Omar Musa - Here Come the Dogs

wondering what’s in it for me,

but are generally pretty stoked.

One of them

offers to help out as an assistant.

Used to play for Queensland,

she reckons.

When I get home,

Mum’s cooking something delicious,

but I head straight to bed

and collapse onto it.

The next morning

‘I call it the Ulysses,’ says Jimmy. ‘An adventurer. Feel like an

adventure?’

‘Chur bro!’ I say in a Kiwi accent.

‘Red like fire, red like the devil,’ says Jimmy.

Red polished to a high gleam.

Headlights perfect in design and shape.

I squat,

run a finger over the bonnet with wonder,

as if the paint might still be wet.

My bro Jimmy.

Unbelievable.

Dad loved this car.

Tears in my eyes,

spliff in hand.

I’m trying to quit smoking

but this is a special occasion —

tomorrow I’ll quit.

I hold it like a dart,

puff, puff, pass to Jimmy

who holds it between curled forefinger and middle

as if he’s checking his nails for dirt,

then blows the delicious smoke

towards its brother clouds above.

Soon we’re driving,

Mercury Fire in the back,

no destination in mind,

just towards the ocean somewhere.

We pass antique towns,

places that were once rough-and-tumble outposts –

bushranger, massacre land.

The Dodge doesn’t have a proper system,

so I play tunes on my phone.

New Aussie shit –

Astronomy Class,

a Big Village compilation,

Joyride’s baritone over washed out synths,

Seth Sentry’s multi-syllabled wordplay.

It’s not Jimmy’s style but he smiles and lets it go,

seeing how I’m yelling the words.

We head towards Shellfish Bay.

It’s a coastal town that swells

during holiday season

and washes out in low season.

The southern beaches,

just out of town,

are the most pristine you’ve ever seen,

as if they’ve been forgotten by time and humanity.

‘How’s Scarlett?’ Jimmy asks tentatively. We don’t often discuss my

women.

‘Good. I think.’

‘Getting serious?’ asks Jimmy.

‘Nah, man. True playa for life.’ I laugh.

‘Don’t fuck it up, bro.’

Instead of getting annoyed,

I nod.

We pass through rain,

a fine mist,

bizarre rocky outcrops and green fields,

climb slowly up a small mountain

and are soon in cool rainforest.

We stop to smoke at a place

where a white cross is wreathed with flowers.

A little girl and her dad died here in a car crash.

As we wind down the mountain,

we can smell the ocean for the first time,

the saltwater tang.

Jimmy says, ‘The beach. That’s the true Australia.’

‘Fuck noath.’

As we approach Shellfish Bay,

we’re practically bouncing in our seats.

Jimmy is driving with one hand

and he looks at the sky.

It’s restless,

charged with electricity and moisture.

Mercury barks out the window.

We pass stores

that advertise bait and the catch of the day,

scallops and grenadier and gemfish

and we grin at each other.

We cross the long bridge into town.

There are heaps of people on the streets,

mostly kids –

shaved skulls, boardies and wife-beaters or shirtless,

lean and sun-dark, pockmarked and tatted,

smoking or doing kickflips,

some with sun-bleached curls,

some grinning and skinny as skeletons,

heads ballooning and enlarged –

their faces turn to us

as we drive past and some of them yell

and we realise that we’ve passed no cars on our way here,

nor were we overtaken.

We are the only car going into town.

We see the first burned-out shop

when we get to the main street.

A middle-aged man

is leaning against the blackened doorframe,

crying or coughing.

There are burnt sneakers swinging from lampposts

like dead rabbits.

Inside the obscene shattered maws of shopfronts,

graffiti drips with no rhyme or reason:

FUCK THE PIGS

FUCK OFF WE’RE FULL

ALWAYS WAS, ALWAYS WILL BE

LISA IS A SLUT.

Cops, cops everywhere,

blue and red lights flashing on corners.

The riots.

We’d forgotten about that.

We get fish and chips regardless.

The shopkeeper is sombre.

‘Animals,’ he says,

but who’s he talking about?

Kids wandering along in groups of five or ten,

with eyes flashing from beneath hoods.

There are still fishermen along the water,

lines feeding into the black tides.

I stop a kid.

‘What’s all this about?’

The lad eyes me, then says, ‘Cops bashed a young Koori fulla. There’s

video of it and everything.’

‘You seen it?’

‘Nah, but me cousin reckons he has. Boy died this morning.’

We drive further down the coast in silence.

Take a sandy track off the main road

and at last — the beach we’re looking for.

It’s long and windswept,

subtly curved for what seems like kilometres

until it reaches a promontory far off.

The fish and chips are still warm and we eat,

watching the choppy waves.

Mercury Fire hurtles down the sand,

a grey hyphen on a white page.

We walk down the beach

and soon come across a cluster of sheds

just over the sand dunes,

fishing shacks, at least eighty years old,

made from odd bits of rusted metal.

Latrines out the back

and the smell of trapped seaweed and bait.

No one is around.

‘Look like they’re from another world,’ I say.

The stink somehow comforting.

No way this type of place will last.

‘James. Jimmy,’ I say, looking at him seriously.

‘Yeah?’

‘Trust me, bro, if he reaches out to you, don’t meet up with that cunt.

Nothing good will come of it, bro.’

Jimmy looks pained, cornered, trapped. He won’t meet my eyes and

doesn’t speak. I persist.

‘Seriously. He’s lied about everything else. What’ll be different now?’

Jimmy clears his throat and finally looks at me. ‘Now, I’m a man.’

We just sit, looking out over the choppy surf.

Jimmy drops Solomon at Scarlett’s house and drives to his mother’s flat. Grace has just finished a long shift at the nursing home and is methodically watering the few plants she has on the landing. She’s staring across the road at a stately, heritage-listed house when Jimmy climbs the stairs. She wraps him up in a hug.

When Ulysses Amosa had his second stroke, he lost the faculty of speech. He eventually regained it, but moved slowly and often spoke Samoan. He spent much of his time sitting on the landing. Sometimes he would play chess with Petar Janeski. The two men would speak in gentle and respectful tones to each other, punctuated by roaring laughter. They’d sit for hours talking about their plans to return to their homelands. They seemed to have a crystalline understanding of their parallel situations, of a certain type of manhood, of the centrality of the church. They’d repeated their plans like a mantra, to the point where Grace and the children would roll their eyes. Other times, Ulysses would pray, as if preparing for death. Grace fussed around him, saying he was silly for even thinking of it. Remembering his own father’s congregation, Ulysses sang hymns and his voice was a ribbon that insinuated itself throughout the flats. He didn’t know that people listened; that it moved the residents of the flats to see such an enormous figure, rocking slowly back and forth, singing.

When Jimmy enters the flat, he sees the hole in Grace’s flyscreen where a neighbour cut a circle out of it to make a veggie strainer. Her cat, Biggie, arches and sniffs Jimmy before rolling on his back and rubbing his head against Jimmy’s ankle. Biggie then leaps up onto the ledge and starts dabbing lazily at a blowfly.