Vision
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.