Here Come the Dogs Read Online Free Page A

courthouse. He sees two people he knows smoking outside, looking uncomfortable in suits. They wave at him as he passes. He gives them the thumbs up.
    When he pulls up at the primary school, Mila is already unbuckling her seatbelt. ‘Don’t forget your lunch.’ She kisses him on the cheek and clambers out of the Hilux. He leans across the seat and yells, ‘
Te sakam, Mila
!’ She looks back once with those neon-blue eyes and yells back, ‘I love you too, Dad!’ in English. Then she turns and becomes another eight-year-old streaming into the schoolyard. Aleks exhales and opens the glove box. He sifts among the papers and takes out a crumpled packet ofdurries. There is one left, which he lights.
Ahhh.
He reaches into his shirt and rolls the bead between his fingers, lets the strap fall over his thumb, middle and index. A thrill goes through him.
    â€˜Goodness me. Fucken lovely,’ he says.
    He starts up the engine and drives off. As he drives, he passes an abandoned building that was supposed to be demolished years ago. A yellow crane crouches next to it. He looks up and sees something he painted at the top of the building almost fifteen years ago. Tall, dripping, black letters: ‘Greece is Macedonia,’ and a yellow Vergina Sun next to it. Amazing that it’s still there.
    He and Solomon had scaled the heights of the building and twice they nearly fell to certain death. The building had been a general store in the early 1900s and was falling apart. It was two-storeys high and the wooden beams they climbed were rotten, the iron railings rusted. Neither would admit their terror, so they had egged each other on. They had to crawl on their bellies over the corrugated iron, staining their shirts yellow and red, to get a good position to spray-paint the slogan on the streetside wall, starlit.
    Solomon had asked what the slogan meant. Aleks tried to explain it the way his father had explained it to him: that Macedonia had been at the centre of a tug-of-war since time immemorial, that heaps of people claimed it didn’t even exist. However, he had found it difficult to explain and had become tongue-tied.
    Solomon had shrugged and said, ‘Sounds good to me,’ then started plotting how to rack some tins of paint. They were twelve at the time. Aleks wishes he could explain it to his mate now, properly, but Solomon always seemed so uneasy discussing nationality.
    Back then, Jimmy had been too scared to climb, so he stood below and kept watch for cops. Solomon had ridiculed him mercilessly, even though they needed a lookout. Jimmy turned away, and afterward they didn’t see him for two whole days.
    No one knew where he’d gone.
    Aleks considers Jimmy and Solomon’s relationship to be one predicated on a struggle for power and Jimmy had been born into a losing war. It was bad blood, Aleks was sure of it.
    He passes a small block of flats that sits next to the river.
    Only derros, alcos and new immigrants living there.
    He keeps driving at a leisurely pace. Dead grass, eucalypts, low river, even the empty driveways: all seems bare and hungry from drought. Some gardens have been planted with the drought in mind, and bloom with tough plants like wisteria, sage and bush sarsaparilla, their lilacs and purples slurring in the heat haze. A Christmas beetle drops onto his bonnet.
    Aleks is closer to the heart of Town now. On the main street he passes several redbrick pubs from the early 1900s, a small war memorial shaped like an obelisk, a dry fountain and a bronze statue of a bearded man carrying a book. There is a TAB, several kebab shops, charcoal chicken joints and pide houses, and on every block is the scaffolding of construction. He stops the car at a traffic light and an African girl in a hijab crosses the street. They catch eyes. Aleks nods at her but she looks down and keeps walking, books close to her chest.
    Unlike many in his family, Aleks has always liked Muslims. He even