While I called for the nurse to bring more water, he asked again: “What do you remember when it comes to me?” and I never bothered to answer because the nurse came rather quickly into the doorframe, though obviously in a hurry, and had us shout what we needed over the room. I was grateful to every busy body in that place who took the moments out of your hands and swept them along with the dustpan and brush. Never a moment for idle hands on the ward. And it was not that I had no recollection of him; but more that I had given them all their fair share of the once and twice over; the same occasions trotted out every time I had the urge to redeem him or feel fondly over the past, and I was beginning to feel that you could wear a thing’s significance out by bringing it up too often, replaying it again, scratching the silver part of the disc… But when the days were long and pleasant under the sun, they really were! Your breath seemed to roll over the grass fields, caught in the periphery of a new season, the countryside green and grown, tangled in the creeks, but well-tended where we spent our weekends. So that when Cricket dawned and his Self resumed so did Ours along with His in a wild sort of graph that tracked over the parklands and proved how families could “spend time together” by being apart in the same place and forgetting each other comfortably and without malice. He was an accomplished batsman, we knew. Everyone told us that. I heard his name sung again and again from the pavilion. It began to sound as strange as my own if I repeated it enough. And always it seemed to come from out of the sun. The grey light of summer the way it dwelt low over the ground, up from the grass, your spellbound mirage at certain angles, hazy through the day without any smoke. Wind and heat always beyond, somehow, roaring through the back part of your ears, and his name amidst it every so often… —Mick! —Micky! while after a while my stomach began to turn and my head began to ache and I would find my mother wherever she was. She called it heat stroke “of a kind” which meant I had to sit quietly under the shade and drink lemonade. The grass was soft under the awnings where the wives and mothers sat. It was couch grass, allowed to grow long, flattened by picnics, cool and moist in the shade. If I closed my eyes and laid under towel, as she suggested, then I swirled in their voices, the sea sounds over the way, hounds, mosquitoes, jewellery, fathers long gone onto the field, or you could hear them walking by, cleats on the concrete, wind, fabric, small erections beneath my underwear when the attractive women discussed the intimate details of their divorce. Pick, pack, pock! Mick was at his true calling. “ …—Good man seen and not heard,” I learned from one of the women. Whatever they knew about men. Father’s cricketer. Mother’s gossiper. Baby’s squall, baby, more babies. How did I put it for him into words? The days were long without a word between us, never a word while the moment was so pervasive, how you knew you were getting on and living by the way you forgot, the same time the weekend lost that rationed itself however it chose, no habits, no ritual, time at one pace or the other, we were both late and early, moments to spare, and never worrying, sort of drifting, making our way home and back every weekend, you got out of the car, vistas, grass fields and the men in whites, Yes they are tired and I have conjured them again, but that was what I know she wanted, and what in part she got, morning, lunch, afternoon tea, a mother and father who conversed with each other while the station wagon drove through an afternoon, swapping stories, men’s stuff, women’s stuff, they liked to gossip, one beer out of the fridge, hobbyist’s lean against the wall, the news at a certain hour made the house blue, but it was off to bed that night at an early hour for the first time in over a year which caused us all to feel strikingly normal.

“You don’t even remember that?”

“I prefer not to remember anything,” she said.

She spent the night coughing into her pillow so I wouldn’t hear.

“You had all your friends in summer. How can you say you don’t remember?”

“That all sort of came and went for me. You were a child. It was different for you.”

And there it all comes down to how you felt at the time. It is right that children see things differently. So that, if you’ll bear with me on the matter, taking the winter of 2005 for example—a cold winter; one we suffered through after the electric heater died—I invariably recall it via the smell of motor oil and the tale he told me about the Pioneer River and his friend who had given him a run on his motorbike, and how excited it made me when he suggested he would take me out for a ride come the weekend. He wasn’t playing the last half of the baseball season because of a shoulder injury, but he seemed so enthused by the culture of riding that his good moods sustained for much longer than we would have predicted. He had an idea about the sort of bike he wanted but the only thing he could afford was the Honda CT100 that Wayne Buckeridge had out for sale. It needed plenty of work, but it ran well enough in the meantime to satisfy his feelings. He started it up in the mornings at 5am, earlier than he ever gone to work, the motor sputtering through my bedroom window, chain running loose. He told me he “ripped it” through the dirt roads along the back ways into town, but I had the feeling he was embellishing for my sake.

I often watched from the foot of my bed and through the flyscreen window as he worked on the bike late into the night. He appeared like a figure under the glare, the fluorescent light casting more shadow than it was supposed to. Repair manuals stacked the tray tables we kept along the wall. He perused the same pages a dozen times over before setting anything he was unsure of, cross-referenced them, the bike, the manual, the bike, but I could tell by his concentrated expression that he was in there somewhere more than he had ever appeared to us, enjoying the process, his mandate, and although I was tempted then to call out to him and gain his attention—frivolously, the way a child wants to—I knew that it would only disturb him, so I left him be.

If it had been a serious hobby of his—a lineal culture he was born into: motorcyclists, equestrians, yachtsman out of northern Tasmania, etc.—then I’m sure she would have let us go with him when the weekend came around. But because she knew it clearly as another expression of his condition, she came out of the house swinging the cricket back at him when he tried to put us on the back of the bike, chasing him onto the road where he stayed at range, and she started bashing the orange chassis as hard as she could while he looked on, smoking a cigarette. But repairs were part of the experience; she may not have known or cared. His friends from the river began to visit our home most days. They worked together under the carport, setting up for long stays, leaving their tools for tomorrow. His bike was much smaller than theirs, but he didn’t seem embarrassed at all; he was a lifelong beginner in things, and largely enjoyed the novelty of starting out. Most the men were larger than him in stature. Whether it was their life of riding and falling or to control a bike so large that must have taken strength, their legs were thick through the shin and the knee, and I often noticed how small his hands were compared to theirs as they worked closely on things. And they all had sons of their own who resembled them. My father encouraged them to feel at home for as long as they were around. I formed distant friendships with some of them but quickly found they had come together as brothers and cousins already, and they were mostly uninterested in how I fit into the equation. It did work out that they had a copy of Bloody Roar: Hyper Beast Duel, however, which fitted our PlayStation console, and it became common for us to spend hours playing multiplayer sessions while our fathers worked in the garage. A game like that with a roster of fantastic characters. We each laid claim to our favourites and competed in tournaments against each other. It had the same feeling of any sporting event I have since known. Some of the boys felt comfortable enough to raid the kitchen pantry. And more and more they pushed their way onto the couch and forced me onto the carpet or against the wall. I began to resent them and the obvious fact that they knew my father was too preoccupied to assert a natural sort of order in the home or at least a set of rules by which we would have to play by. One of the boys, after I had won the first match of my turn, decided at the last minute that we were going to begin playing by a “turn-by-turn” round robin system to rotate the controllers instead of the merit based “die-by-die” system we had already agreed upon, which could permit a player to hold onto their controller indefinitely until they lost a match. By his attitude I could tell that he was likely to change the rules again as soon as they suited him, so I refused to hand over my controller. He had this way of pushing his tongue under the corner of his mouth when he was concentrating on something, I had been watching him do it all week. He looked down at me through the snout in the middle of his face and tried to snatch the controller, but I moved it away in time. Then he lunged and tried again, and I blocked his arm with mine and the edge of my arm stung on the hard side of his bone. His snout and that tongue of his presented themselves. If you have ever been a child with any sort of energy, then you may remember the “point of no return” as it occurs during certain disagreements between peers. When the chest flushes with anger and you both elect for violence. Dogs know it quite well—and we all jump at the first sign of them growling. He was much stronger than I and he grabbed straight for my testicles which caused me to panic. He had fat, callous hands. You could tell right away how cruel a person was willing to be. But fortunately, I possessed a kind of spasticity that had always been useful in self-defence settings and when wriggling out of small spaces. When he pinned me on the carpet, I managed to bend my leg from under his groin and I kicked him under the chin and his teeth sliced through his tongue. His blood got in my mouth and over my shirt and it was gushing quite a lot. Some of the other boys tried to interfere but once I saw he had lost his mettle I took the PlayStation controller and began to bludgeon him with it. It was very easy to do something like that when you knew you could. The tongue is soft and spongey, the worst conduit for pain, how it must have throbbed, and I think it was no surprise at the time that it softened him so much to think of it sliced in half. I tried putting the cord of the controller around his neck to see how far he would let me go, but he ran away from me through the back door and the other boys chased after us. He ran as far as he could around the yard until eventually he hid in the garden shed, pulling the door shut behind him to stop me getting in. We always left the padlock hanging through the latch with the key in it so we could lock up quickly of a night, so I pushed the mechanism through the lock and put the key in my back pocket and I listened as he banged on the inside of the door and screamed, while the rest of them went to get their fathers.

I had to admire it while I could. It’s quite a thing is to feel powerful; and ordinary people only get the odd occasion to fall short of its responsibilities. It puts you in the world again. Of course you can still be cut, killed, the skin is just as it was and knows it all too well, but nevertheless, it is no metaphor to say that a person feels invincible after they have bested someone physically. And that is all the same whether won through cunning or not. So that when the boy’s father strode out of the back carport, driving over my mother’s primroses with his colossal legs, I almost didn’t fear him as he bore down on me and seized me by the arm. His hand was nearly the size of my chest, though, and when I struggled, he smacked me across the face and dispelled me of whatever bravery I had. The other boys, and some of the men, approached us and formed a small crowd, as if minding the scene from getting out of hand. I looked to some of them for comfort, but it was obvious they were invested in another outcome.

“You’re going to let him out right now,” he said.

“Then he has to go home. I don’t want him here.”

“We’ll all be going. Now let him out.”

“Dad!” I called around the corner.

“He’s busy.”

We could hear the boy crying inside the shed. It was getting weaker the more he put into it. And I knew it smelled heavily of petrol and round-up, which is why we were not supposed to play in there. When he whined at a particular high pitch, the sheet metal began to ring at each end. The tip of a finger could have felt him through it. But I still had little remorse for him, trapped like a pig, no less dangerous however it cried. His father grabbed me by the collar and put his hands into each of my pockets until he found the key. The same callous fingers over my crotch again that worked to gain or inflict. When he finally got him out, the boy stumbled around the grass crying about how he couldn’t see, but who knows if it had been any longer than ten minutes. His father pocketed the keys and then smacked me hard across the face again. This time I tried to run away but he caught me by the arm and pulled me over his knee. Then, while the rest of them watched, he bent my arm around my back and pulled my pants down and smacked me on the backside until I started crying. I tried calling to my father, but the air compressor was going loudly around the corner, and he couldn’t hear me. When he rolled me off his knee and onto the grass, some of the other boys started kicking me in the ribs, which I believe he allowed to go on for a second, before coming between us and sending them away. The silicon of the grass peeled through my eyelid and into my nostrils, crying into the soil, breathing the fertiliser and the dry rain. I tried to stay as long as I could with my face in the dirt, but he picked me up off the ground and held me across his body like you would a baby. And I sobbed like a baby, then. I put my face in his shirt, and I held tightly around his neck and said that I was: “Sorry! I’m sorry!” and he said it was “Okay, I know you are, it’s okay now.”

“I just want to go to bed,” I said.

“Come and I’ll put you down.”

Then he placed me on the concrete floor of the garden shed and shut the door before I could say anything. I heard him lock it from the other side through the padlock. I began screaming and kicking against the shed as hard as I could, but it was sturdy built that way so that no one could break in. I screamed for my father to let me out, but the echo of my voice was so loud between the walls, I knew it hardly disturbed the silence outside. Besides I had the feeling he had gone away somewhere in the meantime. Ducking in and out as the need occurred. It was not totally black in there, because the daylight was still drawn around the shapes of the door and the gable ends, but it was black for all it was worth and black for being alone and forgotten, and I found that my eyes adjusted to see less rather than more, and for a long time I cried and begged for someone to let me out. It was exhausting. A sponge of blood began to form under my eyes, causing me to go dizzy. I was tremendously upset. You come to see in those moments how quickly things can change. The grass and the way he beat me, the itch of both, even, that still lingered, carried off by the ongoing way of things, gone. Black, grass, black. Perhaps he had gone flying from his bike after a sudden crash. Then who would come? Or know where I was? I sat against the wall, crying, leaning my head on the cold iron, breathing chemicals and grass matter. The word “thrombosis” always sounded to me like the gushing of blood that seemed to fill your ears in silent spaces, not ringing, but pulsing again and again with all the contents of your imagination. And your memories, as well. Idle thoughts that formed various data centres. Advertising songs playing compulsively. Pop songs, hymns, soundbites. I found myself mouthing them. The same as sometimes when I ran long distance a phrase from a film would get stuck on my tongue and I had to breathe to its rhythm.

Nicolas Cage: “I’m like a prickly pear! Ha-ha-ha! I’m a prickly pear!”

Father: “Like a prickly pear!”

McCain Super Juicy Corn Commercial: “Marge, Marge! The rains are ‘ere!”

How Computer Programming Works by Daniel Appleman: “…” How Computer Programming Works by Daniel Appleman.

Me: “Prickly pear.”

Father: “Like a prickly pear!”

Rush Limbaugh: “You don’t believe me, Jerry?”

Rush Limbaugh: “Je—… Now—Jerry!”

McCain Super Juicy Corn Commercial: “The rains are ‘ere!”

Nicolas Cage: “Whaddya say we finish these and we go back to my apartment On The Beach?”

Father: “On The Beach!”

Me: “I’m like a prickly pear.”

Father: “A prickly pear!”

Motorcycle: “…” A little ways off.

Shed Door: “…” Padlock scraping. Iron structure.

Once the afternoon had passed—and I had likely napped a little to cope with the boredom—my mother opened the doors with her key and pulled me into the yard as though I had done something wrong. She was wearing her robe still because she had been in bed all day unwell with something. She had said not to bother her, which was serious coming from her, so I did my best by forgetting all about her. And something about the long hall of that place used to take people, and other things, down its end where it removed them from the presence of the home. Her eyes were sunken, and her breath smelled badly like she had been breathing through her mouth. I was not sure what she heard from her end of the house, but she seemed frustrated with me.

“Dad’s friends locked me in the shed!”

“It’s what you get for the way you behaved.”

“How do you know?”

“I know it was you hitting those boys to begin with.”

“You didn’t see how they were acting first.”

She was standing over me with her arms on her sides, but when she stood away, the evening sky peeled after her where it fell upon us in its complete size and my eyes needed time to adjust to the starlight and the full moon. Ferns blue-grey, wet and weeping, fell over the shadows and the arced shapes of the garden. As we walked under the pockets of tree shade, the cold air closed us in, and although she was not the kind of mother who embraced affectionately, she took me under her robe while we walked inside; her body odours clung to the material, the dense weight of her sickness keeping me at her preferred distance.

“… —and even then I tried calling after Dad, but he couldn’t hear me.”

“He was working in the shed.”

“But you could hear me.”

“I told you I was sick. And I heard you start it all to begin with.”

“Did Dad go away with them?”

“No. He’s been inside playing video games.”

“Really?”

“His friends all left without saying goodbye.”

“Can I play with him do you think?”

We found him cross-legged in front of the television mashing the buttons of the PlayStation controller; some of his tools were piled behind him, nudged by his backside to make room. On the television screen, he controlled an anthropomorphic tiger, fighting out of its Shaolin stance, and he appeared to have cornered a boxing wolf against the wall, bouncing it off the side of the screen again and again with the same button combination. Without any of the lights on, he was illuminated under the television’s glow, and it darkened the shadows under his arms and chin. The side of his face seemed to sag a little over the frame of his jaw. He was never pockmarked, but something seemed wrong with his skin. I reached out and touched it. He didn’t notice me. Dried blood from where he had scratched it. His fingers were still oily, and they had marked the controller. I began to growl in his ear through the cylinder of my palm, making sounds like a rabid dog would. Miming my elbow into the back of his neck, karate strikes, and pretending to stab him in the ribs with a katana.

“Leave your father alone. You’re going to your room.”

“Dad can I play? It’s better with two players. They left their other controller.”

“Get it and plug it in. We can do a proper versus match.”

My mother called for me again, but I left my back to her. My father did the same except he hadn’t heard her. He let me lean on his leg and he took me by the shoulders and kissed me on top of my hair. Eventually, she went down the hall and back to her bedroom. The door closed and locked… Black, grass, video games. You got what was coming to you and then life moved on… I selected the boxing wolf as my character and went on to defeat my father for the rest of the night. The match-up was fair and even, although he complained that I was withholding information from him about how to play. I tried to get it across to him, not knowing exactly what I meant at the time, that what he lacked more than anything was a boy’s natural instinct for video games, and it was not likely that he would get anything over me save for a lucky shot here and there.

“Your mother said you had a falling out with those boys today.”

“We had a fight over the game.”

“She said you took them all on yourself.”

“Yeah well it was basically a four on one.”

“Unbelievable. You don’t take shit from anyone do you?”

“No,” I said. Trying to mean it.

“That’s a good boy. You’re a lot like me like that.”

During the week leading up to his death, my father began to speak to people who were not in the room. The behaviour was definitely strange, and it could give someone a fright if their guard was down, but I wasn’t sure it was totally authentic. It seemed to me that when he had the attention of some ghost across the room, he was still looking to see that we were paying attention to him. It made me sad to think. I could never tell what he wanted from me. To put his nerves at ease I tried stroking his hair. He began laughing to himself, as well, sometimes all over, and it caused him a special kind of delight when he stared into the blank television screen. We were both in its glass somewhere from the way we were sitting, darker the brighter the noon was, his bed was amongst the shade of the curtains, not so alight by the sun, and the more you searched in it for detail, the more you found of its grey glass, its thickness, and the workmanship behind the screen, electronics, cathode-ray tube, instead of our pithy reflections that began to mean less and less in comparison. The world sort of brought itself to bear every time you got the sense things were more than they seemed, and so by the time he had started screaming “Ghost!” I just ignored him and gave him a glass of water.

“You’re looking good,” he said each time I visited.

He had jam down his gown and blood had started to leak from his catheter.

“Thanks Dad. You too.”

The phlegm in his throat rattled when he laughed. He leaned over every time and spat it into a tissue for the nurse to collect later. The chaplain suggested it might be the right time to begin praying—if he was interested in the exercise. But I didn’t think there was anything left for him to pray for. Now that he was vulnerable and afraid, it led naturally to a state of humility, all of it being new to him, in his way for what time he had left, and the distress he had turned over in the preceding months had been its own tired saga; one of which we had all had enough, and considering the kind of man he was, I decided—as his proxy—that he had learned all he was like to in that short amount of time, or, for whatever else there was, he had at least expressed his regret over the correct things. And as far as his repentance, you know, whatever that was supposed to look like, I was beginning to feel that our lives had already been lived by the time we got them, so: “I’ve forgiven him already,” I said. And although the chaplain looked at me queerly, seeming to think that I had misunderstood him, or the point of the rite as he had described it to me, I made eye contact for long enough that he eventually left us alone. I’m certain now that we should be suspicious of any authority that attempts to instruct us on how to die, although I know he was only concerned for my father’s eternal soul, so I hold nothing against the chaplain in particular. But that my father was raving again over some greeting card someone had left him with a small note he couldn’t parse due it being written in cursive. You see there is really no time that is right. Serious matters are supposed to frighten us. And to that end we are better off unprepared. It didn’t do to have a priest hold your hand. When the time came, I was sure he would run like a coward, but then so what? So to God everyone should! Death comes right up to meet us!—and someone offers to leave the lamp on? No. For his sake I wanted him fresh and weak and ready to squirm before the end that had him—that’s how it ends—and it wasn’t such a big deal to me about anything he ever did in his life or who or what he owed or what he was supposed to be; I wasn’t trying to revenge us or torment him or get anything over him in the last second. No. Time and attention took him his whole life, but we all meet the same end, and we prove ourselves just by enduring it. I admonish no one for their proclivities. A man could run his entire life. Hide from every sense he has. It doesn’t matter. You die and beg the whole time for it to stop but by the time it’s over, you’ve been blooded. I just want to be sure he showed up to it this time. If he had any fancy to cling to out of the chaplain’s head, he would have drawn up a daydream, the way I knew he could. And I had the nurses get rid of his tablet, as well, in case he wanted to scroll the news while it seized him.

So I took his hand as often as I could, and I kissed it on the back part of his palm. “And have you forgiven them?” a man had asked me… —Well, yes, for their part, yes. But, God, I mean, I hope to God they have forgiven me. He didn’t cry by the end the way he had so much, but he looked at me and he felt, again, that he could talk about the night of my conception as one who was, in some sense, there. I nodded and patted his hand, and I breathed over his knuckles and it reminded me of how, when he was preoccupied with something, I could smack the back of his arm with a ruler and he never seemed to notice. I hoped to God he was actually deranged when he went on and on the way he did, and not merely trying to atone to a power higher than maybe myself or my mother (if he ever thought of her), but when he finally began to hallucinate with real consequence, I saw him depart from the front of his eyes and I knew without any doubt that he was falling through the blackness of whatever lies behind us—through the garden shed, say, the tip of the spear falling again though every phase of our making, and our undoing, the next generation always willing something, now how they took the plunge for us, stewards our whole lives, then that desire almost to push them and to see what happens (we read of patricide every so often), seeing, if you have seen, how the light departs them in that most physical sense, when they have gone somewhere else, still falling for a time, and that way written across the old mortal coil attached by long threads a little yet to snap. He was raving again, but without any motive this time. It was stupid, empty language, calling for porridge, “blue tobacco,” naming species of fish, “flatbream,” “mak-oo-rel,” singing from his favourite albums, advertising songs, all of that bullshit he was still on about my conception and the “first domino” of his every error to come, set in stone that night, he said, lost to that fugue that took him, “This may be the moment,” and it was very scientific then, “Just a part of the body letting go,” the nurse said: “data shedding,” information through the synapses, and before his heart gave out he was laughing at something on the television, patting the top of his own hand, calling all the nurses “darling,” darling, and looking directly at me calling “darling!,” though he had never used that name for me… someone placed a hand on my shoulder and suggested I wait in the hall, but I stayed with him for the long duration while he stewarded the way, the same way he brought me forth when I urged him, and for that alone, considered that his function as a father was probably complete.

The moment he dropped away, like a pen gone through the matter that made it final, the procedure suddenly took to him like a different task altogether. Let’s get this bed out of the way if we can. Someone in here to strip the linen. The liner bag, please. And can someone have a word to the son about—”No, no!” I was gone without a hassle. Let me get out of the way here. Most grateful to you all. Thai women, Filipino, Indian, thank you so much. No but thank you it’s fine. Bereft of the hassle, then, I made my way home. When I returned, I found my mother in the living room watching the news of foreign wars on television. She greeted me kindly and hoped all had been okay, but I could see her attention was elsewhere. All the world’s wars were hers now that she had sunk herself into them. You know if there was another genocide promised she would have clung to hope to see it, whatever’s next, you know, just to live and say she’d seen it, or seen it documented, televised, however it mattered to her. I knew better than to rouse her sense of duty when she was so busy in the middle of something, so I didn’t bother telling her about my father.

“He’s okay,” I said.

Her shape was dark from behind when she faced the television again. All things seeming as real through the glass as she made them out to be. And I thought it was nice that she could depart herself properly in that way. I hoped for her sake that she let it drive her to insanity before she was gone, because she had been sensible her whole life, and it must have been a freeing feeling. That I was certain she was owed. I left her to her devices. It was the 24-hour news channel, so whether it was to her heart’s content, or until she was tired, or whatever it was that marked enough for her, I wished her the world if it could be delivered through the screen. Nice as well to know that we were done classifying each other’s habits. That so while I entered the bathroom, the mists of grief were still stirring and feeling strange, I took the measure of my own thoughts and drafted the first iteration of how it all “made me feel.” Serious business always came of the father. You should not think of it any other way. Except that I stood naked in front of the mirror toying with my penis while the water got hot. I heard outside as my mother began coughing again, hacking phlegm, and muffling her face as far deep into the cushion as the material and the strength of her arms permitted… The tough old bitch, I know she’s okay, even. She keeps all the worst news to herself. Very much unlike him. Except the only problem is how intentionally she means it. When the time comes, I daresay she’ll take it on the chin to prove a point. My girls won’t hover long because she will say they’re better off doing something outside than sitting around her. Not him? No, not exactly. Her thoughts are racing, though, and they’re to do with him. I won’t get the truth out of her until maybe the final minute or so. Part of me thinks she might at least have it rehearsed, which I won’t lead on, so as not to spoil it for her. The “final truth” she’s held back the whole time… Nor but what could that ever be? I barely want to hear it anymore. There’s about five lies a person can tell with any endurance and by the end of a life and if time has passed anyway at the same rate, how on earth does it possibly matter?