But it’s not all bad. Madonna’s autographs will certainly come in handy in my own present, in their own future. Just like the autographs I got out of Lee Harvey Oswald right before I had him ice Nixon.
Hungry Man
Will Elliott
When the redheaded woman with the baby carriage at last moved out of earshot, Phil said, “It’s easy, just get it down the back of your pants. You saw me do it a hundred times, come on.”
Lex looked nervously at the girl behind the news-agency counter and said, “She’ll see me. We come here every other day and never buy anything.”
“She doesn’t care. For twelve dollars an hour, think she cares if they’re missing a couple magazines? C’mon go, she’s not looking.”
Phil made it look easy. In awe, Lex had watched him walk out of shops with packets of corn chips stuffed in his shirt so he looked pregnant, watched him take show bags from stalls at the carnival, condoms from the chemist (they did nothing with them except leave them on the spouts of their school’s drinking fountains). Phil stole cigarettes and sold them to the older kids who played coin-op games. He stole CDs, once a DVD set from JBHiFi. His prize catch: an iPod, one of those nice thirty-two gig ones with a digicam inside. Close call, the Target woman turned her back for just a moment after he’d got her to take it out of the case for a look at it, not even planning to steal it till she took her eyes off them. A security guard chased them out of there and they couldn’t go back to Westfield Strathpine again any time in the next decade.
For his part, Lex had stolen two packets of bubble gum. It had been from this very news agency the girl had gone out to the back for a minute or two. “The register,” Phil had urged. “Go! There’s fifties in there.”
Lex had been unable to do it. People had been walking past the doorway; they’d have seen him. He took the gum instead. His hands shook for half an hour afterwards.
And right now the news agency was busy. Old people buying lottery tickets. A creepy perverted dude by the porn mags who hadn’t moved since they’d come in, probably had a big fat woody while he fumbled through the latest Picture. “Don’t worry about that perv,” Phil whispered. “That’s the retard who walks up and down the road all night. If he sees you, he won’t even remember it five minutes from now.”
“How do you know?”
“We threw rocks at him, me and Trent. He just looked at us, didn’t even care. Next day we walked right past him, he didn’t recognise us. So what are you worried about?”
I have a dad at home, Lex thought but didn’t dare say. Not like you. Your mother won’t pull your pants down right in front of everyone at any old excuse to do it and hit the crap out of your nude butt like it turns her on.
Well no, Phil’s dad wouldn’t do that exactly. Phil’s dad would visit once a week and his doped-out mum would sit there in a Valium cloud and list out stuff he’d done wrong during the week in a calm dreamy voice, while Phil’s dad slowly undid his belt. Alex, I think you should go home now. You’d hear it from three houses down: cries and pleads as if Phil were being killed in there, whack, whack, whack. Every Tuesday. Visiting Day.
Phil said, “Alex, listen. You eat the stuff I steal, you keep half of it. You never take anything yourself. Bubble-gum? How badass. Come on. Go-get us some titty mags and we’re even.”
Lex left Phil standing before the comics, sidled over to the magazine stand opposite the titty mags and looked nervously at the girl behind the counter, now selling smokes to some geezer who thought he was pretty funny. Lex snuck a glance at the glossy covers, heart beating faster with the alien allure of women as old as his teachers, posing on the Penthouse with legs open, a white sheet draped between them; on Barely Legal in roller skates with a lollypop and pig-tails; in this weird black leather outfit on Babes & Bikes. Suddenly he wanted each magazine very badly. He’d all but forgotten the pervy guy, who hadn’t moved, still thumbing through the Home Girls section in Picture. The pervy guy was just a pillar of legs beside him, as inhuman as concrete.
Lex grabbed a Penthouse and a Playboy. Down the back of his shorts they went, where they slipped and slid almost completely out till he tucked them into his underwear. Turning for the exit, not daring to look to see if anyone had witnessed it, he walked head-first into the pervy guy’s legs, his face striking the man’s hip.
It was a long way to look up and see the face staring down at him, half-covered in black stubble. The man’s wide mouth hung open, eyes just peering down with no way of telling if it was anger or total blankness in them. Lex sensed something else there, too, a threat he didn’t understand at all, which made something inside him scream run but at the same time paralysed him so he couldn’t.
“Hey, Alex, let’s go for a swim,” Phil called innocently across to him from the news-agency counter. “Before it gets dark. Over at the nature strip. C’mon.” Phil’s voice seemed to break Lex out of a trance. He walked through the magazine rows, not daring to look sideways at the girl behind the counter, whose gaze he felt following him. The magazines down his pants were surely sticking out a mile.
At long last, blessedly, they were outside in the afternoon light. Cars whizzed by on Anzac Avenue. Their bikes leant against the shop wall. “Don’t pull ‘em out yet, you dink,” Phil hissed, as Lex adjusted the magazines’ position. “Oh shit. Quick, get on your bike and go.”
“What, why…?”
The pervert guy, like a horror movie zombie, shuffled slowly out of the shop and headed their way. His mouth still hung open, his eyes as dead as pebbles. “Catching flies, fuck head?” Phil said to him. “Shut your mouth, you look like a spastic.” The man didn’t say a word, just stared and shuffled closer. “I think he likes you, Alex. Frigging weirdo.”
They rode away, wheeling through traffic and many pissed off drivers, car horns blaring. Lex was so filled with sweet relief to be out of the news agency he hardly noticed how close he was to getting run over.
Rumour had it that if you could get to the waterhole at night, you’d sometimes see the bogan kids who got drunk in the Kallangur shop car parks doing it with their girlfriends, actually doing it right here in the long grass. They’d been out here one sleepover to test the theory but had seen no such thing.
It had rained last night and now the quite frequent cars that swung down the nearby road’s dip sloshed up water as they went. On the wide grassy platform a few metres above the water, Phil took out the Mars bar he’d slipped into his pocket right in front of the counter girl while he’d joked with her about the pervert guy. He peeled back its wrapping, which took much of the squished melted thing off with it, then stuffed the rest into his mouth. “Yeah, I saw that retard before,” said Phil, examining the Penthouse centrefold. “Lives on Sheehan Street. He just walks around at night, right down the middle of the road sometimes. Drivers have to go around him. Lives with these really old people, maybe his parents. Not right in the head. You can throw rocks at him or whatever and he just looks at you, doesn’t even care. So, are you going to jump or not?”