on the wall to my right. An eagle soaring along the wall behind her back. A koala clinging to a gum tree she’s painted on the wall to my left. These decorations all serve to complement the office’s real talking piece, a large framed wall print of a penguin scurrying across a vast ice desert above the words, LIMITATIONS: Until You Spread Your Wings You’ll Have No Idea How Far You Can Walk.
On her desk beside her phone is a fundraising coin box for Shelly Huffman.
I hope Poppy Birkbeck takes that Limitations penguin poster down for Shelly.
There’s a picture of Shelly smiling on the coin box in her Nashville uniform, all gappy teeth in one of those forced over-the-top smiles Artful Dodger kids like Shelly smile when some gruff photographer asks them to put a little more effort into it. Shelly is in my Year 8 class. She lives around the corner from our house in a Housing Commission place on Tor Street, which August and I walk down to get to school. Four months ago, Shelly’s parents found out that the second eldest of their four kids will live the rest of her life with muscular dystrophy. August and I like Shelly, even if she is an A-grade smartarse most days we walk past her house. She’s the only friend we’ve made so far in Bracken Ridge. She keeps asking me to challenge her to arm wrestles on her front porch. She usually beats me because her arms are stronger boned and longer boned and she has me beat on leverage. ‘Nah, hasn’t come yet,’ she says when she beats me. She says she’ll know when the muscular dystrophy has properly arrived when I can beat her in an arm wrestle. The school is on a fundraising drive to help fit out Shelly’s home with outside and inside wheelchair ramps and rails in the bathroom and Shelly’s bedroom and kitchen, generally making the house what Shelly calls ‘fuck-up friendly’. Then the school hopes to purchase a wheelchair-friendly family van for the Huffmans, so they can still drive Shelly to Manly on the east side of Brisbane where she likes to watch skiffs and yachts and tin rowboats sail into the Moreton Bay horizon. The school hopes to raise $70,000 to future-proof the home. The school’s so far raised $6217 or what Shelly calls ‘half a ramp’.
Mrs Birkbeck clears her throat and leans in close across the desk.
‘I phoned your father four times and he did not answer.’
‘He never answers the phone,’ I say.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he doesn’t like talking to people.’
‘Can you please ask him to call me?’
‘He can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Our phone only takes incoming calls. The only number it can call is triple zero.’
‘Can you ask him to please come in and see me? It’s extremely important.’
‘I can ask, but he won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he doesn’t like to leave the house. He only ever really leaves the house between the hours of 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. when nobody else is around. Or when he’s pissed and he’s run out of piss.’
‘Watch your mouth.’
‘Sorry.’
Mrs Birkbeck sighs, leans back in her chair.
‘Has he taken you and August to see your mother yet?’
*
I slept in after that first night in Lancelot Street. I woke to find August’s bed was empty and my neck was stiff from sleeping on a rolled bath towel. I walked out of August’s room across the hall and past my father’s open bedroom door on the way to the toilet. I saw him on his bed. He was reading. I opened the door of the toilet and I saw that the toilet floor was now spotlessly clean and smelling of disinfectant. I took a long piss and walked into the bathroom off the toilet. The bathroom was four white walls, a yellow bathtub, a mould-covered shower curtain, a mirror, a sink, a lonely and spent lick of yellow soap and a lime green plastic circular comb. I stared at myself in the mirror and I didn’t know if I was sick from hunger or sick from the question I had to ask the man reading in the room beyond the bathroom door. I knocked on his door and he turned to me and I tried to not look like I was looking so hard at the darkness of his face and I was thankful for all the translucent blue-grey cigarette smoke filling the room that put a veil between us.