A Forgotten Tomorrow by Teresa Schaeffer Page A

was listening.
    I made my bed straight away, tucked in the corners and folded down the sheet. I put on my school uniform and rubbed the mud off my sneakers with a bit of toilet paper wet with spit, gathered up the clothes from the floor and chucked them in the laundry. God was watching. I wasn’t going to let Dad down.
    ‘Come on Douggie, stop crying,’ I said as I dragged him down the path to school. ‘It’s going to be all right. I’ve fixed everything.’

    My teacher, Sister Bernadette, kept looking at me funny. She must have thought I was about to put pins on her chair again, because she couldn’t seem to understand why I was being so good all of a sudden. At the end of the week she made me wear the best student Holy Medal home. That made Dad smile. But it didn’t make him better.
    He stopped going to work, which wasn’t like Dad, and lay in bed all day coughing, with Mum and Gran and strange nursesfussing over him. When I tried to get him to laugh or play with the ball they said ‘Hush’ and ‘Leave your father in peace’. So I took Douggie out to the backyard instead and we kicked the football to each other in silence. It wasn’t fun anymore. It seemed like nothing was fun.
    Every night I prayed hard, made more promises, told God I’d get Douggie to be a priest too if that would help. But as the days wore on and Dad got thinner and greyer and the stink in his room started to turn me away, I knew that God wasn’t listening. Had never been listening. And that even Mother Mary in her long blue gown didn’t see me, there on my knees, by my bed, crying.
    The deal was off. I stole half a packet of Mum’s Marlboros and headed down to the creek with my mates. Smoked up a storm.
    The sun kept shining like always. I went to school every day and pretended I was normal. But it felt like I wasn’t really me at all. The real me who used to laugh and tease and chase after the girls had disappeared,gone away camping. He’d left me, some sort of robot double, to keep on doing the stupid things I had to do every day.
    It wasn’t me.

    On the day before Dad died I went in and sat beside him on the bed, trying not to look at the way his skull showed through the skin on his face and his bald head, the way the tube sticking out of his arm bulged up the skin. Tried to see Dad the way he used to be, before cancer turned him into something scary.
    ‘Hey,’ he said. His lips were cracked, white pasty stuff was sticking in the corners, and his breath smelled bad.
    ‘Dad, I …um…’ The words wouldn’t come. I wanted to say, ‘Please don’t die. Don’t go and leave me behind.’ But I couldn’t.
    ‘Brian, listen to me.’ He coughed and scrunched up his face. I handed him atissue from the box on the bedside table that was crammed with pill bottles and a vase of flowers with brown edges and dirty water. ‘You take care of your mother and your brother for me. Okay?’
    I nodded.
    ‘Be a good boy.’ He coughed again and lay back on his pillows with his eyes closed, holding onto his belly.
    ‘I will.’
    He didn’t say any more, just lay there breathing hard and raspy, a deep crease between his eyebrows.
    ‘I love you Dad,’ I whispered as I rested my head to his bony chest. I lifted his arm and put it, loose and floppy, around my shoulders. But I couldn’t stay there long because of the stink that was coming from under the sheets. It smelt like the dump where we go hunting for treasures. Something rotten.
    Mum came in and bustled me out. She didn’t like us kids being in there bothering Dad. She looked almost as skinny as him and was smoking more than ever. I’d even seen her helping him to have a drag on her cigarette, putting the butt up to his crusted lips, brushing them with her fingertips, smoothing back where his hair should have been with her other hand.
    The day he died they sent us to school like it was any other day. Pushed us into the bedroom and told us to kiss Dad goodbye. He was still sleeping.