petrol and they’ll thank you for sticking your nose into our business as they’re burning your house down.’
Close your eyes. I close my eyes. And I see the dream. I see the memory. The car hits the lip of a dam edge – the backyard dam of someone’s farm in rural Samford, in the fertile hills of Brisbane’s western fringe – and we’re flying.
‘The boys were left unconscious,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
I can’t hear Dad respond.
‘It was a miracle anyone survived,’ she says. ‘The boys were unconscious but you pulled them out somehow?’
The magic car. The flying sky-blue Holden Kingswood.
Dad sighs. We can hear the sigh through the cracks.
‘We were going camping,’ Dad says. He leaves big gaps between his sentences. To think and drag on his smoke. ‘August loved camping under the stars. He loved looking up at the moon when he slept. Me and their mum had been going through some . . . issues.’
‘She ran away from you?’
Silence.
‘Yeah, I guess you could say that.’
Silence.
‘I guess I was thinking too much about it all,’ Dad says. ‘I should never have been drivin’. Got the big shakes just before a blind lip in Cedar Creek Road and that blind lip led to a blind corner. Wasn’t easy to see on the road. My brain turned to mush.’
Long silence.
‘I got lucky,’ Dad says. ‘Them boys had their windows down. August always had his window down to look out at the moon.’
August is still.
And the moonlight shines on the black dam water in my mind. The full moon reflected in the dam. The dam pool. That damn moon pool.
‘Bloke who owned the little cottage near the dam came racing out,’ Dad says above us through the floorboards. ‘He helped me drag the boys out.’
‘They were unconscious?’
‘I thought I’d lost ’em.’ Dad’s voice wavers. ‘They were gone.’
‘They weren’t breathing?’
‘Well, that’s the tricky thing of it, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says.
August gives a half-smile. He’s enjoying this story. Nodding his head knowingly, as if he’s heard it before but I know he hasn’t. I know he can’t have heard it.
‘I woulda sworn they weren’t breathing,’ Dad says. ‘I tried resuscitating them, shook ’em like crazy to wake ’em up. And I couldn’t wake ’em. Then I start screaming to the sky like a lunatic and I look back down again at their faces and they’re awake.’
Dad clicks his fingers.
‘Just like that,’ he says, ‘they come back.’
He drags on his smoke. Exhales.
‘I asked the ambos about it when they lobbed up and they said the boys mighta been in shock. Said it mighta been hard for me to find a pulse or check their breathing because their bodies were so cold and numb.’
‘What do you think about that?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘I don’t think anything about that, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says, frustrated. ‘It was a panic attack. I fucked up. And not an hour has passed in my life since that night that I haven’t wished I could turn that car back onto Cedar Creek Road.’
A long pause.
‘I don’t think August has stopped thinking about that night,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘How do you mean?’ Dad asks.
‘I think that night left a deep psychological imprint on August,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘August has seen every psychologist in south-east Queensland, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says. ‘He’s been analysed and tested and probed and prodded by people like you for years and none of ’em have ever said he was anything more than a normal kid who don’t like talkin’.’
‘He’s a bright boy, Robert. He’s bright enough not to tell those psychologists any of the things he tells his brother.’
‘Such as?’
I look at August. He shakes his head. Eli. Eli. Eli. I look up at the floorboards, covered in messages and sketches August and I have scribbled under here in permanent marker. Bigfoot riding a skateboard. Mr T driving the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. A poor sketch of Jane Seymour nude with breasts that look more like metal garbage can lids. A scribbled collection of dumb one-liners: I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger and bigger, and then it hit me. The banker wanted to check my balance so she pushed me over. I didn’t want to believe Dad was stealing from the road works, but all the signs were there.
‘Why did he stop talking?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘Not sure,’ Dad says. ‘He hasn’t told me yet.’
‘He told Eli he doesn’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll let his secret slip out,’ she says.