Free Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths Page A

night the boy sees different coloured lights and people movingand dancing through those lights and he hears loud laughter and shouting and music and it looks all exuberantly abandoned and celebratory and suggestive of something good and bright about humanity. One day, he thinks. One day. There are things to look forward to in this life and this world. Plus, one afternoon, they go shopping in the Argyle Centre in the city by the bridge and they go to a bar and the boy wants a shandy but the barman has no more than a splash of lemonade left so the boy drinks a pint of more-or-less undiluted lager which is enough to get him drunk. Colours glow brighter and everything spins. The skin on the faces of the adults around him looks endlessly fascinating and their words reel with mystery and the hilarity and absurdity that underlies everything makes itself known and available. My God, thinks the boy, here is something extremely special. This stuff, this drink, this is something that is going to help him for the rest of his life. This is a gift from God. This is magical. This drink is a beautiful and secretive potion. The world trembles and hums in a curious pale blue light.
    And, even through the sickness and sweating that come on later that night, still these words: This is truly magical.
    They go to the Botanic Gardens and gaze in wonder at the huge orb-web spiders suspended between branches. They go to Coogee Beach. Bondi Beach too, where they witness large rats scampering through the litter on the sand of an evening and where they eat at the Double Bay Steak House after which, in the dad’s words, they all ‘get the wild shites’. On Coogee Beach the boy swims in the sea and, back on the sand, is surrounded by sea-wasps; giant jelly blue-bottles, they pop and hiss and spit and slither towards him with malevolent intent. He panics and leaps across them and runs to his mother. AtBotany Bay, John straps himself into a hang-glider, his first attempt at the activity, and is caught by a sudden gust and sent tumbling sideways to the bottom of the hill and cut and bruised and battered. The boy’s eyes have that imprinted on them – the rolling triangle of canvas and the flailing shadowy limbs seen through it like a demented puppet play. Recovering from the accident that night, on deckchairs outside, John sips at his restorative tea and suddenly coughs and splutters and gags. A moth the size of a small bird had drowned in his mug.
    Taronga Park Zoo. The Court House, Lady Macquarie’s Chair. Parakeets and cockatoos and galas. Watson’s Bay. At the Opera House, the children sit on top of the steps while their mother takes a picture, the building soaring, vast white clam shell, behind them.
    –You’re sitting too far apart, the mother says. –Get closer together.
    They shuffle closer and squash themselves together like giggling sardines in a tin.
    –No. Move further apart.
    They do. Ten metres between them now. They find this very funny.
    –You’re going from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mum says, but takes the photograph anyway, and the picture will show them separated by several yards of space and tiny before the cliff-face sail of the building behind them and big beaming pleased grins on each of their faces.
    Inside the Opera House is a huge painting depicting the hallucinations of a drowning man. Vivid squiggles and static starbursts, twisted faces, strange animals and birds on a deep purple background. It captivates the boy. He was born with a caul on his head. He is immune from drowning. These areimages which he will never see and they’re not too dissimilar from what happened in his head when he was drunk and they’re not too dissimilar from what he saw of the partying people when he looked through the window of the flat in Vaucluse. Life can be this, that, way, even at the moment of its ending. Wondrous and colourful and immensely exciting. Thrilling and holy, even at the moment of its ending. One day the whole