Omar Musa: Here Come the Dogs

When he gets home, his wife is just waking up.

Pure bogan, this one. Trying to act all classy. Look atter, ay.

Against an enormous map of the world, the woman pouts, all blonde hair and bleached teeth. Jimmy examines her nose keenly. Pinched, upturned. Unconsciously, he touches his own hawkish nose, then runs a hand over his ponytail. Here, in the City, it’s public servant land, where people get paid big bucks for doing fuck all, where a sign pointing to a national institution can be found next to a sign for plastic surgery. The vain and the bored. Jimmy should know. He’s worked in a call centre in the public service ever since high school and he sees it every day. The more money earned, the more capacity to trade insecurities for even more illusions. The buildings reflect it, too — trendy new bars and coffee shops striving to mimic the styles of Melbourne but falling just short. They should chuck a nuke into the whole place.

‘Nice scarf.’ He smiles. ‘Where’s it from?’

She touches the blue silk protectively and doesn’t smile back. ‘I’m not sure. Um. Milan,’ she decides.

‘So how does the trip go again?’ Jimmy puts on his work voice, clipped and professional.

She sighs. ‘Okay, like I said last week, you’ll fly into LAX. Then to JFK. Then back to LAX. Then Apia, Samoa. Then back here.’

‘Great.’

‘You wanna put down a deposit this time?’ The corner of her mouth twitches.

‘Yep, yep, just ah, gotta make a call to my bank.’

She sighs again. This is a game they play at least once a week. Jimmy stares at the map of the world, focusing on the blue span of the Pacific, the neat lines delineating territories, and he can just make out the name: Samoa. Samoa — such an awesome ring to it. He remembers his stepfather’s descriptions of the wind singing off the sea, alive with guitar music and salt and smoke, of the laughter of families bouncing in the flatbed of trucks, of the sun setting on the western tip of Savai’i, leaving a blood-red trail on the sea. ‘God created those islands especially for the people of Samoa, James.’

One day, soon, Jimmy was gonna go there. If his lazycunt brother wasn’t gonna get off his arse and do it, to pay homage to his own dad, then Jimmy would do it. Hit the sandy roads in search of a village called Fagamalo. Or maybe even seek out that real father of his and find some answers. Steady now. All he has to do is work and wait. In the meantime, it’s fun to imagine he’s about to escape this shithole once and for all, and to talk to the hot travel agent bitch. There’s fuck-all other customers, and she’s bored as, like everyone else, so she plays the game for shits and giggles. Jimmy wonders if his breath is stale from the morning shift at the call centre. He sees a wisp of hair dislodge from her tight blonde bun. Her name tag says Hailee.

‘Hey. you into cars at all?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she says uncertainly, as if he’s asking a trick question. ‘Why?’

‘Check this out.’ He finds a picture on his phone and hands it to her. It is a 1967 Dodge Coronet, fire-engine red, white interior. His stepfather loved that car — it was one of the few material things Jimmy ever saw him covet. ‘I’m gonna buy it soon.’

She looks at it warily. ‘Sure. I mean, really?’

‘Yep, just saving up.’

She tilts it back and forward, as if it were a hologram. ‘Looks good. I prefer sports cars, though. My ex-boyfriend had a Corvette.’

His stomach lurches, but, thinking of what Solomon would do, Jimmy nods calmly and smiles. ‘Ah, you’d change your mind if you saw it in person.’

She smiles back, for the first time. ‘Maybe. Anything’s possible, I guess.’

He brightens, then says spontaneously. ‘Hey. when d’you get off work?’

‘Why?’

‘Just wondering.’

‘Five.’

‘Wanna grab a drink sometime?’

‘With you?’

‘Ah. Yeh.’

‘No. I’ve got a boyfriend.’ She smiles, relishing it.

‘Oh righto. just asking.’ His voice falls into its normal cadence, rising at the end of the sentence. ‘Um, I better get going, ay.’

‘No worries. Say hi to Solomon for me.’

Solomon? What the fuck?

She looks at him, still smiling, but her eyes are impenetrable, looking just past his shoulder. What the fuck is she thinking? Maybe he doesn’t want to know. He looks away, then back with hatred. He wants to grab her face and make her look right at him, magically change her opinion of him somehow, make her see him in a fresh light.

She looks puzzled then a little bit scared, and says, ‘We’ll arrange those tickets for you soon, James.’

Jimmy tries to steady his breathing as he leaves. Walking to the bus interchange, he counts numbers in his head, from ten to one, breathing slowly. Then he repeats the Bruce Willis line from Pulp Fiction — ‘They keep underestimating you, Butch.’

They keep underestimating you, Jimmy.

Seven bucks twenty for a half-hour bus ride over the state border. Fucken extortion. One buck, two bucks, three bucks, four. One buck, two bucks, three bucks, more.

‘There you go, mate,’ he says. The bus driver grunts and takes the shrappers. This same bloke has given the boys shit since they were eight years old and looks exactly the same — aviator shades, spade-shaped beard. He tears off the ticket and slaps it in Jimmy’s palm without a word. There can’t be a group of people in society as cuntish as bus drivers. Parking inspectors maybe.

‘Yeh, you’re welcome, ya fucken thief,’ Jimmy mumbles.

‘What’s that, mate?’

‘Have a good day, buddy,’ Jimmy says brightly.

The man growls and the engine growls louder. Jimmy sits down a few seats in front of two loud bogans, who are wasted at two p.m., slurping on longies. One of them says ‘right?’ at the end of every sentence and pronounces it ‘rawt’. Jimmy thinks he used to work with one of them at the fried chicken shop.

The bus has air con, thank fuck, the cool air edged with cigarettes and body odour. It dries his temple sweat. On the back of the seat in front of him love memorandums and Aboriginal flags are scratched into the metal. In Wite-Out someone has scrawled a picture of a man aiming a gun at a woman with huge tits. Then he realises the barrel of the gun is a cock, veins and all, and the balls are grenades.

He starts to scratch it off with his thumb. As he does so, he looks out the window and sees Solomon’s girlfriend Georgie handing out flyers, wearing a headwrap. Georgie is a bit of a pain in the arse, going on about women’s rights and refugees all the time; but Jimmy doesn’t mind her, unlike Aleks. Jimmy remembers her once saying, ‘I never go out with white guys. It’s so boring — Australia just doesn’t have any culture .’ She’s from a well-to-do farming family from western New South Wales and it’s obvious to everyone (Solomon included) that Georgie is just slumming it with Solomon, having her fling with a big Islander bloke before she settles with some white cunt with a dog and a law degree. Jimmy thinks of the word white and wonders.

Maybe if he got a hot girlfriend, it’d prove to everyone that he’s not a shit cunt. But how to make it happen? Chicks like cars, don’t they? The travel agent was just playing hard to get, surely — a bit of persistence would pay off. What was it Solomon always said? ‘Boyfriends are just details.’ Jimmy knows he’s none of the things his half-brother is: brawny or charismatic. But he knows he’s resourceful. And determined as fuck.

The bogans are getting louder. Jimmy can smell alcohol vapours from his seat, even though his back is turned.

‘Johnno sold his Holden, rawt. Got a pretty decent price too, ae . Now he has wunna them Chink cars, rawt.’