“Marty!” Terry screamed. He strode over and gave me a bear hug. With an arm over my shoulder, he made enthusiastic introductions. “Boys, this is my brother, Marty. He got all the brains. I got whatever was left. Marty, this is Jack, and this timid-looking bloke over here is Meat-ax.”
I smiled nervously at the powerfully built men, thinking an ax was rarely necessary when cutting meat. Looking at my vigorous, muscular brother, I automatically straightened my back. Sometime over the last few years I had become conscious that I’d developed a slight hunch, so I looked, from a distance, approximately seventy-three years old.
Terry said, “And now for the grand finale…”
He removed his shirt and I reeled in shock. Terry had gone tattoo mad! Head to toe, my brother was a maze of crazy artwork. From visiting days, I had already seen the tattoos crawling down his arms below the shirtsleeves, but I’d never before seen what he’d done to his body. Now I could make out, from his Adam’s apple to his belly button, a grinning Tasmanian tiger, a snarling platypus, an emu growling menacingly, a family of koalas brandishing knives in their clenched paws, a kangaroo dripping blood from its gums, with a machete in its pouch. All those Australian animals! I never realized that my brother was so horribly patriotic. Terry flexed his muscles, and it appeared as though the rabid animals were breathing; he’d learned to contort his body in particular ways to make the animals come alive. It had a frightening, magical effect. The swirling colors made me dizzy.
“It’s getting a bit crowded here in the old zoo, isn’t it?” Terry said, anticipating my disapproval. “Oh, guess who else is here!”
Before I could answer, a familiar voice cried out from somewhere above me. Harry was leaning out an upstairs window, smiling so widely, his mouth seemed to swallow his nose. A minute later he joined us in the yard. Harry had aged badly since I saw him last. Every hair had turned a gloomy gray, and the features on his tired, wrinkled face looked to have been pushed deeper into his skull. I noticed that his limp had gotten worse too: he dragged his leg behind him like a sack of bricks.
“We’re doing it, Marty!” Harry cried.
“Doing what?”
“The democratic cooperative of crime! It’s a historic moment! I’m glad you’re here. I know we can’t coerce you to join up, but you can be a witness, can’t you? God, it’s wonderful to have your brother out. I’d been having a shit of a time. Being a fugitive is lonely.” Harry explained how he eluded the police by phoning in anonymous sightings of himself. There were patrols conducting street-by-street searches in Brisbane and Tasmania. Harry exploded with laughter at the thought of it. “The police are so easy to throw off the scent. Anyway, I was just biding my time until Terry’s term was up. And now here we are! It’s like the Greek senate! We meet every afternoon at four by the swimming pool.”
I looked over at the pool. It was an aboveground number, the water a snaky green. A beer can floated in it. Democracy obviously had nothing to do with hygiene. The place was a sewer. The lawn was overgrown, there were empty pizza boxes strewn about and bullet holes in everything, and in the kitchen I could see the whore sitting at the table listlessly scratching herself.
Terry smiled at her through the window. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Can I have a word with you?”
We walked around to the other side of the swimming pool. On the brick barbecue the sausages had been incinerated and were withering in the sun.
“Terry,” I said, “what are you doing? Why don’t you give up crime, go get a normal job somewhere? The cooperative is never going to work, you must know that. Besides, Harry’s mad,” I added, though I knew I wasn’t convinced. The truth was, as I gazed at Terry’s wild eyes I began to suspect that my brother was the real madman and Harry just an old goat with strange ideas.
“What about you?” Terry asked.
“What about me?”
“What are you doing with your life? I’m not the one trapped in a cage- you are. I’m not the one living in a town I hate. I’m not the one ignoring his potential. What’s your destiny, mate? What’s your mission in life? You don’t belong in that town. You can’t hang around there forever. You can’t protect Mum from Dad, or from death. You’ve got to cut them loose. You’ve got to get out of there and live your life. My life is mapped out, more or less. But you- you’re the one sitting around doing nothing.”
That struck me cold. The little bugger was right. I was the one trapped. I had no clue where to go or what to do. I didn’t want to get locked into some grind, but I wasn’t a criminal either. Plus I had made that unbreakable bond with our mother, and I was beginning to strain against it.
“Marty, have you thought about university?”
“I’m not going to university. I didn’t even finish school.”
“Well fuck, mate, you have to do something! Why don’t you start by leaving that shit hole of a town?”
“I can’t leave town.”
“Why the hell not?”
Against my better judgment, I told Terry about the promise I had made. I explained that I was stuck in no uncertain way. Viciously and immovably stuck. What could I do? Leave my mother alone to die with my unfeeling father? The woman who read to me while I lay in a coma all those years? The woman who had risked everything for my sake?
“How is she?” Terry asked me.
“She’s OK, considering,” I said, but that was a lie. Impending death was having a strange effect on her. Occasionally she crept into my room at night and read to me. I couldn’t stand it. The sound of a voice reading a book reminded me of that other prison, that rotten living death: the coma. Sometimes in the middle of the night when I was sound asleep I was woken by a violent shaking. It was my mother, wanting to make sure I hadn’t fallen into another coma. It really was impossible to sleep.
“What are you going to do?” Terry asked. “Stay there until she’s dead?”
It was an awful thought, both that she would one day die and that I’d made this vow that was now strangling me. How could I go on in this way without succumbing to the ugliest thought: “Hey, Mum. Hurry up and die!”
Terry discouraged me from visiting his house again. At his insistence, we met at either cricket or rugby games, depending on the season. During these games Terry filled me in on the democratic cooperative’s antics: how they changed their modus operandi all the time, never doing the same job twice, or if they did, not doing it in the same way. For instance, once they did two bank jobs in a row. The first was at the end of the day, and they all ran in wearing balaclavas and forced customers and staff facedown on the floor. The next job they pulled at lunchtime, and they wore gorilla masks, spoke only in Russian to each other, and made customers and staff hold hands and stand in a circle. They were fast. They were successful. And above all they were anonymous. It was Harry’s idea for the gang to learn a couple of languages- not the whole thing, but just the kind of vocabulary you’d need in a robbery situation: “Get the money,” “Tell them to put their hands up,” “Let’s go,” that kind of thing. Harry really was a genius at throwing people off the scent. It was a mystery how he’d spent so long in jail. He also found a couple of police informers and fed them misinformation. And the one or two enemies they had to deal with from Harry’s old days, they attacked when they were most vulnerable: when they had more than two items on the stove.