DOMINIC HOEY Poor People with Money. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm
Fast paced, heart-wrenching, darkly comic, Dominic Hoey’s new crime novel is dark and unrelenting.
Do you remember when I was a hero, Eddy? Back when everyone thought I saved you, before my face looked like a broken dinner plate. Mt Albert girl, 15, rescues brother from house fire. I felt special, me, Monday Wooldridge, getting all that attention. You’d hold me, your little arms wrapped tight around my waist, while everyone said how brave I was. If I’m honest with you, that’s probably the happiest I ever felt.
But a year later you vanished, and this time I couldn’t save you. Just sat around crying and staring at your photo on the stupid television Aunty Sarah gave us. Then all the newspaper clippings on the wall, the cheap, tacky medal some dumb politician pinned on me in the St Luke’s shopping mall – they were mocking me. So I chucked them in the bin. Cos I understood there’s no heroes or rescue. There’s just a whole world of danger outside the front door. That’s when I started learning to fight.
Monday Wooldridge makes ends not-quite-meet with a dead-end bar-tending job and by living in a flat with no furniture to speak of so that every cent she manages to scrape together can pay for her catatonic mother’s care in a very expensive nursing home. The one thing that really matters to her is fighting. It’s been the most important thing in her life since she was a young girl and her brother Eddy disappeared.
A few weeks after you disappeared, I caught the bus up to the gym Dad coached at in Three Kings. I told him I wanted to learn. I was filled with anger, my blood like fire. I wanted to hurt someone, and I didn’t want that person to be me.
But you know what Dad was like, Eddy, told me to piss off home.
I gave him the fingers and then came back a few days later, and a few days after that. I’d stand at the back of the gym, flailing at one of the heavy bags. Dad would be holding mitts for one of his fighters. When the buzzer went, he’d look over and shake his head.
‘Go home, girl,’ he’d yell. ‘Look after ya mum!’
Soon she turned to Muay Thai, and that, she declares, changed her life.
Still, fighting was going good I guess. My pro record was 15-2, 10 knockouts. But I was almost 30. I needed to get a move on, as Dad used to say. But to train properly I needed money, and no one in the Wooldridge family ever figured out the magic of turning time into gold.
Wooldridge is a bit of a loner, but a friendship or attachment (it’s hard to define) grows with her flatmate JJ. Possibly because JJ is an outsider as well.
‘I’m part of a research group based in the States – we study the science of ghosts.’
‘What?’
JJ sighed. I could tell he’d had this exact conversation a thousand times.
‘OK, so some people reckon you can explain ghosts with quantum physics.’
‘I don’t know what you just said.’
‘Like, there’s been experiments that show that matter behaves differently when observed. Some people believe we’re creating reality with our thoughts.’
Before her friendship with JJ, the one abiding connection Wooldridge has is with her missing brother Eddy, and she maintains a constant dialogue with him throughout the novel. He’s a ghost from her past and a constant in her present. Despite these forays into other realms, the reality that Wooldridge has to deal with is a lot less metaphysical. It’s dead-end jobs and never-ending money worries, random hook-ups for sex with losers. It’s a nose so badly broken you’d have to wonder if they would know where to start repairing it, and getting on the wrong side of some very dangerous people.
She’s also adept at a brutal, no-holds-barred way of seeing everything. She is not a woman to be stuffed around, nor does she have stars in her eyes (unless from a misjudged swerve in the ring).
Anyway I guess I should tell you about the Hastings brothers, Eddy. Romeo, the younger brother, would come into the bar with his various lovers. He was more beautiful than most women. I don’t know what he put on his skin, but it was flawless. He had bleach-blond hair and these sleepy blue eyes that never focused on anything. They’d just drift around the room. That is, unless he got angry.
But I didn’t get to see that side of him at first. I always imagined he worked in fashion or maybe he was an artist. He wore tailored suits and carried this small fluffy dog, Pickles, with him everywhere.
There’s an inevitability to Monday Wooldridge that makes for sobering reading. Even when she has some spare cash, she knows it’s not going to last, and she knows she’s going to stuff up something. Somewhere. There’s bravado, and there’s knowing. And then there’s Romeo.
‘I have to confess this isn’t a social call,’ Romeo said. Pickles lay on his back, his little legs sticking up in the air.
‘Word is you’ve been selling some pretty decent coke out of here,’ Romeo said, scratching the dog’s belly.
I didn’t say anything, just kept polishing.
‘We’d like to help out,’ Sylvester added.
‘Yeah, make things easier for you.’
It’s not long before Wooldridge and JJ are running for their lives. From gangsters, ghosts and their own demons.
We caught the last bus north. It was mostly empty. A few families, a German couple, and me and JJ. I sat low in the seat as if the Hastings brothers would be staking out the bus terminal. JJ was trying to get his laptop onto the shitty bus Wi-Fi.
‘Got to tie up a few things before we go back in time.’
‘Is there no Wi-Fi up there?’ I asked.
JJ laughed and shook his head. ‘There’s not even power.’
In part two of the novel, Wooldridge and JJ are hiding out in the remote north, a part of the world that JJ’s family come from. Survival becomes part city-girl versus the country, part threats from (hopefully) distant gangsters. All the while they sit on a pile of money that other people want, and listen to tales of rescue animals and escaped pigs.
The humour in Poor People with Money is dark and dry as dust. The violence is extreme, and the swearing full on and intense. Intensity is the keyword when it comes to this story. The connection with Monday Wooldridge is intense, not just because she’s telling this story in her own voice, but because you know darn well she’s not telling you everything. She’s very selective in how she deals with what she’s feeling, what she’s been through and where her life is going. It’s not at all surprising that when it comes to the obvious question – obvious on one level, and so opaque on another – it’s Eddy she finally asks:
But I’ve been doing that for 15 years, keeping you alive for me. And you’re dead, Eddy, and I’m not yet. I open my eyes and try to sit up.
The night is flashing past the windows.
Pain shoots down my back. The headlights shine onto the dirt road. All around us is pitch black.
‘Where the fuck are we going?’
Dominic Hoey Poor People with Money Penguin Books 2022 PB 240pp $29.99
Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.
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