I'm Dying Here. Damien Broderick

of Ayers Rock to the lair of the Hidden Masters in Tibet. “Ayers Rock” is what we whites used to call Uluru, that big slab of red stone in the middle of the Australian continent that the aborigines revere. The navel of the universe, we were taught. Joe Bannister and I used to snigger and wonder if the arse of the world would fall off if you got a really big fucking Phillips head and unscrewed it. That earned us gentle reprimands and extra hours churning up the slurry for the mud bricks. I didn’t mind that one bit, although it could get cold sloshing in the wet; it was better than learning the sixteen portals of the reptile mutants who secretly ran the world. The Queen of England and the rest of the royal family were among their number. In fact, they and certain other leading Jewish dynas­ties were the world’s leading reptile invaders. I swallowed it all until I was about fourteen, when I was already a bad kid, and then one day I woke up and looked around me at the real world and started shaking my head. I suppose I can’t complain; it gave me a rich line of bullshit for my future careers.

      None of this is what turned me to crime, not directly. That happened when I was twelve and three badly dressed State educa­tion department heavies, one male and two females, visited our classroom and sent in a report that eventually reached the Min­ister. “Damned jackbooted busybodies!” thundered Kundalini Richardson, but it was too late, we were pinched. I spent the next six years at Eltham High, going through culture shock roughly equivalent to a Stone Age Papuan being hijacked and put to work for Amway.

      “Children, we have three new students joining us for class to­day. Stand up, boys. I’ll ask you each to tell us your name, then sit down and open your geography book at page 121, the Principal Imports of Peru. You there, son.”

      I jumped up breezily, grinned around at the class. The other kids had been nervous, scared even. I’m the extroverted type, I knew I was in for heaps of fun.

      “Recherché,” I said loudly.

      Ears pricked up. A ripple of manic joy passed across the class­room, but I was too dumb to understand what it was that had happened.

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “I’m Recherché,” I said, “and this here is my cousin Con, that’s short for Contrapuntal, and this bloke’s—”

      The ripple had became a haze of muttering. Some residue of survival instinct made me stumble into silence. The teacher was a burly youth with hair parted firmly on the left, some hapless bonded victim of the Education Department fated by his contract to penal servitude in the sticks, or near enough. He stepped for­ward and his fists clenched.

      “Are you taking the piss, son? You having a lend of me?”

      I blinked at him. “Eh?”

      “I asked for your name. Just tell us your name.” He consulted a list. “If he’s Con, you’d be Tom, is that right?”

      Triumphant glances were being exchanged across the rows of desks, and a soggy spitball hit me behind the ear. I flinched, rubbed at it, stared around. A fat kid with boils stared at me with hatred. I looked back at the teacher.

      “My name is Recherché Doubting Thomas Purdue,” I said care­fully. “Sometimes Outsiders just call me Tom....” But the room was in uproar. That set the tone for the next few years. One day I’m going to borrow Mauricio’s gun and drive out to Eltham and blow fucking Martin Kundalini Richardson’s noble Alzheimerish head right off his fucking shoulders.

      Share stowed the step ladder in the back of the Cobra, which somehow I’d parked in the brick carport at the side without smashing it. The ladder didn’t fold up as neatly as Mauricio. It stuck straight into the air like some mediaeval torture rack. There was no way we could carry the thing and put the canopy up. I didn’t really feel like uncocooned driving. But there again, maybe the wind in my face would be good for the hangover. Share looked at me with undisguised mistrust.

      “Sure you are up to driving?”

      “No,” I said.

      “Give me the keys.”

      I handed them over meekly.

      §

      For a while Share drove in silence. She was heading East. I fum­bled in the glove box and found a pair of shades and put them on. They cut down the glare a bit, but did nothing for the headache. I decided to take my mind off my condition with some polite con­versation.

      “So what line of work are you in, Share,” I said. Jesus, I must have quizzed her on all this last night over ten kinds of lamb.

      “Christ, Tom, you’ve got a memory like a sieve. Alzheimer’s already? Or did they smack you around the head a bit too much in prison?”

      Fuck, she knew that as well. “Disgraceful, I know. I put it down to the vodka.”

      She shot me a tired look, reconciled to my inadequacies. “In­vestment advice. Risk assessment. Risk management. Financial services. Import/export. That sort of thing.”

      “Sounds interesting,” I said, and my eyes drifted away to the passing street life.

      “Somebody’s got to do it.”

      “Big firm?”

      “Big enough. Just me.”

      “A one woman outfit?”

      “Exactly.”

      “Saving on the secretarial side of things. I do it myself.”

      “Christ no, I’ve got secretaries. Two of them.”

      “A three woman outfit, then.”

      “I don’t think Wozza and Muttonhead would like to hear that.”

      “Wozza?” I said. “Wozza O’Toole? Muttonhead Lamb?” “Those are my men.”

      “They’re your secretaries?”

      “You got problems with that?”

      “I...um...I had occasion to meet Mr. O’Toole once.”

      “Yeah, he told me: Remand yard, Pentridge, 1993.”

      Pentridge. Good god, that brought back memories, and a hun­dred years of scuttlebutt traded by old crims. The great gray ter­rible walls, topped with barbed wire, guard towers with guns at each corner. Jika-Jika, the dreadful hell hole for the worst of men. Gardens where bodies were buried in shallow graves, they said. The place had been closed for years. And now some hungry bas­tards had reopened it as a district of expensive homes. A veritable walled and gated community, Pentridge Village, not five miles from Vinnie’s shop. Lovely view of the Coburg Lake, now they’d removed the razor wire. Fuck, nothing was beyond parody in this day and age.

      “Why are you smiling? Fond memories of your cell in Pentridge?”

      “No. Thinking of Wozza as a secretary, that’d make anyone smile. Bloke couldn’t write his name. Couldn’t add two and two.”

      Share shrugged. “The education system had totally failed him. He was a lost cause from day one at kindergarten.”

      “So, how come...?”

      “You’ve got to do something inside, you should know that. Might as well do a bit of Adult Literacy. Get yourself a cushy bil­let in the prison library, read a few books. Matriculate. Enroll in a TAFE. Get yourself a degree. It impresses the bejesus out of the parole board.”

      “A degree? Wozza?”

      “Bachelor of Information Technology.”

      “Fuck me, all I did in Seattle was lift weights.”

      “Wozza won’t talk down to you, Tom. He’s an egalitarian sort—wears his distinction lightly.”

      “What about Muttonhead?” I said. “You’re not going to tell me

      Muttonhead is now a doctor of semiotics.”

      “No, Mutton’s more your action type.”

      “Standover