Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  Lyle came to Zohra’s house to see Astrid. He soon came to Zohra’s house to play Scrabble with Mum. Lyle’s not book smart but he’s street smart and he reads paperback novels endlessly so he knows plenty of words, like Mum. Lyle says he fell in love with Mum the moment she landed the word ‘quixotic’ on a triple word score.

  Mum’s love came hard. There was pain in it, there was blood and screams and fists against fibro walls, because the worst thing Lyle ever did was get my mum on drugs. I guess the best thing Lyle ever did was get her off drugs, but he knows I know that the latter could never make up for the former. He got her off drugs in this room. This room of true love. This room of blood.

  *

  August turns on the flashlight, shines it into the black void beyond the wardrobe wall. The dead white light illuminates a small room almost as big as our bathroom. The torchlight shines on three brown brick walls, a cavity deep enough for a grown man to stand in, like some kind of fallout shelter but unstocked and empty. The floor is made of the earth that the room was dug out from. August’s torch shines on the empty space until it finds the only objects in the room. A wood stool with a cushioned circular seat. And upon this stool is a push-button box telephone. The telephone is red.

  *

  The worst kind of junkie is the one who thinks they’re not the worst kind of junkie. Mum and Lyle were woeful for a while there, about four years ago. Not in the way they looked, just the way they behaved. Not forgetting my eighth birthday, as such, just sleeping through it, that kind of thing. Booby-trap syringes and shit. You’d creep into their bedroom to wake them up and tell them it was Easter, hop onto their bed like the joyful seasonal bunny and cop a junk needle in your kneecap.

  August made me pancakes on my eighth birthday, served them up with maple syrup and a birthday candle that was actually just a thick white house candle. When we finished the pancakes, August made a gesture that said because it was my birthday we could do whatever I wanted. I asked if we could burn several things with my birthday candle, starting with the fungus-green loaf of bread that had been sitting in the fridge for what August and I had tracked at forty-three days.

  August was everything back then. Mum, dad, uncle, grandma, priest, pastor, cook. He made us breakfast, he ironed our school uniforms, he brushed my hair, helped me with my homework. He started cleaning up after Lyle and Mum as they slept, hiding their drug bags and spoons, responsibly disposing of their syringes, with me always behind him saying, ‘Fuck all that, let’s go kick the footy.’

  But August cared for Mum like she was a lost forest fawn learning to walk because August seemed to know some secret about it all, that it was all just a phase, a part of Mum’s story that we simply had to wait through. I think August believed she needed this phase, she deserved this drug rest, this big sleep, this time out of her brain, this time out from thinking about the past – her thirty-year slideshow of violence and abandonment and dormitory homes for wayward Sydney girls with bad dads. August combed her hair while she slept, pulled blankets over her chest, wiped drool from her mouth with tissues. August was her guardian and he’d clean me up in a flurry of pushes and punches if ever I stood in judgement and disgust. Because I didn’t know. Because nobody knew Mum but August.

  These were Mum’s Debbie Harry ‘Heart of Glass’ years. People say junk makes you look horrific, that too much heroin tears your hair out, leaves scabs all over your face and your wrists from your anxious fingers and your anxious fingernails that keep filling with blood and rolled skin. People say the gear sucks the calcium out of your teeth and your bones, leaves you couch-bound like a rotting corpse. And I’d seen all that. But I also thought junk made Mum look beautiful. She was thin and pale white and blonde, not as blonde as Debbie Harry but just as pretty. I thought junk made Mum look like an angel. She had this fixed dazed look on her face, there but not there, like Harry in that ‘Heart of Glass’ clip, like something from a dream, moving in the space between sleeping and waking, between life and death, but sparkling somehow, like she had a mirror ball permanently spinning in the pupils of her sapphire eyes. And I remember thinking that’s how an angel really would look if they found themselves in suburban Darra, south-east Queensland, down all this way from heaven. Such an angel really would be dazed like that, puzzled, glassy, flapping her wings as she studied all those dishes piling up in the sink, all those cars passing by the house beyond the cracks in the curtains.

  There’s a golden orb-weaver spider that builds a web outside my bedroom window so intricate and perfect that it looks like a single snowflake magnified a thousand times. The orb-weaver spider sits in the middle of the web like it’s parachuting sideways, suspended in the quest it keeps wanting to finish without needing to know the reason why, blown but not beaten by wind and rain and afternoon summer storms so strong they fell power poles. Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.

  *

  ‘We need to get outta here, Gus.’

  August hands me the flashlight to hold. He turns around and kneels down, sliding his legs backwards through the space in the wardrobe and into the void of the room. He drops into the room and his feet find footing. He turns back around to me and, standing on his toes for extra height, he nods at the sliding wardrobe door. I close it behind us and we’re in total darkness but for the light from the torch. August nods me into the void, reaches up to take the flashlight from my hands. I shake my head.

  ‘This is insane.’

  He nods me in again.

  ‘You’re an arsehole.’

  He smiles. August knows I’m just like him. August knows that if someone told me there was a hungry Bengal tiger on the loose behind a door I’d open it to be sure they weren’t lying. I slip down into the room and my bare feet land on the cold damp earth of the room’s floor. I run a hand along the walls, rough brick and dirt.

  ‘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.