‘I see,’ Mrs Birkbeck says gently. ‘And tell me, Eli, why are you all sleeping?’
This could really upset the plan.
Boy Seeks Help
Five days to Christmas and I can’t sleep. We have no curtains or blinds on our bedroom’s single sliding window and the blue post-midnight moonlight falls on August’s right arm hanging over his bed. I can’t sleep because my mattress is itchy and smells like piss. Dad was given the mattress by Col Lloyd, an Aboriginal man who lives five houses up on Lancelot Street with his wife, Kylie, and their five kids, the eldest of whom, twelve-year-old Ty, slept upon this orange foam mattress before me. The smell of piss keeps me up but what woke me was the plan.
‘Gus, you hear that?’
Gus says nothing.
It’s a moaning sound. ‘Huuuuuuuuuuuuu.’
I think it’s Dad. He’s not drinking tonight because he’s coming off a three-day bender. He got so spectacularly pissed on the first night of the bender that August and I were able to crawl under the gap beneath the living room lounge while he was watching The Outlaw Josey Wales on television and we tied the shoelaces of his Dunlop Volleys together so that when he stood up to abuse one of the many villainous Union men who foolishly killed Clint Eastwood’s on-screen wife and child he would fall down heavily, crashing over the coffee table. He fell over three times before he realised his shoelaces were tied, at which point he vowed – through a largely incoherent barrage of slurred words and at least twenty-three ‘cunts’ – to bury us alive in the backyard beside the dead macadamia nut tree. ‘As fuckin’ if,’ August wrote in the air with his forefinger, shrugging his shoulders as he got up to turn the TV over to Creepshow, which was showing on Channel Seven. On the second day of the bender, Dad put on his jeans and a button-up shirt and, with a second wind brought about by six Saturday-morning rum and Cokes and a splash of Brut cologne, he caught the 522 bus, without saying where exactly he was going. He came home that night at 10 p.m. while August and I were watching Stripes on Channel Nine. He walked through the back door, straight through the kitchen to the cabinet where he keeps the telephone he never answers. Beneath the telephone is the important drawer. This is the drawer where he keeps unpaid bills, paid bills, our birth certificates and his Serepax tablets. He opened the important drawer and retrieved a dog chain leash that he wrapped methodically around his right fist. He didn’t even acknowledge August and me sitting on the lounge when he turned the television off followed by every light in the house. He walked to the front window and drew the old frilly cream-coloured curtains closed, peering out the crack where the two curtains met.
‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling sick in the stomach. ‘Dad, what is it?’
He simply sat down on the lounge in darkness and tightened the dog chain around his fist. His head flopped dizzily about for a moment, then he focused on his raised left forefinger which he brought, with great concentration, to his mouth. ‘Sssssssshhhhhhh,’ he said. We didn’t sleep that night. August and I let our imaginations run wild guessing at what dangerous entity or entities he had offended enough to warrant the dog leash fist-wrapping: some goon at the pub, some hulk on the way to the pub, some killer on the way home from the pub, every single person inside the pub, ninjas, Yakuza, Joe Frazier, Sonny and Cher, God and the Devil. August wondered what the Devil would look like standing at our door. I said he would wear light blue flip-flops and sport a mullet cut with a rat’s tail and a Balmain Tigers beanie to hide his horns. August said the Devil would wear a white suit with white shoes and white hair and white teeth and white skin. August said the Devil would look like Tytus Broz and I said that name felt like something from a different world, a different time and place that we didn’t belong to any more. All we belonged to was 5 Lancelot Street.
‘Another Gus and Eli,’ he said. ‘Another universe,’ he said.
Dad spent the following morning sitting on the kitchen floor by the entrance to the laundry rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing, rewinding and playing ‘Ruby Tuesday’