Five days to Christmas and I can’t sleep. We have no curtains or blinds on our bedroom’s single sliding window and the blue post-midnight moonlight falls on August’s right arm hanging over his bed. I can’t sleep because my mattress is itchy and smells like piss. Dad was given the mattress by Col Lloyd, an Aboriginal man who lives five houses up on Lancelot Street with his wife, Kylie, and their five kids, the eldest of whom, twelve-year-old Ty, slept upon this orange foam mattress before me. The smell of piss keeps me up but what woke me was the plan.
‘Gus, you hear that?’
Gus says nothing.
It’s a moaning sound. ‘Huuuuuuuuuuuuu.’
I think it’s Dad. He’s not drinking tonight because he’s coming off a three-day bender. He got so spectacularly pissed on the first night of the bender that August and I were able to crawl under the gap beneath the living room lounge while he was watching The Outlaw Josey Wales on television and we tied the shoelaces of his Dunlop Volleys together so that when he stood up to abuse one of the many villainous Union men who foolishly killed Clint Eastwood’s on-screen wife and child he would fall down heavily, crashing over the coffee table. He fell over three times before he realised his shoelaces were tied, at which point he vowed – through a largely incoherent barrage of slurred words and at least twenty-three ‘cunts’ – to bury us alive in the backyard beside the dead macadamia nut tree. ‘As fuckin’ if,’ August wrote in the air with his forefinger, shrugging his shoulders as he got up to turn the TV over to Creepshow, which was showing on Channel Seven. On the second day of the bender, Dad put on his jeans and a button-up shirt and, with a second wind brought about by six Saturday-morning rum and Cokes and a splash of Brut cologne, he caught the 522 bus, without saying where exactly he was going. He came home that night at 10 p.m. while August and I were watching Stripes on Channel Nine. He walked through the back door, straight through the kitchen to the cabinet where he keeps the telephone he never answers. Beneath the telephone is the important drawer. This is the drawer where he keeps unpaid bills, paid bills, our birth certificates and his Serepax tablets. He opened the important drawer and retrieved a dog chain leash that he wrapped methodically around his right fist. He didn’t even acknowledge August and me sitting on the lounge when he turned the television off followed by every light in the house. He walked to the front window and drew the old frilly cream-coloured curtains closed, peering out the crack where the two curtains met.
‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling sick in the stomach. ‘Dad, what is it?’
He simply sat down on the lounge in darkness and tightened the dog chain around his fist. His head flopped dizzily about for a moment, then he focused on his raised left forefinger which he brought, with great concentration, to his mouth. ‘Sssssssshhhhhhh,’ he said. We didn’t sleep that night. August and I let our imaginations run wild guessing at what dangerous entity or entities he had offended enough to warrant the dog leash fist-wrapping: some goon at the pub, some hulk on the way to the pub, some killer on the way home from the pub, every single person inside the pub, ninjas, Yakuza, Joe Frazier, Sonny and Cher, God and the Devil. August wondered what the Devil would look like standing at our door. I said he would wear light blue flip-flops and sport a mullet cut with a rat’s tail and a Balmain Tigers beanie to hide his horns. August said the Devil would wear a white suit with white shoes and white hair and white teeth and white skin. August said the Devil would look like Tytus Broz and I said that name felt like something from a different world, a different time and place that we didn’t belong to any more. All we belonged to was 5 Lancelot Street.
‘Another Gus and Eli,’ he said. ‘Another universe,’ he said.
Dad spent the following morning sitting on the kitchen floor by the entrance to the laundry rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing ‘Ruby Tuesday’ on a cassette tape until the tape jammed in the player and the reel of brown tape unspooled in his hands like a mess of curled brown hair. August and I were eating Weet-Bix at the kitchen table as we watched him hopelessly attempt to fix the tape but succeed only in pulling the tape further and further into chaotic and irreparable oblivion. This forced him to resort to his Phil Collins tapes, the only point in the whole drunken three-day domestic nightmare when August and I genuinely considered notifying the Department of Child Safety. The vivid and violent bender climaxed at 11 a.m. that morning with a spectacular blood and bile vomit over the kitchen’s peach-coloured linoleum floor. He passed out so close to his own abstract gut spillage that I was able to take hold of his arm and extend his right forefinger so I could use it as a pencil to write a message he would have to see when he woke up sober. I dragged and swished his forefinger through the foul-smelling vomit to form a capital-letters message straight from the heart: SEEK HELP DAD.
*
‘Huuuuuuuuuuuu.’ The sound slips under the crack of our bedroom door.
Then a desperate call, frail and familiar.
‘August,’ Dad calls from his bedroom.
I shake August’s arm. ‘August,’ I say.
He doesn’t stir.
‘August,’ Dad calls. But the call is soft and weak. More a moan than a call.
I walk to his bedroom door in darkness, switch on his light, my eyes adjusting to the brightness.
He’s clutching his chest with both hands. He’s hyperventilating. He speaks between short, sharp breaths.
‘Call . . . an . . . ambulance,’ he says.
‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I bark.
He sucks for air he can’t find. Gasping. His whole body trembling.
He moans. ‘Huuuuuuuuuu.’
I run down the hall, dial triple zero on the phone.
‘Police or ambulance?’ asks a woman on the phone.
‘Ambulance.’
The phone patches through to a different voice.
‘What’s your emergency?’
My father is gonna die and I’ll never get any answers from him.
‘I think my dad’s having a heart attack.’
*
Dad’s next-door neighbour on the left, a sixty-five-year-old taxi driver named Pamela Waters, is drawn out to the street by the flashing lights of the arriving ambulance, her unwieldy breasts threatening to spill from her maroon nightgown. Two ambulance officers lift a gurney from the back of the ambulance and leave it by the letterbox.
‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Pamela Waters, fixing the satin belt of her gown.
‘Not sure,’ I say.
‘Another turn,’ she says knowingly.
What the fuck does that mean?
The ambulance officers, one carrying an oxygen tank and mask, rush past August and me, standing barefoot in our matching white singlets and pyjama shorts.
‘He’s in the room at the end of the hall,’ I call.
‘We know, buddy, he’ll be all right,’ says the oldest ambulance officer.
We go inside and stand at the living room end of the hall, listening to the ambulance officers in the bedroom.
‘C’mon, Robert, breathe,’ hollers the oldest officer. ‘C’mon, mate, you’re safe now. Nothing to worry about.’
Sucking sounds. Heavy breathing.
I turn to August.
‘They’ve been here before?’
August nods.
‘There ya go,’ says the younger ambulance officer. ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
They carry him out of the bedroom and down the hall, an arm each under his thighs, the way the Parramatta Eels forwards carry the starry halves in grand final celebrations.
They haul him onto the gurney, Dad’s face pressed to the gas mask like it was a long-lost lover.
‘You all right, Dad?’ I ask.
And I don’t know why I care so much. Something deep inside me. Something dormant. Something pulling me towards the crazed drunk.
‘I’m all right, mate,’ he says.
And I know that tone in his voice. I remember that tenderness in the tone. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right, Eli. I will remember this scene. Him on a gurney like this. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right. The tone of it.
‘I’m sorry you boys had to see this,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, I know, mate. I’m fucked at this dad stuff. But I’m gonna fix meself, all right. I’m gonna fix meself.’
I nod. I want to cry. I don’t want to cry. Don’t cry.
‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I say. ‘It’s okay.’
The ambulance officers load him into the back of their vehicle.
Dad sucks some more gas, pulls the mask away.
‘There’s a frozen shepherd’s pie in the freezer you can have for dinner tomorrow night,’ he says.
He sucks again on the mask. His eyes catch sight of Pamela gawking in her nightgown. He sucks enough air into his lungs to say something loud.
‘Take a fuckin’ Polaroid, Pam,’ he barks, wheezing with the effort. Dad’s flipping Pamela Waters the middle finger when the officers close the rear ambulance doors.
*
The next morning there is an ibis walking through our front yard. It’s favouring its left leg, which is wrapped in fishing line at the base where its prehistoric black claw foot begins. The crippled ibis. August watches the ibis through the living room window. He holds his Casio calculator, taps some numbers and holds the calculator upside down: ‘IBISHELL’.
I type in 5378804, turn it upside down: ‘HOBBLES’.
‘I’ll be back before dinner,’ I say. August nods, staring out to the ibis. ‘Save me some pie,’ I say.
Down the left side ramp, past the black wheelie bin. Dad’s rusting bicycle leans against a concrete stump holding the house up beside the tan cylinder of the hot water system. Beyond the bicycle is the vast below-the-house dump of Dad’s collected gallery of ancient household white goods – washing machines with engines like the ones used by QANTAS, disintegrating refrigerators filled with redback spiders and brown snakes, and discarded car doors and seats and wheels. The grass of the backyard is beyond mowing now, towering and leaning straw-coloured shoots so thick I can picture Colonel Hathi the elephant and Mowgli parting them on their way to the Big Rooster on Barrett Street. Only a machete could bring it all down now; an accidental fire, maybe. What a fuckin’ shithole. 008. ‘BOO’. 5514. ‘HISS’.
*
The bike is a rusting black 1976 Malvern Star ‘Sport Star’ model, made in Japan. The seat is split and keeps pinching my arse cheeks. It goes quick but it would go quicker if Dad hadn’t gone and replaced the original handlebars with handlebars from a 1968 women’s Schwinn. The brakes don’t work so I have to break by jamming my right Dunlop between the front wheel and front wheel brace.
It’s been raining and the sky is grey and a rainbow arches over Lancelot Street, promising everybody here a beginning and an end in seven perfect colours. Red and yellow and Vivian Hipwood in 16 Lancelot Street, whose baby died of cot death and for seven days she continued to dress it and nurse it and rattle toys in front of its blue face. Pink and green and number 17, where sixty-six-year-old Albert Lewin tried to gas himself in his sealed garage but couldn’t get the job done because he was only gassing himself with a rattling lawnmower because he’d sold his car two months before to pay for the vet surgery bills for his boxer dog, Jaws, who’d been put down two days before Albert pushed his green Victa into his garage. Purple and orange and black and blue: all the mums along Lancelot Street on a Saturday morning smoking Winfield Reds at the kitchen table hoping the kids don’t spot the purple and orange and black and blue bruising beneath the concealer on their cheekbones. The concealer. The concealers. The concealed. Lester Crowe in 32 Lancelot Street, who stabbed his pregnant girlfriend, Zoe Penny, thirteen times in the stomach with a heroin syringe to kill his unborn daughter. The Munk brothers in 53 Lancelot Street who tied their father to a living room armchair and cut half his ear off with a tomahawk. When it’s so hot in summer on this endless street and the Brisbane City Council has laid new bitumen over potholes that explode in frustration, the tar sticks to the rubber of your Dunlops like Hubba Bubba bubble gum and everybody pulls open their curtains despite all the mosquitos blowing in from the Brighton and Shorncliffe mangroves and this whole street becomes a theatre and all those living rooms are window-framed to become televisions playing a live daytime soap opera called Thank God It’s Dole Day and a ribald comedy called Pass the Chicken Salt and a police procedural drama called The Colour of a Two-Cent Piece. Fists are thrown through these front window theatre screens and laughs are had and tears are shed. Boo fuckin’ hiss. Boo fuckin’ hoo.
‘Hey, Eli.’
It’s Shelly Huffman, leaning out her bedroom window, blowing cigarette smoke to the side of her house.
I jam my shoe in the front wheel and pull a U-turn in the middle of the street and guide Dad’s rickety Malvern Star into Shelly’s driveway. Her dad’s car isn’t in the carport.
‘Hey, Shelly,’ I say.
She drags on the cigarette, blows seasoned O-rings on the exhale.
‘You want a drag?’
I suck two drags and blow them out.
‘You by yourself?’ I ask.
She nods.
‘They all went to Kings Beach for Bradley’s birthday,’ she says.
‘Didn’t you want to go?’
‘I did, Eli Bell, but it’s this ol’ bag o’ bones,’ Shelly says, adopting the voice of an old American grandmother from the Wild West, ‘she don’t walk too well across sand no more.’
‘So they left you home alone?’
‘My aunt’s comin’ soon to babysit,’ she says. ‘I told Mum I’d prefer the dog motel on Fletcher Street.’
‘I hear they give you three meals a day,’ I say.
She laughs, stubs the cigarette out on the underside of the windowsill, flicks the butt into the garden running along the neighbour’s fence line.
‘Heard the ambos took your old man to hospital last night,’ she says.
I nod.
‘What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know, really,’ I say. ‘He just started shakin’. Couldn’t speak or nothin’. Couldn’t catch a breath.’
‘A panic attack,’ she says.
‘A what?’
‘Panic attack,’ she says casually. ‘Yeah, Mum used to get ’em, few years ago. She went through a bad patch where she didn’t wanna do anything, ever, because she’d start having panic attacks if she went out among too many people. She’d wake up feeling on top of the world and tell us she’d take us all to the movies at Toombul Shoppingtown, then we’d get all dolled up and she’d have a panic attack the minute she sat in the car.’
‘How did she get over them?’
‘I got diagnosed with MD,’ she says. ‘She had to get over them then.’ She shrugs. ‘See, that’s called perspective, Eli,’ she says. ‘A bee sting smarts like a bitch until someone clubs you with a cricket bat. And speaking of the ol’ English willow, you wanna game of Test Match? I’ll let you be the West Indies.’
‘Nah, can’t,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna meet someone.’
‘This part of the big secret plan?’ she smiles.
‘You know about the plan?’
‘Gus wrote it all out for me in the air,’ she says.
That pisses me off. I look up to the grey sky.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t say a word,’ she says. ‘But I think you’re fuckin’ nuts.’
I shrug.
‘Probably am,’ I say. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks I am.’
Shelly rolls her eyes. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks we’re all nuts.’
I smile.
‘It is nuts, Eli . . .’ she says. And she looks at me with a pretty smile, all heart and sincerity. ‘But it’s sweet too.’
And for a moment I want to drop the plan and go inside and sit on Shelly Huffman’s bed playing Test Match, and if she hit a six by her favourite batsman, the dashing South African Kepler Wessels, with the small ballbearing cricket ball cutting through the ‘six’ space in the left corner of the octagonal green felt cricket ground, we could celebrate with a hug and because her family is all out and because the sky is grey we could fall back on her bed and we could kiss and maybe I could drop the plan forever – drop Tytus Broz, drop Lyle, drop Slim and Dad and Mum and August – and just spend the rest of my life caring for Shelly Huffman as she fights that unfair and imbalanced arsehole God who gives Iwan Krol two strong arms to kill with and gives Shelly Huffman two legs that can’t walk across the golden sand of Kings Beach, Caloundra.
‘Thanks, Shelly,’ I say, wheeling the Malvern Star back out her driveway.
Shelly calls from her window as I speed away. ‘Stay sweet, Eli Bell.’
*
Lyle told me once they used concrete from the Queensland Cement and Lime Company in Darra to build the Hornibrook Bridge. He said it was the longest bridge built over water in the Southern Hemisphere, stretching more than two and a half kilometres from seaside Brighton to the glorious seaside peninsula of Redcliffe, home of the Bee Gees and the Redcliffe Dolphins rugby league club. The bridge has two humps on it, one at the Brighton end and one at the Redcliffe end, where boats sailing along Bramble Bay can slip underneath it.
I can smell the muddy mangroves skirting Bramble Bay on the wind that pushes the Malvern Star along the bridge, up over the first hump. Lyle called it ‘Humpity Bump’ bridge because of the bumps his mum and dad’s car made when he was a boy crossing over the buckled and rough aggregate bitumen surface that crackles beneath my bicycle wheels today.
The bridge was closed to traffic in 1979 when they built a strong, wider, uglier bridge beside it. Now the Hornibrook is used only by a few bream and whiting and flathead fishermen and those three local kids pulling backflips off the tallowwood decking, spinning into a full and choppy green-brown tide so high the water lashes the iron safety rails that are peeling with yellow paint.
Rain on my head and I know I should have worn a raincoat but I love the rain on my head and the smell of the rain on the bitumen.
The sky gets darker the closer I get to the middle of the bridge. This is where we always meet, so this is where I find him, seated on the concrete edge of the bridge, his long legs dangling over the side. He wears a thick green raincoat with a hood over his head. His red fibreglass fishing rod with an old wooden Alvey reel rests between his right elbow and his waist as he hunches over, rolling a smoke. With his head under the hood, he can’t even see me pull up in the rain, but somehow he knows it’s me.
‘Why didn’t you wear a fuckin’ raincoat,’ Slim says.
‘I saw a rainbow over Lancelot Street and I thought the rain was done,’ I say.
‘The rain’s never done with us, kid,’ Slim says.
I lean the bike against the yellow rails and inspect a white plastic bucket resting beside Slim. Two fat bream swim without moving forward or backwards inside the bucket. I sit beside him, my legs over the side of the bridge. The high tide water heaves and swells in peaks and valleys.
‘Will the fish still bite in the rain?’ I ask.
‘It ain’t raining down there under the water,’ he says. ‘The flathead come out in this. Mind you, different story fishing in a river. I’ve seen yellowbelly out west go bonkers in the rain.’
‘How do you know when a fish is going bonkers?’
‘They start preaching about the end of the world,’ Slim chuckles.
The rain gets heavier. He pulls a rolled Courier-Mail from his fishing bag and spreads it out for me to use as a shelter.
‘Thanks,’ I say.
We stare at his taut line, dragged up and down by the Bramble Bay waves.
‘You still want to go through with this?’
‘I have to, Slim,’ I say. ‘She’ll be all right once she sees me. I know it.’
‘What if that’s not enough, kid?’ he asks. ‘Two and a half years is a long time.’
‘You said it yourself, a lag gets a little bit easier every time you wake up.’
‘I didn’t have two kids on the outside,’ he says. ‘Her two and a half years will feel like twenty of mine. That men’s prison is filled with a hundred blokes who think they’re bad to the bone because they’ve done fifteen years. But those blokes don’t love nothin’ and nothin’ loves them back and that makes things easy for ’em. It’s all those mums across the road who are true hard nuts. They wake each day knowing there’s some lost little shit like you out there waiting to love them back.’
I take the newspaper off my head so the rain can hit my face and hide my wet eyes.
‘But the man on the phone, Slim,’ I say. ‘Dad just says I’m crazy. Dad just says I made him up. But I know what I heard, Slim. I know he said what he said. And Christmas is coming and Mum loves Christmas like nobody I’ve ever seen love Christmas. Do you believe, Slim? Do you believe me?’
I’m crying hard now. Hard as the black sky rain is falling.
‘I believe you, kid,’ he says. ‘But I also believe your dad is right not to take you up there. You don’t need to see that world. And she don’t need to see you in it. Sometimes it makes it hurt worse.’
‘Did you talk to your man?’ I ask.
He nods, taking a deep breath.
‘What did he say?’ I ask.
‘He’ll do it.’
‘He will?’
‘Yeah, he will.’
‘What does he want from me in return?’ I ask. ‘Because I’m good for it, Slim. I’ll square it, I promise.’
‘Slow down, Road Runner,’ he says.
He winds in his line, turning the old Alvey reel three rotations, gentle and instinctive.
‘You got a bite?’
‘Nibble.’
He winds in one more rotation. Silent.
‘He’s not doing it for you,’ he says. ‘I kept his brother safe through a very long porridge a very long time ago. His name’s George and that’s all you need to know about his name. He has a fruit wholesale business and he’s been making fruit deliveries into the Boggo men’s and women’s for the past twelve years. The guards know George and the guards also know the things George carries inside in the false floors beneath his watermelon and rockmelon crates. But of course they’re paid handsomely not to know about these things. Now, like any retail business on the outside, the Christmas season is a nice earning period for traders who care to make a few extra bucks from retail on the inside. George can usually bring in all kinds of gifts at Christmas time. He can smuggle in sex toys and Christmas cakes and jewellery and drugs and lingerie and little Rudolph lights that turn red with a tickle of his nose. He has never, however, through twelve years of successful clink trade, smuggled in a thirteen-year-old boy with a childish lust for adventure and an unshakeable hankering to see his mum on Christmas Day.’
I nod. ‘I guess not,’ I say.
‘When you get caught, Eli – and you will get caught – you do not know George and you do not know anything about George’s fruit truck. You are mute, you understand. You will take a leaf from your brother’s book and shut the fuck up. There will be a total of five trucks making deliveries on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, all with their individual illegal bonus cargo. You can guarantee the screws will try to smuggle you out as quickly and as quietly as you came in. They’re the last ones who want the world knowing a thirteen-year-old boy was found running around the grounds of the Boggo Road women’s prison. If they take it further up the food chain then they’re more fucked than you. Press comes in, then the prison standards crowd comes in, the clink trade collapses and the wife of one of those screws don’t get that special Mixmaster she’s been dreaming about and that screw don’t get his Sunday-morning pancakes and everything else that comes with ’em, you know what I mean?’
‘Do you mean sexual intercourse?’ I ask.
‘Yes, Eli, I mean sexual intercourse.’
He jiggles the rod twice, studies the top of the line like he doesn’t trust it.
‘Another nibble?’ I ask.
He nods, reeling his fishing line in a little more.
He lights a smoke with his head tucked into his chest, cups the smoke from the rain.
‘So, where do I meet him?’ I ask. ‘How will George know who I am?’
Slim blows a drag into the rain. He slips his left hand into the top pocket of a flannelette shirt inside his raincoat. He holds a slip of paper, folded in two.
‘He’ll know you,’ he says.
He holds the slip of paper in his hands, dwells on it.
‘You asked me that day in the hospital about the good and the bad, Eli,’ he says. ‘I been thinkin’ about that. I been thinkin’ about that a good deal. I should have told you then that it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.’
‘But you didn’t always have a choice,’ I say. ‘When you were a kid. You had no choice then. You had to do what you had to do and then you got on a road that gave you no choice.’
‘I always had a choice,’ he says. ‘And you got a choice today, kid. You can take this slip of paper. Or you can breathe. You can step back and breathe, ride on home and tell your old man you’re looking forward to spending time with him on Christmas Day and you ain’t gonna worry any more because you know you can’t do your mum’s time for her, and that’s what you’re doin’, boy, you’re living inside that prison with her and you’re gonna be there for the next two and a half years if you don’t step back for a second and breathe.’
‘I can’t, Slim.’
He nods, reaches his hand out with the slip of paper.
‘Your choice, Eli,’ he says.
The slip of paper peppered by rain. Just a slip of paper. Take the slip of paper. Take it.
‘Are you gonna be angry at me if I take it?’
He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says flatly.
I take the slip of paper. I tuck it in my shorts pocket without even reading what’s written on it. I stare out to sea. Slim stares at me.
‘You can’t see me no more, Eli,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘You can’t keep spending time with an ol’ crook like me, kid,’ he says.
‘You said you weren’t gonna get angry?’
‘I’m not angry,’ he says. ‘If you need to see your mum, all well and good, but you leave this crook bullshit behind, you hear me. No more.’
My head throbs with confusion. My eyes swell. The rain on my cheeks and on my head and in my crying eyes.
‘But you’re the only real friend I got.’
‘Then you need to get some new ones,’ he says.
I drop my head. I put my fists in my eyes, press down hard like you press down on a cut to stop it bleeding.
‘What’s gonna happen to me, Slim?’ I ask.
‘You’ll live your life,’ he says. ‘You’ll do things I only ever dreamed about. You’ll see the world.’
I’m cold inside. So cold inside.
‘You’re cold, Slim,’ I say, between the tears.
I’m so angry inside. So angry inside.
‘I reckon you did kill that cabbie,’ I say. ‘You’re a cold-blooded killer. Cold like a snake. I reckon you beat Black Peter because you don’t have a heart like the rest of us.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he says.
‘You’re a fuckin’ murderer,’ I scream.
He closes his eyes at the sudden noise.
‘Settle down,’ he says, looking up and down the bridge, seeing no one in earshot. Everybody’s gone. Everybody’s gotta go some time. Everybody’s runnin’ from the rain. Nobody runnin’ to it. So cold inside.
‘You deserved everything you got,’ I spit.
‘That’s enough, Eli,’ he says.
‘You’re full of fuckin’ shit,’ I scream.
Slim shouts and I’ve never heard him shout.
‘That’s enough, damn it!’ he hollers. And the shouting makes him wheeze and he falls into a coughing fit. He brings his left arm to his mouth and coughs into his elbow, retching and rattling lung coughs like there’s nothing inside him but old bone and the earth dust from Black Peter. He breathes deep, wheezing and spluttering, gargles and hacks up a phlegm spit that lands two metres to his right beside a couple of discarded pilchards. He calms himself.
‘I done enough,’ Slim says. ‘And I did it to too many people. I never said I didn’t deserve the time I got, Eli. I just said I didn’t do that killin’. But I done enough and God knew I done enough and He wanted me to think on some other things I’d done and I did that, kid. I did my time thinkin’ on those things and I thought them inside and out. And I don’t need you thinkin’ on them for me. You should be thinkin’ ’bout girls, Eli. You should be thinkin’ ’bout how you’re gonna climb the mountain. How you’re gonna climb outta that shithole you’re livin’ in there in Bracken Ridge. Stop tellin’ everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once.’
He shakes his head. Stares out to the brown-green sea.
The tip of his rod bends sharply. Once. Twice. Three times.
Slim studies the rod silently. Then he reefs on the rod with a whipping pull and it bows like the rainbow I saw over Lancelot Street.
‘Gotcha,’ he says.
The rain batters down and the sudden action makes Slim cough uncontrollably again. He hands me his fishing rod as he attends to a coughing fit. ‘Flathead,’ he says, between choking coughs. ‘Monster. ’Bout ten pounds.’ Three more coughs. ‘Pull her in, will ya?’
‘What?’ I say. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘Just bloody wind it in,’ he barks, standing now with his hands on his kneecaps, coughing up some vile witch’s brew of tar and phlegm. And blood. There’s blood in his spit and it hits the bridge’s aggregate bitumen and the rain washes it away but it keeps coming. No colour as strong as the colour of Slim Halliday’s red blood. I reel the line in frantically, darting my head back and forth between the sea and the blood at Slim’s feet. The sea and the blood. The sea and the blood.
The flathead pulls away with the line, swimming for life. I pull harder on the Alvey, winding in long, slow rotations like I used to turn the handle on the rusty Hills Hoist in the backyard of the Darra house.
‘I think it’s a monster, Slim!’ I scream, as suddenly awed as I am elated.
‘Just stay calm,’ he says between coughs. ‘Give him some line when you think he’s gonna snap away.’
Only when Slim’s standing do I notice how thin he’s become. I mean he’s always been thin. He’s always been Slim. Arthur Halliday needs a new nickname, but Emaciated Halliday just doesn’t have the same romance.
‘What are you lookin’ at?’ Slim wheezes, hunched over. ‘Pull that monster in!’
I can feel the flathead zipping left and right through the water. Panicked. Lost. For a time he comes with me, follows the pull from the hook in his lip, like he’s had some divine message that that’s where he’s supposed to go, that the pilchard and the hook and the Bramble Bay tide this rainy day were the ultimate goal behind all that searching for survival along the ocean bed. But then he fights. He swims away hard and the Alvey reel finger-grips punch into the heel of my hand.
‘Fuck,’ I shriek.
‘Fight him,’ Slim wheezes.
I yank on the rod and rotate the reel at once. Long, deliberate reels. Rhythmic. Purposeful. Relentless. The monster is tiring but I’m tiring too. Slim’s voice from behind me.
‘Keep fighting,’ he says softly, coughing again.
I reel and I reel and I reel and the rain slams my face and the world seems close to me now, every piece of it, every molecule. The wind. The fish. The sea. And Slim.
The monster eases. I reel him hard and I see him approaching the top of the sea, surfacing like a Russian submarine.
‘Slim, here he comes! Here he comes!’ I howl, euphoric. He might be eighty centimetres long. He’s closer to fifteen pounds than ten. An alien monster fish, all muscle and spine and olive green flatheaded stealth. ‘Look at him, Slim!’ I scream, ecstatic. I reel the Alvey so fast that I could start a fire to barbecue the monster, then wrap him in tinfoil and bake him for Slim and me by the muddy mangrove banks on the Redcliffe side of the bridge, and follow him up with some toasted marshmallows dipped in Milo. The flathead rises into the air and my rod and line are a crane hauling some priceless cargo up to a skyscraper, my monster flying through the black sky, the ocean-bed dweller feeling rain on its back for the first time, glimpsing the universe above the sea, glimpsing my gasping face, wide-eyed and joyous.
‘Slim! Slim! I got him, Slim!’
But I don’t hear Slim at all. The sea and the blood. The sea and the blood.
I turn from the fish back to Slim. He’s lying flat on his back, his head turned to the side. Blood still on his lips. Eyes closed.
‘Slim.’
The flathead whips its spiny, powerful frame in the air, snaps the fishing line cleanly.
I will remember this through the weeping. I will remember this through the way my cheek rubs against the rough bristles of his unshaved face. The way I sit so awkwardly because I don’t think about sitting, I just think about him. The way I can’t tell if he breathes in the rain. The blood on his lips, spilling to his chin. The smell of White Ox tobacco. The small rocks from the bridge gravel biting into my kneecaps.
‘Slim,’ I sob. ‘Slim,’ I shout. The way I bob back and forth in pitiful confusion. ‘No, Slim. No, Slim. No, Slim.’
The sound of my stupid teary breathless mumbling. ‘I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said.’
And the way the monster fish plunges into the brown-green sea, down deep into the high tide, having seen the universe up here.
He wanted to see it only for a second. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like the rain.