Where There's Smoke

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

Book: Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. Read Free Book Online
Authors: Black Inc.
her up.’
    â€˜Nothing you could have done. She was on edge the whole time.’ After my last chance, I’m now eager to speak. ‘Probably junk too. And those friends of hers – in Footscray.’ ‘What?’ His brow creases. ‘Nah, I meant Mum.’ He looks at me curiously for a second, then scoffs at himself. ‘Though her too, I guess.’
    I recall a story Baby told me during her last visit, how a friend of hers in detention had collapsed from withdrawal; the male guards had grabbed her, double-cuffed her, stuck a motorbike helmet on her head for two days so she couldn’t ‘hurt herself.’
    â€˜Mum still going up to that temple?’
    He’d come back from jail and I’d fantasised about receiving his confidences. He’d copped the time for both of us – knowing, surely, that I would’ve done the same. But he hadn’t grown more open at all. Nor the couple of other times he’d visited. Only this time seemed different. This was the most communicative I’d ever seen him.
    â€˜In Sunshine? I think so.’ He doesn’t react, so I go on, ‘I think once she ran into one of the families there. I heard one of them spat in her face.’
    He nods absently. ‘And you? You okay?’
    The side-stepped directness of his question stuns me. I saunter my arm out along the view. ‘What’s not to be okay about?’
    â€˜Listen,’ he says. ‘Can I ask you something?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜That stuff Mum said about you doing talks.’
    â€˜It’s nothing. Just uni stuff.’ I feel myself smirking. ‘They just need someone with slanty eyes who can speak in their language.’
    â€˜What sort of stuff do you say?’
    â€˜You know – just whatever they wanna hear.’
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Like poverty, or language issues. Cultural marginalisation …’
    â€˜They don’t ask about what happened that night?’
    â€˜You mean do I talk about you.’
    He shakes his head impatiently. He’s working himself up to something and it puts me on edge. ‘I mean, don’t they ask why? Why I did it? I mean, isn’t all the rest of it bullshit?’
    â€˜Why we did it. I was there too.’
    â€˜Yeah,’ he says, visibly annoyed at having been interrupted. ‘You’re right. I forget. I’m sorry.’ I wait for him to go on but now I’ve mucked up his thinking. ‘It’s all bullshit,’ he says again, struggling to recall his argument, and out of some old fraternal deference I find myself looking away. I listen to the frogs gulping for air down by the rushes. The black ducks and reed warblers. My heart is beating harder and harder. I know, of course, what he’s referring to – it’s the same thing that brings him here each time, then each time strikes him silent: the mind-boggling bullshit of me , years on, still with nothing but time, still cashing in, ever more deeply, on his time. Those twelve bullshit years piled on the back of a single night’s spur of the moment. That night, too, I’d felt the same sick, heady exhilaration talking to him like this – like we were friends.
    â€˜You’re shaking,’ he had pointed out. We’d made it home and both showered; he’d scrubbed his face, I noticed, until it was bright pink. The corners of his temple lined with delicate blue veins.
    â€˜I can’t piss. My bladder feels heavy as, but nothing comes out.’
    He’d frowned, then reached out and clutched my neck with one of his strong pink hands. I knew the strength of those hands. My stomach hitched. He didn’t say anything, and at the physical contact I was shuddered back to our surreal, silent trip in the car; the fog descending upon the freeway canyons, the red blinking lights of radio towers blooming like blood corollas in the mist. The streets had sucked us through the city and

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