The King and Other Stories: Collected Fiction Read online

  She tilts her head. "Focus."

  "Fiver's team."

  "Yeah." She narrows her eyes. "Question. What do you hate?"

  "Not much. I'm not an angry guy."

  "Yeah. You say that. But I bet if you really think about it, you'll find something to hate. You know what gets me? There are businesses in this city that make millions every week but two of my friends can't afford computers to do their shitty homework. And in the news, all the time, managers laying off a hundred workers and taking a bonus. And every time I hear about kids in sweatshops, or some factory dumping poison into a river, I want to puke. I really want to puke."

  My latte has gone cold. "Those are some big hates for a schoolkid."

  "Yeah. And Fiver helps me focus them."

  "You think you can change things?"

  She shrugs. "Maybe. It's enough to get people to wake up."

  "You think they don't know?"

  "I think they don't care." She looks to the street. "Like, when I found out my clothes were made with slave labour, I was shocked. And when I tell other people, they get shocked. But they don't stop buying it, and if you talk to them again in a week, they've forgotten. It doesn't stick." Her lips curls. "I have things to do."

  She stands without warning and weaves out the doors, and I have to run to catch up. Seb is already vanishing fast into the throng of the Sunday crowd. "Hey!"

  She stops and turns. "What?"

  "I want to help."

  She looks me up and down. "I'll tell Fiver."

  I lift the camera and twist off the lens cap as she walks away. Click. Hands stuffed into her pockets, head down, pushing through the crowds of casual shoppers like a salmon diving headlong up a waterfall.

  * * *

  It's Wednesday night, edging into the AM. When I inhale, ice crystallises in my sinuses. The camera shakes in my hands as I bring it up to my eye.

  "You should have brought gloves," Fiver says. I don't bother to reply. The guys are hard at work with rollers and poster strips. We're outside a CBD clothing store that's hawking jeans with an extensive window display. Tall leggy blonds with curly perms show off their arses. The tagline under the display reads: WHICH JEANS ARE WORTH YOUR RENT? OUR JEANS.

  Fiver took some special offence at this, so he had Voda craft up a scale poster to go over the top. They work by the light from the streetlights, and by my camera flash. It's hard to pick an angle where everything will be in focus without catching their reflections in the window. "Voda. Pull your mask up." He shoots me a dirty look but does it anyway. The flash pops like a strobe.

  Seb isn't here. She claimed prior commitments. The guys nodded when I told them, as if this has happened many times before.

  The last strip goes up and the image is complete. It's the same pair of jeans, but the girl wearing them has changed. The leggy blonde has been replaced with a dark-skinned child cut straight from a World Vision commercial. She is topless, breastless, her ribs jutting out so far that the spaces between are shadowed valleys. Her neck is no wider than my wrist. She stares with haunted eyes. It would have been easy to add tears to her cheeks, but Voda showed restraint.

  The jeans hang loose around her waist like clown pants. Printed below in bold letters is SKINNY LEG JEANS: $130. 3 MONTHS OF FOOD AND MEDICINE IN SUDAN: $130. THIS GIRL? ALREADY DEAD.

  My hands are still shaking, but not from the cold.

  We split up by the train station. Fiver and Phelps shake my hand. "Nice to have you along," says Phelps. He grins, and the scar on his upper lip twists grotesquely. Then they vanish through the turnstiles.

  Voda looks at me. "You want a drink?"

  "Yeah." I tuck the camera away. "A drink sounds damn good."

  He leads the way to a back-alley bar on Little Bourke, duffel bag bumping against his leg. The bouncer waves us inside and somehow I end up buying the first round. Voda is slouched on a ratty lounge in the corner. His hair shines under the disco lights. Slick and greasy. He takes the beer without a word.

  "You been enjoying yourself?" he says.

  I sip my beer. "Wouldn't come back otherwise."

  "Well, good. Good." He breaks out a tobacco pouch and papers. "Wouldn't want you wasting your time."

  There's something in his tone that sets me on edge. In the excitement of the night, I'd forgotten how young he is. Voda might be in his mid twenties but he has the jitters of a teenager. "Don't worry about me. I'm loving every minute."

  He lights his cigarette and bites down. "I don't want you sticking my name on the photos."

  "You think I'm stupid?"

  He stares at me for a moment, and then breaks. "No," he says. "No." Smoke leaks from the side of his mouth. "Why are you doing this?"

  I realise my hands are moving of their own accord, fiddling with the focus, flicking the latch on the lens cap. I force them to still. "I don't know. Why are you?"

  "Man. Are you blind?" He leans over until we're almost bumping foreheads. "Are you really that blind?"

  I say nothing. Beneath the table, my left hand curls into a fist. But Voda only blinks a few times and settles back into the lounge. "This is a real war, you know. It's been going on since the sixties. Ever since the Stonewall riots, for Christ's sake, since... hippies, and BUGAUP."

  "What?"

  "B-U-G-A-U-P. Bugger-up. Aussies that started this billboard business in the eighties. They did what we do, but went around messing up ads for cigs and booze. They saw problems and they fixed them. But things are getting worse now. You can't get away. Always trying to sell you shit that doesn't make any sense." Whatever Voda's smoking contains more than tobacco. He coughs. "They get in your home, yeah? You know how many media messages you absorb every day? Three thousand! I read that. Three thousand things they want you to buy."

  He pauses for a moment, draws deeply on his cigarette, exhales. "I had this dream. I have pretty good dreams. I dream in colour. It's a sign that your brain works harder." He puffs. "So it was a sex dream. Me and some girl. Started off alright. I don't remember her face. You know why? Because all I remember is that about halfway through, all these floodlights come on. Boom! Right in the middle of the deed. But they're not pointed at us. They're pointed up at some giant billboard. Some ad for Adidas. We're fucking under a great big Adidas sign, all lit up like a cabaret. Some colossal running shoe looming over me as I get it on."

  He takes a final puff and rests the cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. "When you can't even bone in a dream without thinking of running shoes, something is wrong. You get that? Adidas stole my wet dreams."

  I want to laugh, but Voda's expression is deadly serious. "What would you prefer?"

  "Prefer? Damn, man." He grins. "That they think of me while they bone. That some Adidas executive prick is with some grand-an-hour callgirl and he can't get it up because he's thinking of the mystery guy ruining his sales. That'll make him deflate." He leans in close again. "Isn't that what they do to us? They squeeze us dry and then offer to pump us back up for a fee and we're supposed to be grateful? Just smile and pretend we aren't gagging on their shit."

  One last drag. The cigarette burns down to a nub.

  "I want them to think of me and go limp."

  * * *

  I dump my clothes in the wash and sit naked at my computer, uploading and tagging. I linger on the final shot. Phelps ducking away from the emaciated African child, one arm over his face. He looks ashamed, although whether it's the vandalism or the sight of the dead girl that's done it, I can't tell.

  The lighting and contrast is an easy fix. I save, compress, upload.

  The shot looks false. Doctored.

  Get hard over something real, I remember. It makes more sense at four AM on Thursday morning.

  I delete the shot and upload the original. I don't know if it's any better this way, but at least it's honest.

  My bed has never been softer.

  * * *

  The assignment is to photograph power tools for a warehouse catalogue. Endless lines of drills and circular saws and nail-guns. I keep checking my watch. Everything here smells of sawdust and metho.

  I don't feel truly awake until the sun tips behind the skyline and the streetlights pop on. Fiver is waiting under the clocks at the train station. He nods to me as I arrive.

  We walk. Fiver has a bagful of stickers slung over his shoulder, and he slaps them onto the back-lit ads at tram stops, covering up the faces of celebrities hawking Rolex and Maybelline. His messages glow from within: Media CRAP and BUYBUYBUY. Pitt stares at me, his face blown up so large that every one of his manicured chin-hairs is as wide across as my pinkie. His eyes follow me as I pass.

  "It is creepy, yes?" Fiver lays one of the stickers right over Brad's nose. The sticker is cut in the shape of an erect phallus. The text reads It won't make you any bigger.

  I help smooth out the sticker. "Shouldn't it be all wilted?"

  He stops and stares at me for a while. "Yes. That makes sense. I will tell Voda."

  "He made that one?"

  "Can't you tell?" He grunts. "Kids. Always thinking with their you-knows. They think this can be won with macho. But they don't use macho. They do it by thinking smart. So we must think smart as well." He waits for a car to pass around the corner before pulling out his largest sticker. It's an A4 printout of Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt's character in Fight Club. Below him are the words You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. We're standing outside a Starbucks, and he pastes it up right over the smiling mermaid.

  "Can't get away from that guy," I say.

  "It is not Brad Pitt talking. It is Chuck Palahniuk. Brad was a... mouthpiece? Besides, it is a good movie." He stares through the glass at the empty seats, empty tables, idling coffee machines. "Tell me
. Do you ever think to burn it all down?"

  I think of Seb and her oversized mug, the steam rising in wreaths around her face. The way she turned to hide when I mentioned Fiver and Voda. "From time to time."

  Another sticker. This one over an ad for protein powder. I take a shot. Fiver is pallid and sunken in the flash, like a reanimated corpse. "Where are you from?" I ask. "You know. The accent."

  "Damascus. Have you been there?"

  "Never."

  "It is a strange place. But not like this. There are bad and good in both." He pauses. "We would never do this, in Damascus."

  "Will you ever go back?"

  "No," he says. "There is a fight here now. This is good, what you are doing. Maybe people will start to know. Then they will join us."

  I adjust the focus and grab another shot of the bag, his arm buried to the hilt, questing for the right sticker. "But if people join you, then there would be more than four horsemen."

  He grins, and I realise for the first time how sharp his teeth are. "Yes. Then we will have a cavalry."

  The others are waiting outside McDonald's, hunched against the cold. Seb smiles at me as we arrive. Voda less so. He has deep bags under his eyes. "You look like you need a break," I say.

  "Whatever." He hefts his duffel bag. "Let's go ruin some shit."

  He leads the way to the edge of the CBD. It's late, but lights are still on in the office blocks, revealing cubicle drones hammering on their keyboards long past closing hours. Seb sticks by my side. I whisper, "Missed you on the last few outings. Busy with school?"

  She scowls. "Not funny."

  "I'm not joking. Are the late nights messing you up?"

  "Nothing is wrong. Nothing." We don't speak after that. The streets converge and turn into a highway. We stop before a squat, knobbly building. On the rooftop is an electronic billboard that alternates between a promo for a reality TV show and Peters Ice Cream. It's the last thing a traveller will see as they exit the city and accelerate towards Canberra.

  "Seriously?" I say. "That thing?"

  "Yes. That thing."

  "How the hell are you going to poster that?"

  Fiver pats me on the shoulder. "We will not poster it. Today is something more."

  Voda vanishes around the side of the building with his duffel bag. A few seconds later there's a low whistle, and Fiver leads us around the corner. Voda is waiting by the side door, snipping through the padlock with a huge pair of bolt cutters. The door swings open on rusted hinges, and Voda slips inside without a word.

  "After you," says Fiver. I swallow, trying to hide how my hands are shaking. I haven't done a break-and-enter since my tagging days. I'd sworn, never again. But we're here, and Fiver is waiting, so I go inside.

  Voda leads the way up to the rooftop. The stars are invisible behind the glare of city lights. I can smell the street, the petrol haze, the rot in the storm drains. The electronic billboard stands on the edge of the roof, black and featureless from behind.

  Voda is pouring out the contents of his bag onto the pebbled rooftop. There are cables and plugs and things I can't identify. Phelps unzips his own backpack and lifts out a laptop. Fiver watches on with arms crossed. "We figured out how these work from the internet. Very simple. Animations are a program fed from USB. The passwords are usually default."

  "Admin, admin," Seb says. She's already prised open a panel on the back of the billboard with a screwdriver. Phelps has his laptop up and running, and Voda has found the right cables. I take a photo as they plug in. The flash picks them out in silhouette.

  Everyone is silent as Phelps fiddles and tunes. He is humming the Eighteen-Twelve Overture. Then he nods and clicks the laptop shut. "Done." It's been less than half a minute.

  We pack up and head back down. Phelps is still humming. "What did you do?" I ask, but nobody answers. The door is in sight and I start to relax.

  We file out onto the street. I cup the camera, check traffic, and jog to the far side. The billboard flashes, incredibly bright, brighter than any of the streetlights. It says, WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW THE STARS?

  I don't know what they're trying to say, but I like it. Camera up, finger on the trigger, click.

  In the corner of the viewfinder there is a tickle of red and blue. Then the siren begins, a wobbling tone that conjures up images of bombers and ack-ack guns, and my guts fall through the floor. I'm already backpeddling, shouting "Cops!" Seb looks panicked as she pulls her hood up and tightens her bag straps. Phelps's eyes are huge white saucers.

  "Run," says Fiver.

  We sprint together down the back streets while the sirens rise and fall. Phelps makes strained whistling noises as he runs. "Christ," he says. "Christ. Christ."

  We turn a corner. The sirens are fading. Phelps and Fiver are red in the face, heaving for breath, but smiling too. Voda is bouncing on his heels. "Shit, that was close!" he says. "That was awesome! Fuck the pigs!"

  I want to slap him, but I'm glad just to not be wearing cuffs. "Too close," I say. The camera is in my hands, squeezed in a deathgrip. I can feel my heartbeat like a metronome. "Goddamn." Beside me, Seb is sobbing into her sleeve, and I squeeze her shoulder gently. "Hey, it's okay. They're gone."

  She slaps my hand away, and I pull back, fingers stinging. "Shit, what'd I do? The cops are-"

  "It's not the cops," Seb whispers, in between sobs.

  "And? If you're scared of being arrested, so am I."

  "I've been arrested." She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. "It's not that. Just the sirens. It's the sound."

  "I-"

  "Leave it, okay? Just leave it." She turns her back, hugging herself tight.

  Fiver smiles and shrugs. "Not your fault. You did not know. It was good that you ran with us tonight! Many would not. Perhaps we need five horsemen, eh?"

  "Maybe," I say.

  Even so, the sound of Seb crying echoes in my head all the way home. With the door locked behind me I download the photos, cull the crap, touch up the best. There are only five or six shots from the night worth keeping. I share them with the masses.

  There are comments in my inbox. They can wait.

  * * *

  Morning hits hard. The late nights are catching up. My hand shakes as I pour milk into my cereal and I open my laptop as I chew.

  First, emails. No new jobs this week means I'm back to my noodle diet. More people want me to enlarge my genitalia for no money down. Delete, delete, delete.

  I jump to the gallery. Comments are building up fast. Some people are laying praise. A few are angry. This is mindless vandalism. You should be arrested. Disgusting.

  I hover over the DELETE button for a long time before deciding to leave the comments where they are. You take the good with the bad, after all.

  Then, towards the end of the list, there's a comment on one of the photos from the very first night. The Four Horsemen running from the billboard, Voda leading the charge, head down, hidden by shadow. Behind him, the kliegs make the woman's cellulite glow from within.

  The comment reads: This portfolio is fantastic. A real insight into the activities of Melbourne's counter-corporate activists. Have you considered exhibiting? I run the Tumnus gallery on Gertrude St...

  I call Seb.

  * * *

  We all meet in a coffee bar on Collins St. It's a high-class establishment. The bartender has a white moustache and gold cufflinks and the air is full of whispers, like the rustling of corn-stalks. Our coffee arrives in tiny cups with even tinier handles.

  Phelps is the first to speak. "It's a bad idea."

  Then Seb, black hair over one eye like a mopey pop-star throwback. "I think it's a damn good idea."

  "They could find us."

  "There isn't a single photo that could identify you," I say. "Not a one."

  "I can't be caught doing this." Phelps stares at me, face drawn, the scar on his lip livid white. "I have two kids. I can't afford court fees."

  "They don't send people to jail for sticking up posters."

  His hands are shaking. "You don't know that. It's all knee-jerk these days."

  We're all silent for a while. I push my tiny coffee over to Seb. She gulps it down. "Look," I say. "She asked for fifteen photos. They'll be exhibited for a few weeks and sold at auction. Nobody is going to see any more than they would if they were up on my portfolio. This isn't going to expose you." I look around the group one by one. "Any of you."