingdom with a brown drawbridge fashioned into a children’s slide, with castle walls big enough for me to hide behind as I watch Lyle sitting with Darren’s mum and stepdad, Bich and Quan, on a lounge suite through the sliding glass doors of their living room.
‘Back Off’ Bich Dang earned her nickname with acts of unspeakable savagery. As well as the Little Saigon supermarket, she owns a large Vietnamese restaurant and the neighbouring hairdressing salon where I get my hair cut, across from Darra train station. Quan Nguyen is more her humble loyal servant than her husband. Bich is famous in my town as much for her selfless sponsorship of Darra community events – dances, historical society show days, fundraising flea markets – as she is for the time she stabbed a Year 5 Darra State School girl, Cheryl Vardy, in the left eye with a steel ruler for teasing Karen Dang about having steamed rice every day for school lunch. Cheryl Vardy needed surgery after the incident. She nearly went blind and I never understood why Bich Dang didn’t go to prison. That’s when I realised Darra had its own rules and laws and codes and maybe it was ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang who had selflessly drafted them into existence. Nobody knows what happened to her first husband, Darren’s dad, Lu Dang. He disappeared six years ago. Everybody says Bich poisoned him, laced his prawn and pork rice paper rolls with arsenic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she stabbed him in the heart with a steel ruler.
Bich wears a light purple dressing gown, her mid-fifties face made up even at this hour. All the Vietnamese mums in Darra have the same look: big black hair in a bun so heavily treated it can bounce light beams, white powdery foundation on their cheeks and long black eyelashes that make them look permanently startled.
Bich has her hands folded, elbows resting on her knees, giving instructions, pointing her forefingers occasionally the way the great Parramatta Eels coach Jack Gibson used to give instructions to his on-field brains trust, Ray Price and Peter Sterling, from the sideline. Bich nods her head at something Lyle is saying and then she points at her husband, Quan. She directs him away somewhere and he nods obediently, waddles out of view and then returns with a large rectangular Styrofoam ice box, the same kind the Dangs keep their whole fresh fish in at the Little Saigon supermarket. Quan places the box at Lyle’s feet.
Then a sharp and cold metal blade presses against my neck.
‘Ring, ring, Eli Bell.’
Darren Dang’s laugh echoes through the palm trees.
‘Jeez, Tink,’ he says, ‘if you’re trying to stay invisible you might want to think about changing out of your old pyjamas. I could see that pale Aussie arse all the way from my letterbox.’
‘Good advice, Darren.’
The blade is long and thin and presses hard into the side of my neck.
‘Is that a samurai sword?’ I ask.
‘Fuck yeah,’ he says proudly. ‘Bought it at the pawn shop. Been sharpening it for six straight hours today. Reckon I could take your head off in one slice. Wanna see?’
‘How would I see it if I don’t have a head?’
‘Your brain still works even after it gets chopped off. It’d be cool. Your eyeballs looking up from the ground, me waving at you, holding your headless body. Fuck. What a funny way to go out!’
‘Yeah, I’m laughing my head off.’
Darren howls.
‘That’s good, Tink,’ he says. Then, on a dime, he turns serious, pushes the blade harder against my neck.
‘Why are you spying on your dad?’
‘He’s not my dad.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s my mum’s boyfriend.’
‘He good?’
‘Good at what?’
The blade isn’t pushing so hard against my neck now.
‘Good to your mum.’
‘Yeah, he’s real good.’
Darren relaxes the sword, walks over to the trampoline, parks his backside on the edge of the trampoline, his legs hanging over the steel springs connected to the black bounce canvas. He’s dressed all in black, his black sweater and tracksuit pants as black as his bowl haircut.
‘You want a smoke?’
‘Sure.’
He moves his sword, spears it into the ground, to make room for me on the trampoline’s edge. He takes two smokes from a soft white packet with no branding, lights them in his mouth and hands me one. I suck a tentative drag and it burns my insides, makes me cough hard. Darren laughs.
‘North Vietnam durries, Tink,’ he smiles. ‘Kick like a mule. Good buzz, though.’
I nod heartily, my head spinning with the second drag.
We look up through the living room sliding doors at Lyle and Bich and Quan talking over the Styrofoam ice box.
‘Won’t they see us?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘They don’t notice shit when they’re doing business. Fuckin’ amateurs. It’ll be their undoing.’
‘What are they doing up there?’
‘You don’t know?’
I shake my head. Darren smiles.
‘C’mon, Tink. You must know. You might be full Aussie but you’re not that fuckin’ dumb.’
I smile.
‘The box is full of heroin,’ I say.
Darren
