Riggs Crossing (10 page)

Chapter 27

Lucy Grubb was in the news again. It’s getting close to her trial date, and some news commentator is talking about the ‘class resentment’ that this case has exposed. In America, the working classes are getting tired of waiting on and being abused by the snotty upper classes. People are wearing shirts that say ‘White Trash’, with the imprint of a tyre tread printed over the top. Someone started a website called www.nukethehamptons.com, because The Hamptons is where rich people like Lucy Grubb go on holiday when they feel like tearing around in their four-wheel drives and running over people for a laugh. Somebody else started a website that has a computer game of Lucy driving a car. You get points for each pedestrian that you run over.

How can I check out this website?

Lyyssa has the internet in her office, but she wouldn’t be game to let me use it unless she watched over my shoulder. And even if they got us new computers and hooked up the internet, they’d install Net Nanny or find some way to spy on what sites we’d visited. There are internet cafés, but there’s other stuff I’d rather spend my pocket money on.

The computers in the library are crap. They used to work even though they were old, but then some kid named Dirk who’s not here anymore went postal because Lyyssa caught him getting into gay porn sites and banned him from the computer room. I heard Bindi and Cinnamon talking about it one day in the kitchen; I was reading in the dining room and they didn’t know I was listening. Dirk broke the lock on the door to the library and started kicking towers and throwing monitors around. Supposedly this Dirk was in the Refuge because they caught him living with some bent priest who was molesting him. You’d think gay porn would be the last thing he’d want to see. Anyway, Lyyssa called the police and the do-gooder squad, and Dirk was taken away.

‘So now he’s right back where he was, renting his arse at the Wall,’ Cinnamon laughed. ‘I saw him on my way to perform at a bucks’ night.’ Cinnamon’s full of it. She’s been under curfew ever since she’s been here, so how would she see Dirk at the Wall?

‘No
way.
Dirk isn’t renting
his
pretty little arse at the Wall anymore,’ Bindi said, all full of herself at knowing something Cinnamon didn’t. ‘He’s eighteen now. He camped at some old fag’s place, bought some clothes, started going to the gym and now he’s a high-class rent boy.’

Bindi’s full of it, too. How would she know this?

‘It’s
so
unfair that I’m stuck here when I could be making five hundred bucks an hour, easy. They can shove their pocket money.’

Cinnamon mumbled something in agreement and the two of them headed upstairs, and I was left sitting alone at the dining room table with my plate of McVitie’s digestive biscuits, glass of milk, and my English homework that I couldn’t concentrate on anymore.

I hope I never see Bindi again. Lucy Grubb’s someone I only see on TV. Cinnamon’s too stupid to pay any attention to. I decide right then and there that I’m not going to bother myself about any of them. People who waste time on www.nukethehamptons.com are people who should get a life. I’ve got better things to do.

But I might ask Miss Dunn if I can use the internet at the University. After all, I might need it for my schoolwork.

Chapter 28

Jo’s brother came down from Queensland to visit their mum. He brought a big crate of mangoes to the Refuge, big sweet mangoes that would cost six dollars apiece in Sydney. There are heaps more than we can eat, and Karen won’t eat fruit anyway, so nobody minds that I take half a dozen of them and put them on a tray in my room. I have a mango every morning for breakfast, and one after dinner. I bring some more from the crate. They’re starting to go a bit spotty, but I like the smell.

Until the smell reminds me of something I don’t really want to remember.

There are two canvas bags in the boot. One has the stuff. The one that doesn’t matter has some old clothes and a rock to make it heavy. Daddy takes the one that doesn’t matter. We’ll be back for the other one. But this one first.

‘You sure she shouldn’t wait in the car?’

Daddy and I are going to a block of flats in Marrickville. A guy named Terry is with us. Terry is younger than Daddy, with a dirty-blond mullet haircut. I don’t like Terry, and I don’t think Daddy really likes him, either. Terry doesn’t take much notice of me. And he never refers to me by name, it’s always ‘she’ this or ‘she’ that.

Daddy doesn’t bother answering Terry. ‘You done business with this guy before?’

I don’t know why Daddy’s asking Terry that. We wouldn’t be here if Daddy didn’t know that already.

‘Yeah, he’s a mate of mine. He’s all right. He’s up on the second floor.’

We stop at a milk bar on the corner. Daddy buys four hamburgers and four cans of Coke. The man we’re going to see is a block away.

There isn’t a lift, so we walk up two flights of stairs. Terry knocks on a door and a skinny man with stringy hair answers.

‘Have any trouble parking?’

Terry starts to say something, but Daddy cuts him off. ‘No.’

‘Good. Can be hard round here. Close by?’

Daddy gives him a quick, direct look. The man shouldn’t be asking this. ‘Don’t worry about where we’re parked, it’s close enough.’

You never want anyone to know where your car is.

‘What about the kid?’ The man looks at me doubtfully as we go inside.

‘She’s too young to know what’s going on,’ Daddy says. Daddy knows this is a lie, so do I, so does Terry and so does the man, but we all understand that we have to pretend that it’s the truth. If we don’t, what needs to be done won’t get done.

We step inside. ‘Nice place,’ Daddy says. ‘Wanna show me around?’ Daddy needs to make sure no one else is there. Once Daddy has looked into every room, we sit in front of the TV and eat our hamburgers.

‘Let’s have a look at the stuff,’ the man says.

‘In a while,’ Daddy says.

We have to wait for half an hour. Daddy, Terry, and the stringy-haired man watch TV and I read Black Beauty.

‘Right,’ Daddy says finally. ‘I’ll go get the stuff.’

The man looks at the bag. ‘What’s that right there?’

‘Just some other stuff. I’ll get the stuff you’re after.’

You can tell by the look on Terry’s face that he didn’t know there wasn’t anything worth having in that bag.

Daddy takes me with him. Daddy puts the fake bag in the boot and takes the real one back to the flat.

‘So, let’s have a look,’ the man says.

Daddy pulls a heavy plastic garbage bag from the larger canvas tradesman’s bag.

Daddy puts the bag on the floor and pulls another bag out of that bag, and a bag out of the second bag, and a bag out of the third bag. The top of each bag is twisted and the top folded back over itself, sitting upside down into the next bag so it’s airtight. Unwinding them takes a bit of time. The last bag is a fertiliser bag. You get it from the agricultural supply store. Daddy opens the last bag and takes a step back. The room smells sweet and sticky, almost like mangoes. He nods at the man, who steps forward and has a look.

‘Lotta kif in that,’ the man says without conviction.

Kif is little pieces of twigs and sticks and stalks and leaf. Kif isn’t worth anything.

‘Crap,’ Daddy says, like he knows he’s right.

The man pulls out a handful and sniffs. ‘Pretty green. Bit wet, too.’

Dope that’s green hasn’t been dried thoroughly, so the moisture content makes it artificially heavy. Dope is sold by weight, so low-life growers with no principles just don’t dry their stuff properly so they can get more money.

‘Crap,’ Daddy says again. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. We’ll get rid of it someplace else.’ Daddy bends down and starts doing the bags up. Terry looks nervously at the man.

‘He means this, you know,’ Terry says to the man.

The man takes a step forward. ‘Maybe it’s not that bad.’

Daddy looks up and gives the man a foul look. ‘I don’t grow or sell bad stuff.’

The man shrugs. ‘I guess I could move it on. Twenty pound, you say. Must be pretty squashed up.’

‘Yeah, twenty elbow.’

The man picks up the bag. ‘Doesn’t feel like twenty elbow to me.’

Daddy is starting to get cranky. ‘Well, we’ll have to sort this out. Where’s your scales?’

The man opens a cupboard and takes out a scale, but it’s a grotty old bathroom scale that shows the weight with a red needle against black numbers. This guy’s dumber than I am, and I’m only twelve. I want to laugh, but I can’t let on that I know that using a cheap bathroom scale to weigh dope is a stupid thing to do.

Daddy knows weights and measures in English and metric and can estimate the weight of anything without needing a scale. So can most other people he does business with. But the scale is like manners. You have to have a scale in such a situation, and you have to have the right kind. It can be an old-fashioned kind with brass weights, or a kitchen scale with a digital readout. Otherwise, it’s like inviting someone to dinner and not serving any food, or serving dinner and not giving them a knife and fork to eat it with. What this man has done is embarrassing.

‘Mate, what’s this?’ Daddy points at the scale.

Terry is getting more nervous. He’s looking from Daddy to the man, back and forth.

The man looks up, open-mouthed. ‘You said weigh it.’

‘Not on a Mickey Mouse scale, I didn’t. Don’t you know those things are unreliable? Haven’t you got an electronic one?’

The man looks confused. ‘Well, it’s the only scale I got.’ He stands with his hands hanging at his sides.

‘There’s twenty pound there, believe me,’ Terry says, trying to sound confident. ‘Why don’t you just put it on that scale and see what it says.’

Daddy looks at Terry. ‘I’ll do this bit of the talking. Leave it to me.’ What Daddy means is, butt out, we’re talking eighty thousand dollars here, don’t screw it up.

The man picks it up and puts it on the scale and the scale goes closer to twenty-one than twenty.

‘Did you zero that first?’ Daddy says.

‘Yeah,’ the man says in a pathetic whimper. This guy is really a loser.

‘Well, mate, you better get yourself a new scale, ’cause this one’s costing you money. There isn’t twenty-one pound in that bag, there’s twenty. If you trusted that thing, I’d be taking four thousand bucks out of your pocket that I shouldn’t be getting. You can’t do business like this. Now I said twenty, and there is twenty. Agreed?’

‘Yeah, looks like it, okay.’

‘Right. Now for Chrissake, close that bag up and get it inside two other bags before we stink up the whole neighbourhood.’

‘Yeah, I s’pose.’ The Loser’s voice is getting smaller all the time. He tries to close the bags, but he’s not doing it properly. Daddy doesn’t say anything. He just steps forward and looks at the Loser, and the Loser steps back and lets Daddy take over.

Daddy bends down to close the bags up, twirling, folding, and locking each bag as he goes.

‘How do I know the weight of the bag?’ the Loser says.

Daddy stops what he’s doing instantly, looks up and says, ‘For Chrissake, mate, I just stopped you from skinning yourself to the tune of four thousand bucks. And now you’re asking me about the weight of the bag?’

Daddy goes back to what he was doing. ‘The bag would be lucky to weigh three ounces. Seems to me you don’t know when you’re on a good thing.’ Daddy twirls another bag, folds it back onto itself.

Daddy rocks back on his heels and stands up when he’s finished wrapping up the bags. ‘Right. Let’s count out the cash.’

The Loser disappears into a room and comes back out with a white plastic shopping bag. There’s nine or ten rolls of fifties with an elastic band around each one. He says each one is five thousand.

‘Let’s start counting,’Daddy says.

‘You want to count it out?’ the Loser says.

‘Yep. Every fifty.’

Daddy and the Loser move to the table and get on with counting the money. Terry has been moving backward one step at a time.

‘Will I make a cup of coffee while you blokes are doing that?’

‘I’ll make the coffee,’ the Loser says.

‘No you won’t,’ Daddy says. ‘You’ll sit here with me and we’ll watch each other do this. That way there’s no argument from either side.’

Terry looks at the Loser. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

Daddy looks up at Terry for half a second. You can see it in Daddy’s eyes. Terry doesn’t know how the Loser takes his coffee. He hasn’t been doing business with this guy for years.

‘White and one. Ta.’

Terry brings back the coffee.

‘Got anything for my kid,’ Daddy says without looking up.

Terry gets me a Coke from the fridge.

The counting takes about twenty minutes.

‘Let me have that rug rolled up and put in that bag so it looks like I’m carrying out what I carried in. Terry can bring it back to you.’

‘Terry? Bring it back? When?’ the Loser says.

Dadd
y
looks straight at Terry. But all he says is, ‘He’ll bring it back.’

We leave and walk down the street a bit.

‘Where did you meet that idiot? Where did you hear about him?’ Daddy asks Terry in a low voice.

‘Hey, he’s my mate, I told ya…’

‘You don’t know how he takes his coffee,’ Daddy says. ‘I don’t know who put you onto him, but I never want to do business with him again. Or see him.’

‘Well, you got your money,’ Terry says.

‘Yeah, and that was a bloody struggle.’

We get in the car and Terry starts spouting some crap. Daddy cuts him off.

‘Don’t take me near that bloke again and don’t lie to me.’

I think Terry takes his point.