CHRIS YARRAN and Michael Walters are in Nick Naitanui's living room, sitting squeezed into a two-seater couch. They are trying to remember the first time they met, and it's hard; they can't remember not knowing each other.
Chris can still see Nick's big afro hairstyle, and recall the day he jumped onto the PA system at primary school and called a Melbourne Cup. Michael can remember how quiet Chris used to be, how he never used to speak until someone spoke to him, and Nick can't remember Michael being anything but a chatty, cheeky, energetic kid. "Look at him!" he laughs, pointing at a junior basketball photo in which Walters leans towards the camera with a big, goofy grin. Walters doesn't even bother objecting, or even just rolling his eyes: there's another photo, on another wall, where he's hamming it up even more.
Walters was the first to move into Bushby Street - a long, wide road in Midvale, in Perth's outer-eastern suburbs - and nobody ever called him Michael. As a baby, he travelled from Perth to Adelaide with his parents and big brother, to see his father's family for the first time. As the train rattled along, and the sky turned dark outside, he refused to fall asleep, so his father made up a lullaby, calling him "my son son". It caught on: his brother, Colin, wouldn't let anyone call him anything but "Son Son" after he did, finally, drift off to sleep. These days, he'll settle for Sonny as well.
Walters was four when "Nicko" Naitanui moved in, six houses down the street, his fraternal twin brother Mark in tow. Next door to them was Yarran, who was living with his mother at her parents' place. The 17-year-old has lived in many houses and in many streets over the years; at times, he wasn't entirely sure where he would be sleeping the next night. But Bushby was the street Yarran kept coming back to, and Midvale the suburb that most felt like home. The three boys started primary school together and - except for a few years when Yarran moved an hour away to Northam, still dropping by some weekends - they have lived within a few minutes of each other. The AFL draft will make their long-shared dream come true, but separate them for the first real time in their lives.
Football connected the boys, from the very start. Yarran can remember the three of them clumping down the bitumen road together, to the oval at the end of it, already wearing their footy boots. They would drag a bin out onto the road in front of Nicko's place, lining it up alongside a mail box, a tree and a concrete pole - cheap, easy goal posts. Between the Naitanuis' cousins, Yarran's cousins, Walters's brother and the other kids in their street, there would be up to 30 boys on the road at once, tackling each other to the asphalt, scampering to the side when a car tore past, scoring bonus points for hitting the bin or the tree, and never craving company. "All you had to do if you were bored," said Naitanui, "was go and knock next door."
Yarran was the kid who always hit the target; the one with the sharp, instinctive skills. He only ever wanted to be one thing: an AFL footballer. "Son Son" was the little one, who went to bed each night with his footy and would scurry around after the bigger, older kids, all energy. At school, Naitanui could do anything he turned either his mind or body to: he was the class accountant, counting the money when his class went off on excursions, and winning almost everything on athletics day. His mother, Atetha, thought he would end up becoming a basketballer; he started kicking the football only because the other kids did, and it was actually the least of his talents.
"I was just a skinny kid and I couldn't even kick properly. I'm still struggling now with it," he said, smiling. "But most of the kids in Midvale, that's just how we played. We didn't really practise or train all our skills like some other kids, we just ran around on the street. We'd have little scratch matches, four-on-four, and all we did was play."
Still, Naitanui could tell even then that Yarran's plans were sensible ones. "You just knew," he said. "Some kids are just better than the rest. Chris was the best one of us all."
Life hasn't exactly been easy, for the boys or those around them. Naitanui's parents, Atetha and Bola, moved to Sydney almost 19 years ago, from the Fijian village near Suva where Nick's older brother and sister still live. He has never lived there himself, but when he goes there, each year, he feels at home. His parents moved away because they wanted opportunity, said Atetha, but the twins were just one when Bola found out he had cancer and only a few months to live. Alone, Atetha moved the boys to Perth, simply because she had a brother there and wasn't sure where else she should go. She still sometimes wonders how she made it, how she kept from collapsing, but she knows her boys kept her going, that they gave her no choice. "If I'd given up … " she said, pausing. "I couldn't give up."
Atetha, who married again three years ago, always resisted signing on for a pension - she never wanted to be given anything and she always wanted to work, even if it meant things were a little bit trickier to pay for. For the past 14 years she has worked for Homewest, helping to find housing for homeless people in Perth's eastern suburbs and working with some of the kids who grew up playing kick-to-kick with her own boys. Some seem too embarrassed to look her in the eye.
"It's like the kids here are in hiding, they turn the other way when they see that I am coming," she said. "I say to Nick and Mark always, when you see these boys, talk to them, don't even think they have been in jail. It's sad, it's very sad. Some of these young indigenous boys that played with my boys, I thought that they were going to make it. They had so much talent, so much skill. But drugs and bashings and assaults … that's the way of life here. That's how these kids survive."
As he was growing up, Walters knew that his mum and dad struggled some months to pay the rent; that even filling the petrol tank to take him to a training session was sometimes a stretch.
"It wasn't something you ever really thought about," he said. "You just sort of knew, that we had it a bit harder than most people."
He can only ever remember being a happy child, although this year has been a wrenching one. Walters's parents separated earlier this year and his father, Mick, moved home to Adelaide. He came back to Perth mid-year, but left again in September, two days before Walters played for the Swan Districts under-19 team in a grand final. His grandfather flew straight from Adelaide to watch him play, but Walters was emotional, deflated and, said his mother, Martha, forced for the first time to re-assess his biggest idol.
"It was devastating. It really hurt Son Son and it's been a real struggle for all of us," she said. "He looked up to his father, I think Son Son really just wanted to make dad proud, and thought what he was doing was the right way to do that.
"He's an emotional boy, he's a fiery boy - the only time he isn't fiery is when he's playing on the football field - but he's worked through it now. He knows he has some exciting times coming up and that he has a lot of support and that a lot of people love him. He loves dad, but dad has to be put at the back for a while, and that's hard."
It's something Yarran had to grapple with a lot longer ago. He was only eight when his father, Malcolm, was jailed; he still sees him now, and talks to him on the phone, and his most vivid memories are of walking home with him from footy training, hand-in-hand. He can't remember feeling ashamed of where his dad was, and will be for a while yet, but when other kids asked him about it, he didn't want to talk.
"I just took it as life, as the way life goes," he said. "I never said much about it and it's still hard now, to think about it. But I just think of the good times with him, and I saw my mum and how she didn't let it bring her down. She didn't want it in my head, she wanted me to feel proud. With where I am, I sort of owe it to her. She's the one who kept me playing football."