MuM DIDN'T TAKE well to Dad smoking in

the house. He would sneak a cheeky one,

as he used to say, in the empty chicken

shed out back. You could always smell it

on him, noxious like gum and ammonia.

To keep it a secret, he bribed me with

a Cabbage Patch Kid that had a plastic

window on its belly where you could

put a four-by-six photo. The one I put

in there was of the two of us, taken on

our holiday to Lake Conjola the January

before I started primary school. Dad had

a thick, dark moustache and pink short

shorts, fluorescent even in oversaturated

Kodachrome. I was wearing an olive

green Gumby trackie jumper. Dad was

holding a lifeless luderick and the fishing

line that had seduced it to an air-induced

asphyxiation.

'The human body is more resilient

than we give it credit for.' That's what Dad

would say. VB was his preferred tinny.

After a night on the cans he slept heavy and

kept everyone else awake with his apnoea.

It was at the time my body was becoming

slick and vigorous that Dad started

getting sick. We had watched Hitchcock's

The Birds the night before he had to go to

hospital with a fever and abdominal pain.

When I did find sleep between tears and

anxious procrastination, I dreamt that

night-drenched crows were eating my

dad's insides through tiny holes in his flesh.

VANADIS

BY MATT YOUNG

When I was too young to comprehend

its very concept, Dad took me to the gun

placements underneath Hill 60 to look

at nothing. There had once been pipes

with nozzles six inches wide that pointed

out at the ocean, at nothing, waiting for

warships that never came. As Dad led me

down through the shrub to the abandoned

concrete bunker, hang-gliders, maybe

three, exploiting the ocean winds, were

taking off from the lookout above. The

bunker was decaying, dry with graffiti.

'This is where the nation's sons protected

Australia,' Dad said, and I believed

him. Off the coast there was a freighter,

expectant with coal, nursed close between

Five Islands and the horizon. I imagined

a gun battery pirouetting on its axis and

unloading deposits of shrapnel and fire

upon the freighter, its hull crumbling

like a soggy Milk Arrowroot. The hang­

gliders, overhead now, with their gaudy

kites floating on the sounds that mpved

the ocean, also entered themselves into my

fantasy. Their sails pleating as they dived,

clutching the crew from the splintering

ship and carrying them into the heavens.

As I grew older, I understood more, knew

less, and the world stopped being magical.

Since before I can remember Dad

worked at the Cintec plant, making the

sulphuric acid used in the production of

fertiliser, and he would come home with

hands stained yellow like brass. It was

the yellow on those hands that made the

mortgage repayments, clothed and fed

me, paid for Mum's new VN Commodore

when the Kingswood carked it. It was also

those same yellow hands that demanded

compensation in human life. Dad's tests

came back as leukaemia. One time, when

he wasn't in Sydney for one of his four­

day stints of VAMP regimen, I caught

him sneaking a cheeky one. I tore him to

shreds. I tore him to shreds and I cried and

I promised him I wouldn't tell Mum. By

then, the jaundice in his hands had spread

to his face.

Kirk Trajkovski was my first kiss.

It was at the bench on top of Hill 60.

Someone's house party on Military

Road, I can't remember whose, had been

broken up by coppers just after midnight.

A residual group had wandered around

to Fisherman's Beach and, their blood

infected with witchcraft and hormones,

had gone skinny dipping, bodies smooth

and marble white -the girls' still sated with

baby fat, the boys' fighting erections. The

water, black and cold against the world.

We broke off. My hair and bra were heavy

with seawater. The stacks bellowed, silent,

the smoke booming passively like it was

spurting from cracks in the ocean floor. I

watched the flames from the steelworks

interminably blossom and furl behind