Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

'Luke just keeps talking about Danny, so I thought,'

'It's OK,' I interrupt, 'I just prefer Dan. Danny was a long time ago.'

His cool grey eyes are questioning but he remains silent.

So I continue. 'Yeah, yeah, I'd like a drink.'

What would it be like to kiss him?

‘This used to be the front entrance, but Dad had it all torn down before we moved in.’

Danny and Martin were on the balcony of Martin’s bedroom. To get there you had to step through the enormous open window, its frame carved from a heavy hardwood painted white, with lead ballasts on either side. There was just enough space on the balcony for four people. Martin pointed to the houses across the street, three- and four-storeyed with front yards as big as football fields. Houses like Martin’s.

‘Most of those houses,’ he said, ‘are owned by Jews. Dad didn’t want us to live on Jew Street so he spent almost as much money as it cost to buy the place knocking down the original walls and putting the entrance on Orrong Road.’

Danny nodded as though he understood what Martin had said, though he didn’t. He thought that there was something obscene in what Martin had just told him. He also thought there was something very stupid in what Mr Taylor had done, something wasteful and ignorant. It was more information he would have to keep from his parents; his father would rant and rave, his mother would shake her head and say, How awful . And of course he would have to keep it from Demet, who would go spare. Fucking racists . He could hear her saying it. He blocked it all out. Demet and his mother and his father were in the other world. It was like his two worlds were parts of different jigsaw puzzles. At first, he’d tried to fit the pieces together but he just couldn’t do it, it was impossible. So he kept them separate: some pieces belonged on this side of the river, to the wide tree-lined boulevards and avenues of Toorak and Armadale, and some belonged to the flat uniform suburbs in which he lived.

Martin pointed to a house across the street with what looked like castle turrets on each corner, and with two tall liquidambar trees in the front yard through which Danny could see the Yarra River. ‘That’s Jacob Latter’s house,’ Martin said. ‘Ugly, isn’t it?’

Jacob was a Jew. Sometimes the boys at school would tease him and say, ‘Hey, Jacob, can you smell gas?’ If Demet were to hear them she would be furious: it was all politics now with Demet, all New World Order and Srebrenica and Arafat selling out the Palestinians on the White House lawn. She’d say that the boys who teased Jacob at school were rich racist scum. But it wasn’t like that, he knew, it was just something that happened at a boys school, you just mocked and teased and joked. Like in the showers when Scooter would joke about being careful not to drop the soap around Tsitsas or when they said to Luke, ‘We’ll-have-six-spling-lolls-and-one-sweet-and-sour-pork-and-two-flied-lice.’ It was no different to Demet and Yianni calling him a skip or a bogan, or calling Boz a blackfella or Shelley a curry muncher or Mia a Leb. It was no different, but he couldn’t get the pieces to fit, they wouldn’t go together. He couldn’t explain it.

There was a knock on Martin’s door and a soft voice called, ‘Where are you?’

‘Out here.’

Emma, Martin’s sister, stepped over the window frame and almost fell on Danny, then steadied herself on the balcony rail. In the cramped space their bodies had to touch. Danny and Martin were shoulder to shoulder. Danny stepped back from the rail, anxious about getting too close to Emma. He was sure he reeked of chlorine. He thought Emma was the most dazzling creature he had ever seen. Her blonde hair was cut short, which made her blindingly blue eyes seem enormous. She was wearing a man’s oversized white shirt with the top two buttons undone. Her neck was pale, flawless; he tried to avoid looking there, near the second undone button where the plump swell of her breasts began. Emma was two years older than he was, had just started university. She was not only the most beautiful girl he had ever seen but also the smartest. The first time he’d visited the Taylors’ house, Martin had showed Danny her bedroom and he couldn’t believe how many books she owned — a whole wall of bookcases, books on the floor, a book lying open on the bed, a stack of books on her bureau, on her dressing-room table. It was like a library, her room: everywhere you looked there were books. ‘Emma reads all the time,’ Martin had said to him, and the way he said it made it sound shameful, like something wrong. Demet would have loved Emma’s room, as would Luke. Emma and Luke and Demet should meet, but the pieces just didn’t fit.

Emma smiled at him. ‘I’m really glad you’re coming with us, Danny.’

‘Me too,’ Danny blurted out, but it came out as an indecipherable grunt. It felt as though he had something stuck in his throat.

Martin smirked. ‘She likes you, Dan.’

Emma rolled her eyes and said, effortlessly cutting, ‘Marty, you’re so childish. I don’t know why you hang around with him, Danny.’ She sighed and looked out across the skyline of gabled rooftops and transplanted European trees. ‘God, I have to get out of Toorak. Living here is like private school continuing all your life.’

Martin glowered at her. ‘What’s wrong with Toorak?’

She turned to Danny, smiling. ‘Go on, tell him what’s wrong with Toorak.’

Danny didn’t know what to say, what was expected of him. Was it a trick question, a challenge, a plea, a joke? Toorak was the most expensive suburb in Melbourne: was that what she wanted him to say? But everyone knew that. The more confused he was around her, the more entranced with her he became. He wondered what her skin would be like to touch, what her breasts would feel like. He thought, I am an astronaut and she is another planet. He thought, Is that childish? Toorak was also another planet. He didn’t answer and Emma turned her back on him.

Somehow, he couldn’t exactly work it out, but from that dismissive turn, he knew he had failed her.

‘Are you packed? Mum wants to head off soon.’

‘Yeah, we’re packed.’

We’re packed. He liked that Martin included him straightaway, instinctively. Martin and Danny — it was now nearly always Martin and Danny. At school, in the pool, it was now all Kelly and Taylor. All the boys knew, assumed it. Kelly and Taylor, mates. They were going to the beach, to another Taylor house, to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Emma and Martin’s grandmother. Martin could have invited Wilco or Fraser — his family had known theirs forever — but Danny was the one to be invited. Wilco hadn’t complained, Fraser hadn’t said a word. It was Martin and Danny, that was how it was.

Emma pulled a packet of cigarettes out of her jeans pocket. She was about to put one in her mouth when Martin shook his head. ‘You can’t smoke up here, the smoke will go into my room.’

‘I’ll shut the window.’

‘I don’t want your filthy cancerous smoke in my face.’

Emma licked a finger and raised it. ‘The wind’s coming from the north,’ she announced, and gently pushed Danny to one side so she could get to the other end of the balcony. ‘I’ll make sure not to exhale in your faces.’ She lit her cigarette and Martin shut his window with a bang.

‘You’re a cow.’

Emma blew smoke into his face.

She had perfect skin, thought Danny, they both had skin like the surface of milk. Martin’s skin would be rough and Emma’s skin would be soft. That would be the only difference.