welcome, welcome, sit, sit,’ she says. She puts an arm around Tytus Broz. ‘Now I hope you have brought your appetites. I have prepared more hot dinners for tonight than this one has had hot dinners.’
*
Points of view. Vantage points. Angles. Mum in her red dress, laughing with Lyle as she drops chunks of crispy tilapia onto her plate. The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell.
Tytus Broz resting an arm over his daughter, Hanna, as he talks to our local member, Stephen Bourke, who wrestles with a chopstick clump of Vietnamese lemongrass beef noodle salad.
Lyle’s best friend, Teddy, staring across the table at my mum.
Bich Dang bringing another dish to the table.
‘Braised snakehead!’ she beams.
Darren Dang is seated on my left and August is on my right. The three of us are eating spring rolls. The man Tytus calls Iwan is across the table, sucking the flesh from a bright orange chilli crab claw.
‘Iwan Krol,’ Darren says, keeping his head down as he chomps into a spring roll.
‘Huh?’ I say.
‘Stop staring at him,’ Darren says, his head darting anywhere but in the direction of the man Tytus calls Iwan.
‘He gives me the creeps,’ I say.
It’s loud at this table. The restaurant noise, between the lounge singer on the dining floor below us and the drink-fuelled chat of our table guests and the cackling howl of Bich Dang’s laughter, has caused a kind of invisible sound booth to form around Darren and me, allowing us to talk freely about the people sitting around us.
‘That’s what he’s paid to do,’ Darren says.
‘What?’
‘Give people the creeps.’
‘What do you mean? What does he do?’
‘By day, he runs a llama farm in Dayboro.’
‘Llama farm?’
‘Yeah, I been there. He’s got all these llamas on his farm. Crazy fuckin’ animals, like a donkey had sex with a camel. They got these big yellow bottom teeth, like the worst case for braces you ever saw. The teeth are so bad you give ’em half an apple they can’t bite into it, they just have to roll it around their tongue like it’s a gobstopper or somethin’.’
‘And by night . . .?’
‘By night, he gives people the creeps.’
Darren spins the lazy Susan on our table and brings a bowl of salt and pepper baked mud crab to our places. He takes a claw and three crispy crab legs and lays them in his small bowl of rice.
‘That’s his job?’ I ask.
‘Shit yeah it is,’ Darren says. ‘He’s got one of the most important jobs in the whole operation.’ Darren shakes his head. ‘Jeez, Tink, you’re one green-arse drug dealer’s son.’
‘I told you, Lyle’s not me dad.’
‘Sorry, forgot he’s your temp dad.’
I take a salt and pepper crab claw and bite it with my big back teeth, and the baked crab shell breaks like an eggshell breaks under pressure. If Darra had a flag that we residents could wave in solidarity then a soft-shelled salted and peppered mud crab would have to feature on it somewhere.
‘How does he give people the creeps?’ I ask.
‘Reputation and rumours, Mum says,’ Darren explains. ‘Anyone can get a reputation, of course. Just walk outside and stick a knife in the neck of the next poor bastard you see in the street.’
Darren turns the lazy Susan again, stops it spinning at a bowl of fishcakes.
I can’t stop staring at Iwan Krol, picking crab shell gristle from his big straight tobacco-stained teeth.
‘Sure, Iwan Krol has done his share of bad shit that everybody knows about,’ Darren says. ‘A bullet in the back of a head here, a hydrochloric acid bath there, but it’s the shit we don’t know about that scares people. It’s the rumours that build up around a guy like Iwan Krol that do half the work for him. It’s the rumours that give people the creeps.’
‘What rumours?’
‘You haven’t heard the rumours?’
‘What rumours, Darren?’
He looks over at Iwan Krol. He leans in close to me.
‘Dem bones,’ Darren whispers. ‘Dem bones, dem bones.’
‘The fuck ya talkin’ ’bout?’
He takes two crab legs, makes them dance on his table like human legs.
‘The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone,’ he sings. ‘The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone’s connected to the leg bone, now shake dem skeleton bones.’
Darren bursts into laughter. He reaches out a sharp hand and