Green by Nick Earls

him.
    â€˜What do we do with it? It’s twenty bucks. Plenty.’
    â€˜Yeah, but it belongs to someone.’
    â€˜Yeah, right. And we go up to them at the end of the ride and go “anyone lose a twenty?” We’ll never know whose it was. What are we going to do? Ask them the serial number?’
    â€˜I think we’ve got to give it back.’
    â€˜Yeah, and then the Zipper people are onto us.’
    â€˜Hey,’ the guy from the generator shouts. ‘What have you got there?’
    â€˜Nothing,’ Frank says.
    â€˜Nothing, hey? Doesn’t look like nothing.’
    Frank takes the twenty, puts it in his pocket, shows the guy empty hands.
    â€˜You give that back,’ the guy says.
    â€˜Yeah, who to?’
    â€˜You give it to me. That’s all you’ve got to worry about. And then you piss off, all right?’
    â€˜And what are you going to do with it?’
    â€˜None of your fucking business.’
    â€˜Are you giving it back to the person who lost it?’
    â€˜Just give it to me, prick.’
    â€˜No.’
    And he’s coming closer, glaring at both of us, and he looks at Frank’s name tag and says, ‘Give it to me, you fuckin’ wog.’
    And Frank says, ‘Hey, I’ve got friends who are wogs. Arsehole.’
    â€˜Frank didn’t mean that,’ I say, and then come over all foolishly brave. ‘You’ve probably got friends who are arseholes, and he’s not normally that insensitive.’
    The guy doesn’t have the verbals to deal with that, so he goes for menace instead. Lifts his fist, takes a swing at Frank. But Frank ducks and flails his own fist around, just to get the guy away, but it connects and sends him staggering backwards.
    â€˜Shit, run,’ Franks says.
    And we go, off through the queue with the guy running after us, swearing away about what he’s going to do when he catches us. The two of us running like hell in our bright white Whipster overalls, like some remake of a knock-em-down silent movie classic, but one in which both of us could end up in actual pain if the wrong ending comes about.
    We keep running, probably long after we’ve lost him, past the Hall of Mirrors, round the Ferris wheel, past the woodchop and up into the animal pavilions.
    â€˜Department of Agriculture,’ Frank shouts to someone who tries to stop us, and we hide among some pigs.
    The pigs snuffle round, make room. Frank’s eyes water with the straw and he pinches his nose hard, tries not to sneeze. A tear rolls down one cheek.
    â€˜Well, Joanne, that got a bit dicey,’ I say, when I realise we’ve got away with it. ‘And I don’t think we can go back there now, can we?’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ he says, in a pig-snuffly way.
    â€˜Well, I don’t think we give the twenty back to its rightful owner. They’ll be long gone.’
    â€˜Yeah. Must be finders keepers then.’
    â€˜Must be.’
    â€˜And Jesus it hurts, hitting someone,’ he says, shaking his right hand. ‘I’m a lover, not a fighter, mate. A lover, not a fighter.’
    â€˜And a Latin lover at that.’
    â€˜Shit, yeah. Now, we should probably get back to work. And roll on the arvo break, hey?’ He takes the note from his pocket and unfolds it. ‘When we can blow this twenty on lime spiders and loose women.’
    And with the wild allergic response his face is mounting, it comes out as ‘libe spiders ad loose wibbid,’ but I know what he means. We’re cashed up, we’re men in uniform, we’re ready.
    â€˜Twenty bucks between boredom and glory,’ I say to him, and he lets out a big solid sneeze that he moves to block, but all that gets in the way is the twenty-dollar note.
    â€˜No worries,’ he says, and wipes it in the straw. ‘We can swap it back at Whipster. We’ll tell Leon it’s ice-cream.’

 
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    LOSING IT