using Lyle’s hard-earned drug money to drink and eat ourselves to death.
My initial plan is to spend five hundred bucks on a takeaway food frenzy at the Barrett Street shops. We can start with Big Rooster – a whole chicken, two large chips, two Cokes, two corn cobs – then move along the shops to the fish and chip shop, the Chinese shop, then the deli for large dim sims and choc-chip ice cream. After that we can slip down to the Bracken Ridge Tavern and we can go into the public bar and ask one of Dad’s old barfly acquaintances, Gunther, if he’ll buy us a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for a pineapple.
You’re being a fuckwit, August does not say. So I drink alone tonight. I ride to the Shorncliffe Pier with a bottle of rum and the pockets of my jeans filled with four hundred bucks in cash. My legs dangle over the pier beneath a flickering pier light. Beside me is the severed head of a mullet. I sip the rum straight and think of Slim and realise how warm the rum makes me feel and how it won’t feel so bad spending the next year of my life spending the remaining $49,500 of Lyle’s drug money on rum and chicken Twisties. I drink until I pass out on the edge of the pier.
*
The sun wakes me and my head throbs and I stare into the lips of the dried mullet head. I drink from a green council water fountain for two straight minutes. I strip to my underpants and swim in the lice-filled waters by the pier. I ride home and find August sitting on the lounge room couch exactly where I left him last night. He’s smiling.
‘What?’ I ask.
Nothing.
We watch television. It’s lunch in a test match between Australia and Pakistan.
‘How we goin’?’
August writes in the air. Dean Jones on 82.
I’m tired. My bones are stiff. I lean my head back and close my eyes on the couch.
But August clicks his fingers. I open my eyes again to see him pointing at the TV screen. He points at a Channel Nine local midday news bulletin.
‘Christmas has come early for one very special family in Bracken Ridge in Brisbane’s northern suburbs,’ says the newsreader, a woman with big black hair-sprayed hair. Then there’s a shot of Shelly Huffman in her wheelchair with her parents outside their house on Tor Street.
‘That’s Shelly!’ I say.
August laughs. Nods his head, claps his hands.
The newsreader’s voice rolls over a series of images of Shelly and her parents weeping and hugging each other.
‘For the past three years, parents of four Tess and Craig Huffman have been trying to raise the $70,000 they need to transform their home into a disability-friendly space for their seventeen-year-old daughter, Shelly, who is living with muscular dystrophy. As of yesterday, they had raised $34,540 through school and community fundraising drives. Then, this morning, Tess Huffman opened her front door.’
In the bulletin, Shelly’s Mum, Tess, wipes a tear from her eye and talks to a reporter in her front yard. She’s holding a box wrapped in Christmas wrapping.
‘I was going down to the bakery to get some scones because Shelly’s grandma was due to come around,’ she says. ‘I open the front door and there’s this box on the doormat wrapped in this nice wrapping paper.’
The wrapping paper is a series of intersecting rows of candy canes and Christmas trees. ‘I tear it open and look inside and there’s all this cash,’ Tess says, sobbing. ‘It’s a miracle.’
The footage cuts to a police officer standing in Shelly’s front yard.
‘We’re looking at a total of $49,500 in cash,’ says the straight-faced police officer. ‘We’re still making some investigations into the origins of the money, but from early assessments it would appear the money was donated by a genuine good Samaritan with a big heart.’
I turn to August. He’s beaming, slapping his knees.
The on-the-ground reporter can be heard off camera asking Shelly a question.
‘What do you want to say to that good person out there who left this money on your doorstep, Shelly?’
Shelly’s squinting, looking into the sun.
‘I just wanna say . . . I just wanna say . . . whoever you are . . . I love you.’
August stands in celebration, nodding his head in triumph.
I stand and take two long steps before diving at his pelvis and driving him into the sliding window over the front porch. The window almost shatters on the impact of August’s