Certainly I bullied my gallery into showing her and my friends into buying her. Who could not see the hairline fracture in the pedestal? Me, your honour, not to save my bloody life.

Of course we fought. But if you have grown up in a house where your mother hides twenty-seven knives each night, the bruises of these conflicts would seem more like love bites. We fought violently when she wished to relegate my brother to a garden shed, but she also called him Brother Hugh, Frere Hugh, Brother Bones. She kissed his big fat cheek. She made him blush. She cooked cevapi, just for him, beef, lamb, pork, garlic cayenne pepper, but then again—she found him wandering in his sad immodest underpants and suddenly she was in a dreadful fright, ordering me to lock him in his room at night. I asked her was she mad, without ever once considering that she really was.

She claimed to be terrified of kidnappers and I thought, Oh, that's all, and—please don't laugh—installed a dirty big padlock inside our bedroom door.

Now I hear that everyone saw the marriage was a disaster, but at the time I was shtupping her stupid three times a day, and this padlock seemed like a tiny pimple, a human imperfection on the cheek of her perfect goddess arse. I did not foresee the Codling Moth, the maggots soon to come.

When Billy Bones was born, she kept the lovely little bugger in our bedroom and I was very moved by her, until I discovered she feared Hugh would break the door down and eat the baby in the night. She was on guard, behind the padlock, and perhaps we would all be together still, me and the Plaintiff, with Billy Bones between us scratching our shins with his dirty boy toenails, had she been able to stomach the wafting perfumes of his dirty nappies. The smell of shit made her gag. So Billy Bones was soon put out to the nursery guarded by a Fisher-Price Alarm. Who bought the alarm? I did.

The suspected cannibal, for his part, kept a wary sort of distance from the baby, rather like a cat watching the arrival of a puppy in the house—he observed closely, he stayed distant, in his corner. The mother, however, remained on guard, wakeful while I snored complacently into her ear. And guess what. Poor old Hugh was immediately caught red-handed. The cunning old wombat had crawled along the passage and removed the two AA batteries from the door alarm, but there is nothing, it seems, that can escape a mother's ears. I was brought to the crime scene, beneath all the mobiles I had fondly strung up from the nursery ceiling. There in the half light, under this great shadow flock of eagles, cockatoos, galahs, birds whose wooden wings rose and fell dreamily in the balmy Sydney air, was the great hunched form of the Meat Eater, leaning down above our son.

"Hugh!"

He jerked wildly, holding the baby in his arms, and it was clear, in the glare of the emergency flashlight, that more than the Fisher-Price Alarm had taken his attention. The shitty nappy had been changed and young Bill Bones had been transformed into a clean tight perfect bundle, like a pound of chops and sausages.

There you are Missus. Will there be anything else today?

The Plaintiff, to her credit, laughed.

And thus did Frere Bones, immediately, without delay, and for a period of almost seven years, become the beloved Uncle Bones, wrestler, babysitter. And when, later at Bellingen, I saw him with his puppy, all wrapped up inside his coat, it nearly broke my heart because the silly old bugger held that dog, alive and dead, as once he held my son.

My son loved my brother, why wouldn't he? He grew up chasing after him through the grass, eating aniseed-flavoured apples, sailing wooden boats in the little green pond. They loved to wrestle, both of them. Even when Bill was six months old it was the thing that made him happiest, to roll him back and forward almost violently. From the minute he could walk he was a charging bull running at our manly legs and there was not a day when he would not demand a wrestle the moment that he saw me. It is hard to credit now, but Slow Bones was happy. He was like a big dog with puppies always playful permitting all sorts of nips and barks and scraps. So I cannot explain what happened when it finally did. Perhaps it was only that Bill would not let go, or he had grabbed a private part by accident, because Hugh then did to Bill what I had always done to him, the move I made when I could not beat him by other means.

I was in the studio when I heard the howls, Hugh's deep-chested bellow, Billy's shivering metal sheet of pain. I can see them now.

I wish I couldn't. My brother holding my son out to me as if he wished to push him away, or thrust him back through a cobweb veil of time. At first I did not know what I was seeing: the little boy's little finger dangling, swinging by a flap of skin, a tiny chicken neck.

For more of this, I would refer you to the Plaintiff's affidavit, but I was always totally determined that I would not abandon either my brother or my son although in this I had an inflated idea of my rights. For apparently, it was not for me to choose, but rather a judge with a Pierre Cardin tie who made the Brothers Bones the subject of a restraining order and I finally saw that padlock in a clearer light.

So you will now perhaps understand that, when the gorgeous Marlene Leibovitz said she would get me a show in Tokyo, my first thought was not of her moral character—not a quality you can ever look for in a dealer—but of Hugh. There is always Hugh, and what to do with him.

18

I would not mind a quid for every time the Butcher judged it time for me to piss off to my bed but in the case of Marlene Leibovitz no words were needed, their BUSINESS DISCUSSION being so urgent that I said cheerio before I got embarrassed for them both. God save them. When I stood to go she kissed me on the cheek and said something in a foreign language it must have been good night. I had no reason to get myself excited in spite of how I felt.

Having left them to their NEGOTIATIONS I sat on the stairs between the first and second floors but then Butcher came bursting out like a BAND-DOG who has broke his chain. What did I think I was doing? I could have punched. him in the nose but our father had correctly taught us the folly of fighting on a staircase and so I descended until I heard him close the upstairs door and slide his bolt, wad, load, what did I care?

From the time I was cast out of state school number twentyeight THROUGH NO FAULT OF MY OWN I occupied a grey steel chair purchased from AR-BEE Supply Company, and on Sunday evenings in the summer I would sit and watch the line of traffic that descended on us from Ballarat and the Pentland Hills, vehicles made of steel but for all the world like flesh and blood, dogs on heat, each one sniffing the tail of the one in front, an unbroken chain of men and women, boyfriends, girlfriends, the females with their heads on the shoulders of the males, sometimes a slender arm stretched out along the top of the backseat. One after the other they travelled in their mating myriads, their red behind-lights stringing a glowing necklace through the gloaming and depresh. Afterwards I went to the sleep-out which was what we called the part of the verandah Blue Bones walled in with asbestos sheets now generally against the law. Nothing much there after my brother ran away—steel bunks, old brown sticky tape the only evidence of the missing HOLY PICTURES by Mark Rothko the one who passed away.

On Bathurst Street I carried my JERRY-BUILT chair to the bottom of the stairs all the time feeling the great BLAME of the Butcher settling on my neck and that got my engine churning, pumping, and all the muscles in my forearms began to ELECTRIFY and then I must take a little stroll. I do not like the dark but had no choice. I pushed through the boys and girls, the drunk men shouting suck my dick. Cast-out angels, imps and demons of the bottle dark. Did I make them? Was it my fault they were there?