twos and ones. The box’s sender details read: R. Hood, 24 Montague Road, West End.
*
Can you see us, Slim? Mum messing up August’s hair.
‘I’m so proud of you, August,’ Mum says.
August smiling. Mum crying.
‘What is it, Mum?’ I ask.
She wipes her eyes.
‘My boy’s a Queensland Champion,’ she sobs. ‘They’re gonna ask my boy to get up on stage in that hall and they’re gonna thank him for bein’ . . . for bein’ . . . for bein’ him.’
Mum takes a breath. She gives stern instructions.
‘We’re all gonna go, all right,’ she says.
I nod. Dad squirms.
‘We’re all gonna get dressed up,’ Mum says. ‘I’m gonna buy a nice dress for it. I’m gonna get my hair done.’ She’s nodding. ‘We’re gonna look great for you, Gus.’
August nods, beaming. Dad squirms.
‘Fran, I . . . ahhh . . . I probably don’t need to go,’ he mutters.
‘Bullshit, Robert, you’re going.’
*
Can you see my desk, Slim? Can you see my fingers tapping words on the typewriter at my desk, Slim? I’m writing a piece on race 8 at Doomben. You’re looking at The Courier-Mail’s back-up of the back-up of the back-up turf writer. The chief back-up turf writer, Jim Cheswick, complimented me on a piece I wrote last week on the McCarthys, three generations – grandfather, father, son – of trotting drivers – they’re called drivers in the trots, not jockeys, Jim says – racing in the same event at the Albion trots. Grandfather won by two lengths.
Brian Robertson is kinder than people give him credit for. He gave me a job and he even let me finish school before I took it up. My job on the newspaper is essentially a free-wheeling shit-kicker grunt role that I am grasping tight with both hands and nine fingers. If something big happens in State or Federal parliament I get sent out to shopping centres to ask random people questions set for me by our grizzly chief-of-staff, Lloyd Stokes.
‘Is the State of Queensland going down the toilet?’
‘Does Bob Hawke care about Queensland going down the toilet?’
‘How will Queensland pull itself out of the toilet?’
I write about weekend sporting results in local community competitions. I write about tide times and every Friday morning I phone an old fisherman named Simon King for a weekly column called ‘Simon Says’, where we give readers Simon King’s predicted fishing hot spots along the Queensland coastline. You’d like Simon, Slim, he knows that fishing’s not about the catchin’ at all and it’s all about the sittin’. All about the dreaming.
I write about homes in the property pages. I write three-hundred-word stories – the property editor, Regan Stark, calls them ‘advertorials’ – about expensive homes being pushed by the real estate companies who pay the most advertising dollars to fill our pages. Regan says my writing is too enthusiastic. She says there is no room for simile in three-hundred-word property advertorials and she’s always showing me how to shave my sentences down from something like, ‘The sweeping outdoor entertainment deck cradles the north and east sides of the home like a mother wallaby curling around a newborn joey’, to something more like, ‘House has L-shaped verandah’. But Regan says I shouldn’t stop being enthusiastic because – more than even pen and paper – enthusiasm is a journalist’s greatest tool outside of Gilbey’s Gin. But I’m just doing like you, Slim. I’m just keeping busy. I’m just doin’ my time. Every day is one day closer to Caitlyn Spies. We share the same room at work, Slim. It’s just that the room – the main newsroom in the building – is about a hundred and fifty metres long and she sits at the front of the room on the crime desk by the office of the editor-in-chief, Brian Robertson, and I sit at the far back of the room by a loud photocopier and Amos Webster, the seventy-eight-year-old man who edits the crosswords, whom I prod on the shoulder several times a day to ensure he’s not dead. I love it here, Slim. The smell of the place. The sound of the presses in the brick buildings beneath us when we write. The smell of cigarette smoke and the way the old men swear about older politicians they knew in the 1960s and younger women they screwed in the 1970s.
It was you who got me the job, Slim. It was you who changed my life. I want to say thanks, Slim. If you can see me. Thanks. It was you who