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used to reckon I’d stolen some of his change. He’d belt me for it if I wasn’t quick enough to get out of his way.
    The real joke was that I actually did steal his change quite often.
    But you. You trusted me, Miff. I don’t know why. It could be that you’re incredibly stupid, but I don’t think that’s it. You fail all the tests for stupidity that I ever heard of. Like, I mean you fail them by not being stupid, not the other way round . . . anyway, you know what I mean.
    No, I never thought you were stupid, but I’ve never figured out why you’d pick the biggest delinquent in the whole school, your worst enemy, the kid from such a different bloody world to yours, why you’d tell him stuff you never told anyone else before.
    It was a weird experience, believe me. Maybe that’s what gave me the feeling I was on something—and for once I wasn’t.
    So, suddenly I knew so much about you. I felt like I’d walked right inside that big rich house and was sitting in the middle of the big lounge room with the grand piano and the fireplace the size of a garage. Without having met any of the people in the house except you, I knew why your father was so moody and silent, why your grandmother wouldn’t speak to him from one week to the next, why your brother and sister only came in to shower and change before they went off for another wild night of sex and drugs and forget about the rock’n’roll.
    I always thought doctors were kind of different, you know what I mean? I always thought doctors, with their clean hands and quiet voices and their old-fashioned classy-looking clothes, were like special people who’d been chosen by God or something to be doctors: they didn’t have no bad thoughts and they didn’t do no bad things. I can’t remember who told me your father was a doctor, but I knew from somewhere, and I was a bit nervous about you after I heard it. I thought you must be from another world, like you were an angel, maybe. Is that too weird? Sorry if it is.
    Then you told me the whole shithouse story and I was like in shock and excited at the same time. Before that I’d thought there were two worlds, one where people like me lived, a scungy world full of shit where you fought in the gutter just to stay alive, just to score another dollar. Like my mum getting paid about a dollar an hour or some shit to clean rooms in this el cheapo motel with cigarette butts on the carpet and torn flyscreens on the windows. There was good stuff in our world too, like sticking by your mates, but just not enough of that good stuff.
    Then—this is what I thought—there was this other world for the rich pigs, where they drove around in their posh BMWs and talked posh to each other and they were all beautiful looking. If they did anything bad it’d be like on TV, where it wouldn’t seem really bad, it’d be like glamorous bad, not scungy or shabby or disgusting. I never thought that maybe they could be really rotten underneath.
    But your father and that little girl, that was rotten bad, as bad as anything that ever happened in our street, in our suburb. And it was worse in a way, with him paying them off. I’m not saying no-one around here wouldn’t pay someone off if they could; the thing is, no-one’d have the money, so it’s hypo—whatever that word is—hypothetical, or something.
    I don’t know what it would do to you, having a pervert for a father. You tried to explain it, a little bit, that day in the det, but we never really talked about it after that. I remember you saying you couldn’t stand for him to touch you any more. Geez, I can understand it’d give you the creeps. I don’t know how you could even look at him again.
    My father had a lot of shit wrong with him but I don’t think he’d do anything like that.
    I tell you what it did for me: it made me angry as goddamn hell,