Read Online Rush by Daniel Mason - Free Book Online Page B

other empty warehouses or factories, so there was nobody to listen to the gunblasts except for the destitute.
    When it came, the blast sounded like it might only have been a rock thrown into a stack of garbage cans in a nearby alley.
    I lit a cigarette. The double doors opened behind me and I could hear the hiss of the crowd, and a thin man with long matted hair emerged from the haze. The doors were shut behind him and we were left alone in the moonlight. The man was nothing more than a silhouette when he approached me and asked for a cigarette. His accent was thick Australian.
    â€˜Fuckin’ madhouse in there,’ he said. He was young, maybe no more than twenty. I watched him as he struck a match and lifted it to the cigarette that I had surrendered. His face contorted in horror as he drew on the cigarette, and he spat and said, ‘Jesus, what the fuck is this?’
    â€˜It’s an Asian brand,’ I explained, feeling a slight stab of shame at that confession. I’d noticed that nobody smoked the Asian brand but Hayes. I couldn’t figure out why he’d lied, why he’d converted me from Western cigarettes.
    The Aussie laughed and turned away. ‘You crazy cunt, nobody smokes that shit. Gonna take me ages to wash that fuckin’ taste out of my mouth.’ He followed the wall of the warehouse to a nearby downpipe where water dripped from the guttering. He stood beneath it with hismouth open, head tilted back, swallowing what water he could, moisture spilling over his forehead and into his knotted hair.
    I didn’t see what he’d done with the cigarette. It seemed a perfectly good waste, to me.
    The Aussie and I never exchanged names. In places like that, you’re better off nameless.
    He’d been doing the Asia backpacking thing. It was what all of the young hip travel magazines told him he should do. He told me that he’d stumbled onto the roulette by accident. Another traveller introduced him to it, said it was an easy way to make some money. A week later that traveller lost his visa and shipped out. The Aussie stayed. He told me there was an attraction to the roulette that was more than the money he could win. ‘It’s the thrill of it,’ he said. ‘That knowledge of five chances at safety and one at death. The risk, it gets my blood pumping. When I play a game, I feel like I can do anything.’
    He told me that he wrote poetry and showed me a notebook that he carried around in his tote bag. I read the first poem, which consisted of two lines:
    Â 
    A girl rings at two in the morning and she says,
I might be pregnant.
    I laugh and tell her that she’s going to need a
coathanger, the malleable metal kind.
    Â 
    I told him that I was impressed. I said, ‘It’s very pro-choice.’
    He flipped through his book looking for another snippet that he could share with me, his hair hanging in his face and the tip of his tongue sticking out between his lips.
    The next one read:
    Â 
    A young man tells me that he’s been sentenced to two months imprisonment.
    I instruct him on how best to make a noose from a bedsheet.
    Â 
    I read it and said, ‘Not as catchy as the first one. Doesn’t grab me.’
    He said, ‘Okay. Okay, yeah.’
    He flipped through his book some more, showing me tiny illustrations of mushrooms and people trapped in bubbles. Most of his characters looked as if they desperately wanted to escape the pages. I ashed my cigarette onto an open page of his book.
    There was one page in his book that caught me. It showed Death in a flowing black robe, not wielding a scythe but holding a six-shooter like a cowboy, and I knew without being able to see, that there was only one bullet in that gun.
    At the bottom of the page, in the shadow of Death, were scrawled the words:
    Â 
    I wake in the night
And I don’t know what to do
I lay in my bed
And I’m sick with the thought of you.
    Â 
    A week later I was at