Tram Cop Episode 2

Got em

I hear a voice talking in conversation, maybe in a phone call. ‘That won’t work… that’s not going to work… fuck’. I open my eyes, no, eye, my other one doesn’t want to open, and see a tram driver talking to… himself. He’s wearing a cop uniform for some reason. Hang on.

I go to jump to my feet but my wrist twists and tugs and I slip and I’m back on my ass again. I’m fucking cuffed. I’ve got a knife in my pocket, maybe I can cut through this thing. I awkwardly reach into my right pocket with my left hand and find nothing.

‘Looking for something?’ the pig oinks from the driver’s seat.

‘Pig Cunt.’ I reply.

‘I’ve confiscated your knife, you’ll need to find another, not that it did you much good anyway’.

I say nothing. I pull my phone out of my left pocket, and it’s flat. Useless piece of shit. I piff it at his head but my left arm betrays me and it bounces off the windscreen.

‘Pull something like that again and I’ll take out your other eye and drop you off at the other side of the city’ he responds, probably trying to act like he didn’t just shit himself.

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘I’m taking you to the nearest stop to your house’

‘How do you — nevermind.’ clearly he’s had a good look through my wallet and found my learners permit. That means he knows my name too.

‘What was that?’

‘I said fuck off fat cunt’

‘When you’re older and you grow out of smoking bongs all day you might put a few pounds on yourself’

‘Fat fuck’. I’m going to jump this cunt as soon as he makes me the mistake of uncuffing me.

We sit in silence for a time, and soon enough the tram stops and I hear ‘this is your stop’. The pig pulls out a key to uncuff me, but before he does, he squats in front of me, his shoes dipped in a hardened puddle of what is probably my own vomit, and whispers ‘Jake Moroney, I know who you are, I know where you live, and I know how to ruin your life. If you tell anybody what happened here tonight, and I’m having a good day, I’ll put you in prison. If I’m having a bad day, I’ll kill you and make it look like self defense. Do you understand me?’

I lock up. I can’t bring myself to look him in the eyes when he’s looming over me like that. He just waits.

‘Yes’ I reply.

He uncuffs me, hands me back my phone which now sports more cracks than before, stands up, and shows me the door. I remain sitting for a few seconds, then decide this pig’s not worth my time, and stumble out onto the street. As the doors close behind me I spit on the window and give a howling ‘FUCK YOU’ as it starts to drive away. I catch a glimpse of my face in the reflection of the windows and I don’t recognise myself.

I can see my house from here, but fucked if I’m going there. I’ll just walk to Sharon’s, even if it’s ages away. It’s stopped raining now, and there’s enough moonlight to see where I’m going. Thankfully there’s nobody around to see my face, but I put on my hood anyway, and in doing so end up with sticky fingers from the munt that’s caked onto the back of my jacket. I see an empty coke bottle on the pavement and kick it as hard as I can and it shatters everywhere. For a moment it occurs to me that kids might walk on this pavement in bare feet, but I block that out of my mind and start towards Sharon’s.

Soon enough I reach the house, and it looks like everybody’s asleep. I go through the back entrance and walk straight past Sharon’s room to the bathroom. I strip off, ensuring not to catch my reflection in the mirror, and step into the shower. It feels good to wash away all the filth from my body, but my face flares up from the steam. I switch to cold water, take a few breaths, and let it run over my face. Every cut and bruise scream in concert and I cup my hands over my mouth and add my own scream to the choir. I see a silhouette appear behind the door’s translucent window, and hear ‘Who’s that?’. It’s Sharon’s mum.

‘It’s me’ I reply, and then wait longer than I would have expected for a response.

‘Oh Jake, okay’ and then the silhouette is gone. Sharon’s mum had never really been open about whether she was cool with how often I stay over, and I suspect she isn’t cool with it at all. Good thing there’s no dad to deal with.

I finish up and put a towel on and head to Sharon’s room. She’s asleep, and the mix bowl on the bedside table is empty. Fuck. I check in the usual drawer for weed and there is none, and then I look under the bed and in all the other drawers and in the wardrobe. No luck. Okay.

I put my phone on charge and wait sitting on the other side of the bed, hoping Jack’s awake and happy to drop off. After a couple of minutes I feel a hand stroking my back. ‘What took you so long?’ Sharon asks in a tired, muffled tone.

‘Just got held up, go back to sleep’. I don’t trust my phone’s ability to know when it has enough charge to start so I’m repeatedly pressing the power button like a kind of phone-CPR. My cheekbones are aching and my nose is on fire. My right eye is buried under a doughnut sized bruise and it wouldn’t surprise me if there were shards of glass buried there with it.

Sharon sits up and gives me a cuddle from behind, then tugs at my shoulder to turn me around. I shrug her off and maintain my gaze on my phone. ‘Do we have any weed left?’

‘You were gonna get more remember?’

‘Sure’.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘Nope’.

She goes to turn me again and this time I forcefully push her away but I’ve turned enough for her to see my face and she screams loud enough to wake the whole neighbourhood, recoiling back to her side of the bed, holding the blanket up to her face.

‘Could you please shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down?’ I whisper, one hand over my facial doughnut. ‘I got in a fight, we all shook hands afterwards, no need to freak out’. At this point she has already begun crying, though thankfully she’s putting the effort in to keep the volume down.

‘What the fuck Jake, what the fuck’.

‘It was just some random fucking guys on the street who wanted to fight, there was nothing I could have done’.

‘Who were you with?’

‘No one. There were a couple of guys I had never seen before who just wanted to take my shit. I got em good but… yeah, they got me good too’

We share a brief silence. If she didn’t believe my story, she wasn’t going to admit it. I continued, ‘I don’t want to talk about it okay I’m shaken up and I want to smoke some weed and pass out’.

Tears subsiding, she nods and whispers ‘Are we going to talk about it tomorrow then? Are we both safe?’

‘What?! Yes obviously we’re both safe, and yes we can properly talk about it tomorrow. I’ve actually been through this a few times it’s not a big deal’. That was a lie, I’ve never looked this bad, and I can’t say I’ve ever properly been in an actual fight with strangers.

‘Okay, okay. Tomorrow. I’ll let you sleep.’

Jack does not respond to my messages or attempts at calls. I return to the bathroom, take two of Sharon’s mum’s valiums and return to bed then wait until I fall asleep. When I close my eyes, all I see is the pig holding me by the collar and beating me. I try staring at the ceiling, slightly illuminated by a streetlight outside the window. The images still appear. I remain awake for far longer than I have any reason to after those valiums. At some point Sharon whispers ‘you’re shaking’.

Eventually, sleep takes me. By the time I wake up, Sharon has already left, probably knowing full well I had no intention of showing up to school. A note propped up on the bedside table reads Couldn’t wake you. We still need to talk about last night. I love you. My wrist is killing me from when I was suspended from the pig’s cuff, an ugly bruise circling it. I realise my hands are still shaking. I need to get high or else. There’s no money in my wallet, and Jack has made it clear he’s not selling me any more weed on tick, so I’ll need to get some off mum. My house isn’t too far from the skate park so it’s not much of a detour. I manage to find some clothes I’d left at Sharon’s another night and leave the house. The tram stop I’ve waited a half hour for countless times coincidentally has my tram stopped there, and this is the point where I should hail it to wait for me, but I don’t. It leaves, and I start walking to my house.

A nameless dread clings to me, and soon I find myself breaking into a jog to escape it. Old ladies watering their garden, cars driving past, people walking to tram stops, all of them raise their brows at the sight of a tall lanky teen with a brutalised face and a rat tail flailing behind jogging through the street. I don’t care, every step is one step closer to leaving this disgusting planet behind.

I reach home and spot $20 on the kitchen bench which is a miracle really given that I was afraid of having to explain my face to mum. I grab it, as well as a couple of muesli bars that are reserved for school lunches, and make for the front door.

‘Not so fast’ I hear from the top of the stairs. I can hear my mum’s footsteps from behind. I continue anyway, but before I reach the door I hear ‘walk through that door and you’re grounded for a month’. I toss it up in my head and I think I can talk my way out of it so I continue anyway, but before I’ve passed through the doorway I hear ‘three months’. She has done that before and it was not a pleasant three months.

‘One, if you want money you have to ask me directly for it. Two, why aren’t you in school?’

I stand in the doorway with my back to her, thinking about the right way to handle this. ‘Don’t freak out’ I start, slowly turning my head. ‘But I got in a fight and copped a few hits to the head’.

‘Jesus Christ’ she says, almost a whisper. ‘I’ll get some disinfectant’.

What follows is a good ten minutes of excruciating stinging all over my face as mum dabs my wounds with a cotton bud. She asks me to tell her exactly what happened and I recall the same story I told Sharon. She gives the disinfectant a rest and listens intently, staring into my eyes watching for clues of deception like a hawk watching prey. I do not feel comfortable. I break eye contact and look out the window at the street lamp outside and finish with ‘I got em good though, trust me’.

‘I don’t trust you for a second’. What does this bitch care? I got beat up, isn’t it humiliating enough without having to fill her in on every detail? ‘Anybody who was trying to mug you, who was in a position to do that much damage, would have easily taken your wallet and phone, yet they’re still in your pocket. And this’ she grabs my wrist, still tender at the touch, to show me the red ring of bruises around it, ‘this tells me you were cuffed’. So what actually happened?’

With her grip on my wrist, she can no doubt feel me starting to shake again. I close my eyes tight to stave off tears that I feel coming on. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong’

She says nothing, waiting.

‘I mean I didn’t do anything criminally wrong. I didn’t scan my MyKi on this tram, and it happened to be the fucking pig tram where the driver is actually a cop, and I wasn’t even paying attention, and then this guy picks me up last night’

‘In the tram?’

‘Yeah in the tram, and then he beats the shit out of me’ I start laughing hysterically but there’s tears running down my cheeks. ‘What the fuck right?’

‘So he had no good reason to beat you up?’

‘Yeah’ I wipe the tears away with my other wrist. ‘He goes straight past my stop and when I walk up to him to grill him about it he gets out of his seat and jumps me. Then I wake up cuffed and he drops me home, telling me not to tell anyone or he’ll kill me.’ Now I’m the one watching her eyes, trying to decipher whether she believes me.

‘If what you’re saying is true, this guy needs to be put away. We need to go to the police’.

‘He is the police, why the fuck would we want to bark up that tree? Especially given how much reason they already have to hate me’.

‘Because it’s the right thing to do’. She puts a hand on my shoulder.

‘The right thing for me to do right now is to go to the skate park and chill the fuck out’. It’s unlikely that showing my face there would chill me out at all, but it’s where I’ll find Jack.

‘It won’t go away’ She says.

‘The bruises will’. I make for the front door again and this time she doesn’t try to stop me. I catch my reflection in a mirror and I look even uglier after crying. I double back to my room upstairs and get a jacket with a huge hood and a large-framed pair of sunglasses. All I would need is a fake moustache to complete this ridiculous disguise.

I come back down and she’s standing there looking concerned, but she’s still not making any efforts to stop me. ‘Seeya tonight’ I say before closing the front door behind me.

I make a start towards the skate park. Yep, I think to myself, I got em good.