Crimechurch E-Book

Michael Botur

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Life in the safe suburbs of Christchurch isn't dangerous enough for Marty. He needs excitement, and goes looking for it in punk, protest, politics and crackpipes.

Marty soon finds Mona, a teenage runaway living in a flophouse of skinheads and goths. The two live for drugs and dodgy deals, but they are minnows compared to savage siblings Jade and Shayna.

Meanwhile, war has broken out among the bikers Marty and Mona depend on for their daily fix. Fuelling the fight is 'King Kong' Chong, a thug determined to be Number One in the 0h-3.

Swimming between the sharks is Winston, Marty's baby brother, who has big plans. When Winston gets in over his head, it's up to Marty to try and pull him out of a neo-Nazi nightmare before their family becomes a target.

“Breathtaking, relentless, unapologetic… It's a wild, wild, wild ride.” - Australia & NZ Crime Fiction Reviews

Leseprobe

CRIMECHURCH

MICHAEL BOTUR

Copyright (C) 2023 Michael Botur

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Tyler Colins

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

You want a dedication? I am dedicated to Abe and Violet, my perfect kids. If you’re reading this, I love you and I am one hundred percent proud of you. Thanks for being loyal fans and listening to my stories. Hopefully, after I’m gone, people can look back on this book as my masterwork—a book which captures private thoughts and perceptions I struggle to communicate otherwise. We needed someone to try and capture male-on-male codes of violence and ask angry young Kiwi men what the world looks like to them. I’m the only artist who wanted to take on that job.

It was very hard getting any attention for this book while the COVID-19 pandemic was happening, so thanks to every single person who read the early versions of it.

I’m singling out a couple of reviewers who have selflessly gone out of their way to review, endorse and support Crimechurch and my other books—so huge thanks to Paul Brooks and Jeremy Roberts.

Thank you to all the people on Goodreads, from around the world, who read the book—and double-thanks to those who have reviewed it. It means a lot that you took the time to ride the book with me to the end. If you’re brave enough to experience Crimechurch with me, you’re awesome.

Cheers to you.

Michael Botur

February 2023

“The new Canterbury was to be as genuine a reproduction as possible of the old country: an English county, with its cathedral city and its famous university; its bishop, its parishes, its endowed clergy; its ancient aristocracy, its yeoman farmers, its few necessary tradesmen, its sturdy and loyal labourers; and all this with no crime, no poverty, and no dissent. It was to be a veritable New Atlantis or, rather, a City of God.”Project Canterbury. H. T. Purchas, 1909

I against my brother.

I and my brother against my cousin.

I, my brother and my cousin against the world.

—Bedouin proverb

PRAISE FOR CRIMECHURCH

“A brutal novel full of horrible people doing horrible things, leaving themselves no obvious path forward or out, Crimechurch isn't going to be to everyone's taste. So dark, so populated by downtrodden, desperate people I'm not even sure you could call this noir - there's something breathtaking, relentless, unapologetic […] It's a wild wild wild ride, and this reader found it utterly fascinating despite the confrontation, brutality, and dysfunction.”

– Karen Chisholm, Australia & NZ Crime Fiction Reviews

“Botur has claimed for himself a piece of literary territory occupied by the desperate, downtrodden and damned.”

–Paul Little

“I’m exhausted and overwhelmed reading this harsh tale of gang life in Christchurch, NZ, and I feel as if I have just emerged from a freakish carnival roller coaster ride. Moments of intense graphic violence, relieved sporadically when I uttered a laugh at unexpected, but totally appropriate, humour.

The book is populated by inhumane and psychopathic gang leaders, and those who would do their bidding, who occasionally show a glimpse of sentiment. A bungee-cord ride from start to finish. Gritty, raw, and bleak don’t even begin to describe the general tone of this remarkable account given life by the author. […] This is not a book I will easily forget. Marty, Winston et al will lodge in my brain for a long time.”

– Jamie’s Reviews

“If I had to sum up this novel in a few words, I’d say, “intense from start to finish.” Yes, there are a few darkly comical moments, but they only allow us to catch our breath. Author Michael Botur minces no words, respecting no boundaries of subject matter, no niceties of language in telling his tale of youthful rebellion in modern day Christchurch, New Zealand. From page one, the author dives below the peaceful and picturesque surface of the city into a rebellious nether world of alcohol, drugs, thievery and destructive—often self-destructive— violence. […] Overall, Crimechurch is a fast-paced page-turner, full of the kind of twists and turns—and surprise outcomes—readers of modern crime fiction relish.”

– John Timms

“Reading Michael Botur’s books brings you face-to-face with characters you are unlikely to find anywhere else in contemporary NZ fiction. Fiction rooted in the world of multicultural Kiwi scuzbuckets and hobnockers. The lowlife crim’ element, if you’re struggling with those terms. Crimechurch is a story of redemption, though. The book is a vivid, wild piece of imagination – or is it? It’s so convincingly written that you can’t help but wonder – maybe Mr Botur was born with a criminal mind and should probably be behind bars, along with these Punks, runaways, bikers, and losers. […] Botur doesn’t waste a sentence. The reader is swept along, moment-by-moment – with fantastic, graphic descriptions of highly charged scenes, as the arc of the time-shifting story plays out, and all the characters meet Mr. Fate.”

– Jeremy Roberts, Award-winning NZ poet

"Crimechurch can be brutal, nasty, with moments of humour and some clever use of language. I read this book in one sitting, not daring to interrupt the flow or decrease the story’s speed by lifting my eyes from the page. No matter where you come from, or where you’re planning to end up, this book will have you thinking thoughts you never thought possible, and finding empathy with characters you’ll probably never want to meet.”

– Paul Brooks, Wanganui Midweek

“A fascinating book… the nearest thing you could compare it to would be Pulp Fiction. Michael is a very powerful author. He’s the type of guy that rolls up his sleeves and puts his heart and soul into it. He’s so involved in what he wants to say. … An excellent book…. He doesn’t conform to nobody for nothing.”

– In Brief Book & Film Reviews

“Gritty, violent and captivating. A tense story of life on the seedier side of Christchurch. Botur writes with authority and humour.”

– Anna Willett, Author

ON THE DEVIL TOOK HER: TALES OF HORROR AND OTHER BOOKS

“Probably the most terrifying collection of chilling fiction I've read in 2022.”

– Pan Book Reviews, on The Devil Took Her: Tales of Horror

“Botur is the last beacon of darkness in the modern Kiwi cultural landscape.”

– Luka Tomic, Director

"With The Devil Took Her, Michael Botur has created a series of wonderfully unsettling stories that fill the reader with ill-ease. Settle in for some energetic, evocative, jump-off-the-page writing and stories that do what all good horror should do - repulse and intrigue."

– Kathryn Burnett - Award-winning Screenwriter/Playwright

“It’s rare to read an author that puts it all out there, straying well and truly outside the boundaries of today’s PC societal views. Botur invites backlash in, and I respect that. There are so many great tales in here, all written with panache and a street cred that can only be garnered, I feel, from experience, which makes me like this guy even more. He trades grammar convention for a stream of consciousness that pulls you into each story, a roller coaster with a fresh destination Botur hides in each telling with aplomb.”

– Scott Butler, Screenwriter, Shortland Street

“Botur’s energetic prose and clever and compelling storytelling deserves recognition and a wider audience. […] Botur is definitely a new New Zealand talent to keep an eyeball out for.”

– Linda Niccol, Award-winning screenwriter/director

“Michael Botur’s work grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go. His stories throb with what feel like real people, real conversations, real moments of pain and hope, misunderstanding and reconciliation, remorse and surprise.”

– Maggie Trapp, New Zealand Listener, on True? (2019)

“Written in unvarnished street language about the rougher side of life - drugs, jail and death, the book shows rare bravery and honesty […] The thing about Michael Botur is his voice is very much a street voice. His language is street language: it’s raw, it’s coarse, it’s

obscene. It’s tough and it’s confronting […] There are gems s– some of them are absolutely great.”

– Ian Telfer, Radio New Zealand on True? (2019)

“One of the most original story writers of his generation in New Zealand.

– Patricia Prime, Takahē 86, on Spitshine (2016)

“As a former journalist he has perfected the skill of telling a story and evoking emotion. Botur is a clever writer. He has mastered the art of leaving things unsaid.”

– Rebekah Fraser, New Zealand Book Lovers

CONTENTS

MARTY

1. Set The Playground on Fire

2. Going Wrong In Your Own Way

3. Live Fast, Die Young

4. Staying Hard By Staying Hungry

5. Revolutionaries Unsure What To Do

6. Not The Revolution I Planned

7. A Year Driving

8. A Birthday Card Has Broken Me

9. Let’s Get The Fuck Out Of Here

JADE

1. Everything Except A Friend

2. The Nicest Jail Jadey’s Ever Been In

3. Sugar Is For Cookies

4. Idle Hands

5. A New Frontier For Jadey

6. Ten Thousand Kays From Canterbury

7. You Gotta Go All In

8. They Ain’t Killed Old Jade Slattery

MONA

1. Bacchanalian as FUCK

2. Court Sucks

3. Alpha Māori

4. The Devil Took That Boy

5. If She Can’t Get Her Money

6. All Your Troubles Will Be Gone

7. Babies Who Need Me

8. Come Back To Your Whānau

9. Taking Charge Of Our Fucked-Up Family

CHONG

1. Just Try Callin’ Me Chink

2. Chongyboy Invented Crime

3. In Jail, I Dreamed

4. Twice As Outcast

5. The Definition Of Ruthless

6. Halfcaste Little Upstart

7. Soldiers Till They Die

8. Riders Forever, Forever Riders

9. Leave It Up To Jadey

WINSTON

1. Who’s This Minimart Kid?

2. Chickens Coming Home To Roost

3. A New Kind Of Warrior

4. We’re Animals

5. My Big Bro Carved a Path

6. A Bit Of a Rep

7. Wish Marty Was There

8. If You Want To Get Out

9. King of Australia

MAMA TA’A

1. Thank God My Boy Isn’t In Trouble

2. Irreversible Damage

3. Creating Lasting Change

4. Too Delicate For All This Man Stuff

5. My Boy Is The Best

6. That Boy of Yours

7. We Don’t Want Any More Deaths

8. Don’t Get Mad, Mama

9. A Tonne of Courage

BEZUIDENHOUT BROTHERS

1. Mopping Up The Mess

2. Escape The Shame

3. I Done Somethin’ Real Bad

4. Make It To The Other Side Without Falling

5. The Last Night I Ever See My Family Alive

6. Pure Hungry Predator

7. You Wake My Sister, You’re In Trouble

8. This Is Boy Stuff

9. Strap Yourself In Real Tight Till This Is Over

AFTERMATH

1. Thug Life All The Way

2. We’re Not Running Anymore

3. Beauty In This City All Along

EPITAPH

1. King Chong Put The Crown On

About the Author

MARTY

1

SET THE PLAYGROUND ON FIRE

It’s 10.30 on a Saturday morning and instead of kneeling in a park catching cricket balls, I’m at a gangsta’s granny’s flat in Halswell. We’re on a tiled patio looking out at roses, a bird bath, and a jungle of cauliflower. There’s no granny in sight; Jade Slattery’s pretty much taken over the place. We’re doing shots and tryina talk tough to impress Jade. His granny could be sleeping, or dead, or gone, we’re unsure. There are no adults in Jade’s world.

My friend Joel Lin told me on the way over, as he hovered his mountain bike alongside mine, that I should never speak any nerd-shit in front of Jade, which is why I’m carefully controlling what I say to sound cool.

Just be chill, Marty. Don’t use no nerd-words. No cricket, no computers, no Tintin. I’m auditioning to get into Jade’s gang, 2 Hard Corpse. Jade’s refilling my glass with fiery bourbon that I don’t even want. I have to drink it. If I look staunch, Joel might get me patched, not that 2 Hard Corpse really have patches. You join 2HC, you get a brand from a hot bit of metal plus a t-shirt.

I’ve looked up to Joel Lin since we were little. You could do anything you wanted at his place, like eat whole packets of cookies. He’s some sort of mystery brown race with kinda thin eyes, Chinese I think. White kids used to always rip on him, which I guess is why he stopped coming to school and started doing burgs and hangin’ with gangstas instead.

Today, Saturday morning, I’m adding streetsmarts to my booksmarts. I’ve been devouring Bill Hicks, Hunter Thompson, Bobby Sands, but I’m hungry for something real gritty, something that’s hard to find in our safe hood. Something spicy and dangerous. When I grow up, I’m going to write revolutions like Kesey and Kerouac. Right now, I just need to round out my street cred a bit. Get down and dirty and dangerous with people who aren’t as posh and brainy as my family. I can’t think of anyone better to soak up badass-ness from than this Jade guy. Dude’s the most deadliest person I’ve heard of. He’s a total psycho, always looking for reasons to kick or scald or stab people. He looks like an evil hippie, with long blonde hair he keeps shaking over his shoulder, and glasses like little windows through which he can peer down his beak at us, waiting for an opportunity to peck once we’re fucked up on buds and booze.

I went to primary school with Jade and still have the Jesus doll he stole from the Bible teacher and melted with a magnifying glass, then ordered me to hold onto for him. I haven’t seen Jade in like five years. He still has this fucked-up habit; he giggles nervously like someone murmuring in their sleep, Hininin, plus he always rhymes like Dr Seuss or some shit. Seems like in the last five years he’s become a man, learned a tolerance for drink and drugs, and now he doesn’t need that stuff to get a buzz.

He gets off on running his dictatorship. We heard his mum smoked him out from when he was like nine, and that’s how come the court ordered him to go live with his granny, wherever the hell she is. The dude got taken away to all these reform schools for a while—for throwing a bottle in the principal’s teeth when we were like 10, plus he set the playground on fire, and carjacked Kelvin’s wheelchair, and put a popsicle stick up this girl’s pussy. If I hang with Jade for a day, hopefully his dangerousness should rub off on me. Just a day.

While we suck breakfast bongs and put our bourbon glasses on lace doilies, Jade gives us a lecture about the fishing line guillotine he set up in the botanic gardens to try and chop people’s heads off. Jade reckons he hasn’t quite got the counterweights perfect but he’s workin’ on it. Total nutcase, this dude—but that’s why people are scared of him, and that’s why I’m here. I’m 15, I haven’t made a dent in the world so I’m’a learn how to make the world a little more wary of me.

Jade pauses the lecture every 30 seconds to study us through his glasses; he asks me what he just said five seconds ago and kicks me in the shin when I get it wrong. Me and Joel Lin have been nodding and giving him encouragement but Jade holds up a hand to shut us up and cranks up this Insane Clown Posse song that goes Knock ’em down, skull to ground / choke ya throat, no more sound.

While I rub my sore shin, Jadey paces a circle around us, explaining the ICP lyrics, ordering us to take shots. Jadey begins telling us a good way to knock your enemy down. If you wanna be a 2HC soldier, the best thing to do is sweep their legs out, allllways knock the knees out, then as soon as they’re on the ground, you race to the freezer and get a frozen plastic two-litre milk bottle and hold it by the handle and smash their face in. He stands up and starts shadow boxing, slamming imaginary milk bottles on people’s faces and makes Joel Lin laugh till he chokes. I pretend to find it funny too, even though I’m picturing my little brother getting bashed and it’s me that wants to puke.

The collar of the baggy t-shirt swings away from his neck, showing Jade’s bony chest. No tats, no eyebrow rings, no decorations at all ’cause of that weird religion his mum was into before she went to Sunnyside. They were like a sex cult that got into needles and half of them went to jail. Jadey has a sister, Shameless Shayna we used to call her, who’s like a girl-version of him, living on stolen sandwiches and smashing boys. She’s even more mental than Jade, people reckon. They lost their virginity to each other, if the urban legends are true.

I accept another shot of stinky alcohol, toss the toxic sludge down my throat, try rap along with the latest stuff on the stereo, Eminem. I keep up with Slim Shady’s angry white words decent enough and Joel Lin lifts the rim of his NBA cap to see if Jade’s impressed, flicking his eyes between us.

‘The bro’s brought a mixtape too,’ Joel says, clearing his throat.

I want to tell the guys this music will warm their hearts, but that’s not a very gangsta thing to say. ‘Yous niggas is gonna hear some shit that’ll blow your motherfuckin’ MIND,’ I venture.

‘Let no corrupting talk come out of your mou-ouths,’ Jadey croons.

‘Is that … ICP?’

‘That’s Fenians. Means no swearing.’

‘Um—d’you mean Ephesians? Fenians means, like, Irish and stuff.’

Joel Lin looks at me with drowning eyes.

Jadey kicks my shin again. I grit my teeth. He doesn’t like that I’m not crying, so he kicks my ankle. I gasp a little and hit ‘play’ and Henry Rollins and the Black Flag boys start screaming about burning the suits out of the White House.

THINK THEY'RE SMART, CAN'T THINK FOR THEMSELVES

RISE ABOVE, WE'RE GONNA RISE ABOVE

LAUGH AT US BEHIND OUR BACKS

RISE ABOVE, WE'RE GONNA RISE ABOVE

‘How ’bout this, oi, check this out!’ I’m out of my seat with excitement, skipping songs. ‘Dead Kennedys, yo! Jobless millions whisked awayyy / At last we have more room to playyy! Kill kill kill the poor tonight, yo, kill kill kill the poor!’

When I open my eyes, Jadey’s head is tilted sideways. I’ve shown him a sensitive belly to bite.

‘Are you poor?’ Jadey begins. ‘I should kill you, right? Your mum’s rich. I seen her on them real estate billboards. Glenda. That’s your old lady. You’re rich.’

‘Nah, honest, like –’

‘So, I’m a liar, Marty?’

‘Nah, Jade, n—’

‘How much money’s your mum got, real estate boy?’ Jade squats in front of my face. His eyes bore into me. There’s a weird shivery giggle he can’t seem to stop bubbling out of his throat. Hininin the giggle goes, like he’s vibrating with glee. ‘Song’s sayin’ you deserve to die, Martin.’

Joel Lin creates an interruption, forcing the bong into my hands. It’s a delicate black glass object like a beautiful vase, which Jade must’ve nicked from somebody important. Joel’s been using a barbecue lighter on it and the cone is glowing orange.

‘Don’t keep Jadey waiiiii-tiiing,’ Jadey says, weirdly talking about himself from above. ‘Your mum sells houses hard-out. Big fancy rich billionaire. Think you’re better than Jadey? She got some big chubby tits on her. You like your mum’s tits, rich boy?’

‘Well, not me personally, I, um—’

‘91 Charles Upham Avenue. That’s where you live, hininin. You lie to me, I come fiiiind you, hininin.’

‘TIME FOR A TOKE!’ Joel goes, clapping to interrupt, ‘Marty, no more revolutions, eh? Scratch that shit on a desk on Monday, bro.’

I attempt to take a heavy toke, get a shock as the scorching lighter flame passes through the glass and zaps my hands. I let go of the bong so I can suck my thumb. In the half second the bong drops onto the tiles and explodes, my life derails.

Steaming bong water spatters our pants. Glass shards settle on my shoes. We stare at the wreckage on the floor. Jade bends his pouty lips into a smirk, tilts his eagle head sideways, shunts to the edge of his seat, seizes my ears with both hands, starts twisting, tells me the bong’s worth 80, nah, 100 bucks. 120, maybe. He speaks in a calm, flat, almost quiet voice, with little giggles of hininin, like a real-life Beavis & Butthead. I’ve given him a ticket to smash me. His eyes sparkle with excitement.

Down the driveway, over to the park, towards the woods, I march ahead of him, not daring to look back for bystanders to call the cops. For a minute, then five, then we’re passing fields and the last houses with hope in the window.

We plunge into a mushy forest of logs and stumps and bamboo and wild willows. We’re near the Dirtmounds, now, the tussocky construction zone where acres of Canterbury are being ripped up and rebuilt.

Jade orders me to stop in a clearing. There is a blow-up doll with fishing line around its neck, dangling from a branch. There’s a hole in the ground full of duck feathers. There’s a scorched area with a lake of melted plastic. I want my Mumsie.

Right now, she’ll be in a trance, working on a portrait on a paint-spattered sheet in the kitchen, listening to Wagner. Dad’ll be dabbing gloss on his model trains, getting ready for an afternoon train demo with a bunch of other dads while my goody-good brother Winston puts a tiny perfect dot of yellow on the headlights of a Pacific Pegasus.

Jade positions me against a tree, jams the bourbon bottle against my teeth.

‘Drink it all, get numb, hininin,’ he giggles, producing from his pocket a handful of skyrockets and a lighter, tugging down my pants and boxer shorts. ‘You won’t feel as much.’

2

GOING WRONG IN YOUR OWN WAY

The burns from Jadey’s fireworks, the hiding, crying in the bushes, stumbling home, sleeping in a bed of puke … it was useful, all that. I needed the pussy slapped out of me.

I wake up with a text on my phone from Joel Lin, saying he’s got me a 2HC t-shirt and him and Jade are going to the pool and they’ll pick me up. We head vaguely towards QEII pool but never make it past Colombo Street. Colombo invites us to make mayhem. Everyone’s an uncaring capitalist clone. Fuck ’em. We put dry ice bombs in a Coke machine, pour petrol in a clothing bin outside a church, we borrow Mumsie’s credit cards and get out $300 cash, then Joel gets busy and Jade gets busy, and they both sorta forget about me and I find new friends at school I’ve never noticed before—friends with homemade tats and pregnant girlfriends. Risky people who make my heart race. The whole 2 Hard Corpse Jade Slattery thing was like a new pair of shoes I couldn’t quite fit.

We cruise the flat streets, yell shit at people out the windows as we drive by, splash each other with shaken-up beer. We barely see older or younger people, only peeps our age. Our strata of 17. Our universe has no parents to tell us off. We are a tribe of teens ruling the world, no responsibility, fake IDs for all, fucking skanks and fucking each other, waiting for Saturday nights so we can walk into parties in Somerfield and scrap with private school bourgeois pigs. Jade has hardened me up to fight when the revolution comes. There’s riots on TV at the G8 Summit. People smash up Starbucks. It’s electrifying. School can’t contain me. There’s a battle zone out on the streets. I’m being called up.

I read tons of books. I listen to that Naomi Klein journalist-lady on my headphones. I hang out on Reddit and we talk about everything controversial. Psychedelics, anarchism, cyberpunk.

Ken Kesey said, ‘He who marches out of step hears another drum.’ He was talking to me when he said that, directly to me. Think for yourself; question authority; redefeat fuckin’ high on drugs. That’s me, yo. Every time I skip school and get off the bus in Cathedral Square and smoke weed and kick around a hacky sack with the hippies, they pull back the curtain a little more. Show me what’s beyond the visible spectrum. Comfort is complacency. Every lounge suite, every sedan, every heat pump my parents buy, it’s The System trying to make them soft so they’re easy to conquer. The world is oppressive. The world needs me to fight it.

My last day at Hillmorton High School doesn’t start out being my last day; it’s just Mr Mohammed keeps telling me to pay attention. We’re supposed to be copying his dumbass PowerPoint onto A2 paper but I’m writing some serious words of revolution and when I hold my poster up, the Establishment trembles.

Teacher stands in front of the class

But the lesson plan he can’t recall

The student’s eyes don’t perceive the lies

Bouncing off of EVERY FUCKING WALL

His composure is well kept

He fears playing the fool

complacent students listen to some of that

BULLSHIT he learned in school

WE GOTTA TAKE THE POWER BACK.

Mr Mohammed tells me to go wait out in the hall and I just grab my bag and slap a bunch of palms and bail, leaving my poster as my epitaph.

Rage Against The Machine: 1. Mr Mohammed: 0.

Half a dozen of us sign out permanently, collect our leaving certificates, and gap it. To celebrate, me and the boys spend a whole night on the farming expo showgrounds out at the far end of the Dirtmounds, squirting each other with fire extinguisher, shaking up beers, shooting potato guns at cows, cutting wires with fire axes, burning anything plastic with our lighters.

Still drunk at dawn, we drive to the Waimak, a desert of stones with a cold opal river twisting through it like a ribbon.

We set fire to Johnny Rabies’ car and push it in the river. Johnny Rabies runs his mouth as always; he convinces us all he can get insurance money for it. It burns as it floats, like a Chinese lantern, giving off gas bubbles and an oily rainbow bloom.

The insurance thing doesn’t work out and I get ordered to go to a family conference. I can’t cope with little Favourite Son Winston staring at me, looking all holy with his Scouts gear on, and I ask Mr Favourite if he wants a fight, then storm out.

My tribe picks me up in the parking lot, of course. My tribe don’t think I’m abnormal. We smoke a sesh but the weed’s not quite potent enough and luckily one of the boys has got a strain he calls Hot & Spicy that’s been soaked in speed and that gets our hearts racing.

They dare me to drive down Colombo Street on the kerb for fifty straight metres without hitting anything. We send a couple rubbish bins flying, spook some buskers. Yeah bitch! Fuck paving stones! Fuck the Arts Centre! It’s all Illuminati anyway. I have to go to Youth Court for that. I get a suspended sentence. It means if I get in more shit, I have to go back to court. Pffft. Boo-hoo. I’m growing me some dreadlocks and a yellow goatee, and my eyes have sunk into tired black pits in my skull. Chuck me in jail, I don’t care. Just take me away from this hypocrisy you call the first world.

I live with my olds, but only ’cause I don’t have enough work to get money to pay rent on a place. I stay up all night, get up at lunch, and guzzle milk out of their milk bottle. I use up their internet watching videos about the brewing industry’s conspiracy to ban weed. I’m the last one awake at midnight. I drink my dad’s brandy in the small hours, snort my mum’s Prozac. At the dinner table we get into these debates and I tell them they’re wasting their money on lounge suites and Indonesian statuettes when there’s real exciting shit out on the street to spend on. Pills, man, powder! Pipes! Prozzies! Fuck comfort. Go wild. Blow it all at the casino, Dad, before you die.

But nah. Eating the chocolate chips and hazelnuts from mum’s baking supplies is as edgy as it gets at 91 Charles Upham Ave.

To stop their nagging, I finally agree to do an apprenticeship. I sign up for the first course in the first book in the pile of glossy handouts my dad dumps in front of me; it’s plumbing he wants me to do, apparently.

Fine. Whatever.

The boys at work don’t really like me ’cause I rock up on time, but then I take my morning shit in the toilets, using up a good 20 paid minutes, reading MAD magazine. I come out and there’s a confrontation ’cause the boys don’t believe me that shitting on the boss’s time is how workers start a revolution.

They say I oughta go work for my mum instead. Put on a Century 21 blazer and sell houses, attaboy. Fuck these guys. My parents are from Cape Town. They’ve seen real dirt and danger. They know I’m capable of better but capable of worse too. They see me walk in the door with the collars of my t-shirts torn, my eyebrow ring ripped out and believe soon enough I’ll be scared straight.

They’re wrong. I ain’t scared yet.

It’s winter, some shivery indigo night in July. I drink a box, then get chucked in the cells for climbing up the frosty Chalice and pissing into the cold wind. It’s 5 am when I get bailed and sent home to my bedroom. All I want to do is sleep and feel sorry for myself but Mumsy comes into my room with a tray of dinner and a pile of folded fresh towels, then Dad comes in in his dressing gown and tells me they’ve got some money set aside, “To pay for a barrister, if you’re in trouble again.” He’s asked for a hook-up from his friend in the Probus Club to get me a full-time gig with Otautahi Plumbers. To help me get comfortable.

Comfortable? COMFORTABLE?!

I crank the stereo, blast some Rage, wake the house, scream into the night, ‘FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELLL MEEEE.’

I turn the bed over, smashing my bedside lamp. The bulb pops with a whisper of smoke. I clomp down the stairs and pack all my shit into the boot of the Nissan Skyline I’m not supposed to be driving. My little brother follows me to the doorstep in his Yu-Gi-Oh boxer shorts, folds his arms, tells me I need to stop shaming the family.

Four and a half years younger than me and he thinks he’s the man of the house.

I spew a sloppy, drunken Dostoyevsky line in Winston’s face. ‘Going wrong in your OWN way’sh better than, better than going right in someone ELSH’s.’

‘Words of a condemned man,’ Winnie yawns, bathing me in shame for not being as perfect as him.

I knock him down with a right hook. His head hits the door frame and he slithers onto the Welcome mat and starts crying. Knock em down / skull to ground. But that’s– but that’s not me…

Mumsie and Dad build a wall around him with their backs.

I disappear.

3

LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG

I wake up after a night on the piss in a house I don’t remember. The rug is covered in what look like corpses in body bags. I check. They’re breathing; turns out they’re just pale-skinned goths in black dresses and dark overcoats and leather boots. I have to walk down to the dairy to get some ciggies and work out where I am and what buses are nearby. Worcester Street, it turns out. The city centre. Flat streets where people scrap in the middle of the road outside pubs. High rises leering down. Needles in the gutters.

I come back and hang out and smoke ciggies and sip instant coffee with no milk. The goths need another flatmate to make rent, they mention. We agree I may as well hang out permanently. We get wasted and I spray-paint Bill Hicks on the wall of the lounge with a can I’ve stolen from the roadworks outside.

Today a young man on acid realised WE ARE THE IMAGINATION OF OURSELVES. Here’s Tom with the weather.

One of the goths with big Bambi eyes and hands so tiny she can’t be much older than 15 or 16 gets me to come into her bed on the first night to keep warm. She’s lying about the reason for calling me into her bed, but she’s not lying about the lack of warmth. The place is like a chilly Victorian castle with fog hanging in the rooms and wind whistling in the fireplaces.

Bambi, she’s a Māori girl with pillowy lips, puffy soft curly black hair, skin pale as balsa wood. We smoke in bed after we’ve climaxed a couple times, filling the room with blue clouds, watching droplets dribble down the vast old colonial windows. She’s innocent, this one. Must’ve run away from home or something. Not as street-smart as some of the older goths upstairs. We get to know each other, smoking and gossing, and I’m onto the subject of weed science and how tetrahydrocannabinol bonds with the sucrose in pot brownies and she doesn’t know what the long words mean, so I kiss her little naïve brain.

At least she hasn’t been irreparably indoctrinated with Western propaganda. She lets me read to her some lines from Das Kapital by the godfather of the revolution, Karl Marx, till she yawns and I snap my book shut. Pretty boring, I guess, to be fair.

It’s after midnight and we’re spilling our guts, sharing everything. She says her street name is Evanescence. Bullshit. I tickle her till she ‘fesses up her real name: Mona. Over the next month, I experiment with sleeping in every bed in the flat, but there’s something about the way Mona arranges her soft toy pandas (red pandas, specifically, she’s obsessed with those things) and dreamcatchers that make me feel welcome. She’s too babyish to distrust anyone. This girl lives in a warzone without armour. I need to protect her.

Four days after banging her, I have to piss every five minutes ’cause there’s white goo leaking out of my dick. On the building sites where we lay lines of Alkathene pipe I can barely concentrate ’cause I keep having to rush off to the Portaloos every ten minutes to squeeze out a couple droplets of cloudy piss.

It’s another two weeks before I’m hurting bad enough to sign up at a clinic beside the needle exchange place on Hereford Street and let some pretty Filipina nurse inspect my weeping cock. She gets me the right antibiotics, but she insists on a blood pressure check too, and some questions about my lifestyle. I have the blood pressure of a fat 40-year-old she tells me. I’m gonna live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse, I tell her.

‘My boyfrien’, he is-a like you are being,’ she tells me.

‘Sounds like a fun cunt,’ I tell her. ‘Hafta have a beer with him some day.’

My work week starts at seven on a Monday morning with coffee and a smoke and the plumbing boys picking me up in the ute. Every evening I trudge back into our creaky castle, too weary to pull my muddy boots off. I sell a few brass taps and copper fittings at Cash Converters on the way home but I don’t make more than a hundred bucks most days. Dinner is always a steaming mountain of fish and chips all my goth flatmates pick at. Cheap cunts hardly have jobs, any of them. They’re all on the sickness benefit.

We stretch the food out with white bread and margarine and sachets of Burger King ketchup; then there’s no food in the house again till the next night. Everyone reckons they’ve already spent their student loan money and there’s only so many fake accounts you can set up. Every TV show I watch has got rooms of good-looking twenty-somethings living in perfect democracy, all lovemaking and laughter.

This place, I dunno. It’s really only this Mona chickadee that makes me wanna stay. She does shifts on checkout at PAK’nSAVE. She dyes her hair amethyst, covers her childish spotty skin with a mask of white foundation makeup. When we’re watching scary movies, she pulls a Pokémon blanket up to her teeth.

Just before midnight, there’s a wildfire of gossip and knocking-on-doors and everyone mobilises. The call goes out: someone needs a hiding. This friend of Vlad has had his son taken off him by his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend from Nelson, or whatever, and he wants revenge on somebody, anybody. Our mob goes out looking to deface the pretty city. Walking in a sweeping line eight wide down the pavement, we force people into the gutter. We march our boots and dreadlocks through Worcester and High Streets and Cathedral Square. Tourists see us coming and cross the road.

We drift up the north end of Manchester through the posh neon restaurants of Merivale. We unchain some rich people’s dogs, shake their lop rabbits out of their cages. We’re starting a revolution of animals, or whatever. It’s unclear. All I know is one of the group members is in the Earth Liberation Front and hates animal bondage. It feels good to be pissed off at something.

We clomp down to the Botanic Gardens, where we topple this big marble statue and shunt the broken hunks of marble into the middle of the road. I’ve heard Jade Slattery started living like a commando survivalist nutjob in the bushes somewhere in Hagley Park and I pause to wonder, for a sec, if we’ll step in one of his bear traps. Then we’re on the move again. Forget Jade Slattery. And Joel Lin. He was a lousy bro. Zero chance I’ll ever bump into those cunts again.

We take a taxi to the Rocky Cola bar where it’s Halloween and there’s a show from this band that Vlad’s stepsister is in called Ümlaüt, and although you’re supposed to mosh, I wrap my arms around my babygirl and she buries her face in my woolly dreadlocks, and we slowly swoon in the basement of black beats and mist, our feelings pausing the spinning world. Back in school it was weird to date someone four years younger than you. Out here, stuff’s different. I’m living on the frontier just a few clicks from hopelessness.

We amble home in blue light as the birds are waking up. We crash back into our wet-window castle at 7 am when Straightos are going to work. Everyone collapses on his or her own mattress, too exhausted to take off their boots and trench coats, except me and Mona. High school’s still got its hooks in her. She won’t get her leaving certificate unless she completes a two-page essay on the ANZACs and it has to be done this morning.

Mona head’s full of coloured candy popcorn. She’s useless with time management. I have to help her. There’s only one decent lamp in this flat and its base is broken, so I hold the wobbling lightbulb for two hours over her refill pad while she handwrites her assignment. After, she hums a Pink song as she laces up and walks out the door to catch an 8.30 bus to Hagley Community College to hand her work in. I watch to see if she’ll look back at me, remembering who helped her.

It’s pay day so I call in sick and smoke a session with some chefs who’ve dropped round to score Ritalin and end up away for a week at some Riccarton flat, playing poker with Chinese meth head accounting students from the university. When I come back, the bed is gone from Mona’s room and there’s a blank spot on the wall where her Salmonella Dub poster used to be.

The flat is going empty one by one, and I need to get out, else I’ll be left with the mountain of dirty dishes covered in so many maggots, it looks like the porcelain is alive.

I cram my hoodies and CDs into a black garbage bag, leave my plumbing workbooks in a pile of bills and fines and Baycorp notices, and move on.

There’s this basic kitchen and bar skills certificate you can do at the polytech. It teaches you how to wash your hands so you don’t give hepatitis, pretty much. You get course-related costs and a student loan, plus free kitchen knives. The careers advisor at Tech says it’s a good fit for me. I pick up my certificate two months after I start.

I slide it into my Clearfile résumé along with my Canterbury Cricket Kids Player of the Year award, my ticket stubs from all the gigs I’ve been to, my Cantamath certificate, my Scouts badges. Pictures of my parents. One of me and my brother wrestling.

I get a new SIM card and change my mobile number ’cause I can’t face the awkwardness of Otautahi Plumbers ringing me up and confronting me about why I quit. The world’s a huge place. Plenty of room to run from things.

4

STAYING HARD BY STAYING HUNGRY

My family lure me into what turns out to be a surprise party for Dad. It’s partly a trick to get me home so Mumsie can slip grocery vouchers and a bottle of vitamins into my pockets as she hugs me. She offloads complaints onto me. My little brother Winston’s chucked out his Lego, his GI Joes, his Meccano, and even his Nintendo ’cause he’s trying to act tough and grown-up, and apparently it’s my job to save his toys from the trash and carefully wipe the goo and dust off Winnie’s toys with the lip of my FUBU hoodie. Winnie, you fuckwit.

I wipe the goo off; I box them up. Dad shows me precisely where I can park them in the garage, then uses it as an excuse to give me a tour of the freakin’ place. He’s proud to show me he’s put up new shelves of recycled oak to store his 1000 issues of Popular Mechanics, so proud his voice goes all light and soft, licking his moustache with glee. Obviously, Winston’s hardout carbon fibre mountain bike with its own special display is part of the tour, the subtext being that Winston’s skilled at sports and I’m not. Cheers for that, Pops. Dad’s endless 200-square-metre garage has a sink exclusively for washing paint brushes, stacked boxes of discounted razor blades he bought cheap, because he shaves every day, even when camping. His garage is like a time capsule. A kayak in the wooden rafters, a collection of 400 rare bottles from all over the world, beer brewing in buckets with tubes and yeast, and a tin of elbow grease Winston bought him for his birthday, which Dad thinks is the funniest thing ever.

He comes into the garage while I’m with the old man actually, and asks Dad a question in this nerd-train-language I can’t fathom.

‘Sup Mini,’ I tell the little fuck as he walks past me. Dude hates being called Minimart. Not my fault he’s a miniature version of me, living in my wake. Mini-Marty Bezuidenhout. Mini Winnie.

‘Fuck you,’ he replies. ‘Bet you didn’t even get Dad a present.’

‘Now, now, boys,’ Dad goes, ‘seeing my sons is present enough.’

Winnie gives a satisfied sneer and goes and helps Mum with the recycling bin. God damn try-hard. Winnie acts perfect to try make me look bad.

The whole thing dates back to some little scrap we had when he was like eight and I was twelve, and we were fighting over a Thomas the Tank Engine duvet cover and he deliberately upended his bowl of cornflakes and cried and told Mum I spilled it, the little wanker. Jealous of the world ’cause he’s an inch shorter than the median for his age.

Everyone in Hillmorton without a rap sheet gathers at my parents’ place on Charles Upham, all these quartets of bourgeois men in button-up shirts and wives with bowls of trifle, and of course they each have twins that play musical instruments. My family’s house—ironed flat and clean, of course, with a marquee in the back lawn—is turned into a giant hall and all the guests have chipped in to pay the $8000 for Dad to get his predator-proof birdhouse legally patented, and the local comptroller or whatever the fuck from Standards New Zealand, presents Dad with his patent and there are queues of bourgeois people, no shit, actual queues stroking Dad’s woodwork all through the property: his sculptures in the garden, his handmade coffee tables of driftwood, his drum kit made of paint tins. Every conversation is capital gains this and valuation that and the only politics people are talking is Reaganite anti-immigration bullshit, even though half the cunts here are fresh off the boat from the Cape and Mum catches me as I’m leaving and begs me to stay the night, and when I tug my forearm out of her vice grip, she makes a big scene, weeping on the driveway and begging me, “Come back hoooome, sweetie, I’ve made up your room for you, Kolwyntjie Cupcakey.”

And this big cloud of onlookers from Probus are clutching their elbows with concern as I wade through family like rugby players hanging off my waist. Mumsie’s begging me to explain why I never stay for meals and why I never call, and we’re in the middle of the road now and here’s a taxi slowing and it’s an angel, lo and behold. I’ve texted her and she’s appeared. Mona is opening the door and it’s black and expensive in there, but I need to get the fuck away from my family.

We get a lift up to Victoria Park and watch the city lights twinkle in the blue night. Suddenly, Mona up and bolts to the top of the slide, barrels down, then jumps on the swings, ‘Wheeeeee.’

I relax, shaking my head with laughter. I can’t put a finger on why my family are unbearable. All I know is I like unwinding with little Mona. She’s so pure, man. I can’t remember the last time I was with someone who used a playground for something other than getting stoned.

We drive back to the bedsit I rent, sit on my single bed and discuss Tool lyrics I’ve downloaded on my laptop, sucking smoke from a joint I spend 20 minutes trying to roll to perfection to impress her. I stroke her wrist. She has a Bible verse tattooed down her arm in cursive now: Peter 4:12-19, apparently. ‘Rejoice as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.’

Mona tells me to promise not to get upset; she has a boyfriend. I hesitate, question her a bit, then unbutton her jeans anyway. That drug dealing Marilyn Manson-wannabe Vlad who’s been looking after her? It’s that prick, and they’re supposed to be engaged. I tell her I don’t care. My old goon squad have gone onto uni or the Gold Coast, or on their OE. I don’t have any other friends. I need you, Mone.

I lean her onto my mattress. We each have one last suck of Kronic and she arches her stomach up towards me as wasps buzz in my skull. Kronic is potent shit.

‘You’re 16 now, right?’

She hesitates for a moment, then sniggers. ‘Yeah, like I don’t remember much of my birthday. But totally.’

Her body recalls the rhythms we agreed on. Our hips lock like puzzle pieces. We kiss with thirst. She makes little squeaks and squeals. I ride a rocket to the moon. After, she lies breasts-down on the mattress, shy, modest, girly, writing in her diary with a fountain pen and a bottle of ink while I roll a smoke on my heaving chest. I come with every girl, but this is something different. A deep orgasm. Love. I’m so unfit that sex makes my blood just about pop out of my skin. I’ll get fit some day in the future, when I get out of Crimechurch and escape to Australia, shirtless, free, renewed.

There’s tonnes to catch up on. I’ve been working in the kitchen of this Vietnamese restaurant on Gloucester Street in the centre of town, trying to pretend my life is Orwell’s Down and Out In Paris and London, staying hard by staying hungry, staying away from my family for sixteen bucks an hour, chewing khat, smoking Indonesian cigarettes with Triads who call me White Devil cause they know there’s something shifty in me.

Me and Mone swap stories for four hours, extending roots into each other’s hearts. I have to keep this girl. She’s my warmth in the black ice winters. She has soft baby fat on her hips and pert breasts that wobble when she gets excited about some 5%-off lipstick voucher she finds under my bed.

She tells me about her childish plans for the future—making Crimechurch people nicer to each other, some naïve Disney shit along those lines. It’s 5 am now.