Jill Jackson - 02 - Voodoo Doll by Leah Giarratano Page B

suited him fine.
    As always, he felt guilty on the way to his mother's place.
    His maternal grandparents had moved Joss and his mother out of Cabramatta after the car accident. The fight had left her after that. The much-loved only child of Richard and Joan Preston-Jones, lost to schizophrenia, and later heroin, was finally home.
    The house in Mosman evoked a confusing mix of nostalgia and pleasure for Joss. After six months of half-arsed rebellion, he'd settled with relief into the quiet habits of his grandparents, happy to swap the chaos of his childhood for their structure and normalcy. The house was the first real home he'd ever had – he and his mother had bounced between rental units, her friends' loungerooms, squats and refuges for his first thirteen years. The sedate mansion that had smothered his mother when she was growing up was, for him, the first place he could breathe.
    It hadn't been that way in the very beginning, though.
    Now, staring through the rain into his childhood, his breath fogging the window on the bus, Joss thought about the only time he had tried to unite his Cabramatta past with his Mosman present. He'd been living with his grandparents for three months or so, and although he'd made a few friends at his new school, Sandhurst College, the other boys had had a great time at his expense, filling every moment outside of class with stories of his ignorance of the social etiquette they took for granted. After fighting three of the loudest on the oval after school, they began to make comments only when they were in groups so that he couldn't distinguish the speaker, and they developed codes that sent them into fits when he walked by, like raucous packs of birds.
    He had missed his brothers from Cabra. Their escapades became heroic adventures in his mind, adventures that he knew the pissants at his new school would never have survived. He remembered his face pushed into the gravel one night, squashed with Fuzzy against a railway wall while a train passed above them, deafened, aware that he would be decapitated if he raised his head just a fraction. Just when he'd thought that the screaming monster above them would suck him up, the last carriage had passed, and he and Fuzzy had risen, their legs trembling in the dark, to finish their graffiti piece on the side of the wall. They'd been legends for a year for that piece, sprayed onto a virgin wall that everyone else had assumed was untouchable.
    He remembered running from the transit cops with Cutter, Hendo and Tatts, jumping fences, dropping level to level in carparks, turning back to laugh at the fat fucks running behind them. He remembered, after trashing a school, the searchlights of a police chopper turning night into day. His friends had scattered in all directions, but he'd chosen the worst route – across the school quadrangle. Two cops behind him, guns drawn, shouted at him to stop or they'd shoot. He'd imagined the bullets entering his back, but he didn't stop. He still wondered at his indifference to death that night.
    And so he'd invited them over. And, unbelievably, Tatts, Esterhase and Cutter had come to Mosman. Hardly anyone knew Tatts's real name: Guo Qi Xu. Even the teachers couldn't say it properly, so they also called him Tatts. Tatts's uncle, this mad motherfucker who sold smack from his tattoo parlour, had been practising on his nephew since Tatts was six. Tatts loved the body art, and hated his real name, so everyone was happy. Mouse and Cutter wanted Tatts's uncle to do all of their crew with spiders crawling around their necks. Joss and Esterhase had copped some shit from the others when they'd refused.
    Joss remembered his grandmother's face when she'd first seen Tatts, but to her credit, she'd welcomed his friends, preparing them sandwiches and juice to eat in the garden by the pool. She'd provided them with tennis racquets and left them alone to spend the day together. Joss had known that inviting them was a mistake from the