Through the Cracks Read Online Free PDF Page A

soundlessly. His father didn’t eat all the toast. But he did drink all the tea. Adam ate five pieces of toast and drank milk from the carton. They watched
The Midday Show
,
Days of Our Lives
and
The
Young and the Restless
. Monty and Jerry started following Adam around. His father stayed lying on the couch. His lips were parted and his eyes half-closed. He wasn’t sleeping, though. Whenever Adam went in or out of the room, or whenever something sudden happened on TV, his father’s eyes would open wider and stare, unseeing but looking. He tried to move but it was as though it was too much effort and he would lie back down. The white-hot feeling returned as Adam stood, watching the effect the tablets had on his father.
    D
r Who
was on that night. Adam sat on the footstool, close to the TV. When the show was over, hungry again, he went into the kitchen and stood by the table thinking of what to eat. The ability to choose was new. He wanted meat. He turned the dial on the stove. The pan was on the draining rack from when he’d washed it. He waited until the black rings of the hotplate turned red.
    ‘Does the meat go straight in the pan?’ he called.
    His father didn’t answer.
    Adam put the pan on the element. He opened the fridge. There was no meat. He turned the stove off and made a bowl of cornflakes instead.
    Adam brushed his teeth. It was unsettling to be at the basin, head over the sink, scrubbing, rinsing well, using dental floss, opening his mouth and checking his back molars in the mirror. Everything else had changed, but this hadn’t. All Adam knew was that he didn’t want a cavity. Of all the rules, this one stuck. Each loose tooth he’d had as a child his father had removed with pliers. Before the tooth was properly loose. He’d used the heavy tool and ripped the tooth out, explaining, as he did it, that it was what he’d do to Adam’s adult teeth if he ever got a cavity or didn’t brush enough. Adult teeth weren’t meant to come out. He’d said he’d strap Adam down, tie his hands, tie his head back, jam open his mouth. If Adam thought it hurt to have his baby teeth removed, wait until he felt the pain of adult teeth, rooted down into his jaw, being ripped out. Adam had never felt that pain. He brushed enough and flossed enough to stop it happening. To make sure Adam understood, his father had dropped each baby tooth he’d pulled into a glass of Coke and left it on the kitchen windowsill until it had turned black and began to rot. He’d then made Adam drink the Coke, tooth still in it.
Sweet things will rot your teeth
. Fizzy drinks still made Adam gag.
    He went to bed. He heard his father get up and go into the bathroom. Adam listened to him stumble into things, try to wash. He listened to him stagger into his bedroom. It sounded like he changed into pyjamas. Monty and Jerry didn’t sleep with Adam. He could hear one of them yipping softly in its sleep in the lounge room. Probably dreaming of killing chickens.

T he thing that lived inside Adam’s father never stayed down long. It came to the surface the same way the sun went up and down each day. The following morning it was up. Meanness was showing in his mouth. It was rippling through his expression. It coated his words.
    ‘Is this all that’s left?’
    He was in the kitchen, shaking the bread bag. There were a few pieces in the bottom. He’d showered, dressed in long pants and a T-shirt. Adam saw that the rope from the table leg was missing. Whatever it was that lived inside Adam’s father evaporated his age. Adam understood that now. His father looked and sounded younger. His body was old, but the things in him weren’t, his mind wasn’t; it was tough and durable like leather. Looking at him it would have been easy for Adam to let the fear take hold, to be like Monty and Jerry, dropping to their bellies at the sound of the sneering voice, rolling onto their backs to see Adam’s father standing straight and well again. But, instead,