Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. Read Free Book Online

him around. Almost like he’s scared of you or something. Like you’ve got something on him – the way you’ve got something on me – ‘cos that’s what you do, right, Big T? Spy on everyone? Get all the dirt?’
    As she spoke, the space inside the hatchback seemed to shrink. It was as though everything real, dimensional, was happening here, inside, while the windows were actually screens broadcasting a program of outside movement and colour. In this enclosure I became acutely aware of her smell – sweat from where her body had kneaded the seat, the chemical tang of her shampoo.
    Without thinking I reached for her.
    She flinched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she coughed, then, somewhat unsteadily, she undid her seatbelt, leaned forward, and peeled her cardigan off. I realised her cheeks were wet. I didn’t know what I wanted. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, and offered both her naked arms to me. She was sobbing now, quietly. And then I saw what it was she was trying to show me. The two dark mottled bands around her wrist, and two more around her biceps. The bruises yellow and orange and green, and myself enraptured and repulsed by them. The rot and ripe of them. Most strangely, I felt myself powerfully flushed with a sense that I only much later recognised – and ultimately accepted – as betrayal.
    I told my brother a friend had seen her go into the ex’s house. I told him to ask her himself. I told him – thinking he’d be happy to hear it – that this ex was gearing up for a major attack against the Footscray crew. I told him my source was unimpeachable.
    *
    The afternoon, finally, is cooling down when Thuan returns. He catches me half-naked in the kitchen. ‘I’ve washed up in plenty of kitchen sinks,’ he assures me. He’s carrying a slab of Carlton Bitter under one arm and holding a supermarket bag in the other. ‘Meat,’ he explains, ‘for the barbie.’
    â€˜Where’d you go?’
    He ignores me, sets the bag down, rips a couple of cans out of their tight plastic trap. When he throws me a beer I realise it’s exactly what I feel like. The rest of the cans he tips into an esky. By silent consensus we head outside and sit on the deck. Through the gums and melaleucas, the thick pelt of scrub and sedge along its banks, the river is light brown, slow, milky. This river that famously flows upside down. The day’s heat hangs in the air but is no longer suffocating. The brightness no longer angry. We finish the beers, and then the next ones, and the next. I hadn’t realised how thirsty I was. He tells me he walked along the river, up to the falls. He saw kayakers there, rehearsing their moves, and uni students doing water tests. He stops, losing interest in his own story. I picture the concrete-capped, rubbish-choked weir, the graffitied basalt boulders, all dominated by the Eastern Freeway roaring overhead. I wonder whether it brought to his mind another river – the same river – running beside and below a different freeway. I wonder whether, when he stares out at this river now, he connects it to that other river a few Ks dead south of here; if he follows it, in his mind’s eye, through its windings and loops, through Collingwood, and Abbotsford, and Richmond, and Burnley – to South Yarra.
    He throws me another beer. The barbeque is all but forgotten. I’m getting a bit dreamy with alcohol, my mind draggling in the heat.
    â€˜So what’s going on with you anyway?’
    â€˜What?’ I say, even though I heard him. I have no idea why I said this. I start to audition sentences to make my answer over but this only affirms the silence. My brother snorts, then hoists his drink in a wry toast. I skol my can, stand up and torpedo it into the bush. I’ll pick it up later. A pair of rowers glance at us from the river and wave.
    â€˜Jesus,’ my brother says, ‘I really screwed