Rube reminds me of something as we stand there by the street, making sure we don’t let him see us.

He says, ‘Remember when we was kids?’

‘Were kids.’

‘Shut up, will y’?’

‘Okay.’

We walk to a trashed, scabby shop on Elizabeth Street that closed down years ago. Rube continues to talk. It’s grey sky again, with blue holes shot through the cloud-blankets. We sit, against a wall, under a bolted-up window.

Rube says, ‘I remember when we were younger and Dad built a new fence, because the old one was collapsing. I was about ten and you were nine, and the old man was out in the yard, from first light to sunset.’ Rube brings his knees up to his throat. His jeans cushion his chin and the bullet holes in the sky widen. I look through them, at what Rube speaks of.

I remember that time quite clearly — how at the end of a day, when sun was melting back into horizon, Dad turned to us with some nails in his hand and said, ‘Fellas, these nails here are magic. They’re magic nails.’ And the next day, we woke to the sound of a pounding hammer and we believed it. We believed those nails were magic, and maybe they still are now, because they take us back, to that sound. That pounding sound. They take us back to our father as he was: a vision of tall, bent-over strength, with a tough, hard smile and wire-curly hair. There was the slight stoop of his shoulders and his dirty shirt. Eyes of height … There was a contentment to him — an air of control, of all-rightness that sat down and hammered in the wake of a tangerine sky, or in that gradual twilight of slight rain, when water fell like tiny splinters from the clouds. He was our father then, not a human.

‘Now he’s,’ I answer Rube, ‘just too real, y’ know?’ Not much else to say when you’ve just seen the man knock on doors.

Real.

Reel from it.

Half a man, but.

Still human.

‘The bastard,’ Rube laughs, and I laugh with him, as it seems like the only logical thing to do. ‘We’re gonna cop a hidin’ for this at school, ay.’

‘You’re right.’

You must understand that we know he’s doing his door-knocking in our own district, which means people in school are getting closer and closer to whipping us with remarks. They’ll find out all right, and Rube and I will go down heavily. It’s just the way it is.

Dad, doors, shame, and in the meantime, Sarah has been out late again.

Three nights.

Three drunken hazes.

Two throw-ups.

Then it happens.

At school.

‘Hey Wolfe. Wolfe!’

‘What?’

‘Your old man came knockin’ at our door on the weekend, lookin’ for work. Me mum told him he’s too useless to even let him near our pipes.’

Rube laughs.