I know, mate. I know. He walks into the bedroom and I follow my older brother and I watch her sweep him into her arms. She was crying before he entered. She’s not wearing white, she’s wearing a light blue summer dress, but her hair is long like the vision and her face is warm and whole and here.
‘Group hug,’ she whispers.
We’re taller here than we were in the vision. I forgot about time. The vision lagged, spoke of things that weren’t and not things that would be. She sits on a single bed and I remember how she sat on that bed in Boggo Road. And those two women could not be more different. The worst of her in my head and the best of her here.
And this is the her that will be.
*
Mum closes the door of the bedroom and we don’t come back out for three straight hours. We fill in the gaps of all that time missed. The girls we like at school, the sports we play, the books we read, the trouble we make. We play Monopoly and Uno and we listen to music on a small clock radio near Mum’s bed. Fleetwood Mac. Duran Duran. Cold Chisel, ‘When the War is Over’.
We go out to a common room for dinner and Mum introduces us to two women who were with her inside and who are also finding their feet for a wee little bit in this rickety old house of Sister Patricia’s. The women are named Shan and Linda and I reckon Slim would have liked them both. They both wear singlets and they don’t wear bras and they both have raspy smoker laughs and when they laugh their boobs bounce in their singlets. They tell dry yarns about the miseries of life inside but they tell them with almost enough sprinkles of sunshine to make August and me believe it wasn’t so bad for Mum in there. There were friendships and loyalty and care and love. They joke about the meat that was so hard it broke their teeth. There were practical jokes and pranks on screws. There were ambitious escape attempts, like the Russian former child athlete who built a pole vault in a calamitous attempt to vault the prison walls. And of course there was no greater day than when the crazy boy from Bracken Ridge broke into Boggo to see his mum at Christmas.
Mum smiles at that story but it makes her cry too.
*
We set up a thick doona as a bed in Mum’s bedroom. We use cushions from the living room couch as our pillows. Before we sleep Mum says she has something to tell us. We sit either side of her on the bed. I reach for my backpack. There is $50,000 inside it.
‘I’ve got something to tell you too, Mum,’ I say. I can’t keep it in me. Can’t wait to tell her. Can’t wait to tell her our dreams will come true. We’re free. We’re finally free.
‘What is it?’ she asks.
‘You go first,’ I say.
She brushes my fringe out of my face, smiles.
She drops her head. Thinks some more.
‘Go on, Mum, you go first,’ I urge.
‘I don’t know how to say it,’ she says.
I push her gently on the shoulder. ‘Just say it,’ I chuckle.
She breathes deep. Smiles. Smiles so wide it makes us smile with her.
‘I’m moving in with Teddy,’ she says.
And time is up. Time is undoing. Time is undone.
Boy Bites Spider
There’s a redback spider plague in Bracken Ridge. Some confluence of heat and humidity is causing redback spiders across Lancelot Street to crawl beneath plastic toilet seat lids. On my last day of Year 11, our next-door neighbour, Pamela Waters, is bitten on the arse while doing one of her boisterous number twos that bubble and squeak across the fence sometimes from her dunny. August and I aren’t sure who to feel more sorry for, Mrs Waters or the unsuspecting redback who bit a chunk out of her arse flesh for supper.
I found a book on spiders in Dad’s library room and I’ve been reading about redbacks. The book says the female redbacks are sexual cannibals who eat their male partners while simultaneously mating with them, which is similar to the mating and eating rituals of some of the girls at my school. The cute little spiderling sons and daughters of these killer lovers are sibling cannibals who spend up to a week on the maternal web before floating away on the wind.