The underside of a car loomed above me; it looked, up there on the hoist, like a stuck beetle seen from underneath. I made out a Volkswagen, its headlights half-shut eyes in the garage gloom. The office window, variegated with Castrol, Visco-Static, Penrite, and Marlboro stickers, opened on the apron where the sun was dropping bombs of heat. It made silhouettes of bowsers and humans and rendered the houses on the other side of the road colourless. Beyond the houses a faint line, an eye-shadow, of low distant hills held its midday trance. The garage attendant became a tall thin stooped cut-out of some dark animal pointing a gun at my unseen father, a sitting duck in the driver’s seat of his black cardboard car. Heat-driven waves of fuel vapour rose, refracting the Shell sign behind the attendant as he dutifully tap-tapped the nozzle on the car’s tank outlet. Every last drop. I slunk out into the swimming atmosphere and climbed onto the hot vinyl. We slid smoothly out of the Shell service station, and I looked back to where the blue Volkswagen was grinning from its lofty perch in the gloomy garage, like a bird with ill intentions.
*
That afternoon the room in which I sat drawing filled itself slowly with sun. The room, sealed by a door off the kitchen, and used for surreptitious telephone calls, looked west through a row of louvred windows, like those along the side of an old tram, towards curling pathways and fruit trees. Beyond the garden, over the back fence, lay an empty block of land where on cracker night a giant bonfire lit up a child's universe with red reflected off the night sky. That dream lasted until a couple built a brick house over the scorched earth, and left the rest of the block run to seed. The male half of the couple shouted into the night, every night, while his partner eventually gave birth to a dark-haired pale sole child who played futilely in the weeds and whose lonely half-smile under brimming eyes was an exquisite sadness seen from across the fence.
*
I stopped drawing and left the west-facing sundrenched room, and the house, to find my brother, something I did often; the walk itself was usually the motivation. My brother always turned up. I had almost reached the shops when we met, collided, outside the Shell garage. He had the early afternoon edition of the Herald. It carried a three-stack headline, the main of which broke perfectly in two lines over the masthead: Pres. Kennedy Assassinated
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