made-up faces and immovable hair and normally quiet Vietnamese dads loosened and laughing heartily on beer and wine and tea. There are great beasts of the ocean lying sideways in the centre of each table, glazed and oiled and boiled and crumbed and salted and peppered, and whole deep-sea leviathans from the Mekong and beyond, Neptune maybe; big fat awkward bottom lips and slimy tentacle whiskers in colours of green and moss green and blue green and grey green and brown, black and red. Bich Dang owns acres of land at the back of Darra, beyond the Polish migrant centre, with soil like chocolate cake where her old and wrinkled and wise farmers grow the piles of rau ram coriander, shiso leaf, hung cay mint, basil, lemongrass and Vietnamese balm that guests pass between themselves tonight like they’re playing some children’s party game called Hands Across the Table. An oversized mirror ball twinkles above us and a Vietnamese lounge singer twinkles on stage, purple glitter make-up on her cheeks and a turquoise sequined dress that shimmers the way a mermaid’s scales might shimmer beached on the banks of the Mekong. She sings ‘Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft’ by The Carpenters, sways to the crackly backing track, alien somehow, like she just flew into Darra on the kind of craft she’s calling through that old microphone. Red tinsel lines the walls, running above fish tanks with catfish and cod and red emperor and fat snapper fish with balls on their heads that look like someone’s clubbed them with a cricket bat. There’s two more tanks dedicated to the crayfish and the mud crabs who always seem so resigned to the fact they’ll form tonight’s signature dish. They sit beneath their tank rocks and their cheap stone underwater novelty castle decorations, so breezy bayou casual all they’re missing is a harmonica and a piece of straw to chew on. They’re so unaware of their importance, so oblivious to the fact they’re the reason people drive from as far away as the Sunshine Coast to come taste their insides baked in salt and pepper and chilli paste.
A staircase to the right of the restaurant runs up to a second balcony level with ten more round tables where ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang seats her VIP guests, and tonight there’s only one VIP and his name is stretched across the birthday banner running across the balcony rail of the top level: Happy 80th Tytus Broz.
‘Lyle Orlik, son of Aureli!’ Tytus Broz says grandly, his arms raised welcomingly in the air, standing over the balcony rail. ‘It seems Bich has pulled out all the bells, all the whistles and all the stops to celebrate my eighth decade on this good planet!’
Tytus makes me think of bones. He wears a bone-white suit over a bone-white shirt and a bone-white tie. His shoes are brown polished leather and his hair is as bone white as his suit. His body is all bone, tall and thin, and he smiles like a skeleton frame would smile if it hopped off a Biology classroom hook and started to dance like Michael Jackson in the ‘Billie Jean’ clip August and I love like lemonade. Tytus’s cheekbones are round like the protruding balls on the heads of Bich Dang’s tank snapper, but his actual cheeks have been slowly sucked inwards over eighty years on earth and when his lips tremble – and they tremble all the time – it looks like he’s permanently sucking on a pistachio nut, or a vampire bat sucking on a human liver.
Tytus Broz makes me think of bones because he’s made a fortune out of bones. Tytus Broz is Lyle’s boss at Human Touch, the Queensland prosthetics and orthotics sales centre and manufacturing plant he owns and runs in the suburb of Moorooka, ten minutes’ drive from our house. Lyle is a mechanic there, works maintenance on the machines that build artificial arms and legs for amputees across the State. Tytus Broz is the Lord of Limbs, whose vast natural arm reach has stretched across my and August’s lives for the past six years, ever since Lyle landed the Human Touch maintenance job through his best friend, Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas, the man with the thick black moustache seated four plastic white chairs to the right of Tytus at the VIP dining table. Teddy is also a maintenance mechanic at Human Touch. Teddy is also, I have long suspected, a man with a lucrative on-the-side stream of Tytus Broz’s