“This is a nice little system you have here,” I said, and put the container on the kitchen bench. “But I’m gonna need cash too.”
Manco pointed to the top cupboard; I reached up and pulled out a tin box. I put the tin box on the bench, ready to open it.
There were three knocks on the door. I turned around to face Manco with the gun. His lips were gray, two thin slugs coated with saliva. The front door flew open and two cops came into the apartment, their guns in their hands. They saw me with the stash of drugs in front of me, holding a double-barrel pointed at Manco.
Manco was smarter than I was. His organized pills were part of a system. His life was part of a system. Dealers needed a series of checks and balances. And what I didn’t know then is that many fresh-faced boys with threats had been there before me. Many fresh-faced boys trying to make a forced withdrawal. Manco had a failsafe. At an allocated time, if he didn’t send an SMS to a person and confirm that everything was good with his guest, they would call certain police officers — slightly dodgy and on the cut — who were intertwined with Manco. They would come. Scare the shit out of the person causing trouble. Make it seem that it was a legit arrest, when they were just clearing the scraps.
“That’s him, officers,” said Manco.
The cops ordered me to drop it with booming voices. They held their guns with both hands and arranged themselves in a pincer movement around me. I put my gun on the bench in front of me. Gently resting it — the sound of metal clinking on marble. I put my hands in the air. A blue uniform came toward me and twisted my arm, forcing me to turn around. I felt a big hand push me on my back and I was up against the glass wall. My chest was pressing against the cool.
I looked out over the city and the skyscrapers were dead-eyed monuments. Behind me the two cops and Manco muttered while my arm was twisted. The pain made me shut my eyes and when I opened them again, I looked over the cityscape, saw the skyscrapers as concrete pillars that were a bulwark to suburbia. Beyond them were the fringes of a landscape that had houses with red roofs, dead-end streets, nature strips, and parks. There were fringes of green trees. When I squinted I could almost see an olive tree and there was a goat stuck in its branches and underneath a father and son fought.
The Razor
by Robert Drewe
Lavender Bay
One humid Sunday morning when the scent of frangipani hung heavily in the air, Brian Tasker stood in his yard overlooking Lavender Bay while his mother-in-law shaved his body.
Sunlight bounced off the fence of oleanders and frangipanis and flickered through the native fig trees clinging to the cliff behind the house. The cliff marked the boundary of Luna Park, the harborside fun fair, and between the loops and slopes of the dormant roller coaster that came to rumbling, screaming life every sunset, a mirage quivered on the surface of the bay.
While Dulcie Kroger was kneeling and spreading shaving cream over her son-in-law’s legs, he tried to concentrate on the way the mirage lapped like a windswept lake on the boat shed roofs across the bay. But once his mother-in-law began wielding the razor, working upward from his size-thirteen feet, up his shins and calves to his thighs, he found it difficult to maintain interest in an illusion.
During dinner the evening before, he’d mentioned something Don told him at training.
“Guess what?” Brian said to his wife Judy and her mother as he dug into the five courses Dulcie had served him. “The Yanks have had a bright idea — shaving their bodies before a race.”
“Seriously, Brian?” Judy’s eyes twinkled. Even after six months of marriage he still found her wide-eyed look and little-girl giggle appealing, even provocative. “Shaved all over?”
A delicate creature to look at, but her chirpy laugh, blond bob, bright nails, and arms like twigs hid her intensity. Though full of energy, she seemed to hardly eat. Compared to his meal — tonight it was chicken soup and thickly buttered bread, six lamb chops and vegetables, a plate of potato and egg salad, a dessert of sliced bananas and ice cream, and cheese and biscuits, washed down with two glasses of milk — hers was miniscule: a single chop, a smidgen of mashed potatoes, and a smattering of peas to push around her plate.
“All over?” her mother repeated.
“Shaving down, it’s called,” Brian explained. “The whole body. All the exposed parts anyway. They reckon it makes them swim faster.”
Don Wilmott, his longtime coach, had picked up this intelligence from an American friend who’d observed a training session of the swimming squad at the University of Southern California. “Shaving down eliminates drag,” Don told Brian as he dried off after his afternoon of one hundred laps in the North Sydney Olympic Pool. He’d been Brian’s coach ever since Junior Dolphins, where he’d recognized the talent of the skinny nine-year-old who was swimming to help his asthma. More than a coach, really. A mentor, almost a father figure. Then through all the high school and district victories over his teenage years, and the regionals, and his successes at state level. And now, if all went to plan, to the nationals and the selection trials for the Australian team.
“We’ll give it a shot,” Don went on. “They say you feel transformed. Smooth and slippery like a fish. The psychological effect alone is supposed to make you swim quicker.”
Brian didn’t need reminding that he had to swim faster. To be transformed. As Don repeated, unnecessarily, the Melbourne Olympics were only nine months away, in November. The Australian team would be selected in August, after the national championships. And there was another Sydney swimmer, Murray Rose, dogging his heels. Rose’s times for the 400 and 1,500-meter freestyle almost matched his. Worse, they were improving, and he was still only sixteen.
This boy Rose was a handsome wunderkind, a blond prodigy who defied swimming’s traditions. For a start he was thin, rather than conventionally barrel-chested and broad-shouldered. And he trained in Sydney Harbour. The harbor? With its tides and waves and oil spills and flotsam? Moreover — veteran sports writers shook their heads in wonder — the kid was a vegetarian.
They struggled to recall any top athlete who’d been a vegetarian. The papers set up photographs of wet-headed, muddy-footed young Murray standing on the harbor shore after training, towel looped around his neck, skinny ribs poking out, happily munching a carrot or a stick of celery.
Brian knew Melbourne was his last chance to make the Olympic team. The combination of his BSA Gold Star with slippery tram tracks on the Lane Cove line led to a broken elbow that had ruined his chances for Helsinki in ’52. So he’d sold the motorbike. No more physical risks. He’d be twenty-four by November, twenty-eight, positively elderly, by the 1960 Olympic games.
“Get out the razor this weekend,” Don had said. “We’ll do a time trial on Monday.”
Brian thought he’d surprise Judy with his new smooth body when she came home from Mass at St. Francis Xavier that Sunday. Surely anyone could put a new blade in their safety razor and shave themselves down? But standing there in the sunny yard in his skimpy racing costume, cursing with the effort, he found it surprisingly tricky. How to shave the backs of your thighs? How to avoid nicking the tender skin behind your knees?
The grunts, the near-naked contortions: a neighbor or passerby might have wondered what was going on behind the frangipanis and oleanders.