Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton

Author:Trent Dalton [Dalton, Trent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2025-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Corrections are as inevitable as they are essential. It is never too late for the journalist to publicly admit to a mistake.

– Rutledge, Journalism Practices and Principles

Dad lives in a small one-bedroom flat in a block of twelve units on the calm side of Bribie Island. The flyscreen mesh on his front security door is split in three places.

His in-home carer hears my footsteps as I reach the door. ‘That you, Noah?’

She opens the door. A tag on her St Vincent’s Home Care polo shirt says Carmen.

‘He’s in bed,’ she whispers. ‘He can’t wait to see you.’

‘Thanks, Carmen.’

The unit smells like pumpkin soup. And the smell of pumpkin soup is masking the smell of something rotting in the flat.

‘What’s that smell?’

Carmen hauls a duffel bag of used sheets up over one shoulder and a bag of medical supplies over the other shoulder.

She tries to say it tenderly. ‘That’s your dad, hon’.’

Maritime décor through the flat. For two decades, before the emphysema kicked in, Dad ran the Reel Life bait and tackle shop on Bribie Island, the one next to the Bellara boat ramp off Marine Parade.

A ship’s wheel hanging on the living room wall. Framed paintings from the 1950s. Giant-sized marlins and sharks being hauled onto fishing boats. Two crab pots in the laundry off the kitchen. A framed oil painting of a mangrove jack, Dad’s favourite fish to catch in the green-brown creek systems of Bribie Island. The jacks like to eat in stormy weather and Dad likes to fish in stormy weather.

I open Dad’s bedroom door. He’s lying flat on his mattress. Looks like he’s shrunk in size, shrivelled up like a fallen frangipani leaf curled and aged by the sun. A grape withering on the vine of life.

‘Jesus, Dad, you look like a skeleton.’

He laughs and the laughter makes him cough three times. A wheezy rattle in his chest like there’s nothing beneath his thin skin but air and a single dried-up pea seed.

‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ he says. His breathing is laboured, movement slow as tar pitch.

‘Meg says you’re dying?’

‘Meg’s spot on, as usual,’ he says.

‘She said Dr Fielding has given you a month at the most. There’s a bed waiting for you in Caboolture Hospital, Dad. I can take you there right now.’

‘They gimme the penthouse suite?’

‘Yep, bar fridge full of XXXX Gold. Nightly spa bath wash from a nurse named Inga.’

‘Fuck me, does sound inviting. Trouble is, hospitals an’ me are a bit like oil and water, Israel and Palestine, Abbott an’ Gillard – we’re best kept at a distance.’

‘You can’t just rot away here in bed, Dad.’

‘I’m not gonna. Fair warning, mate, some night soon I’ll be chugging down that box of Oxycodone on the bedside table there.’

‘Please don’t do that,’ I say, resting my backside on the edge of the mattress. ‘I don’t know how I would explain that to the girls.’

‘Just tell ’em I got eaten by a bull shark in the Pumicestone Passage. They’ll love that story.’

He leans over to find a piece of paper he has slipped inside a paperback copy of Hog father by Terry Pratchett.

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