black block from Rua’s hand. ‘Fuckin’ dumb fucks,’ she says.
She summons a smile for August and me. ‘You boys want to come choose a soft drink?’ she asks.
We look at Lyle. He nods approval. We follow her into the kitchen.
Rua passes beers to Ezra, Lyle and Teddy.
‘When you Queenslanders going to get another beer other than bloody XXXX Bitter?’ Ezra asks.
‘We do have another beer,’ Teddy says, sitting back in the three-seat couch to watch Conan the Barbarian. ‘We got XXXX Draught.’
*
It’s almost 1 p.m. when we’re eating potato scallops at a snack bar along the Moorooka Magic Mile, the stretch of road in Moorooka fifteen minutes’ drive from Jamboree Heights, where people across Brisbane come to buy their cars from a strip of dealerships that range in quality and prestige from ‘All our cars have airbags!’ to ‘All our cars have windscreens!’
We sit around a white round plastic table eating from a ripped-open brown paper parcel of battered potato scallops, beef croquettes, seafood sticks, large bright yellow dim sims and hot chips made from old oil so they look like bent cigarette butts and taste about as good.
‘Who wants the last beef croquette?’ Teddy asks.
Teddy’s the only one who’s been eating the beef croquettes. Teddy’s always the only one who eats the beef croquettes.
‘All yours, Teddy,’ I say.
August and I sip from purple cans of Kirks Pasito, our second favourite soft drink. Slim put us onto Pasito. He drinks nothing but Kirks soft drinks because they’re from Queensland and he says he knew an old bloke who worked for the original Kirks company, which was actually the Helidon Spa Water Company, which made a name for itself in the 1880s bottling the restorative spring waters of Helidon, near Toowoomba, which local Aboriginals said gave them the strength they needed to fend off any greedy souls who might want to exploit the benefits of their personally significant spring water supplies. I’ve never tasted the natural spring waters of Helidon, but I doubt they match the sweet, restorative powers of an ice cold sarsaparilla.
‘Elsie had Big Sars,’ I say, selectively biting my potato scallop in an attempt to create the shape of Australia. August’s biting his so it looks like a ninja star. ‘She had a whole shelf of small soft drink cans. She had the whole Kirks range. Lemon Squash. Creaming Soda. Old Stoney Ginger Beer. You name it.’
Lyle’s rolling himself another White Ox.
‘You see anything else, Captain Details, when you went with Elsie into the kitchen?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say. ‘She had a whole pack of unopened Iced VoVo biscuits in the fridge on the shelf above the vegetable trays. I reckon they must have had Ribbetts last night because there was a silver takeaway box on the shelf above the Iced VoVos and even though the takeaway box had a lid on it and I couldn’t see inside it I knew it was Ribbetts because I could see the Ribbetts barbecue sauce spilling over the edge of the box and there is no barbecue sauce like Ribbetts barbecue sauce.’
Lyle lights his rolled smoke.
‘Any details you picked up that weren’t related to what Elsie had in her fridge?’ he asks, turning his head to the right to avoid blowing smoke over the potato scallops.
‘Yeah, saw heaps,’ I say, shoving three chips into my mouth, cold now and losing their crunch. ‘There was a Maori weapon hanging on the wall above the kitchen bench and I asked Elsie what it was and she said it was called a mere. It was a big club shaped like a leaf and made of something called greenstone and it was passed down through generations in her family. And she stood at the sink carefully cutting the wrapping on your heroin block on the kitchen sink bench and levelling a set of kitchen scales and as she did this she told me about the horrible things her great-great-great-great-grandfather, Hamiora, did with this club. Like once there was this chief named Marama from another tribe who was always bullying and intimidating Hamiora’s tribe and when Hamiora visited this rival chief’s HQ . . .’
‘I don’t know if ancient Maori chiefs had HQs,’ Teddy says.
‘His hut, the big rival chief’s hut,’ I clarify. ‘When Hamiora visited Marama’s hut the rival chief began to laugh at the size and shape of Hamiora’s mere because it looked so unthreatening, like a stone rolling pin or something you might use to roll out your biscuits and Hamiora