goes down the Barrett Street deli and buys three slices of leg ham but Max has left his deli cabinet window open for the past two hours and all those slices of delicious leg ham have been tainted with salmonella and Pam kicks the bucket two weeks later and doctors can’t work out whodunit but it was the ham and salad roll whodunit, in the sunroom with the baguette.’
‘So my silverside sandwich chunks could one day kill Mrs Waters?’
‘Yeah, on second thoughts, feed the fuckin’ birds.’
We reel back laughing. We watch the ibis for a long moment.
‘Dad.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you a good man?’
He looks out to the amputee ibis, trying to chew and swallow a chunk of white Tip Top bread.
‘Nah, probably not, I’d say,’ he says.
We stare out the window in silence.
‘Is that why Mum ran away from you?’
He shrugs. Nods his head. Maybe no. Probably yes.
‘I gave her plenty of reasons to run,’ he says.
We watch the ibis some more, bobbing about and studying the yard.
‘I don’t think you’re a bad man,’ I say.
‘Why, thanks Eli,’ he says. ‘I’ll remember to put that hearty endorsement on my next job application.’
‘Slim was a bad man once,’ I say. ‘But he came good.’
Dad laughs. ‘I do appreciate it when you compare me to your murderer friends.’
Then the yellow Ford Mustang passes our house. That same man driving it. Big guy. Black hair, black moustache, black eyes, staring at us as he passes the house. Dad stares back at him. He drives on down the street.
‘What’s his fuckin’ problem?’ Dad says.
‘I saw him last week,’ I say. ‘I was sitting on the seats outside Sandgate train station and he was staring at me from his car.’
‘Who do you think he is?’
‘Fucked if I know.’
‘Try not to fuckin’ swear so much, will ya.’
*
The phone rings in the afternoon. It’s Mum. She’s calling from the phone box at Sandgate train station. She’s scared. She’s crying. She can’t go to Sister Patricia’s house because he’ll find her there. Teddy knows Sister Patricia’s house.
I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him. I’m gonna stab him in the kidney with a small knife.
I place the phone down.
Dad is on the lounge watching a Malcolm Douglas adventure documentary. I sit down one lounge cushion away from him.
‘She needs us, Dad,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘She needs you.’
He knows what I’m thinking.
‘She’s got nowhere else to go.’
‘No, Eli,’ he says.
On television, outback adventurer Malcolm Douglas has his right hand inside a mangrove mud hole.
‘I’ll clean out the book room. She can help around the house. Just a few months.’
‘No, Eli.’
‘Have I ever asked for anything from you?’
‘Don’t do this,’ he says. ‘I can’t.’
‘Have I ever asked for a single thing from you?’
Malcolm Douglas pulls a raging Far North Queensland mud crab from the mud hole.
I stand and walk to the front window. He knows it’s the right thing to do. The ibis with one leg hops and hops and flies over the houses of Lancelot Street. The ibis knows it’s the right thing to do.
‘You know what a good man once said to me, Dad,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The whole point of life is doing what’s right, not what’s easy.’
*
Her summer dress is frayed and stretched. She stands barefoot by the train station phone box. August and I wait for her smile because her smile is the sun and the sky and it makes us warm. We smile at her as we rush closer to the phone booth. She has nothing. No bags. No shoes. No purse. But she will still have her smile, that brief celestial event, when her lips open from right to left and she curls her upper lip and she tells us in that smile that we’re not crazy, we are correct about everything, and it’s just the universe that is wrong. And she sees us and she beams that smile and it turns out the universe is right and it’s the smile that is wrong because Mum is missing her two front teeth.
Nobody talks on the drive home from the station. Dad is driving and Mum sits in the front passenger seat. I sit behind her and August sits beside me, reaching his left hand over to regularly rub Mum’s right shoulder reassuringly. I can see Mum’s face in the reflection of the car’s side mirror. That upper lip can’t curl right because it’s fat. Her left eye is black and there is blood pooled in the white of her eyeball. I’m gonna stab his fuckin’ eyes out. I’m