in a nursing home in Ipswich, twenty more minutes’ drive along Brisbane Road.
August and I are standing at the top of a rickety staircase with iron rails so old and flimsy the staircase feels like a rope bridge Indiana Jones and his loyal sidekick, Short Round, might traverse over a pool of crocodiles.
‘Long time no see, ay boys,’ Teddy says, his fat arm around Mum like she’s a keg of beer.
I see you in my head almost every day, Teddy.
‘Long time,’ I say.
August is behind me, leaning his hand over the staircase rail to grip what looks like a wild yellow apricot from a tree hanging over the house’s front stairs.
‘Good to see you, Gus,’ Teddy says.
August looks at Teddy, gives a half-smile, tugs a fruit from the tree.
‘That’s Mum’s loquat tree,’ he says. ‘Been here more than fifty years that tree.’
August smells the fruit.
‘Go ahead, have a bite,’ he says. ‘Tastes like a pear and pineapple all in one.’
August bites, chews a chunk of loquat. Smiles.
‘You want one, Eli?’ Teddy asks.
I want nothing from you, Teddy Kallas, except your head on a spike.
‘No, thanks, Teddy.’
‘You boys wanna see somethin’ cool?’
We say nothing.
Mum gives me a sharp eye.
‘Eli,’ Mum says, not having to say any more.
‘Sure, Teddy,’ I say with all the personality of a loquat.
It’s a truck. A hulking orange 1980 Kenworth K100 Cabover parked down the side of his sprawling yard beneath a monstrous mango tree that drops its flying-fox-sucked green fruit on the truck’s engine bonnet.
Teddy says he drives this truck for Woolworths, hauling fruit up and down Australia’s east coast. We climb into the truck with him and he turns the ignition and the rattling food-hauling beast wakes.
‘You want to honk the horn, Eli?’
I’m not fuckin’ eight years old any more, Teddy.
‘That’s okay, Teddy,’ I say.
He honks it himself and gives a thrilled chuckle, the way a pea-brained fairytale giant might chuckle at a thieving farmboy bouncing on a pogo stick.
He takes his CB radio and fiddles with some frequency knobs in search of some close mates he says are somewhere out there in trucker land. These trucker mates all slowly check in, sweary blokes called Marlon and Fitz and some Australian trucking legend wanker known as ‘The Log’ on account of his dick size.
I liked Teddy Kallas when I first met him. I liked how Teddy and Lyle got along like the best friends they were. Teddy seemed to see in Lyle what I saw in him. I thought Teddy looked a bit like GI Blues–era Elvis Presley, the way he combed his hair back with gel, something about the curl of his puffy lips. But now every part of him is puffy, so he looks like Vegas Elvis. Deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches Elvis. He ratted on Lyle. He told Tytus Broz he was running a drug business on the side. He had Lyle dragged away and quartered and he thought it would get him the girl and get him in the good books with Tytus Broz. But Tytus cast him out because Tytus knew rats couldn’t be trusted. Rats have to go get real jobs driving Woolworths food trucks up and down the east coast of Australia. He started visiting Mum inside and I guess she wanted to believe he didn’t rat because I guess she wanted the visits. I wasn’t going up there to Boggo. August wasn’t going up. Nobody allowed us to go up there without Dad. But Mum had to talk to someone on the outside, if only to be reminded that the outside still existed. So she talked to the rat. He’d visit every Thursday morning, Mum says. He was funny, she says. He was kind, she says. He was there, she says.
‘I like driving trucks,’ Teddy says. ‘I get out on the highway and I just get into this zone. I can’t explain it.’
Please don’t then, Teddy.
‘You know what I do sometimes on the road?’
You, Marlon, Fitz and The Log masturbate in a kind of CB radio circle jerk?
‘What?’ I bite.
‘I talk to Lyle,’ he says.
He shakes his head. We say nothing.
‘You know what I say to him?’
Sorry? Please forgive me? Please release me from the 24/7 soul-binding agony of my guilt and my betrayal and my greed?
‘I talk to him about the milk truck.’
Teddy and Lyle stole a milk truck when they were boys, he says. It happened in Darra. They drove off in the milk truck while the milko was chatting on the doorstep to Lyle’s mum,