Everything was different without Mister Mosely around. Sort of slow and empty.
When I came home from school the next day there was nothing to do, so I just sat on the back steps and bounced a tennis ball against the wall. I was doing that when I heard the paper man’s car down the road. A bit later I heard the paper landing in our front yard so I went and got it. That made me think about Moe and I just started crying. I couldn’t help it.
I didn’t want Mum to see me doing that because I knew it would make her sad. So I took the paper up the back where Mister Mosely was buried and I sat on the big rock under the mango tree. I told Moe I’d got the paper for him, which I guess was a pretty stupid thing to do.
That’s where I was when Dad’s car came down the driveway. He was home early, which meant he mustn’t have done any overtime that day. I watched him get out of the car. He was carrying his little Esky and his thermos and some work gear. He had dirt and black stuff all over him as usual. He didn’t see me because I was behind the trellis.
Dad went under the house and put some of his stuff away in his work room and washed up a bit. Then he got a bottle of beer and a glass out of the fridge and he sat down by himself at the old kitchen table. Dad just sat there drinking and sort of staring at nothing. He looked kind of lonely.
Mum was upstairs in the kitchen. I could see her through the little window near the stove. She was making tea. She was speaking to someone because her mouth was moving. It must have been Amelia, but I couldn’t see her. It was funny watching Mum and Dad like that. One upstairs and one downstairs.
Then I remembered that I had the paper. I knew Dad liked to read it when he was drinking his beer so I took it over to him. When I got there he asked me if I was okay and I said that I was. I was going to go upstairs then, but Dad said to ‘pull up a pew’, which means to sit down, so I did. Then he took out another glass and put a little bit of beer in it and he gave it to me. He said we should ‘toast Mister Mosely’, which sounds pretty creepy when you think about it.
Anyway, what Dad did is, he clicked his glass against my glass and said, ‘To Mister Mosely.’ Then I had to drink some beer. I didn’t like it very much but I pretended I did because it was good being there and doing that stuff with Dad. He called it having an ‘awake’ or something. We didn’t say much for a while but then Dad said, ‘He was a good dog, the old Moe.’ Then he smiled, but not much, and said, ‘when he wasn’t pretending to be a fish and getting himself caught on hooks.’ That made me smile a bit too, because I hadn’t heard Dad say something like that for a long time.
Then the weirdest thing happened. Dad and me started to remember stuff about that day with Moe and the fish hook and we started to tell each other. Like I told him how I shouldn’t have kept calling Moe and making him try to come home when he couldn’t and Dad told me that it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t know about the hook being in Moe’s mouth in the first place.
We were still talking about the fish hook thing when Mum called from the back porch that tea was ready and for me to come up. I said, ‘In a minute,’ because I didn’t want to stop talking to Dad. But I guess it must have ended up being longer than a minute, because pretty soon Mum was coming down the steps to find out what I was doing.
I was sure Mum was going to go cross at Dad for giving me some beer. I didn’t want her and Dad fighting again. I started to get worried when she came over to the table and she looked at my glass and then at Dad and me. But all she said was, ‘What’s this then – secret men’s business?’ I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Dad, but Dad was just looking at the table so I told her how we were having an awake for Mister Mosely. Mum smiled a bit when I told her that, which made me feel better and she said, ‘I see.’
Mum just went back upstairs then, and Dad and me sat there without saying anything. Dad drank all his beer down and told me I’d better head off before my tea got cold otherwise we’d both be in trouble from Mum. And that’s what I was going to do, but we heard someone coming down the stairs. It was Amelia. Then we saw Mum coming down behind her. She was carrying a big tray.
Amelia ran over and pulled around a chair so she could sit right beside me, and Mum came over and put the tray on the table. It had three plates of spaghetti bolognaise and a bowl of ice-cream on it. Mum told us that Amelia had already eaten her tea and Grace was asleep. She said, ‘If you’re having an awake for Mister Mosely, then it should be a family thing.’
I told Mum she had to have a drink too so she could toast Moe. I didn’t think she even heard me, because she just kept looking at Dad. But I guess she must have, because she said, ‘I could sure do with one.’ She sounded pretty sad and worn out when she said that. So Dad got some more beer from the fridge and some soft drink too and Mum went back upstairs and brought Grace down in her carry basket.
That night was one of the strangest nights ever because we all had dinner together under the house. The only one missing was Mister Mosely. But after a while he sort of wasn’t, because we started to tell all these stories about him. It happened when I asked Mum if she remembered the time that Moe got the fish hook caught in his mouth because that’s what Dad and me were talking about. Mum said, ‘The poor thing. How could I forget?’ And then she started saying some stuff about it and then Amelia wanted to know more because she was only little when it happened.
Dad didn’t say much at the beginning, he just listened mostly. But when I told Amelia about me fainting at the vet’s and hitting my head and how Mister Mosely had to wear that bucket thing and how Dad had to carry both of us to the car, he said, ‘Two peas in a pod,’ which made Mum smile.
Then we just started to tell all the Mister Mosely stories we could think of. One after the other. Like how we got Moe from Uncle Gavin and how Moe got his name and how he cried on the first night when we put him downstairs. And we talked all about the teddy bear and the clock and Amelia drawing on him and that time at the park and the Pink Panther and how he learned to fetch the paper and the time he disappeared and the time he got hit by the car and lots of other things as well.
Mum and me did most of the talking, I guess. Amelia just asked a million questions, as usual. Dad listened mainly and drank his beer, but every now and then he’d add some stuff. Like when I said it was a pretty good trick how Moe learned to fetch the paper, he said, ‘Yeah, until he tried to steal every one in the neighbourhood.’ That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it made us laugh just the same.
So like I said, even if Mister Mosely wasn’t there, he kind of was because he was still there in the stories. And that’s how come Mum ended up getting me this journal. She brought it home one day and said I should write down all the Mister Mosely stories we talked about and then we’d have them forever. So that’s what I started to do. And that’s what I’ve been doing just about every day since Moe died.
Except now I guess I’m finished, because I’ve got no more Mister Mosely stories left to tell.