I remember. I remember the sweets, the pink chocolate pigs and the railway tracks and you. I remember the toy store and you and the packaging you couldn’t open and I couldn’t afford. I remember sitting with a pink pig and you at the park. I pushed you in a swing and was singing to you. I remember trying to push my life away so in that moment I would belong only to you, and failing. I never saw how you’d grow up and inch away. I remember that I forgot to tell you to wait for me.

The phone rings sometime before dawn, the beginning of a hangover licking at my temples from that third glass of cider at book club, and I haven’t finished the marking for my year tens and,  “I forgot to tell you,” you say. “I was dreaming. I dreamed you were asleep. I forgot to wake you. You slept in a white room with the curtains blowing. There was music. I heard shooting. A train in the night. What time is it?”

“It’s alright,” I say. A siren wails somewhere at your end. A continent between us, time zones and malls and drought and cities and jails and airports and sports arenas. “It’s almost day.”

DEEDEE RATNER is a schoolteacher from Taree, NSW. Her first novel is underway.

They took some side trips and passed through Albury at midnight of the following day. Turner kept driving west. He drove until he got to Glen Creek. His mother was up and watching TV and took no more notice of his arrival at dawn than she had of his departure ten years before.

It was an L-shaped house on a quiet street. Out the back was a third bedroom, a bathroom and a fibro verandah with frosted windows. His brother’s EPL stickers still there. Turner set himself and Clint Eastwood up in that part of the house and if his mother ever noticed the dog she didn’t acknowledge him. Turner slept in his old bed, divided from his brother’s by two bed tables, two lamps, a bar heater, and a strip of floor. Clint Eastwood slept in the sunroom on an old towel. Turner kept the dog in during the day but at night they walked along the river and through the twisted stumps and over charred bracken. The river was lined with gum trees that stood bone pale against the dark of the bush beyond and beyond that the darker hills. Muddy watering holes. During the day Turner took his mother to the one shopping centre in Glen Creek or to the doctor. He maintained the garden. The vegetables and fruit trees. Some of the people in the town remembered him. He was pleasant and he made sure to be seen once or twice a month at the pub or at the Video store just so they wouldn’t wonder too much about the creepy guy who lived with his mother and never went out. Some of the old timers remembered Turner’s old man. They remembered his brother who’d stayed on after Turner left.

A few months on he and his mother watched a special report on Today Tonight about the little girl whose hand had been bitten off by a savage and cowardly Pit Bull that was really Clint Eastwood going for the lollipop she’d held out for him. She’d had the surgery and the doctors said she would regain sixty percent of the use of her hand and her mother yanked the little girl’s arm above her head in triumph to show the interviewer the neat bracelet of scar tissue around her wrist. ‘Her badge of honour,’ she said.

Turner’s mother died five years after he and Clint Eastwood came to live with her and Clint Eastwood died five years after that. Turner had been expecting it. The whiskers on the dog’s black mask had turned white and sometimes he’d freeze during his walk and stare into a space just beyond his muzzle as if there was someone or something in front of him that only he could see. Turner sat with him on the lawn from midnight to the smudge of daybreak. He kept watch while Clint Eastwood uncoupled himself from the world and Turner saw it slide off the edge of his dark round eyes. He wept and couldn’t stop. He hadn’t counted on such sorrow. He didn’t know what he should do. If only he could go with him. He sat and thought about that for a long time.

Finally, late that night he picked the dog up, all thirty-eight kilos of him and carried him to the bottom of the long garden near the back fence. He placed him on the grass. He went back to the house for the towel Clint Eastwood slept on. The cold air burned his bare arms. He dug the hole four feet deep and five feet across and laid the towel in the dirt and put Clint Eastwood on the towel. He cut the shovel into the earth and tossed dirt onto the body. It sprayed across the dog’s ribs. A yellow flower from the box gum drifted onto the dirt. He shovelled earth into the hole until the dog was covered in it and the blossoms that blew down in the rising breeze.

Turner didn’t leave the property for most of that winter. He slept late into the morning. He watched the EPL. He listened to ads for stud hogs and the Bowling Club on the local radio. Followed the Golden Spurs contest. He spent the afternoons down by the old box gum in a lawn chair in a patch of sun that hit the fence. He dug the garden, covered the soil in mulch and harvested silverbeet and pears. One day he started to talk to Clint Eastwood down by the fence and at first mistrusted the thin sound of his voice beneath the birdcalls and distant tractor snarl but it got easier. When tiny green shoots began to poke through the dirt Turned said, ‘What the hell.’ His mother was dead. Clint Eastwood was dead. Turner could wait for death too or he could go check with the world one more time just to see if anything had changed to make it worth his while.

‘You should get one,’ the mother’s words floated across the grass. ‘They’ll go on special next month.’

Turner saw that the child was in shock but not yet bleeding to death. Out of one dirty pink jacket sleeve poked a stubby hand with dirt under the nails. Out of the other sleeve there was an ungodly nothing. Blood began to trickle from the edge of the sleeve. The neatly severed hand floated brightly among the scattered leaves and Turner had no idea what to do with it. Hurl it into the bushes. Pick it up and screw it back on. There was a building thwok thwok in his temples like a chopper was landing. He wanted to duck. He heard someone say ‘faaaark’ below the hammering of his heart and recognised the voice as his own.

The mother over by the gondola thumbed her purse higher on her shoulder and hunched against the winter chill. Her fine dark hair wisped around the phone she pressed to her ear. Turner pulled off his belt and wound it tightly around the child’s right arm over her jacket and he lifted the arm up so that the blood would flow back to her heart. Look ma no hand. The child watched him and her face was as pale as paper. He scanned the empty park. Clint Eastwood was not a big talker so when he did you listened. Low in his throat. Time to go. Turner glanced once more at the mother and then back at the child. He raised his own arm in good-bye and then he followed Clint Eastwood out through the avenue of trees past the swimming pool closed for the winter and an hour later they were on the road.

The world was no longer a safe place for them. They put dogs down for mauling kids. Turner sat behind the wheel of the old Astina he picked up from a lot by a LiquorLand. He had had his tragus pierced the day before and the whole right side of his head was throbbing. He hadn’t counted on so much pain. The big dog snored on the back seat. Turner glanced frequently into the rear view mirrors. He’d phoned in his resignation at the plant and felt guilty because it was his birthday tomorrow and he knew Anu on the desk would have ordered a cake.

They left the city and kept going until dawn. They pulled off the freeway for gas and Turner sat in the car drinking a V and reading in the Telegraph about the dog who’d bit the hand off the child in the park back in Sydney. The girl was in a stable condition in the hospital. The bruising and scratches on her back and arms were explained by the savagery of the attack. It was a Pit Bull, the mother said that knocked her daughter to the ground. She said she’d seen the whole thing “‘like in slow motion.’’’

“‘I had to pull it off with my bare hands. You just find the strength when you have to.’”

The dog dropped the hand on the ground and ran off ‘like a thief in the night.’ The mother said she saw an old belt lying by the side of the playground and used it to tie the tourniquet and the experts praised her knowledge of first-aid. ‘You never know when these things’ll come in handy,’ the mother said. She said that it took some doing just to find the hand lying hidden among the winter leaves, which would explain the fact that the blood had begun to clot. How the child was no help but just stood there staring wordlessly past the trees with her arm raised like she was waving at someone.

‘Not waving,’ Turner said to Clint Eastwood with the newspaper spread out between them.

Fortunately no one thought to get a description of the dog from the little girl but according to the mother it was a large white Pit Bull with red eyes and yellow fangs and the authorities rounded up the dogs in the area matching that description but they all had alibis. They described the owner of the dog as a coward. The silenced little girl was a hero. Her mother was a hero too but ‘that’s my job,’ she said. ’That’s what we do.’

Clint Eastwood was not a Pit Bull. He was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, wheaten with a black mask and one white left paw but Turner wasn’t taking any chances. Behind the petrol station, he threw a stick to tire him out but Clint Eastwood just wanted to get back in the car again.

‘What would you do if I they put me down?’ Turner asked Clint Eastwood as night swiftly fell. The road swung ahead of them into a dark bowl peppered faintly with lights.

‘Wrroooogh, wroooogh,’ said Clint Eastwood.

‘Me too,’ said Turner. ‘We’re heading west now. South and west. Is that okay?’

Dead Celebrity FACT 2: The little girl and her brother never speak to anyone about what happened. They give the euros and dollars and rupees in my wallet to their mama, and sell the passes and id’s and memberships to a cousin’s dealer for fifty bucks. Add three zeros to that, which is what the dealer sells the story to New York Today for. History bought and paid for. I am aware of rumour and speculation. The bitch is dead. The bitch is not dead. The bitch is gone, just disappears one icy September morning, 1993. The story of gone, that’s all the story ever is.

Dead Celebrity FACT 3:They cancel a New Years Eve bash in Sydney slated to launch my homecoming tour. My record label gets bought and sold a half-dozen times over the next decade, during which another war is begun in Iraq. My vinyl collection—priceless—is broken up and distributed among my old band and technicians who promise to keep it safe until my ‘return’. There are sightings of me in Singapore and Reykjavik and Auckland and Mosul. I get booked for gigs at which I sometimes show, playing to a hushed and reverential crowd. Their cell-phone cameras twinkle in the void like stars, such disappointment later to have captured no more than a blur, negative space. Tribute groups spring up, calling themselves Potion, Portent, and Potent. Look-alikes spring up from Vegas to Varanasi. Put your hands in the air. The crowd raves in my absence and in my honour.

Dead Celebrity FACT 4: They find Jimmy the Shoe in a Jersey dumpster on a bitter September day in the Year of the Towers with his skull bashed to gravy. No one cares—the world is ending anyway. CSI report tiny fragments of titanium chloride (TiC) in his cerebrospinal fluid. The little kid whose sister found me reads the story on the Internet in the Belleview library. A sidebar explains that TiC is a coating used on metal tools like crowbars, anvils and wrecking bars such as the ones marines use to dig out terrorists and free hostages in Iraq.