Shortly after graduating from high school, Jack Goolbroom bought his first car, an old red Honda Civic, pocked with dents and dings more numerous than the acne scars spattering his pallid cheekbones. The red paint was sun-damaged, acid-washed to almost-pink on the roof, as if it had suffered third-degree burns in a housefire. He didn’t even really want a car. He bought it to alleviate the guilt of bumming rides from his friends, or rather to give them one less thing to jab at him about.

The Civic was around two decades old, with almost three-hundred-thousand kays, and for some unknown reason would only start in second gear. A single white picket from a nuclear-family fence sat in the boot, for propping open the hatchback door, as both the little pistons were broken. Jack paid the guy six hundred dollars, which he thought was a pretty decent deal, despite what his friends said. He didn’t want to take out a loan like some people he knew. Debt sounded daunting, suffocating, exhausting. Life was hard enough already.

The little red Civic had issues almost right away. Its engine stalled at random moments, conking out at the lights with all check-engine indicators flashing in unison. Sometimes a horrible scraping sound emanated from the wheel bay, and at other times while going uphill, the back half of the car would clunk and overrev and the Honda would slow to the crawl of a mobility scooter. The car idled funny at red lights and an oily smell would pervade the interior from time to time. Jack loved it all the same. Despite the hiccups, the Honda started first go every morning, no matter what, and always conveyed Jack from a to b. He didn’t know what to do about the issues but often wondered if his dad would have.

Jack took the car to a mechanic. Automasters. It was the only one in walking distance from his share house. The shop sat on the corner of a busy, four-way intersection. A billboard perched precariously atop the building, advertising the business, probably for people whose car idled funny at red lights. It showed a life-sized cutout of a man who looked like Martin Lawrence, betraying a gentle, homely nature, his dirty-blond hair in tight little curls. In big black letters on an orange background, the billboard assured Jack: Don’t worry, you can trust in Tim.

Jack walked inside and there was the man himself, Tim, sporting the same goofy grin as his image on the billboard. The way he smiled reminded Jack of his dad, who had also been a mechanic of sorts. Tim diagnosed the problem that afternoon, then called Jack with a quote for six hundred dollars including parts and labour. Tim told him it was a common problem with Civics from the early nineties. An easy fix. He could have it ready to go by tomorrow with a complimentary full service thrown in. For an extra couple hundred he could fix the boot door as well. Jack paid and retrieved the car the next day, then pulled up at the skips behind Coles to toss away the bit of fence from the now-working boot.

Not a week later, though, the same shudder in the steering returned in the little Honda, and on top of that, the accelerator acquired a delay, so once, when Jack put his foot down to squeeze into a small gap in traffic, the car hesitated and crawled and then the bullbar of a huge Holden Colorado bore down as if to T-bone him and the driver blew his almighty horn as he was forced to swerve around Jack in his little red hatchback. All future opportunities and past words-not-said spasmed in Jack’s spine and he pressed his eyelids together expecting impact.

Jack took the car back to Tim at Automasters, and Tim took it for a quick test drive but couldn’t identify any of the issues Jack described, other than the pistons in the boot door, which were naturally hard to deny. Dodgy parts, said Tim. These things happen. Jack wanted to trust him, like the sign said. Who else could he turn to for advice?

The mechanic looked hurt when Jack insisted on the reality of the problems and Jack felt his guts twist. Tim ducked into the workshop and retrieved the broken CV joint from the week earlier. Let me show you. Tim’s eyes softened, and his brows pointed upwards like those of a sad donkey. See, mate, it’s totally busted through, the washer here is supposed to go all the way around. A large chunk of deformed metal sat in Tim’s grease-blackened hand. It looked like a hose fitting, or a section of a hamster’s maze. Tim told him he had to rifle through the bins for this, but yes, here it was, hard and true, evidence of a job well done.

Jack had no idea what he was looking at.

How can you tell if you can trust someone you’ve only just met? Jack scanned Tim’s face; he looked at the sterile tiles of the Automasters floor for guidance.

How can you tell if you can trust someone you’ve known your entire life?

They took the car for another test drive, Jack now in the passenger seat, with Tim looking sour and petulant the entire time. Jack quickly became convinced Tim wasn’t driving the same way Jack would, possibly to hide his dodgy work, and so he forced Tim to pull over and swap drivers. But Jack couldn’t reproduce any of the problems he needed to have fixed. The Honda revved correctly, better than ever, the steering wheel didn’t shudder, and no clunking issued from beneath the rear seats.

Mate, I don’t know what to tell ya, said Tim, as he screwed the replacement piston into the boot door while Jack held it open.

Jack went home, lost, defeated.

When Jack first learnt about the issue, it was supposed to be just a few scans. Shortly after that, just a few more scans. They were simply following up, standard operating procedure. Jack never thought for a second anything really bad would, or could, happen.

Jack was told the cancer was at stage four on Christmas Eve, but that number meant nothing to him. He was not yet sixteen. How many stages could there be?

Four, he said.

Does it go up or down?

No answer.

Jack asked, just once and once only, if it was because of the smokes or because of the drink or something like that.

Jack was told there was nothing he could have done differently, other than perhaps going to the doctor a bit more regularly. It was simply bad luck.

One orangey autumn afternoon, on a trip to the hills to see the changing leaves, the car let out an ungodly cer-clunk and smoke billowed from the exhaust pipe. The Civic did things like this all the time, undiagnosed and unobserved tantrums, but no matter how many mechanics he saw, including, of course, Tim down at Automasters, nobody at all could identify any of the problems he described.

The mechanics would always find something else wrong, though, and Jack had to have things like a catalytic converter or a backside sparkplug or an electric-steering alternator replaced. Jack spent thousands and his friends kept saying to scrap the car, they told him to cut his losses. Just buy something more reliable. But Jack couldn’t, he wouldn’t, so he took it to more and more mechanics.

Then, he stopped caring. He drove for days with the fuel gauge on empty, only filling up when certain he’d be stranded if he didn’t. Year after year, he refused to get regular services. He drove to Melbourne and back three times and didn’t check the oil even once. And as reliably as hidden fees on concert tickets, the car continued to play up once the two of them were alone again, in privacy.

Not long before the end, Jack was supposed to go with his dad to a game at Football Park, like they’d done before hundreds of times. It was a special connection between them, the footy, their mum never came, his brothers only rarely. Just a few years earlier his dad had surprised him with tickets to Melbourne to watch the grand final – they’d road-tripped there together. It was Jack’s first time in Victoria. Their team, Port Adelaide, lost the grand final to Geelong by 119 points. The biggest loss in history, a record that still stands today. Jack had gotten his face painted before the game: three big stripes, black, white and teal. When they left, the black and teal on either side was washed away from tears.

A day before they were supposed to go to the game, though, this footballer, Trevor Pound, came to his school to sign autographs and give a motivational speech. How he came to be a sportsman, or something like that. Word went around that this guy had been captain of the local side for many years, but had just signed a contract to play for a new team, in Perth, across the country. Jack had the bright idea to photoshop a dog onto his body, since he had dogged the local team, and thus dogged the boys. It was just supposed to be a laugh, he didn’t think anyone would actually do it. But one of the other boys did the photoshop work, and then a third went ahead and printed it off and handed it to Trevor to be signed. Trevor was an Indigenous man and did not take kindly to being called a dog. He took it as a racial insult, which was entirely fair, but had never been the intention of the boys. They thought he was Italian. All three were suspended for a week, and they had to write a letter apologising to Trevor. Jack’s dad cancelled their trip to the game at the last moment, as punishment. Jack felt really bad about that, and really bad that he was now a bona fide racist. His mum told him later that it was actually because his dad was simply, at that point in time, too tired to go, and too proud to admit that that was the reason.

He had been totally himself that week, to Jack’s eye. But day by day he’d been sleeping longer and talking slower. His liver had stopped working completely, so liquid would build up and he’d inflate like a balloon animal until the people from palliative care would come and jab a finger-thick needle into his torso to pump it all out. Jack’s dad said it was a great relief and that those people were doing really great work.

One day, Jack had to help his aunty carry his dad onto the toilet. He was dressed in a hospital robe but he was too heavy for Jack and his aunty, and so they heaved his half-naked and half-asleep body onto the loo with great difficulty. His father had once been the bastion of strength and stability for Jack, the knower of all things, answerer of all questions, well before Google even existed. Seeing him so weak stuck in Jack’s memory, as if the giant oak tree in their front yard, once the tallest tree in the entire world, had been cut down and shredded.

When his dad finally died, a week or so later, Jack was in the next room playing free-for-all on Call of Duty and listening to a Bliss n Eso CD. His aunty came in and said, Jack, I think you should be in here. When he realised that his dad was gone, actually gone, the room began to spin. Slowly, at first, then faster, and faster, and the walls closed in, and eventually surrounded him like a horrible cold gyprock hug, as Jack bounced from corner to corner, inside his head and out.

Jack sat outside with his head buried deep in a hoodie for the rest of the night, and for the following couple of years, right by Dad’s asparagus plants, and where they had written their names and placed handprints in wet cement not a month earlier. The rest of the family sat around the empty vessel in a white hospital bed in the kitchen and moaned and wailed and checked in on Jack intermittently, who dared not go inside lest he be faced with the reality of what had happened. He tried to sleep outside, alongside the smell of asparagus, but his uncle pulled him in around four am to sleep on the loungeroom floor.

Jack’s mum had always begged his dad to take out a bit more on the mortgage, to fix the kitchen, add a bedroom so Jack and his brother need no longer share, and to get more reliable family cars. A few months before the diagnosis Jack’s dad had finally and reluctantly agreed to the loan. So, when he died, they were plunged deep into debt, and his mum had to go back to work – in a bakery in the central market. During that period, Jack had vivid dreams, and in those dreams his dad was always still alive. Jack would hear his voice, he’d breathe the chemical smell of cigarettes and acetone he associated with his father, and when he woke, he’d clamp his eyes closed again and try desperately to fall back to sleep, to escape back into the dream, and back into the past.

He still has dreams like that. More rarely, but still, sometimes. Nowadays, even asleep, Jack knows the truth. Or at least some version of it.

A decade or so later, Jack was at the wedding of a mate from high school, and ran into a close family friend, a great mate of his dad’s.

Tell me something about him.

The old fella, a wharfie with a grey goatee and the rare ability to smash through a 30-block of red tins and still drive home, was named John Smith (no, really). He said Jack’s dad was a great bloke, a really top, top bloke.

No, no, I mean, I never got to know him properly, you know, tell me something real. Then Jack bummed a rollie off the aging wharfie.

Well, he had his demons in his past, of course, and that’s what took him in the end, but he loved you guys, that’s for sure, he loved you so much.

Demons? And then, under pressure from a champagne-drunk and courageous Jack, he said that those demons had been in fact a heroin habit, back in his youth, and a brief stint in a labour prison on a pig farm. And those sharp, unforgiving needles, shared needles, must have carried Hep C.

We always just thought he was tired, y’know, that he worked too hard. We’d get kicked out of pubs because they said he was too drunk, but he’d only had one beer, I had seen it with me own fucken eyes.

At home, Jack googled Hepatitis C and learnt it often causes liver cancer. Jack read that Hepatitis C is entirely treatable, and has been for many years, so long as IV users get regular blood tests and keep an eye out for symptoms. Jack saw that liver damage from Hep C can make skin turn dark and yellow, which also explained why his dad appeared so tanned when the rest of the family was so pale.

Jack called his mum. She confirmed everything, even the pig farm. His dad really did know everything there was to know about raising pigs.

He asked her why his dad was arrested, and she said it was weed, something like that. She asked him, who told you all that?

And Jack said, why didn’t you?

Jack came to realise that, in life, it is very difficult to avoid being lied to. And once you’ve been lied to by someone you trust, it can be very difficult to discern, from that point forward, what is really the truth. It became an obsession of Jack’s, and the harder he looked, the murkier it all became.

The last time he drove the car, Jack kept getting stuck in roundabouts. He kept going around and around and around, missing the exit he was supposed to take. Over and over again. Eventually, he’d make it out of a roundabout, only to get stuck in another one not a moment later. The thing about roundabouts, and unlike nearly everything else, is that they offer second chances.

Not long after that wedding, Jack Goolbroom finally sold the red Honda Civic, to a young woman from the Phillipines and her impatient, greying husband. And since Jack had been lied to about the cancer, he didn’t say shit about the problems he’d had with the car.