On the TV talk of inundation and floods, rising tides, tsunamis of human beings coming across the ocean, all headed here. A watery invasion threatening to drag us under. Too many boats. Same thing they’ve been anxious about since yesterday, the day before that, two hundred years ago.
And at this moment, 31 August 2001, a day on which the Parramatta River was overflowing down near the Ferry Pier, where this story begins and ends, there was flooding too. The footpaths around the river’s edge were under water. Disgruntled teenagers drank on the top of the grassy slopes because their usual spot on the benches below had become submerged. The old Chinese women with their Mandarin-playing boom boxes must have been doing their nightly riverside aerobics somewhere else, the Lebanese men had stopped fishing near the housing commission flats and got their fish at the markets instead. The tradies at the Workers Club pressed cold beers to their mouths and smoked their ciggies on the balcony and made jokes about how the river could swallow their utes in the parking lot while the public servants from the newly relocated offices of Sydney Water and Electricity stared out towards the river behind the polished windows of their bloated office blocks.
Antonio’s son Francis stood on the riverbank and looked out to the mangroves at the ferry that was making its way to the slim top of the pier that hadn’t been swallowed by the water and said ‘fuck’ into the evening air. He had just shoved his hands into his saggy jeans and discovered that he was out of cigarettes. He backtracked slightly down the road behind the river and went to the corner store he had been avoiding on account of the man working there being an old friend of his father’s who was going to ask him, for sure, about what his father had done.
Do you know what his father did?
Of course you do.
Everyone wanted to know about it but what the fuck did Francis know?
When Francis entered the shop Ron said, ‘Yer fa-dah, hah!’
Francis shrugged his shoulders and put his money on the counter and pissed off out of there as soon as the cigarettes were in his hand. No explanation. He wasn’t trying to explain it to no one. He hardly understood it himself.
Back on his way. He walked down the street, just puffin’. The man with no left arm stood there by his letterbox like usual, watching the road. Francis kicked a rock as he passed him. He pretended to be interested in the rock and all, so he didn’t have to look the man in the face. It was the same street he’d walked down on the way to Charbel’s place since they were in primary school. There were the same old Eels banners hanging slack from the fibro cottages since their last win, same old convict graveyards, same people floating down the street like they were cruising even when they were not in their cars, the same women in hot pink Spandex running towards the river.
Dawn of a new century, 2001 and all that, but things were pretty much the same as they were in high school except now Francis was five years older and he spent his days laying bricks instead of waiting outside the principal’s office. His two best mates were still Jesús and Charbel. On weekends there was still nothing to do. Women weren’t really interested in Charbel and Francis but they were interested in Jesús. Jesús could put it on like he was one of those Latino playboys from the telenovelas his mother watched. He even did the slicked-back hair and the patent leather shoes and the walking up to a girl at The Albion like he was dancing a salsa or some shit like that. But that wasn’t really who he was. Francis would’ve acted like that too if he’d thought it might’ve helped him get laid. When Jesús wasn’t with a girl, Francis and Charbel hung out at his place. Charbel was still boring. Francis was still angry with his father for lots of things like being crazy and stubborn and unable to take him seriously, but mostly, at this moment, for giving him a pussy name like Francis.
He walked. The sun set through the spaces between the buildings and spread itself across the road like a kind of golden slime. There was a mania for sitting on plastic chairs on the lawn outside the apartment blocks. People just stewing. Cigarettes in hand. The local newspapers on the ground everywhere. Someone had drawn a red line underneath the headline in the Parramatta Sun: ‘ It’s Not Racist if They Come Without Their Visas!’
And then he was back down by the river again where people had gathered on the grass to point at the things being swallowed by the water. Summer was on its way and even this early, before things got really hot, the place was on heat. Walking past The Albion he could see the women were already out in their short shorts and high heels, standing in the courtyard. A blonde woman in tight white jeans leant against the brick wall outside and watched the men playing footy in the park across the road.
He headed straight across the highway. Stopped to have a fantasy or two in front of the BMW SUV and the Mercedes with the convertible roof in the second-hand car yard. Jesús was mowing the lawn in front of his mother’s pale blue fibro. Francis was sure that the mowing was just an excuse to take his shirt off. Jesús was the one with all the muscles, even though it was Francis and Charbel that worked with their bodies. No one would guess that of the three of them, it was Jesús who was training to be an accountant.
Jesús didn’t say anything. He waved. Francis walked himself straight into the living room where Jesús’ mother was dressed in her orderly’s scrubs. She was leaning against the kitchen cupboard eating toast, flicking through the newspaper. Something Spanish played on the radio, and on the TV it was the five o’clock news. The kettle went off and she looked up at Francis as if he was making all that noise.
‘Be good,’ she said like she’d been saying since they were in primary.
The boys from school had been spending their evenings here since forever, on account of Mrs Consalvo working nights. Even now that Charbel had his own place in one of the slicked-up new apartments just off Church Street, they still came here. Force of habit. Mrs Consalvo must have known what went on under her small roof, but she never said anything but you boys be good, or there’s leftover chicken in the fridge. She was cool like that. They called her Mami like Jesús did. All the boys called Jesús Jesus, like Jesus Christ, even though he was always telling them to say it the Spanish way, like Hey-Seuss.
At least Francis wasn’t the only one with a pussy name.
Even though it was the end of August, Jesús still had up the banner, ‘Welcome to the year 2001,’ nine months after the new year had come and gone, so that he could hide the hole Francis had accidentally punched into the wall when he was high. He liked Jesús’ house. It was a loud space but it felt quiet. Francis’ place was quiet but it felt loud. Francis lived in a much larger house but every inch of it was taken up by his father, even when his father was just sitting on the couch saying nothing, watching the telly.
‘Mami!’
Charbel was entering through the door; Mrs Consalvo was leaving for the night. Charbel walked in with a couple of six packs so they could drink cheaply before they got to the bars. He was wearing board shorts and a wife-beater. He would change into his favourite Tsubi jeans and poloneck shirt right before they went out. Francis would spray Lynx deodorant over the outside of his clothes.
They were all posers in their own way.
Charbel walked to the fridge, stuck the beers in and looked over the rest of its contents. He went over to the flower-covered couch where Francis was sitting, handed him a beer and sank down six inches as soon as he sat on the cushion.
‘Shit,’ he said as he fell backward.
‘Shit,’ Francis said.
Francis took long gulps of his beer. His hands trembled. He told himself it was because he masturbated too much, but he knew it was the pot: he needed to cut down (on both things really) but he just couldn’t stop. He liked the way the pot gave the world a softer edge. Even the air took on the feel of cushioned fabric, as though you could just reach out and touch it and everything else, all the things that were bothering you, just sat like a quiet old man in the background.
When Jesús came into the living room he sat on the recliner without his shirt on, sipped his beer slowly, rubbed his belly. Charbel opened another beer he’d had waiting by his feet. The nights always started out like this. Slowly. They saved all their energy for later.
Francis tried to concentrate on the TV. On the news there was a big ship and a big ocean. The only small things were the tiny dots of people sitting around shipping containers on the deck. Then there was John Howard and his eyebrows and he was saying, ‘ordinary, average Australians,’ over and over again, and it was all very serious and Francis couldn’t get at the words.
‘You coming back to work on Monday?’ Charbel asked.
‘Nah, maybe.’
Francis had definitely planned on going back but he was being a jerk.
‘You take as much time as you need.’
It was exactly that kind of tone, like you’re talking to someone’s grandmother, that meant Francis had to be a jerk. It was like this: when Charbel said ‘you take as much time as you need’, that wasn’t everything he was saying. There was a whole lot of backstory shoved into that sentence like helium stuck in one of those over-inflated balloons. The story played over in Francis’ head in time lapse: Charbel’s dad (who everyone called Fat Frank, on account of him being really skinny) was the contractor on a new set of McMansions near Macquarie Fields; Francis and Charbel were both working for Fat Frank on the site and that made Charbel act like he was also the boss of everything even though he was the boss of nothing. Francis should be grateful for the job because he was a very average bricklayer who may or may not turn up to work on time but he didn’t really know how to be grateful for much. There’s a whole lot more backstory here about how Fat Frank and his dad used to be business partners until Francis’ dad had exploded about how shit their McMansions were and Fat Frank went on to make fuck-loads of money and Francis’ dad ended up without much.
Francis suspected that he got away with a lot because Fat Frank thought his family was pathetic, or because Fat Frank had some kind of guilt complex, or just wanted to get back at Francis’ dad by hiring his son. Maybe all of the above. ‘Your father Antonio, Antonio,’ he was always muttering whenever he saw Francis on the site. Whatever it was, when Charbel told him he could ‘take as much time as he needed’, he said it in a tone that made Francis think that maybe it was the pathetic thing. ‘I’ll be back by Tuesday.’
‘Everyone understands about your father.’
‘Wednesday then.’ No one understood about his father.
They drank more beers. Jesús took a shower and Charbel changed his clothes and Francis smothered himself in Lynx. Then the boys slipped out into the street and Jesús took what he had promised them out of his wallet. The three dots of pink paper sat there in his palm. They had the smallest set of wings on them. They said take us, take flight, and they did, the three of them standing there, staring at the granite statue of a pouncing lion on a neighbour’s lawn.
Even though this was Parramatta, and even though it was never really quiet, tonight felt calm. No one spoke. They walked. Each street they passed had the same dull, brick rectangles of apartment blocks, and in between there were lost strips of lawn and too much concrete. They cut through the park. This was the park where they used to play footy on Fridays: Italians and Yugoslavs versus Asians – the Asians always lost. On Sundays everyone teamed up against the Islanders, but the Islanders always won. At night the park looked dark and grim, not like it did in the daytime when everyone was screaming and running. There was the noise of the trains everywhere, always pulling up and leaving again. The sounds skipped across the concrete as they turned the corner.
Now they were at Francis’ old school. One of his old schools. He’d spent the last two years at Arthur Phillip instead of the local Catholic where he’d started out with Charbel and Jesús, because the fat old Brother who ran the place had had enough of Francis by the time he finished Year Ten. Public school. His father never got over it. The kids there were from a wholly different planet than the Catholic school ones. Francis thought he was a bad-arse before he wound up there but afterwards he learned to stay silent.
Just as he had done a few times in his school days, he picked up a rock and chucked it at the windows of the science lab. He chose those windows because he’d always failed science and because the safety glass in the windows always broke into patterns like spiders’ webs and refused to fall out. It was a challenge: he was rising to the occasion. But the wings he took earlier had made him into some type of bird with no power to break glass.
It was a while before Francis realised he was still standing in the same place holding a rock, staring at his own reflection in the glass windows. Maybe he’d been there, yesterday, today, the day before, maybe he was back at school.
‘Stay loose,’ Jesús said, holding Francis’ hand, but Francis could feel the blood pumping right through his arm and out to his palm. They cut through the library car park and walked out onto the main street. People thought nothing went on this far from the city, but they were wrong. Everybody came to Parramatta Friday and Saturday night. Everyone. Night-time and everyone went off. This was what defined the place these days – the constant parade. For instance, as he walked down the street there were two men with too-tight tops and too-big muscles, who took up most of the wide pavement just because they could, and girls who stood on the corner and waved to the cars as if they knew everyone. The cars cruised slow and loud down Church Street. They were hot pink Echoes and lowered Hondas with orange racing stripes. Chrome. Blue lights. Hubcaps glinting in the neon glow of the restaurants. There were calls back and forth, windows rolled down. Some fat bald head in Ray-Bans yelled ‘hey ladies,’ and twenty-somethings in hotpants smiled and said ‘fuck you’ in the most seductive of ways. Francis paid particular attention to the ladies: he would take them, any of them, anytime, anywhere, if only they would have him.
They walked up through the mall to the Burger King on the corner. Everyone started here before they went anywhere else. Jesús pointed to a spare table in the corner and put Charbel in charge of Francis. Francis watched as Charbel took out his door key and tried to scratch a line through ‘Charbel + Lee’ where he’d carved it into the wooden wall when he was in love with Lee Chang back in the day.
The music wrapped itself around Francis’ body. Jesús showed up again with the food. Francis watched the red stream of light that followed his hand each time he put his arm into the bag and pulled out a burger. Then he was stuck to his chair chewing, chewing, chewing. The food was something musical. His throat was a flute. His body was light but he couldn’t move. He looked at Charbel, who was trying to eat his entire burger in one mouthful.
Moving again. They were out in the open mall. St John’s Church was twice the size it usually was. Jesús was standing in the flowerbeds in front of the church. He was all movement and light. Francis found it difficult to keep track of where he was amongst all this moving. Now Jesús was next to the old men with worry beads sitting on the bench near the children’s play equipment, and then he was next to the guy with a sign that says ‘The End of the World is Coming’ and a microphone, then he was hanging around the entrance to the Connection Arcade, smoking, talking shit in Spanish. Maybe he was skipping. Maybe he wasn’t. The flight of his feet across concrete.
They went off again. They headed south towards the brighter lights of Church Street. The bikies had parked on the pavements again, just because they could. How do you join a bikie gang? Francis would like to be one of them. They had a tribe. He’d like to be in a tribe. Francis thought he would like to sit up on the thick leather seats of one of their Harley Davidsons. He didn’t. The hot spice smell of cheap men’s cologne. Somewhere, an apple hooka. People cram their legs up underneath too-small tables in front of the restaurants on the footpath.
The words ‘One World’ glowed in the distance. They headed towards them. The shops selling cheap shit. Shirts for five dollars. Jeans already ripped at the knees hung in the windows. Plastic cats with oversized heads that bounce in the sunlight. Everyone wanted something cheap. More two-dollar shops.
They were standing in line in front of One World. Francis stood up as straight as he could for the bouncers. He gave instructions to himself: Get your ID out of your wallet. Hold it in your hand. Look them in the eye like you haven’t been up to nothing. Play it cool. The signs in front of the bar said: Sexy. Bounce. Karaoke.
Inside, the place was dark and cool. Blue lights skidded across the dance floor. The ceiling was stained by cigarette smoke, from the tradies who used to come for a beer after work, to the professionals who came here now from those corporations that had relocated from the city. In the corner, a giant screen played soccer from another country. Two thirty-ish men sat at the counter drinking beer, not talking. The DJ played Prince. Maybe it was retro night. Francis hoped it wasn’t retro night. Three women, all with frizzy hair, drank Bacardi Breezers by the bar. Retro brought out women who looked like schoolteachers. They should have stayed in Burger King where Shaggy and Tupac brought out the girls in the short shorts. Almost ten, and there was the slow creep of people entering the place. Things began to slow again. The boys sat down at a booth in the corner. Francis lit a cigarette and watched the smoke disappear into the air in front of him.
Francis watched Jesús’ eyes dart around the place. It was too loud to really hear anything. Francis stood up, did the drinking gesture with his left hand, pulled on his cigarette with the right. ‘Drink?’
Jesús stopped looking around and faced Francis. ‘You alright?’
‘Yeah, fine.’ He gave himself the instructions in his head again. Stand up straight. Look the guy behind the counter in the eyes. Keep your hands in your pockets so no one can see they’re shaking. Charbel looked at him again. This time for too long. You are not the boss of me, Francis thought. You are not the boss. ‘Beer?’
‘Yeah.’ Jesús got out his phone. Francis knew he was trying to work out if the women in the bar were a better chance of a hook-up than the girl he’d been texting with. Francis moved towards the bar where a woman with dark roots and bright blond hair was wiping the counter with a rag.
‘What can I get you?’ she shouted over the music. AC/DC started up with ‘Back in Black’. It was definitely retro night.
‘Three schooners of New.’
The woman pulled out three frosted glasses and began to fill them up. One of the frizzy-haired women leaned against the bar next to him, sipped her pink Bacardi in its bottle. She didn’t look so bad up close. Too much makeup but he wasn’t picky. Her clothes said she’d been at work all day. The ID card she used to get into work was still clipped to her pants. She was tapping out the rhythm of the song with her hands on the bar.
He could feel the words vibrating underneath his feet. The woman behind the bar put his drinks in front of him. He brushed up against the woman with the frizzy hair on purpose when he went to pay. She turned and looked at him. They made eye contact. Where to go from here? He was pretty shit at this but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
He smiled. She smiled back. He ran his hands down the front of his shirt to smooth out the creases. ‘You like AC/DC?’
‘Yeah, they’re alright.’ She nodded, looked him up and down.
‘My dad knew AC/DC, like back in the day, before they were all famous and shit.’
She looked at him. Raised her eyebrows. Disbelieving. Never tell a real story that sounds like it isn’t true. ‘Is that right?’
‘Yeah. They were in Villawood together, back before it was Villawood, like now. They came from Scotland and my dad came from Italy. They lived together.’
‘Your dad’s in Villawood?’
‘Not like it is now, like it was before the refugees. With just regular migrants.’
‘Regular,’ she said. She nodded her head. The music just kept on getting louder. He wasn’t sure she’d heard a word. She looked at him like he was a wanker. He was a wanker. Shitty pick up line. He needed to work on something better. He realised just how much he was moving: swaying from side to side. Some guy pushed up against his back to get towards the bar. He looked towards the guy and then the girl was gone. Shit.
He pushed the beers into a triangle. Held them with his hands. Tried to give it all his concentration but couldn’t. He was looking for the girl with the frizzy hair. Where did she go? He should have started with, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘My dad’s a regular guy from Villawood.’ Fuck. What kind of pickup line was that? Maybe he could find her. Buy her a drink. She was interested, maybe.
His hands shook again. He turned with the three beers. Pushed them straight into some big bloke’s chest and watched as the beer jumped out of his hands and all over his shirt and down the other bloke’s pants.
‘Shit.’
Two hands jumped out at him from the enormous body, pushed him backwards and then he was on the floor, and a giant foot kicked him in the stomach. He was wet all over. He thought his insides must have burst open and were soaking through his shirt. He ran his hand over his stomach, checked it for blood. It was beer. It was only the beer he spilled.
‘Fuckin’ cunt,’ someone was yelling from above. He was so small down here, everyone else was huge. And then someone got their hands up under his armpits and he was being dragged across the floor.
‘Get up. Get up.’ He couldn’t work out where all the instructions were coming from until someone pulled him onto a chair. It was the bouncer. He remembered his instructions to himself: Get your ID out, look them in the eyes, be cool.
This big black face was all up in his and was saying, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ And Francis was looking from his big stern eyes in real time to the ID tag he was wearing around his neck. The face on the tag was smiling. The face in front of him was not.
‘Yeah, yeah. Leave.’ Look him in the eye, like you’re not high or anything. Charbel took his left arm. Jesús took his right. He was out in the night air and the bright lights of Church Street again, just like that, before he could even understand how he got there.
‘Can I sit down?’
‘No.’
Jesús and Charbel were dragging him down the street.
‘Walk.’
He started to use his legs. His head was thumping. He walked. They were back in front of the library before he was allowed to sit down on the steps.
Charbel was huffing and puffing in front of him. ‘You almost got bashed.’
Francis watched him look around like there might be someone waiting to hit him again. ‘Fuck. Why do you always do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Make people want to bash you?’
‘I never did nothing.’ Francis ran his hands over his body just to make sure all his parts were still there. It was true. He never did anything really, but he was always getting into fights. He just had something about him. Something that said bash me.
Hours later, when Mrs Consalvo came home, they were sprawled out on her flowery couch again, ordinary as a Neighbours episode. Mrs Consalvo was too tired to talk in the mornings. Francis watched as she came through the doorway, paused to run her hand across the image of her husband who went missing all those years ago. In the kitchen she turned the radio on to the Spanish news. In the living room she sat and ate toast, leaning against Jesús’ shoulder. Francis shoved his shaking hands deep into his pockets. The boys watched TV and laughed and talked about shit.