Animal Kingdom

ANIMAL KINGDOM

ANIMAL
KINGDOM

A CRIME STORY

A NOVEL BY

STEPHEN SEWELL

BASED ON THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED FILM WRITTEN
AND DIRECTED BY DAVID MICHÔD

VICTORY BOOKS
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited
187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
[email protected]
www.mup.com.au

First published 2010
Text © Stephen Sewell and Animal Kingdom Holdings Pty Ltd, 2010
Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2010

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Typeset by Megan Ellis
Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Sewell, Stephen, 1953–
Animal kingdom / written by Stephen Sewell.
9780522858082 (pbk.)
Organised crime—Victoria—Melbourne—Fiction.
Police—Victoria—Melbourne—Fiction.

A823.4

FOREWORD

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I can't begin to tell you how strange this is. Not that I'm writing a foreword to this book, but that this book exists at all. When I discovered that Melbourne University Publishing was interested in producing a novelised version of
Animal Kingdom
, my first thought was
no
, my second was
why?
and my third, a little while later, was
why not?
Maybe it'd be fun to see what form it took, to read the film through someone else's eyes, and especially through the eyes of the very talented Stephen Sewell, who wrote the screenplay for one of my favourite Australian films,
The Boys
.

What became quickly apparent, however, was how gargantuan the task was that Stephen had been set. Maybe it only seems gargantuan to me, but what Stephen was asked to do was take the culmination of what had been for me ten years of reading and thinking and writing, and countless hours of conversations with the film's cast and crew, and turn it into a book—that most quiet, contemplative and solitary art form.

Good films are good because of their detail. That detail may not always be explicitly apparent, but it's there. It's in every frame, every line of dialogue, every performance choice, every costume and prop, every sound and music decision. It's the grand mash of this detail that makes a film feel rich and substantial. And while in a finished film this detail sits as a texture, as an emotional or even physical presence, in a book the detail must, by necessity, sit front and centre. And so my impulse was to drive Stephen a little bit crazy at the level of detail. But it became apparent to me early on that, for the sake of my sanity (and Stephen's, I'm sure), I would have to step back and let Stephen do his thing, and let the book version of
Animal Kingdom
be its own beast.

I guess I just feel grateful that anyone thought doing this—any of this—worthwhile.

Cheers
David Michôd

He was nothing. An absence, a blur. A seventeen-year-old blank called J staring into the nothing of a TV game show
blah-blah-blah
ing at him from the other side of the room while his mother sat slumped next to him on the saggy Furniture Warehouse sofa, not saying a word.

None of it made sense. Him, this place, this world—this flat, arid world of plastic and laminate that stretched for endless miles in every direction, dull and featureless. And overhanging it all like a mist, like a brown, smudgy fog, the sound cackling from the TV sets all tuned to the one lurid image of overweight contestants scrambling for money while the audience shouted its excitement that, for once in their mean, fucked-up lives, these poor dumb bastards felt like they were actually getting somewhere.

But J wasn't. J was just stuck, pinned to the sofa, sitting there in his school pants and short-sleeved shirt with one pink rubber glove on his hand from when he'd been doing the washing-up, just before he'd realised what the dead silence underneath the electronic babble in the other room really meant.

‘Did you call an ambulance?' the fat ambo guy who suddenly burst in through the screen door asked, as J sat, sunk in the cushion, watching the telly.

‘Yeah,' he said, standing uncertainly.

‘What's she taken?'

‘Heroin,' J heard himself answer matter-of-factly, as if it didn't even concern him, as if it was just another school-day conversation about tuckshop money or something, while the fat guy's offsider started working on his mother.

But J already knew she was dead. Not because he'd checked her out—he hadn't. Sometimes in the past he had checked her out, tried to do CPR—a hard thing for a ten year old to do on an adult—but this time he just knew, knew somehow, like there was a hole in the room sucking out every thing alive. She was dead, lost—but then, she'd been lost for years, for most of J's life. Not that she didn't love him; she did, he knew she did. She'd just had this itch that needed to be scratched, and she'd scratched it once too often.

Now there she was with the ambo guys doing their ambo guy routine over her, flicking their needles and sticking Narcan into her and being all focused and urgent and serious, when anyone could see she was past it, that her few moments of life and breath on this earth were gone.

She was dead. His mother was dead. Her wheel of fortune had come to a stop.

‘Grandma, it's J,' he said into the phone a few hours later, after they'd taken the body away. The silence at the other end made him prompt, ‘Josh.' But before she could really get going with all the gushy
J, how are you? What have you been up to?
guff, he got in fast, saying, ‘Yeah, good. Um, Mum's gone and OD'd, and she's died and so …'

There was a soft gasp at the other end, not of shock, more like the recognition of some long-understood fate. Grandma Smurf was like that; she had second sight, she said: somehow she always knew what was going to happen, even before it did, and was always ready for it.

‘Yeah, I'm okay,' J answered her sympathetic enquiry. ‘Sorry, I probably should've said it slower and not just gone and blurted it out and that. I don't really know what I'm supposed to do now and …'

He was searching for the words. Of course, none of the words he was saying made any sense: they were all just tumbling around in his head and coming out of his mouth, but he was sure that sooner or later he'd feel something real.

‘They took her away,' he continued. ‘An ambulance came.'

‘Ambulance …?' the other end echoed, as if she was thinking about something else, her mind already plumbing some other depth.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘They turned up and took a statement and that, but I told them I was eighteen, and now I don't really know what to do.' He suddenly felt very alone, hanging on to the phone and wondering if the other end was really listening, as he continued, ‘They didn't say anything about, you know, like am I supposed to organise the funeral and that? I don't really know what I'm supposed to do now, with the paperwork and arrangements and that. I just remember when Grandpa Donny died you were all over it, you know what I mean?'

She did, and she came, struggling and puffing all the way up the two flights of stairs of the block of cheap flats they lived in, arriving like a warm, cuddly saviour, a mother hen gathering a lost chick under her wing to bring it to safety, and it felt good.

‘Come here, sweetie,' she said, like a proper mother would, instead of lying dead on a slab in the morgue the way his real mother was because her own needs were more important than anyone else's.

But that's the way it was with the Codys, all of them, more or less. J saw that. It was all about them, never about anyone else, and the only thing that held them together was that everyone else hated them—and they knew that—or were frightened of them—and they knew that, too. A long time later, J realised that even his mother had been frightened of them: that's why she'd kept him away from them, frightened of what they did and frightened of what they could do.

And what they did was crime. Not big crime, not the kind of crime bankers get up to, but
big enough
crime. Big enough for you to read about it in the papers or hear about it on the evening news. Big enough for pensioners to be banging on about it to daytime shock jocks, calling for
longer sentences
and
throw away the keys
and
tougher laws to deal with these hooligans
. That sort of crime. Crap crime, buzzing like static over every decaying urban shithole in the world; dumb crime that you can get away with for a while, till someone gets sick of you and you've suddenly got a face full of shotgun pellets and are found dead in a ditch with the dogs licking your blood. Stupid crime. That's what they did, and that's the sort of criminals they were.

And that was J's new family.

Well, where else was he going to go? Baz wasn't family— well, he
was
—in fact, he was the smartest one of the family. But he wasn't related—he wasn't
blood
, and blood was important: blood was the most important thing. If you were blood, you were protected, you were looked after, you were
loved
. But Baz was loved, too, because he was kind. Not kind in any girly way, not
feel your bum
kind; he was just nice to be around, a good bloke, and a pretty damned handy armed robber to have on your side when you were planning to pull off some job.

And, a few days after his mother's death, when J stumbled into the Codys' kitchen after a restless night's sleep, that's exactly what Baz and Darren looked like they were doing.

‘Morning, Uncle Darren,' J said quietly, as Baz tidied the money.

‘Seriously, you got to stop calling me
Uncle
,' Darren answered with a nervous smirk. ‘It's giving me the creeps.'

J felt weird about it, too. Darren was only a couple of years older than J was himself, and, even though they hadn't seen each other for a long time, they'd played together as kids, so to call him
Uncle
was, like, weird. But the truth was, he
was
his uncle—his mother's brother—just like Craig was, another of Smurf 's sons. Not that you'd guess it, as he charged at that moment through the kitchen into the backyard dragging the pissing, shitting Doberman with one hand while holding a buzzing chainsaw in the other.