‘Look. You put both of these inside the barrel of most locks and you can open it in ten seconds. Inside the lock there are these five little pins, and you use the rake to scrub over them. It sort of loosens them, and then this torque wrench,’ he twirled the nail between his fingers, ‘will engage the lock. You hit the sweet spot and
pop
, it’s open.’
Zac stared at the nail and piece of metal and raised an eyebrow again. Yeah right, he said, without saying anything.
Luke sighed. ‘It’s actually easier to do it than to explain it. Anyway, these are just the most basic tools. But they’ll crack any of the crappy old tumbler locks they use around this place.’
‘Well, I’d have to see that to believe it,’ said Zac.
Luke grinned. ‘Maybe you’ll get to one day, but right now, it’s our turn on the grinder. Bring your stuff. I need you for cover.’
He made his way over to the grinding table with his soon-to-be-very-useful tools hidden in the toolbox. He helped Zac unpack his kit, keeping half an eye on Blainey. The teacher had his open-mouthed-snore-thing going on. Pretty soon he’d have a stream of spit connecting his lip to his shirt collar.
Luke quickly shaped his rake, sparks flaring briefly from the screaming hot metal as he pressed it against the grinder.
The reshaping took just a couple of minutes. He studied his new tool, still hot from the grinder. He felt Zac watching him and gave him a quick grin before slipping the rake into his sock, next to the nail.
He straightened, studied Blainey: dead flesh, or as good as, anyway. He turned to Zac, who had deftly begun the first stage of his toolbox, his beetle-black hair a glossy hardhat.
‘You get used to it. The neglect, I mean. You know, I could be here welding your thumb to your ankle, and Blainey would snooze on regardless. What happens is that they send us all the teachers who have been kicked out of the education system. But you look like you’ve done this before, anyway.’
‘Well, it’s not that hard to read instructions,’ said Zac.
‘It is for ninety per cent of the kids in here,’ said Luke. ‘Most of them can’t read the exit sign over there.’
Zac continued to work with the tin in front of him.
‘But doesn’t everyone steal all this stuff?’ he said after a moment. ‘I mean, what with Blainey sleeping?’
‘We get searched,’ said Luke. ‘Well, we’re supposed to. He wakes up when the bell goes and does a basic search. But this is why I love Blainey. He’s never very dedicated at
doing anything, if you know what I mean.’
Zac nodded.
Luke watched him, and decided to try his special guessing game – figuring people out. Understanding why people did things had kept him alive more than once. Let’s see, what would little Zac Nguyen be locked up in here for? Stealing a car? Hmm, maybe.
‘How long is your sentence, Zac?’ he asked.
Zac kept his eyes on his work. ‘That’s usually the second question people ask in here. Aren’t you supposed to ask me what I’m in for?’
‘Aren’t you innocent anyway? Everyone else in here seems to be.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Zac laughed. ‘Well, I got twelve months.’
Luke whistled. Okay, all right, so it’s either a repeat offence or maybe he screwed up a suspended committal – he got charged again when he was on a bond for something else.
‘Ever been in before?’ he asked.
‘Nope.’
Something pretty serious, then.
‘How many times had you been to court before this one?’ he asked.
‘Never,’ said Zac.
So … maybe he stole a car and someone got hurt?
‘Did you steal a car and kill someone?’ said Luke.
‘Ah … No. Not lately.’ Zac stared at him. ‘Why don’t you just
ask
me what I’m in for?’
‘What are you in for?’
‘Assault.’
‘Right. That makes sense. With the whole ninja thing you did last night. Thanks for doing that, by the way.’
‘I hate bullies.’
‘Well, you’re gonna love it in here then, Nguyen,’ said Luke, beginning to pack up. ‘Because that’s exactly how the screws control us. They’ve got their own little private army. They’re the generals, Toad and his buddies are the soldiers, and we’re the enemy. Oh, and you do know that Taylor, Toad and Holt are now gonna make it their life’s mission to make you sorry you were born?’
Zac shrugged.
‘Come on,’ Luke said. ‘We gotta get off this machine. Watson’s waiting for his turn.’
Back at their bench, Luke shaped a handle for Zac’s toolbox using a spare piece of tin. ‘That must have been a pretty bad assault,’ he said, positioning the handle. He knew that first-offence assault charges usually didn’t involve a custodial sentence, let alone twelve months.
Zac’s mouth turned down a little. ‘He was a bad guy. I taught him a lesson.’
‘You must have done, to get twelve months.’
‘He had people around him with a lot of money and a good lawyer, that’s all.’
‘So what did you do to him?’
Luke always asked for the war stories. It was worth a shot to see whether something could shock him, make his heart race a little like he heard people talk about. It hadn’t happened yet. But Nguyen seemed different to everyone else.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Zac, turning to face him. Luke was only average height, but Zac had to tilt his head back to eyeball him. ‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘Who cares how I got here?’
‘All right, all right. Don’t get all emotional, Princess.’
‘Why are
you
in here?’ said Zac. ‘Why don’t you tell me something about yourself for once?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Luke.
He laughed when he saw Zac’s face. This guy has anger issues. I like him. I’d like to have some anger issues. They sound like fun.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll bond later. The bell’s about to go.’
In the dining hall, Luke took a seat in the Section Six area. He thought that maybe he was hungry now, but he wasn’t sure how well he was going to be able to chew with his mouth hurting this bad. He prodded gingerly at his jaw. He had a terrible headache radiating right from that spot.
A wrapped sandwich and an apple sat on his plate; two big plastic jugs of water waited in the middle of the table. Mmm, yum. Not.
Although they weren’t allowed to begin eating until instructed, Luke flipped the sandwich over to see what their lunch would be today.
Please don’t be tuna, please don’t be tuna
, he told the sandwich. The smell gave it away. Tuna. He took a closer look. Tuna
and
mayonnaise. Ick. The bread was sodden; he could feel it limp and oozing through the clingwrap. Despite his still-healing lip, he smiled widely: Toad was on permanent kitchen duty and would be watching for his reaction. If he grimaced, he’d be eating tuna every day until he got out of here.
It was moments like these that he hated Zecko Sevic the most. He wouldn’t be in here if it wasn’t for him.
He’d dealt just fine with the welfare department until Zecko had been hired and appointed his case manager. For his first twelve years, Welfare didn’t make much of a fuss of Luke at all. And that had been fine by him. The only time they made contact was when he’d stuffed up another foster care arrangement. They’d give him a new case manager who would go about doing their best to find him another family. And that was that. Until case manager Zecko Sevic came on the scene. After Dick and Frances.
Although Luke had made certain that Dick knew he’d done the fiery redecoration of their kitchen, he’d also ensured that no one could actually prove it, so nobody came right out and accused him. But Zecko seemed to have it sussed and he made it his mission to take Luke under his wing. Maybe that could have been a good thing for a kid in the welfare system who actually wanted an adult to help them. But it wasn’t the fact that Luke didn’t need or want any help that made Zecko the biggest pain in the butt. The problem with Zecko was that every time he took Luke ‘under his wing’, Luke came close to being taken off the welfare books. Permanently. As in dead.
Like the time Zecko had arranged for him to clean the second-floor windows at the rec centre. And then pushed the scaffolding out from under him. Luke had managed to grab hold of a ledge at the last minute, yelling and shouting until help arrived; Zecko was well gone by then.
And then there was that weekend when Zecko arranged a camping trip for twenty under-privileged kids. Zecko had been in a great mood on the bus all the way to the river campsite. He’d been smiling fit to burst when he taught them all to make damper. And when he got a rifle out of the back of the bus and told them he was going to teach them all to shoot,
he’d been positively beaming. Luke dodged two stray bullets that weekend and slept under the bus with one eye open.
He knew there was no point trying to tell anyone about Zecko – who was going to believe him? But he’d spent a lot of nights after that camping trip coming up with a plan to get him out of the way.
Then Zecko tried again. This time, on the way to a new foster placement, he’d gone all out. In a backstreet in Stanmore, Zecko gunned his departmental Holden up to seventy and aimed the passenger side straight for the corner of a factory. Luke had seen the crazy in Zecko’s eyes just in time and hurled himself across the seat, pushing with all his might at the steering wheel. The Holden got a new front end after it hit a row of wheelie bins. Zecko got a bravery award for wrestling control of the car from a suicidal juvenile delinquent. Two civilians on the street got twenty grand from the media for their mobile phone footage of the crash. And Luke got eight months in Dwight. His past computer-fraud charges didn’t help in court.
Now, in the Dwight dining hall, Luke cut his eyes to the Section One tables, suddenly salivating at the smell wafting over from there. Toad waved back at him, gesturing to his plate as if it were a prize. Oh my God. They had meat pies. Sausage rolls. Sauce. And in the centre of each table – two-litre bottles of Coke. Oh man. Luke waved back to Toad and blew him a kiss for good measure.
‘Get even fatter, Toad,’ he said under his breath. ‘It’s good for your heart.’
‘Did you say something?’ said Zac, opposite him. ‘Oh no. Tuna.’
‘Shh,’ said Luke, too late.
‘Nguyen. Are you talking?’
Holt was at their table in three strides. He stood as close as possible to Luke, speaking across the table to Zac. He didn’t shout, but the hall was silent as everyone watched the show.
‘I just said that I can’t eat tuna,’ said Zac. ‘I’m vegan.’
Idiot, thought Luke. Are you that stupid? Don’t tell Holt anything else he can use against you.
‘You’re a vegan, Nguyen?’ said Holt. ‘So you can only eat lettuce, is that right?’
‘No …’ said Zac. ‘Other stuff too.’
‘Do you think that your dorm mates might like to eat some actual food today, and not just grass and leaves?’ said Holt.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Zac.
‘Well, Nguyen, inmates do not speak during meal service. Inmates do not touch their food during meal service,’ said Holt.
‘But the meals have already been served,’ said Zac.
Luke put his head in his hands.
‘And you do not eat lunch at all today,’ said Holt. ‘Stand, Section Six.’
Luke scraped his chair back, making as much noise as possible. Watson made a sound like he was trying not to cry. Watson was chubby and he’d lost maybe half his body weight since arriving in Section Six.
‘Because of your bunkmate, all of you will now take your sandwich, like so,’ said Holt, lifting Clarkson’s sandwich from his plate and dangling it with two fingers. ‘You will then drop it onto the floor at your feet.’ Holt tossed the sandwich onto the floor next to Clarkson’s sneakers. ‘And then you will stamp on it. You will then wait in silence at your table until
everyone else has finished their meal. Ready now – lift your sandwiches, Section Six.’
Luke heard Section One doing everything they could to stifle their delight. Holt was not above punishing even his boys if control was not maintained. He watched Zac, Watson, Barry and Hooley take their sandwiches from their plates.
‘Drop them on the floor now, Section Six, and stomp on them,’ said Holt.
Luke knew he should just do as Holt instructed. I mean, it wasn’t as though he wanted to eat the foul thing anyway. But he had that feeling again. He guessed the sensation was as close as he was going to get to the anger that everyone else seemed to feel. He’d pigeonholed it as anger because it always seemed to pop up in these sorts of situations – when he was being told to do something by someone in authority. But while people in books described anger as boiling and seething until they erupted in fury, unable to control themselves, Luke experienced exactly the opposite. He felt just a little more cool, more still, more centred and quiet, and everything zoomed into pinpoint focus.
Clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches burst on the floor around him, the sounds cracking like gunshots. The no-longer-controllable merriment from Section One bounced off the walls and it suddenly felt as though Toad Wheeler was standing even closer to him than Holt, shouting laughter into his ear. Luke put a hand on the table to steady himself.
‘Black, I will not tell you again,’ said Holt, very quietly. He took a step even closer. ‘Pick up your sandwich and tread on it. Now.’
The laughter died and Luke sensed everyone almost breathing in synchrony, watching him. He smiled at Zac.
‘Did you have garlic for lunch, Mr Holt?’ he said, picking the sandwich up from the plate and tossing it high. Forty-eight pairs of eyes watched the wrapped sandwich spin in the air and then land
splat
at Mr Holt’s feet.
‘It’s just that your breath is rank, man,’ Luke continued, and lifted his foot. He skidded the front of his sneaker into the package, hoping for the best.
He got it.
The plastic skin exploded and projectile-vomited its tuna innards. An arc-like stream of creamy fish splattered its way up the leg of Holt’s military-pressed trousers.
Nobody moved. Even the movement in the kitchen stilled.
‘Whoops,’ said Luke.
Without taking his eyes from Luke’s, Holt reached for a paper napkin from the table. He bent and wiped at the goop. It smeared. He stood up again.