two times. His eyeballs are pulsing like lightbulbs losing power. He stands before me and runs the blade along my right cheek.
‘Eli who?’ he whispers.
‘Eli Bell,’ I say. ‘From school. Fuck me, Darren. It’s me, mate. I used to live just down the road.’
He puts the blade up to my eyeball.
‘Darren? Darren? It’s me.’
Then he freezes. A smile explodes across his face.
‘Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa!’ he hollers. ‘You see your face, bitch!’ he screams. His friends in navy blue tracksuits howl at my expense. He adopts a thick Australian outback accent. ‘You hear this bitch?’ he says to his audience. ‘“It’s me, maaaate. It’s meeeeeeeeeeeee, Eeeeloiiii.”’
He slaps his thighs then wraps his arms around me, blade still fixed inside his right fist. ‘Come here, Bell End!’ he laughs. ‘What the fuck’s up with you? You don’t call, you don’t write. I had big plans for us, Tink.’
‘It all went to shit,’ I say.
Darren nods in agreement. ‘Yeah, a whole bunch of runny ol’ Eli Bell shit,’ he says. He grips my right hand, lifts it into view, runs his finger across the pale white nub of my missing finger.
‘You miss it?’ Darren asks.
‘Only when I’m writing,’ I say.
‘No, I mean, Darra, dumb arse, you miss Darra?’
‘I do,’ I say.
Darren walks back to his desk.
‘Can I get you anything?’ he asks. ‘Got a fridge full of soft drink in the room there.’
‘You got any Pasito?’
‘Nah,’ Darren says. ‘Got Coke, Solo, Fanta and Creaming Soda.’
‘I’m good,’ I say.
He leans back in his desk chair and shakes his head.
‘Eli Bell is back in town!’ he says. ‘It’s good to see you, Tink.’
His smile goes flat. ‘That was fucked what happened to Lyle,’ he says.
‘Was it Bich?’ I ask.
‘Was it Bich, what?’ he replies.
‘Was it Bich who ratted on Lyle?’
‘You think it was Mum?’ he asks, perplexed.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘But was it?’
‘She considered Lyle a client, just like Tytus Broz,’ he says. ‘Aside from the fact rattin’ is bad business, she had no reason to rat about any side business she had goin’ on because she was just doing business, Tink. If Lyle was dumb enough to start tradin’ with her behind his boss’s back, that was his business, not hers. His cash had the same numbers printed on it as anybody else’s. Nah, man, you know exactly who ratted his arse out.’
No. No, I really don’t know. Not exactly. Not at all.
Darren looks at me, mouth open, dumbstruck.
‘You really are one sweet kid, Eli,’ Darren says. ‘Don’t you know the biggest rats are always closest to the cheese?’
‘Teddy?’ I say.
‘I’d tell you, Tink, but I don’t eat no cheese,’ he says. Darren’s friends nod.
Piss-weak fucksack so-called friend Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas. The fuckin’ cheese eater.
‘Where is your mum?’ I ask.
‘She’s up in the house resting,’ he says. ‘She got the Big C about a year ago.’
‘Cancer?’
‘Nah, cataracts,’ he says. ‘Poor Bich can’t see no more.’
The gate man drops my backpack on his desk. Darren looks inside.
‘You still importing for Tytus Broz?’ I ask.
‘Nah, that pussy has gone to Dustin Vang and BTK,’ he says. ‘That incident with your precious Lyle didn’t help relations between Mum and Tytus.’
Darren sticks his knife in the bag, pulls it back out with its tip holding grains of Lyle’s high-grade heroin.
‘What’s BTK?’ I ask.
Darren inspects the gear on his knife like a jeweller inspecting the clarity of diamonds.
‘Born To Kill,’ Darren says. ‘It’s the new world, Tink. Everybody’s gotta be gang-affiliated now. BTK. 5T. Canal Boys. The exporters back home have all these rules around shit now. Everything goes through abracadabra Cabramatta down south and all the heads in Cab were forced to split into sides when all the heads back in Saigon split into sides. That punk bitch Dustin Vang went BTK and my mum went 5T.’
‘What’s 5T?’
Darren looks around at his friends. They smile. They all chant something in Vietnamese. He stands and unzips his red nylon Adidas jacket, pulls down a white singlet to reveal a tattoo on his chest, a large numeral ‘5’ with a ‘T’ in the shape of a dagger, stabbing into a throbbing black heart emblazoned with five Vietnamese words: Tình, Tiên, Tù, Tôi and Thu.
The 5T gang chant in unison. ‘Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge’.
Darren nods. ‘Fuck yeah,’ he says approvingly.
There’s a knock on the door of the bunker. A young Vietnamese boy, maybe nine years old, dressed in his own navy nylon Adidas tracksuit, enters the office area. He’s sweating. He hollers something at Darren in Vietnamese.