He soups up on enough Serepax to get him outside the front door and onto a bus that takes him into a job interview at the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory on Kingsford Smith Drive, Hamilton, not far from the Brisbane CBD. For three weeks he works on a factory line cutting lengths of aluminium into various shapes and sizes, earning enough to buy a small bronze-coloured 1979 Toyota Corona for $1000 from his loose Bracken Ridge Tavern mate, Jim ‘Snapper’ Norton, on a payment basis of $100 every payday for ten weeks. He smiles when he opens his wallet on Friday afternoon and shows me three grey-blue money notes, the ones we never see, the ones with Douglas Mawson on them standing in a snow jumper, the Antarctic cold freezing the many hairs on his iceberg-sized balls. I’ve never seen Dad more proud and he’s so proud this night he actually laughs more than he cries on the piss. But in the fourth week of this wondrous paid work, his foreman berates him for something he didn’t do – someone plugged in the wrong numbers on a line of metal sheeting and $5000 worth of metal came up five centimetres short – and Dad can’t absorb the injustice so he calls the foreman ‘obtuse’ and the young foreman doesn’t know what that means so Dad tells him. ‘It means you’re a freckle-faced cunt,’ he says. And on his way home he stops into the Hamilton Hotel, off Kingsford Smith Drive, to toast what he might have made of that wondrous paid work with eight pots of full-strength XXXX. And pulling out of the Hamilton Hotel driveway he’s stopped by police who send him to a judge for drink-driving and the judge takes away his driver’s licence and sentences Dad to a further six weeks’ community service and August and I have very little to say when Dad informs us that his court-ordered community service will be carried out assisting the aged and ailing groundsman, Bob Chandler, at our very own Nashville State High School. I have even less to say when I look out my classroom window in Maths A class to find Dad beaming proudly up at me, standing beside the giant ELI! he’s mowed into the manicured grass lawn that fronts the Mathematics and Science block.
Time makes the phone ring.
‘Yeah,’ Dad says. ‘Okay. Yeah, I understand. What’s the address? Okay. Yep. Yep. Bye.’ He puts the phone down. August and I are watching Family Ties and eating sandwiches with devon and tomato sauce.
‘Yer mum’s gettin’ out a month early,’ he says. And he opens the drawer beneath the telephone, pops two Serepax, and walks on down the hallway to his bedroom, sucking those nerve lollies down like Tic Tacs.
*
Time makes the soft red roses on Khanh Bui’s prize-winning garden turn hard, makes them grow into themselves like Dad did after that brief and colourful moment in the spring sun of the G. James Glass and Aluminium factory line.
I walk past Khanh Bui’s house on the way to Arcadia Street in Darra. I remember what Khanh Bui’s front garden looked like when it won first prize in a neighbourhood garden competition as part of a Darra State School fete celebration five years ago. It was like a lolly shop of colour then, a mix of ornamental and native plants that Khanh Bui would hose every morning we walked to school, standing in his blue and white pyjamas. Some mornings his wrinkly old dick would be sticking unassumingly out of the fly in his pyjamas but Mr Bui would never notice because his garden was so damn enchanting. But it’s all gone dry and dead now, straw-coloured and bristly like the grass oval in Ducie Street Park.
As I turn into Arcadia Street I stop on the spot.
Two Vietnamese men are sitting in white plastic garden chairs at the top of Darren Dang’s driveway. They wear black sunglasses and they sit in the sun in Adidas nylon tracksuits with white sneakers. The tracksuits are navy blue with three yellow stripes running down each side of their jackets and pants. I approach the front driveway slowly. One of the men holds his hands up to me. I stop. Both men stand from their chairs and reach for something out of view behind Darren’s large and secure front fence.
They are now holding large and sharp-looking machetes when they approach me.