Chapter Seven

Ridgey didge

A FLOCK OF white cockatoos screeched as they flew across the horizon; it seemed as if they had fallen from the last white clouds that remained in the sky’s west. The sun was beginning to set, and the clouds surrounding it looked as if a toddler had spilled pink, yellow, and purple paint all over a perfectly blue canvas, which now threatened to drip to the ground. It would only be a few more moments before the night would wipe the sky clean. It was the autumn of 2014, and it was dusk in the Toomuc Valley. Deep in one of the suburb’s terracotta-coloured houses, the blind was shut, the lights were off, but Beck was there in her lounge room — just around the corner from Smithy’s — staring at the television. Crystal meth had well and truly taken hold of certain sub-sections within the community, Beck among them.

Gravity — or perhaps more specifically, reality — had been treating Beck rather harshly all day. In fact, Beck had only fallen from paradise — the crystal-meth high — a few hours earlier, and now the forbidden fruit which had gotten her there was rotting at her heart; she was tumbling, weakened, in freefall. In her own mind, she was a passive victim of this imminent crash — perhaps she was getting sick, perhaps something had infected her.

There was a sensation digging like a butter knife at the base of her skull, and the more she concentrated on it, the more it felt like two sharp screws in her temples, and now she noticed it was blurring her vision as if she were slightly drunk.

Not helping matters was the odour of cat shit coming from the other end of the house. It hit her nostrils only occasionally, and yet it was, to her, a definitive smell: the smell of waste, the smell of something which been kept inside all day. Beck was worried that she would need to put her poor old cat down soon — it had been going to the toilet inside almost every day. Probably, she’d concluded, because the old boy was starting to go senile.

She wished she could be bothered getting up to get her phone. Smithy might have been getting more gear tonight. Meth — make that crystal meth — would have been a spectacularly useful ‘pick me up’, especially as she thought she was coming down with a flu, and the kids had made a mess of the house, and the stray cat she took in ten years ago was now shitting everywhere, and ‘I have to fucking cooking dinner tonight’, and Smithy had probably given her less than he was supposed to the night before — like he always did, even though she put out, and did ‘all the dirty, disgusting things’ he wanted her to — and, in fact, Smithy had probably given her share to Luke when she wasn’t looking, that was why Luke ‘bloody well moved in there in the first place’.

And right at that moment, there was a knock at the door. It was Luke; in other words — me.

I had walked over from Smithy’s — a walk which took no more than a few minutes — with something on my mind: a life-changing revelation that had been baking inside my head all day during my own slow drift down from a high. One particular idea was stuck in my head; I felt like a child who’d gotten on a Gravitron before realising I was going to get more than I’d bargained for. When I walked into Beck’s house, the first thing I noticed was the aforementioned smell, and just as I came into the room, Beck picked up her iPad and started playing her favourite game — Zombie Apocalypse. Her forehead was deeply creased, like a plant that had not been watered for a long time; she had bags under her eyes, and lines on top of those bags. She also had a rather ominous-looking open sore, which had taken up one corner of her chin, and ran roughly half the length of her lips. It was weeping pus, and bleeding slightly. Her shoulders were slumped over. Her eyes seemed darker than normal, and bloodshot; they reminded me of a syringe when its water is mixed with blood.

‘Beck, mate, there is something I have to tell you.’

‘Mmmm?’

‘It’s about Smithy,’ and at the mention of his name, her face lit up a little. ‘I’ve been in a real panic; I think Smithy has been fucking me, y’know. He hasn’t really been giving me meth; he’s been giving me acid, and everyone has been laughing at me behind my back. He just took $700 off me; he knew I would say yes because I was on acid. Because I have been getting in all these vortexes, y’know, and wanking constantly, and I’ve never had meth which has done this before and I think it’s because he’s charging me for meth and just giving me acid trips and I think everyone is in on it.’

And on I went — and on and on — and Beck’s expression didn’t change much, but her ears pricked up each time I mentioned Smithy. Eventually she interjected with, ‘Smithy is a psychopath, Luke, he would have done that.’

‘Has he, Beck?’

‘I don’t know, maybe. Stealing money is the kind of thing he would do. Ring him, Luke. Ring him and tell him what you think is going on.’

And so she handed me the phone, having already dialled the number, and said, ‘Ask him, ask him.’

‘Hello,’ Smithy answered in his deep, gravelly voice.

‘Smithy, I gave you $100 last night,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t feel shit; it’s nothing like the meth I had the other week, I feel like shit now.’

‘I fucking told you it was shit gear, you gave me the money anyway,’ he said.

‘Here’s my theory, Smithy — you took my portion, and then gave me acid instead,’ and then I left a long silence, waiting for him to put his foot in it.

Emboldened, I took a deeper jab. ‘Go on Smithy, I’m listening,’ I said.

‘How could you fucking say that about me, you are supposed to be my friend, fuck you, you are a fucking arsehole. I gave you acid the other day, remember, does it feel like this meth does?’

And I think honestly and deeply, and I guess it doesn’t …

‘Well, does it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, realising that this was yet another paranoid delusion that had built up, bit by bit, over the day.

‘And you didn’t give me $100, you gave me $700 — and that was for rent and drugs in advance — remember?’

‘Oh,’ I said, as my panic turned to relief and then to guilt. ‘I’m sorry, seems I got a bit paranoid. Can we perhaps just put this one behind us?’

Smithy started laughing and said, ‘I’ll see you later on, we need to go and get more gear.’

My fear having been alleviated, all I could sense was the smell of shit, as Beck explained that her cat had gone senile. The odour was becoming unbearable; I got up and followed the smell to find a sloppy, mousse-like turd on the floor of the bathroom. There were a few blowflies buzzing around it. The cat ran up to me — poor old George, the ginger cat with the gimpy foot that Beck had taken in — and started meowing around my legs. I noticed all the doors were shut, so I opened one, and he immediately ran outside and started pissing like a hose. George wasn’t senile at all, I thought. Beck hadn’t been opening the door for him. More to the point, she didn’t need to get him put down. Beck — in her state — was undoing all her good deeds.

I cleaned up after the cat, and went back into the lounge room, where I sat on the couch next to Beck. Tears fell down my cheeks. Beck saw this, and turned back to her iPad.

‘People were just so horrible to me, for no reason, no fucking reason. I had so many friends, Beck, everyone liked me — and then suddenly nobody would be my friend — nobody!’ I said.

My sobbing turned into howling, and upon hearing this, Beck put down her iPad and picked up her book — a second-hand geology book about the structure and metamorphosis of rocks. Something seemed to have drained out of Beck; it seemed to have drained out of the ever-growing hole in her arm. She was so sick of giving a fuck. Nobody ever gave a fuck about her. Nobody ever stuck up for her, patted her on the back when she talked about the torment she had experienced. The same people who picked on her went on to have careers, mortgages, husbands, and twice as many Facebook friends.

She believed that all my paranoia was a symptom of my narcissism; that I wanted everything to revolve around me. Her facial expression had moved slowly over the hour from fatigued to embittered. She was still reading her book on rocks, which was now half covering her face. I had a feeling of clarity, as if I had been working on a maths problem all day, and had just had a ‘Eureka!’ moment, where all the faulty reasoning and wrong turns seemed worth it to get to this point.

My anxiety lifted along with my psychotic fog. ‘You know what, Beck?’ I said. ‘You haven’t been very sympathetic.’

She peered over at me. ‘I’m sick,’ she said.

This lit my fuse.

‘You’re always sick, Beck — always. What’s wrong this time?’

‘I’ve got sinus pain.’

‘So you can’t comfort me because you’ve got a blocked nose?’

She gave me an evil look.

‘Ohhh, isn’t that sad,’ I continued. ‘Poor little Beck has got a blocked nose.’

Beck jolted, as if she’d received an electric shock, and shouted, ‘Perhaps I would have given you a bit more sympathy, Luke, if you haven’t had sat there crying like a fucking girl.’

And then it was on.

Let me interject here for a second, and state what is probably obvious — I was in the beginnings of my crystal-meth binge. I had been using for about a month. I had become a little preoccupied myself, with maybes, and apparently probable — to me, at least — theories, and possible subterfuge. By this stage, my mission — to investigate crystal meth — had almost been forgotten. This was supposed to be my daring comeback into journalism, my chance to prove the haters wrong. I was here to cut through the spin and the hearsay reportage, and to find out precisely why meth had made a comeback of its own — into my life, and into the lives of many others — and was wreaking such havoc. Even if it wasn’t the sort of havoc that made the news, and it was nothing like the havoc on the anti-meth adverts, it was havoc, nonetheless. The average drug-user — the one who used ecstasy and stayed away from heroin — was finding profound new highs in a substance that few of us had ever tried ever before, let alone understood. I, for one, was too involved in my elaborate paranoia to realise that what I was taking now was crystal meth, and that what I had been taking for the past few years had been powdered meth. This fact had been obscured to me by another fact: I had started injecting drugs again for the first time since my brief heroin foray in 2007.

When I first took the crystallised variety of meth at Smithy’s in early 2015, I had no idea I was taking something different, and I wonder how many users were in the same boat. The fact that so many different substances are all referred to as ‘meth’ only adds to the confusion. I thought the reason it felt so much stronger was that I was injecting it again, but it wasn’t that simple.

The key to understanding how crystal meth came to supersede powdered meth in Australia is in, as explored in previous chapters, the growth of the production and consumption of the former in South-East Asia. Figures from the Australian Crime Commission show that while there was a 15 per cent increase in domestic lab detections between 2010–11 and 2011–12, and a steady increase over the past ten years, this figure did not compare to the enormous increase in international imports. And what was being imported was either crystal meth (which until very recently was almost certainly not being made here) or much more potent varieties of powdered meth.

The statistics on border detections tell a large part of Australia’s crystal-meth story. The peak year for border detections of amphetamines between 2003 and 2011 was just under 600 detections in 2006–07 (years are counted in financial years), equalling about the same in kilograms. During many of the years throughout the 2000s, border amphetamine detections were at near negligible levels; for the year 2010–11, less than 100 kilograms were detected, and in 2011–12 there were about 300 kilograms discovered, relating to 1000 detections (then the highest number of detections on record).

Then, in 2012–13, the number rose to 1,999 detections. Yes, you did read that correctly, and it meant that the amount of meth being smuggled into our country increased by about 700 per cent, in terms of weight, from 2010 to 2013. The 2012–13 record high was eclipsed a year later, in 2013–14, by the new record of 2,367 detections.

As a result of the sharp increase in the amount of high-purity meth coming across the border, meth’s purity in Australia saw a rise from an annual average of 21 per cent in 2009 to 64 per cent in 2013. In Victoria, the purity of meth rose from about 20 per cent in 2010–11 to more than 75 per cent in 2012–13. All in all, in the decade since 2004, the purity of methamphetamine (ice and speed) in Australia has generally increased, ranging between a median of 4.4 per cent and 76 per cent. The Victorian police — whose state records the highest purity — have labelled this a major factor in the meth problem: higher purity makes the drug more addictive.

And it wasn’t just more pure; there was also more of it.

The reported use of powdered methamphetamine fell significantly between 2010 and 2013, but the reported use of crystal meth — what we by now knew as ice — more than doubled. People were also using ice more frequently, with many people using it daily or weekly. First, the number of methamphetamine users who prefer ice to other types of methamphetamine doubled from 27 per cent in 2007, and 22 per cent in 2010, to 50 per cent in 2013. The proportion of people using it at least weekly grew from 9.3 per cent in 2010 to 15.5 per cent in 2013. There was a corresponding increase in people seeking treatment at drug and alcohol clinics. The proportion of treatment ‘episodes’ where methamphetamine was the principal drug of concern doubled from 7 per cent in 2009–10 to 14 per cent in 2012–13.

The 2013–14 Australian Customs and Border Protection Service Annual Report shows crystal-meth detections by kilogram at our border. And when I say border, I should explain that crystal meth is mainly found amid the letters and parcels coming in via international post. According to data from the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, 86 per cent of all crystal meth is coming via the parcel post, with another 9.5 per cent coming in via air cargo. According to data from the ACC, no fewer than 49 countries were identified as countries of origin over the 2012–13 period. However, to simplify things somewhat: three territories account for 88 per cent of the total detections (when measured by weight). They are Hong Kong (96 detections, weighing a total of 224.1 kilograms); Thailand (43 detections, weighing a total of 313.9 kilograms); and China (8 detections weighing a total of 1224.6 kilograms). Therefore, based on figures of what is actually intercepted (2000 detections totaling 2,138.5 kilograms during that period), more than half of the amphetamines that are imported here are coming from the world’s biggest nation.

Yep, China: the world’s most populous nation is third behind the US and Mexico on the global meth pie chart, and is where most of our meth is coming from (this doesn’t mean it’s all being made in China, but it is certainly the major transit point). Indeed, meth is big business in China: confiscations of meth pills went up 1,500 per cent across the nation in the four-year period from 2008 to 2012. There is mounting evidence that the nation is actually supplying the cartels with precursors — that is, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — which isn’t surprising when you consider that the country is filled with, and surrounded by, ephedra plants.

According to UNODC, the average street price per gram of methamphetamine in China is A$105, whereas in Australia it is $500. Wholesale prices in Australia have been recorded as ranging from A$90,000 to A$325,000 per kilogram.

And to be even more specific: thanks to United Nations data, we know that most of the meth coming to Australia from China originates in Guangdong, a province of over 100 million people on the South China Sea.

To give you an idea of where the meth so many Australians are taking is being made, and just how engaged some of these southern China communities are in meth production and distribution, let me take you to a little Guangdong village called Boshe. Boshe is isolated, right on the coastline. It has no more than 1,700 households, and the last official estimate put the village population at approximately 14,000. Boshe isn’t much to look at — in fact, it’s like the worst of the old and new worlds deliberately came together on the marshy, sandy flatlands of the Southern Chinese coast to highlight what happens when a society fails. Boshe resembles some kind of mythic dystopia, with a mix of rural despair, urban decay, a few trees, abandoned buildings, cramped living, and a Technicolor dream-coat of plastic rubbish enmeshed in the soil just about everywhere you step. Amid this ghetto-come-junkyard — though it’s not quite bleak enough to be classified a slum — if you were to walk through the mud, the pollution, and the litter, you would most likely notice an acidic, cat-piss-like odour that hits your nose like a bunch of blunt needles. The closer you look at the piles of garbage dumped around vacant housing lots, the more you notice the used glass flasks and other lab equipment, surrounded by pools of sludge.

Boshe, as it turns out, has in years gone by been one of the biggest meth producers in China, and probably the world. Guangdong police estimated that around 20 per cent of the town was involved in meth production in Boshe, and corruption went all the way to the top: the people running the meth trade in Boshe were government officials. Fourteen of them all up, and the local Communist Party secretary was in fact the local drug king pin, Cai Dongjia. Local police were in on it, too, colluding with local criminal groups to provide what seemed like a watertight and highly profitable illicit market. Today, there are even signs that read ‘discarding of meth lab garbage here is forbidden’.

Chinese police knew what was happening in Boshe for a long time. In August 2013, police had tried to enter the village, but were met with roadblocks, people hurling abuse, and violent resistance. Peter Barefoot on Chinasmack.com writes that before the Thunder Drug Raid:

As soon as the police entered the village, they’d be surrounded by the two to three hundred motorcycles in the village, with nail boards placed on the roads in the village, and rocks thrown from the top of buildings. Villagers would hold imitation firearms, even AK47s, homemade grenades, crossbows, and other deadly weapons.

The police retreated and re-evaluated the situation, deciding that they needed to go in better armed and better resourced — although few could have imagined just how well armed and resourced they would be when they finally returned a few months later. In China’s coldest month, amid the drizzle and grey, 3,000 police surrounded Boshe. When the police got out of their vehicles, they were dressed in camouflage gear, and so the raids began. There were police vans on top of police vans, speedboats, and at least two helicopters accompanying the raid.

Police arrested 182 people, destroyed 77 methamphetamine labs, and a massive three tonnes of meth was seized along with 100 tonnes of meth ingredients. Cai Dongjia was the first to be captured. After completing the raid, the police said Boshe and the surrounding region were the source of a third of China’s crystal-meth supply.

They later discovered that the village had become so polluted with chemicals for drug manufacturing that the groundwater could not be used for farming. Locals reported that a huge wealth gap had developed between the farmers in town and those involved in the drug trade. Indeed, entrepreneurialism and economic inequality could have a lot to answer for in explaining why China has become our biggest trading partner in both legal and illegal markets. Australia pays a lot for meth compared to our Asian neighbours. While China has increasingly advanced technology, it still has very low production and labour costs — big profits are to be made by making meth in poorer nations, and then selling them to high-income nations like Australia. Trafficking a highly addictive, highly pleasurable drug into a nation that is surrounded by some of the biggest meth-producing countries in the world must seem like a no-brainer to drug barons all over the world.

And we are not talking about one particular set of groups with names or brands, or any one particular country or region — in the transnational illicit-drug game, allegiances often only exist for a short time, and most of these ‘groupings’ are informal, fleeting, and very hard to track down.

With all this taken together, it is very tricky for our authorities to get a handle on the problem.

If there is one common fuel to this engine right around the globe, however, it is the bribing of high-level government officials in often weak, poorly resourced states that help get the drug cartels into gear. While we might know this is happening, stopping it is another thing altogether, especially when crime cartels are paying members of the government far more than they would be getting on their taxpayer-funded salary. In this way, poor and weak nations make the perfect hunting ground for criminal entrepreneurs to make it rich. And indeed, some of them are very rich — the illicit-drug trade makes up 1 per cent of the total global economy. The illicit-drug trade is the largest in value among global illicit commodities, at some US$320 billion, according to the United Nations World Drug Report — an unwelcome, though arguably inevitable, consequence of an increasingly globalised economy.

Robert Mandel, who is the professor of international affairs at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, argues in his book Dark Logic: transnational criminal tactics and global security that while Ronald Reagan started the ‘global war on drugs’ in 1985 with that very catch-cry — as well as with an allocation of hundreds of millions to the defence department to ‘combat’ the problem — the endeavour met with limited success:

Any attempt to interdict global drug smuggling faces nearly insurmountable problems including (1) the eagerness of users/victims to imbibe, making them unlikely to press for prosecution of distributors; (2) reduced government monitoring of domestic activities due to economic liberalization and deregulation; (3) the proliferation of weak states which have remote areas conducive to drug growing and; (4) the scarcity of alternative sources of income for impoverished workers involved in the production of drugs.

And what I have told you about southern China is really just the cherry on top: it is unclear how much of the meth sent from Guangdong is being made in China, and how much of it is just distributed from there. If it is the latter, it is also not known precisely who Chinese criminals are linking with internationally. In many cases, it is likely to be groups in the jungles of the Golden Triangle — that infamous patch of jungle comprised of Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand where crystal meth is known to be made en masse. Much like the Mexican cartels, the Golden Triangle is likely going through an ‘upgrade,’ as a paper from Brookings Institute put it, and ‘transforming from traditional drugs to new synthetic drugs, following demand of the international drug market’.

So our relationship with the illicit drug trade is ‘complicated’, and to make it even more so, today’s problem region might be tomorrow’s massive headache. The latest intelligence suggests parts of the Middle East and western Africa — regions usually associated with transit points for drugs — are now increasingly producing meth, particularly Iran and Nigeria. In fact, there is at least a 50 per cent chance that the gear my friends were selling was manufactured overseas. AFP Assistant Commissioner Ramzi Jabbour told the Victorian parliamentary committee at a hearing that: ‘These very large seizures were being attempted to be imported into Australia, or in this case particularly Victoria, from overseas, and we allege by sophisticated organised criminal syndicates which have tentacles both in this country and reaching out through numerous countries overseas’. In many cases, crystal-meth users in Australia don’t even go through their local dealer — they simply order from one of the many websites from which people can purchase meth and other drugs from overseas. While the notorious Silk Road site has closed down, many others have emerged in the space known as the ‘Dark Web’.

The net result has not just been a stronger drug flooding our drug markets, but a significant global shift in drug use: according to 2013 data from UNODC, ATS were used, in 2011, at rates higher than any other drug class with the exception of cannabis. The number of cannabis users worldwide (on an annual basis) is estimated to be about 180 million, ATS users about 34 million, opiate users 16.5 million, and cocaine users about 17 million.

Today, we live not so much in a meth nation as a meth world: meth use is now an issue in most parts of the world, from the working classes of the United States to the middle classes of New Zealand, and from the shanty towns of South Africa to the increasingly affluent young people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Fiji, Thailand, and India. In Europe, the Czech Republic remains the focal point for the drug in the region, where it is called Pervitin. In Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, and Latvia, UNODC reports that amphetamines and methamphetamine users account for between 20 per cent and 60 per cent of those seeking drug abuse treatment. There are few nations around the world that remain untouched by meth.

After the argument with Beck that day, Smithy and I made up from our little incident a few hours earlier. Our physical altercation in 2011 (and our recovery from it) had actually strengthened our friendship — I think we both knew how difficult we could be. A little while earlier, I had thought he was orchestrating a cruel and vengeful plot; now we were the best of buddies again, with bong smoke consuming the space between us, and most sentences finishing with uncontrolled giggles. He had come back from Beck’s, where he’d given her a small fix. She had, reportedly, lost her grimace, cured her cold, and was now vigorously washing rocks in her basin with her rock book next to her.

Smith had given me a tiny hit, too. It hadn’t knocked my socks off, but it was enough to make me feel more energised: like a car that had been running on a low tank, but now had a bit in reserve. I felt calm — intensely calm — and knew that Smithy was a blood brother once again.

‘That’s it, the last of it,’ he said, looking at me meaningfully. ‘Y’know what that means?’

‘We are both going to go clean and never use drugs again?’

‘Hilarious — it means we have to go for a drive.’

‘Where?’

‘St Kilda.’

So we jumped in the car. We drove along what was in reality an uneventful freeway, but which felt, on this day, like the road to some of the greatest pleasures a man could ever know. We threw words around like confetti; Smithy talked about cricket, I talked about the way I got my job at triple j. Smithy said he had been texting Beck’s oldest daughter for the past few months because it was ‘important she had a parent right now’, and as the wind blew around the car, and we smoked cigarette after cigarette, Smithy said ‘Is it just me, or do you smell like cat shit?’

We got to the dealer’s house, and Smithy went to the door. After a while he came back, remarkably calm, and said, ‘There’s nobody fucking home, and he’s not answering his phone.’ It was warm inside the car, but I suspect Smithy, who was resting outside the car against the door, was feeling much warmer; he’s an intolerable, catatonic, hot mess when he can’t have drugs.

We asked a prostitute on the side of the road if we could pay her to find us some meth. She said her name was Celia, and agreed to help us out, but only if we gave her a cut.

‘One of you need to come with me. Just one of you — if I bring two guys in he will freak out.’

I agreed to go, and so we walked silently together down the street, and the prostitute took me around the corner, then down a little side-alley, until we reached a set of white-brick apartments about three storeys high.

‘It’s not a houso block, by the way,’ she said, smirking. ‘It’s a boarding-house, love. If you love freaks, you’ll love these guys.’

From the front yard, we could see a 7-Eleven sign on the horizon, amid a row of oak trees. She knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ a grubby-sounding voice yelled.

‘It’s Celia, darl.’

‘What do you want?’

‘A bottle of chardonnay.’

A man opened the door. He was a tall, broad guy with short dark hair and dark skin, and he was wearing a large purple T-shirt and brown tracksuit pants. He had a mono-brow, and some of the hairs in it looked as long as my little finger.

He ushered us in. There were two other guys there — both men in their forties, old-timers with caps and tattoos — sharing a joint. The place was smaller on the inside that it looked from out. It was also musty, and there were barely any windows. There was a tiny lounge room, a small bedroom that barely fit one bed, and a kitchen — where everyone was standing — which was the biggest room in the unit.

‘Who’s this guy?’

‘This is my friend, Luke,’ Celia said. ‘He wants two points.’

‘Two points, hey?’ he said, staring at me wide-eyed, his pupils swishing like two vibrating eggs.

‘Luke, is it? Fucking let me tell you something, okay,’ he said, eyes getting bigger and his movements looking almost comically self-righteous as he puffed out his chest. ‘I am a fucking pharmacist, do you understand me?’

I nodded.

He thumped on his chest ‘Me, I am a fucking chemist, the chemist, okay — I am the fucking chief, do you understand?’

Ignoring him, Celia flashed $200. ‘Got those points, babe?’

‘Here and here,’ he said, passing them on to Celia, who immediately passed them to me. I looked at the bags of small clear crystals — innocuous, clean-looking — pretending that I knew what I was looking for.

‘Sit down,’ the chief said.

‘No babe, I think he has to — ’

‘Sit down! In my culture, if somebody doesn’t sit down, if they don’t work a trade, if they are not polite to the chief, they get the shaka,’ he said, raising his fist with his little finger and thumb raised on either side — what my generation would probably understand as the ‘ridgey didge’ symbol.

Celia was trying to hold back her laughter.

I pulled up a seat in the dining table. The chief pulled up a chair next to me and said ‘But I am not going to give you the shaka. I am a chemist.’

It had been a long couple of days. Proving why white middle-class pencil-pushers should never, ever try to go ghetto, I said, with a tinge of sarcasm:

‘Are you actually a chemist? I mean do you actually have a chemistry degree?’

The Chief ejected himself from his chair with a jolt, panting madly, walked over to the door, and slammed it shut.

‘Nobody is fucking going anywhere, nobody leaves unless I say they can, and under my terms. Do you all fucking understand?’