Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  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?’

  Boy Follows Footsteps

  Wake up. Darkness. Moonlight through the bedroom window bouncing off August’s face. He’s sitting by my lower bunk bed, rubbing sweat from my forehead.

  ‘Did I wake you again?’ I ask.

  He gives a half-smile, nodding. You did, but that’s all right.

  ‘Same dream again.’

  August nods. Thought so.

  ‘The magic car.’

  The magic car dr
eam where August and I are sitting in the back tan vinyl seat of a Holden Kingswood car the same colour as Lena’s sky-blue bedroom walls. We’re playing corners, leaning hard against each other, laughing so hard we might piss our pants, as the man driving the car makes sharp lefts and rights around bends. I wind the window down on my side and a cyclonic wind blows me along the car seat pinning August to his side door. I push with all my strength against the wind funnelling through the window and I lean my head out to discover we’re flying through the sky and the driver of this mystery vehicle is ducking and weaving through clouds. I wind the window back up and it turns grey outside. Everywhere grey. ‘Just a rain cloud,’ August says. Because he talks in this dream.

  Then it’s grey and green outside the car window. Everything grey and green outside, and wet. Then a school of bream swim past my window and the car passes a forest of waving seaweed ferns. We’re not driving through a rain cloud. We’re driving to the bottom of an ocean. The driver turns around and that driver is my father. ‘Close your eyes,’ he says.

  My dad’s name is Robert Bell.

  *

  ‘I’m starving.’

  August nods. Lyle didn’t give us a flogging for finding his secret room. I wish he had. The silence is worse. The looks of disappointment. I’d take ten open-palm smacks across my arse over this feeling that I’m getting older, that I’m getting too old for smacks across my arse and too old for creeping into secret rooms I was never supposed to know about; too old for squawking about finding dope bags in mower catchers. Lyle hauled us out of the thunderbox this afternoon in silence. He didn’t have to tell us where to go. We went to our bedroom out of common sense. Rage was coming off Lyle like a bad cologne. Our room was the safest place to be, our cramped sanctuary decorated by a single long-faded McDonald’s promotional poster showing team photos from the 1982–83 Benson & Hedges World Series Cup one-day cricket competition between Australia, England and New Zealand, with a special cock and balls ink tribute August has added to the forehead of David Gower in the front row for the Poms. We didn’t get dinner. We didn’t get a single word, so we just went to bed.

  ‘Fuck this, I’m gettin’ somethin’ to eat,’ I say a couple of hours later.

  I tiptoe down the hall in darkness, into the kitchen. Open the fridge, a corridor of light filling the kitchen. There’s an old wad of plastic-wrapped deli luncheon meat, a tub of ETA 5 Star margarine. I close the fridge door and turn left towards the pantry and bump into August, already laying four slices of bread on a cutting board on the bench. Luncheon meat sandwiches with tomato sauce. August takes his to the front window of the living room so he can stare up at the moon. He reaches the window and immediately hunches down in a panicked effort to stay out of sight.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  He waves his right hand downwards. I duck down and join him beneath the window. He nods his head upwards, raises his eyebrows. Have a look. Slowly. I raise my head to the bottom of the window and peek out to the street. It’s past midnight and Lyle is out on the kerbside, resting on the brick fence by the letterbox, smoking a Winfield Red. ‘What’s he doing?’

  August shrugs, peeks out alongside me, puzzled. Lyle wears his thick roo-shooting coat, the thick woolly collar up, breaking the midnight chill against his neck. He blows cigarette smoke that floats against the dark like a grey ghost.

  We both drop down again, chomp into our sandwiches. August drips tomato sauce onto the carpet beneath the window.

  ‘Sauce, Gus,’ I say.

  We’re not allowed to eat food on this carpet now that Lyle and Mum are all drug-free and house-proud. August wipes the drops of sauce up from the carpet with his thumb and forefinger, licking the recovered red sauce from his fingers. He spits on the red stain left on the carpet and rubs it in, not enough for Mum not to notice.

  Then a loud popping sound echoes across our suburb.

  August and I immediately hop up, eyes peeking out through the window. In the night sky, about a block away, a purple firework whizzes into the darkness above the suburban houses, rising and fizzing with a corkscrew velocity before reaching its peak elevation and exploding into ten or so smaller firework strands that umbrella-pop into a briefly luminous and vivid purple sky fountain.

  Lyle watches the firework flare out then he takes one more long drag of the Winfield and drops it at his feet, stubbing it out beneath his right boot. He puts his hands into the pockets of his roo-shooting coat and starts walking up the street in the direction of the firework.

  ‘C’mon, let’s go,’ I whisper.

  I stuff the rest of my luncheon meat and tomato sauce sandwich into my mouth so it must look like I’m eating two large marbles. August stays beneath the window eating his sandwich.

  ‘C’mon, Gus, let’s go,’ I whisper.

  He still sits there, processing like always, running the angles like always, weighing the options like always.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘C’mon, don’t you want to know where he’s going?’

  August gives a half-smile. The right forefinger that he just used to wipe up tomato sauce slashes through the air, scribbling the invisible lines of two words.

  Already know.

  *

  I’ve been following people for years. The key elements to a successful follow are distance and belief. Distance enough from the subject to remain undetected. Belief enough to convince yourself you’re not actually following the subject, even though you are. Belief means invisibility. Just another invisible stranger in a world of invisible strangers.

  Cold out here. I give Lyle a good fifty-metre start. I’m just past the letterbox when I realise I’m barefoot in my winter pyjamas, the ones with the large hole over my right arse cheek. Lyle marches on, hands in his coat, drifting into the darkness beyond the streetlights that line the entrance to the Ducie Street Park across the road from our house. Lyle turns into a shadow, crossing the cricket pitch at the centre of the black oval, climbing up a hill that leads to a kids’ playground and the council barbecue that we had a sausage sizzle on for August’s thirteenth birthday last March. I’m creeping softly across the oval grass like a phantom, walking on air, ninja quiet, ninja quick. Snap. A thin dry stick breaks beneath my bare right foot. Lyle stops beneath a streetlight at the other side of the park. He turns and looks back into the park darkness engulfing me. He’s staring right at me but he can’t see me because I have distance and I have belief. I believe I am invisible. And Lyle does too. He turns from the park and walks on, head down, along Stratheden Street. I wait until he turns right into Harrington Street before I sprint out of the park darkness and into the exposed streetlights of Stratheden. A sprawling mango tree on the corner of Stratheden and Harrington provides the visual protection I need to watch Lyle, clear as day, take a left into Arcadia Street and into the driveway of Darren Dang’s house.

  *

  Darren Dang is in my grade at school. There’s only eighteen of us Year 7 students at Darra State School and we all agree that handsome Vietnamese-Australian Darren Dang is by far the most likely of us to become famous, probably for killing all eighteen of us in a classroom machine-gun massacre. Last month while we were working on projects about the First Fleet, making British ships out of Paddle Pop sticks, Darren passed by my desk. ‘Hey, Tink,’ he whispered.

  Eli Bell. Tinkerbell. Tink.

  ‘Hey, Tink. Bottle bins. Lunchtime.’

  That translated to, ‘You best come by the large yellow metal bottle recycling bins behind groundsman Mr McKinnon’s tool shed at lunchtime if you are at all interested in continuing your modest Queensland state school education with both of your ears.’ I waited for thirty minutes by the bottle bins and was thinking, with false hope, that Darren Dang might not make our impromptu rendezvous when he crept up behind me and gripped the back of my neck between his right forefinger and thumb. ‘If you saw ninjas, you’re seeing ghosts,’ he whispered. It’s a line from The Octagon. Two months earlier, during a Physical Education class, I
’d told Darren Dang that I, like him, believed the Chuck Norris movie about a secret training camp for terrorist ninjas was the best movie ever made. I had lied. Tron is the best movie ever made.

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Eric Voight, Darren’s roly-poly empty-headed muscle from a family of roly-poly empty-headed mechanics who run the Darra Auto Transmission and Window Tinting shop across the road from the Darra brickworks. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shit his little fairy pants.’

  ‘Shat,’ I said. ‘Tinkerbell the fairy just shat his pants, Eric.’

  Darren turned to the bottle bins and dug his hands into a collection of Mr McKinnon’s empty spirits bottles.

  ‘How much does this guy drink?’ he said, clutching a Black Douglas bottle and sucking down half a capful of liquor resting at the bottom. He did the same with a small bottle of Jack Daniels, then a bottle of Jim Beam bourbon. ‘You good?’ he said, offering me the dregs of a Stone’s Green Ginger Wine.

  ‘I’m good,’ I said. ‘Why did you want to meet me?’

  Darren smiled and slung a large canvas duffle bag off his right shoulder.

  He reached into the duffle bag.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ Darren said.

  Such requests from Darren Dang always end in tears or blood. But, like school, once you start with Darren Dang there’s no realistic way of avoiding Darren Dang.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Eric pushed me hard in the chest: ‘Just close your eyes, Bell End.’

  I closed my eyes and instinctively cupped my hands over my balls.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ Darren said. And I opened my eyes to see a close-up view of a large brown rat, its two front teeth nervously buzzing up and down like a council jackhammer.

  ‘Fuckin’ell, Darren,’ I barked.

  Darren and Eric howled with laughter.

  ‘Found him in the storeroom,’ he said.

  Darren Dang’s mum, ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang, and his stepdad, Quan Nguyen, run the Little Saigon Big Fresh supermarket at the end of Darra Station Road, a one-stop super shop for Vietnamese imported vegetables, fruits, spices, meats and whole fresh fish. The storeroom at the rear of the supermarket, next to the meat locker, is, much to Darren’s joy, home to south-east Queensland’s longest and most well fed dynasty of obese brown rats.