Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

When he finally does sleep, he sees the monastery’s inner sanctum again, but this time the fresco is made flesh. Women are lamenting and pulling at their hair, angels are weeping, and a single face is speaking. Aleks can’t hear a word the face is saying, only a resonant singing, as if from deep within a mountain or a lake.

Flakes of gold paint are falling from the face of a saint, falling on him like sunlight.

* * *

‘When did that shit get to Oz, anyway? Fucken tidal wave.’

‘World War II, bro. The Japs used to be high on the shit. Shabu, they called it. Kept em rampaging. Every army done that shit, throughout the ages. Nazis had amphetamines, too.’

‘Nah, nah, it was the gay bars. Early nineties, mate. The faggots used it first for parties, then it got into other clubs.’

A semicircle of ten men, all white, most of them smoking. Aleks is in the Aussie yard. There’s the Islander yard, the Aboriginal yard, the Lebanese yard, the Asian yard, the Terrorist yard and the Boneyard for people who need protection: dogs, rapists and informants. The heat waves unspool in great ripples, and through it the inmates walk in lines with the jerky movements of marionettes. High winds today. Aleks feels as if he is in a dream within a dream, marooned somehow in a place as lonely and desperate as a space station.

‘It’s our version of crack. Three generations hooked on the fucken shit. Dirty as,’ says Clint, an old crook Aleks knows from the outside.

‘Don’t knock it till you tried it.’

‘Sucking a glass dick? Fuck no.’

‘Remember when it first come out? Big bags of shard-like diamonds.’

Aleks has another story. ‘They call ice kamche in the Town. Rock, little pebble. That meant Macos first brought it here.’

‘Nah, nah, no way!’

Another voice cuts in, and everyone goes silent, even Aleks. ‘If some cunt is dumb enough to buy it, then I’m gonna be smart enough to sell it. This is Australia, mate. Race or get erased.’

Torture Terry is a redhead with a square jaw and a loose bottom lip. A Queenslander, he slowly drifted down the coast making a piecemeal existence from armed robbery. But since getting inside, Terry has become infamous for the rape of new inmates. ‘I do it till they start liking it, mate — then I get a new one,’ he had whispered to Aleks early on. He knows the justice system inside out — sly enough to slip out of a few years here and there, but way too far gone to ever go straight. Mostly his tatts are homemade, probably done at a young age with a protractor and Bic ink, but on his wrist he has a delicate tattoo of a swallow in flight, the only beautiful thing about him. When asked about it, he is rumoured to point at the swallow and say, ‘This is what I make em do.’

Aleks looks at his knees, scratches his throat then looks back at Terry. For all intents and purposes, this animal is considered his equal: same uniform, same yard, same company. Aleks feels ashamed. To people outside they were both to be demonised; or, even worse, pitied. Aleks wonders why Terry isn’t in the Boneyard or why nobody has put a hit on him. Then again, death is almost too good for this animal.

Terry is now holding court. ‘It’s the fucken Asians, mate. They’re the ones bringing it in. Ruining our country with drugs and whores. They take our jobs, too, mate. And they don’t even speak English.’

Some of the men nod. Aleks speaks jovially. ‘Oh, yeh. Suppose you got a degree in medicine, ay? They took that day job you had working in an office too, did they?’

The men laugh nervously.

‘But this is my country, mate,’ says Terry, smiling with lightless eyes.

‘Oh, yeh. You a Mabo, are ya?’ Aleks is still smiling, too, but the tension is palpable.

‘Fuck that! Look, I grew here, they flew here.’ For a tiny moment, every man is perfectly still, like statues or pieces on a chessboard, waiting for some divine revelation, when suddenly Clint nudges Aleks, breaking the tension.

‘Hey, I got something to talk to you about, mate. Business opportunity.’ He offers Aleks a ciggie and jerks his head.

Aleks takes the ciggie and turns with Clint. They walk away and fall in step with the river of pacing men who are all discussing crime: how they got caught, how they might succeed next time.

‘Bloody Terry,’ says Clint. ‘Don’t worry about him. Always carrying on like a half-sucked cock.’ Aleks laughs. He’s surprised to see Clint inside. The odd jobs they had done together were simple, a bit of cash on the side.

The sky is inescapable and there’s smoke on the wind, most likely from a bushfire somewhere. Aleks remembers a story Ulysses Amosa had told him when he was a child.

In the story, a beautiful woman is about to be burned at the stake for murdering a baby. Just as the flames are about to close around her, she sends a message to her brother far, far away, who sends spirits in the form of bats to flap out the flames with their wings. When the astonished villagers see her alive, standing untouched among the cinders, she says to them, ‘We meet on the crossroads of life.’ Aleks finds himself saying these words to Clint, who looks at him strangely. They smoke and pace.

‘So. How you going for cash, mate?’ asks Clint.

‘All right. Businessman like me always has a Plan B.’ Aleks grins but he’s lying. He had paid his lawyer ten thousand dollars straight off the bat and might have to pay another ten grand soon. He left Sonya a few grand in their bank account but it won’t last long. What if he gets more time? Plans need to be made. His family would help her, of course, but they didn’t have all that much either. Then there was the mortgage to worry about. If his trial went badly and he had to go back inside, the whole bloody thing would fall to pieces.

He feels a pang, wishing that Sonya could get up out of bed and work. She’s a smart one with a medical science degree. He once knew a man hooked on Xanax who thought the government had turned his eyeball into a video camera. The man stared at the sun for three hours to try to burn out the retina.

‘Well, never hurts to have a bit more cash,’ says Clint. ‘And this is a good one, like the old days.’

They laugh. They’re both thinking of the same scam, something they’d done a few times. They would sit on a hill thirty kilometres from the City and watch the bushland. If they saw a car go down a certain road, then switch its lights of halfway, they knew it was where a weed plantation was being watered. They’d wait an hour for the car to leave, and then hit it. Easy money, especially if you make the weed a bit heavier. One occasion, as they had gathered the weed, Aleks had seen an old kangaroo bone on the ground, a perfectly clean femur with a big ball on the end. It glowed white in the moonlight. Aleks had picked it up and surreptitiously slipped it through his fly and told Clint to look over. He then tipped the enormous, moonlit appendage up through the zipper and Clint’s look had been one of sheer horror.

‘Anyway, just think about it. Not much risk. Just money. Get ya back on ya feet once you get out,’ says Clint.

‘Yeh, or put me back in here.’

She,

a twist of pale smoke

between the criss-crossing lasers

and cursive of bodies.

She,

all hips and legs and curves,

floating, bending, popping

into an alphabet

of perfect b-girl control.

Me,

chewing my chain,

fixing my cap,

looking around,

but soon, fuck it,

I’m reacting

to her controlled explosions of movement.

Heaps of kids

haven’t seen a b-boy before.

What kind of shit is that?

There used to be more solidarity between the elements,