There’s a redback spider plague in Bracken Ridge. Some confluence of heat and humidity is causing redback spiders across Lancelot Street to crawl beneath plastic toilet seat lids. On my last day of Year 11, our next-door neighbour, Pamela Waters, is bitten on the arse while doing one of her boisterous number twos that bubble and squeak across the fence sometimes from her dunny. August and I aren’t sure who to feel more sorry for, Mrs Waters or the unsuspecting redback who bit a chunk out of her arse flesh for supper.
I found a book on spiders in Dad’s library room and I’ve been reading about redbacks. The book says the female redbacks are sexual cannibals who eat their male partners while simultaneously mating with them, which is similar to the mating and eating rituals of some of the girls at my school. The cute little spiderling sons and daughters of these killer lovers are sibling cannibals who spend up to a week on the maternal web before floating away on the wind.
One week. That’s how long Mum wants August and me to stay at Teddy’s house over the summer holidays. One week with Teddy the rat. I’d prefer to stay here in Bracken Ridge with Dad and the sexual cannibal redbacks.
*
‘Which planet has the most moons?’ asks Tony Barber inside our fuzzy television, posing questions to three contestants on the pastel pink and aquamarine set of Sale of the Century.
Dad has thirty-six beers and three cups of Fruity Lexia under his belt and he still beats all three contestants to the answer.
‘Jupiter!’ he barks.
‘What’s the capital of Romania?’ Barber asks.
‘A knot is the collective noun for which amphibian?’ Barber asks.
‘How the fuck in her right mind did Frankie Bell trust that pissant Teddy Kallas?’ Barber asks. I sit up in my seat, finally interested in Dad’s favourite show.
‘And for a pick of the fame board, who am I?’ asks Barber. He asks the question straight down the tube. He asks me directly. ‘I was born to a couple that never was. The youngest of two boys, my older brother stopped speaking when his father drove him into a dam at the age of six. When I was thirteen years old the man I believed I was going to grow up with was dragged away to unseen oblivion by the enforcer of a suburban drug dealer masquerading as a small business seller of artificial limbs. Just when I thought things were getting better, my mother moved in with the man I believe brought about the death of the man I loved most in life. A rolling tumbleweed of confusion and despair, I am Eli who?’
*
August is in our room, painting. Oil on canvas. He says he might become a painter.
‘Just like your old man,’ Dad says whenever this subject comes up, making his usual link between August’s often startling, occasionally unsettling oil paintings and Dad’s first job as an apprentice for the End of the Rainbow House Painting company in Woolloongabba.
A collection of canvases lies around the room, on the walls, beneath his sagging bed. He’s prolific. He’s been working on a series where he paints insignificant suburban scenes from the streets of Bracken Ridge against impossibly grand backdrops of outer space. In one painting he placed our local Big Rooster restaurant floating in front of the spiral galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light years from earth. In another, he placed a scene of two kids from McKeering Street playing backyard cricket with their wheelie bin for stumps, backgrounded by a red starburst galaxy that looked like stomach blood reacting to a shotgun shell. Yet another shows a Foodstore supermarket trolley floating 100,000 light years away on the edge of the Milky Way. He did a painting of Dad in a blue singlet, lying on his side on the couch, smoking a rollie and circling the form guide, before a backdrop of a vast and colourful celestial gas cloud at the very edge of the known universe where, Gus said, all universal matter smells like Dad’s farts.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask from the bedroom door.
‘It’s you.’
August’s paintbrush dabs at a Black & Gold choc chip ice cream lid that he’s using as a paint palette. It’s me on the canvas. It’s me from my Nashville High School photo. I need a haircut. I look like I play bass in the Partridge Family. Late-teen pimples, big dumb late-teen ears, greasy late-teen nose. I’m sitting at a brown school classroom desk looking out the classroom window, a worried look on my face, and through that classroom window is outer space.
‘What is that?’
Some intergalactic phenomenon, a luminous green blob forming among the stars.
‘It’s you looking out the window in Maths and you’ve seen a light that’s taken 12 billion years to reach you,’ August says.
‘What’s it mean?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think it’s just about you seeing the light.’
‘What are you gonna call it?’
‘Eli Sees the Light in Maths Class.’
I watch August add a deeper shade to my oil-paint Adam’s apple.
‘I don’t want to go to Teddy’s house,’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘I don’t either,’ he says.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘But we’re still gonna go, aren’t we?’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
August nods. Yes, Eli, we have to go.
*
Teddy’s eyes have sunk inwards since I last saw him and his stomach has pushed outwards. He stands in the doorway of a two-storey Queenslander house in Wacol, one suburb south-west of Darra, which he inherited from his parents who now live in a nursing home in Ipswich, twenty more minutes’ drive along Brisbane Road.
August and I are standing at the top of a rickety staircase with iron rails so old and flimsy the staircase feels like a rope bridge Indiana Jones and his loyal sidekick, Short Round, might traverse over a pool of crocodiles.
‘Long time no see, ay boys,’ Teddy says, his fat arm around Mum like she’s a keg of beer.
I see you in my head almost every day, Teddy.
‘Long time,’ I say.
August is behind me, leaning his hand over the staircase rail to grip what looks like a wild yellow apricot from a tree hanging over the house’s front stairs.
‘Good to see you, Gus,’ Teddy says.
August looks at Teddy, gives a half-smile, tugs a fruit from the tree.
‘That’s Mum’s loquat tree,’ he says. ‘Been here more than fifty years that tree.’
August smells the fruit.
‘Go ahead, have a bite,’ he says. ‘Tastes like a pear and pineapple all in one.’
August bites, chews a chunk of loquat. Smiles.
‘You want one, Eli?’ Teddy asks.
I want nothing from you, Teddy Kallas, except your head on a spike.
‘No, thanks, Teddy.’
‘You boys wanna see somethin’ cool?’
We say nothing.
Mum gives me a sharp eye.
‘Eli,’ Mum says, not having to say any more.
‘Sure, Teddy,’ I say with all the personality of a loquat.
It’s a truck. A hulking orange 1980 Kenworth K100 Cabover parked down the side of his sprawling yard beneath a monstrous mango tree that drops its flying-fox-sucked green fruit on the truck’s engine bonnet.
Teddy says he drives this truck for Woolworths, hauling fruit up and down Australia’s east coast. We climb into the truck with him and he turns the ignition and the rattling food-hauling beast wakes.
‘You want to honk the horn, Eli?’
I’m not fuckin’ eight years old any more, Teddy.
‘That’s okay, Teddy,’ I say.
He honks it himself and gives a thrilled chuckle, the way a pea-brained fairytale giant might chuckle at a thieving farmboy bouncing on a pogo stick.
He takes his CB radio and fiddles with some frequency knobs in search of some close mates he says are somewhere out there in trucker land. These trucker mates all slowly check in, sweary blokes called Marlon and Fitz and some Australian trucking legend wanker known as ‘The Log’ on account of his dick size.
I liked Teddy Kallas when I first met him. I liked how Teddy and Lyle got along like the best friends they were. Teddy seemed to see in Lyle what I saw in him. I thought Teddy looked a bit like GI Blues–era Elvis Presley, the way he combed his hair back with gel, something about the curl of his puffy lips. But now every part of him is puffy, so he looks like Vegas Elvis. Deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches Elvis. He ratted on Lyle. He told Tytus Broz he was running a drug business on the side. He had Lyle dragged away and quartered and he thought it would get him the girl and get him in the good books with Tytus Broz. But Tytus cast him out because Tytus knew rats couldn’t be trusted. Rats have to go get real jobs driving Woolworths food trucks up and down the east coast of Australia. He started visiting Mum inside and I guess she wanted to believe he didn’t rat because I guess she wanted the visits. I wasn’t going up there to Boggo. August wasn’t going up. Nobody allowed us to go up there without Dad. But Mum had to talk to someone on the outside, if only to be reminded that the outside still existed. So she talked to the rat. He’d visit every Thursday morning, Mum says. He was funny, she says. He was kind, she says. He was there, she says.
‘I like driving trucks,’ Teddy says. ‘I get out on the highway and I just get into this zone. I can’t explain it.’
Please don’t then, Teddy.
‘You know what I do sometimes on the road?’
You, Marlon, Fitz and The Log masturbate in a kind of CB radio circle jerk?
‘What?’ I bite.
‘I talk to Lyle,’ he says.
He shakes his head. We say nothing.
‘You know what I say to him?’
Sorry? Please forgive me? Please release me from the 24/7 soul-binding agony of my guilt and my betrayal and my greed?
‘I talk to him about the milk truck.’
Teddy and Lyle stole a milk truck when they were boys, he says. It happened in Darra. They drove off in the milk truck while the milko was chatting on the doorstep to Lyle’s mum, Lena. They took a reckless joyride in the truck, maybe the happiest six minutes of both their lives. Lyle let Teddy out at a corner store before he returned the milk truck, wearing the consequences on his own. Because Lyle Orlik was a good and decent boy who happened to grow up into a suburban skag pusher.
‘I miss him,’ he says.
And his thoughts are interrupted by two large German shepherds barking at the driver’s door of the truck.
‘Hey boys!’ he beams out the truck window. ‘Come meet my boys,’ he urges us.
He slips out of the truck and play wrestles with his dogs in his backyard.
‘This bloke is Beau,’ he says, vigorously rubbing the head of one dog, his left hand reaching out to tickle the belly of the other dog. ‘And this feller is Arrow.’
He looks lovingly into their eyes.
‘These boys are the only family I got now,’ Teddy says.
August and I say something to each other we do not say. What a fuckin’ loser.
‘Come see their house,’ he says, giddy.
Beau and Arrow’s kennel beneath the house. Less a dog house than a two-level dog retreat set on a concrete slab. Hardwood palings with flourishes of shaped plywood for windows and doors resembling the kind found on a cottage Hansel and Gretel might stumble across wandering lost in the woods. The whole thing is built on stumps and Beau and Arrow have a ramp with foot notches to access their blanketed and cushioned dream home.
‘Built it meself,’ Teddy says.
August and I say something to each other we do not say. What a prize fuckin’ loser.
*
It’s all peachy perfect here at Teddy’s house for the first three days of our stay. Loquat perfect. Teddy smiles at Mum to show us he cares and he buys us Paddle Pops to win us over and tells us trucker jokes, almost all of which are deeply racist and end with an Aboriginal/Irishman/Chinaman/woman being found in the front bullbar of an eighteen-wheeler. Then Dustin Hoffman makes everything go south on the fourth night of our stay.
We’re driving home from the Eldorado cinema in Indooroopilly when something about Dustin Hoffman’s performance in the movie we just saw, Rain Man, reminds Teddy of August.
‘Can you do that sorta stuff, Gus?’ Teddy asks, looking through the rearview mirror at August in the back seat.
August says nothing.
‘You know,’ Teddy pushes, ‘can you count up a pile of toothpicks in a single look? You got any special powers like that?’
August rolls his eyes.
‘He’s not autistic, Teddy,’ I say. ‘He’s just fuckin’ quiet.’
‘Eli!’ Mum snaps back at me.
The car is silent for a full five minutes. Nobody talks. I watch the yellow glowing of roadside lights. The glowing is the fire inside me, forging a question out of flame. I ask it flat, not a hint of emotion.
‘Teddy, why did you rat on your best friend?’
And he says nothing. He just stares at me in the rearview mirror and he doesn’t look like Elvis from any kind of era or time or place or context any more because Elvis never went to hell. Elvis never had a devil phase.
*
He says nothing for two more days. He wakes late in the morning and trudges heavily past Mum and August and me at the breakfast table eating Corn Flakes and Mum says, ‘Good morning’, and he doesn’t even look up as he silently walks out of the house.
Dad does this sometimes to August and me after we’ve had a big blow-up in the lounge room during one of his benders. He’s the one who picks a fight with us, he’s the one who keeps slapping us across the backs of our heads when we’re trying to watch 21 Jump Street, he’s the one who always pushes August too far and he’s the one August punches in the eye just to get a moment’s respite. And yet it’s us who get the cold shoulder. Most of the time Dad wakes up the next morning, assesses the bruising on his face and apologises. But sometimes he gives us the silent treatment. Like we’re the arseholes. Like we’re the dicks in all this. Fuckin’ adults.
Teddy’s acting like we’re not in his house, like we’re ghosts, spectres in his living room playing games of Pictionary and The Game of Life while he plays the wrongfully persecuted mute inside his bedroom.
Then I feel shit for making Mum feel shit and when she asks August and me to help her cook some lamb shanks for dinner August gives me one of those looks that says, You’ll help her cook these lamb shanks because it means something to her and you’ll enjoy it and if you don’t I’m gonna cave your skull in.
We make the lamb shanks, slow-cook them for a day just like little iddy widdy Teddy likes them.
Teddy leaves the house at midday, marches through the kitchen.
‘Where you going?’ Mum asks.
He says nothing.
‘Can you be back for dinner at six?’ she says.
Nothing.
‘We’re making you lamb shanks,’ she says.
Say something, you fuck.
‘With the red wine sauce, just how you like ’em,’ Mum says. Mum’s smile. Look at that smile, Teddy. Look at that sun inside her. Teddy? Teddy?
Nothing. He walks out of the kitchen, down the back stairs. Down, down, down, the devil going down and the devil’s sunshine girl doing her best to laugh it off.
We slow-cook the lamb shanks in a steel pot that once belonged to Teddy’s grandmother, big enough to take a bubble bath in. We cook them for half a day and then some, turn them every hour in a sauce made of red wine, garlic, thyme, four bay leaves, chopped onions, carrots and celery sticks. By the time it comes to taste testing, pieces of lamb are falling off those shanks like chocolate in the hands of that ethereal lady in white from the Flake ad who August has a crush on.
*
Teddy doesn’t make it back by 6 p.m. We’ve already started eating at the dining room table when he pads in two hours later.
‘Yours is in the oven,’ Mum says.
He stares at us. Assesses us. August and I can smell the piss on him the minute he sits down at the table. And something else inside him. Speed, maybe. The trucker’s little helper on a long-haul drive up to Cairns. His eyes can’t fix on us and he’s breathing loud and he keeps opening and closing his mouth like he’s thirsty, thick white balls of saliva pooling in the corners of his lips. Mum goes to the kitchen to serve his meal and he stares at August across the table.
‘How was your day, Teddy?’ I ask.
But he does not answer, he just keeps staring at August, who has his head down in his plate, dragging flakes of lamb through red wine sauce and mashed potato.
‘What’s that?’ Teddy says, staring at August. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.’
‘He didn’t say anything, Teddy,’ I say.
He leans in closer to August, heaving his fat stomach onto the table so far that his Winfield Reds fall out of the pocket of his blue denim work shirt.
‘Can you repeat that for me? Maybe a little louder this time.’
He turns his left ear theatrically to August.
‘No, no, I understand, mate,’ Teddy shrugs. ‘I’d be lost for words too, if my old man did that to me.’
My brother looks up at the betrayer and smiles. Teddy rests back in his dining chair and Mum places his meal in front of him.
‘We’re glad you made it,’ Mum says.
He forks some mash like a child. Bites into a shank like a shark. He looks across at August again.
‘You know what his problem is, don’t you?’ he says.
‘Let’s just eat our dinner, hey, Teddy,’ Mum says.
‘You indulged this vow-of-silence bullshit,’ Teddy says. ‘You made these boys as crazy as their fuck-up father.’
‘All right, Teddy, that’s enough,’ Mum says.
August looks up again at Teddy. August is not smiling this time. He’s just studying Teddy.
‘I gotta hand it to you, boys,’ Teddy says. ‘It sure is brave of ya to sleep under the same roof as the bloke who tried to drive you into a fuckin’ dam.’
‘That’s enough, Teddy, damn it!’ Mum screams.
Teddy howls. ‘Yep, exactly.’ He laughs. ‘Dam it, hey boys? Dammmmmmmm it.’
Then he screams, too. Louder than Mum. ‘Nup, nup,’ he barks. ‘This was my dad’s dinner table. My dad built this fuckin’ table and now it’s my fuckin’ table and my dad was a good fuckin’ man and he raised me right and I’ll say what the fuck I want at my fuckin’ table.’ He bites another lamb shank like he’s biting the flesh from my left forearm.
‘Nup, nup,’ he shouts. ‘You can all fuck off.’
He stands. ‘You don’t deserve to sit at this table. Get away from my table. You’re not worthy of this table, you fuckin’ crazies.’
Mum stands now. ‘Boys, we can finish our meals in the kitchen,’ she says, her hands lifting up her dinner plate. Then Teddy’s hand smacks the plate loudly back down on the table, cracking the plate into three pieces, splitting it like a peace sign. ‘Leave your fuckin’ plates here,’ Teddy snarls.
August and I are already standing, moving away from our chairs, moving towards Mum.
‘Nup, nup,’ Teddy says. ‘Only family eat at this table.’
He makes a loud farmyard whistle and his beloved German shepherd dogs run up the back stairs, in through the kitchen and into the dining room. Teddy pats his hands in front of my table place, pats August’s too. ‘Up ’ere boys.’ Beau dutifully bounds up onto my chair and Arrow loyally leaps onto August’s. Teddy nods his head. ‘Eat up, boys,’ he says. ‘These lamb shanks are restaurant quality.’
The dogs sink their heads into our plates, their tails wagging with euphoria.
I look across at Mum.
‘Let’s go, Mum,’ I say.
She stands staring at the growling dogs eating up the day she spent cooking. She turns and paces silently, robotically, into the kitchen. There’s an old canary yellow kitchen cabinet lining the wall near the oven where our lamb shanks pot sits, filled with four more lamb shanks we’re saving for lunch tomorrow.
Mum stands silently in the kitchen, just thinking, for maybe a full minute. Thinking.
‘Mum, let’s go,’ I say. ‘Let’s just leave.’
Then she turns to face the kitchen cabinet and she drives her right fist into a row of eight old country-style dinner plates that once belonged to Teddy’s grandmother, standing upright along the cabinet behind a flexible white band. She punches them like she’s programmed to punch them, like something mechanical inside her is operating her arms. She’s not even realising how much the broken ceramics are cutting up her knuckles, spreading dark red blood across the pieces still standing behind the band. And August and I are so stunned we can’t move. I can’t get a word out of my mouth, so frozen and perplexed am I by her actions. Blood and fists. Punch after punch. Her fists then smash the sliding glass door that fronts the cup section of the cabinet. She reaches in and clutches an FM 104 radio station mug and she grabs a World Expo ’88 mug and she grabs a pink Mr Perfect Mr Men cup and she walks back into the dining room and whip-throws all these mugs hard at Teddy’s head, the third mug, Mr Perfect, colliding with his right temple.
And he rushes at her with a blind amphetamine rage. August and I throw ourselves instinctively between him and Mum, ducking our heads for protection, but he knees us in our thin-skulled heads with his fat kneecaps that are the size of cricket helmets and he barges his way, brute fury and power, to Mum whose hair he clutches from behind and he drags her out of the kitchen. He drags her along the linoleum kitchen floor, so hard that clumps of her hair are falling out in the pulling. He drags her down – the devil drags her down, down, down – the back wooden stairs. He drags her behind him, holding her by her head like he’s dragging a heavy rug or a cut tree branch, her backside and heels bouncing hard against the steps. And I wonder something in this moment, a clear thought reaches me in this perfectly terrifying moment, as the monster drags my mum to hell. Why is Mum not screaming? Why is Mum not crying? She is silent in this moment and I realise now, as the time in this moment stretches out flat and looped and infinite, that she’s not screaming because of her boys. She doesn’t want us to know how scared she is. A rage-filled, speed-buzzing psychopath is dragging her by the hair down a wooden staircase and she is only thinking of us. I look at her face and her face looks at me. The details. The unspoken. Don’t be scared, Eli, her face tries to say as the monster reefs her head. Don’t be scared, Eli, because I’ve got this under control. I’ve lived through worse, matey, and I’ve got this. So don’t cry, Eli. Look at me, am I crying?
At the bottom of the staircase, he drags Mum to the entry ramp of Beau and Arrow’s downstairs dog kennel. He grips the back of Mum’s neck forcefully and he presses her face into Beau and Arrow’s dog bowl. She gags as her face sinks into a mushy brown mess of old meat chunks and jelly.
‘You fuckin’ animal,’ I scream, driving my right shoulder as hard as I can into Teddy’s ribs but I can’t move his fat and vast frame.
‘I made you dinner, Frankie,’ Teddy screams, eyes wide and electric. ‘Dog food. Food for a dog. Food for a dog. Food for a dog.’
I push and punch at his face from below but the punches have no impact. He can’t feel in this moment so he can’t be moved. But then a large silver object flashes past my eyes and I see this silver object connect with Teddy’s head. Something warm that feels like blood and flesh splatters across my back. But it doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like lamb. It’s the pot we slow-cooked the lamb shanks in. Teddy falls to his knees, stunned, and August swings the pot again, straight at his face this time and this swing knocks him out, lays him flat on the miserable concrete beneath this miserable house of inheritance.
‘Go out to the street,’ Mum instructs us calmly. She wipes her face with her shirt and she suddenly looks like a warrior in this moment, not a victim, an ancient survivor wiping the blood of the fallen off her cheeks and nose and chin. She runs back up the stairs and into the house and meets us out on the street five minutes later with our bags and a backpack for herself.
*
We catch the train from Wacol to Nundah one hour later. It’s 10 p.m. when we knock on the door of Sister Patricia’s house on Bage Street. She takes us in immediately and she doesn’t ask why we’re here.
We sleep on spare mattresses in Sister Patricia’s sunroom.
We wake at 6 a.m. and join Sister Patricia and four transitioning ex-prison women for breakfast in the dining room. We eat Vegemite on toast and sip apple juice from the Golden Circle Cannery. We sit at the end of a long brown table big enough to fit eighteen or twenty people. Mum is quiet. August says nothing.
‘Soooooooo,’ I whisper.
Mum sips a black coffee.
‘So what, matey?’ Mum says gently.
‘So what now?’ I ask. ‘Now that you’ve left Teddy, what are you gonna do now?’
Mum bites into her toast, wipes crumbs from the corners of her mouth with a napkin. My head is bursting with plans. The future. Our future. Our family.
‘I reckon tonight you come spend the night with us,’ I say. I say things as fast as I think them. ‘I reckon you should just turn up on Dad’s doorstep with us. Dad will be shocked to see you but I know he’ll be good to you. He’s got a good heart, Mum, he won’t be able to turn you away. He won’t have it in him.’
‘Eli, I don’t think . . .’ Mum says.
‘Where would you like to move to?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘If you could choose anywhere to live, and money wasn’t an obstacle, where would you want to go?’ I ask.
‘Pluto,’ Mum says.
‘Okay, anywhere in south-east Queensland,’ I say. ‘Just name the place, Mum, and Gus and me, we’re gonna make it happen for you.’
‘And how do you boys suppose you’ll do that?’
August looks up from his breakfast plate. No, Eli.
I think for a moment. Measure my thoughts.
‘What if I told you I could get us a place in . . . I don’t know . . . The Gap?’ I say.
‘The Gap?’ Mum echoes, puzzled. ‘Why The Gap?’
‘It’s nice there. Lots of cul-de-sacs. Remember when Lyle took us to buy the Atari?’
‘Eli . . .’ Mum says.
‘You’ll love it in The Gap, Mum,’ I say, excited. ‘It’s beautiful and green and right at the end of the suburb is this big reservoir surrounded by bushland and the water in it is so crystal clear . . .’
Mum slaps the table.
‘Eli!’ she snaps.
She drops her head. She cries.
‘Eli,’ she says, ‘I never said I was leaving Teddy.’