Luck in the Greater West by Damian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

hard. His kisses made her roll away. She was lying face down now, and he climbed on top of her. He tried to insert himself but she closed her legs. He left the room and jerked himself to a quick orgasm in the toilet.
    The evidence was too much throughout the house. People and carpet, both lying lumpy, smelt of beer. Helen was awake and testing cans for dregs.
    He took her out into the backyard where they climbed the old ghost gum and watched the sun threaten over the steel and tile. And magpies talked of the coming day.
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    The flat was on the ground floor and had a small courtyard. Easy to break into. Not that his things were worth a forced pane or broken glass. His possessions had been kept by the Public Trustees Office while he was away — released to him by paying a tax — and no longer felt they were his. They had the smell of the not-too-distant past though, which came back in intensely short gusts. He set his things up — spacing them evenly through the one room. The mattress, the foam two-seater, the three drawers, the low table, the portable telly and its cousin, the portable stereo.
    He’d also gone back into business. He’d been offered five ounces of head on credit, and a few days later, two ounces of goey. For a drug dealer, living in Brunei was like having a souvenir shop at the airport outside the JAL terminal.
    Ronnie had also lent him the use of an unregistered VB Commodore to run around in. The rectangle of yellow new-growth grass where the car had been almost permanently stalled was too poignant for Whitey as they rolled the freshly-jumpedHolden onto the street. Would going back to his life before prison burn him, the way it had before, the way the sun had laid waste to the grass outside the shade of the Commodore? He didn’t want to think about it. But things were rolling.

FIVE
    Sonja lay on the grass, letting it etch into the back of her thighs. She put her arm over her eyes, making the inside of her elbow fit snugly over the bridge of her nose, to shield them from the lunchtime sun. She disappeared from the sun, from the other students, from time.
    She heard the grass telling her of an approach. She lifted her sun-sealed arm but her eyelids knew better and strained in a shaky protest.
    â€”Hey, someone said.
    Sonja sat up, into the wood of someone’s skull and dropped back onto the now hard and indifferent grass.
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    Sonja vomited into the plastic bucket. A boy was already on the sickbay bed, so Sonja sat hunched in the vinyl chair. The boy whose head had knocked her down looked into the doorway.
    â€”It was a mistake, he said. I thought you were someone else. My head got hurt too.
    The deputy principal called him into the office.
    â€”We’ve called your mother, the office lady said. She’ll be ’ere when she can get ’ere, she told us.
    Sonja worried how her mother would get to the school. They didn’t have a car. And she was sure she wouldn’t know the way anyway. It had been her father who’d enrolled them. But the worry was thick and numb, unlike the usual sharpness that accompanied anxiety concerning her family. She’d forgotten twice now why she was in the sickbay. And she felt sleepy. But then that hotness would spurt up, making her vomit and vomit. She dreamed for a while, about the sickbay and the school office, and the orchard beyond. How it went neglected, while the dramas echoed through the halls and offices.
    â€”Sonja. Your mother’s come for you, the office lady said, shaking her too hard.
    And her mother was before her. With a man. A young man. An absolutely beautiful young man. He was nervous, and dressed in that shabby, heavily faded, Aussie way, but not the deliberate way the boys here tried for. His clothes were his. He was boyish and slouching, but she could see something manly in his out-of-place stance — he wasn’t trying to cover up his nervousness by acting tough like a teenager. What was he