Dreaming of Amelia Read online

  I brought the shadow home.

  WEEK 7

  This week I remember stopping.

  I mean, I got tired.

  Went to school but not to any more parties. Took a break from schoolwork. Stayed home and watched my dad. (He was working from home this week.)

  I watched him through windows. Watched him mow the lawn. Give the neighbour’s car a jump-start. Peel some old, wet junk mail from the bottom of the mailbox.

  I watched him through doors. Frying garlic in the kitchen. Hunting down a tin of tennis balls from the closet. Carrying a cardboard box.

  He looked fine.

  I mean, he looked bored as hell mowing the lawn, but he joked around with the neighbour about jumper cables. Sang to himself while he cooked dinner. Told me a long and complicated story about that cardboard box. Something to do with a mistake at work and how Dad was going to fix it. It made him laugh his arse off: the mistake was not serious, but funny, apparently. I didn’t really listen. I was watching him.

  And, like I said, he looked fine.

  Except for the shadow.

  Even when he laughed, he was in shadow. Like a film where the lighting has gone wrong. You can’t make out the characters’ features.

  Or was I imagining that? Because of my obsession with black holes?

  That’s what I couldn’t figure out.

  So there I was, watching him carry that cardboard box — he’d stopped and was framed by the study door, the box under one arm (he’s a big guy, my dad) — and he’s telling his dumb-arse story about work while I squint my eyes to see his features — and a memory flashed into my mind.

  Dad carrying boxes, three years ago.

  See, he helped Mum when she moved out. He was telling stories then, too, laughing at himself, taking heavy boxes right out of her arms so she wouldn’t hurt her back. I remember Mum was so relieved. She stepped onto the street to take a call from her boyfriend and I heard her say, ‘It’s going much better than I thought. He’s fine.’

  She’s supposed to be the smart one in the family.

  To me it was clear as day that this was just Dad’s strategy. He was thinking, if I stay sweet and funny, even while she leaves me, if I help her carry boxes, it’s dead certain that she’ll change her mind. How could she leave a guy as great as that?

  That’s what he was thinking.

  Right up to the moment when he pressed down on the boot of her car, testing it to make sure it was closed — right up to that moment, he thought she’d change her mind.

  But I guess Mum must have missed that.

  She drove away smiling in a sad, apologetic way, but smiling.

  We stood on the kerb and I looked at Dad’s face and for as long as I live, I never want to see an expression like that again.

  Anyhow, back to the present, and Dad had finished his funny story about work and was waiting for my laugh. I gave it my best shot. He went into the study, still chuckling himself, and I looked over at a print of purple flowers on the living room wall.

  It belongs to my mum. (She’s into purple.) She left it behind when she moved out that day.

  In fact, she left a lot of stuff behind. Some of her favourite novels are lined up on our bookshelf. Humorous(ish) coffee mugs. Her CD collection (including a couple of great compilations that I made for her myself).

  In the months after she left, I think it made Dad happy, noticing these things around the house. It meant that this was only temporary. She wouldn’t have left those things behind for good. They were her home, we were her home, these things were her warm, woolly slippers. She’d be back any day and slip back into them.

  But the months went by and she didn’t come back and put the slippers on.

  I guess she didn’t need them. Brisbane is warm. (Ha ha.)

  She didn’t even ask us for her things. And that was a different kind of shock. Turned out she really must have wanted to escape. She’d sacrifice all that just to get away?

  Dad and I didn’t talk about it though.

  Just walked around amongst her things.

  If you look at my house closely, even today, she’s everywhere. Family photographs on the sideboard. Magnet on the fridge listing the qualities of Capricorns (that’s her star sign). The giant wooden ‘M’ with hooks for keys that hangs in our front hallway (her name is Megan). She’s even on our computer — a folder in the Inbox called ‘Meg’.

  It’s like the past is still here. We live in it.

  Which reminds me:

  Black Holes

  They make time collapse. The faster you run towards the exit, the further you get from it. So your future falls back into your past. It’s a curving of time.

  (I don’t get it either. Ask a science nerd.)

  See, it’s linked again. My dad’s shoulders curving as he watches television — time curving inward, our future collapsing right into our past. It’s all here in our house at the same time — all in this moment — our lives right now; our lives as a family with Mum; there’s even the life of an Irish convict named Tom. It’s all here, all at the same time.

  Mum is everywhere. She’s absent but she’s present. She’s a ghost in a way.

  A presence that hasn’t crossed over — an absent presence.

  She’s a shadow.

  You know what? She’s the black hole.

  WEEK 8

  Oh yeah, this week, on the Monday night, Dad goes on the blind date with Roberto’s friend. He brings her back home for the night.

  This is not the first woman he’s been with since Mum or anything. There’s been quite a few. They all seem like nice, funny, sad, kind women to me. But the same thing always happens.

  He forgets their names.

  Seriously.

  I mean, not in front of them, but later in the day. I ask what he thinks and he never remembers their names.

  The other thing is, he’s weird.

  I have breakfast with the two of them on Tuesday morning, and I watch him talking to this woman. He talks like a freakin’ maniac. He talks about himself, about work, about me, about goldfish, flying foxes, sugar cubes. Anything.

  I sit still. I sit there staring straight at him, thinking, Who is this freak in my kitchen?

  Then, when the woman finally gets a chance to talk herself, for a moment or two, he looks down at the table, seems like he’s concentrating hard, says, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ then right away he gets agitated. Picks up the milk, nearly drops it, puts it back down. His ‘yeah, yeahs’ keep coming but at all the wrong places, cutting right through her sentences. He looks up, his eyes flicker around the room. He picks up the cereal bowl, looks underneath it like he’s checking where it was made. Next thing he’s tipping piles of sugar onto the table, taking out his credit card and using it to split up the sugar.

  I got out of there as soon as I could.

  Left the poor blind date sitting at the table watching him. As I reached the front door I heard her ask quite clearly, ‘Did you do a lot of drugs growing up?’

  I don’t think it was just the way he was cutting up the sugar like cocaine. It was the fact that he acts like his brains are fried.

  I’ve said to him in the past, I’ve said, ‘Dad, you just have to listen. Women like you to listen to them.’

  And he’s said to me, ‘Tobes, you’re absolutely right.’

  But then he’s exactly the same.

  The funny thing is, he doesn’t seem to need my advice. The women always like him anyway.

  He’s a big guy, like I said, and I get the impression that a certain kind of older woman likes a big guy. Maybe they think he’s a bear that’s going to keep them warm?

  (I’m kind of a big guy myself, but girls my age are not as turned on by this.)

  (At least I know they’ll like me when I’m 40.)

  Fact is, the women give him their number, leave little notes with drawings of flowers, say they hope he’ll call. He never does.

  Still, it looked for a moment like things might end up different with this on
e.

  Tuesday night, Dad and I are watching TV and an ad comes on for one of those antiperspirants that make women tear your clothes off.

  ‘You reckon that really works?’ Dad says.

  I thought he was kidding around.

  Wednesday night, he says, ‘You think I should dye my hair to cover up the grey?’

  Once again, I thought he was having a laugh.

  Thursday, he came home from the chemist’s with the antiperspirant in one hand and black hair dye in the other.

  I kid you not.

  He held them both out to me. ‘Whaddya say, Tobes, want to help me dye my hair?’

  I felt bad. I would have stopped him wasting his cash if I’d realised he was serious.

  Then late Thursday night he shut himself in his study with his phone and his new black hair. Couldn’t hear what he was saying, just some low-voice talk and laughing.

  That made my night. Thinking, finally my dad’s found love! He’s asking that blind date out again!

  Woke up happy Friday morning.

  School was a riot that day. You remember I mentioned a friend who said there was a ghost in the Art Rooms, but nobody believed her? Well, over the last few weeks, she’d been bringing them around. Now it was like everyone believed. Or was having fun pretending to.

  And that day, I guess the ghost went wild. Something about a photo of the ghost. Anyhow, it was like someone had picked up a huge bag of popcorn, opened it, tipped it up and started shaking hard. That’s how fast the ghost sightings were coming. Everywhere I turned, people were running by with pale faces, or were telling breathless stories, or gasping. There was a lot of laughing. And a funny event at lunchtime with a party, and somebody’s hair catching fire for a moment.

  It was great.

  Got home in a super mood. Walked in the front door.

  And first thing I heard was Dad’s voice on the phone sounding like low and distant thunder.

  ‘The fact is,’ I heard him say, thunder closer now, ‘he’s your son. You —’

  He stopped — silence — then a kinder tone, ‘I guess he didn’t know so it won’t —’ paused, laughed, ‘Yeah, like that’s going to happen,’ laughed again, ‘Take care,’ and hung up the phone.

  Swung around and saw me.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to hear that,’ he said.

  It turned out that Mum had been planning to fly down to surprise me tonight. Dad had kept it secret from me. He’d phoned her last night to finalise the details.

  So that’s who he was talking to on the phone last night, the low murmurs in the study — not the date at all, just Mum.

  Anyhow, Mum had just called to say she couldn’t come, she had to work.

  ‘She said she might make a late flight tonight,’ he said. ‘There’s one at midnight apparently.’

  ‘Yeah, like that’s going to happen,’ I said, kind of echoing how he’d said it on the phone — making fun of him at the same time as showing he was right.

  Mum would never stay up as late as midnight. She’s one of those people who turns into a pumpkin at ten. (Her words.)

  Have I mentioned this about black holes?

  Black Holes

  They’re impossible.

  I mean, think about it, they’re everything crammed into nothing, and they turn time upside down. So I’m pretty sure I’m being scientific when I say they’re impossible.

  As impossible as Mum getting a midnight flight.

  As impossible as Ireland getting out of England’s grasp; as impossible as England holding on.

  Or those Irish convicts escaping from their ships.

  Or Tom ever seeing his girlfriend again.

  As impossible as Tom’s story changing, now that it’s done.

  Or of me reaching back in time to warn him.

  As impossible as Dad getting Mum to come home by changing the colour of his hair.

  WEEK 9

  The final thing I’m going to say about black holes is:

  Black Holes

  Who knows?

  That’s also scientific.

  Cos you know what I get from my reading?

  Nobody actually knows what a black hole is or what it looks like or, you know, whether it’s bad-tempered or sweet. It’s all just guessing. Cos it turns out nobody’s been inside. I didn’t realise this at first. Doing all this reading about what happens to you when you go into a black hole and how you can’t escape and so on, and I’ve gotta say, in the back of my head, there was this little voice going, Hang on, something’s not right here.

  Eventually I realised what it was. If you can’t ever escape, how can you come back to tell us that you can’t escape? See what I mean?

  I thought maybe they took their mobile phones in with them, but, no.

  So, I thought, photographs? Those remote-control flying cameras.

  No again.

  If a black hole is so strong even light cannot escape, well, you know, total darkness.

  Black holes are technically invisible. Nobody can see them. Not even a camera.

  Not the smartest scientist in the world. (Not that scientists have great eyesight. I’m thinkin’: a lot of them wear glasses.)

  Even if you could get a camera inside, it’d go all warped and never get back out.

  The scientists even have a scientific name for this situation: information paradox. Also known as, we don’t have a freakin’ clue.

  Took me nine weeks of research about black holes before I realised this.

  And between us, it made me feel good. Kind of powerful.

  Cos we live in a world where most things are all tied up. Everything’s labelled and mapped. Nothing new to explore. Reading Tom’s letters, I almost got jealous at first — there he was, back in time, all excited about the brand-new world.

  It’s like the afterlife, like ghosts, or the future — could be something wonderful, or could be pure hell. Either way, it’s kind of fantastic that we don’t know.

  Makes me think of all those kids at school getting high on the idea of a ghost in the Art Rooms. Laughing because they know it isn’t true, but also thinking: Well, who knows? You could see that in their eyes, that secret hope.

  Ghosts could be real. We could have one at our school.

  It’s the horror and the beauty of the things that we don’t know.

  Until they pin it down, I could be right about black holes. Not likely, I know, but my guess could be better than a scientist’s guess.

  There could be dinosaurs or dragons. Those stars that disappear inside black holes, they might take on new personalities. Drive around in sports cars. Eat watermelon. Or teleport and turn into alligators, or newsprint, or water droplets. Or into the spark of understanding between a boy and a girl in a graveyard at 3 am. The girl’s hair blowing sideways, eyes confused.

  WEEK 10

  According to the school’s online calendar, this week (the last week of term) there was a meeting of the KL Mason Patterson trust fund Committee and a joint Ashbury-Brookfield Art Exhibition.

  I know nothing about the art exhibition, but my dad is on the trust fund committee. He’s one of the two parent reps.

  Roberto Garcia got him to join.

  How?

  See my most recent definition of black holes, a coupla pages back.

  Anyhow, Thursday night, last week of term, Dad had to go to a committee meeting.

  He was heading out into the cold, dark night and I was kicking back with the TV remote, when it occurred to me I should get back to work. You know, schoolwork. What with having taken a personal break the last couple of weeks. And there being only one more day before the school gave us an official break of its own. And this being the HSC year. And my future being on the line, etc, etc.

  ‘Dad,’ I go.

  And I head out into the night by his side.

  Dad’s committee meets in the Art Rooms, and that’s where our school has its D&T facilities now. Seemed to me, a little woodwork might be a nice, smooth way to ease myself back in
to the scholarly life.

  So I headed left and Dad headed up the stairs. I took a couple of corners, let myself into a dim, empty, warm room, and breathed it in.

  No need for me to go on here about the smell of wood and how it soothes my soul like a long, slow hug, or how working with wood takes up a weirdly big piece of my heart. No need to tell stories of how Dad first taught me how to turn wood when I was seven (I made a toilet-roll holder). Or how we worked together in his shed for years until I got so much better than him that he said, ‘The shed’s yours.’

  No need for tales of Toby the carpenter here.

  You get it, right?

  I got straight to work on my cabinet. The cabinet’s my major design project this year. Not so flash as the pool table last year — now a key feature in the lives of me and Dad (and Roberto Garcia, of course) — but I want this to be beautiful. Hauntingly beautiful. I don’t know if I’ll be able to pull it off; it’s just what I’m hoping.

  I got to work doing something quiet. No need to tell you how I disappear while I’m working, right? Just, that I do. Couple of hours passed. It must have been almost 11, and I hadn’t even heard my own thoughts.

  So the scream was like a fire hose turned onto a fast-asleep face.

  It was a long, loud, high-pitched, full-throttle scream.

  Followed by a deep, black silence.

  I had no idea where the scream had come from. Felt like somewhere just beneath my feet. Then I realised it had come from down the hall.

  I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t move for a few moments. Heart was like a hyperactive jackhammer.

  And the jackhammer kept on digging up streets as I walked to the door, opened it and leaned out.

  The corridor was empty. Building silent.

  I remembered that the drama theatre is two doors down the corridor.

  They’ve been practising for the Ashbury-Brookfield production.

  I think the theatre’s got good insulation but that scream was loud enough to break sound barriers.