The tell, p.1
The Tell, page 1
About the Book
The world turns on moments like these. Crossroad moments; a toss of the coin . . . I see half my face in deep shadow, eyes glittering like diamonds, the resemblance to my father never stronger.
Rey Tanic is not like other 14 year olds. His dad is a mafia boss. His dad is also in jail. When Rey’s life explodes, every decision he makes will shape the rest of his life. How far does the apple really fall from the tree?
Cinematic and gripping. Powerful writing for young teens. - Candice Fox, bestselling author of Gone by Midnight.
CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
CHAPTER EIGHTY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY MARTIN CHATTERTON
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Seen from any angle, the Coffin is one seriously ugly pile of stones. A grim, dusty box squatting at the outer edge of a thousand acres of dirt-blown semi-industrial scrub three hours west of Sydney, it’s a Darwin oven in summer and a Canberra fridge in winter.
The Coffin is a hundred years old and, my brother Solo keeps telling me – no contest, bro – the toughest jail in Australia. Although exactly how Solo would know is a mystery, since the big blowhard’s never been within an hour of the place.
The official name is the New South Wales Deep Cut Correctional Centre, but just about everyone calls it the Coffin because, they say, once you go in you stay in. It’s a maximum security facility holding the worst criminals in the country – terrorists, armed robbers, gangsters, cold-eyed killers – people too flat out dangerous to keep anywhere else.
It was built for one reason and only one reason: to keep the wolves away from the sheep.
It’s where my dad lives.
‘Looks different, eh, Raze?’
‘What?’
‘The surface of freakin’ Mars, what else? Jeez-us. No, the city, you dipstick. The city. This time of night, man. Looks way different.’
Spray can in hand, I turn away from the wall to give Ids a serve right back, but as soon as I see he’s sitting right on the edge of the mall roof, my words dry up. Ids’ long legs dizzy-dangle in space over the concourse below. We’re only three floors up but you’d still do a good impression of a dropped pizza if you hit the concrete from here.
Truth is I don’t like heights all that much (okay, I pretty much hate ’em), so Ids sitting there all casual right on the edge makes my guts churn and I feel for sure that any second now he’s just gonna, y’know, drop. Blammo. Whomp. That’s it. The End.
But I don’t let any of that show.
Not to Ids McLafferty, anyway, who never seems fazed by anything.
Ids is a long, lean East African kid with a sly sense of humour. Whenever I come out with anything too wussy, he’ll just give me that dead-eye look, like he’s some sort of, y’know, Somali warlord or something, instead of what he is: the chess-playing adopted son of a couple of Eastern Suburbs accountants. But I don’t want to look soft so I put down the spray can and sit next to him, fighting the urge to be sick. I glance back at Candy, who nods her head encouragingly. Sit, you’ll be fine, her gesture says. So I sit.
Candy knows I don’t like heights. Don’t ask me how: I never told her about it or nothing . . . she just knows. There’s lots of things she knows without me saying a word.
‘How different?’
Ids waves a hand at the skyline. ‘Quiet.’
I open my mouth to say something smart but stop myself. Ids is right. It’s four in the morning and the first light is starting to show back over towards the coast. The city is real peaceful.
More than peaceful, maybe. The whole place is silent. Not a car moving, no sirens, nothing.
For a few wonderful seconds I forget about my dad and what I need to tell him next time I see him.
Candy sits next to me and puts a reassuring hand on my back and, just like that, I feel heaps safer. The roof is solid. The conversation with Dad can wait. I’ve got almost a week before the next visit and this thing has been in my head for months. Another week won’t hurt. Our latest artwork is almost finished. It’s taken us all night and it’s one of our best. We’ve painted a long ragged tear in the wall with green liquid coming out, like the building’s bleeding. Ids did the highlights on the liquid and made it really pop. Looks good, y’know? Professional.
With our backs to the art we sit for a long minute, drinking in the quiet.
We’re MCT. Our initials: McLafferty, Cooper, Tanic. We’ve been painting as a crew for a few years, starting out as nothing but ‘toys’ – beginners – but now MCT is all-city. We’re everywhere. It might not seem like much to anyone in the straight world but it’s something. We’re something. We’ve got a mile to go before we’d be known or suchlike, but we’re deffo up, bro, we’re doing it. MCT never hit the same spot and never do go-overs – you got to have respect, right? We know it’s against the law, blah blah blah, but what we do isn’t just scrawl. I saw online they’re doing Street Art tours down in Melbourne. Taking paying customers to see the work. You can’t tell me that –
‘HEY!’
We look down and see two rent-a-cops pointing at us from down in the mall. If we’d been painting, they wouldn’t have seen us, but there we are, out in plain sight, and we’ve been busted.
‘HEY YOU!’
The guards run towards the stairwell door and we scuttle off the ledge like startled cockroaches, Ids and I scrabbling for our paint gear.
‘Leave it!’ says Candy. ‘No time! Just grab the sketchbooks!’
She stuffs a couple of things into her backpack and slings the straps over her shoulders in one smooth movement before sprinting for the fire ladder that leads down onto the car park roof next door.
‘C’mon!’ she shouts over her shoulder. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Ids laughs. ‘Christmas!’
Heavy boots boom up the stairwell. Yelling, radio static, authority.
Excitement.
‘Go! Go! Go!’ I shout, pushing Ids ahead of me and we stumble after Candy towards the ladder.
The door on the other side of our roof bangs open just as Ids waves a cheeky bye-bye and clatters out of sight. I drop in behind him, can hear the crunch of cop boots getting closer.
‘C’mon!’ shouts Ids, and I slip-slide down the ladder and land on top of him before we hit the grit and sprint hard for the corner. There’s a big metal sign – BARGAINS GALORE! – wedged between the car park roof and the building next door. It’ll be a major balancing act to get across the top of the sign – three metres by just thirty centimetres of wobbling metal – but Candy’s already over and Ids yells ‘Possum Magic, bro!’ and then he’s dancing across all quick and agile and somehow looking exactly like a freakin’ possum and a crazy snort-laugh thing blurts out of my nose and I try not to think about THE DROP below, adrenaline rushing through me like fire through a forest – do it! do it! do it! – and then I’m across before I know it – oh thank you, Jesus! – and the guards behind are just too old and slow and low paid to try. With real cops we’d have thought twice. Cops’ve got guns and tasers, but these security guys don’t have jack.
We clatter down the fire stairs and into the alley then we’re out on Sydney’s streets, breaking the dawn silence into a million pieces as we rat-run east towards home, laughing and gasping and shouting. I’m happy. Alive. Myself.
For those few moments I can almost forget I’m a Tanic.
I knew it was too good to last.
Only a few hours after the Great Sydney Roof Chase, my life has flipped right back into being a total bummer. And I mean a full-on, Code Red, DEFCON ONE nuclear bummer.
Buds in, I’m tapping out a beat on the back-seat armrest of the blacked-out Hummer as me, my dog Mac and dad’s Tongan driver, Fiji Jones, hiccup west out of Sydney along the traffic-clogged artery of Parramatta Road. Feeling roughly eight trillion years old, I pass the time when the car picks up speed by matching the street signs to my music.
Hungry Jacks, Grab a Big Mac, IKEA Flat-Pack SALE ATTACK.
That’s one.
Left Lane ONLY Parramatta, OPTUS BUNDLE NON STOP CHATTER! PAVING! PAVING! PAVING! Now On, INSANE Anaconda SAVINGS!
Two.
Turn For Bunnings, GOD IS WATCHING, Halal Meat Sold, Reece’s PLUMBING – Roadworks ahead, SLOW STOP GO – Vote YES Vote NO, HAVE U PAID YOUR TOLL?
Three.
I don’t care about the traffic because any delay to this journey is fine by me. It puts off the Big Talk With Dad I’m determined to finally have when we reach our destination. We still have more than two hours of boring driving before we get to the Coffin.
Today wasn’t even supposed to be a visit day. That was supposed to be next Saturday, but Ma had hauled me out of bed at ten o’clock. Which was, of course, the moment my buzz from last night’s painting was killed stone dead.
‘Get up, Rey!’ Ma yelled. ‘They changed the visit day!’
‘Can they do that?’ I mumbled, but Ma wasn’t listening and all I could think was, Oh man, today’s the day. Not next week, next month, next year. Today.
Ma smacked the back of my head with the flat of her hand. ‘How do I know, Rey? Those prison people do whatever suits them. You know that! C’mon! Hurry! Jesus!’
She wasn’t angry or nothing. Least, I don’t think so. It’s kinda hard to tell with Ma, ’cos she yells, like, eighty per cent of the time. She’s also the only one who calls me Rey. Candy and Ids and basically everyone else calls me Raze after my graffiti tag: ‘RAZr’. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t got anything against ‘Rey’ as a name, but ‘Raze’ is better.
Better than Solo, anyway. Which, for reasons I don’t want to think about too hard, is my older brother’s actual name. It doesn’t sound like Ma and Dad were thinking there’d be any other little Tanics coming along after Solo, hey? Ma had clouted me a real good one when I’d made that observation.
She’s got a massively annoying habit of punctuating her conversation with slaps and finger jabs and ear flicks. ‘You’re our little “Rey” of sunshine,’ she’d say – clout, slap, flick – ‘Rey, get it? Ray? Sun ray?’ – knuckle to the scalp – ‘Get it, hey?’
I got it. I got it. I just didn’t like it.
Back in the Hummer, I let out a long sigh and watch the slab-sided retail warehouses, servos and shops blur past in a headache of competing information. Last night’s fun seems like something that happened a couple of centuries ago. I guess I could leave it – leave the Big Talk With Dad until the next time – but I’ve already done that so many times I’m already disgusted at myself. I have to do it this time. I have to.
I slump back into my seat and stare at Fiji’s neck spilling over his shirt collar like too much dough in a cake tin. Fiji is the kind of guy who would take lollies from a baby without blinking. That isn’t just a saying by the way: I saw him do exactly that for real a couple of months ago, when Fiji was outside my house getting ready to drive Ma and Aunty Cam into the city. I’d been looking out my bedroom window and deadset saw Fiji yank a red jelly snake off Cam’s two-year-old and stuff it into his own mouth. I don’t know what that proves or nothing, but it proves something, right?
There’s a loose nerve under his skin that’s been giving a tiny kick every time the big fella says something a little un-Fiji.
That little nervous tick is Fiji Jones’ tell.
A tell?
A tell is a sign a person gives out, accidentally, when they’re trying really hard to keep something secret, and I just happen to be an expert. When I was little, I hung around Dad’s Friday night card sessions down in the rec room with Uncle Sal, Mookie, Mini Mook, Drago, Jimmy Biscuits and the rest of the crew. I’d be in my jammies, sitting right up on Dad’s lap while the game went on and on and on until my smoke-stung eyes began to roll back into my head and it was time for me to be carried upstairs.
After Drago told me about tells I began getting good at picking up on them. It was the way Sal licked his lips right before saying ‘hold’, or how Mookie smiled too much when he had a bad hand, or that little nose adjustment Jimmy Biscuits did with his glasses every time he got excited about holding an ace. I don’t know why or how exactly, but I seem to have a gift for reading the tells. It’s like they talk directly to me. And, right now, Fiji’s neck is talking. I’ve sat behind Fiji on the way to the Coffin about a million times before and I’ve never thought about the back of his neck once until I saw that tick. That tick is Fiji’s tell, and it’s trying to tell me something. The big question is what?
It sure isn’t saying he’s hungry. Fiji ate four brekkies this morning when we’d stopped at the golden arches outside Parramatta, like we always do on the way down to the Coffin. He scarfed that grease down as easy as a shark taking surfers up at Byron, and with about as much mess.
Fiji’s neck gives another tick and I decide to push. That’s what the card players would do when they figured someone had a tell. They’d push his buttons, insult him, wind him up, whatever, just to try and get the same reaction. Just to see if the tell really was a tell. Anyway, worth a shot.
‘You got a fat neck, Fiji,’ I say, making my voice deliberately whiny, probing for a reaction. ‘Like, majorly major blubber, bro. I’m not kidding you, man. You wanna cut down on the carb intake. Go jogging or something, y’know.’
‘Jogging?’ Fiji slathers about a kilo and a half of undiluted scorn onto the word. He shakes his head. ‘You see me jogging?’ His voice is so deep it comes from somewhere south of Antarctica, the bass notes vibrating the Hummer like a speaker skin.
‘Couldn’t hurt. We’ll call in at Rebel, get you some sneaks. See if they’ve got a couple of tents at Anaconda they can turn into some shorts for you, bro.’
‘Wise guy,’ growls Fiji. His eyes catch mine in the rear-view mirror and I suddenly find something super-interesting to look at out the window. I don’t want to push my luck too far. Fiji Jones is proper tough. He could snap me in two with his freakin’ eyelids, if he wanted to. And probably he does want to. I would if I was as big as Fiji and some whiny fourteen-year-old mouthed off like that to me.
