Will was waiting on Aunty Nic’s porch when Lena started up the path. He’d been planning to leap up and shout, Surprise! but her expression as she approached was pure terror, like there was an axe murderer charging at her. He barked with laughter, snapped a series of fast photos as recognition hit.
‘Will? Holy fuck! You bastard! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’
‘Wanted to surprise you. Which, mission accomplished. Your face, mate. Bloody unreal.’
Truth was he felt a bit shocked-and-awed himself now he was looking at her up close and personal. When he’d said goodbye to Lena in Brisbane she was a sturdy, sun-browned fourteen-year-old. He’d seen plenty of photos of her since, knew she’d got skinnier as she grew taller, but none of the photos captured this frailty. Her collarbones stabbed up between the straps of her dirt-streaked pink singlet; a pair of navy school shorts hung low and baggy off her bony hips. And that goddamn vicious purple scar, more obvious than ever against the unnatural, wintry paleness of her skin.
He swallowed the gut-cramping panic the scar always produced in him, gestured to the front door. ‘Can we go inside before the lung cancer sets in or what?’
‘Yeah, ’course.’ Her huge, wet eyes blinked fast. She unlocked the door, hesitated. ‘Actually, just let me put this shopping away and then we’ll go see Nic. She’ll be so excited.’
Lena turned on her heel and Will followed her into the house. It looked about the same as in the pictures Lena had sent, which was weird given the skip he’d walked past on the way in had been half full.
‘You ready?’
‘Yeah, but …’ He put his backpack on the floor at his feet. ‘Can we take a minute to catch up first. I haven’t seen you in—’
‘Nic’s expecting me.’
‘—six years,’ he finished.
‘We’ll catch up later. Come on.’ She squeezed past him, out the door. ‘Make sure the lock clicks shut,’ she called, already on the footpath, moving away from him.
Aunty Nic was in a different hospital from the one Dad had died in. This one was on an inner-city street so chaotic that making it from the bus stop to the front door was like a game of Frogger. Motorbikes and delivery vans and SUVs screamed to a stop milliseconds before slamming into Lena as she dominated the crossing, seemingly oblivious to it all. Will kept stopping before the vehicles did, not sure they wouldn’t speed through, leaving a vaguely man-shaped smear on the road. By the time he reached the entrance Lena was tapping her foot. ‘Keep up, country boy,’ she said.
Once through the sandstone arches and across the granite and stained-glass foyer the hospital felt remarkably familiar. The same poster chiding lazy lift-riders about the missed opportunity to be good to their hearts by taking the stairs. Same creepy instrumental versions of Elvis Presley songs playing just loud enough that you can’t ignore it, interrupted by the same decibels-louder pre-recorded announcements about proper hand-washing and the fines applicable to anyone found smoking in the building. Same aggressively chemical scent in the public areas, not always disguising the reek of piss or shit or vomit or blood wafting from the wards.
Outside Aunty Nic’s room, Lena reminded Will not to say anything about the house. ‘As far as she knows, I left and never went back.’ He thought it was stupid to lie about it—she was going to find out sooner or later—but this was Lena’s show; he was merely the supporting actor.
If Lena hadn’t been there it would’ve taken him an age to figure out which of the six seemingly comatose, elderly white people was Nic. But Lena went straight to the middle bed on the right-hand wall, plonked herself in the visitor’s chair. ‘Wakey, wakey, Nic. Big surprise for you today. Huge!’
The eyes opened, blinked a few times and there, instantly, undeniably, was Aunty Nic. For a terrible second he was sure he’d burst into tears, instead he said, ‘Haven’t you been in the wars?’ like an awkward grandpa talking to a toddler. Lena had taken the only chair, so he hovered a minute and then perched on the end of the bed, millimetres from the blanketed lump of his aunty’s left foot.
‘Surprise all right! Geez, I would’ve taken a dive from my dressing table years ago if I thought I’d earn a visit from the one and only Mr Will Harris.’ She said it in the same light-as-air tone she used the last time they saw each other, the day before his sentencing. She’d hugged him tight and told him it was a blip, that no judge in his right mind would put away a kid like him for supplying a little pot, whatever that legal aid moppet said. Mum said Nic was exactly right, which made him relax all the muscles he’d been tensing since his arrest. They never agreed on anything, so this must be, like, inarguable. Aunty Nic said she wasn’t even going to come to court because she’d just see him at home after.
And here, nearly seven years later, he was the one to come to her, the one asking her how she was coping.
Aunty Nic flicked the question away, sending tubes shuddering, making Lena suck in her breath and gently press the hand back down to the bed before running her fingers over the cannulas, checking they remained attached.
‘Stop fussing,’ Aunty Nic said, then to Will, ‘Tell me everything! How’s Queensland? What is it you’ve been doing up there? Something in the mines?’
‘Nah, nah. That was a while back. Lately I’ve been in a warehouse. Packing and transporting produce. Getting it from the farms out to grocery stores and that.’
‘And where is this again? I know Lena told me.’
Will himself has told her more than once in the odd, rare text or Facebook message.
‘Mackay,’ Lena said now.
‘Yeah. Actually, though, I was let go last week. The drought and the fires and all. Not so much produce to be moved at the moment, so …’
Lena made a sorry face, whether for the job loss or for not having bothered to ask for his news he didn’t know.
‘Best bit is,’ he said, before either could ask if he was okay, ‘couple of days after I lost my job, Mercy asked me to move out. Talk about kicking a man when he’s down, hey?’
‘Bloody hell. I’m sorry,’ Aunty Nic said and actually sounded it. ‘Do you reckon it’s for good? I mean, people fight, need space and that. Doesn’t mean it’s over, does it?’
‘Yeah, nah. I reckon it is, though.’ As he said it he knew it was true. His jaw clenched and pain erased the world. When it ebbed and his vision returned both of them were looking at him with anxious, crinkled faces. ‘It’s fine,’ he told them. ‘I mean, I’m sad and … I’m gonna miss the kids something chronic, but … I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’
‘We should’ve known something was up, shouldn’t we?’ Aunty Nic said to Lena, fake jolly-jolly voice. ‘Knew he wouldn’t come all this way just because I had a little tumble.’
He had to walk out of the room then. It was just a bit too fucking much.
He wandered the hallways with half a plan to find a doctor and ask for some proper painkillers, but it quickly became obvious that the doctors and nurses—he wasn’t sure he could tell the difference—occupied a different dimension. They were in his field of vision, but he was never in theirs. He observed that a few civilians had somehow learnt how to flag them down and draw them through a portal to communicate with the lowly realm for a minute at a time but then whoosh, off they went again, and you could be bleeding to death from all your orifices at once and they wouldn’t see it. Literally bleeding to death, he reckoned, but if you didn’t know the correct signal, every one of these green- and-blue-clipboard-and lanyard-wielding figures would float on by, oblivious.
Lena didn’t ask why he’d taken off. Didn’t ask him anything. Looked at her phone the whole bus ride, angled so he couldn’t see the screen. Boyfriend? he asked at one point, and she shot him a look that would kill any other man. It made him smile, though. He lived for those looks growing up. Making your little sister’s face do that was the ultimate Achievement Unlocked.
Back at the house she slid a builder’s dust mask over her nose and mouth. ‘I spent yesterday in Nic’s room,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘There’s space enough to move there now. You can take over. Concentrate on getting the floor clear.’ She handed him two rolls of garbage bags. ‘Green for rubbish, white for clothes or anything else that can go into the charity bins. When I say rubbish, I mean shit that’s broken, faded, useless. Shit no one would want, even for free. You’ll be filling five green for every white, trust me. Appliances, framed stuff, anything big, can go straight into the skip as is. Paper recycling bin is already full, so magazines and paper products go in the skip, too. Put anything that looks precious or important on the kitchen table—I started a pile there already. I’ll go through it later.’
‘Leen, wait. Can’t we get some lunch or something? Catch up?’
‘I’ve got too much to do. You go eat if you have to.’ Lena plonked herself on the floor in front of a plastic storage container, pulled out a stack of CDs, dumped them into a green garbage bag by her side.
‘Seriously?’
‘Sorry. I really can’t stop, though,’ she said, not stopping.
‘Right. Okay. But hey, do ya want me to sort through those CDs before you chuck ’em? Might be something good in there.’
‘There’s nothing good, Will.’
‘Maybe not to you, but something Aunty Nic likes. Or I’d like. Or that we could sell.’
‘Think like that and we will never, ever be done here.’
‘So you’re just chucking everything?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Would Aunty Nic be okay with that?’
Lena pulled the mask down so it hung at her throat. ‘She will not be okay with any of this. It doesn’t matter. If we don’t clear enough space they won’t let her come home.’
‘We can make space without chucking everything, surely. She’s just gotta be able to move around easily, yeah? A few CDs aren’t going to make a difference.’
Lena stood, pulled the CDs back out of the garbage bag and handed the stack to Will. ‘Go for your life.’ She gestured to the dozen or more clear plastic storage tubs lining the wall, and stomped out of the room.
He flicked through the CDs—Panpipe Classics, Music to Dream To, Classics for Bedtime. Fair call, Leen. He dropped them back into the garbage bag, dug into the container for the next lot. 75 Best Nursery Rhymes. The cover left a film of sticky dust on his fingers. He chucked it and the six or seven beneath it into the bag, sung out to Leena that he could do with a rag or something for the dust.
She didn’t answer, and after a bit he pulled off his t-shirt and began using that to wipe his hands, and the occasional promising-looking item. Didn’t matter if the shirt got wrecked. It was a crappy old freebie, hardware store logo front and back. He’d worn it because it was the softest t-shirt he owned. Had to dress comfy for travel. Didn’t notice when he put it on that moths had feasted on a section near the back hem and that the neckline was fraying in the front. No bloody wonder Mercy’d had enough. Look at the state of him, when she always made such an effort.
Over the next couple of hours Will sorted through six plastic storage containers in between glaring at his still and silent phone. There were dozens of records (mostly rubbish compilations but a couple of classics—Bowie! Springsteen! Patti Smith!—that he put aside for himself), four containers of wrapping paper (used and neatly folded as well as brand-new rolls) and six of Christmas decorations and lights. Underneath a plastic tub of sewing patterns—none of them looked more recent than 1985—there was a sewing machine, still in its sealed-up box. He wanted to ask Lena if Aunty Nic sewed and, if not, what did she reckon an unused but possibly quite old sewing machine was worth, but she was getting saltier and saltier every time he opened his mouth. She had, at least, chucked a pack of ibuprofen at him when he asked if she had any painkillers, but she’d looked super angry about it. He pushed the machine to the side and carried on.
Next: three tubs of yarn and one full of knitting needles and patterns. Definitely never seen his aunty knitting, never received a knitted gift from her (thank god). Knitting gear could be chucked. Or sold. Would anyone buy this stuff? It looked all right. Lena had said anything useless and this wool was definitely useable. Shit. He shoved the knitting gear next to the sewing machine. He’d deal with the definitely-getting-thrown-out stuff first and then make decisions about the rest.
‘Will?’ Lena yelled from some distant pile, ten years or half a day since he’d arrived. ‘Did you want to order some food? There’s fuck-all here.’
‘Yeah, um, thing is I don’t have any cash and my account is kind of—’
A sigh heavy enough to bring down walls. ‘I’ll get it. But it’ll have to be cheap-arse Dominos.’
Will’s whole mouth spasmed at the thought of the chewy crust, the acidic sauce. He told her not to bother for him. He wasn’t hungry. ‘Cool. Same,’ she said. ‘Just thought I’d offer.’
He could howl with hunger. Fucking roar with it. He pulled out his phone (nothing from Mercy) and googled Free dentist Sydney. The first page of results all had the word ‘pain’ before the word free, which sounded good, but not without cost, which was what he needed. He dialled the first on the list anyway, walking out into the front yard as it rang. Smelt like someone had doused a bonfire the second before he’d stepped outside. The phone was answered by a machine, so he tried the next number and then the next. Finally he got through to an emergency dental service. They could see him immediately but it would cost a minimum of $245 for the consultation. More depending on what treatment was needed.
Back inside, he looked at the gaps in the hoard like a man waking from a coma. The newly revealed baseboards and windowsill were coated in what must be years of accumulated grime and laced with cobwebs. Some were grey and stringy, but others appeared freshly woven. Must be spider families scuttling all over the place, shocked by their exposure after living in peace for generations. Living well, it would seem from the black and brown flecks of half-eaten bugs scattered beneath the webs.
The carpet looked almost new in some places, protected from wear and tear and sun-fading; in other places it had been stained by unknown forces, worn through to the under-fibres by pressure or nibbling. And the air was getting worse, not better, the more he cleared out. Like every item had been holding a lungful of dust ready to release into the room when it was moved. He’d blown his nose earlier and the tissue came away bloodied, like he’d been punched.
Will pushed aside several empty plastic crates and leant over a waist-height stack of still-full ones to reach the window. The curtain was caught on something, and when he yanked it the whole thing came down, rod and all, sprinkling insect remains and scat as it fell. With it out of the way he was able to unlatch the window, but it stuck like it’d been glued in place.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Playing basketball.’ He turned to his side, put his shoulder to the sash. His feet were too far from the wall. There was no way to get a proper grip.
‘The air outside is worse than in here.’
‘Impossible.’ He stepped back, moved four crates from under the window to in front of the TV. Lena watched from the kitchen doorway, her arms crossed, face blank. Why had he imagined she’d be happy to see him? Hadn’t they got on best of all when they’d been minimum nine hundred k’s apart?
‘I was out there, like, literally one minute ago, Leen. It’s not that bad.’ Now he was closer to the window he was able to get his shoulder right in under the sash, his hand flush on the lower glass. He took a deep breath, heaved. Nudged the window up a centimetre.
‘Fine. Go ahead and poison the air I have to sleep in. Why should you give a shit?’
Will paused in his shoving, rested his forehead against the cool, weirdly sticky glass, remembered the time when he was ten or so and Lena had thrown a massive tantrum about some trivial shit and was sobbing into her pillow while Mum comforted her. Will had turned to Dad, sitting next to him on the lounge watching cricket, and said, She’s such a whiny cunt. Like she’s permanently on her period.
Dad, his eyes still on the telly, said, You’re gonna need to repeat that, because I can’t possibly have heard what I think I heard, and Will could read the tone of his voice and knew he was in big trouble. He mumbled something about being sick of Lena carrying on all the time. Dad turned the TV off. Told Will to look at him, which Will tried to do but couldn’t.
Three things, Dad said. One. I don’t know who you heard that period thing from but you need to know that periods don’t start until girls are teenagers, or near enough. Your sister is six years old. Saying she’s on her period makes you sound really, really dumb.
Two. Only ignorant, backward idiots who hate women think talking about periods is funny or insulting.
By now Will had his defence, was busting to spit it out, but he knew it would work better if he waited until Dad was finished, so he held it in.
Three. If I ever, ever hear you use that word again—you know the one I’m talking about—I’ll knock your teeth out. If I hear you use it about your sister, I’ll cut out your tongue, too.
This last bit shook him. Dad never hit them, never even threatened it. The worst punishment they ever got was having to go to their room for an hour or miss out on dessert. But Dad was saying, Do you understand me, Will? Do you? And so Will took a deep breath and said, Yes, then, with the thrill of the righteous, added, How come you didn’t knock Muzza’s teeth out?
Dad blinked and Will went on. ’Cause he said it. That’s where I heard it from. The other week out the back when Linda yelled at him and stormed off home Muzza said, She’s such a—what I said. All of that. But you never told him off for it.
Will shivered with pleasure at Dad’s face. Almost said, Ha ha, gotcha. Muzza was one of Dad’s good mates. He had lots of mates, but only half-a-dozen good mates, the ones who came around most weekends and who Dad went to the pub and the footy with on the regular. Muzza was maybe even a best mate, though Will had never heard him called that. But he was around more than most of the others, and on Anzac Day Dad took him to the march and then let him spend the day drinking until he cried and then passed out in the backyard and that seemed like a best mate kind of thing to do.
Dad stared at Will so long that the pleasurable shiver was replaced with fear. He could still hear Lena’s sobbing down the hall. Maybe he should start yelling, get Mum running back out here. But no, Dad closed his eyes a sec, said, Yeah, well, that wasn’t right him saying that. Not right at all. But he’s not my son. It’s not my job to teach him how to behave.
Will nodded, knew he wasn’t really in trouble anymore. Dad turned the TV back on and they watched it a bit longer before Dad said, It’s okay to be annoyed with your sister. With anyone. But you’ve gotta try to say things straight and calm. Kind, too, if you can. Men like Muzza, they never learnt how to talk right to people.
You said you’d knock my teeth out. That’s not calm or kind.
A laugh, kind of. Can’t get away with anything, can I?
Later, Lena came and snuggled on the lounge between Dad and Will, and Dad kissed her forehead and told her the score. Will felt crappy about what he’d said then. She was just a little kid with a lot of feelings. And if Dad could stay calm and kind about that then so could he.
‘You’re right,’ he said now, pushing the window back down, giving up the tiny ground he’d gained. ‘We’ll keep it shut.’
‘Do you what you want. I don’t care.’ And she was gone again.
He was supposed to sleep in Aunty Nic’s room, which had been more cleared out than the others. But there was a stain on the carpet he knew came from her body. Lena had done her best, but blood and piss don’t ever come out, not fully. Ask anyone who’s worked prison laundry. The bed was clean, fresh sheets and all, but even with the light off the stains across the room bothered him. The longer he lay there the more the residue seemed to be seeping into him. He thought about little Taylah and Haymish, how often he’d cleaned up their leaking body fluids or got up to change wet sheets and pyjama pants in the middle of the night. Hadn’t bothered him one bit. Little kid piss was nothing. In prison the smell of other men’s leakages was constant. The disinfectant made it worse, its chemical stench burning your nostrils and making them more sensitive than ever to the piss and shit and come, the sweat and unwashed hair and balls.
This was not like that. The room smelt a little musty but nothing animal, nothing invasive or infectious. But still. Someone had bled and pissed on the carpet a metre away from where he lay. Not just someone. Aunty Nic. Family. Made it worse somehow. Will imagined his own uncreated, until this moment unimagined, nephew having to sleep in a room in which he himself had lost control of his functions. Imagined the pity and disgust the kid would feel for poor old Uncle Will. The shame socked him in the chest.
He took the quilt and pillow, inched his way to the door, giving the stain a wide berth. The spare room. He could clear the things from the bed onto the floor tonight, clean up properly in the morning.
‘What’s wrong?’ Lena said.
Will spun, tripping on the dangling quilt, taking a moment to find his balance again. She was on the sofa, her phone screen illuminating a face so old and haunted-looking his breath caught in his throat.
‘What?’ The phone dropped on her lap, her face in darkness and so bearable.
‘Yeah, sorry, Leen. Can’t sleep in there.’
‘What about—’
‘Spare room? Yeah, good luck.’
He opened the door with difficulty, switched on the light as the small avalanche he’d started settled. Right. Was there even a bed in there anymore? It’d take a day’s clearing before he could say one way or the other. God, he used to daydream about this shitty little room. After Mum told him she was moving to Brisbane with Rick the Dick and tried to get him to commit to coming up when he was released, he said to her, You know, I think I’ll stay in Sydney. Aunty Nic has always said the house was ours, too, and Mum had said something cynical and mean, but he thought that was just her way when it came to her sister. He spent a lot of time thinking about how he’d fix up this front bedroom, paint the whole house while he was at it. After that he could clear the backyard and plant some vegies. Get a Weber and a little outdoor table. It helped, thinking it through; like designing a simple, comforting path he could take to reach the rest of his life.
He returned to the living room. Lena didn’t look up from her phone. ‘Can we swap? You sleep in Aunty Nic’s room.’
She sighed. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t like it in there.’
‘Are you joking?’
‘I find it creepy, okay? And you obviously don’t, so stop being a bitch and go sleep there.’
‘Wow. I was about to, but now you’ve called me a bitch you can sleep on the footpath for all I care.’
‘Why are you like this?’
‘Seriously. I came all this way to help you and you can’t do one little thing so I can get some rest.’
‘Fine.’ She stood so fast, it was like she’d never been on the sofa at all. ‘Thank you so much, mighty saviour. Of course you should sleep wherever you like, whereas I who have been dealing with this shit alone all week should immediately move to make way.’
‘Leen, come on. I don’t get why you …’
It was pointless; she was gone, stomping herself and her sleeping bag down the hall and slamming the door. Cunt, he said under his breath. Let Dad rise up and kick his teeth in. He’d bloody welcome it.
Before he’d woken properly, still cocooned in blankets on the lounge, pressing his tongue to his tooth, wondering if Mercy was awake and if she was thinking, as he was, of the way they were together in the early mornings, half asleep and warm and seemingly unable to get close enough to each other, wondering this while a tiny raw part of him did what it always did in the moments after waking and waited with a deep, sick sense of disbelief for the rise-and-muster bell. Still in this state of pain and longing and dread, but on the far edge of it, beginning to think of shaking off the night and the dawn and sitting up, a weight fell on his feet and with it the sound of his little sister sobbing.
‘Leen? What? What’s happened?’
She was a scrunched-up, quivering ball at the far end of the sofa. He couldn’t move his feet without disturbing her, but he couldn’t do much without moving them. She let herself be rocked and dropped, didn’t let up on the sobbing.
Her phone was clutched tightly in her left hand, as per usual, but there was something else in her right hand. A moment of disorientation. Back in time, yes, but also space. This object that still existed but in a place it had never been. Will reached for it, was surprised at the tenacity with which she held on and then the suddenness with which she let go. It fell hard onto her thigh. Will grabbed it, turned it over in his hand. Dad’s vice grips.
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where?’
‘In her wardrobe. Box up the back. All of his stuff’s there. His tools. I didn’t know at first. That they were his. But once I saw that …’
Will ran his hands over the initials engraved on the underside of one arm. The rest of the metal was so scarred you wouldn’t know the letters were there, unless they’d been pointed out to you, proudly, by the man who’d carved them. First tool Dad’d bought with his own money. The stuff in his bucket before then had been handed down or loaned to him by older mates. But he’d taken his first pay envelope straight down the hardware and, though he’d thought about getting cheap versions of half-a-dozen tools, when he laid eyes on the shiny red-handled vice grips he changed his mind instantly. Had to have them. Over the years he’d lost them many a time, he told the kids, but they always found their way back to him. It’s how he knew it was the right decision; they were made for each other.
‘How come Aunty Nic … ?’
Lena shook her head, swiped the back of her hand roughly across her face. ‘She helped us pack and clean up before we moved. Her and Mum fought the whole time. Bet there’s other stuff here that she nicked.’
‘You think she nicked these? Maybe Mum—’
‘Why would Mum give her Dad’s tools?’
‘I dunno. Why would Nic steal Dad’s tools?’
‘Seriously? Look around! She’s nuts.’
‘I guess, but … I mean, she wasn’t like this then, was she? Her place was neat. Not like Mum-neat, but normal.’
Lena’s phone buzzed and she flinched as though it had transmitted a tiny electric shock through her arm. She kept staring at the vice grips. After a while, he said, ‘Anyway, I’m glad she took them. Probably would’ve been chucked out otherwise. Now we’ve got something else of Dad’s to remember him.’
She was up and off the sofa in a second. ‘I don’t need a chunk of metal to remember him!’
‘Good. You won’t mind if I keep these then.’
‘It’s sad, you know. Needing an object to remember someone you loved. Your own father.’
‘Didn’t say I needed it to remember him. Just that it’s nice to have.’
She kicked a garbage bag, as hard as she could judging by the way her whole body shook and staggered. It moved maybe a centimetre, stopped from going any further by the other bags surrounding it.
Will pressed the vice grips to his jaw. The initial contact killed but the cold was soothing. He’d never thought to ask what happened to Dad’s stuff. Last of his worries at the time. It was sick-making to think of Dad’s tools dumped into the stinking abyss of the council tip or accumulating dust in a cardboard box at Vinnies. Or, god, his clothes! They were bloody terrible, Dad’s clothes. A family joke that Will was never quite sure if Dad was in on or not. He could see the stack on the ironing board, folded and ready to be put away: couple pairs of fading footy shorts, a thick stack of flannies, that one dressy shirt he got from the Country Road clearance sale, three identical pairs of Kmart jeans that Mum said made his bum disappear. No one would want any of that shit. Will didn’t own enough clothes to fill a small backpack and even he didn’t want it.
But.
Still.
But, still, though he had spent yesterday loading a giant street bin full of someone else’s useless shit, and he would do the same today and tomorrow, still, if Dad’s stupid, embarrassing clothes were here he would fall on them like they were laced with morphine. And this tool in his hand? This beaten-up, useless, worthless fucking thing he’d not given a single thought to until it was in front of his face? He would hold on to it until the day he died and if anyone ever tried to throw it away he would use it to bash their smug, sensible brains in.