Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

Some lads, all wearing high-vis work jackets, come in and one of them recognises him. They’re drunk already and talking loudly. ‘Oi. It’s Janeski,’ says the youngest of them. Aleks hasn’t seen this halfwit in a long time.

‘Aleks! Kako si ?’

‘ Dobar, brat .’

‘ Kay si be ?’

‘ Eve be .’ Aleks tries to smile. Once, when both were on holiday in Ohrid from Australia, Aleks scored some Albanian coke for him so that he and his dumb cunt mates weren’t beaten senseless looking for it. The younger fella, it seems, wants to pay back the favour.

‘ Zhimi maika brat, I swear to God, bro, I swear on my mum’s life, nah nah nah, I swear on your mum’s life. We could invest in a whole kilo. Pure white.’ The boys laugh.

Aleks, even in his drunken state, stares at the lad as if witnessing a thrown boxing match where the loser is unintentionally but fatally injured. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, champ. I think you got the wrong bloke.’

‘Oh. yeah.’ The bravado instantly gone. ‘Sorry, Janeski. Sorry.’ For a moment there’s nothing but the bleep of poker machines, then Aleks looks at him.

‘Got any on ya?’

A sly smile in return. ‘Course.’

Between trips to the bathroom and more beers, Aleks starts chatting to a man who is selling tickets to a meat raffle. The man, it turns out, is a chiropractor, whose wife beside him is Lebanese. Aleks tries to engage her in a conversation about Islam. He tells her about the Cross Mosque in Ohrid, how when it had been a church it was devastated by earthquakes again and again until the priest had a dream that, if Muslims and Christians could both worship there, it would never fall. ‘The man attached a crescent to the cross and the building has not fallen since. Can you believe that?’

The Lebanese woman tells him she is an atheist but her family is Maronite Christian. Aleks, confused, begins to talk in labyrinths. He taps his fingers on the tray of meat and tells them how you can’t get good meat in Australia, that it’s full of chemicals and not organic. ‘You can only find good meat in villages. The chicken tastes better in Macedonia. Tender, sweet. Bloody orgasmic. Not just meat, but the chillies, the bananas too.’ He counts on his fingers. ‘The air itself, brother, the water!’ Eventually he slams a beer on the table and says it’s important to believe in God.

The wife smiles awkwardly and the man asks, ‘So how about a ticket in the meat raffle, mate?’

What happens after that is unclear, and unfolds in flashes.

His hand around a young man’s throat.

A bloody face. in the mirror?

A plateful of cocaine in a microwave.

Lines on lines on lines.

A steering wheel.

Blackness.

When he comes to, he’s floating in water, swallowing it, choking. He sees red and blue lights bobbing all around him and hears a man’s voice yelling. He sees his Hilux, nose down, full of water. Then a wooden fence with a Hilux-sized hole in it. Then a policeman holding up the gym bag. Aleks realises he is in a suburban swimming pool, up to his chest in water, and floating all around him are sausages and schnitzels and steaks. He begins to laugh, madly and with gusto. He doesn’t stop laughing, even when they come to take him away.

A low, pale dusk.

Jimmy is at the window this time, watching through a chink in the curtains. He has a brick in his hand. He swears he can smell Hailee’s moisturiser and shampoo through the glass. Her body itself some kind of unfairness. He examines her throat, her mid-sized breasts, tight under a T-shirt. She looks like she’s going to take the shirt off. He leans closer. She’s just adjusting the waistband of her gym pants. A glimpse of peach-coloured skin.

When he sees her leave the room, he heaves the brick as hard as he can through the window, like a shot-putter. The window explodes; there is a single shriek and the cascade of glass, but he is already walking away, fast. Fucken bitch. He rounds a corner, crosses a road and walks through the park before looking back. No one has followed him.

He buys a frozen pizza and an energy drink at the supermarket, a headache spiderwebbing on the inside of his skull. He’s already forgotten the brick and Hailee. The streets are as silent as a field after a gunshot. Or before one. There seems to be dust everywhere today, but he’s not sure where it blew in from. It’s in the trees, in the grass, in the gutters. Enough to drown the world.

Be good to have housemates, ay? He rented the duplex for himself because he thought it would be good to have privacy, but he gets lonely. As soon as he opens the door, a beast leaps at him from the dark. He falls on his arse and scoots backwards instinctively. He puts up a hand to push it away but the beast nuzzles up and starts licking his nose.

‘What the fuck?’

Mercury Fire.

The dog licks his face and its alert eye strikes him as compassionate, wise. He wipes saliva off his face and and walks through the house, switching on lights. As each one goes on, it lights up a different feature of the house. The cream carpet, the rack of cassettes he is so proud of (arranged in alphabetical order), his crates of vinyl, the signed Immortal Technique poster and a framed Shem RDC sketch — everything as it should be. Then, in a carved wooden frame, there is the black-and-white photo of a young Ulysses Amosa astride a motorbike, the one he crashed on the sandy roads of Savai’i. Jimmy remembers how Ulysses used to carry him and Solomon around the block, one on each shoulder, until the pain in his bad knee became too much.

Mercury Fire follows at his heels the whole way, excited.

Jimmy hears music from the garage — A$AP Rocky, who he can’t stand. The garage is spare but for raw concrete, a Malcolm X poster, a wardrobe and Solomon lying on a bench lifting the weights Jimmy never uses. His shirt is off, his arms still considerably muscled, his skin shining. Once lean and fatless, he now has a small but obvious gut. The expression on his face is one of fury. Jimmy watches with pleasure. This cunt.

Jimmy stares at the Malcolm X poster. It was a present from his biological father. It’s Malcolm in his later years with that longer red beard, after he left the Nation of Islam. Jimmy knows that Solomon would say Malcolm X was his personal hero. What a joke. Malcolm X: a disciplined and pious man. Solomon Amosa: a hedonist, a libertine who had lost any sense of discipline to booze, women and MDMA years ago. Solomon told Jimmy that he reckons Malcolm was a great man because he changed and eventually realised the true Islam as one of acceptance and peace. But Jimmy always liked the early Malcolm more — angry, militant, fuck the white man. When people die young, you don’t get to see them become boring old fucks, lose their principles and become sellouts. We’d probably roll our eyes at Malcolm if he was still alive, that 2Pac woulda been a politician or doing Viagara ads or some shit. Better to die young, ay.

Solomon is grunting and breathing hard as he pushes the weights up, sweat lathering his skull. The bassline and 808 drums bounce around the raw concrete. On the last rep he looks dizzy and as though he is scared he’ll get trapped under the bar. Jimmy doesn’t move to help him. With one last yell Solomon pushes the bar up onto the rack. He sits up and swears, gulping for air. Jimmy’s headache is gone now.

‘Hard workout, mate?’

Solomon turns around and sees Jimmy in the doorway. ‘How fucken long you been there?’

‘A while. Looked hard,’ Jimmy smiles.

‘Not too bad. Been a while. You give it a go.’

‘Nah. Needa cook dinner.’

‘Of course not, ya gronk.’