Read Online The Courier's New Bicycle by Kim Westwood - Free Book Online

look more like a cat burglar in my black joggers, black pants and zip-up jacket. For the second time this evening — but for an entirely different reason — I feel style challenged, even if it’s due to a lifelong resolution to never wear anything I can’t run like hell in.
    Unlike the spruce white Cute’n’Cuddly delivery vehicles, this van is rusty and battered, as if on its last few clunking kilometres before a final parking space in the wrecker’s yard. But that’s just for show. Behind the blistered patina of cheaply tinted windows it’s fitted out for comfort, and the nice new SEC motor under its mouldering bonnet whirrs as quietly as a beetle’s wings.
    We negotiate the nightmare of detours that’s the perpetually unfinished roadworks at the end of Saviour Street then cross the river into Port Melbourne. At the city end of Barrow Road, Anwar pulls onto the verge and kills the lights, and we sit there while the van’s engine flutters silkily, its clever hybrid design a reminder of human ingenuity amid so many mistakes.
    The streetscape ahead is a chiaroscuro of shadowy recesses and glimmering surfaces lit by moon, nothing stirring above the layers of industrial dirt. I remind myself it’s early yet for Fishermans Bend. Nothing happens here till after midnight.
    We ease into gear and inch forward, tyres crackling on broken glass.
    The industrial park is set out on an unfinished grid, many of its streets petering into dead ends, waiting for the extensions and development that never came. Several roads lead left off Barrow as it heads towards the Angels Gate Bridge. We do a slow crawl to the cul-de-sac then park with our backs to the water and wait, our eyes fixed on the wreckage across the road that was once one of the swishest drug factories in town.
    I scan the misshapen buildings doubtfully. ‘Gail’s sure they’re doing business around here …’ I let the sentence hang.
    â€˜She is,’ says Anwar.
    My eyes are drawn to the plastic Donald Duck figure stuck on the dashboard, its head bobbing gently on a spring. Surely it’s a piece of frivolousness not reflective of Anwar’s restrained style. But then, what do I really know of him?
    I breach the silence again. ‘Where’d you get the van from?’
    â€˜The confiscated vehicles compound on Atonement Street.’
    I shoot a look sideways. Last I heard, the compound and the police headquarters next to it had been torched by two of their own on a steroids rampage.
    â€˜They had a fire sale,’ he says, deadpan. It’s the closest thing to a joke I’ve ever heard from him.
    Anwar is small and unprepossessing, with an almost surreal equanimity. That level of calm is, ironically, disconcerting to be around at first; but I’ve shared overnight vigils with him before and have become used to the lack of chit-chat, the long silences. No chance of any personal intimacies accidentally escaping here. What little I know of his life has been pieced together from other sources, the scars on his arms enough to silence questions out of mere curiosity.
    The child of asylum seekers, at twelve years old he saw the rest of his family drown in international waters just offthe Lucky Country. The residue of grief that must be there he covers well. He was put in a detention centre until the government of the day finally conceded to the human rights lobbyists and let the survivors of the sunken fishing vessel become Australian citizens instead of keeping them in a stateless limbo. Still, Anwar could have gone into adulthood an angry man, or broken-spirited and weighted with a victim’s despair; instead he developed a stepped-back relationship with the world, an invisible buffer against the vicissitudes of life.
    The only person this reticence doesn’t apply to is Gail. As long as I’ve known them, she and Anwar have been close, no one else she trusts more. That trust is