Free Clancy of the Undertow by Christopher Currie

bucks.’ He sticks out his hand.
    ‘I’m not shaking your hand,’ I say.
    ‘You’ll do it, though?’
    ‘Can I drive for a bit?’
    ‘Maybe when we get out of town.’
    ‘I want a guarantee.’
    ‘You in or out? I’m more than happy to leave you here at the servo and let you become a trucker’s sex slave.’
    ‘So funny. Let’s just go already.’
    ‘Awesome.’ He starts up the car and swings back onto the main road, heading straight through town and out into the hills.
    Secretly, I’m smiling. Fifty bucks’ll buy me a new pair of shoes easy. Cheap shoes, from Spend-Less, but new shoes nonetheless. I want hi-tops or maybe rip-off Cons. Sasha—I know—will only be impressed by stilettos or thigh-high boots, but it’s a start. I think about Sasha in thigh-high boots. Slinking through some cocktail party, mouth slashed with dark red lipstick, a tight black dress that wrinkles only at her hips.
    Angus interrupts my thoughts with an impromptu drum solo on the steering wheel. I never want to know what awful college-rock soundtrack he’s got grinding through his head at any given moment. He says, ‘So Mum was pretty freaked, hey.’
    ‘I guess. Yeah.’
    ‘Why’re you home so early? Thought you were working.’
    I tell him about Raylene McCarthy and her twins, about Eloise, even about Buggs. I leave out Nancy and her mum for some reason.
    ‘This town’s full of real arseholes,’ is all he says in reply.
    ‘Cops still there when you left?’
    ‘Yeah, just sticking around to eat all our biscuits.’
    The houses thin out and we drive out through the wheat fields on a backroad that runs past the abattoir. Past the turnoff that takes you out onto the highway. It occurs to me that Dad’s accident would’ve happened pretty close by. I wonder if there’s still police tape at the scene, whether anyone has put up bouquets yet, or stuck crosses into the ground.
    ‘You talk to Dad today?’ I say.
    ‘Nup.’ Angus keeps his eyes on the road.
    ‘He seemed better than last night.’
    ‘Yeah. I haven’t talked to him. I saw him downstairs but I couldn’t—didn’t know what to say.’
    ‘You think anything’ll happen to him?’
    ‘Hard to know.’
    Angus is doing his cool act. He’s put a million sticks of gum in his mouth again and hasn’t offered me any. With the aviators, he looks like an eighties motorcycle cop. ‘Don’t you care what happens to him?’ I say.
    Angus shakes his head. ‘He’ll get what he deserves, I guess.’
    ‘What if he goes to jail?’ Voice at full Disney princess.
    ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ he says.
    ‘What what’s like?’
    Angus sighs. ‘To be constantly called a fuck-up. That’s all Dad ever does. Reels off the ways he thinks I’ve gone wrong, the decisions I could’ve made better. As if his life’s been perfect. As if he’s ever made it easy for me. This is just karma.’
    ‘He can get pissed off sometimes, but—’
    ‘You don’t know, cause you’re the smart one. It’s like, they don’t have to worry about how you’re going to turn out because you’ll be a scientist or a lawyer or whatever. With me, with Dad, it’s like it’s his life’s purpose to have a go at me.’
    ‘I don’t think he’s that bad. Is he?’ Dad is a dick to Angus, but Angus is a dick back. And, really, my brother never settles on one thing long enough to fail or succeed. He always just changes his mind.
    ‘You’ve got no idea,’ he says. ‘Uni was the worst. Having to come back home was totally humiliating.’
    ‘You didn’t have to come back.’
    ‘Yeah, I did. Head lecturer had it in for me, just because I had the balls to ask the tough questions. Just cause I wasn’t a sheep like the rest of them.’
    I knew exactly the types of questions Angus would’ve asked. He’s always been a contrarian : this is the word Dad uses. Constantly trying to find ways to undermine authority, to take the opposite view to what he’s being shown is right. He would