by Ben Hobson
A nod.
‘Alright, now. Sleep time.’
‘Water?’
‘No, sweetheart,’ his mother said. ‘You just had a Milo.’
‘Go to sleep, mate.’
His father turned off the bedside lamp and launched them all into darkness. The parents stood at the doorway a moment looking back on their son. His father’s arm around his mother’s middle. Then his father shut the door.
THREE
1961
Travelling north in their old car up Gympie Road the boy saw their turn-off coming up and was surprised when they passed it without slowing. His father gave him no sign to indicate his intention. They drove on, turned a corner. Soon there were odd trees the boy had never seen before flitting by the car with thin octopus arms sunk into the mud.
‘We’re not going home?’ the boy asked.
His father’s wrist rested on the steering wheel and he was slouched back in his seat. The radio off despite the boy’s earlier pleas. His father staring hard at the road as it travelled beneath them. The boy had tried to mimic his father’s gaze and conjure up something of interest, but failed. Instead the road blurred to a spinning black so dizzying he’d had to look away.
‘We’re not living in that house anymore, Sam,’ his father said, his eyes boring holes in the road.
They turned another corner.
The use of the boy’s name so strange from his father it rendered the boy momentarily speechless, but soon he asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we’re not living there anymore. I’ve sold it.’
He watched his father, waiting for more, but his father’s face was still set upon that road, his eyes fierce in their focus.
At last the boy mustered the courage to ask, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Leave it, mate. We’ll talk about it later.’
The boy sat back. He had no immediate emotional response to what his father had said, which aroused a faint curiosity regarding the state of his soul. If what his father had said was true, he should damn well bloody care, but there in the pit of him was nothing at all. Did it all mean nothing now? In light of her passing were all things now mute?
They drove. Soon, in desperate need of distraction, the boy wound his window down. The humid air whipped at his face and he leaned more fully from the window to better capture it. He squinted through the barrage of wind. The car climbed another incline and then turned right. Beside them now were green pastures dotted with cows. In the distance, up a long dirt driveway, squatted an abandoned house. Beside it, what once may have been a milking shed, buckled. The legs had long ago given way and the roof sat lopsided. A touch would bring it down.
A few minutes later they turned down a driveway that snaked around a hill on which a few sheep stood. The makings of small horns visible on their domes. The boy wound his window up.
On the other side of the hill there stood a house in better condition. It was timber and although one side of it was slightly tilted, the rest of it stood proud and white in the sun. There were potted plants dangling from the verandah’s wrought iron lacework and as they approached the boy saw them sway in the breeze.
They pulled up on the gravel and the father, after clapping his hands on his knees and staring wildly at the boy, opened the car door and got out. The boy followed, intensely puzzled.
They walked to the house, the tangled mess of leaves and branches scratching at their faces. The giant fig tree had impressed itself upon the fence, some of the palings bulging in their middles. The boy pushed the leaves away from his face but his father ploughed through seemingly unaffected. The owner’s laziness plain on closer inspection, cobwebs between the ferns that lined the path to the house, the white timber caked with mud. They clomped onto the wooden porch, the boy still wondering what they were doing here. His father knocked on the door.
A rumpled woman answered quickly. Short, overweight, hair up in a messy bun. The opposite of the boy’s mother.
‘You Walter?’
His father nodded. ‘I called a few days ago?’
‘Right on time. Come in, come in,’ she said, and waved them through the door.
The inside of the house as dilapidated as its exterior. The beating heart beneath as grimy as the skin. The woman seemed most at home, navigating the clutter with precision. She led father and son to the living room, where she sat down on a laundry-strewn couch. Patting the seat beside her and grinning, she invited his father to join her.
The boy’s father stood before her shifting his weight from foot to foot, awkward to watch. He smiled and said, ‘If it’s all the same, I’d rather just get the pup.’
‘I need to talk to you, though, about what to do with him,’ the woman said. She patted the cushion beside her again. ‘Let me make you some tea.’ She started to stand.
‘If it’s all the same, we’ve a ways to go.’
The woman became disgruntled. Her face squished in and her eyes grew dim. She lurched up and straightened her dress with angry hands and looked at the boy. ‘You got the money?’
‘Where’s the dog?’ his father said.
‘Out back is where the litter is,’ she said.
The boy, at the first mention of the dog, had been looking at the doorway. The woman smiled at this and said, ‘Bit of a surprise for you then, is it?’ She chuckled.
The boy turned to his father, feeling something slight in his gut. ‘We’re getting a dog?’
A nod. ‘We need one.’
‘Why?’
His father shook his head. An implied promise, maybe, to answer the boy’s questions later. His father turned back to the woman and said, ‘Can you show us the litter?’
‘Follow me.’
She led them out to her spacious backyard. In the distance a barbed-wire fence and beyond only grass and horizon. A wire-mesh chicken coop stood to the left. Chickens busy being chickens. A kennel beside.
‘Pups’re in there,’ she said, pointing.
‘Well.’ His father put a hand on the boy’s neck.
The boy noticed how small he felt beside his father.
His father leaned down and said, ‘Go and pick the one you want.’
‘Except the dark brown one,’ the woman said. ‘She’s getting picked up later. She’s already sold.’
His father nodded at the boy and moved his eyebrows comically in the direction of the kennel.
The boy said, ‘But how do I see in?’
‘Just reach in there and feel around,’ his father said.
‘What if I get bit?’
‘You won’t get bit.’
The boy approached the kennel. Beside him a chicken pecked in its hay. The smell of excrement and farm. The kennel, the boy found as he neared it, had a panel on top he could lift to look inside. One fat dog within and three smaller ones asleep. The mother dog looked at him blearily and then thumped its head back onto the wood. The smallest pup closest to the bitch’s rear legs. It had its head tucked in and looked ashamed. The boy levered this one out and cradled it to his chest. It was sucking at the air. It woke and yawned and stretched its limbs. No reaction from Mum, maybe thankful her child had been stolen. The boy stepped away from the kennel and lowered the pup to the ground.
In the grass it looked smaller than he’d expected. A scruffy ball with teeth and unsure legs. Fat as it walked. It sprang at the boy’s feet in an attempt to be ferocious and gnawed at his leather shoe. One of his laces was longer than the other, and the puppy seized it and pulled.
The boy crouched and studied its movements. An innocent creature this, not yet ready for the world, to be taken from its mother and thrust into life. Rust-coloured fur. As it trotted towards the boy he noticed its two rear legs were socked with white. It had black eyes and its ears were small and tipped like peaks of pavlova. He tried to pat it. It darted away and bared its teeth once more.
The boy, still on his haunches, crab-walked closer and reached out his hand again, slower this time. The puppy nipped at first and then licked. The
boy withdrew his offer and the puppy darted in and the boy got to his feet and took a step away.
His father, nearer to the house, yelled, ‘He’s only playing, mate.’
The boy, though nervous, reached out again and allowed the puppy its play. Its tongue was warm and its teeth were friendly. It licked and then bit too hard and the boy withdrew his hand and sucked on his finger.
His father yelled, ‘He bite you?’
‘Yes,’ the boy yelled. He turned to look at his father, who said something direct to the lady who grew upset, judging by her crossed arms. She shrugged and sucked her teeth.
‘Give him a smack,’ his father yelled.
‘What?’
‘Smack him on the snout so he knows not to do it again.’
The boy tentatively tapped the pup on its wet nose. The puppy did not take this disciplinary measure as it had been intended. Undaunted, it waddled towards the house.
‘Mate, nothing’d learn from that,’ said his father, who had walked over to join him. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’
‘But he won’t remember what he did wrong,’ the boy said.
‘He does.’ The father approached the dog, bent down and whacked it in the side. The sound of an open palm striking another. The pup keeled over and yelped loudly. It looked stunned as it lifted its head. His father said, ‘No,’ sternly, and pointed a finger. The pup scurried away from them both, crying for its mother. A few metres from them it stopped and peed on the grass, its legs trembling.
‘He won’t like us now,’ the boy said.
‘Doesn’t matter if he likes us or not.’
The boy watched as the pup dashed back into its kennel, its crying loud enough to carry through the wood. The boy wondered what its mother might think.
‘You teach ’em young and they’ll grow up respecting you. Harder to teach an old dog. You heard that saying before?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well. That, then.’
The boy said nothing to this and his father, smiling, crossed his arms and nodded as though satisfied with this clay he’d sculpted.
‘Can I go see if he’s alright?’
‘He’s fine,’ his father said, his arms still crossed. A statue the boy knew he would never shift with argument.
FOUR
Back in the car, the pup rested on the boy’s lap in a cardboard box with holes cut in, an old shirt in the bottom. The pup whined softly, maybe for its mother. The boy watched as it nestled into the shirt and then fell silent, regarding its confines with canine apathy.
‘What’re you gonna name him?’ his father asked. His smile seemed genuine.
The boy said, ‘I get to name it?’
‘Sure.’
The boy thought for a moment. ‘It’s a boy?’
‘Yep.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘His balls. There.’ His father pushed the almost-asleep pup over in the box and pointed at the dog’s scrotum as it did its best to twist back onto its front, little legs churning.
The boy thought and after a moment said, ‘Albert.’
‘Why Albert?’
‘Sounds like a dog’s name.’
The boy watched Albert fall asleep and reached in to softly stroke the fur on his head. The car jolted, which stirred the dog. He got to his feet and scratched at the side of the box, regarding the boy with imploring eyes.
The boy looked up. They’d hit a dirt road that sloped downwards, dotted with dark blue rocks. The car moved slowly and his father grimaced as he drove. Beside them, the trees had tentacles again and were clustered more densely now, some of them even clawing the edge of the road. The old Ford scraped against them. The sound of squeaking metal. The smaller twigs and branches were snapped clean off and the boy watched them scatter across the stones. The father didn’t notice, or didn’t care, and ploughed doggedly forward.
The road levelled out shortly and became less rocky. More dirt, soon combined with sand. They drove a little further and then the car slowed. Before them stood a pile of new timber at the side of the road and, stretched out behind it, a muddy slop. An old-looking cement mixer too, caked in rust. Next to it an old wheelbarrow. Bags of cement stacked neatly beside the timber. The top few packets darkened, damp. The car crawled to a stop and his father sat behind the wheel, only staring. He looked down, breathed. Finally he lifted his head again, slammed it against the steering wheel.
‘Damn it! Damn you, Gus, you mongrel!’
The whole dashboard vibrated with his rage. A red mark across his forehead from the steering wheel. Both fists crashed down again and again, the ruined one devoid of power.
The boy lurched out of the car, landing on his back in the muck, then realised he’d abandoned Albert in his box. He reached back into the car to grab the box.
The veins in his father’s neck were pulsing, his eyes possessed by some foul demon, and the boy slammed the door to confine him. The boy huddled against a tyre, cradling the dog.
Soon he heard his father open the door on the other side of the car and slam it shut again. Then the sound of trees snapping and ripping nearby.
His father’s fits of rage had usually been witnessed from a distance. Once, the boy had watched from the verandah as his father drove his fist into a fence post he’d been mending and swore. Carrying on like a pork chop, the boy’s mother had said, safely out of earshot. The boy had never been this close to such wild aggression. The eyes. No telling what control the rage within him exerted over his father’s body, if any, as he lost his temper.
The boy didn’t move, his breathing shallow as he waited until eventually the sound of his father’s fury grew fainter. No telling if the man had simply calmed down and now stood nearby, or if he had walked further away.
The boy got to his feet and, holding the box to his chest, risked a look.
His father was seated on the ground behind some trees, cross-legged, head down, with his back to the boy. The boy’s heart was racing from what energy he’d expended and what fear still filled him, yet his father’s body seemed composed now, capable of more, as though his rage had never existed. Behind the trees he was a spectre of unknowable intent. The boy continued to watch, but did not dare approach.
When he was feeling calmer, he took Albert out of the box and set him down, and watched as the pup struggled to stand and stretched his limbs one by one. The dog soon found his feet and dashed away. The puppy was a welcome distraction from his demonic father. He led the boy away from the car, further into the bush. As he waded through the overgrown thick of it and the puppy skittered between trees ahead of him, he was struck by the sound of waves. A seagull overhead. He had no idea they had travelled so far from the city and come so close to the water.
The distance from his father allowed the boy a moment of respite and he sat on a tree lopsided from the bog to think things through and watch the puppy at play. He had never before questioned a decision made by a parent. Until this day they had seemed to him incapable of error. Who was he, the boy, to question them? After a chase he managed to recapture the pup. He walked back to the car holding the dog, nervous about what he would find.
His father was now leaning up against the car smoking, a habit the boy thought his mother had expunged. His father’s left foot was up against the door and his lips were relaxed, the cigarette dangling from them. The boy had never been more afraid and he stood immobile at the edge of the clearing and watched his father for signs of further violence.
‘It’s alright, mate.’ His father rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’m sorry, okay? I just lost my cool a bit. A bloke’s allowed to lose his temper, yeah?’
‘You scared me,’ the boy said, still not coming closer.
‘I know I did. I didn’t mean to. It’s just –’ his father glanced at the trees ‘– bloody Gus has buggered this whole thing up.’
‘Buggered what up?’
His father grinned. ‘You’ve never used that word before.’
‘Not in front of you.’ The
boy looked down, a little ashamed, the pup still in his arms.
His father stepped towards him and the boy, wary, almost fled, but instead he stood his ground.
The father held out his hands as though to calm a startled animal. ‘Mate, come on.’
The boy did not move.
His father said, ‘Come closer.’
‘You won’t get angry?’
‘I’ve calmed down, mate. Bloody hell.’ Another rub of the back of his head. ‘I just lost my temper, alright? Blokes do that.’
The boy did not approach but when his father took another step towards him he did not back away. His father kept coming until he was beside the boy, and then he reached out a hand to stroke the puppy. He said to the boy, ‘We’re going to build ourselves a new home.’
‘We’re not going home?’
‘I told you, mate,’ his father said and looked down. ‘It’s gone. I sold it. All the furniture, the rest of our clothes –’ a breath ‘– your mother’s things. All of it.’
Now his father had said it again he knew his feelings were no longer dormant, that his mother’s death had not rendered him permanently numb, because now he felt sick, like throwing up. Somebody else was walking around in their home, using their things. Wearing his mother’s clothes. Asleep in the bed where she’d died. The life he had lived up until this point, he realised now, was truly gone, more of it than he’d imagined, stolen by a stranger. Some other kid wearing his things, being friends with his friends. All that remained for him, his entire world, was this: this dangerous man and this dog. This wet, dirty landscape. He swiped at his eyes. ‘But why?’ he said, a crack in his voice.
His father looked away.
The boy released Albert and the puppy, oblivious to the boy’s despair, trotted over to the car and sniffed the tyre.
‘Because, alright?’ his father said. He sighed. ‘Because I didn’t want to live there anymore. And I thought we’d do this. This …’ he said, and waved his arms about. ‘This adventure. You and me, together.’
The boy walked to the car and stood beside it and watched the puppy scamper beneath. ‘Who’s Gus?’ he said finally.