Chapter 33: Ned Kelly

Ian is watching television. He oohs and ahs as thirty men chase a ball around a field, running into each other with thudding regularity. Ian drinks beer as the game goes on: he is on his third now. I am drinking a beer. I don’t understand all the rules, but the game is diverting in a morbid kind of way, as the injuries mount with exciting frequency.

Ian whoops as ‘we’ score, spilling his beer in the process. ‘We’ are the men wearing white, according to Ian. He sits back in the armchair, scratching at his chin.

Ian is growing a beard.

After three weeks of effort, he has patchy stubble that is thick in places and sparse in others, like a worn carpet. I ask him why he doesn’t shave it into a goatee or a moustache or a beard and no moustache, just to make it look less silly.

Ian rubs a hand over his whiskers and replies he is going for ‘the full Ned Kelly’. He wants a beard he could ‘lose a rabbit in’, apparently.

At half-time, I google ‘Ned Kelly’ and find a tintype picture of an extravagantly coiffed man with a smug expression, and a beard that could contain an entire warren of rabbits.

I return to the living room, and cast an eye over Ian’s meagre facial hair, and the pale skin that peeks through.

Good luck, I say.