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.