Boy Swallows Universe. Trent Dalton

opens in Father Monroe’s living room.

      ‘Hey, hey, what are you doing?’ Father Monroe bellows through a half-open window.

      ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I urge.

      Father Monroe opens his front door and steams down his pathway to his gate.

      ‘Get off my car!’ he screams.

      ‘Fuck,’ Darren says, leaping off the back of the car.

      Father Monroe reaches his car and sees the samurai sword twanging back and forth, its mystical shaft speared inexplicably through the top of the parked car.

      Darren turns around at a safe distance, joyously waving around the Vietnamese cock he’s pulled from his pants.

      ‘Just ten dong for this donger, Father!’ he screams.

      *

      Still night air and two boys smoking on a gutter. Stars up there. A cane toad down here has been flattened by a car tyre on the bitumen road a metre from my right foot. Its pink tongue has exploded from its mouth so it looks like the toad was flattened halfway through eating a raspberry lolly snake.

      ‘Sucks, doesn’t it?’ Darren says.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Growing up thinking you were with the good guys, when all along you were running with the bad guys.’

      ‘I’m not running with the bad guys.’

Darren shrugs. ‘We’ll see,’ he says. ‘I remember when I first found out Mum was in the game. Cops burst through our door when we were living over in Inala. Turned the place upside down. I was seven years old and I shit my pants. I mean, I actually shit my pants.’

      The cops stripped Bich Dang naked, threw her against fibro walls, smashed household items with relish. Darren was watching The Partridge Family on a large National television that detectives tipped over looking for drugs.

      ‘It was fuckin’ mad, stuff breaking everywhere, Mum screaming at them, kicking her legs, scratchin’ ’em and shit. They dragged Mum away out the front door and left me alone on the floor of the lounge room crying like a bitch, huge big dump in my dacks. I was so stunned I just sat watching that Partridge mum talking to her kids upside down on the telly.’

      I shake my head.

      ‘That’s insane,’ I say.

      ‘That’s the game,’ Darren shrugs. ‘’Bout two years later Mum gave it to me straight. We were key players. I felt like you’re feeling now.’

      He says this sinking feeling inside me is the realisation that I’m with the bad guys but I’m not the baddest of the bad guys.

      ‘The baddest guys just work for you,’ he says.

      Paid killers, humourless and mad, he says. Ex-army, ex-prison, ex-human. Single men in their thirties and forties. Mysterious bastards, weirder than the kind who squish avocadoes between their fingers at fruit and veg markets. The kind who will squeeze a man’s neck until it squishes. All the villains operating between the cracks of this quiet city. Thieves and cons and men who rape and kill children. Assassins, of a kind, but not the kind we love from The Octagon. These men wear flip-flops and Stubbies shorts. They stab people not with samurai swords but with the knives they use to slice Sunday roast when their widowed mothers drop in. Suburban psychopaths. Darren’s mentors.

      ‘They don’t work for me,’ I say.

‘Well, they work for your dad,’ Darren says.

      ‘He’s not my dad.’

      ‘Oh, forgot, sorry. Where’s your real dad?’

      ‘Bracken Ridge.’

      ‘He good?’

      Everybody wants to measure the adult men in my life by goodness. I measure them in details. In memories. In the times they said my name.

      ‘Never found out,’ I say. ‘What’s with you and men being good?’

      ‘Never met a good one, that’s all,’ he says. ‘Adult men, Tink. Most fucked-up creatures on the planet. Don’t ever trust ’em.’

      ‘Where’s your real dad?’ I ask.

      Darren stands up from the gutter, spits a jet of saliva through gritted teeth.

      ‘He’s right where he should be,’ he says.

      *

      We walk back down Darren’s driveway, resume our places at the edge of the trampoline. Lyle and Bich are still deep into a seemingly endless conversation.

      ‘Don’t sweat it, man,’ Darren says. ‘You just won the lottery. You’ve landed smack bang inside a growth industry. The market for that shit up there in the ice box never dies.’

Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation’s inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.

      ‘Ten, twenty years, I’ll own three-quarters of Darra, maybe half of Inala, a good chunk of Richlands,’ Darren says.

      ‘How?’

      ‘Expansion, Tink,’ he says, eyes wide. ‘I got plans. This area won’t always be the city’s shithole. Some day, man, all these houses round here will be worth somethin’ and I’ll buy ’em all when they’re worth nothin’. And the gear is like that too. Time and place, Tink. That gear up there ain’t worth shit in Vietnam. Put it on a boat and sail it to Cape York, it turns to gold. It’s like magic. Stick it in the ground and let it sit for ten years, it’ll turn to diamond. Time and place.’

      ‘How come you don’t talk this much in class?’

      ‘There’s nothing I’m passionate about in class.’

      ‘Dealing drugs is your passion?’

      ‘Dealing? Fuck that. Too much heat, too many variables. We’re strictly imports. We don’t make deals. We just make arrangements. We let you Aussies do the real dirty work of putting it on the street.’

      ‘So Lyle’s doing your dirty work?’

      ‘No,’ Darren says. ‘He’s doing Tytus Broz’s dirty work.’

      Tytus Broz. The Lord of Limbs.

      ‘Hey, a man’s gotta work, Tink.’

Darren puts his arm around my shoulder.

      ‘Listen, I never thanked you for not ratting on me about Jabba,’ he says. He laughs. ‘You didn’t rat about the rat.’

      The school groundsman, Mr McKinnon, marched me by the collar to the principal’s office. Mr McKinnon was too blind, or too blind drunk, to identify the two boys who were intending to slice my right forefinger off with a machete.

      All McKinnon could say was, ‘One of ’em was Vietmanese.’ And that could have been half our school. It wasn’t out of loyalty that I didn’t name names,