can into Teddy’s ribs but I can’t move his fat and vast frame.
‘I made you dinner, Frankie,’ Teddy screams, eyes wide and electric. ‘Dog food. Food for a dog. Food for a dog. Food for a dog.’
I push and punch at his face from below but the punches have no impact. He can’t feel in this moment so he can’t be moved. But then a large silver object flashes past my eyes and I see this silver object connect with Teddy’s head. Something warm that feels like blood and flesh splatters across my back. But it doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like lamb. It’s the pot we slow-cooked the lamb shanks in. Teddy falls to his knees, stunned, and August swings the pot again, straight at his face this time and this swing knocks him out, lays him flat on the miserable concrete beneath this miserable house of inheritance.
‘Go out to the street,’ Mum instructs us calmly. She wipes her face with her shirt and she suddenly looks like a warrior in this moment, not a victim, an ancient survivor wiping the blood of the fallen off her cheeks and nose and chin. She runs back up the stairs and into the house and meets us out on the street five minutes later with our bags and a backpack for herself.
*
We catch the train from Wacol to Nundah one hour later. It’s 10 p.m. when we knock on the door of Sister Patricia’s house on Bage Street. She takes us in immediately and she doesn’t ask why we’re here.
We sleep on spare mattresses in Sister Patricia’s sunroom.
We wake at 6 a.m. and join Sister Patricia and four transitioning ex-prison women for breakfast in the dining room. We eat Vegemite on toast and sip apple juice from the Golden Circle Cannery. We sit at the end of a long brown table big enough to fit eighteen or twenty people. Mum is quiet. August says nothing.
‘Soooooooo,’ I whisper.
Mum sips a black coffee.
‘So what, matey?’ Mum says gently.
‘So what now?’ I ask. ‘Now that you’ve left Teddy, what are you gonna do now?’
Mum bites into her toast, wipes crumbs from the corners of her mouth with a napkin. My head is bursting with plans. The future. Our future. Our family.
‘I reckon tonight you come spend the night with us,’ I say. I say things as fast as I think them. ‘I reckon you should just turn up on Dad’s doorstep with us. Dad will be shocked to see you but I know he’ll be good to you. He’s got a good heart, Mum, he won’t be able to turn you away. He won’t have it in him.’
‘Eli, I don’t think . . .’ Mum says.
‘Where would you like to move to?’ I ask.
‘What?’
‘If you could choose anywhere to live, and money wasn’t an obstacle, where would you want to go?’ I ask.
‘Pluto,’ Mum says.
‘Okay, anywhere in south-east Queensland,’ I say. ‘Just name the place, Mum, and Gus and me, we’re gonna make it happen for you.’
‘And how do you boys suppose you’ll do that?’
August looks up from his breakfast plate. No, Eli.
I think for a moment. Measure my thoughts.
‘What if I told you I could get us a place in . . . I don’t know . . . The Gap?’ I say.
‘The Gap?’ Mum echoes, puzzled. ‘Why The Gap?’
‘It’s nice there. Lots of cul-de-sacs. Remember when Lyle took us to buy the Atari?’
‘Eli . . .’ Mum says.
‘You’ll love it in The Gap, Mum,’ I say, excited. ‘It’s beautiful and green and right at the end of the suburb is this big reservoir surrounded by bushland and the water in it is so crystal clear . . .’
Mum slaps the table.
‘Eli!’ she snaps.
She drops her head. She cries.
‘Eli,’ she says, ‘I never said I was leaving Teddy.’
Boy Tightens Noose
The capital of Romania is Bucharest. The collective noun for a group of toads is a knot. The collective noun for a group of Eli Bells is a prism. A cage. A hole. A prison.
Saturday night, 7.15 p.m., and Dad is sleeping by the side of the toilet. He passed out directly after vomiting into the porcelain bowl and he sleeps soundly now beneath the toilet roll holder, and when he breathes out, air from his nostrils blows three hanging sheets of one-ply like a white flag of surrender blowing in the wind.
I give up. I want to be just like him.
But Sir August the Unmoved does not share my enthusiasm tonight for