WHAT WAS SPOOKY about the house in Patterson Street had nothing to do with murders or the bad vibe left by the White Knights Motorcycle Club. Everything could be traced to sad parents coming and going with no explanation, one sleeping in his office in his socks and underwear, the other attempting to plant flowers, shouting shit, hurling her trowel against the garden fence. Fast forward. Gaby tried to stay away. Saturdays Frederic had to work with his mum at the Trash ’n’ Treasure. Fast forward. Gaby hung out with Troy. Troy always travelled via the lanes. He taught her how. In some parts the lanes had been colonised by the adjacent houses and they climbed the corrugated-iron fences, jumped across the beds of puntarelle, chased lizards within a hundred metres of Sydney Road.

Troy and Gaby smoked in the lanes but the true lanes existed only in Frederic’s Mac IIx.

On two Saturdays Gaby rode her bike to Solosolo’s house in Thomastown but then Solosolo said her mother was forcing her to tidy up for her palagi visitor, so forget it Gabes. But Peli was now a cable tech with Telecom and he had the perk of a Toyota HiAce van for use on public streets and highways all weekend.

Peli was six foot tall and over a hundred kilograms with his back tattooed “Fa’a Samoa” to show he had no fear of pain. Peli was strong. He liked strong weed, thank you Troy, who brought him over to Frederic’s place one rainy afternoon when the NES console had just arrived. Who else but stoned Troy would put those two together: Peli was like a refrigerator in board shorts; Frederic had satanic nail polish and eyeliner and careful floppy hair and a considered whispery voice. Peli was a big dog examining a whippet, sniffing, and pushing him with his paw.

But then they smoked and leapt to the Mac IIx, to Wizard’s Crown, with magic weapons named Frost, Flaming, Lightning, Storm. Frederic was polite. He used Plus-category weapons so the visitor would pass out (“The opponent lies unmoving”) but not die outright. The Samoans had no video games, but Peli was a duck to water. Dark, Doom, Soul, Demon and Death were his weapons of choice. If you are taken out by these weapons you are dead except with a resurrection spell.

Then Peli spied the Nintendo. It was his. He must play it now. Then he morphed into Small Mario, trotting left to right across the Mushroom Kingdom, collecting gold coins, dodging Bowser’s armies. Peli was addicted. Could he come back? Frederic thought that would be so, so cool.

Here, by accident, was an unlikely gang glued together, Gaby said, by not much more than dope and games, or so it seemed. Frederic, Gaby, rabbity Troy, Solosolo and red-eyed Peli took the HiAce cruising in the early morning, hooning through the S’s on The Boulevard, three passengers unsupported, rolling, bruising and cutting themselves amongst the racks and cables. The HiAce had the aerodynamics of a garden shed which was frustrating to its driver who was a “man of spirit.” It was Peli’s continually expressed desire to swap the Toyota engine for a Chevy V8. He lay on a beanbag in the sleepout and performed the television news report in a deep blissed-out voice: “A Toyota HiAce van marked with Telecom insignia drew away from a police car already travelling at a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour.”

Frederic loved Peli straight off. Peli was slow to get the hang of Frederic but he was there to be with Gaby. This was obvious to everyone but her. She was so dumb.

When they set off cruising in the HiAce, Gaby must sit beside the driver in the front.

Someone else should get a turn, she said.

Nah, you don’t get it.

What don’t I get?

Cappuccino, he said, meaning expensive white froth, black coffee. Drive the racists mad, he said.

Let Frederic sit here, Gaby said.

I don’t drink that brand, Peli said.

The boys played Wizard’s Crown and Mario Bros.

Frederic said no word about Peli’s job, but surely this was the first thing he thought about Peli, that God had sent him a Telecom van. Peli could deliver him all the free phone lines that he wanted. Within days of their first meeting Frederic had “located” a USRobotics Courier, way better than the modem he had lost. Gaby didn’t see that at the time.

Frederic did absolutely not social-engineer Peli. Gaby said this. Peli’s family would later say he had been conned by the palagi kids. This was so untrue. It was Peli who loaded the gear into the HiAce. It was Peli who drove so carefully along the shadowy streets. Fast forward. Play. Gaby was beside him, natch. It was her job to keep her eyes skinned for pods, those pieces of municipal furniture you never notice until you do, foot-high metal Mario mushrooms everywhere, parked in clear suburban sight, melancholy purple in the yellow streetlights so common in those Melbourne nights. The pods were packed with phone lines like spaghetti squash, waiting to connect with that new modem and catapult you into teenage worlds of wonder unimaginable in Patterson Street Coburg or almost anywhere on earth that year.

Later Gaby would be persuaded that perhaps Peli had a conflicting sense of loyalty. He did not hate Telecom like everybody else did. Telecom gave him a good job and a vehicle. It did not occur to anyone that the way they slagged off Telecom might have been offensive to him. In any case. For whatever reason. Peli wouldn’t touch the pods. Troy, on the other hand, got his beaky nose inside the pod. Troy hooked a line, stripped its wire, attached alligator clips and ran the hundred metres of cable, an umbilical cord, a garden hose, like a shadow along the front of those suburban fences, then around the corner to the van. Meanwhile the driver played Tetris, super-cool.

Then Gaby saw the delicious dark side of Frederic, the kid who had already spent two years flying online solo, messing with two different computers, learning to write programs, connecting with local BBSs and doing mischief on his own account. He was the sort of alienated boy who might have set fires down by the Merri Creek but it was way more fun to invade and incinerate a certain local BBS (Pacific Fire) which had banned him. Rewriting Zork was cool and retro, but by the time he got a replacement modem and Gaby caught her glimpse of the online universe, Zork seemed like Play School. Frederic had traded a set of passwords for the local dial-up number for Minerva, a system of three Prime mainframes in Sydney.

It was certainly less convenient to go online via one hundred metres of cable, but it was a rush as well, to be faster and smarter than anyone, to be a trickster amongst governments and corporations run by complacent admins, with carelessly protected networks. These were anywhere you looked. From Peli’s HiAce Frederic could stroll unhindered into a massive computer known as Altos. Watch, watch, he said, and if Gaby did not know what she was seeing, Frederic told her. He was sweet and patient and excited too. He gave Altos the digital version of a masonic handshake. And Altos thought he was a fucking corporation.

Crammed inside that van with fuggy boys, Gaby was no longer the tangle-haired cherub dribbling a football across the green in Parkville. She was five kilograms heavier. Her breasts pushed in against Frederic’s back. Her cheek was against his cheek and she liked that he had stolen the modem. As his pretty fingers fluttered like moth wings across the keys, she wandered from world to world in a universe she had not known existed.

Now she understood how it had felt to him to lose his phone line. Being REALLY online was like Zork to the millionth power. From a dark street in sleepy Moonee Ponds, she was teleported into NASA. Frederic passed her the keyboard and she could write nothing better than FOO WAS HERE. How embarrassing, she said on tape, please don’t report that. No-one would believe it anyway.