‘Which one’s that?’
‘Side one, third thick line from the edge,’ Mum always said.
I unplugged the record player and I dragged it down the hall, plugged it in close to Lena’s door. Dropped the needle down, third thick line from the edge.
That song about a girl who never said where she came from.
The song echoed through the house and Mum’s sobbing echoed through the door. The song finished.
‘Play it again, Eli,’ Mum said.
*
On the seventh day, at sunset, Lyle unlocked the door. After two or three minutes, Lena’s bedroom door creaked open. Mum was thin and gaunt and waddling slowly like her bones were tied together with string. She tried to say something but her lips and her mouth and throat were so dry and her body was so spent that she couldn’t get the words out.
‘Gr . . .’ she said.
She licked her lips and tried again.
‘Gr . . .’ she said.
She closed her eyes, like she was faint. August and I watched and waited for some sign she was back, some sign that she was awake from the big sleep, and I guess that sign was the way she fell into Lyle’s arm and then collapsed onto the floor, clinging to the man who might have saved her life, and waving in the boys who believed he could do it. We huddled around her and she was like a fallen bird.
And in the cave of our bodies she chirped two words.
‘Group hug,’ she whispered. And we hugged her so tight we might have all formed into rock if we’d stuck around long enough. Formed into diamond.
Then she staggered, clinging to Lyle, to their bedroom. Lyle closed the bedroom door behind them. Silence. August and I immediately stepped softly into Lena’s room like we were treading lightly into a minefield in one of those North Vietnamese jungles of Duc Quang’s grandparents’ homeland.
There were scattered paper plates and food scraps across the floor amid clumps of hair. There was a bedpan in the corner of the room. The room’s sky-blue walls were covered in small holes the size of Mum’s fists and emanating from these holes were streaks of blood that looked like tattered red flags blowing in battlefield winds. A long brown streak of dried-up shit wound like a dirt road to nowhere along two walls. And whatever the battle was that Mum had been waging in that small bedroom, we knew she had just won it.
My mum’s name is Frances Bell.
*
August and I stand in silence in the hole. A full minute passes. August pushes me hard in the chest in frustration.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
Another two minutes pass in silence.
‘Thanks for taking the hit on whose idea it was.’
August shrugs. Another two minutes pass and the smell and the heat in this shithole grip my neck and my nose and my knowing.
We stare up to the circle of light, up through Lena and Aureli Orlik’s backyard wooden arse void.
‘Do you think he’s coming back?’
Boy Follows Footsteps
Wake up. Darkness. Moonlight through the bedroom window bouncing off August’s face. He’s sitting by my lower bunk bed, rubbing sweat from my forehead.
‘Did I wake you again?’ I ask.
He gives a half-smile, nodding. You did, but that’s all right.
‘Same dream again.’
August nods. Thought so.
‘The magic car.’
The magic car dream where August and I are sitting in the back tan vinyl seat of a Holden Kingswood car the same colour as Lena’s sky-blue bedroom walls. We’re playing corners, leaning hard against each other, laughing so hard we might piss our pants, as the man driving the car makes sharp lefts and rights around bends. I wind the window down on my side and a cyclonic wind blows me along the car seat pinning August to his side door. I push with all my strength against the wind funnelling through the window and I lean my head out to discover we’re flying through the sky and the driver of this mystery vehicle is ducking and weaving through clouds. I wind the window back up and it turns grey outside. Everywhere grey. ‘Just a rain cloud,’ August says. Because he talks in this dream.
Then it’s grey and green outside the car window. Everything grey and green outside, and wet. Then a school of bream swim past my window and the car passes a forest of waving seaweed ferns. We’re not driving through a rain cloud. We’re driving to the bottom of an ocean. The driver turns around and that driver is my father. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says.
My dad’s name is Robert Bell.
*
‘I’m starving.’
August nods. Lyle didn’t give us a flogging for finding his secret room. I wish he had. The silence is worse. The looks of disappointment. I’d take ten open-palm smacks across my arse over this feeling that I’m getting older, that I’m getting too old for smacks across my arse and too old for creeping into secret rooms I was never supposed to know about; too old for squawking about finding dope bags in mower catchers. Lyle hauled us out of the thunderbox this afternoon in silence. He didn’t have to tell us where to go. We went to our bedroom out of common sense. Rage was coming off Lyle like a bad cologne. Our room was the safest place to be, our cramped sanctuary decorated by a single long-faded McDonald’s promotional poster showing team photos from the 1982–83 Benson & Hedges World Series Cup one-day cricket competition between Australia, England and New Zealand, with a special cock and balls ink tribute August has added to the forehead of David Gower in the front row for the Poms. We didn’t get dinner. We didn’t get a single word, so we just went to bed.
‘Fuck this, I’m gettin’ somethin’ to eat,’ I say a couple of hours later.
I tiptoe down the hall in darkness, into the kitchen. Open the fridge, a corridor of light filling the kitchen. There’s an old wad of plastic-wrapped deli luncheon meat, a tub of ETA 5 Star margarine. I close the fridge door and turn left towards the pantry and bump into August, already laying four slices of bread on a cutting board on the bench. Luncheon meat sandwiches with tomato sauce. August takes his to the front window of the living room so he can stare up at the moon. He reaches the window and immediately hunches down in a panicked effort to stay out of sight.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
He waves his right hand downwards. I duck down and join him beneath the window. He nods his head upwards, raises his eyebrows. Have a look. Slowly. I raise my head to the bottom of the window and peek out to the street. It’s past midnight and Lyle is out on the kerbside, resting on the brick fence by the letterbox, smoking a Winfield Red. ‘What’s he doing?’
August shrugs, peeks out alongside me, puzzled. Lyle wears his thick roo-shooting coat, the thick woolly collar up, breaking the midnight chill against his neck. He blows cigarette smoke that floats against the dark like a grey ghost.
We both drop down again, chomp into our sandwiches. August drips tomato sauce onto the carpet beneath the window.
‘Sauce, Gus,’ I say.
We’re not allowed to eat food on this carpet now that Lyle and Mum are all drug-free and house-proud. August wipes the drops of sauce up from the carpet with his thumb and forefinger, licking the recovered red sauce from his fingers. He spits on the red stain left on the carpet and rubs it in, not enough for Mum not to notice.
Then a loud popping sound echoes across our suburb.
August and I immediately hop up, eyes peeking out through the window. In the night sky, about a block away, a purple firework whizzes into the darkness