OR TREAT

‘Dad, Dad, Dad. Quick. I need some shaving foam’

– Shaving foam? What for?

‘Oh come on, quick Dad. Its Halloween’

– Halloween? Since when do we do Halloween?

‘Come on, Dad. hurry up’

– What’s the magic word?

‘Please please please please please oh please’

This last ‘Please’ drawn out into the long squeal of someone who needs to go to the bathroom

Urgently

And sounding more like

‘Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeezzz’

– Actually, it is Abracadabra.

‘Dad’.

When Zac says ‘Dad’ like that, you have to get serious.

– It’s in the bathroom cabinet, along with…….

‘Thanks, Dad’

– Hey. Hold on a Sec. What’s shaving foam for?

‘No more Secs, Dad. Gotta go. David Vered’s Dad’s coming’

And he’s gone.

Did he just say ‘no more sex’?

I try to go back to reading, but find myself trying to form a mental picture of David Vered and then, when that fails, trying to remember if I know what his Dad looks like.

That’s it. I can’t read.

I put the book down on the sofa next to me and then I put my reading glasses on top of the book. Halloween? Since when do we do Halloween in Australia? And what is Halloween anyway? Isn’t it when kids dress up in spooky costumes and go out at night looking to get the bags that they carry filled with chocolates and sweets and marshmallows and toys? Isn’t it when evil people put razor blades into apples and muffins to scar the mouths and tongues of the kids who come round looking for treats?

How could Anne-Marie have agreed to this?

I get off the sofa and head out into the garden.

Anne-Marie is kneeling on a green rubber mat and there is dirt scattered over the paving stones. A tray of seedlings from the Arcadia Nursery wait patiently to be given their new homes in the flowerbed.

– Which one is David Vered?

Anne-Marie is used to being asked silly questions out of a clear blue sky. She wipes the back of a gloved hand over her forehead, and the brim of her straw hat tilts back to a cute angle.

‘He’s the wild one. You know, the one who got suspended for the rest of the term’

– Uh huh.

Seeing that nothing has really registered, she goes on

‘The little dark-haired one. The one you said has eyes like little black ball bearings’

– Oh him. What’s his dad like?

‘His dad? His dad is wilder than David. He has that greasy pompadour hairdo and always wears Hawaiian Shirts’

– I don’t think I’ve met him

‘Oh you would remember if you had’

– And you think its ok for Zac to be going off with them?

‘What? When?’

– Well, today. Now. For Halloween.

She pales and I realize that I have screwed up. Again.

Running through the house is a blur. The cats scatter. I manage not to crash into any furniture and make it out to the street without breaking anything.

Zac is still standing in front of the house

– Did you tell Mum that you were going out?

‘Course’, he says, looking up and down the street and shaking the can of foam.

– Well Mum doesn’t seem to know about it

It isn’t that Zac ignores what I am saying, he doesn’t hear what I have said

Noone could have heard

The roar is like the rattling blast of a gang of unmuffled Harleys and the monster car appears at the end of the road

It is a deep metallic purple and it is huge

It has a mouth at the front that looks like something carved into a pumpkin, but with teeth that have been chromed. It has fins that rise up at the back like the wake behind two jetskis.

It is so wide that it fills the street, almost touching the parked cars on either side. Like Halloween, this Land Barge would be at home in America.

The car has no roof. Maybe it is a convertible, maybe it simply never had a roof. Sloshing about like shrimps in a bucket there must be ten or twelve kids already in there.

The man at the wheel is wearing sunglasses that are so black that they censor his face like the black bar in a newsphoto. Slick hair, Hawaiian shirt, just like Anne-Marie said. The noise is ear-splitting. The man is waving Zac in and Zac vaults over the side.

He may not have meant for me to get in, but I clamber in too. The car is rolling. It hadn’t really stopped. I look back to the house and Anne-Marie is a picture framed in the doorway. She is a photo of a newlywed bride whose husband left for war on the day of the Wedding. She looks brave but forlorn. And so does the little seedling she is holding, except he doesn’t look half as brave. The photo and its frame get smaller as we rumble down the street.

When the picture is out of sight I turn to see where we are going but the windscreen is covered in spidery yellow strands of plastic. The driver is looking over the rim and steering with one hand on something that looks like a doorknob attached to the steering wheel. With the other he is setting fire to a cigarette with a device that he has pulled from a hole in the dashboard.

Mercifully the noise makes conversation impossible, because all I can think of to say is ‘Who the hell are you and what the fuck do you think you are doing?’.

I feel the icky goo being jetted onto the back of my head and when I turn to see which of the little angels I can thank for that, it jets into my eyes.

The yellow goo stings and the reflex makes me jerk my head back onto something sharp. Now I don’t know whether to hold the back of my head or wipe the stuff out of my eyes. I feel something that I haven’t felt for years. The warm trickle of blood seeping into my hair and the way it turns cold in the air.

I am blinded, in pain and my son and I have been kidnapped by a man with a car called Mogul or Nabob or ThunderChief who is either crazy or pushing his envelope on being an Extrovert.

The car stops rolling and the sound of the motor idling is only marginally quieter than the sound of it running. I can get my eyes open but there is still yellow sticky stuff in my eyelashes that interferes with what I can see. I can see that the boys have piled out of the car and are at the front door of a house. I look for the driver but he is not there. I shift over to the driver side to look for the ignition key and shut the damn thing down, but there is no ignition key. There is no ignition. There are lots of dials and knobs and buttons and levers, but nothing that says ‘On or ‘Off’.

The brick going through the window is what makes me look up at the house. The front garden has been torn up. One of the kids is hefting a garden gnome to take out another pane of glass. Zac is emptying my can of shaving foam into the letterbox in the door.

Little David, his black BB eyes shining, is waving the others back to the car. They cascade back towards me like bats flying out of a cave, but they run to the back of the car. I can’t see them because the lid of the trunk is up.

When I get back there the driver is handing out all kinds of stuff. There are hats and wigs and capes and pumpkins. There are greasy jars of makeup. There are crates of beer, bottles of vodka, a jerrycan which might have petrol in it. There’s an open box of what look like fireworks, some greasy rags, an M16 automatic rifle and, rolling around loose, some things that are either grenades with hair stuck to them or blackened shrunken heads with their mouths sewn shut.

When the driver slams the lid closed, there is only a moment to take in the monstrous brake lights that are mounted on the monstrous fins. They are like rearward facing missiles. They are a cross between an enormous red lipstick and a sign that says ‘Fuck you’ more than it says ‘Slow down because I am slowing down’.

But there is no slowing down. I have to run alongside and haul myself in over the door in a way that makes all the kids laugh. The car careens around a narrow corner into a street that was never intended for cars like this. The left front fender lops small peppercorn trees off at the knees. The driver touches the brakes and, as the car slows, the kids tumble out like paratroopers. This might be the moment to try and grab Zac and take him back home. I look at the driver to see if it might be possible to reason with him.

The dull crump of an explosion blows the glass out of every window in the house. The kids all pile back into the car and the tyres squeal and make smoke. The car scrapes along all the cars parked on that side of the road. Kids are lobbing stuff out of the car as another house goes up in flames.

It isn’t even dark yet. Those flames won’t be lighting up the night sky. Dusk still has to come before night falls and that isn’t likely to happen for a while.

I try to grab at the driver’s arm to and let him know that I want him to stop, but his sunglasses stare back at me and he smiles and offers me a cigarette.

I haven’t smoked in twelve years, but this one tastes great. You would have thought that I’d be coughing and spluttering all over the place but, dammit, it’s just like I had my last cigarette five minutes ago.

When I see that the kids are filling bottles with petrol and stuffing rags into the tops, I get rid of the cigarette faster than if Zac had caught me smoking. What the hell am I doing? There he is, his face blacked out in tiger stripes like a Commando, making Molotov cocktails with the rest of them. One of the little tykes is bundling sticks of dynamite with electrical tape.

Halloween Night is still young.

The growl of the car goes deeper as we climb uphill. The driver is still weaving slightly from side to side, but the parked cars keep us on track as we caroom from side to side. He climbs up and sits on the back of the seat. He steers with his foot. I signal to the kids to keep their arms and legs inside the car.

How safety conscious of me.

What a good Dad I am.

From up here at the top of the hill, we can see the whole of Eastern Sydney below us. On the other side is the mighty and majestic Pacific Ocean.

Pacific.

How did it ever get a name like that?

Over there are the palls of smoke rising from the second street that we hit.

Over there is the dull orange glow of the sun setting.

The driver lights up another cigarette with his last one. He flips the last one away and slides down into his seat and then a miracle, he shuts down the engine. I don’t see how he does it, but the noise stops.

We can talk.

Maybe after the ringing stops in our ears I can be heard.

He speaks. The driver speaks. I can see his mouth moving.

I say ‘What?’ and make body language that says ‘I can’t hear you’.

He makes body language that says ‘Nice here, innit?’

And then, with smoke curling out of his mouth, he says ‘Nice here, innit?’

And I can hear what he is saying.