3.

Stolen cars were often left in the carpark behind the local footy club. It was a good place to do donuts, skidding the car through the stones in figure-eight patterns around a small island of shrub (my brother Pete and I had our fair share of joyrides there).

When the thieves were finished they would fill the car with petrol and throw in a lit match. Usually the cars would be towed away within a week, but one time a burnt-out car was rolled down the hill behind the carpark. It hit a gum tree and was lodged there long enough for grass to grow up through the bonnet – giving Dad the idea for a work he called Botanical.

Botanical gave Dad his first taste of fame. What he did was tow that burnt-out car to the flat where he gutted it, cut out a sun roof, and gave the car a paint job (all white, five or six coats). Then he filled the car with soil and planted a wattle tree in the centre. The branches of the tree extended from the sun roof and when it bloomed the car was showered in gold. It is still my favourite work of his.

For his efforts, Dad made it into the local paper. There was even talk of an exhibition until the car got pinched from out the front of the flat. It was left in the carpark behind the footy club, burnt out all over again.

4.

When Pete was eighteen he got himself into a bit of strife and had to go inside for a while. Dad was pretty upset. We both were. Pete told me he had just held onto some money for a mate, but it turned out that Pete’s mate was Holly’s dad, the Hells Angels bikie. Pete held quite a lot of money for Holly’s dad, as well as a sawn-off shotgun.

I think Dad blamed himself for the direction Pete was headed in. He stepped away from his art and hit the drink a lot harder then. He even got himself banned from the members’ bar at the RSL Club.

5.

On my twenty-first birthday Dad put on a party at the flat. He cleared out most of the front yard and set up a marquee and a keg. One of my mates from school made a speech. He told the story of how I came to be nicknamed ‘Rubble Boy’. I could tell Dad was embarrassed.

‘Well, fuck me,’ Dad began his speech. ‘I guess that makes me Old Man Rubble!’ There was a bit of laughter and somebody yelled out ‘Sure does’, but it soon went quiet while Dad scanned the yard, as if daring somebody to say another word.

‘Fucking Rubble Boy, eh?’ Dad said before pausing again. He seemed to be deciding whether to continue with the speech. ‘I’ve taken a lot of shit from this world. Let’s see one of you cunts walk a second in my shoes.’

Dad left the party then. He walked straight out of the driveway and down the middle of the street.

6.

I picked Dad up from the hospital one day. He was a diabetic and he’d had multiple surgeries in the space of a few years – a total of four toes removed. After his appointment with a surgeon he demanded we stop at the bottle shop on the way home.

‘Are you sure you’re meant to drink, Dad,’ I said. ‘With the diabetes I mean?’

‘Don’t bloody worry about my drinking,’ he said. ‘You’re worse than your bloody mother ever was, you know that? These surgeons are all full of shit. They’re overeducated. You know, the only letters after my name are F.F.E.’

‘All right, Dad. I know.’

‘F.F.E. Form Four Education. That’s all I’ve ever needed.’

After the bottle shop, we returned to the flat. There was an eviction notice in the mail.

7.

Dad wasn’t the only one being evicted. It turned out the whole block was to be demolished. Pete had got wind of it before the notice arrived but assumed it would be years before the process started so he never mentioned it.

‘Probably for the best,’ I said to Dad, trying to be positive. ‘You could barely get up the driveway before your surgery. And the place is falling to bits. I reckon you must have two dozen possums living in your roof.’

‘Bastards of things,’ Dad said. ‘I told you to give me a hand trapping them. If you take ’em over water they can’t ever find their way back. Bloody easy fix if you gave me a hand. We could just drop them off in a park across the other side of a creek.’

‘You’ll be right, Dad. They’ll sort you out with a newer place. We’ll ask for somewhere closer to the shops, save you walking on those bung toes as much.’

‘I’ll be walking just fine, don’t bloody start with that. It’ll just be a shame if there’s nobody to fix up the windmill.’

The Windmill was Dad’s latest project. He said he was inspired by a documentary he saw on the Discovery Channel, about wind farms in the Netherlands. He had started building a windmill in a playground across the street from the flats. He built four identical blades from sheet metal and PVC pipe and attached the blades to a steel support that had once held a basketball hoop.

‘Kids love that thing – and there’s plenty I’ve still gotta do. I just hope they realise.’

‘I don’t know if the windmill will be around either, Dad. Pete reckons the whole block is getting developed. They’re putting up townhouses for the uni students. The whole block, Pete reckons.’

Dad was quiet then.

After that day, we never talked much about the move, except for practical things like how we would use Pete’s van to move Dad’s stuff, and whether we should try to dig up the lemon tree in the backyard. The tree grew lemons the size of coconuts just about all year round.

The Windmill remained unfinished.

8.

Dad credits Pete’s time away as his wake-up call. Afterwards, the wildness in Pete from those earlier days was gone, in its stead was a more patient (if somewhat muted) resolve. Pete got a job as a bricklayer and reunited with an old girlfriend, Vicky, from his early high school years. Soon they married and started a family.

Pete’s family and I would visit Dad on Christmas and Easter. We would celebrate with Dad on his birthday and go round to watch the grand final. Before the move, Pete, Dad, and I would sometimes go out to the back deck, put on Greatest Hits of the 70s, and howl together into the night, just enough to let the neighbours in the surrounding flats know that the Reeves boys were still around.

That was how we spent Dad’s last night in the flat.

9.

They eventually found Dad a little house on a leafy street a few suburbs over. There was an IGA with a bottle shop next door. The street was flat enough for Dad to use his wheelchair when his feet were sore (they often were).

But Dad was lonely there.

He didn’t know any of the neighbours like he had back at the flats and he no longer enjoyed notoriety as the de facto (and self-proclaimed) neighbourhood artist-in-residence.

Pete got Dad a pet budgie which he called ‘Bluey’. Dad let Bluey sit on his shoulder and peck at his food on the dining table. Pete and I thought Bluey seemed to help.

10.

It was around this time that Dad’s memory began to slip – just idle comments here and there, mixing up the grandkids’ names (Pete had two girls by then), or which day of the week it was. One morning he spoke about an old widower, Fay, who used to live next door to us back at the flats. He spoke as if Fay was still on the other side of the fence, complaining to Dad about the music or the smell of urine from the lemon tree.

‘She doesn’t ever let up,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve got half a mind to go over there now and give her a taste of her own medicine.’

‘That was at the old place, Dad,’ said Pete. ‘She’d be long gone by now.’

‘I know that,’ said Dad, ‘I know that. I’m just saying … she was an old bag that one.’

Dad got up to put the kettle on, but we knew Pete’s correction had unsettled him.

11.

I started to check up on Dad more often. I was worried that he might forget to feed Bluey or to read the expiry date on the milk. I would stop by with some groceries and cook him sausages and mash or baked beans on toast.

Besides the dodgy memory, he still wasn’t in the best way physically. The years of hard drinking and cigarettes showed: his face was bloated and dry, and he’d have coughing fits that turned his cheeks from red to blue.

12.

Bluey learned to mimic the sound of the telephone. One afternoon I rang the doorbell a few times and I could hear Bluey in his cage in the kitchen. After each ring Bluey would follow with a telephone ring – but Dad never answered the door. I searched the house, the IGA, the bottle shop, the RSL Club. Pete suggested I check the nearby bus stops (this was a running joke between Pete and I after we’d found Dad passed out at a bus stop the morning after my twenty-first).

It was getting late. Dad was nowhere to be found.

13.

The buildings on our old street were gone. At one end of the block, through the grates of the temporary fencing, I could see that fresh foundations had been poured. Elsewhere, a single red-brick wall remained in an otherwise empty lot. The wall was covered in overlapping layers of graffiti, so that the remnants of the prior layers obscured the more recent additions.

Dad’s wheelchair was left on the footpath across the street from where our old flat had been. I could see him hobbling around a bare concrete slab, stopping every few steps to inspect a patch of overgrown grass, his figure backlit by a streetlamp at the other end of the block.

‘You all right, Dad?’ I called from the car. ‘It’s getting late.’ At this point he was leaning over as if to tie his shoe. I didn’t think that he heard me, because he remained bent over, slightly swaying, his weight shifting rhythmically between each leg, even as I approached.

He smelt like a brewery and was humming the tune of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by The Bee Gees in long guttural heaves between coughing fits. When I touched his back he jerked so suddenly that he lost his balance and tumbled over. I wiped my hand on my jeans to remove the sweat that had soaked through his shirt.

Dad’s face was bursting at the seams, as if he were suffocating. He lay there with his eyes wide open but unable to focus, like he was trapped in some nightmare that caused his body to seize up then flinch. He muttered half-baked sentences now, his voice lilting dramatically as if midway through a story.

Then he went quiet for a moment. His eyes finally registered me.

‘Rubble Boy digs for his rubble dad,’ he said.

In his hand he held a thin piece of sheet metal that curved at one end like the outline of a shell. I could tell it was one of Dad’s windmill blades because of the PVC piping attached to the inside.

It probably sounds strange, but in that moment I thought about Dad’s theory on possums: that if you take a possum over water they can’t ever find their way back. Dad had crossed two creeks to get to our old street that night.

‘Come on, Dad,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you home.’