Читать книгу Smythe's Theory of Everything - Robert Hollingworth - Страница 9

An ant has six legs and as such, has the potential to move them in 4,683 different ways - or permutations, to use the correct term. Those 4,683 different permutations include moving three legs on one side and then three on the other, which would be a rock from side to side, and moving all six together, which would be a jump or a hop. The ant, however, uses only one of its 4,683 options. It moves two legs on one side (front and back) at the same time as the middle leg on the other side and then reverses the process in the next step. Though I wonder why it has six legs at all. Four should be plenty, like mammals.

The spider has eight legs. It is remarkable to think that those extra two legs mean it has an astounding 545,835 different options for the order in which it could move them. Yet like ants, all 38,000 known species of spider the world over move their legs in just one sequence. Figure that out! And figure out what that sequence might be. If there was a God (and don’t get me started) it would take that omnipotent bearded wonder a lifetime just to resolve that single issue.

When I was sixteen, Kitty and I had a spider living behind a poster on our bedroom wall. That was the year my life began. If I were to choose the exact moment, I’d say it would be 9 a.m. on the morning of my birthday. You might think I had sixteen years before that, 5,849 days to be exact, including leap years. But I can tell you nothing happened in all those 5,849 days, nothing at all. But that morning of my birthday it all changed. It was a Saturday and Kitty and I were just lying on our beds stretched out and staring at the wall. I can see that room as though it was here right now: the globe hanging down, the stain near the ceiling in the shape of a brontosaurus, the punch hole in the plasterboard where my father did his block and the row of three nails in the back of the door.

And my big poster of the Solar System. Even in those days I wanted to know about planets and stars and what it all means. From my pillow, those spheres of wonder-ment fairly flew around the sun and I knew in my imagination every aspect of them; their moons, comparative densities, surface structures, gravitations, atmospheres, compositions - the entire meaning of existence was contained in that one buckling poster.

And behind it there came to live a big huntsman. One morning I woke to see it right there on the wall. I took an old dart from the bedside drawer, aimed carefully and threw it. Missed by inches. Kitty screamed - not at the spider but at me.

‘Leave it alone, you prick,’ she said.

I should have known she’d take a fancy to it. That’s my little sister, afraid of nothing and ready to defend anything or anyone if she deems them to be taking it up the … well you get the point. Me, I couldn’t give a rat’s backside and that morning I just wanted to do that spider an injury. I just wanted to kill the fucking thing, make it suffer for being a big crawly, stalking around in our bedroom with eight fucking legs all moving in the same order the world over. And living behind my poster, happily, because Kitty would have killed me if I’d harmed just one of its estimated two million body hairs. Haley the huntsman she called it. And in time, it actually became our one and only friend.

Forty-five years ago that was. What happened to those four and a half decades, approximately 2,342 weeks, 16,440 days? And how did I come to end up in this fuck ing nursing home? ‘Eden’ they call it - can you believe it? Fucking Eden! As though it’s the original Paradise - abundance, beauty and innocence. This place is as innocent as the glass tube they shove up your backside. Fourteen days I’ve been here. Fourteen days in which to push my wheelchair through the smell of the dying, a heady mix of body wastes and Nilodor. They think the latter rectifies the former but it only provides another layer of unpleasant complexity. ‘Who is “they”?’ you may ask. Uncharitable, marble-hearted pseudo-nurses who will bite your head off if you dare smoke in your room. I don’t exaggerate. And the food! It must be seen to be believed. If a fridge magnet fell in the pot it could only improve the taste. Why am I here in this house of the dying? You may well ask.

It would be an understatement to say I’m feeling down. First chance I get I’m leaving. Pack my bags and just march right out the front door. I already know the exit code (the postcode plus ‘e’). A fool could observe the staff using those numbers yet not a geriatric in residence takes any notice. Press those digits into the pad, shove open the big wooden doors and just march right out into the sunlight. First I have to work on my legs. They’ve got worse. But in here at least I’ve got time to work on them, get them pumping up and down like they used to. And then I’m going to dump the wheelchair and walk right out of this poor excuse of a bedroom, straight up the passage and I’m gone.

Week three begins today. Fortunately I’ve found my little Oxford dictionary wrapped in a plastic bag; a very pleasing discovery and it gives me plenty to do. I never cease to be amazed by the English language and how little we know of it. You only have to read a half a dozen pages of that little navy blue book to realise we only using about 25 per cent of all possible words. For instance, who knows what a coprologist is? A writer of obscene books; a painter of indecent pictures. Gk kopros: dung, logos: discourse. Coprology is therefore, shitty language. Oxford p. 179.

As long as I am forced to endure a month or so in this Godforsaken camp, I think I might write the remarkable story of Kitty. ‘Always write about what you know’ is the advice of the bards. Therefore I’ll put down what I remember as well as I can. Kitty deserves it; the most beautiful person I have ever known. Without her I would be nothing at all, not even worthy to be sitting here in a hole like this. Eden. Can you believe it? The room here no bigger than the one we had at home.

Some time in the early fifties, my mother, Kitty and I moved into a one-bedroom flat. And Kitty and I slept in that one bedroom while our mother took over the lounge. She lived in that lounge, the double bed jammed between the wall and the couch, and any old time of the day you’d find her stretched out, legs spread so she could see the big TV looming up at the foot of the bed. When I say big TV, I mean big box - the screen itself was small and oval and black-and-white. It was an Admiral, one of the best brands and by far the most expensive item in the flat. Mum bought it with what was left of our father’s cash just so she could watch the Melbourne Olympics - it was the first time the games had ever been televised. After that she was hooked.

When 1957 came all the new programs started: I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best, the latter a concept which seemed ludicrous to us. Mum protected that TV with her life and we were not allowed to switch it on or off or adjust the channels. We watched it when she was out, which was most nights, and we had to sit on her bed to do it. But we’d always make sure we returned it to the channel she left it on and be out of there by the time she got home. We’d hear her come in, click on the set, collapse on the bed and be snoring in minutes.

During the day that big Admiral went all hours and the room would fill with smoke, the big glass ashtray so full of butts they fell onto the carpet. Then it was time for Mum to go to the pub. It would be fair to say that she was resigned to a life of nothingness - she worked at the pub, drank at the pub, watched TV, smoked and slept. Needless to say, it didn’t worry us at all.

In our room we had a wireless which picked up most of the shows we wanted: Biggles, The Goons, No Holiday for Halliday. We had a bed each against opposite walls and some nights we’d reach out in the dark and touch fingers. Other nights Kit would come over and get in with me and we’d curl up together like a relationship. Though nothing funny happened. Only when I was about fourteen did we do a bit of exploring; we were fascinated with our changing bodies and maturity coming on and it was as much an education as anything else. There was no sex education then. I’m talking the 1950s. As far as sex went all we knew was what we learned from each other. She knew about erections and what goes with it and I watched her body grow into a lovely young woman with all that it entails. My only venture into crime involved knocking off packets of Tampax at the chemist.

On hot weekends while my mother was out we used to lie around our room naked. But it was all innocent. There was such a thing in those days - innocence - a concept that just isn’t available to the young now. Back then it was perfectly natural that we should share our private lives and intimacy; we were close in age and grew up side by side like Siamese twins. We were virtually inseparable.

Our father cleared out about five years earlier. Going to work in Real Estate up north, he said. But we were at school the day he went and after that we never heard from him again. I cannot say I ever knew him; even less as I would find out in years to come. At that time I never thought of him as a bad man. Sure he could get awful angry but he never hit us, never raised a hand to our mother even when she came home so bad she couldn’t get out of her clothes.

I hardly remember much about him at all. Except that he once told me he’d always hoped he’d have an excep-tional son rather than an ordinary one. And I remember his constant refrain from the age of about five, You got no intestinal fortitude, Jack. No intestinal fortitude. At that time I imagined I’d been born with some part of my anatomy missing and I had high hopes it would eventually grow back.

Apart from that my father hardly paid me any attention at all and I just went into my teens assuming he was skilled at particular things but parenting just wasn’t one of them. I created a simple logic for it and I remember explaining it to my little sister: you can be good at one thing - say ‘gardening’ - but unable to play tennis to save yourself. Our father could produce great tomatoes but when it came to being a Dad he couldn’t even manage the ball toss. But that’s all I ever thought about it and it would be another thirty-odd years before I would discover the awful truth and see the man for what he really was.

That day of my sixteenth was just like any other and being a Saturday we just stayed in our room, Kitty staring at the ceiling, me staring at my planets poster. I did not foresee how that simple poster would one day play an important part in my future.

Suddenly Kitty said, ‘Happy birthday’.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ I said and then we just lay there listening to the bell on the railway crossing. We used to count the dings on that boom gate bell. I’d say, I got seventy-four and Kit would say, I got seventy-eight. Then one night that bell just wouldn’t stop. It just went on and on and on. After that we never bothered counting the dings again. It was 1957, the year TV really kicked in.

Suddenly Kitty said, ‘Let’s go.’

‘Where?’ I said, thinking she meant to Porter’s or even down to the creek which wasn’t a creek but a big concrete culvert under the main road.

‘Somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Somewhere away from this doghouse; we could go and live somewhere else.’

‘We haven’t got any money or anything.’

‘So what?’ she said. ‘We could find an empty building. You know, abandoned.’

A strange feeling flooded my body - I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was as if I’d had that same idea all along but it was only when Kit said it that I knew I had it. On my own I would never have acted on it, but when Kit said let’s do something it was as infectious as the plague.

‘We could just hole up somewhere in the city,’ I said.

Kit sat up.

‘There’s heaps of empty factories. Maybe an old house.’

A minute later we were out the door. We took the tram to Errol Street and then spent the whole day just walking around looking for something empty. But we came up with nothing, only a few derelict sites with broken glass, damp brick and piss-wet corners where even an old wino wouldn’t stay. It was getting late so we headed back to the tram stop - and that’s when we spotted the brick building on the corner of McKillop and James. It was set back a few metres with a tall cyclone fence right around; an old two-storey factory with a few windows broken on the ground floor and the letters DACO on the side - the leftovers of a bigger name. A sign on the fence said Property of Chemcel Pty Ltd and Keep Out. The lock on the gate looked old and untouched. We went down the narrow alley between the fence and another building and that’s where we got in under the wire. Kit found a steel picket and we used it to lever up the mesh just enough to crawl under. But there seemed to be no way into that building. Then Kit found this kind of cellar trapdoor with old bricks and rubble over it. Ten minutes later we were down in that dark hole and then up again inside the building.

‘Gotta go down to go up,’ Kit whispered for no reason. I remember that because I thought it was true: we had to go through that big down-time at home so we could go up into our own future.

Straight away we quit school. Then over the next week we shifted our stuff into the Daco, a bit at a time on the tram while our mother was down at the pub. She never caught on once. We sold a lot of things to the second-hand dealers: ornaments, a tea set - even our grandmother’s old wind-up clock - and still our mother didn’t notice. We didn’t think of it as stealing. It wasn’t as if we sold anything useful - except perhaps our wireless. And then we just started our new life.

At that time I think we were among the first to ever come up with the idea of creating our own home in an empty building. They call them squatters now but we were one of the first. Of course the authorities would call us homeless. But who says home is cooped up in some suburban nightmare with a parent whose life is somewhere else? And what about all those nomadic people, are they homeless?

We had an upstairs room as good as any house and a real toilet block just two streets away. We started hanging around the Victoria Market and we had an Airways bag that we filled with all sorts of things that weren’t fit for selling. We met an old Asian lady and sometimes we’d help her pack up at night and she’d give us leftover mangos, bananas, loose grapes. And every day we’d go off on some adventure around the city and you wouldn’t believe the things you can do for free. At night we always curled up together on the floor. We were really close, like brothers and sisters should be, and night after night we’d just lie there in the dark with the faint noise of traffic and pigeons, and tell each other stories.

I don’t pretend we had it good all the time. I remember times when Kitty would get anxious, as if deep down inside her something else was trying to surface. On those nights she’d tell a different story, one about a magic snow sleigh. I never quite understood it but Kitty said she often closed her eyes tight and imagined riding that Christmas sleigh, the wind in her hair, gliding freely down white slopes, through snow-bound forests, across frozen lakes and then down again; on and on, riding as if nothing could stop her. What for, I often wondered. Now I am amazed that it never occurred to me how troubled that little sister of mine was.

To comfort her I’d make up fantastic stories that had nothing to do with reality. Other times I’d just talk - and so would she - about everything, though never the past or the future. We lived in the present which a lot of people seem to forget about. It is a subject I would one day create a theory about, though I never thought of it then.

Only here at so-called ‘Eden’ nursing home do people live in the present. That’s because their past is long lost to them - that’s why they’re here. Can’t remember their own names let alone what happened this morning. But I remember those times with Kitty as if they were yesterday. We’d lie there in the dark in the old Daco building and make up stories as good as any movie. Sometimes I wish we’d written them down.

I wake each morning hoping it’s all a dream. Then reality dawns. One minute I’m in St Vincent’s having an operation, standard procedure, and then I’m in here - poof ! Lisa’s idea of course. I open my eyes a few days after the op and there’s some bloke leaning over the bed.

‘You’ll be very comfortable here,’ he says.

‘Where?’

‘Here, at Eden.’ Eden? Had I ascended to heaven? Then, I look around the room and start to get the picture.

‘I’ll see you in a week or so,’ the doc says and suddenly I’m alone.

Since then I’ve noticed that the staff seem to hate this place as much as I do. Yesterday I overheard one of them complaining that they get 20 per cent less pay than the nurses in public hospitals. This morning I asked Dell Williams about it but she wouldn’t be drawn on the subject. I got better results asking her about the inmates. Eighty-eight in total, two divisions, the more affluent in the West Wing, the cheapies over here. Overall, at least two new ones each month.

‘Does that mean two have died?’ I ask. Dell stiffens up immediately. She seems to be better than some of the others, one of the youngest nurses here - actually they aren’t officially nurses at all, more like nurse’s aides - but like all the others, she doesn’t want to give out too much information.

‘Not necessarily,’ she replies.

‘Oh, so you mean the numbers are growing?’

‘Heavens no! There aren’t enough beds as it is.’

As not a single soul ever escapes this place on foot, I can only assume they leave in a box. So what are the odds of getting through a fortnight without someone in here dropping dead? Well, as anyone can see they are zero. How many people can boast living arrangements where every two weeks at least one person dies under their own roof ? Yesterday they rolled out another poor soul, right past my door. I tried to close the door quickly in case her spirit came floating in and took up residence right here in the corner of my room. Now it’s midnight and I can’t sleep for thinking about it.

We were at the Daco about three months when we woke one night to hear faint scratching in the outside alcove. The next morning we saw an old bloke walking away and he got out under the fence at the same spot we used. Next evening he was back again. One night it stormed like no tomorrow and the wind rattled the windows. We heard a new sound coming from outside and I looked through a crack in the door and saw the same old bloke sitting on the concrete and he was crying. It was freezing out there and he was wet through. Silhouetted against the city lights you could see the steam coming off his woollen coat. He sat hunched over, his broad back shaking with the sobs.

But that’s not why we let him in. We could see he wasn’t going to go away and eventually the cops would catch on and come and investigate. That meant they’d find out about us as well. So one night when he arrived he found me sitting in his alcove. He just stood there staring. He wasn’t very tall but his big coat, patchy beard and hair tied back in a ponytail made him look dangerous. I was only sixteen after all and I was as nervous as hell.

He just looked at me and said, ‘I stay here.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘and if you keep staying here they’re going catch you for being on private property. The sign says Keep Out.’

He just kept staring and I could hear rattling in his chest.

‘What about you? S’pose you must be above the bloody law then?’

‘I’m not intending to stay here exposed to the world until they come and march me somewhere else.’

‘Well what if I don’t give a fuck about that. You think I care? What are they going to do, take every bloody penny I got? They give you a cup of bloody tea and a bowl of soup and you’re on your bloody way.’ He stuck one of his knobby forefingers under his nose and pushed it roughly from side to side.

I said, ‘You got any friends?’ He just stared. ‘Street friends,’ I added.

‘Street friends? Yeah, Henry Bolte is a good street friend of mine and H. R. Petty is my best pal.’

I’d heard of Bolte, our Premier - I’d seen him on TV.

‘Who’s H. R. Petty?’ I said.

‘Christ you bloody kids are a waste.’ He looked right through me.

‘I live in here,’ I said thumbing over my shoulder. The guy stared at the big wooden door padlocked shut.

‘Me and someone else. We can get you in if you don’t fuck up our living arrangements.’ I said the ‘f ‘ word because he did, and I thought it might suggest some sort of solidarity. He looked up at the building as though seeing it for the first time.

I didn’t look at him.

‘You want to sleep in there or not?’

‘I’m not getting mixed up with no thieves and bloody pickpockets,’ he said at last. I stood up and he followed me around to the cellar door. He waited for me to get in first. Behind me he said, ‘Horace Petty is our Minister for Housing - Petty by name, petty by nature.’

I told him we were Jack and Kitty and the old guy said his name was Dr Milo.

‘Doctor? You mean like helping people …’

‘I mean like PhD. You know what that is? Course not. It’s a qualification; the idea is you think of a topic, study it real hard, write a hell of a lot of stuff down, pass it across the desk of some bloody faculty or other and then you get to join them. They give you a framed bloody certificate, a new title at the front of your name and some letters on the back and away you go.’

I stared at him. ‘You did that?’

He looked around the big empty space and his voice echoed. ‘Don’t believe every bloody thing you hear son, OK?’

He said Milo was a nickname and it made me think maybe we should have changed our names as well but it was too late once we’d introduced ourselves. He also said to drop the ‘doctor’ - if we were going to share a house, it should be on a first-name basis. Then Milo stayed on and we began to look forward to our times together. He never came up to our room and we never went into his but sometimes late into the night we’d all sit down on the floor in our ‘Office’ and just talk. The Office was an area near the main entrance, sectioned off by a glass partition and a low wall of wooden hutches. Those hutches each had a label on them, things like pending, returns and hp&l and we would take it in turns thinking up explana-tions for those words. pending was the sound biros make when they hit the polished floor.

Like us, Milo was good at telling stories. One night we sat in the dim light of the street and Milo told us about an astronomer who spent his life in a government observatory monitoring sunspots and events on the surface of the sun. By night he studied the stars. Immediately it took me back to Preston and my planets poster - up until my sixteenth birthday I felt I’d been doing the same thing in the confines of my own bedroom. Milo said the astronomer knew the stars and planets better than he knew people and places on earth. Then one day the government closed the observatory and reopened it as a tourist attraction. The astronomer was out of a job and suddenly realised he had the same bewildering relationship to the world that ordinary people had to the cosmos.

‘That astronomer disappeared right up his own pipe of prisms and lenses,’ he said.

It was so dark in the ‘Office’ that night we could hardly see each other.

‘You were the astronomer,’ Kitty said.

‘Well, who bloody knows?’ he replied, his usual gruff voice almost a whisper. ‘Who can say what any of us are. Sometimes we’re one thing, sometimes we’re another.’

Kitty stared at his dark form wide-eyed. ‘Couldn’t … couldn’t the astronomer get another job?’

‘Who wants an old astronomer? Who wants an old anything? Once you hit fifty there’s a shitload of people the same age as your own children ready to take over all the positions. Anyway, what’s it matter? Freedom to make your own decisions - that’s what we need - and to ponder the big questions.’

Milo often pondered the big questions. Like why we say ‘the sun is going down’ when for centuries we’ve known that the sun hasn’t moved at all.

Me, I liked calculating things. The only subjects at school I ever liked were maths and science. I liked them because they came easy to me - even though I hated our teacher and the way he, in turn, hated the students and his mediocre job. One day we were given a long and protracted formula for calculating the surface area of complex shapes - I think the idea was to put us off the subject forever. I spent the class reinterpreting the given formula, simplifying it to something streamlined and beautiful - even if it only worked for particular types of shapes. That little misdemeanour cost me four enthusiastic lashes across the palm with Carter’s yard of hardened leather. And so I learned an important lesson: what is deemed correct by authority should not be tampered with.

But it never dulled my interest in calculation. When we lived at the Daco I worked out there were 5210 bricks in the end wall, allowing for the double brick, the windows and the taper to the ceiling, and that the total weight was something near 24 tons - each brick approximately 7 pounds multiplied by the total and including the mortar which has a calculable length and thickness but is slightly less dense than the bricks themselves.

Why do I do it, you might ask? Well, a wall is just a wall, a starry sky is just a starry sky - until you start to investigate its essence, and then it becomes nothing short of a miracle. I found my miracles by calculation, Milo found his by pondering the big questions. But Milo didn’t want answers, he just wanted to dwell on the mysteries and meaning of life rather than the mundane, rather than the hack of ambition which he said had ambushed all those people rushing about outside.

We never talked about the people who might have worked in the Daco - beyond speculating on what the letters in that name stood for: Daft Accountants Company; Dead Animal Collection Office. And sometimes we sat for hours in the silence of that big old Daco building just thinking about things and watching fine dust float in the light. There was no forgotten past lingering in that massive old factory. Some people think that the spirit of all that’s happened is still somehow embedded in the brickwork or emanating off the old dusty desks pushed against the wall. But we lived there for a year and I can tell you it’s no more than a big hollow chamber. You occupy that chamber like a crab inside a seashell until one day it starts to feel like a part of you.

Just had a visit from the doctor. I never called for him and I don’t have any more ailments than usual but there he was just the same. I think he was visiting the old geriatric next door and just looked in on me in passing. Of course right behind him I had a very large nurse looking on - as if it’s got the slightest to do with her!

‘Could you stand up for me?’ the doc says.

‘No,’ I reply, ‘I don’t think I’m quite up to that yet.’

‘Come on, up you get,’ he says as if I hadn’t spoken.

‘I’d rather not,’ I say.

‘Come on Mr Smythe, just put some weight on and let’s see what happens.’

Meanwhile that great big nurse stands there, arms folded, smart and smarmy. She’s loving it. She’s tried this before, tried to get me to walk, but what they fail to recognise is that I’m on the inside, I know what’s going on in my own body and I know when I’m ready and when I’m not. The upshot is I finally stood silently in my slippers just to please them and I also chose to grin and bear the discomfort of it all. I figured that as soon as I satisfied them the sooner they’d leave me alone. I was right.

One night Kitty went upstairs early. She’d been sniffing and sneezing all day and just wanted to curl up in a ball until it all passed. That left me and Milo and as always we went to the Office. Even before we sat down on the floorboards Milo said, ‘I’m working on a big theory’.

‘How big?’ I said, casually.

‘Very big.’

‘About the universe?’

‘Bigger than that. Like why it’s all there in the first place.’

‘The Big Bang.’

‘ The Big Bang?’ Milo rocked backwards and I caught a whiff of him. We could all do with a bath.

‘The big pop and fizzle more like it! No more balls than a cork coming out of a bottle of Porphyry Pearl. Think about it. What’s more intellectually rigorous, a sudden explosion that brought time, space, people and bananas into being or a God that conceived and created the Heavens and Earth over a solid bloody week?’

‘You … you believe in God?’

Milo’s burst of laughter bounced off the brickwork and stirred the dust.

‘God, schmod, but it’s just as ballsy a theory as the Big Bang - or Big Bloody Wang some might say.’

Then we sat a long time in silence. Anyone would say it was completely dark and cold, but we didn’t see it that way. We were used to it and our eyes were accustomed to the dimness; we could pick out the pigeons roosting on a far ledge and, below them, the streaks of grey that ran down the wall. Through our eyes we saw the detail: the cobwebs and the wires hanging down, all the light fittings gone, the iron rods that once held ceiling fans.

I had almost forgotten what we were talking about when Milo suddenly said, ‘Let’s put the Big Bang through the wringer - the wringer of known facts. If such a thing were to take place it would have to do it within some pre-existing context, wouldn’t you say? And if it’s going to happen, then it’s a bloody event, and an event has to be incubated in or with something else. Newton says, “no action ever happens of or by itself ” - it’s a simple law of physics. That means the so-called Big Bang has to have been caused by something. You stare at the sky as long as I have and it becomes obvious.’

Milo scratched his beard, a sound as familiar as the creak of leather.

‘Now I don’t say our cosmos doesn’t have some natural origin - just as a mountain or a river does. Just that the dawn of the universe wasn’t the first bloody thing.’

Milo shifted position, stretched his legs out and tucked his blanket around him. I heard him scratch his whiskers again. I too was starting to get quite a bit of strong stubble and found myself mimicking his action.

‘A New Theory of Everything; that’s what’s needed,’ he said at last.

I thought of the planets and my old poster of the Solar System. Milo’s idea excited me. My head fairly buzzed with ideas and in the darkness I could feel my face redden with the thought of it all. Milo had sparked something and a wave of energy passed through me like nothing I’d ever felt.

‘What do you think it is then?’ I said, almost breathlessly.

‘Well now, that’s the bloody question isn’t it? You want my opinion? I think the Big Bang is like the paintings they made of Australia long before the new land was even discovered - a nice idea to exercise the mind while we wait for a better picture of things.’

Suddenly I heard Kitty’s footfalls on the stairs and she came to sit on the floor with us. She was shivering and she said she’d been having the bad dreams again. I pulled her in under my blanket and put my arms around her. It must have been about three in the morning. Milo shifted position and I felt a wave of disappointment. Our moment had passed and even before he spoke I knew there’d be a change in subject.

‘Now listen you two,’ he said. ‘When I die, I want you to do something special for me.’

Kitty and I straightened and looked towards the dark recess where he sat.

‘If you got any balls you’ll drag me down to the big stormwater grate on the corner of McKillop and York and chuck me in. And then the next rain will take me right under the city. I want to be buried under all those bloody buildings, way down there with the Aborigines!’ Then he laughed and we laughed as well and we agreed it was a fitting end for city-dwellers like us. Then, even in that dark void, I saw his face drop like wet newspaper.

‘Don’t want no bloody relatives coming to claim me,’ he said. And we knew exactly what he meant.

One morning about a month later Milo didn’t come out of his room. We heard him arrive the night before, coming up from the cellar as usual. But by lunchtime we were sure something wasn’t right. We went to his room and pushed the door wide open. A piece of blanket was pinned at the window and it hung to the side letting in weak light. Everything he owned was arranged neatly along one wall: a plastic bucket, a little stack of books, a candle and an old wireless hooked up to a 12-volt battery. On the opposite side there was a camp stretcher - where he’d got it is anyone’s guess - and on it Milo lay sprawling with his boots on. His arm was over the side and his palm rested on the floor, his big old knuckles standing up like speed humps. His head lolled off the edge of the bed at a horrible angle. I said, ‘Milo?’ but I knew he was dead.

It was only then that we realised how much we’d grown to like the old man. In fact I don’t even think he was that old, just tired. And he was the sort of man I wouldn’t have minded for a father. I think Kitty felt the same. She walked out of the room and I found her standing at one of the windows. The lower panes were rippled glass covered with a thick film of dust so who knows what she was seeing. I walked up behind her; she turned and put her arms around me. She was as tall as I was but that day she put her face into my neck and made herself small. Then she cried; I felt it in my own chest. I don’t think Kitty had ever cried before - and just two days off her fifteenth birthday.

High above us street noises came through a broken window pane and I heard a big motorbike’s rowdy blatter. Those windows faced McKillop Street and nearby there was a popular bike shop. We were used to the big choppers starting up and then the noisy blattering as they came past our place. Our place: Kitty and me and dead Milo in a big old factory, no power, no water, no anything.

‘Don’t worry Kit,’ I said at last, ‘we got the best thing that anyone could wish for; we got each other and nothing else matters.’

But it hardly soothed her; she just kept on sobbing against my shoulder as though the only thing decent in her life had suddenly been taken away.

‘You still got me,’ I added, though I wasn’t sure about the compensation.

After a while we went into the Office to figure things out.

‘We’ll have to go to the cops,’ I said.

Kitty sat silently and stared at the floor.

‘We’ve got to let them know, Kit.’

‘No we don’t.’ She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. ‘What about what Milo said? What about the promise we made?’

‘We didn’t make a promise.’

‘Yes we did. I did,’ she said.

She stood up and I found myself following her back to Milo’s room. She just went over and started getting him out of his coat. Reluctantly, I helped her. I was so scared my knees shook. He was skinnier than I imagined and we easily rolled him onto his blanket. Without a word we wrapped him up and tied it off with his own belt. Then, in the weak light coming through the window, we both stood and faced each other.

‘You take the heavy end,’ she said in a soft voice.

I couldn’t touch him. Instead, I held fast to the blanket and we dragged him to the cellar door. Kitty went down first and took his weight as he slid down the stairs. We dragged him to the trapdoor.

‘We come back tonight, Jack. And we do what Milo said.’

I was happy to get out of that dead dark cellar and hoped that by nightfall Kitty would have changed her mind. But sometime before dawn she shook me awake and I found myself again standing in the complete blackness of the cellar with Milo’s body somewhere before us. Out of the void I heard Kitty say that I’d have to heft his weight up the steps and into the outside world.

‘Can’t we call the cops?’ I whispered, staring blankly into the dark.

‘We can do it,’ Kit said. ‘Don’t give up.’ I heard her near the trapdoor and when she lifted it a trace of weak light fell on the bundle.

I took a deep breath and stepped forward. I was hardly a robust boy; skinny legs and bony chest, but I was ready to give it a go. I lifted the lump of him and a long throaty sigh burst from his body. It muffled horribly under the blanket and I never felt so frightened in my life. His slumped body felt heavy and human and his limbs shifted stiffly as though he was still alive. I let out a groan of my own and shoved him up and out and when he was finally on the ground I jumped back, hyperventilating.

‘The blanket,’ I said, ‘it’s all wet!’

Kitty drew close to the long bundle.

‘That’s normal,’ she said, ‘that’s what happens.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just know, Jack.’

‘Well what now?’ My voice was high and panicky.

Kitty hesitated.

‘We have to take him,’ she said flatly.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t! Not now.’

She looked briefly at me and even in the dark I felt her steely blue eyes.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I can do it now. I’ll take him.’

‘No!’ I walked around and took deep breaths. ‘I can do it.’

Kitty let me gather my nerve.

‘You take that end,’ she said.

I could barely touch him, my hands shook so much. I closed my eyes and grabbed the bundle. It could be a sack of potatoes, I told myself. And with Kitty on the other end, at 4 a.m. while the city was all closed down, we got him under the fence and began to stagger off down the street. Whenever a car came by we just sat right down on the footpath. Then I’d steel myself again, lift him up and off we’d go. And in this way we finally got him all the way to York Street.

There we took Milo’s old belt off the bundle, tied it around the metal grid and pulled it up. We were both out of breath and dizzy with the trauma of it. Then, without ceremony, we pushed him into the culvert and I heard the thump as he hit the bottom. We put the grid back and dropped his belt through the grate. Then Kitty put her arm around me and, side-by-side, we went down to the toilets to clean up.