Christos Tsiolkas - Barracuda

Elena walked towards them, munching on a pie from the Vietnamese bakery. She stopped at their table. 'Are you watching the opening ceremony tonight?'

Elena, she just blurted out statements or questions, as if she resented having to speak. Even now she wasn't looking at anyone, was asking questions of the car park.

'Yeah,' said Bennie. 'We're watching it at my place. You wanna come?'

Dan looked down at his hands, examining the paper cut he'd got that morning, slicing open cardboard boxes. He hadn't told the guys that he wasn't going. There was no way he was going to watch that fucking opening ceremony.

Elena still hadn't answered, she was munching on her pie, looking out at the car park.

'What time should we rock over?'

Bennie shrugged at Omar's question. 'Seven, I guess. That's when it starts. Yeah, nah, come at six-thirty.'

Dan's finger throbbed, the pain insidious but relentless. He knew he'd be feeling the subtle pain for days.

'OK,' said Elena.

Bennie made a face, making Omar snicker.

'OK what?' Herc asked.

'OK, I'll come.' Elena wiped pastry crumbs off her work shirt and walked away.

When she was just out of earshot, Bennie leaned into the table and whispered, 'Lard arse.' That made Omar snort again.

Dylan lit a cigarette. 'I like a bit of flesh on a girl's arse,' he said, not bothering to whisper. 'Fat arses and fat tits, that's what I like.'

'No way.' Bennie looked disgusted. 'I like my bitches slim, I don't want any fat on them.'

Dylan blew smoke in his direction. 'That's not a bitch, Bennie, mate. That's called a guy.'

Omar nearly fell off his chair from laughing.

Dan got up, checked the time on his phone. 'I'm going back.'

Bennie had lit another cigarette, and he held it up. 'I'm going to finish this.'

Dan heard them laughing as he walked across the car park to the Safeway entrance. He knew it couldn't be true, but it always felt as though they had to be laughing at him.

Everyone asked Dan, So what are you going to do? They meant after working at Safeway; they were really asking, When will youget a real job? He usually answered that he was taking a year or two off to save some money and that he'd start studying in the new year. If they persisted and asked him what he was going to study, he just made it up. I'm thinking electrical engineering. Or, I'm considering health sciences . Or, Maybe communications . Usually they didn't ask anything more after that; it seemed to be enough that he was thinking about a future.

What he would have really liked to answer was the following: I like working at the supermarket, I like packing shelves and I like being in the stockroom. He didn't much like working the registers, and he hated stocktake, but that was only twice a year. Overall, he enjoyed his job.

Dan knew he could never say that to Demet, or Martin, or Luke. They were all at uni, Luke and Martin at Melbourne, Demet at La Trobe. To them, working at a supermarket was something tangential to life: for it to ever be at the centre of life was unfathomable. But for Dan it was their worlds that were unreal.

He liked his job, he liked the people he worked with, he liked that he could disappear into what he was doing, that sometimes hours could pass and he'd been lost in a task, stripping tape off boxes, checking off items on stocklists, stacking and neatening up the shelves. A job is a job, said Demet. At least you can save money , encouraged Luke. Are they all brain dead there? asked Martin.

His mother found course information for him. His father asked whether he'd thought about what he'd like to do in the long term. Dan knew that they were ashamed of him. From time to time, when some manager was telling him off for getting an order wrong or some impatient rude customer was abusing him because the yogurt was past its use-by date, he realised that if his friends or family had seen it, they would have been ashamed for him.

What's new? he thought. What difference does it make?

He was in aisle eight, stacking tins of soup on the shelf. Each tin carried the Olympic logo and the words S ydney Olympics 2000 .

'Aussie Aussie Aussie,' muttered Dan, 'Oi Oi Oi.'

They were the real brain dead. The ones who kept screaming, Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi .

He'd asked for a double shift, he wanted to work tonight. But Jim, the floor manager, had smiled at him and said, 'Nah, mate, it's the opening ceremony tonight. You don't have to work, there's enough part-timers to carry the load, don't worry about it.' Then, all grey hair and sour smoker's breath, Jim had winked and said, 'Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi.'

He should have insisted, he should be working tonight.

At the end of the shift, Bennie called out from behind the tobacco counter, 'See you tonight, Dan.'

'Yeah,' said Dan. 'See you then.' There was no way he'd be going.

As he left work he felt the phone vibrate in his pocket. It was Demet.

'Howya doin'?' he answered.

'All good. How was work?' Demet's voice had changed. She didn't run her words together anymore. She didn't call people cunts anymore. Now she said she had problems with the word cunt . She said it was sexist. She said many words were sexist, and if not sexist, they were racist, and if not racist, they were het-er-o-NORM-a-tive, a word he always had to spell out in his head to remember. He could never remember what it meant but he assumed it had to be bad.

Demet didn't want to know about work.

'What's up?' he asked.

He knew her well enough to catch the hesitation. 'Luke and I were wondering if you wanted to meet up tonight? We'll be at a pub near his place, the Curry Hotel in Collingwood, in Wellington Street. You know it?'

It kicked. It was irrational and foolish but it hurt that she had spoken to Luke before him. Luke and Demet were always speaking now, seeing bands together, arguing about politics and books and films and music. It stung too that they knew all those pubs and bars and caf's, all over town. He hadn't known there were so many of them.

'OK. I'll find it.'

He knew that they had been discussing him, that they were concerned for him. He should have been grateful that they wanted to be with him, that they wanted to take care of him tonight. But he can hear it in her hesitation. All of that was out of pity.

'Cool, we're getting there at seven.'

She'd hung up before he could ask who we were. He hoped it meant just Demet and Luke.

Dan checked the screen. There was a missed call from Luke, a message from Regan. He texted Luke that he'd organised tonight with Demet.

He looked at the message from his sister. Theo is wetting his pants about 2nite. RU home? It was a question but it wasn't. He put the phone back in his pocket. He didn't text back, he didn't call.

The wind had ice in it, and it whipped across his neck and his exposed forearms. If he were to walk faster, he would have warmed up. But Dan loved the walk home, the forty-five minutes it took to leave the Safeway, to walk past the Catholic cathedral on Bell Street and cross into the market through the Chinese grocery on High Street. He never wanted to rush it. He loved squeezing past the cluttered aisles of tinned food, the wall of refrigerators full of cuts of meat he couldn't identify and trays of misshapen frozen dumplings. He walked to the back, passed through the orange plastic strips hanging over the door to keep the flies away; and though he did it three or four times a week no one in the store paid him the slightest attention. The orange strips of plastic slid over his shoulders and Dan waited for a forklift to pick up two large crates of Japanese aubergines before he crossed into the hangar-like space of the market itself. He could smell oranges, the sharp aroma of ripening fruit, and a rich bouquet of parsley and coriander, the Vietnamese mint and the basil. He dodged the shoppers who were picking through the fruit, inspecting the herbs for deficiencies, a skill Dan was convinced he would never learn, he thought it must be a talent that had come from migration; he didn't know anyone Aussie born who had that skill. He shifted sideways to avoid a veiled African woman bearing down on the shop counter with a bag of okra. He walked past a vendor selling potato cakes, chips and bratwurst hot dogs, and was tempted to stop, the smells igniting hunger. Better watch it, mate, you're getting a belly. He wouldn't stop. It had been three days since he'd gone running.