on a cassette tape until the tape jammed in the player and the reel of brown tape unspooled in his hands like a mess of curled brown hair. August and I were eating Weet-Bix at the kitchen table as we watched him hopelessly attempt to fix the tape but succeed only in pulling the tape further and further into chaotic and irreparable oblivion. This forced him to resort to his Phil Collins tapes, the only point in the whole drunken three-day domestic nightmare when August and I genuinely considered notifying the Department of Child Safety. The vivid and violent bender climaxed at 11 a.m. that morning with a spectacular blood and bile vomit over the kitchen’s peach-coloured linoleum floor. He passed out so close to his own abstract gut spillage that I was able to take hold of his arm and extend his right forefinger so I could use it as a pencil to write a message he would have to see when he woke up sober. I dragged and swished his forefinger through the foul-smelling vomit to form a capital-letters message straight from the heart: SEEK HELP DAD.
*
‘Huuuuuuuuuuuu.’ The sound slips under the crack of our bedroom door.
Then a desperate call, frail and familiar.
‘August,’ Dad calls from his bedroom.
I shake August’s arm. ‘August,’ I say.
He doesn’t stir.
‘August,’ Dad calls. But the call is soft and weak. More a moan than a call.
I walk to his bedroom door in darkness, switch on his light, my eyes adjusting to the brightness.
He’s clutching his chest with both hands. He’s hyperventilating. He speaks between short, sharp breaths.
‘Call . . . an . . . ambulance,’ he says.
‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ I bark.
He sucks for air he can’t find. Gasping. His whole body trembling.
He moans. ‘Huuuuuuuuuu.’
I run down the hall, dial triple zero on the phone.
‘Police or ambulance?’ asks a woman on the phone.
‘Ambulance.’
The phone patches through to a different voice.
‘What’s your emergency?’
My father is gonna die and I’ll never get any answers from him.
‘I think my dad’s having a heart attack.’
*
Dad’s next-door neighbour on the left, a sixty-five-year-old taxi driver named Pamela Waters, is drawn out to the street by the flashing lights of the arriving ambulance, her unwieldy breasts threatening to spill from her maroon nightgown. Two ambulance officers lift a gurney from the back of the ambulance and leave it by the letterbox.
‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Pamela Waters, fixing the satin belt of her gown.
‘Not sure,’ I say.
‘Another turn,’ she says knowingly.
What the fuck does that mean?
The ambulance officers, one carrying an oxygen tank and mask, rush past August and me, standing barefoot in our matching white singlets and pyjama shorts.
‘He’s in the room at the end of the hall,’ I call.
‘We know, buddy, he’ll be all right,’ says the oldest ambulance officer.
We go inside and stand at the living room end of the hall, listening to the ambulance officers in the bedroom.
‘C’mon, Robert, breathe,’ hollers the oldest officer. ‘C’mon, mate, you’re safe now. Nothing to worry about.’
Sucking sounds. Heavy breathing.
I turn to August.
‘They’ve been here before?’
August nods.
‘There ya go,’ says the younger ambulance officer. ‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
They carry him out of the bedroom and down the hall, an arm each under his thighs, the way the Parramatta Eels forwards carry the starry halves in grand final celebrations.
They haul him onto the gurney, Dad’s face pressed to the gas mask like it was a long-lost lover.
‘You all right, Dad?’ I ask.
And I don’t know why I care so much. Something deep inside me. Something dormant. Something pulling me towards the crazed drunk.
‘I’m all right, mate,’ he says.
And I know that tone in his voice. I remember that tenderness in the tone. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right, Eli. I will remember this scene. Him on a gurney like this. I’m all right, Eli. I’m all right. The tone of it.
‘I’m sorry you boys had to see this,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, I know, mate. I’m fucked at this dad stuff. But I’m gonna fix meself, all right. I’m gonna fix meself.’
I nod. I want to cry. I don’t want to cry. Don’t cry.
‘It’s okay, Dad,’ I say. ‘It’s okay.’
The ambulance officers load him into the back of their vehicle.
Dad sucks some more gas, pulls the mask away.
‘There’s a frozen shepherd’s pie in the freezer you can have for dinner tomorrow night,’ he says.
He sucks again on the mask. His eyes catch sight of Pamela gawking in her nightgown. He sucks enough air into his lungs to say something loud.
‘Take