Mum looks at August and me. ‘What do you have left on your homework?’
‘Just the Maths,’ I say.
August nods. Same as Eli.
‘You should have done the Maths first, got the hard stuff out of the way first,’ Mum says.
‘Sometimes life doesn’t work like that, Mum,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you just can’t get the hard stuff out of the way first.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she says. ‘All right, you can go to the pool but you two better have your homework done by the time I get home.’
No problem. But we get to Jindalee pool and it’s closed because the owner is laying a new lining across the empty fifty-metre pool.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle barks.
Teddy is in the driver’s seat because he owns this 1976 olive green Mazda sedan, a mobile kiln even in spring, with hot brown vinyl passenger seats that stick to the undersides of my thighs, August’s too, because he’s wearing the same grey Kmart shorts.
Teddy looks at his watch.
‘We gotta be at Jamboree Heights in seven minutes,’ he says.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle says, shaking his head. ‘Let’s go.’
We pull up outside a two-storey house in Jamboree Heights. The house is made of yellow brick with a large aluminium garage door and a staircase running up the front of the house to a landing where a young shirtless Maori boy, maybe five years old, is furiously skipping on the spot with a pink plastic jump rope. It’s so hot outside that the road bitumen through my car window shimmers with glassy mirage pockets of hot air.
Lyle and Teddy pause for a moment to scan the landscape, look into the car’s rearview and side mirrors. Teddy pops the boot. They exit the Mazda at the same time and walk to the back of the car. Close the boot.
Lyle walks back to his front passenger door carrying a blue plastic chill box and leans into the car.
‘You two just sit here and behave yourselves, all right?’ he says. He goes to shut the door.
‘You gotta be kidding, Lyle.’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It must be fifty degrees in here,’ I say. ‘We’ll be fried in ten minutes flat.’
Lyle sighs, takes a deep breath. He looks around, spots a small tree by the footpath.
‘All right, wait under that tree over there,’ he says.
‘And what do we say when the neighbour comes out and asks us why we’re sitting under his tree?’ I ask. ‘“Just makin’ a quick drug deal, mate. Don’t mind us.”’
‘You’re really startin’ ta piss me off, Eli,’ he says, shutting his door hard.
Then he opens the door on August’s side.
‘C’mon,’ he says. ‘But not a fucking word.’
We pass the kid with the skipping rope and he watches us, yellow snot resting at the bottom of his nose.
‘Hey,’ I say, passing.
The kid says nothing. Lyle knocks his knuckle against a security screen door frame. ‘That you, Lyle?’ comes a call from the dark living room. ‘Come on in, bro.’
We enter the house. Lyle, then Teddy, then August, then me.
Two Maori men are resting on brown armchairs beside an empty three-seat couch. Smoke fills the living room. The men have full ashtrays on the armrests of their chairs. One man is skinny, with Maori tattoos across his left cheek; the other is the fattest man I’ve ever seen in my life, and he’s the one who speaks.
‘Lyle, Ted,’ he says by way of greeting.
‘Ezra,’ Lyle says.
Ezra wears black shorts and a black floppy shirt and his legs are so big that the fat around his thighs spills over his kneecaps so the middle of his legs look like the faces of walruses without tusks. It’s not the size of the man that I dwell on, though, it’s the size of his black T-shirt, big enough to be a shade cover for Teddy’s Mazda parked outside in the sun.
The skinny man is leaning forward in his armchair, peeling the jackets off a bowl of potatoes on a portable tray.
‘Fuck, Lyle,’ Ezra says, smiling as he looks at August and me. ‘That’s some prize parenting right there, my friend, bringing your kids to a drug deal.’
Ezra slaps his leg, looks at his skinny tattoo-faced friend who says nothing: ‘Papara of the Year, ’ey cuz!’
‘They’re not my kids,’ Lyle says.
A woman enters the living room. ‘Well, I’ll take ’em then if they’re not yours, Lyle,’ she says, smiling at August and me as she sits down on the couch. She’s barefoot, in a black singlet. A Maori woman with a tribal tattoo ringing her upper right arm. A