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 hope it is,’ I say.
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?
Dad standing nervously with his axe handle in his right hand. August standing here with a thin metal bar we normally use as a lock chock on the kitchen window. Me standing with my Gray-Nicolls single scoop – the Excalibur-in-the-stone of cricket bats – that I bought from the Sandgate pawnbrokers for $15. Feeble, potbellied warriors in singlets, thongs and shorts before battle. We’d all die for our queen, locked safely in the book room down the hall that we’re slowly emptying of books. Even Dad would die for her, I reckon. Maybe he can prove his love to her. Maybe this is his road to redemption, a few steps into his front yard and an axe handle into Teddy’s temple, and Mum falls gratefully into his thin arms and tattooed Ned Kelly on his right shoulder gives a hearty thumbs-up to true love.
‘Why the fuck did you say I would break his face?’ Dad asks.
‘I thought it would scare him off,’ I say.
‘You know I can’t fight for shit, don’t ya?’ he says.
‘I thought that was just when you were pissed.’
‘I fight better when I’m pissed.’
We’re fucked. Such is life.
*
Then the yellow Ford Mustang pulls into the street and – lump in my throat, wobble in my knees – pulls into our driveway.
‘It’s him,’ I gasp.
Black hair, black eyes.
‘That Teddy?’ Dad asks.
‘No, it’s the guy I saw outside the train station.’
He cuts the ignition and hops out of the car. He wears a grey coat and slacks, black shirt under the coat. He looks too formally dressed for someone visiting Bracken Ridge. In his left hand he carries a small boxed gift wrapped in red cellophane.
He walks across the front yard towards the living room window where the three of us – the Bell boys – stand with our dumb ogre weapons locked in our sweaty palms.
‘If you’re one of Teddy’s mates you better stop right there, mate,’ Dad says.
The man stops.
‘Who?’ the man replies.
Then a second car pulls up at the kerb by the letterbox. A large blue Nissan van. Teddy climbs out of the passenger seat. The driver of the van climbs out too, and a third man slides the van’s rear passenger door along and slams it shut behind him. All three are as large and lumbering as each other. They look like the Tasmanian woodchoppers who always win first place at the Ekka. They have the unmistakeable knuckle-dragging, plus-plus-sized-arse gait of the Queensland long-haul truck driver. Teddy probably called them on his CB radio, called for back-up like a seven-year-old boy playing with his cops and robbers play set. What a fuckin’ haemorrhoid. Maybe one of them is The Log, the big dickhead with the big dick. I’ll be sure to kick him in the balls. I would laugh out loud at these buffoons if they weren’t all carrying aluminium baseball bats.
Teddy marches to the middle of our front yard and calls through the window, oblivious to the man in the grey coat standing beneath us holding a wrapped gift in his left hand.
‘Get the fuck out ’ere now, Frankie!’ Teddy hollers.
He’s got the bluster of drugs in him again. The mania of long-haul speed.
The man in the grey coat steps casually and calmly to the side of the scene, watches Teddy with a puzzled look on his face, something like a panther, I realise just now, making way for a donkey.
Mum appears behind me at the window.
‘Go back to the room, Fran,’ Dad says quietly.
‘Fran?’ Teddy shouts. ‘Fran? Is that what he used to call ya, Frankie? You think you might shack back up with this loon?’
The man in the grey coat has now moved to the two steps that lead to our small front concrete porch. He sits down and studies the scene, a thoughtful forefinger over his lips.
Mum squeezes between me and August and leans out the window.
‘We’re done, Teddy,’ Mum says. ‘No more. I’m not coming back again. Never again, Teddy. We’re done.’
‘Nup, nup, nup,’ Teddy says. ‘We’re not done till I say we’re fuckin’ done.’
I grip my Gray-Nicolls harder. ‘She said fuck off, Teddy Bear, are you deaf?’
Teddy smiles. ‘Eli Bell, bein’ the big man for his mummy,’ he says. ‘But I know your knees are shaking, you little cunt. I know you’ll piss your pants if you have to stand at that window any longer.’
I have to hand it to him, his insights are spot on. I’ve never wanted to piss so bad and I’ve never wanted more to be wrapped up in a warm blanket slurping Mum’s chicken soup while watching Family Ties.
‘You come near her I’ll stab your fuckin’ eyes out,’ I say through clenched teeth.
Teddy looks at his goons. They nod at him.
‘All right, Frankie,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to come out, I guess we better come get ya.’ Teddy and his thug friends march towards the steps of the front porch.
That’s when the man in the grey coat stands. That’s when I realise how broad the man in the grey coat’s shoulders are, how much the grey coat hugs the muscular arms of the man in the grey coat. His gift stays sitting on the first step to the porch.
‘The lady said you’re done,’ says the man in the grey coat. ‘And the boy said fuck off.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ Teddy spits.
The man in the grey coat shrugs.
‘If you don’t know me then you don’t want to know me,’ the man says.
I’m starting to love this man like I love Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider.
The two men stare at each other.
‘Go home, mate,’ the man in the grey coat reasons. ‘The lady said you’re done.’
Teddy shakes his head, laughing, turns back to his two goons, who are gripping their baseball bats, spoiling for action, speed-thirsting for water and blood. As Teddy turns back he sucker swings his aluminium baseball bat hard and fast at the head of the stranger on our porch steps and the stranger ducks like a boxer, not taking his eyes off the threat, and he drives his clenched left fist hard into Teddy’s fatty right ribcage and he pushes up from his feet beneath Teddy, transferring the power in his calves and his thighs and his pelvis into the fury of his right fist that uppercuts the bottom of Teddy’s chin. Teddy wobbles on his feet in a bash haze and he finds his focus just in time to see the stranger’s forehead butting into the tip of his nose, making his nose bones snap, crackle and pop in an abstract splatter painting of human blood. I know this man now for what he is. A prison animal. A freed prison animal. The panther. The lion. I cry tears of madman happiness when I see Teddy’s mangled face lying unconscious on the ground and a name reaches my dry lips.
‘Alex,’ I whisper.
Teddy’s goons reluctantly move closer but they’re stopped immediately in their tracks by the black handgun the stranger whips from behind his waist belt.
‘Back up,’ the stranger says. He points his gun at the head of the closest goon.
‘You,’ he says. ‘Driver. I got your licence plate number so I got you now, do you understand?’
The van driver nods, dumbstruck and frightened.
‘You drag this fat piece of shit back to the hole he crawled out of,’ the stranger says. ‘When he wakes up you be sure to tell him Alexander Bermudez and two hundred and thirty-five Queensland chapter members of the Rebels say he’s done with Frankie Bell. You follow?’
The van driver nods. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Bermudez,’ he stutters. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Alex looks across at Mum, watching the surreal scene from the window.
‘You still got some things of yours at his place that you need?’ he asks Mum.
Mum nods. Alex nods knowingly, looks back at the driver as he belts his gun back behind his waist. ‘Driver, before sundown tomorrow you will have the lady’s belongings sitting on this porch by the front door, you follow?’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ the van driver says, already dragging Teddy along the grass of the front yard. The two goons heave Teddy inside the blue van and start off up Lancelot Street. The driver nods respectfully at Alex one last time and Alex nods back. He turns to us at the window. ‘I always told my mum that’s the worst part about this country,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘All the fuckin’ bullies.’
*
Alex sips a tea at the kitchen table.
‘That’s a nice cuppa, Mr Bell,’ he says.
‘Call me Rob,’ Dad says.
Alex smiles at Mum. ‘You raised two fine boys Mrs Bell,’ he says.
‘Call me Frankie,’ she says. ‘Yeah, ummm, they’re all right, Alex.’
Alex turns to me.
‘I had some dark periods inside,’ he says. ‘Everybody just assumes the head of an organisation like mine would be flooded with letters from friends on the outside. But the reality is, in fact, the complete opposite. No bastard writes to ya because they think every other bastard is writin’ to ya. But no man is an island, ya know, not the Prime Minister of Australia, not fuckin’ Michael Jackson, and not the Queensland sergeant-at-arms of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang.’
He looks back at Mum.
‘Young Eli’s letters were probably the best thing about my lag,’ he says. ‘This bloke made me happy. He taught me a bit about what’s important in bein’ human, ya know. He didn’t judge. He didn’t know me from a bar of soap but he gave a shit.’
He looks at Mum and Dad.
‘I guess you guys taught him that?’ he says.
Mum and Dad shrug their shoulders awkwardly. I fill the silent space.
‘I’m sorry I suddenly stopped writing,’ I say. ‘I’ve been in a bit of a hole myself.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry about Slim. You get to say goodbye?’
‘Sort of.’
He pushes the gift he’s been carrying across the table.
‘That’s for you,’ he says. ‘Sorry about the wrapping. Us bikies aren’t known for our gift-wrapping skills.’
I pull back the roughly taped and folded red cellophane at each end, slide the box out. It’s an ExecTalk Dictaphone, colour black.
‘It’s for your journalising,’ he says.
And I cry. I cry like a seventeen-year-old baby in front of the formerly imprisoned, highly influential senior member of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang.
‘What’s wrong, mate?’ he asks.
I don’t know. It’s my loose knee-jerk tear ducts. I’ve no control over them.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘It’s perfect, Alex. Thanks.’
I take the dictaphone out of its box.
‘You’re still gonna be a journalist, aren’t ya?’ he asks.
I shrug my shoulders.
‘Maybe,’ I say.
‘What, but that’s your dream, isn’t it?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, it is,’ I say, suddenly glum. It’s the faith he has in me. I liked it more when nobody believed in me. It was easier that way. Having nothing expected of you. Having no bar set to reach or fail to reach.
‘So what’s the problem, Scoop?’ he asks, chipper.
There are batteries in the box. I slip the batteries in the dictaphone. I test the buttons.
‘Breaking into journalism hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be,’ I say.
Alex nods.
‘Can I help?’ he asks. ‘I know a thing or two about breaking into things.’
Dad laughs nervously.
‘What’s so hard about it?’ Alex asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You gotta find a way to stand out from everybody else.’
‘Well, whaddya need to stand out from everybody else?’
I ponder this for a moment.
‘A page-one story.’
Alex laughs. He leans over the kitchen table and hits the red record button on my new ExecTalk Dictaphone. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what about an exclusive sit-down with the Queensland sergeant-at-arms of the Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang? Gotta be a yarn in that.’
Such is life.