you, Mrs Birkbeck, but Eli was born with the two qualities of any good storyteller – the ability to string a sentence together and the ability to bullshit.’
I look at August. He nods his head in agreement. The legs of one of the kitchen chairs slides across the kitchen floorboards. Mrs Birkbeck sighs.
August sits up and moves into a crawl position, crab-walking back out from beneath the house. At the back of the under-house area, where there’s enough room between the dirt ground and the house’s floorboards for August to stand, he stops at one of Dad’s abandoned washing machines. It’s a top loader. He opens the lid of the washing machine and looks inside, closes the lid again. He waves me over. Open the lid, Eli. Open the lid.
I open the lid and inside the washing machine is a black garbage bag. Look inside the bag, Eli. Look inside the bag.
I look inside the bag and inside it there are ten rectangular blocks of heroin wrapped in brown greaseproof paper and wrapped again in clear plastic. The blocks are the size of the bricks they make at the Darra brickworks.
August says nothing. He closes the lid to the washing machine and marches up the side of the house, back up the ramp, and into the kitchen. Mrs Birkbeck turns in her chair and immediately sees the intensity on August’s face.
‘What is it, August?’ she asks.
He licks his lips.
‘I’m not gonna kill myself,’ he says. He points at Dad. ‘And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.’
Boy Masters Time
Do your time before it does you. Before it does the roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden on Harrington Street. Before it peels the paint off Bi Van Tran’s yellow Volkswagen van, still parked like it always is on Stratheden Street.
Time is the answer to everything, of course. The answer to our prayers and murders and losses and ups and downs and loves and deaths.
Time for the brothers Bell to grow up and for Lyle’s stash of heroin to grow in value along the way. Time puts hairs on my chin and my underarms and takes its time putting hairs on my balls. Time puts August in his final year at school, with me not far behind him.
Time makes Dad a half-decent cook. He makes us meals most nights he’s not drinking. Chops and frozen vegetables. Sausages and frozen vegetables. A good spaghetti bolognese. He roasts mutton that we eat for a week. Some mornings, while the rest of the world is sleeping, he’s waist-deep in the mangroves of Cabbage Tree Creek, in seaside Shorncliffe, catching us mud crabs with claws that bulge like Viv Richards’ biceps. Some afternoons he walks halfway down to the Foodstore supermarket to get the groceries and he comes back with nothing and we don’t ask why because we know he got the panics, because we know his nerves now, how they ruin him, how they eat him alive from the inside where his arteries and his veins carry all that memory and tension and thought and drama and death.
Some days I join him on the bus because he asks me to watch over him as he travels. He needs me to be his shadow. He asks me to talk to him. He asks me to tell him stories because they calm his nerves. So I tell him all the stories Slim told me. All those yarns about all those crims from Boggo Road. I tell him about my old pen pal, Alex Bermudez, and how those men inside wait for only two things in life, death and Days of Our Lives. When the nerves get too much, he gives me the nod and I press the bell for the bus to stop and Dad takes his breath by a bus stop and I tell him everything is going to be all right and we wait for the next bus back home. Small steps in our Dunlops. He gets a little further each trip out of the house. Bracken Ridge to Chermside. Chermside to Kedron. Kedron to Bowen Hills.
Time makes Dad cut down on his drinking. Mid-strength beer comes to Queensland and Dad stops flooding the toilet with piss. They’ll never measure these things but I know more cartons of mid-strength beer in Bracken Ridge mean less Bracken Ridge mums presenting before Dr Benson in the Barrett Street Medical Centre with split eye sockets.