Omar Musa: Here Come the Dogs

Down the bottom of the street, a boy is throwing a pair of sneakers over a phone line, sending a gaggle of sulphur-crested cockatoos squawking. A cluster of shoes already there, like grapes on a vine. Aleks smiles, turns and takes a gym bag from the top cupboard, well out of reach of little hands.

‘Come on, Mila!’ he yells.

‘Coming!’

He reaches for a pair of old boots, caked in clay and spattered with paint, and thinks for a second of all the brand-new sneakers in Solomon’s room. As he slips his boots on, he looks through the bedroom door at his wife Sonya, still asleep, her blonde hair halfway across her face. He tiptoes in, bends down to clear her face of hair, then kisses her forehead. She doesn’t wake.

As he ties his laces in the doorway, his daughter appears at his shoulder with a mischievous grin. He wipes a smudge of Vegemite off her cheek then pinches it. She squeals when he tickles her and then bounds out the door ahead of him. ‘Hurry up, Dad.’

‘You should eat ajvar, not that Vegemite crap,’ he says half-heartedly.

He throws the gym bag into the back of his white Hilux with the cans of paint and rollers. It’s suffocatingly hot inside the vehicle and the belt buckle burns his hand when he touches it. ‘ Pitchka ti mater !’ he swears, then immediately looks around to make sure Mila hasn’t heard him. He picks up a stack of CDs, stops to look at the Souls of Mischief one but instead throws on a Tose Proeski album that his cousin Nicko burned for him. These are the rules he has made — Macedonian at home and in the car. Australia, the outside, takes care of teaching her English. He stops at a petrol station to fill up and chats about the World Cup with the owner, an enormous, shaved head Samoan man with big teeth. Aleks has always loved how Islanders can convey so much with a simple arch of the eyebrows. He speaks to the man in a soft, ingratiating voice and claps him tenderly on the shoulder. The man once tried to converse with Solomon in Samoan. Solomon looked like a child and couldn’t answer the simplest questions; how impotent and ashamed he had seemed. Aleks heads back to the car, chewing a Mars Bar.

‘ Tat ?’

‘ Da ?’

‘Mum’s birthday’s coming up.’

‘I know, baby.’

‘Can we go on a holiday? Pleeease?’

He turns his head and sees that her eyes are on him, an unnerving, mirror-like blue. She reminds him of his sister Jana. Aleks passes a hand through his sandy hair, winds down the window and drums his fingers on the side of the door. She’s right — the family needs a holiday. Soon. Somewhere tropical with long beaches and rosewater sunsets where Sonya can have some time to get better. Or maybe even back to Macedonia to see the family. He knows it’s unrealistic, unless he can find a way to earn a lot of cash, quickly.

‘Maybe we could go to Madagascar,’ says Mila.

‘What’s in Madagascar?’

‘Lemurs. Chameleons.’ She says the words in English with a broad Aussie accent. Aleks smiles.

‘You know, you look like a little lemur. Where’s ya tail?’

‘Daaaaad!’

‘All right, all right, relax. I’ll see what I can do. Maybe we can build a raft outta coconuts to get there.’

‘Would that even work?’

‘Well, you won’t know until you try.’ He winks.

‘You’re the best, Dad.’

‘Hey, you know the rules. Macedonian only in the car.’

‘ Da, da .’

A police car drives by and Aleks turns his cheek, his whole body tightening. He’s driving on a suspended licence. Shouldn’t have had that shot in the morning; in fact, he might still be a bit pissed from the night before. He has to be more careful, for his family’s sake.

‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ Mila is cocking her head. Nothing escapes this one.

‘Nothing sweetheart. What are you studying at school today?’ He ruffles her hair.

As she speaks about assignments and the upcoming swimming competition, he passes the courthouse. He sees two people he knows smoking outside, looking uncomfortable in suits. They wave at him as he passes. He gives them the thumbs up.

When he pulls up at the primary school, Mila is already unbuckling her seatbelt. ‘Don’t forget your lunch.’ She kisses him on the cheek and clambers out of the Hilux. He leans across the seat and yells, ‘ Te sakam, Mila !’ She looks back once with those neon-blue eyes and yells back, ‘I love you too, Dad!’ in English. Then she turns and becomes another eight-year-old streaming into the schoolyard. Aleks exhales and opens the glove box. He sifts among the papers and takes out a crumpled packet of durries. There is one left, which he lights. Ahhh. He reaches into his shirt and rolls the bead between his fingers, lets the strap fall over his thumb, middle and index. A thrill goes through him.

‘Goodness me. Fucken lovely,’ he says.

He starts up the engine and drives off. As he drives, he passes an abandoned building that was supposed to be demolished years ago. A yellow crane crouches next to it. He looks up and sees something he painted at the top of the building almost fifteen years ago. Tall, dripping, black letters: ‘Greece is Macedonia,’ and a yellow Vergina Sun next to it. Amazing that it’s still there.

He and Solomon had scaled the heights of the building and twice they nearly fell to certain death. The building had been a general store in the early 1900s and was falling apart. It was two-storeys high and the wooden beams they climbed were rotten, the iron railings rusted. Neither would admit their terror, so they had egged each other on. They had to crawl on their bellies over the corrugated iron, staining their shirts yellow and red, to get a good position to spray-paint the slogan on the streetside wall, starlit.

Solomon had asked what the slogan meant. Aleks tried to explain it the way his father had explained it to him: that Macedonia had been at the centre of a tug-of-war since time immemorial, that heaps of people claimed it didn’t even exist. However, he had found it difficult to explain and had become tongue-tied.

Solomon had shrugged and said, ‘Sounds good to me,’ then started plotting how to rack some tins of paint. They were twelve at the time. Aleks wishes he could explain it to his mate now, properly, but Solomon always seemed so uneasy discussing nationality.

Back then, Jimmy had been too scared to climb, so he stood below and kept watch for cops. Solomon had ridiculed him mercilessly, even though they needed a lookout. Jimmy turned away, and afterward they didn’t see him for two whole days.

No one knew where he’d gone.

Aleks considers Jimmy and Solomon’s relationship to be one predicated on a struggle for power and Jimmy had been born into a losing war. It was bad blood, Aleks was sure of it.

He passes a small block of flats that sits next to the river.

Only derros, alcos and new immigrants living there.

He keeps driving at a leisurely pace. Dead grass, eucalypts, low river, even the empty driveways: all seems bare and hungry from drought. Some gardens have been planted with the drought in mind, and bloom with tough plants like wisteria, sage and bush sarsaparilla, their lilacs and purples slurring in the heat haze. A Christmas beetle drops onto his bonnet.

Aleks is closer to the heart of Town now. On the main street he passes several redbrick pubs from the early 1900s, a small war memorial shaped like an obelisk, a dry fountain and a bronze statue of a bearded man carrying a book. There is a TAB, several kebab shops, charcoal chicken joints and pide houses, and on every block is the scaffolding of construction. He stops the car at a traffic light and an African girl in a hijab crosses the street. They catch eyes. Aleks nods at her but she looks down and keeps walking, books close to her chest.