by Trent Dalton
Boy Sees Vision
Can’t wait to tell her. Can’t wait to see her. In my vision she’s wearing a white dress. Her hair is long, falling over her shoulders. She kneels and sweeps me into her arms. I hand her the money we made for her and she weeps. That night we drive out to The Gap and we lay that money down on the desk of a bank in The Gap Village shopping centre and she tells a handsome banker that the money is her deposit on a small cottage home with a white rosebush out the front.
Our bus stops on Buckland Road, in the suburb of Nundah, in Brisbane’s north. A big autumn sun warms the top of my head, burns my ears and neck. We amble past the Corpus Christi Church, a mighty brown brick cathedral with a green dome on top like the tops of all those important London buildings I see in the set of Encyclopaedia Britannica scattered through the book hill inside Dad’s library room.
I might just miss that shoebox shithole Dad calls home. I’m gonna miss those holes in the wall. I’m gonna miss all those books. I’m gonna miss Dad on the sober nights when he’s playing Sale of the Century with us and he’s laughing at Tony Barber’s jokes and he’s thrashing every last person the show calls a carry-over champion. I’m gonna miss Henry Bath. I’m gonna miss walking to the shops to buy sober Dad’s smokes. I’m gonna miss sober Dad.
We turn off Buckland Road into Bage Street. I stop.
‘This is it,’ I say. ‘Sixty-one.’
August and I stand before a sprawling timber Queenslander home, raised high on tall and spindly stump legs, a house with so much aged and rickety character it feels like it’s leaning on a walking stick cracking a joke about the Irish famine.
A tall staircase covered in peeling blue paint takes us up to old French doors, weathered and rotting, splintery to touch. I knock twice with my left hand that has five fingers.
‘Coming,’ sings a woman’s high-pitched voice.
The home’s front door opens and a nun stands before us. She’s old and wears a white dress with short sleeves. A blue and white habit covering her hair and bordering a gentle and beaming face. A large silver cross swaying on a necklace.
‘Now you must be August and Eli,’ she says.
‘I’m Eli,’ I say. ‘He’s August.’ August smiles and nods.
‘I’m Sister Patricia,’ she says. ‘I’ve been looking after your mum for a few days, helping her find her feet a wee little bit.’
She looks deep into our eyes. ‘I’ve heard all about you two,’ she says. She nods at me. ‘Eli, the talker and the storyteller.’ She nods at August. ‘And August, our dear wise and quiet man. Ohhhh, what rare fire and ice we have here, hey.’
Fire and ice. Yin and Yang. Sonny and Cher. It all works.
‘Come on in,’ she says.
We walk through the doors and stand respectfully in the sunroom of the sprawling house. A large framed image of Jesus hangs above the hallway entry. It’s not too different from the image in Lena’s bedroom. Sad young Jesus. Handsome young Jesus. Keeper of my greatest sins. Knower. Forgiver. The man who gives me a break on all that hateful thinking I’ve been doing lately. All that dark hoping. That the men who put my mother here will burn. That these men we once knew will bleed for the things they did. Let them drown. Give them hell, give them disease and wrath and pestilence and pain and eternal fire and ice. Amen.
‘Eli?’ says Sister Patricia. ‘You there, Eli?’
‘Yes, sorry,’ I say.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she says. ‘You need me to hold your hand?’
We walk on through the hallway.
‘Second room on the right,’ calls Sister Patricia.
August walks ahead of me. The hallway is carpeted. A sideboard carries framed prayer messages and trays of rosary beads and a vase of purple flowers. The whole house smells of lavender. I will remember Mum through lavender. I will remember Mum through rosary beads and vertical joint wood walls painted aqua. We pass the first bedroom on the right and there’s a woman sitting at a desk in the bedroom, reading. She smiles at us and we smile back and walk on down the hallway.
August stops for a brief moment before the door of the second bedroom on the right. He looks over his shoulder at me. I place my hand on his right shoulder. We talk without talking. I know, mate. I know. He walks into the bedroom and I follow my older brother and I watch her sweep him into her arms. She was crying before he entered. She’s not wearing white, she’s wearing a light blue summer dress, but her hair is long like the vision and her face is warm and whole and here.
‘Group hug,’ she whispers.
We’re taller here than we were in the vision. I forgot about time. The vision lagged, spoke of things that weren’t and not things that would be. She sits on a single bed and I remember how she sat on that bed in Boggo Road. And those two women could not be more different. The worst of her in my head and the best of her here.
And this is the her that will be.
*
Mum closes the door of the bedroom and we don’t come back out for three straight hours. We fill in the gaps of all that time missed. The girls we like at school, the sports we play, the books we read, the trouble we make. We play Monopoly and Uno and we listen to music on a small clock radio near Mum’s bed. Fleetwood Mac. Duran Duran. Cold Chisel, ‘When the War is Over’.
We go out to a common room for dinner and Mum introduces us to two women who were with her inside and who are also finding their feet for a wee little bit in this rickety old house of Sister Patricia’s. The women are named Shan and Linda and I reckon Slim would have liked them both. They both wear singlets and they don’t wear bras and they both have raspy smoker laughs and when they laugh their boobs bounce in their singlets. They tell dry yarns about the miseries of life inside but they tell them with almost enough sprinkles of sunshine to make August and me believe it wasn’t so bad for Mum in there. There were friendships and loyalty and care and love. They joke about the meat that was so hard it broke their teeth. There were practical jokes and pranks on screws. There were ambitious escape attempts, like the Russian former child athlete who built a pole vault in a calamitous attempt to vault the prison walls. And of course there was no greater day than when the crazy boy from Bracken Ridge broke into Boggo to see his mum at Christmas.
Mum smiles at that story but it makes her cry too.
*
We set up a thick doona as a bed in Mum’s bedroom. We use cushions from the living room couch as our pillows. Before we sleep Mum says she has something to tell us. We sit either side of her on the bed. I reach for my backpack. There is $50,000 inside it.
‘I’ve got something to tell you too, Mum,’ I say. I can’t keep it in me. Can’t wait to tell her. Can’t wait to tell her our dreams will come true. We’re free. We’re finally free.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘You go first,’ I say.
She brushes my fringe out of my face, smiles.
She drops her head. Thinks some more.
‘Go on, Mum, you go first,’ I urge.
‘I don’t know how to say it,’ she says.
I push her gently on the shoulder. ‘Just say it,’ I chuckle.
She breathes deep. Smiles. Smiles so wide it makes us smile with her.
‘I’m moving in with Teddy,’ she says.
And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.
Boy Bites Spider
There’s a redback spider plague in Bracken Ridge. Some confluence of heat and humidity is causing redback spiders across Lancelot Street to crawl beneath plastic toilet seat lids. On my last day of Year 11, our next-door neighbour, Pamela Waters, is bitten on the arse while doing one of her boisterous number twos that bubble and squeak across the fence sometimes from her dunny. August and I aren’t sure who to feel more sorry for, Mrs Waters or the unsuspecting redback who bit a chunk out of her arse flesh for supper.
I found a book on spiders in Dad’s library room and I’ve been reading about redbacks. The book says the female redbacks are sexual cannibals who eat the
ir male partners while simultaneously mating with them, which is similar to the mating and eating rituals of some of the girls at my school. The cute little spiderling sons and daughters of these killer lovers are sibling cannibals who spend up to a week on the maternal web before floating away on the wind.
One week. That’s how long Mum wants August and me to stay at Teddy’s house over the summer holidays. One week with Teddy the rat. I’d prefer to stay here in Bracken Ridge with Dad and the sexual cannibal redbacks.
*
‘Which planet has the most moons?’ asks Tony Barber inside our fuzzy television, posing questions to three contestants on the pastel pink and aquamarine set of Sale of the Century.
Dad has thirty-six beers and three cups of Fruity Lexia under his belt and he still beats all three contestants to the answer.
‘Jupiter!’ he barks.
‘What’s the capital of Romania?’ Barber asks.
‘A knot is the collective noun for which amphibian?’ Barber asks.
‘How the fuck in her right mind did Frankie Bell trust that pissant Teddy Kallas?’ Barber asks. I sit up in my seat, finally interested in Dad’s favourite show.
‘And for a pick of the fame board, who am I?’ asks Barber. He asks the question straight down the tube. He asks me directly. ‘I was born to a couple that never was. The youngest of two boys, my older brother stopped speaking when his father drove him into a dam at the age of six. When I was thirteen years old the man I believed I was going to grow up with was dragged away to unseen oblivion by the enforcer of a suburban drug dealer masquerading as a small business seller of artificial limbs. Just when I thought things were getting better, my mother moved in with the man I believe brought about the death of the man I loved most in life. A rolling tumbleweed of confusion and despair, I am Eli who?’
*
August is in our room, painting. Oil on canvas. He says he might become a painter.
‘Just like your old man,’ Dad says whenever this subject comes up, making his usual link between August’s often startling, occasionally unsettling oil paintings and Dad’s first job as an apprentice for the End of the Rainbow House Painting company in Woolloongabba.
A collection of canvases lies around the room, on the walls, beneath his sagging bed. He’s prolific. He’s been working on a series where he paints insignificant suburban scenes from the streets of Bracken Ridge against impossibly grand backdrops of outer space. In one painting he placed our local Big Rooster restaurant floating in front of the spiral galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light years from earth. In another, he placed a scene of two kids from McKeering Street playing backyard cricket with their wheelie bin for stumps, backgrounded by a red starburst galaxy that looked like stomach blood reacting to a shotgun shell. Yet another shows a Foodstore supermarket trolley floating 100,000 light years away on the edge of the Milky Way. He did a painting of Dad in a blue singlet, lying on his side on the couch, smoking a rollie and circling the form guide, before a backdrop of a vast and colourful celestial gas cloud at the very edge of the known universe where, Gus said, all universal matter smells like Dad’s farts.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask from the bedroom door.
‘It’s you.’
August’s paintbrush dabs at a Black & Gold choc chip ice cream lid that he’s using as a paint palette. It’s me on the canvas. It’s me from my Nashville High School photo. I need a haircut. I look like I play bass in the Partridge Family. Late-teen pimples, big dumb late-teen ears, greasy late-teen nose. I’m sitting at a brown school classroom desk looking out the classroom window, a worried look on my face, and through that classroom window is outer space.
‘What is that?’
Some intergalactic phenomenon, a luminous green blob forming among the stars.
‘It’s you looking out the window in Maths and you’ve seen a light that’s taken 12 billion years to reach you,’ August says.
‘What’s it mean?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think it’s just about you seeing the light.’
‘What are you gonna call it?’
‘Eli Sees the Light in Maths Class.’
I watch August add a deeper shade to my oil-paint Adam’s apple.
‘I don’t want to go to Teddy’s house,’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘I don’t either,’ he says.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘But we’re still gonna go, aren’t we?’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
August nods. Yes, Eli, we have to go.
*
Teddy’s eyes have sunk inwards since I last saw him and his stomach has pushed outwards. He stands in the doorway of a two-storey Queenslander house in Wacol, one suburb south-west of Darra, which he inherited from his parents who now live in a nursing home in Ipswich, twenty more minutes’ drive along Brisbane Road.
August and I are standing at the top of a rickety staircase with iron rails so old and flimsy the staircase feels like a rope bridge Indiana Jones and his loyal sidekick, Short Round, might traverse over a pool of crocodiles.
‘Long time no see, ay boys,’ Teddy says, his fat arm around Mum like she’s a keg of beer.
I see you in my head almost every day, Teddy.
‘Long time,’ I say.
August is behind me, leaning his hand over the staircase rail to grip what looks like a wild yellow apricot from a tree hanging over the house’s front stairs.
‘Good to see you, Gus,’ Teddy says.
August looks at Teddy, gives a half-smile, tugs a fruit from the tree.
‘That’s Mum’s loquat tree,’ he says. ‘Been here more than fifty years that tree.’
August smells the fruit.
‘Go ahead, have a bite,’ he says. ‘Tastes like a pear and pineapple all in one.’
August bites, chews a chunk of loquat. Smiles.
‘You want one, Eli?’ Teddy asks.
I want nothing from you, Teddy Kallas, except your head on a spike.
‘No, thanks, Teddy.’
‘You boys wanna see somethin’ cool?’
We say nothing.
Mum gives me a sharp eye.
‘Eli,’ Mum says, not having to say any more.
‘Sure, Teddy,’ I say with all the personality of a loquat.
It’s a truck. A hulking orange 1980 Kenworth K100 Cabover parked down the side of his sprawling yard beneath a monstrous mango tree that drops its flying-fox-sucked green fruit on the truck’s engine bonnet.
Teddy says he drives this truck for Woolworths, hauling fruit up and down Australia’s east coast. We climb into the truck with him and he turns the ignition and the rattling food-hauling beast wakes.
‘You want to honk the horn, Eli?’
I’m not fuckin’ eight years old any more, Teddy.
‘That’s okay, Teddy,’ I say.
He honks it himself and gives a thrilled chuckle, the way a pea-brained fairytale giant might chuckle at a thieving farmboy bouncing on a pogo stick.
He takes his CB radio and fiddles with some frequency knobs in search of some close mates he says are somewhere out there in trucker land. These trucker mates all slowly check in, sweary blokes called Marlon and Fitz and some Australian trucking legend wanker known as ‘The Log’ on account of his dick size.
I liked Teddy Kallas when I first met him. I liked how Teddy and Lyle got along like the best friends they were. Teddy seemed to see in Lyle what I saw in him. I thought Teddy looked a bit like GI Blues–era Elvis Presley, the way he combed his hair back with gel, something about the curl of his puffy lips. But now every part of him is puffy, so he looks like Vegas Elvis. Deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches Elvis. He ratted on Lyle. He told Tytus Broz he was running a drug business on the side. He had Lyle dragged away and quartered and he thought it would get him the girl and get him in the good books with Tytus Broz. But Tytus cast him out because Tytus knew rats couldn’t be trusted. Rats have to go get real jobs
driving Woolworths food trucks up and down the east coast of Australia. He started visiting Mum inside and I guess she wanted to believe he didn’t rat because I guess she wanted the visits. I wasn’t going up there to Boggo. August wasn’t going up. Nobody allowed us to go up there without Dad. But Mum had to talk to someone on the outside, if only to be reminded that the outside still existed. So she talked to the rat. He’d visit every Thursday morning, Mum says. He was funny, she says. He was kind, she says. He was there, she says.
‘I like driving trucks,’ Teddy says. ‘I get out on the highway and I just get into this zone. I can’t explain it.’
Please don’t then, Teddy.
‘You know what I do sometimes on the road?’
You, Marlon, Fitz and The Log masturbate in a kind of CB radio circle jerk?
‘What?’ I bite.
‘I talk to Lyle,’ he says.
He shakes his head. We say nothing.
‘You know what I say to him?’
Sorry? Please forgive me? Please release me from the 24/7 soul-binding agony of my guilt and my betrayal and my greed?
‘I talk to him about the milk truck.’
Teddy and Lyle stole a milk truck when they were boys, he says. It happened in Darra. They drove off in the milk truck while the milko was chatting on the doorstep to Lyle’s mum, Lena. They took a reckless joyride in the truck, maybe the happiest six minutes of both their lives. Lyle let Teddy out at a corner store before he returned the milk truck, wearing the consequences on his own. Because Lyle Orlik was a good and decent boy who happened to grow up into a suburban skag pusher.