The Styx. Patricia Holland

shirts, ripped denim shorts and bare feet. The whole cast sang the closing pirate song and it was obviously a huge hit with everyone’s parents.

      I looked around for my father, desperate to see him, drunk even, flirting even, asleep even, but of course he wasn’t there. Everyone’s came except mine—mine didn’t come.

      Rememory 29

      Summer in Central Queensland burns Satan. This morning the sun had risen early looking for victims.

      The school is huge on parent involvement—especially the Christmas concert. Many parents have to take time off work to be there. Everyone’s parents wrap a Christmas gift for Santa to hand out. Everyone’s, except mine.

      I remember that “make ’em walk the plank” school concert year, when it came to the present handing-out, Santa (our principal, Mr Stephens) said to Santa’s helper (my teacher, Mrs Stephens), “Oh he must have forgotten again, have we got the spare?”

      Everyone was all happy and excited. It was stinkin’ hot. I’ve already said that, haven’t I? The kids changed into bathers and ate cheerios—mini sausages—or little boys’ dicks, LBDs, as the kids called them. “LBDs, LBDs!” they were yelling, poking cheerios at each other (at crotch level when they were sure no adults were watching) while they were running around under sprinklers squealing and cackling. Sharon was mooning over someone’s ringer brother, and everyone else was too busy with their own families to notice me.

      Still in my chair, still dressed as a pirate, my black eye-patch had slipped down the left-hand side of my face, the top digging into my eye socket. The flies are super thirsty when it’s hot, and swarmed in on the juice from my nose, making it hard for me to breathe without sucking them in. I was really thirsty too, super desperately thirsty. It was forty-two degrees Celsius and the sun had found me still tied in my ancient wheelchair, and I was weeping, hungry, parked on the outskirts of the throng, sitting on a steaming pile of splodgy excrement that stung the sores that were already raw; they were weeping too.

      It’s a wonder someone hadn’t noticed the smell.

      Rememory 30

      My father didn’t come to the school concert because he was away “on business” climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He was a triple diamond in Amway, and told everyone he helped house the poor.

      He bought old, really cheap, houses, did them up using cheap backpacker labour, and flogged them off to the lower end of the housing market. Some, about ten I think, he’s kept and rents out to “help house the poor people” on a permanent basis. He ups the rent a few weeks into the “lease”—he writes his own—and as he is so nice and apologetic about it, and they can’t afford to move after just having the expense of the bond and moving in, they cop it every time.

      He has a way with people—especially the poor saps who are not real bright and not real educated. They seem to love him. They seem flattered that such a golden prince would be their “mate”.

      I’m not sure about the whole Amway thing, but he tells everyone it’s a “gold mine”, and plays “motivational” videos to anyone too stupid to walk away. All his friends, even the creepy cronies’ wives, are in Amway.

      He often travels overseas—about six or seven times a year. He’s been hiking in Japan “on business”, skiing in France and Switzerland “on business”, kayaking down some famous rapids somewhere “on business”.

      He came back all fired up with another new scheme and eager to get together with his cronies—now promoted to his “business partners”. They turned up a few days later and stayed. They were all very chummy, obviously in full bonding mode, and hung around in the bar laughing, drinking, smoking the night away.

      Chapter 6

      Rememory 31

      Today the sea simply doesn’t exist.

      School holidays are lonely, but so are Sunday mornings. It hurts to tell you how it feels waking up to my father’s hangover. The hours of waiting for his liver to process last night’s alcohol. Then finally when the heat sweats him awake, his stinkin’ breath splutters all over me, alone in my cot, alone in the house. No one wants to revisit that. But sustained hate is well fed.

      Rememory 32

      I haven’t seen the sea for three days. My father has been away and Sharon diligently pops into my room three times each day to change my nappy, takes me to the kitchen to eat and drink, then puts me back in my cot in-between. Not even the delights of 90210 video reruns to pass the time. I feel I have missed so much.

      This morning my father is expected back, so I’m verandah-ing at last, and the sky is pink, impossibly merging to blue, then falling behind an opaque and corrugated grey-green sea. Despite today’s incandescence, foreboding breaths of wind float through.

      When he told my mother she was dead to him, my mother didn’t fight. Not enough. Every night I fight for her. But it counts as little in my dreams as it did for her. Perhaps it wasn’t love or courage she lacked, merely a sense of self. Away from me, she shrank, withered, and was no more. He must have known how little fight she would have against him. He was grooming her for the end. The judgement of a person is by their treatment of the fragile and vulnerable. Some so strong, so large, are capable of acts so delicate, so humane, so humble. Some so greedy, so drowned in self, are capable of enjoying, crushing even—especially—the most delicate and vulnerable.

      My mother told me of a man two metres high, weighing one hundred and forty kilograms, hard muscle encasing an invisible neck, who refused to swat a fly on the windscreen. His passenger wanted to squish the fly, but the man said, “No.”

      He said, “Wait,” and stopped the car.

      Two giant overstuffed fingers moved slowly, gently, closer parallel to the fly, mesmerising not just the fly, then closed on one wing drawing it safely to freedom.

      “This man was Wuku,” my mother said.

      Rememory 33

      The sea’s blown up. Swamp green with white caps. The islands are withdrawing, sinking.

      I remember when he sold her books. It was about six months after she left and a definitive action of a mean mind. The books were all I had of my great-grandfather who was nicknamed “Shakespeare” by the local grazier William Northampton.

      “These men were both your great-grandfathers,” my mother told me.

      Every night when she put me to bed, my mother told me stories about her past—our past. She often repeated the stories, but I was never sick of them, not like 90210 re-runs.

      My mother said Northampton settled Styx River Station in the late 1800s when he ventured north from Brisbane in search of adventure and the rumoured “promised land”.

      “Rumour had it that there were extensive holdings of lush pasture and abundant water gushing from the earth,” she told me.

      “The grass was always green and the water, that appeared like magic whenever needed, held healing and other magical properties. The rumours said no white man would ever be able to take these lands, as all who tried had perished—disappeared without trace.”

      “They were describing The Great Basalt Wall,” my mother said. “It was known as The Wall to locals, and had magnetic properties that rendered all normal senses of direction useless. The diatomaceous earth, with underground water springing up seemingly at every clump of trees, earned its ‘magic’ tag by offering year-round livestock fat­tening opportunities regardless of drought conditions elsewhere. This land was a veritable nirvana, an actual Promised Land,” she said.

      “Rumour has it that Northampton listened to the rumours and, unlike most