raised his hand to the timber and knocked again. Along the first finger joints of his hand the letters ‘BROS’ had been inexpertly tattooed, a souvenir from Ali’s incarceration in a place called Kariong Juvenile Justice Centre. The letters on the back of his fingers were rendered as part of his induction into a gang called Brothers 4 Life. The crime that had landed Ali in Kariong? Rape.
There was no response from inside the house, but he could hear the faint clatter of plates and cutlery. Ali opened the door wider and went in. He found himself in a room dimly lit by an old 1970s-style lava lamp, a glowing vermilion tube with ectoplasmic bubbles rising and falling inside. The furniture was sparse, just an old table, two wooden chairs, and a sagging couch. Ali noticed a poster of hip hop artist 50 Cent on one wall. On a shelf was a sports trophy – a dust-coated golden statuette of a man in jersey and shorts holding a rugby ball. Beside the trophy was a framed school photo of a black teenage girl, her face beaming happily into the lens. At the end of the room was an open doorway, a bright yellow rectangle of light. The washing-up sounds grew louder as Ali moved towards the doorway. ‘Hello?’ he said.
In the kitchen, Ruby Jakamara was washing dishes under the glare of a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. She was listening to a Nicki Minaj song, Anaconda, through the buds of the iPhone her auntie Shirley had given her on her seventeenth birthday a month earlier. Despite her auntie’s caution to keep the volume level down and thereby conserve her hearing, Ruby had it turned up high. The track was a eulogy to women with big butts, with the pneumatic-bottomed Minaj showing plenty of her own in the YouTube clip that had notched up more than half a billion hits.
Ruby’s own butt was on the larger side and when she was younger she’d lamented the fact that she’d never be a super model, except possibly a plus-sized one. But Nicki Minaj was a sex goddess whose anthem delivered the message that ‘anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns hun.’ Which made Ruby feel good about herself. As she scrubbed and rinsed dishes and cutlery at the stainless steel sink, she wiggled her pink miniskirted bottom in time to the music and rapped along with the American artist, ’he don’t like ‘em boney, want something he can grab...’
However, at this moment Ruby’s thoughts were actually far from big butts, centred instead on her near future. In less than three months’ time, she’d be starting a design course at Centralian College in Alice Springs, and maybe after that, once she’d got her certificate, she might start a fashion label. She could use designs from Lester and some of the other artists on this community. But by then she wouldn’t be living here anymore. She’d be in Alice Springs, or maybe even Sydney, Melbourne or one of the other big cities. I could come back here like, once a year, every Christmas, she thought to herself.
Suddenly she noticed a large human form framed in the doorway. Her head jerked round. Standing there gazing at her was a fleshy white man with untidy dark hair and beard. His arms were a mass of tattoos. A huge knife hung from his belt. But the most frightening thing about him was his eyes – shining, unblinking pools of darkness. Underneath the left eye, the outline of a tear drop had been inked into the skin.
Tearing out her ear buds, Ruby tried to keep her voice steady as she said: ‘What do you want?’
‘I need help with my car,’ Ali said. His eyes were fixed on Ruby’s breasts under the thin cotton of a white T-shirt bearing the words LIVE LOVE DANCE. The pale tip of his tongue flicked out, then back in, like a reptile testing the air.
‘You can talk to my uncle, I’ll take you to him,’ Ruby said.
Ali took two steps towards her.
‘Or you can wait here to see my uncle, because he said he’d be here in one minute,’ Ruby added, her voice shaking.
‘What’s your name, babe?’ Ali said, taking two more steps closer.
Suddenly Ruby lashed out with her foot and tried to kick him in the balls, but Ali twisted to the side and her bare foot slammed into his hip. ‘Bitch!’ he hissed, reaching down and pulling the knife from the sheaf at his belt. Then moving lightning quickly, he grabbed her arm and pulled her towards him.
‘If you try screaming for help I’ll cut you,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I’ll cut you up real bad. You understand me?’ Ali’s left arm encircled her neck like a tattooed python while his right hand brandished the Jungle Master. Ruby felt the needle-sharp tip of the knife on her cheek. ‘I understand,’ she whimpered.
Ali laughed – a high-pitched, whinnying sound. A cruel sound. And Ruby’s nightmare began.
9 SORRY TIME
ABDUL WALKED over to the stranded ute, limping slightly as he favoured his injured foot, which thankfully was starting to feel a bit better. He could place more weight on it now. The Tea Tree oil he’d rubbed into the puncture had eased the swelling.
He got into the driver’s seat and flicked the headlights once, twice, then a third time. After pausing for ten seconds, he repeated the exercise. He reflected, not for the first time, that his younger brother was a major worry and had been since he was a toddler, when he used to tear the wings off the flies trapped against a French door at the back of the family home. Watching them crawling around like flightless beetles on the floor, Ali would laugh with delight in the way another, normal three-year-old might chortle at the antics of The Wiggles.
Leaving the cabin of the car, Abdul helped himself to a Crown Lager from one of two drinks eskies they’d brought, along with a single cooler for food. He returned to the camping chair he’d set up in a bare patch of dirt. The storm was much closer now, a churning tsunami of dark cloud straddling the horizon. It promised untold mayhem when it arrived. In the middle there was a funnel, black as coal, reaching down to earth. Every few seconds, this eye of the storm would light up as lightning flickered inside it. The wind was picking up. Abdul was wearing open sandals and he could feel wind-borne grit on his feet and ankles. Definitely not a night to be sleeping in a tent, he thought to himself. Nor did he relish the thought of sheltering from the tempest alongside Ali in the cabin of the ute.
Ali gibbered and screamed in his sleep. He’d done so all his life. In their childhood Abdul had shared a bedroom with Ali. Almost every night, he had found himself being jolted from his slumbers by Ali giving vent to bloodcurdling screams and yelling out things like ‘I’m gonna kill ya!’
Their parents had tried putting Ali on various tranquillizers before he went to bed but for some reason the medication only made his nocturnal outbursts more intense. Now, of course, Ali was taking his own medication – crystal meth. And that didn’t help either. During the current shooting trip, he’d heard loud shouts and groans coming from Ali’s tent in the early hours. Abdul had started pitching his own tent further away, but still he’d been woken by his brother’s nightmares.
Yes, Ali was a major worry.
Ali staggered out of the house. He was panting. His eyes were wild and unfocused. His T-shirt was splashed with red stains. He ran around the building and into the gloomy yard behind the house. Here he stopped for a few seconds to work out the direction back to Abdul and the car. No flashing headlights, but his brother had said he was going to flick them on every ten minutes. He glanced furtively over his shoulder. Then he set off into the scrub, moving at a half-run.
As he fled into the gloom, Ali’s face wore an expression of abject self-pity, mouth turned down at the sides and eyebrows creased together. It was her fault, he thought. The black bitch. He broke through a low patch of bushes with thin, sharp-tipped leaves that stabbed through the legs of his thin camouflage pants like little needles. But Ali was oblivious to the pain as he thought, Yes, the black bitch made me do it. Made me do it because she laughed at me.
While methamphetamine can temporarily endow people with super strength, it can have a reverse effect on the male member, causing erectile dysfunction. After he’d toiled away, attempting