said because it was my birthday we could do whatever I wanted. I asked if we could burn several things with my birthday candle, starting with the fungus-green loaf of bread that had been sitting in the fridge for what August and I had tracked at forty-three days.
August was everything back then. Mum, dad, uncle, grandma, priest, pastor, cook. He made us breakfast, he ironed our school uniforms, he brushed my hair, helped me with my homework. He started cleaning up after Lyle and Mum as they slept, hiding their drug bags and spoons, responsibly disposing of their syringes, with me always behind him saying, ‘Fuck all that, let’s go kick the footy.’
But August cared for Mum like she was a lost forest fawn learning to walk because August seemed to know some secret about it all, that it was all just a phase, a part of Mum’s story that we simply had to wait through. I think August believed she needed this phase, she deserved this drug rest, this big sleep, this time out of her brain, this time out from thinking about the past – her thirty-year slideshow of violence and abandonment and dormitory homes for wayward Sydney girls with bad dads. August combed her hair while she slept, pulled blankets over her chest, wiped drool from her mouth with tissues. August was her guardian and he’d clean me up in a flurry of pushes and punches if ever I stood in judgement and disgust. Because I didn’t know. Because nobody knew Mum but August.
These were Mum’s Debbie Harry ‘Heart of Glass’ years. People say junk makes you look horrific, that too much heroin tears your hair out, leaves scabs all over your face and your wrists from your anxious fingers and your anxious fingernails that keep filling with blood and rolled skin. People say the gear sucks the calcium out of your teeth and your bones, leaves you couch-bound like a rotting corpse. And I’d seen all that. But I also thought junk made Mum look beautiful. She was thin and pale white and blonde, not as blonde as Debbie Harry but just as pretty. I thought junk made Mum look like an angel. She had this fixed dazed look on her face, there but not there, like Harry in that ‘Heart of Glass’ clip, like something from a dream, moving in the space between sleeping and waking, between life and death, but sparkling somehow, like she had a mirror ball permanently spinning in the pupils of her sapphire eyes. And I remember thinking that’s how an angel really would look if they found themselves in suburban Darra, south-east Queensland, down all this way from heaven. Such an angel really would be dazed like that, puzzled, glassy, flapping her wings as she studied all those dishes piling up in the sink, all those cars passing by the house beyond the cracks in the curtains.
There’s a golden orb-weaver spider that builds a web outside my bedroom window so intricate and perfect that it looks like a single snowflake magnified a thousand times. The orb-weaver spider sits in the middle of the web like it’s parachuting sideways, suspended in the quest it keeps wanting to finish without needing to know the reason why, blown but not beaten by wind and rain and afternoon summer storms so strong they fell power poles. Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.
*
‘We need to get outta here, Gus.’
August hands me the flashlight to hold. He turns around and kneels down, sliding his legs backwards through the space in the wardrobe and into the void of the room. He drops into the room and his feet find footing. He turns back around to me and, standing on his toes for extra height, he nods at the sliding wardrobe door. I close it behind us and we’re in total darkness but for the light from the torch. August nods me into the void, reaches up to take the flashlight from my hands. I shake my head.
‘This is insane.’
He nods me in again.
‘You’re an arsehole.’
He smiles. August knows I’m just like him. August knows that if someone told me there was a hungry Bengal tiger on the loose behind a door I’d open it to be sure they weren’t lying. I slip down into the room and my bare feet land