years she gets pissed off at Grandma because she had dreams, you know. She wanted to be a lawyer or some shit and help all those poor rat kids of Sydney’s west stay out of Silverwater. She takes off hitchhiking around Australia, gets all the way across the Nullarbor, all the way to Western Australia where she waits tables in the Rose and Crown Hotel and some sick fuck holds a knife up to her neck on her way home one night and he throws her into his car and drives off up some dark highway and who knows what the fuck he’s going to do to her but he slows his car at some roadworks along this highway where a road gang is widening the road at night and Mum, bravest woman in the world, just dives out of this car that’s goin’ at fifty clicks and she breaks her right arm on the bitumen and cuts her legs up but she’s smart enough to get up and sprint like she sprinted when she was a girl who won every school sprint she ran in and she runs towards the lights of this road gang as this sick fuck in the car starts reversing back down the dark highway but Mum makes it to a mobile tea room where three roadworkers are inside having a smoko and Mum screams in hysterics about what just happened and one bloke bolts out the door to find the sick fuck’s car screeching up the highway and this bloke comes back into the tea room and says, “You’re safe now, you’re safe,” and that road gang bloke is Robert Bell, my old man.’
Lyle stops on the spot.
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘She never told you about the drop in the lake?’
‘No, Eli, she never told me.’
We walk on.
‘You really think Tytus would send Iwan Krol after us?’ I ask.
‘Business is business, kid,’ Lyle says.
‘That true, all that stuff about him?’ I ask.
‘What stuff?’
‘Darren told me about what he does with the bodies. Is it true?’
‘I’ve never cared to find out, Eli, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop asking questions about what Iwan Krol likes to do with the bodies of dead criminals.’
We walk on.
‘So where we going tomorrow?’ I ask.
Lyle takes a deep breath, sighs.
‘You’re going to school,’ he says.
‘So what are we doing Saturday?’ I say, unwavering, unsinkable.
‘Teddy and I have some runs through Logan City.’
‘Can we come?’
‘No,’ Lyle says.
‘We’ll just sit in the car.’
‘What the hell you want to do that for?’
‘I told you, I can watch things.’
‘And what do you expect to see, Eli?’
‘The same things I saw tonight. The things that you can’t see.’
‘What things?’
‘Things like Teddy falling in love with Mum.’
Boy Loses Luck
A drop in the lake. Mum is asked to be on the organising committee for the school fete that must meet every Saturday for the next month. She wants to do it because she never does that stuff. She hates all those Parents and Friends cows but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to feel like one of them every so often. Then Slim’s chest starts playing up and his piss turns the colour of rust and his doctor tells him he has pneumonia. He’s holed up resting in a small rental unit in Redcliffe on the other side of Brisbane to us. Mum and Lyle don’t have a babysitter to watch over August and me on Saturdays.
Spring, 1986. I’m a high school kid. As opposed to looking out the windows of Darra State School, I take the bus each day with August now to look out the windows of Richlands State High School in Inala. I’m thirteen years old and like any self-respecting Queensland teenager with a deeper voice and bigger balls I want to experience new things, like spending this next month of Saturdays with Lyle on his heroin runs. I subtly remind Mum about August’s and my burning fascination with burning things whenever we don’t have adult supervision. Why, just the other day, I mention, I’d watched August set fire to a petrol-covered globe we found dumped beside a Lifeline charity bin in Oxley. ‘Gonna set the world on fire!’ I hollered as August held his magnifying glass over Australia and a hot apocalyptic dot of magnified sunlight descended over the city of Brisbane.
‘I’ll take ’em to Jindalee pool,’ Lyle says. ‘They can have a swim for a few hours, Teddy and I will make the run, then we’ll grab them on