I sit and I breathe and I pray this train stops at Darra.
*
Deserted suburbs at dusk. Maybe the world did end. Maybe it is just me and the vampires are sleeping because it’s still daylight. Maybe I’m losing my mind and I shouldn’t be walking like this in the sun, with the hospital painkillers wearing off, but this dream is growing real because I can smell my underarms and I can taste the sweat above my top lip. I walk past the Darra Station Road shops. Past Mama Pham’s restaurant. Past an empty Burger Rings packet blowing in circles in the wind. Past the fruit and vegetable market. Past the hairdressers and the op shop and the TAB. Across Ducie Street Park with the seeds of the paspalum grass catching on the bottom of my jeans and in the white laces of my Dunlops. Almost there. Almost home.
Careful now. Sandakan Street. I scan the street from afar, hiding behind a sprawling widowmaker swaying in the afternoon breeze. No cars in front of our house. No people in the street. I move cautiously and quickly between trees, zig-zagging my way across the park towards our house. The sky is orange and deep pink above the house and night is falling. Returning to the scene of the crime. I’m tired but I’m nervous, too. Not sure this quest was such a good idea. But I’m supposed to be going places. The only way is up out of a hole. Or further down, I guess. Straight down to hell.
I scurry across the road, through the gate like I’m meant to be here because it’s my house after all, or Lyle’s house, I should say. Lyle’s house. Lyle.
Can’t go through the front. Go through the back. If the back door’s locked, try Lena’s window. If Lena’s window is locked, try the sliding kitchen window on the old neighbour Gene Crimmins’s side and maybe Mum, or was it me, forgot to put that length of metal curtain rod in the window track to lock out intruders. Intruders like me. Intruders like me with big plans.
Going places.
Back door’s locked. Lena’s window doesn’t budge. I bring the black wheelie bin around to the kitchen window, pull myself atop the bin and reef at the window. It slides five centimetres along the window track and I’m hopeful, then it slams against the curtain rod and I’m not hopeful at all. Fuck it. Desperate times. Break a window.
I jump off the bin. It’s getting dark but I can still see under the house, the dirt floor strewn with rocks, but none big enough for my needs. But this will do. A brick. Probably one of those glorious bricks from the factory up the road. A hometown brick. A Darra brick. I slip back out from under the house and I sit the brick on top of the wheelie bin and I’m pulling myself back up on top of the bin when a voice echoes over my shoulder.
‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Gene Crimmins, leaning out of his living room through an open casement window. The space between Gene’s house and ours is only about three metres so he can talk softly. He’s a soft talker anyway, which I’ve always found calming. I like Gene. Gene knows how to be discreet.
‘G’day Gene,’ I say, turning to him, letting go of the bin.
Gene’s wearing a white singlet and blue cotton pyjama bottoms.
He registers my face.
‘Bloody hell, mate, what happened to you?’
‘Tripped over running down the train station stairs.’
Gene nods. ‘You locked out?’
I nod.
‘Your mum around?’ he asks.
I shake my head.
‘Lyle?’
I shake my head.
He nods.
‘I saw those boys dragging him out to a car the other night,’ Gene says. ‘Figured they weren’t all going for ice cream.’
I shake my head.
‘He all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I’m hoping to find out. Just need to get inside.’
‘That what the brick’s for?’
I nod.
‘I never saw you, all right?’ he says.
‘Thanks for being discreet, Gene,’ I say.
‘You still got those wicket keeper’s hands you used to have in the backyard?’ Gene asks.
‘Yeah, guess so.’
‘Catch,’ he says.
He throws a key and I catch it with two cupped hands. The key’s attached to a kangaroo bottle-opener key ring.
‘That’s the spare Lyle asked me to hold on to for a rainy day,’ Gene says.
I nod in thanks.
‘It’s rainin’ a bit, Gene,’ I say.
‘Pissin’ down,’ Gene says.
*
The house is dark and silent. I keep the lights off. Our dishes from the night we had spaghetti bolognese are stacked