I will remember devotion through this lump in my chest. I will remember love through a wedge of rockmelon. The lump is an engine inside me that makes me move. She walks off the train and my heart thumps into first, second, third, fourth gear. Move. I rush to the carriage doors and call out to her.
‘I know my three words,’ I say.
She stops and turns around.
‘Oh yeah?’
I nod. And I say these three words loud.
‘Caitlyn and Eli.’
The carriage doors close and the train pulls away from the station but I can still see her face through the door windows. She’s shaking her head. She’s smiling. Then she’s not smiling. She’s just looking at me. Digging her eyes into me.
Spies digs deep.
Boy Takes Flight
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