Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

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СКАЧАТЬ won the lottery. You’ve landed smack bang inside a growth industry. The market for that shit up there in the ice box never dies.’

Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation’s inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

      ‘Ten, twenty years, I’ll own three-quarters of Darra, maybe half of Inala, a good chunk of Richlands,’ Darren says.

      ‘How?’

      ‘Expansion, Tink,’ he says, eyes wide. ‘I got plans. This area won’t always be the city’s shithole. Some day, man, all these houses round here will be worth somethin’ and I’ll buy ’em all when they’re worth nothin’. And the gear is like that too. Time and place, Tink. That gear up there ain’t worth shit in Vietnam. Put it on a boat and sail it to Cape York, it turns to gold. It’s like magic. Stick it in the ground and let it sit for ten years, it’ll turn to diamond. Time and place.’

      ‘How come you don’t talk this much in class?’

      ‘There’s nothing I’m passionate about in class.’

      ‘Dealing drugs is your passion?’

      ‘Dealing? Fuck that. Too much heat, too many variables. We’re strictly imports. We don’t make deals. We just make arrangements. We let you Aussies do the real dirty work of putting it on the street.’

      ‘So Lyle’s doing your dirty work?’

      ‘No,’ Darren says. ‘He’s doing Tytus Broz’s dirty work.’

      Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.

      ‘Hey, a man’s gotta work, Tink.’

Darren puts his arm around my shoulder.

      ‘Listen, I never thanked you for not ratting on me about Jabba,’ he says. He laughs. ‘You didn’t rat about the rat.’

      The school groundsman, Mr McKinnon, marched me by the collar to the principal’s office. Mr McKinnon was too blind, or too blind drunk, to identify the two boys who were intending to slice my right forefinger off with a machete.

      All McKinnon could say was, ‘One of ’em was Vietmanese.’ And that could have been half our school. It wasn’t out of loyalty that I didn’t name names, more self-preservation, and one week’s detention writing number facts in an exercise pad was a small price to pay for my hearing.

      ‘We could use a guy like you,’ Darren says. ‘I need men I can trust. Whaddya reckon? You want to help me build my empire?’

      I stare for a moment up at Lyle, still discussing business with fierce Bich Dang and her humble husband.

      ‘Thanks for the offer, Darren, but, you know, I never really considered heroin empire building as part of my life plan.’

      ‘Is that right?’ He flicks his cigarette butt into his sister’s fairy castle. ‘The man with the plan. So what’s Tink Bell’s grand life plan?’

      I shrug.

      ‘C’mon, Eli, smart Aussie mud crab like you, tell me how you’re gonna crawl out of this shit bucket?’

      I look up at the night sky. There’s the Southern Cross. The saucepan, the set of white stars shimmering, shaped like the small stovetop pot Lyle boils his eggs in every Saturday morning.

      ‘I’m gonna be a journalist,’ I say.

      ‘Ha!’ Darren howls. ‘A journalist?’

      ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna work on the crime desk at The Courier-Mail. I’m gonna have a house in The Gap and I’m gonna spend my life writing crime stories for the paper.’

‘Ha! One of the bad guys making a living writing about the bad guys,’ Darren says. ‘And why in fuck you wanna live in The Gap?’

      We’d bought our Atari games console through the Trading Post. Lyle drove us out to a family in The Gap, a leafy suburb eight kilometres west of Brisbane’s CBD, who had recently purchased a Commodore 64 desktop computer and no longer needed their Atari, which they sold to us for $36. I’d never seen so many tall trees in one suburb. Tall blue gums that shaded kids playing handball in suburban cul-de-sacs. I love cul-desacs. Darra doesn’t have enough cul-de-sacs.

      ‘The cul-de-sacs,’ I say.

      ‘What the fuck is a cul-de-sac?’ Darren asks.

      ‘It’s what you’re on here. A street with a dead end. Great for playing handball and cricket. No cars going through.’

      ‘Yeah, I love a no-through road,’ he says. He shakes his head. ‘Man, you want to get some joint in The Gap, that shit ain’t gonna happen for twenty, thirty years in some journalising bullshit. You need to go get some degree, then ya gotta go beg for some job from some arsehole who’ll boss you around for thirty years and you’ll have to save your pennies and by the time you’re done savin’ there’ll be no more houses in The Gap left to buy!’

      Darren points up into the living room.

      ‘You see that Styrofoam box beside your good man’s feet up there?’ he asks.

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘There’s a whole house in The Gap inside that,’ he says. ‘Us bad guys, Tink, we don’t have to wait to buy houses in The Gap. In my game, we buy them tomorrow if we want to.’

      He smiles.

      ‘Is it fun?’ I ask.

      ‘What?’

‘Your game.’

      ‘Sure it’s fun,’ he says. ‘You meet lots of interesting people. Lots of opportunities to build your business knowledge. And when the cops are sniffin’ around, you really know you’re alive. You pull off some huge import right under their noses and you make the sales and you bank the profits and you turn around to your family and friends and say, “Goddamn, look at what you can achieve when you act as a team and you really stick to it.”’

      He breathes deep.

      ‘It’s inspiring to me,’ he says. ‘It makes me believe that in a place like Australia, anything really is possible.’

      We sit in silence. He flicks the flint СКАЧАТЬ