week. That’s how long Mum wants August and me to stay at Teddy’s house over the summer holidays. One week with Teddy the rat. I’d prefer to stay here in Bracken Ridge with Dad and the sexual cannibal redbacks.
*
‘Which planet has the most moons?’ asks Tony Barber inside our fuzzy television, posing questions to three contestants on the pastel pink and aquamarine set of Sale of the Century.
Dad has thirty-six beers and three cups of Fruity Lexia under his belt and he still beats all three contestants to the answer.
‘Jupiter!’ he barks.
‘What’s the capital of Romania?’ Barber asks.
‘A knot is the collective noun for which amphibian?’ Barber asks.
‘How the fuck in her right mind did Frankie Bell trust that pissant Teddy Kallas?’ Barber asks. I sit up in my seat, finally interested in Dad’s favourite show.
‘And for a pick of the fame board, who am I?’ asks Barber. He asks the question straight down the tube. He asks me directly. ‘I was born to a couple that never was. The youngest of two boys, my older brother stopped speaking when his father drove him into a dam at the age of six. When I was thirteen years old the man I believed I was going to grow up with was dragged away to unseen oblivion by the enforcer of a suburban drug dealer masquerading as a small business seller of artificial limbs. Just when I thought things were getting better, my mother moved in with the man I believe brought about the death of the man I loved most in life. A rolling tumbleweed of confusion and despair, I am Eli who?’
*
August is in our room, painting. Oil on canvas. He says he might become a painter.
‘Just like your old man,’ Dad says whenever this subject comes up, making his usual link between August’s often startling, occasionally unsettling oil paintings and Dad’s first job as an apprentice for the End of the Rainbow House Painting company in Woolloongabba.
A collection of canvases lies around the room, on the walls, beneath his sagging bed. He’s prolific. He’s been working on a series where he paints insignificant suburban scenes from the streets of Bracken Ridge against impossibly grand backdrops of outer space. In one painting he placed our local Big Rooster restaurant floating in front of the spiral galaxy Andromeda, 2.5 million light years from earth. In another, he placed a scene of two kids from McKeering Street playing backyard cricket with their wheelie bin for stumps, backgrounded by a red starburst galaxy that looked like stomach blood reacting to a shotgun shell. Yet another shows a Foodstore supermarket trolley floating 100,000 light years away on the edge of the Milky Way. He did a painting of Dad in a blue singlet, lying on his side on the couch, smoking a rollie and circling the form guide, before a backdrop of a vast and colourful celestial gas cloud at the very edge of the known universe where, Gus said, all universal matter smells like Dad’s farts.
‘Who’s that?’ I ask from the bedroom door.
‘It’s you.’
August’s paintbrush dabs at a Black & Gold choc chip ice cream lid that he’s using as a paint palette. It’s me on the canvas. It’s me from my Nashville High School photo. I need a haircut. I look like I play bass in the Partridge Family. Late-teen pimples, big dumb late-teen ears, greasy late-teen nose. I’m sitting at a brown school classroom desk looking out the classroom window, a worried look on my face, and through that classroom window is outer space.
‘What is that?’
Some intergalactic phenomenon, a luminous green blob forming among the stars.
‘It’s you looking out the window in Maths and you’ve seen a light that’s taken 12 billion years to reach you,’ August says.
‘What’s it mean?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I think it’s just about you seeing the light.’
‘What are you gonna call it?’
‘Eli Sees the Light in Maths Class.’
I watch August add a deeper shade to my oil-paint Adam’s apple.
‘I don’t want to go to Teddy’s house,’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘I don’t either,’ he says.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
‘But we’re still gonna go, aren’t we?’ I say.
Brush and dab. Brush and dab.
August nods. Yes, Eli, we have to go.
*
Teddy’s eyes have sunk inwards since I last saw him and his stomach has pushed outwards. He stands in the doorway of a two-storey Queenslander house in Wacol, one suburb south-west of Darra, which he inherited from his parents who now live