by Trent Dalton
‘Mmmmmmm,’ she continues to ponder.
The train slows.
‘You want to hop off here with me?’
I shake my head. This seat feels good right now. The world feels good right now.
‘Nah, I’m just gonna sit here for a bit.’
She nods, smiling.
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’m gonna look back into Tytus Broz.’
‘Spies digs deep,’ I say.
She raises her eyebrows, sighs. ‘Yeah, Spies digs deep.’
She walks to the doors of the carriage as the train comes to a stop.
‘And, by the way, Eli, if you want to write for the paper, just start writing for the paper,’ she says. ‘Write Brian a story so good he’d be mad not to run it.’
I nod.
‘Thanks.’
I will remember devotion through this lump in my chest. I will remember love through a wedge of rockmelon. The lump is an engine inside me that makes me move. She walks off the train and my heart thumps into first, second, third, fourth gear. Move. I rush to the carriage doors and call out to her.
‘I know my three words,’ I say.
She stops and turns around.
‘Oh yeah?’
I nod. And I say these three words loud.
‘Caitlyn and Eli.’
The carriage doors close and the train pulls away from the station but I can still see her face through the door windows. She’s shaking her head. She’s smiling. Then she’s not smiling. She’s just looking at me. Digging her eyes into me.
Spies digs deep.
Boy Takes Flight
The ibis has lost its left leg. It stands on its right foot, its black left leg a stump cut off at the joint where the missing clawed foot might have once bent to take flight. The fishing line cut right through its leg. The bird must have been in agony for months as the fishing line cut off circulation to the foot. But now it’s free. Hobbled but free. It just let the foot go. It just wore the pain and then let it go. I see it hop now in my front yard from the living room window. It hops into the air and flaps its working wings to take a brief flight four metres over to an empty chip packet that’s blown over to our letterbox. The bird sticks its long black beak into the chip packet and finds nothing and I feel sorry for it and I throw him a chunk of my silverside and pickles sandwich.
‘Don’t feed the birds, Eli,’ Dad says, smoking a cigarette with his feet resting on the coffee table, watching Brisbane’s relatively new and promising rugby league outfit, the Brisbane Broncos, playing Mal Meninga’s near-invincible Canberra Raiders. Dad’s been spending more time out in the living room watching television with August and me. He’s drinking less but I don’t know why. Tired of the black eyes, maybe. Tired of cleaning up pools of vomit and piss, I guess. I think August and me being here has been good for him and sometimes I wonder if us not being here was the hill from which the spirit wagon of his life rolled down out of control. Sometimes he makes jokes and we all laugh and I feel a warmth I thought only American television sitcom families experienced: my beloved Keatons of Family Ties and the Cosbys and the really kinda weird eager beaver Seavers of Growing Pains. The dads in those shows spend a great deal of their time talking to their kids in their living rooms. Steven Keaton – the dad of my dreams – seems to do nothing but sit on his couch or at his kitchen table talking to his children about their myriad teenage calamities. He listens and listens and listens to his kids and he pours glasses of orange juice and hands them to his kids as he listens some more. He tells his kids he loves them by telling his kids he loves them.
Dad tells me he loves me when he forms a pistol out of his forefinger and thumb and points it at me as he farts. I nearly cried the first time he did that. He tells us he loves us by showing us the tattoo we never knew he had on the inside of his bottom lip: Fuck you. Sometimes when he’s drinking, he gets all weepy and he’ll ask me to come closer to him and he’ll ask me to hug him and it feels strange to hold him close to me but it feels good too, with his face hair rubbing like sandpaper against my softer cheeks and it’s strange and sad the feeling of sorrow I feel because I know he might not have actually been physically touched, except by accident, by another human for about fifteen years.
‘I’m sorry,’ he dribbles in these embraces. ‘I’m sorry.’
And I just assume he means, I’m sorry for driving you into that dam that crazy night all those dark years ago because I’m such a fuckin’ mixed up nut but I’m tryin’, Eli, I’m tryin’ real, real hard, and I hug him tighter because I have a forgiveness weakness in me that I hate because it means I’d probably forgive the man who removed my heart with a blunt knife if he said he needed it more than me or if he said his period of bloody heart removal came at a complicated time in his life. Ultimately, in these embraces, to my surprise, hugging Dad back feels like the good thing to do and my hope is to grow into a good man, so I do it.
A good man like August.
August is at the living room coffee table counting money. That grateful, wide-eyed smile of Shelly Huffman’s from the midday news bulletin that day stayed with my brother, August, sentimental mute that he is. It lit something inside him. Giving, he came to realise, might be the thing that has been missing from the lives of the brothers Bell, August and Eli. Maybe that’s why I got brought back, he did not say not so long ago.
‘You didn’t get brought back, August,’ I said. ‘Because you didn’t fuckin’ go anywhere.’
He didn’t listen. He was too inspired. Giving, he realised, was the thing missing from most lives of Australian suburban family units who have, for better or worse, indulged in a spot of small-time crime. Crime, he reasoned, is by nature a selfish pursuit; all robbing and hustling and swindling and stealing and dealing and taking and no giving. So, for the past three weeks August has been door-knocking streets with a donation bucket fundraising on behalf of the South-East Queensland Muscular Dystrophy Association across Bracken Ridge and its neighbouring suburbs of Brighton, Sandgate and Boondall. He’s regimented and obsessive about it. He draws up maps and timetables of his door-knocking routes and commitments. He did research in the Bracken Ridge library, using demography statistics to find wealthier pockets of Brisbane to door-knock, then he caught the train out to these areas this week: Ascot, Clayfield, the old money of New Farm and, across the river, to sleepy Bulimba where, Slim once told us, the old widowed grandmothers keep thick rolls of cash in their bedpans because they know no self-respecting burglar or, worse, sticky-fingered family member is ever gonna scrutinise an old lady’s piss pot. I thought his whole not-talking trip might hamper August’s ability to fundraise but it’s proven somewhat of a secret weapon. He simply holds up his fundraising bucket, emblazoned with a South-East Queensland Muscular Dystrophy Association sticker and makes a gesture with his hands that suggests he does not talk and most kind-hearted people – and when you doorknock enough homes you start to realise the human heart’s default state is actually kindness – take this gesture as meaning he’s deaf and dumb somehow because he himself – the warm-faced young man with the bucket – is living with muscular dystrophy. Maybe we’d all be much more effective communicators if we all shut up more.
*
‘Why can’t I feed the birds?’
‘It’s selfish,’ Dad says.
‘How is it selfish when I’m giving the bird my sandwich?’
Dad joins me at the front window, looks at the one-legged ibis in our yard.
‘Because ibis don’t eat silverside and pickles sandwiches,’ Dad says. ‘You’re only giving it the sandwich chunks because you want to feel good about yourself. That’s a selfish mindset. You start feeding that bird from this window every day then it’ll start dropping by every afternoon like we’re fuckin’ Big Rooster and it brings its friends and then none of those birds get the strength and exercise they usually get from finding food the hard way so you drastically alter their metabolisms, not to mention cause widespread civil war among the Bracken Ridge ibis community
as they battle to be the first to chomp into your silverside and pickles treat. Moreover, you suddenly get an unnaturally high level of birds in one place, which affects the ecological balance of the whole Bracken Ridge area. I know I don’t always practise this but, basically, you know, the whole point of life is doing things that are right over things that are easy. Because you want to feel good about yourself, suddenly the ibis are spending less time in the wetlands on a tree and more time on the ground in a fuckin’ car park rubbing shoulders with the pigeons, and then we start getting inter-species contact and weaker immune systems in the birds and higher stress hormones and from that little petri dish of dynamite springs salmonella.’
Dad nods his head next door at Pamela Waters, in her gardening gear on her hands and knees, pulling weeds from a row of orange gerberas.
‘Then Pam goes down the Barrett Street deli and buys three slices of leg ham but Max has left his deli cabinet window open for the past two hours and all those slices of delicious leg ham have been tainted with salmonella and Pam kicks the bucket two weeks later and doctors can’t work out whodunit but it was the ham and salad roll whodunit, in the sunroom with the baguette.’
‘So my silverside sandwich chunks could one day kill Mrs Waters?’
‘Yeah, on second thoughts, feed the fuckin’ birds.’
We reel back laughing. We watch the ibis for a long moment.
‘Dad.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you a good man?’
He looks out to the amputee ibis, trying to chew and swallow a chunk of white Tip Top bread.
‘Nah, probably not, I’d say,’ he says.
We stare out the window in silence.
‘Is that why Mum ran away from you?’
He shrugs. Nods his head. Maybe no. Probably yes.
‘I gave her plenty of reasons to run,’ he says.
We watch the ibis some more, bobbing about and studying the yard.
‘I don’t think you’re a bad man,’ I say.
‘Why, thanks Eli,’ he says. ‘I’ll remember to put that hearty endorsement on my next job application.’
‘Slim was a bad man once,’ I say. ‘But he came good.’
Dad laughs. ‘I do appreciate it when you compare me to your murderer friends.’
Then the yellow Ford Mustang passes our house. That same man driving it. Big guy. Black hair, black moustache, black eyes, staring at us as he passes the house. Dad stares back at him. He drives on down the street.
‘What’s his fuckin’ problem?’ Dad says.
‘I saw him last week,’ I say. ‘I was sitting on the seats outside Sandgate train station and he was staring at me from his car.’
‘Who do you think he is?’
‘Fucked if I know.’
‘Try not to fuckin’ swear so much, will ya.’
*
The phone rings in the afternoon. It’s Mum. She’s calling from the phone box at Sandgate train station. She’s scared. She’s crying. She can’t go to Sister Patricia’s house because he’ll find her there. Teddy knows Sister Patricia’s house.
I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him. I’m gonna stab him in the kidney with a small knife.
I place the phone down.
Dad is on the lounge watching a Malcolm Douglas adventure documentary. I sit down one lounge cushion away from him.
‘She needs us, Dad,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘She needs you.’
He knows what I’m thinking.
‘She’s got nowhere else to go.’
‘No, Eli,’ he says.
On television, outback adventurer Malcolm Douglas has his right hand inside a mangrove mud hole.
‘I’ll clean out the book room. She can help around the house. Just a few months.’
‘No, Eli.’
‘Have I ever asked for anything from you?’
‘Don’t do this,’ he says. ‘I can’t.’
‘Have I ever asked for a single thing from you?’
Malcolm Douglas pulls a raging Far North Queensland mud crab from the mud hole.
I stand and walk to the front window. He knows it’s the right thing to do. The ibis with one leg hops and hops and flies over the houses of Lancelot Street. The ibis knows it’s the right thing to do.
‘You know what a good man once said to me, Dad,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.’
*
Her summer dress is frayed and stretched. She stands barefoot by the train station phone box. August and I wait for her smile because her smile is the sun and the sky and it makes us warm. We smile at her as we rush closer to the phone booth. She has nothing. No bags. No shoes. No purse. But she will still have her smile, that brief celestial event, when her lips open from right to left and she curls her upper lip and she tells us in that smile that we’re not crazy, we are correct about everything, and it’s just the universe that is wrong. And she sees us and she beams that smile and it turns out the universe is right and it’s the smile that is wrong because Mum is missing her two front teeth.
Nobody talks on the drive home from the station. Dad is driving and Mum sits in the front passenger seat. I sit behind her and August sits beside me, reaching his left hand over to regularly rub Mum’s right shoulder reassuringly. I can see Mum’s face in the reflection of the car’s side mirror. That upper lip can’t curl right because it’s fat. Her left eye is black and there is blood pooled in the white of her eyeball. I’m gonna stab his fuckin’ eyes out. I’m gonna stab his fuckin’ eyes out.
It’s only when Dad pulls into our driveway that a word is spoken. They are the first words I’ve ever witnessed Mum say to Dad.
‘Thank you, Robert,’ she says.
*
August and I set about removing the mountain of books from Dad’s book depository. We don’t have enough boxes to box them all. There must be ten thousand paperbacks and, in turn, some fifty thousand silverfish swimming through their pages.
Augusts writes in the air. Book sale.
‘You’re a genius, Gus.’
We drag out an old table Dad has lying under the house. The book stall is erected on the footpath, just near our letterbox. We make a sign out of one of Dad’s XXXX beer cartons, scribble on the blank brown inside of the cardboard: BRACKEN RIDGE BOOK BONANZA – ALL BOOKS 50 CENTS.
If we sell ten thousand books, we make $5000. That’s enough for Mum to get a bond on a rental place. That’s enough for Mum to buy some shoes.
August and I are carting stacks of paperbacks between the book room and the stall outside while Mum and Dad are drinking Home Brand black teas and talking about what I believe are the old times. They have a shorthand these two. Then I realise they were lovers once.
‘But you don’t even like steak,’ Dad says.
‘I know,’ Mum says. ‘And this stuff they served was so tough you could use it to prop up a wonky table. But a couple of the girls showed me how to carve a circle of meat close to the bone on any old road kill and make it look like eye fillet.’
They cared for each other in the time before they hated each other. There is something alive in Dad’s eyes that I’ve not seen before. He’s so attentive to her. Not in his fake way that he usually is when he needs to charm someone. He laughs at things she says and what she says is funny. Black comedy bits Mum says about prison food and the wild adventure of the past fifteen or so years of her life.
I see something. I see the past. I see the future. I see my mum and dad fucking their way to my existence and I want to vomit but I want to smile too, because it’s nice to think they might have started out with high hopes for our so-called family. Before the bad days. Before they got swallowed up by the universe.
The phone rings.
I rush to the phone.
‘Eli, wait,’ Mum says. I stop. ‘It might be him,’ she says.
I raise the handset to my right ear.
‘Hello.’
Silence.
‘Hello.’
A voice. His voice.
‘Put your mum on the phone.’
‘You gutless fuck,’ I say down the phone.
Dad shakes his head.
‘Tell him we’ve called the cops,’ Dad whispers.
‘Mum called the cops, Teddy,’ I say. ‘The boys in blue are coming for you, Teddy.’
‘She didn’t call the cops,’ Teddy says. ‘I know Frankie. She didn’t call the cops. Tell your mum I’m coming to get her.’
‘You better stay the fuck away from her or—’
‘Or what, little Eli?’ he barks down the phone.
‘Or I’m gonna stab your fuckin’ eyes out, Teddy, that’s what.’
‘Oh yeah?’
I look at Dad. I’ll need some back-up on this.
‘Yeah, Teddy. And my dad is gonna break your coward fuckin’ face in two like he breaks coconuts with his bare hands.’
Dad’s face fills with surprise. ‘Put the fuckin’ phone down, Eli,’ Dad says.
‘Tell your mum I’m coming to get her,’ Teddy barks.
‘We’ll be waiting right here, you gutless cunt,’ I say. It’s the rage that does it to me. It makes me different. I feel something inside me building. All my gathered rage squashed down into my ribs in my youth. I scream, ‘We’ll be waiting right here, Teddy.’
The phone goes dead. I put the handset down. I look at Dad and Mum. August is on the couch, shaking his head. They all stare at me like I’m deranged, which I might well be.
‘What?’ I say.
Dad shakes his head. He stands and opens the pantry door. He uncaps a bottle of Captain Morgan. He slugs half a cup of cheap rum.
‘August, go get the axe handle, will ya?’
*
Slim once told me the greatest flaw of time is that it doesn’t really exist.
It’s not a physical thing, like Teddy’s neck, for example, that I can reach out and strangle. It can’t be controlled or planned around or manipulated because it’s not really there. The universe didn’t put the numbers on our calendars and the Roman numerals on our clocks, we put them there. If it did exist and I could reach out and strangle it in two hands, I would. I would grab time in my hands and bring it under my arms in a headlock where it couldn’t move and time would be frozen under my armpit for eight years and I could catch up in age with Caitlyn Spies and she might consider kissing the lips of a grown man her age. I’d have a beard because hair would have finally started growing on my face by then. I’d have a deep voice that would talk to her about politics and homewares and what sort of dog we should get that might suit our small backyard in The Gap. If we didn’t put those numbers on the clock then Caitlyn Spies wouldn’t age, Caitlyn Spies would just be, and I could be with her. I’ve only known bad timing. I’ve only ever felt out of step with time. But not this day. Not this moment by the front living room window of 5 Lancelot Street, Bracken Ridge. High noon. Where’s the rolling tumbleweed and the old granny closing the shutters on the town saloon?