Jax grabbed his pencil and scanned the form. He ignored all the products on the first page – toiletries, cleaning products and healthy food options – turned to page two: snacks. The good stuff. He ran through the list of chocolate products and stopped when he found the Snickers Bars.

He decided to start with just one. He traced the No. 1 circle with his 2B before colouring it in. Not a speck of lead went outside the circle. Perfection. He had done the same thing with multiple-choice exams at school. Taking his time colouring in, being precise and pedantic meant he finished a sixty-minute exam in thirty minutes instead of fifteen. He always stayed until the end, pretending he had just finished when the teacher yelled, ‘Time: pencils down.’ He made sure he never scored more than ninety percent.

He moved to the soft drinks section and was about to drop lead when his pencil was snatched from his hand and the form slapped away. He turned to face the snatcher but couldn’t move, as an arm around his neck now held him in a vice.

Then Marsh came into view, strutting into the only line of sight the headlock allowed. He parked himself on the pew directly opposite. He was holding Jax’s pencil. Grub walked over and handed Marsh the buy-up list.

‘I’ll have four of these,’ Marsh said as he put a crude X in a circle. ‘And four of these, these, these, these and these. Fuck me, reckon I’ll have four of everything, if it’s his shout. Whaddya reckon, boys?’

‘Nah,’ Grub said. ‘Eight. Make it eight.’

‘You are a simple cunt, aren’t you, Grub?’ Marsh said. ‘How many years have you been in here? Fuck me.’

Marsh turned his attention to Jax.

‘He is a special human, our Grubby,’ Marsh said. ‘And you think you are pretty special too, don’t ya? Think you can get by without me? Think you’re a fucking hard cunt because you jabbed a fat wog and a washed-up bikie with a playschool shiv. What was that fucking thing? Did you get it out of a Kinder Surprise? You still got it, Grub.’

Grub nodded.

‘Well, fucken hand it over then,’ Marsh said.

Grub pulled up his shirt. He had both of Jax’s shivs wedged between his skin and the the elastic in the waist of his pants.

‘Both?’ Grub asked.

‘Nah, you can keep one. Might come in handy if you get some food stuck in your teeth.’

Grub passed the shiv to Marsh.