Playing with fire - Page 3

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Bille Brown

THAT WINTER AFTER THE RACES AT THANGOOL, Custard Guts and Bull Features, the local constables, rounded us up and drove us to the crossing at Krombit to look at the smouldering wreck of the car that had crashed because it was speeding and there had been too much drink at the party at the dam. This is what happens to drink-drivers, how joy rides end. The car had flown briefly through the air and smashed and burnt. Ron and Denise and a couple of other no-hopers were in it.

When Ailsa heard, she ran down the road, and it took her other sons and a couple of big blokes to stop her. Then she began stamping her feet and made a noise like a cow. It was funny for a while, but so scary that we started to laugh and cry at the same time. In broad daylight.

His funeral was a Requiem Mass, kids were not allowed. I stayed at home, underneath the house; it was getting really hot again. It was cool and dark deep under the old house. We kept ice in an old copper and next to it a lowboy and mirror with cracks and missing shards. There I practised my pash, wobbling head, pursing lips singing an appropriately romantic orchestral score.

"What do you think you're doing?" It was Max delivering the ice. "Nothing much. I gotta stay under the house. Out of the sun. I burn." I am under the house. Ronny is burnt and buried and I am singing to myself.

None of this true and all it of is. There was a Ronny and a Wardy and a Denise and a Polar and Tony and Gus and Lindsay and Wally and Ross and Eileen and Ailsa and especially Jim and all the others I mentioned. What happened, happened, but not quite as well as a short story can lead you to believe. All memory is fiction and has different rules from life. ♦