Boy Swallows Universe

‘What is this place?’

August stands staring at the red telephone.

‘What are you looking at?’

He keeps staring at the telephone, excited and distant.

‘Gus, Gus …’

He raises his left forefinger. Wait a second.

And the telephone rings. A rapid ring that fills the room. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.

August turns to me, his eyes wide and electric blue.

‘Don’t answer it, Gus.’

He lets it ring three more times and then his hand reaches for the receiver.

‘Gus, don’t pick up that fucking phone!’

He picks it up. Phone to his ear. He’s already smiling, seemingly amused by someone on the other end of the line.

‘Can you hear something?’

August smiles.

‘What is it? Gimme a listen.’

I grab for the phone but August pushes my arm away, his left ear squeezing the phone to his left shoulder. He’s laughing now.

‘Is someone talking to you?’

He nods.

‘You need to put the phone down, Gus.’

He turns away from me, listening intently, the phone’s twisting red cord wrapping over his shoulder. He stands with his back turned to me for a full minute, then he turns back around with a vacant look across his face. He points to me. They want to speak to you, Eli.

‘No.’

He nods his head and passes the phone to me.

‘I don’t want it now,’ I say, pushing the phone away.

August snarls, eyebrows raised. Don’t be such a child, Eli. Then he throws the phone at me and, instinctively, I catch it. Deep breath.

‘Hello?’

The voice of a man.

‘Hello.’

A real man type man, deep voice. A man in his fifties maybe, sixties even.

‘Who is this?’ I ask.

‘Who do you think this is?’ the man replies.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘No, I really don’t.’

‘Yes, you do. You have always known.’

August smiles, nodding his head. I think I know who it is.

‘You’re Tytus Broz?’

‘No, I am not Tytus Broz.’

‘You’re a friend of Lyle’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re the man who gave Lyle the Golden Triangle heroin I found in the mower catcher?’

‘How do you know it was Golden Triangle heroin?’

‘My friend Slim reads The Courier-Mail every day. When he’s finished with the paper he passes it to me. The crime desk has been writing stories about heroin spreading through Brisbane from Darra. They say it comes from the main opium-producing area of South-East Asia that overlaps Burma, Laos and Thailand. That’s the Golden Triangle.’

‘You know your stuff, kid. You read a lot?’

‘I read everything. Slim says reading is the greatest escape there is and he’s made some great escapes.’

‘Slim’s a very wise man.’

‘You know Slim?’

‘Everybody knows the Houdini of Boggo Road.’

‘He’s my best friend.’

‘You’re best friends with a convicted killer?’

‘Lyle says Slim didn’t kill that cab driver.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He says Slim was verballed. They stitched him up for it because he had history. They do that, you know, the cops.’

‘Has Slim told you himself that he didn’t do it?’

‘Not really, but Lyle says there’s no way in hell he did it.’

‘And you believe Lyle?’

‘Lyle doesn’t lie.’

‘Everybody lies, kid.’

‘Not Lyle. He’s physically incapable of it. That’s what he told Mum, anyway.’

‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

‘He called it a full-blown medical condition, “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder”. It means he can’t mask the truth. He can’t lie.’

‘I don’t think that means he can’t lie. I think it means he can’t be discreet.’

‘Same thing.’

‘Maybe, kid.’

‘I’m sick of adults being discreet. Nobody ever gives you the full story.’

‘Eli?’

‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’

‘Eli?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure you want the full story?’

There’s the sound of the wardrobe door sliding open. Then August sucks in a deep mouthful of air and I feel Lyle looking through the wardrobe space well before I hear him.

‘What the fuck are you two doing in there?’ he barks.

August drops to the ground and in the dark I can only see flashes of his torchlight frantically making lightning bolt shapes on the walls of this small dank underground earth room as his hands feel desperately for something and he finds it.

‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ Lyle hollers through clenched teeth.

But August does fucking dare. He finds a square brown metal door flap at the base of the right wall, the size of the cardboard base in a large banana box. A bronze latch keeps the flap fixed to a strip of wood in the floor. August loosens the latch, flips the door up and, slipping quickly onto his belly, uses his elbows to crawl through a tunnel running off the room.

I turn to Lyle, stunned.

‘What is this place?’

But I don’t wait for an answer. I drop the phone.

‘Eli!’ screams Lyle.

I dive to my belly and follow August through the tunnel. Soil on my stomach. Damp earth and hard dirt walls against my shoulders, and darkness, save for the shaky torch bouncing white light from August’s hand. I have a friend at school, Duc Quang, who visited his grandparents in Vietnam and when he was there his family visited a tunnel network built by the Viet Cong. He told me how scary it was crawling through those tunnels, the suffocating claustrophobia, the dirt that falls on your face and into your eyes. That’s what this is, goddamn it, full North Vietnamese army madness. Duc Quang said he had to stop halfway through a tunnel, frozen stiff with fear, and two tourists who were crawling behind him had to drag him out of the tunnel backwards. There’s no going back for me. Back in that room is Lyle and, more significantly, Lyle’s open right palm which I have no doubt whatsoever he is priming with a series of finger flexes and muscle clenches in readiness to smack the bounce out of my poor white arse. Fear stopped Duc in his tunnelling tracks, but fear of Lyle keeps me elbow-crawling like a seasoned VC explosives expert – six, seven, eight metres into darkness. The tunnel takes a slight left turn. Nine metres, ten metres, eleven metres. It’s hot in here, effort and sweat and dirt mix into mud on my forehead. The air is thick.

‘Fuck, August, I can’t breathe in here.’

And August stops. His torchlight shines on another brown metal flap. He flips it open and a foul sulphur stench fills the tunnel and makes me gag.

‘What is that smell? Is that shit? I think that’s shit, August.’

August crawls through the tunnel’s exit and I follow him hard and fast, taking a deep breath when I spill into another square space, smaller than the last but just big enough for the two of us to stand up in. The space is dark. The flooring is earth again, but there’s something layering the earth and cushioning my feet. Sawdust. That smell is stronger now.

‘That’s definitely shit, August. Where the fuck are we?’

August looks up and my eyes follow his to a perfect circle of light directly above us, the radius of a dinner plate. Then the circle of light is filled with the face of Lyle looking down at us. Red hair, freckles. Lyle is Ginger Meggs grown up, always in a Jackie Howe cotton singlet and rubber flip-flops, his wiry but muscular arms covered in cheap and ill-conceived tattoos: an eagle with a baby in its talons on his right shoulder; an ageing staff-wielding wizard on his left shoulder who looks like my Year 7 teacher at school, Mr Humphreys; pre-Hawaii Elvis Presley shaking his knees on his left forearm. Mum has a colour picture book about The Beatles and I’ve always thought that Lyle looks a bit like John Lennon in the wide-eyed ‘Please Please Me’ years. I will remember Lyle through ‘Twist and Shout’. Lyle is ‘Love Me Do’. Lyle is ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’.

‘You two are in so much shit,’ Lyle says through the circular hole above us.

‘Why?’ I say defiantly, my confusion turning to anger.

‘No, I mean you’re actually standing in shit,’ he says. ‘You just crawled inside the thunderbox.’

Fuck. The thunderbox. The abandoned rusty tin outhouse at the end of Lena’s backyard, cobwebbed home to redback spiders and brown snakes so hungry they even bite your arse in your dreams. Perspective’s a funny thing. The world seems so different looking up at it from six feet under. Life from the bottom of a shithole. The only way is up from here for August and Eli Bell.

Lyle removes the thick sheet of wood with the hole in it that stretches across the thunderbox and acts as the toilet seat that once cushioned the plump backsides of Lena and Aureli and every one of Aureli’s workmates who helped build the house we just miraculously crawled away from through a secret underground tunnel.

Lyle reaches his right arm down into the void, hand extended for grabbing.

‘C’mon,’ he says.

I move back from his hand.

‘No, you’re gonna give us a floggin’,’ I say.

‘Well, I can’t lie,’ he says.

‘Fuck this.’

‘Don’t fuckin’ swear, Eli,’ Lyle says.

‘I’m not going anywhere until you give us some answers,’ I bark.

‘Don’t test me, Eli.’

‘You and Mum are using again.’

Got him. He drops his head, shakes it. He’s tender now, compassionate and regretful.

‘We’re not using, mate,’ he says. ‘I promised you both. I don’t break my promises.’

‘Who was the guy on the red phone?’ I shout.

‘What guy?’ Lyle asks. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Eli?’

‘The phone rang and August picked it up.’

‘Eli …’

‘The man,’ I say. ‘Deep voice. He’s your drug boss isn’t he? He’s the man who gave you the bag of heroin I found in the mower catcher.’

‘Eli …’

‘He’s the big bad mastermind, the puppet master behind it all, the kingpin who sounds all sweet and nice and boring like a high school Science teacher but is actually a murderous megalomaniac.’

‘Eli, damn it!’ he screams.

I stop. Lyle shakes his head. He takes a breath.

‘That phone doesn’t get calls,’ he says. ‘Your imagination’s getting the better of you again, Eli.’

I turn to August. I turn back up to Lyle.

‘It rang, Lyle. August picked it up. A man was on the other end. He knew my name. He knew us all. He knew Slim. I thought for a minute it was you but then …’

‘That’s enough, Eli,’ Lyle barks. ‘Whose idea was it to go into Lena’s room?’

August puts a thumb to his chest. Lyle nods his head.

‘All right, here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Come up now and get what’s coming to you, and after everyone’s settled down a bit I’ll update you on a few things we got goin’ on.’

‘Fuck that,’ I say. ‘I want answers now.’

Lyle replaces the wood toilet seat back on the thunderbox.

‘Let me know when you find your manners again, Eli,’ he says.

Lyle walks away.

Four years ago I thought he was going to walk away forever. He stood at the front door with a duffle bag over his right shoulder. I clutched his left hand and leaned back on it with all my weight and he dragged me with him out the door.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Lyle.’

Tears in my eyes and tears in my nose and mouth.

‘I gotta get myself better, mate,’ he said. ‘August is gonna look after your mum for me. And you gotta look after August, all right.’

‘No,’ I howled and he turned his head and I thought I had him because he never cries but his eyes were wet. ‘No.’

Then he shouted at me: ‘Let me go, Eli.’ And he pushed me back through the door and I fell to the linoleum floor of the front sunroom, friction taking skin from my elbows.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

‘You’re lying,’ I shouted.

‘I can’t lie, Eli.’

Then he walked out the front door and out along the path to the front gate and out further past the wrought-iron letterbox and the brown brick fence with the single missing brick. I followed him all the way out to the gate and I was screaming so loud it hurt my throat. ‘You’re a liar,’ I screamed. ‘You’re a liar. You’re a liar. You’re a liar.’ But he didn’t even turn around. He just kept walking away.

But then he came back. Six months later. It was January and it was hot and I was in the front yard, shirtless and tanned, with my thumb on the garden hose directing arcing sheets of vapour spray to the sun to make my own rainbows and I saw him walking through the wall of water. He opened the front gate and closed it behind him and I dropped the hose and ran to him. He had navy blue work pants on and a navy blue denim work shirt covered in grease. He was fit and strong and when he kneeled on the pathway to meet my height I thought he kneeled like King Arthur and I had never loved another man more in my short life. So rainbows are Lyle and grease is Lyle and King Arthur is Lyle. I ran at him so hard he nearly fell backwards with my impact, because I hit him like Ray Price, steel-hard lock forward for the triumphant Parramatta Eels. He laughed and when my fingers clutched at his shoulders to draw him closer, he dropped his head on my hair and kissed the top of my head and I don’t know why I said what I said next but I said it all the same. ‘Dad,’ I said.

He gave a half-smile and he straightened me up with his hands on both my shoulders, stared into my eyes. ‘You’ve already got a dad, mate,’ he said. ‘But you got me, too.’

Five days later Mum was locked in Lena’s room, punching the thin fibro walls with her fists. Lyle had nailed wooden boards across the room’s two sets of windows. He’d dragged out Lena’s old bed and taken the Jesus picture off the wall, removed Lena’s old vases and framed photographs of distant relatives and close friends from the Darra Lawn Bowls Club. The room was bare but for a thin mattress with no sheets or blankets or pillows. For seven days Lyle kept Mum locked in that sky-blue room. Lyle, August and I would stand outside her locked door, listening to her screams, long and random banshee howls, as if beyond that locked door was a Grand Inquisitor overseeing some wicked variety of torture involving pulley systems and Mum’s outstretched limbs. But I knew for certain there was no one else in that room but her. She howled at lunch, she wailed at midnight. Gene Crimmins, our next-door neighbour on the right side, a retired and likeable postman with a thousand tales of misdirected mail and suburban kerbside happenstance, came over to check on things.

‘She’s almost there, mate,’ was all Lyle said at the front door. And Gene simply nodded like he knew exactly what Lyle was talking about. Like he knew how to be discreet.

On the fifth day, Mum singled me out because she knew I was the weakest.

‘Eli,’ she cried through the door. ‘He is trying to kill me. You need to call the police. Call them, Eli. He wants to kill me.’

I ran to our phone and I dialled three zeroes on the long rotary dial until August gently put his finger down on the receiver. He shook his head. No, Eli.

I wept and August put a gentle arm around my neck and we walked back down the hallway and stood staring at the door. I wept some more. Then I walked to the lounge room and I slid open the sliding bottom doors of the wood veneer wall unit that held Mum’s vinyl records. Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones. The one she played so much, the one with the cover where they’re standing in their winter coats and Keith Richards is all blurred like he’s stepped halfway into a time portal that will take him to his future.

‘Hey, Eli, go to “Ruby Tuesday”,’ Mum always said.

‘Which one’s that?’

‘Side one, third thick line from the edge,’ Mum always said.

I unplugged the record player and I dragged it down the hall, plugged it in close to Lena’s door. Dropped the needle down, third thick line from the edge.

That song about a girl who never said where she came from.

The song echoed through the house and Mum’s sobbing echoed through the door. The song finished.

‘Play it again, Eli,’ Mum said.

On the seventh day, at sunset, Lyle unlocked the door. After two or three minutes, Lena’s bedroom door creaked open. Mum was thin and gaunt and waddling slowly like her bones were tied together with string. She tried to say something but her lips and her mouth and throat were so dry and her body was so spent that she couldn’t get the words out.

‘Gr …’ she said.

She licked her lips and tried again.

‘Gr …’ she said.

She closed her eyes, like she was faint. August and I watched and waited for some sign she was back, some sign that she was awake from the big sleep, and I guess that sign was the way she fell into Lyle’s arm and then collapsed onto the floor, clinging to the man who might have saved her life, and waving in the boys who believed he could do it. We huddled around her and she was like a fallen bird.

And in the cave of our bodies she chirped two words.

‘Group hug,’ she whispered. And we hugged her so tight we might have all formed into rock if we’d stuck around long enough. Formed into diamond.

Then she staggered, clinging to Lyle, to their bedroom. Lyle closed the bedroom door behind them. Silence. August and I immediately stepped softly into Lena’s room like we were treading lightly into a minefield in one of those North Vietnamese jungles of Duc Quang’s grandparents’ homeland.

There were scattered paper plates and food scraps across the floor amid clumps of hair. There was a bedpan in the corner of the room. The room’s sky-blue walls were covered in small holes the size of Mum’s fists and emanating from these holes were streaks of blood that looked like tattered red flags blowing in battlefield winds. A long brown streak of dried-up shit wound like a dirt road to nowhere along two walls. And whatever the battle was that Mum had been waging in that small bedroom, we knew she had just won it.

My mum’s name is Frances Bell.

August and I stand in silence in the hole. A full minute passes. August pushes me hard in the chest in frustration.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

Another two minutes pass in silence.

‘Thanks for taking the hit on whose idea it was.’

August shrugs. Another two minutes pass and the smell and the heat in this shithole grip my neck and my nose and my knowing.

We stare up to the circle of light, up through Lena and Aureli Orlik’s backyard wooden arse void.

‘Do you think he’s coming back?’

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