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Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 139 The Clarion Call Part 1. The knock on Emily’s door startles them both. Panic commandeers Emily’s face. Boyd sees her egg-smeared lip tremble. ‘I’m not ready!’ Boyd grabs her cardigan. Times like these, you take liberties. ‘These people just want to tick you off a list. A list you shouldn’t even be on. They just need to listen to busybodies like Coral pretending to be concerned citizens. But we’re not gonna let her win. Are we?’ Em’s voice is small as her birdlike shoulders rise and fall. ‘No.’ He’s dropped the lance he’s been wielding on the ride past, where every letterbox hit has been Wayne, Pinky or the Elles. He’s been shocked to see Emily’s hair like grey fairy floss rescued from the depths of a fairground dumpster, her skirt on backwards, that beanie which is actually a tea cosy. He’s shelved plans for the ‘Tricky Talk’ with Pinky. His friend’s precious painted figures have rattled like a reminder deep in his pack as she’s seized upon him. Her words have tumbled out as she’s told about the phone call, the letter she missed from ‘aged care assessment vultures!’ And now his voice is low, so those ‘vultures’ on the other side of her door can’t hear. ‘You’ve dealt with harder crowds. You’ve charmed the crowned heads of Europe.’ Her nod admits it. ‘Queen Beatrice gave us gerberas.’ ‘This is your home turf. You have the advantage. So, open up and show them there’s nothing to worry about.’ The strength with which Emily grabs Boyd startles him, and in the language of these needy limbs he feels her real fear for the first time. Finally, she straightens, allowing Boyd to silently work the breakfast remains from her face with his T-shirt.

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 140 --- ‘Mind the step! Luke, I am your father. Extra cheese! Where’s your goddam manners? Don’t be a baby! Spec-tac-ular!’ Errol isn’t helping things. Caged by Boyd, whom he’s bitten on the ear, he’s sulking. He cycles through his phrases, screaming in rage at his incarceration. Boyd hovers like a nervous waiter as Emily busies herself making tea. Don clears his throat, fanning a sheaf of Twilight Meadows brochures across the table like the winning hand of a riverboat gambler. ‘You’ve got options. We’re going to ask you a few things to see what’s best. Twilight Meadows might mean you can live with… dignity.’ Matron Van de Berg’s expression is unnerving: a rigid smile that is vehemently benevolent. Boyd notices her pen poised over the tick boxes of a serious list. Her uniform is so white it’s hurting his eyes. Blind Emily, pretending to be sighted, is oblivious to all this as she stirs water into the teapot. ‘Spec-tac-ular! Don’t be a grub. No way, Jose!’ Leathery-faced Don swivels in his seat to scan the place. The judgement in Don’s bloodhound eyes makes Boyd see the place anew: the crummy carpet, dust-filmed windows, chairs gnawed by something. Their blitz of straightening up has seen Boyd shove everything under Emily’s couch, china hutch and sideboard. He’s been taken by Emily’s braille books⎯a mystic language like his Miadin that intrigues him as much as her odd notes. The clumps of Biro dots are made with such vehemence they pierce the page. ‘To do list,’ she’s told him, snatching it. ‘Stuff I need to be able to do for myself when Manny tours. Admin-Is-Tray-Shun.’ She’s scowled like the word is foul tasting⎯the same face on her explaining why the aged care team are minutes away:

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 141 ‘See if I’m fit to be In-De-Pen-Dent.’ Then she’s stalked the house, emptying a can of air freshener like she’s crop dusting a paddock. But now, worrying at the tea towel draped across his arm, Boyd watches Don try to unsee the cast of Emily’s youthful bum, featured in bronze on top the fridge. ‘Extra cheese! Where’s your goddam manners?’ Errol is crabbily crab-stepping the length of his perch. Making a show of polite listening, Emily hears her hot water reaching the rim as she pours. But she misses the awful occupant of her best teapot. In later, calmer times Boyd will relate that this teapot squatter is the trigger for some spectacularly repulsive events, for the fact is the teapot holds a dead rat. This particular rat has been dead a few days, slinking off to this quiet, ceramic coffin after taking one of Manny’s many baits. Clearing the shack of vermin for Boyd’s party has seen rats displaced like war zone refugees, fleeing across the garden and into Emily’s house. Manny has categorised it as a ‘migration issue’, but he’s still laid poison. Emily seems too busy nodding, smiling and agreeing to think something might be amiss. As hot water hits the rotting rat, the pot swirls with fat maggots. ‘Don’t be a baby! Get a haircut!’ Maybe the rank smell registers, but she’s too busy throwing in tea and laughing at something Don said, even though, Boyd notes, it’s the distinctly unfunny topic of twenty-four-hour nursing care. As the tea hits the table, it’s only Boyd who notices the mess of maggots floating to the surface of her ‘special brew’ from the decomposing rodent. Quite naturally, Boyd freaks out. Panic explodes inside him like fireworks thrown in a post box. ---

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 142 ‘I’m quite sure Twilight Meadows is delightful, but then so is your own sweet home. Your own bikkies.’ Emily offers a biscuit tray to her guests. ‘Your own things around you.’ As Don tries again to avert his eyes from her ‘things’ (like Em’s cast arse), Boyd sees him only succeed only in skidding his gaze to the pinup poster. It’s a shirtless hunk with oiled-up torso. Boyd remembers shaking his head as Mansfield stuck it to a cupboard door in the hope of embarrassing Emily in moments exactly like these. ‘Your own tea.’ Boyd takes this as his cue, but as he’s too slow lunging for the tray. Emily slides it to Don with a simpering smile. Skipping around the table, Boyd reaches the tea tray of disgustingness, but before he can whisk it away, Don has shoved it to Matron Van de Berg. ‘Ladies first. She loves a lap sang su shong.’ Boyd scampers around, swooping to intervene, mumbling, ‘You know, Em, that water in the tea could be⎯’ But Matron returns the pot back to Emily, like a defender soccering back to goalie, Boyd thinks grimly. Matron ratchets up that annoyingly serene smile. ‘Actually, I think we just brew it a bit.’ Despite her impairment, Emily still registers Boyd sneaking the offensive tray away. She slaps him off. ‘Now, Boyd, don’t you fuss.’ She’s convinced she’s winning them, oblivious to the ticking time bomb of her gross beverage. All Boyd can do is stand paralysed by the two non-choices ahead: to make a fuss and draw attention to the pot, or to leave it and have it discovered. He tries hard not stare at the teapot of terror as Matron brightly grills Emily on her routine, her need for assistance and level of ‘In-De-Pen-Dence’. And then it happens.

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 143 Once Emily has pretended to admire their flyers, Matron helps herself to a cup. In a swirl of brown water, the tea strainer captures a small army of maggots the size of rice on steroids. Boyd can’t breathe. He watches Matron sip absently at her cup, reading aloud the last of a questionnaire. Maybe, Boyd thinks, as she takes another healthy slug, she actually enjoys rat-flavoured tea. No harm done, then. He daydreams queasily that her preferred teabags are mice dunked by their tails. Maybe, he thinks, as she appears not to notice for yet another sip, she enjoys decaying foods⎯ nibbling on roadkill roos. But then (he wonders idly) how would she keep her starched nurse’s outfit so white? He’s shaken from his revolting reverie as Matron pokes with a spoon the drained remains of her tea. She squints, bringing the spoon up to examine the horrible floaties crudding the strainer. Her eyes widen. Her mouth twists sourly. ‘Maggots!’ She vomits explosively into her hands. --- Boyd opens the bathroom window, watching Don hold Matron’s hair out of the porcelain bowl. Pale Emily calls in the door, ‘Twenty years I’ve never seen one inside the house. Let alone inside a teapot!’ This seems to be of little reassurance: the retching bleeeerk from the depths of Matron’s soul sounds like the work of a very unwell death metal singer. As she wobbles from the toilet bowl wiping her lips, her white nurse’s shoes slip on pastry chunks from when she’s strafed the tiles with barf. It’s then she falls, hurtling backwards into the bath and pulling down the shower curtain as she scrabbles for any solid object. Unfortunately, Don’s head, the only thing within reach, is not as solid as she imagines. As she gropes, his hair comes away in her hands. She

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 144 shrieks, and not just because it is now she who is holding his hair. Later, Boyd will wonder if Matron has imagined she somehow scalped Don, throwing his rug in the air as if frightened by a massive spider. Just as Boyd is wondering what more this festival of repulsiveness can produce, Don’s airborne wig sails into the toilet. The moan of surprise Don emits is a shock to everyone else present, including Don, tripling the general level of surprise in the room. His wigless head, Boyd registers, is not altogether unpleasant. Sure, he looks older but somehow kindlier. He has the blunt brow of a friendly brontosaurus worried about his wig marinading in stomach contents. Emily can only guess at the chain of events, muttering a series of concerned noises from the sideline. Matron takes in Don’s baldness, her queasy mouth turning downwards with pity. ‘Oh Donny, you’re a nude nut.’ Don blushes a deep crimson that stretches (as far as Boyd can tell) right down to his toes. His ever-helpful Matron makes for the wig, but the treacherous spew still glazing her shoes trips her again as her rubber soles squeak. She sprawls forward but this time finds more solid ground in her scrabbling: unfortunately, it’s the toilet cistern. Her hand finds the button on top. As a loud flush announces the exit of his hairpiece, Don darts for the lavatory but is brought undone by the puke-decorated floor. As his feet, too, slip beneath him like a cartoon coyote, he falls heavily, thumping his head on the toilet, bouncing to a halt on the tiles. The wig churns briefly then vanishes in a flourish of vomitous water. Errol drags himself away from his sunflower seeds to comment, ‘Spec-tac-ular.’ Boyd finds Don lying still: he’s out cold, a growing egg on his head. As Matron Van de Berg checks Don’s pulse while stifling her urge to hurl, Boyd takes in Emily. She’s

Strickland/Dog Boy Freak and the Serious Fooling 145 clutching the door, holding her breath, fearing the worst. Something about the scene provokes Boyd to a lie. ‘Could be worse, Em.’ ---