At 40, he’d never grown up.
His eyes showed a lack of depth but an abundance of boyish humour. He was a child endlessly wandering a man’s body. For five years he kept us in our own private never land; a place where the fineries were packed bongs and half cigarettes. When the stars disappeared he never forgot to give us a bedtime kiss and a glass of coke to soak our lungs in. However he’d never learnt the difference between love and control. He would often paint pictures in our heads of being six years old and waiting in the car outside the train station. Sipping at a bottle of lemonade he’d watched as his father crippled a dozen men with his bare fists; this was the greatness he wanted to bestow upon us.
Of course he was unemployed, another sucker of the bad gene pool. He had barely attended school and his ultimately uneducated brain could rarely decipher between right and wrong. Instead he spent his days quenching his thirst with the almighty dole. The Centrelink payment rate was fortnightly; 12 days out of this cycle he was broke, the other 2 he was drunk. He’d wash down a case of rum with a bottle of whiskey and stab himself in the chest, hack up his biceps and pass out, endlessly hanging stars in a hallway of disaster.
His ex wife had had a romantic affliction with the poker machines and was forever seated on her favourite stool, pressing away her meagre pay check. They had slept in separate bedrooms like brother and sister and had spoke only sour words. Whenever war started there had only been the thrashing of arms and legs, hair and walls and blood and teeth and gnarling twisting words of misguided love. He had destroyed her frequently. After he’d finished he would make a cup of cordial and sit outside smoking his cigarettes. When she finally left him for another man he got drunk and tracked them down. Dancing on their bleeding bodies he’d shed a few tears for the demise of their marriage, and then proceeded home.
After she left he taught us to fly. Sitting on his motorbike, arms around his waist, he would take us on the most amazing journeys. We would buzz down the river bank with the locusts in our hair, watching the silhouetted trees against the pink sky. Wheels drowning in mud we would crush everything in our path; in those moments our lives were endless. As we grew up, he grew sadder and wearier. He was lost in his own bleak sunlight. He still fought away the spiders at night and ran us to the store when we needed cigarettes, still knew how to make us laugh, the only difference was he didn’t laugh himself.
One weekend away was all it took. He said he wanted to stay home and work on his car. I love you and have fun and off we went. We’d washed away our sins in the ocean, ate fish and chips on the sand, smoked in the dunes. Finally we sore a life worth living. When we’d returned to the rusty old house, seashell tributes around our necks, we’d found him in the shed with a screwdriver through his guts.
His eyes showed a depth we’d never seen before.
