out.
‘You by yourself?’ I ask.
She nods.
‘They all went to Kings Beach for Bradley’s birthday,’ she says.
‘Didn’t you want to go?’
‘I did, Eli Bell, but it’s this ol’ bag o’ bones,’ Shelly says, adopting the voice of an old American grandmother from the Wild West, ‘she don’t walk too well across sand no more.’
‘So they left you home alone?’
‘My aunt’s comin’ soon to babysit,’ she says. ‘I told Mum I’d prefer the dog motel on Fletcher Street.’
‘I hear they give you three meals a day,’ I say.
She laughs, stubs the cigarette out on the underside of the windowsill, flicks the butt into the garden running along the neighbour’s fence line.
‘Heard the ambos took your old man to hospital last night,’ she says.
I nod.
‘What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know, really,’ I say. ‘He just started shakin’. Couldn’t speak or nothin’. Couldn’t catch a breath.’
‘A panic attack,’ she says.
‘A what?’
‘Panic attack,’ she says casually. ‘Yeah, Mum used to get ’em, few years ago. She went through a bad patch where she didn’t wanna do anything, ever, because she’d start having panic attacks if she went out among too many people. She’d wake up feeling on top of the world and tell us she’d take us all to the movies at Toombul Shoppingtown, then we’d get all dolled up and she’d have a panic attack the minute she sat in the car.’
‘How did she get over them?’
‘I got diagnosed with MD,’ she says. ‘She had to get over them then.’ She shrugs. ‘See, that’s called perspective, Eli,’ she says. ‘A bee sting smarts like a bitch until someone clubs you with a cricket bat. And speaking of the ol’ English willow, you wanna game of Test Match? I’ll let you be the West Indies.’
‘Nah, can’t,’ I say. ‘I’m gonna meet someone.’
‘This part of the big secret plan?’ she smiles.
‘You know about the plan?’
‘Gus wrote it all out for me in the air,’ she says.
That pisses me off. I look up to the grey sky.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t say a word,’ she says. ‘But I think you’re fuckin’ nuts.’
I shrug.
‘Probably am,’ I say. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks I am.’
Shelly rolls her eyes. ‘Mrs Birkbeck thinks we’re all nuts.’
I smile.
‘It is nuts, Eli . . .’ she says. And she looks at me with a pretty smile, all heart and sincerity. ‘But it’s sweet too.’
And for a moment I want to drop the plan and go inside and sit on Shelly Huffman’s bed playing Test Match, and if she hit a six by her favourite batsman, the dashing South African Kepler Wessels, with the small ballbearing cricket ball cutting through the ‘six’ space in the left corner of the octagonal green felt cricket ground, we could celebrate with a hug and because her family is all out and because the sky is grey we could fall back on her bed and we could kiss and maybe I could drop the plan forever – drop Tytus Broz, drop Lyle, drop Slim and Dad and Mum and August – and just spend the rest of my life caring for Shelly Huffman as she fights that unfair and imbalanced arsehole God who gives Iwan Krol two strong arms to kill with and gives Shelly Huffman two legs that can’t walk across the golden sand of Kings Beach, Caloundra.
‘Thanks, Shelly,’ I say, wheeling the Malvern Star back out her driveway.
Shelly calls from her window as I speed away. ‘Stay sweet, Eli Bell.’
*
Lyle told me once they used concrete from the Queensland Cement and Lime Company in Darra to build the Hornibrook Bridge. He said it was the longest bridge built over water in the Southern Hemisphere, stretching more than two and a half kilometres from seaside Brighton to the glorious seaside peninsula of Redcliffe, home of the Bee Gees and the Redcliffe Dolphins rugby league club. The bridge has two humps on it, one at the Brighton end and one at the Redcliffe end, where boats sailing along Bramble Bay can slip underneath it.
I can smell the muddy mangroves skirting Bramble Bay on the wind that pushes the Malvern Star along the bridge, up over the first hump. Lyle called it ‘Humpity Bump’ bridge because of the bumps his mum and dad’s car made when he was a boy crossing over the buckled and rough aggregate bitumen surface that crackles beneath my bicycle wheels today.
The bridge was closed to traffic in 1979 when they built a strong, wider, uglier bridge beside it. Now the Hornibrook is used only by a few