Omar Musa: Here Come the Dogs

‘I’m off, brother.’

Jimmy starts after him but I grab his forearm.

‘Leave him alone, bro. Jimmy. James, leave him alone,’ I say.

Aleks is now a slash of ink,

darkening into the crosshatch of trees.

Jimmy sits back down –

‘What’s got into him?’

Wish we had a white person with us

Ten empty cabs have passed us by.

The cabbie

His breath smells of cardamom tea

and a twelve-hour shift.

He eyes us warily –

‘If you need to vomit you tell me, yeah? I’ll pull over.’

‘Nah, nah. No worries. We’re big boys, mate.’

There is a diamond-shaped,

gold-tasselled passage from the Qur’an

hanging from the rear-view mirror.

The cabbie smiles tightly. ‘Big night?’

‘Bro, you don’t know the half of it. Fucken hektikkk.

Ay. AY! Turn this song up!’ slurs Jimmy.

‘Where you from, mate?’ I say.

‘Here.’

‘Nah, nah, I mean originally.’

‘. Pakistan.’

‘ Assalamu-alaikum, brother.’ The words sound strange coming out of my mouth.

His eyes, framed by the rear-view mirror, widen with surprise. ‘ Wa-alaikum salam. You Muslim?’

‘Yeah, once. Um, I mean, yeah.’

‘His name was Sulaiman,’ Jimmy crows. ‘Now it’s Solomon again.’

‘Sulaiman? Ah, a good name. A wise man.’ The man nods.

I wind down the window

and blow my breath out subtly,

hoping he won’t smell the alcohol.

Too late, probably.

When I get out at Georgie’s college,

I shake the cabbie’s hand –

‘ Assalamu-alaikum .’

He turns to smile

and I see for the first time

the right side of his face is

scabbed and bruised.

‘Wa-alaikum salam.’

Drunk sex

The arch of her foot

on my teeth,

her thighs move apart.

Erykah Badu’s voice curls

around us.

The heat unbearable.

‘Fuck.’

One of her heels is digging

into my flank

and in a shudder of moonlight,

I realise she has cut her hair

into an ashen wedge

She holds my face close,

and I try to smile

but her presence is crushing,

it almost makes me scream.

Instead I keep moving,

deep, shallow, deep, shallow,

and I’m relieved when she closes her eyes.

I watch her eyelids,

and notice for the first time a crooked lower tooth.

Afterwards,

watching a dreamcatcher spin on the ceiling,

my skin sticking to hers,

I say, ‘I bought a dog tonight.’

‘A dog?’

‘Yeh. A greyhound.’

She pauses before laughing uncertainly

and kissing me.

‘You mad bastard. You’ve got nowhere to keep it.’

A dream about Georgie

I’m the only passenger on a plane –

the sky is the colour of Turkish delight

or suicide bathwater.

Shirtless,

tattoos alive, swarming,

jostling down my forearms.

There’s a gin and juice on the tray –

strong.

I hear a sound

akin to birds chirping,

but can’t tell where it’s coming from.

Georgie appears –

stepping down the aisle solemnly,

as if at the head of a procession,

carrying something heavy and square.

She’s wearing weighted pendants in her lobes

and a headdress of feather flowers.

She looks beautiful and sad.

The plane starts its descent.

I can see rivers, lakes and dams,

holding within them braided veins of light.

The land looks both rich and barren.

The plane is low now, about to land.

In a glance I observe an extraordinary scene

in Munro Park.

A man is kneeling on the kick-off line with

his arms behind him.

Another man is standing close, one arm outstretched,

and a sudden flash leaps from his hand.

The kneeling man jumps backwards

and lies with his arms outflung as if crucified.

It takes a second to see this.

I try to scream to Georgie

but I make no sound

and I see that I am tied to the seat

and can’t move so I bang

my fists on the tray table.

The gin and juice bounces in one motion

all over my lap and the smell of it becomes intense,

more like diesel than liquor.

My hands are shaking

and I stare at them for a long time.

When I look up

I’m standing outside the airport.

There’s nobody else

and it’s cold.

Eventually a cab pulls up.

The Pakistani driver opens the door.

He smiles

and I see that his mouth is full of gold teeth,

his scabs gone.

The drive isn’t long into town

and when we approach Munro Park,

I tap him on the shoulder.

I walk to the centre of the rugby field.

There is no body, no blood.

Just a briefcase lying on the cold soil.

I open it

and see that it’s full of colourful birds of song –

nightingales, swallows, babblers.

They are all dead.

The morning is waiting to be created.

Coffee on stove; toast, eggs, pickles.

A shot of rakia to take the edge off the hangover.

Shot, shudder, smack of the lips.

Aleks’ grandfather Mitko sent a bottle last week straight from the village, made from cherries, strong enough to clean wounds with. Aleks smiles. Dedo Mitko has had a shot every morning of his life, before heading to the fields to plough and plant. ‘Get the blood going before you face the day, Aleksandar — a shot of rakia is a good friend, but someone to be treated with respect!’

He thinks of his grandfather, so frail now, next to the window in a sweat-heavy room, his big, calcified hands the only testament to a life’s labour. Ten years in a German factory, the rest in the fields the family had ploughed for centuries. He would be watching the tomcats stalking through the weeds of the garden and the cars passing intermittently on the way to Ohrid; his eyes shining with frustration. Poor old dedo, waiting all day for news from town, from Australia, from anywhere really, and exclaiming ‘Mashallah!’ if the news is good. Aleks would have to make up some good news and give the old man a call.

He puts J Dilla on the stereo at a low volume.

His hands are huge and hairless, the knuckles scabbed up; they move efficiently, with resolve. He scrubs the stove, then the pan. Streaks of egg and pickled green tomatoes. Then he packs a lunchbox — an apple, a packet of chips, a ham sandwich and an orange juice popper. He sets it on the counter and calls out in Macedonian:

‘Hurry up, sweetheart. Gotta get ta work.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

He moves swiftly, blue bead swinging, and soon the cupboards and marble kitchen top are shining. He proudly observes his kitchen (which he built with his own hands), lights a cigarette and opens the blinds. Aleks can see the whole Town from here, mostly low-lying houses in orange brick or white stucco, with flatblocks in between like dice tumbled randomly from an unseen hand. Everywhere is construction, trucks and scaffolding, and cranes like predatory birds and, winding throughout, the shining body of the river.

The sun whets itself on distant hills and comes in low and mean.

Aleks’ own street curves down a hill in a new part of Town, covered in a scribble of burnt rubber. Several houses down, standing out against the monotony of suburbia, is a phone box with tags all over it, various shades of dripping red and black, Poscas and Molotow flowies. An endless cycle of scrawling and buffing, buffing and re-scrawling — the signatures of generations. He imagines a magic machine stretching out every layer in 2D planes like an accordion.