When the blood was gone, I took the scissors from the shelf in the wash-house, elegant ones with courting swans or herons moulded into the handles, an artefact from his life before. Blunt now, but sufficient. I snipped his hair until it was neat again. As I concentrated on his forehead, his eyes wandered out past me, somewhere in the indeterminate distance, pupils scrolling left and right to follow sounds.

Still he did not speak. I worked the scissors around the patches where the skin of his scalp was rippled and stretched taut. The places where it was melted. I knew them all. The hair grew sparsely over these places. Back when he cared, he would comb it over them. He winced once or twice when the blades caught in the knots. A good sign, I thought.

There was no razor to shave his bestubbled chin but I used a corner of the cloth to get the muck out of his ears. The dog began to make sounds again and I filled a bowl with water for her, took a knife, sliced open one of the fish and placed it within her reach. She leapt upon it and devoured it without regard for the bones.

I dressed him in clean clothes and found the pit in the clearing behind the house he’d been using for his waste: I threw in the bottles, the crates that held them, the gristle of old meals and the broken and filthy castoffs that littered the place.

The dog was barking again. I did not remember her being so needy.

He was clean now; the place was neat. I laughed to think it was neater than mine. Evening was coming down outside, a raucous crowd of birds and the soft padding of wallabies. I cooked the rest of the fishes, gave another to the dog and served plates for my father and me. But when I went to the armchair, I found he had fallen asleep. I took his cheeks in my palms and kissed his forehead, then heaved him out of the chair and onto the hessian of his cot.

And then I walked outside and threw every single bottle of his bloody rum at a tree.

~

It was while I was doing so that the dog started up again: urgently this time. I gave the last bottle fair aim and threw it so it tumbled forward in flight. It hit the trunk of the big gum dead centre and glass shattered brilliant in the late forest light.