Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  He howls and Iwan Krol looks up from his plate, runs his dead brown eyes over the scene. Darren straightens up, collects himself immediately. Iwan drops his head back down to his plate of massacred crab.

  ‘Dickhead,’ I whisper. I lean closer to him this time. ‘What are you talking about, the bones?’

  ‘Forget about it,’ he says, digging his chopsticks into his rice.

  I slap his shoulder with the back of my hand. ‘Don’t be a prick,’ I say.

  ‘Why do you care so much anyway? You gonna write about it one day in The Courier-Mail?’ he asks.

  ‘I need to know this shit,’ I say. ‘I’m workin’ for Lyle for a bit.’

  Darren’s eyes light up.

  ‘What doin’?’

  ‘I’m gonna watch out for things,’ I say proudly.

  ‘What?’ Darren howls. He leans back in his chair, belly-laughing. ‘Ha! Tinkerbell is gonna watch out for things. Well, praise the Lord and kiss my balls! Tinkerbell is on watch! And what exactly will you be watching out for?’

  ‘Details,’ I say.

  ‘Details?’ he barks, slapping his knees now. ‘What sort of details? Like, today I’m wearing green jocks and white socks?’

  ‘Yep,’ I say. ‘Everything. All the tiny little details. Details is knowledge, Slim says. Knowledge is power.’

  ‘This is a full-time gig Lyle’s gonna put you on?’ Darren asks.

  ‘Watching never stops,’ I say. ‘It’s a 24/7 concern.’

  ‘What have you been watching tonight?’

  ‘Tell me about dem bones and I’ll tell you what I’ve been watching.’

  ‘Tell me about the watching and I’ll tell you about dem bones, Tink.’

  I take a deep breath. I look across the table. Lyle’s best friend, Teddy, is still staring across the table at my mum. I’ve seen men look at my mum like that before. Teddy has big black curly hair and olive skin, a thick black moustache, the kind Slim says are worn by men with big egos and small pricks. Slim says he wouldn’t want to share a cell with Teddy. He never says why. Teddy’s got some Italian in him, some Greek maybe, from his mum’s side. He catches me staring at him staring at her. He smiles. I’ve seen that smile before.

  ‘How you boys goin’?’ Teddy asks, shouting across the noise of the dinner table.

  ‘Good thanks, Teddy,’ I say.

  ‘How you goin’, Gussy?’ Teddy says, raising a beer glass to August. August holds a cup of lemonade up in toast to Teddy, raises a half-hearted left eyebrow.

  ‘That’s the way, boys,’ Teddy smiles, giving a hearty wink.

  I lean back to Darren. ‘The tiny little details,’ I say. ‘A million and one details in a single setting. The way you hold your chopsticks with that kink in your right forefinger. The smell of your armpits and the bong water stain on the bottom of your button-up shirt. The woman sitting over there with the birthmark on her shoulder shaped like Africa. The way Tytus’s daughter, Hanna, hasn’t eaten anything but a few forkfuls of rice tonight. Tytus hasn’t taken his hand off her left thigh in more than thirty minutes. Your mum slipped an envelope to our friendly local member and then our friendly local member went to the toilet and when he came back he sat in his chair and raised his wineglass to your mum who was standing by the drinks fridge. She smiled and nodded then went downstairs to talk to the old and large Vietnamese man sitting by the stage watching that awful singer work her way through “New York Mining Disaster 1941” by the Bee Gees. There’s a kid over by the trout tank poking fish with a sparkler. And that kid’s big sister is Thuy Chan and she’s in Year 8 at Jindalee High and she’s looking so fucking beautiful tonight in that yellow dress and she’s looked over here at you four times so far tonight and you’re too much of a stoned arsehead to even notice.’

  Darren looks down at the bottom-floor dining area and Thuy Chan catches his eye and smiles, pulls a clump of her straight black hair away from her face. He immediately turns away. ‘Shit, Bell,’ he says. ‘You’re right.’ He shakes his head. ‘I thought it was just a bunch of arseholes having dinner.’

  ‘Tell me ’bout dem bones,’ I say.

  Darren chugs a lemonade, straightens his jacket and pants. He leans in close to me again and we stare across at the subject of our discussion, Iwan Krol.

  ‘Thirty years ago his brother disappeared,’ Darren says. ‘His older brother was a bloke named Magnar and, you know, even his name meant “tough cunt” in Polish or somethin’ like that. Toughest bastard in Darra. Real sadistic prick. He picked on Iwan constantly. Burnt him and shit, tied him to railways and whipped him with jumper leads. So apparently one day Magnar is drinking some Polish whisky, fifty per cent rocket fuel, and passes out in the family shed where the two brothers were working on some smash repairs. Iwan grabs his brother by the arms and drags him down to the back of the family paddock, a hundred metres away, and leaves him there. Then, cool as a cucumber, he hooks up two power leads running to the back of the paddock and then he grabs a circular power saw and lights it up and he saws off his brother’s head as calmly as he’d cut the roof off a Ford Falcon.’

  We stare at Iwan Krol. He looks up, like he senses us staring at him. He wipes his mouth with a napkin from his lap.

  ‘That shit true?’ I whisper.

  ‘Mum says rumours about Iwan Krol aren’t always accurate,’ Darren says.

  ‘Thought so,’ I say.

  ‘Nah, man,’ Darren says. ‘You’re not gettin’ me. She means the rumours about Iwan Krol never tell the full truth because the full truth is shit most sane people can’t even wrap their heads around.’

  ‘So what did he do with Magnar, or what was left of Magnar?’

  ‘Nobody knows,’ Darren says. ‘Magnar just disappeared. Vanished. Never seen again. All the rest is just whispers. And that’s his genius. That’s why he’s so brilliant at what he does today. One day his mark is walking the streets some place. The next day his mark is not walking any place at all.’

  I keep staring at Iwan Krol.

  ‘Does your mum know?’ I ask.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What Iwan did with his brother’s body?’

  ‘Nah, Mum doesn’t know shit,’ he says. ‘But I know.’

  ‘What did he do with it?’

  ‘The same thing he does with all his marks.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Darren spins the lazy Susan, stops it at a plate filled with chilli crab. He takes a whole cooked sand crab and drops it on his plate.

  ‘Watch closely,’ he says.

  He grips the crab’s right claw, wrenches it off violently and sucks its insides. He grips the crab’s left claw, rips it from the body carapace as easy as a stick pulled from the shoulder socket of a snowman.

  ‘The arms,’ he says. ‘Then the legs.’

  He tears off three legs on the right of the shell. Three legs off the left.

  ‘All them marks just disappear, Tink. Snitches, blabbermouths, enemies, competitors, clients who can’t pay their debts.’

  Then Darren removes the crab’s rear swimmer legs, four jointed leg segments each shaped like a small flat sinker. He sucks the meat out of all these legs and places the intact leg shells back beside the carapace, exactly where they’re supposed to be anatomically, but not actually touching the shell. He puts the crab claws back in place, like the legs, a millimetre from the crab’s chilli-sauced body.

  ‘Dismemberment, Eli,’ Darren whispers.

  Darren looks across at me to see the dumb look on my dumb face. Then he piles up all the crab’s legs and claws and drops them into the upturned shell of the crab’s carapace. ‘Much easier to transport a body in six pieces,’ he says, dropping the piled carapace in a bowl already filled with a mountain of sucked and discarded crab shells.

  ‘Transport where?’

  Darren smiles. He nods his head towards Tytus Broz.

  ‘To a good home,’ he says.

  To the Lord of Limbs.

  Tytus stands at that moment and taps hi
s wineglass with a fork.

  ‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I believe it’s time to mark this extraordinary evening with a brief note of thanks.’

  *

  On the walk home, a thick cloud has covered up Orion. August and Mum walk ahead of Lyle and me. We watch them balancing on the green log fences that border Ducie Street Park. These log fences – each made of one long light green treated pine log resting on two stumps – have acted as our Olympic Games gymnastics balance beams for roughly six years now.

  Mum bounces up gracefully and sticks a two-foot landing on a balance pole.

  She nails a daring midair scissor kick and lands it too. August claps enthusiastically.

  ‘Now the great Comăneci prepares for the dismount,’ she says, cautiously approaching the edge of the pole. She makes a flurry of straight-arm peacock-hand waves for effect and acknowledges her imaginary crowd of Montreal judges and 1976 Olympics diehards. August puts his arms out in front, braces himself low with his bent knees. And Mum springs into his waiting arms.

  ‘Perfect ten!’ she says. August spins her around in celebration. They walk on and August jumps up onto a pole of his own.

  Lyle watches on from afar, smiling.

  ‘So, you thought about it?’ I ask.

  ‘Thought about what?’ Lyle replies.

  ‘My plan,’ I say.

  ‘Tell me more about this taskforce.’

  ‘Taskforce Janus,’ I say. ‘You really need to read the paper more. The police are waging war on drugs imported from the Golden Triangle.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Lyle says.

  ‘It’s true. It’s all through the paper. You ask Slim.’

  ‘Well, the taskforce might be true, but their intentions are bullshit. It’s a smokescreen. Half the senior cops around here have their Christmas holidays funded by Tytus. No bastard round here wants to stop the drugs coming because no bastard round here wants to stop Tytus’s gravy train.’

  ‘Taskforce Janus isn’t cops round here,’ I say. ‘It’s the Australian Federal Police. They’re focusing on the borders. They’re catching them out at sea, before they even reach the beach.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘So soon supply won’t meet demand,’ I say. ‘There’ll be a thousand junkies running around Darra and Ipswich looking to score but the only people with the gear will be the AFP and they won’t be sellin’.’

  ‘So?’ Lyle says.

  ‘So we buy up now. Buy up once and buy up big. Stick that gear in the ground, bury it for a year, two years, let the AFP turn that stash into diamond.’

  Lyle turns to me, looks me up and down.

  ‘I think you need to stop hanging around with Darren Dang,’ he says.

  ‘Bad move,’ I say. ‘Darren’s our in with Bich. You keep dropping me around Darren’s house and then you keep chatting to Bich like the responsible, loving guardian you are and she eventually trusts you enough to sell you ten kilograms of heroin.’

  ‘You’ve lost the plot, kid,’ Lyle says.

  ‘I’ve been asking Darren about market prices. He says ten kilos of heroin sold even at current prices of $15 a gram would earn us $150,000. You let that stash sit for a year or two, I guarantee you’d fetch sale prices of $18, $19, $20 a gram. You can buy a decent house in The Gap for $71,000. We’d have enough for two houses with change left over to put in-ground swimming pools in both.’

  ‘And what happens when Tytus finds out I’m running a little operation on the side and he sends Iwan Krol out for some answers?’

  I have no reply to that. I keep walking. There’s an empty can of Solo soft drink sitting in the gutter that I kick with my right shoe. It bounces into the middle of the bitumen street.

  ‘You wanna pick that up?’ Lyle says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The can, the fucking can, Eli,’ Lyle says, frustrated. ‘Look at this place. Fuckin’ abandoned trolleys sittin’ in the park, chip wrappers and fuckin’ used nappies lyin’ all over the joint. When I was a kid these streets were clean as a whistle. People gave a shit about these streets. This place was just as pretty as your precious Gap. I tell ya, that’s how it starts, mums and dads in Darra start dropping used nappies in the street, next thing you know they’re lightin’ tyres up outside the Sydney Opera House. That’s how Australia turns to shit, with you just kicking that Solo can into the middle of the street.’

  ‘I reckon widespread suburban heroin use might be a quicker road to ruin,’ I suggest.

  ‘Just pick up the can, smartarse.’

  I pick up the can.

  ‘The drop in the lake,’ I say.

  ‘The what?’ Lyle says.

  ‘The ripple effect,’ I say, raising the Solo can. ‘What do I do with it?’

  ‘Put it in that bin there,’ Lyle says.

  I drop it in a black bin on the kerbside that’s stuffed full of Silvio’s pizza boxes and empty beer bottles. We walk on.

  ‘What’s the drop in the lake?’ Lyle asks.

  Just a theory about my life. We watch Mum and August now zig-zagging through the segmented pole fences lining the park.

  ‘The drop in the lake was Mum’s old man leaving her when she was a kid,’ I say. ‘That’s what starts every ripple of her life. The old man takes off, leaves Grandma to look after six kids in a shoebox in Sydney’s western suburbs. Mum’s the eldest so she drops out of school at fourteen to get a job and help Grandma pay the bills and put food on the table. Then after two or three years she gets pissed off at Grandma because she had dreams, you know. She wanted to be a lawyer or some shit and help all those poor rat kids of Sydney’s west stay out of Silverwater. She takes off hitchhiking around Australia, gets all the way across the Nullarbor, all the way to Western Australia where she waits tables in the Rose and Crown Hotel and some sick fuck holds a knife up to her neck on her way home one night and he throws her into his car and drives off up some dark highway and who knows what the fuck he’s going to do to her but he slows his car at some roadworks along this highway where a road gang is widening the road at night and Mum, bravest woman in the world, just dives out of this car that’s goin’ at fifty clicks and she breaks her right arm on the bitumen and cuts her legs up but she’s smart enough to get up and sprint like she sprinted when she was a girl who won every school sprint she ran in and she runs towards the lights of this road gang as this sick fuck in the car starts reversing back down the dark highway but Mum makes it to a mobile tea room where three roadworkers are inside having a smoko and Mum screams in hysterics about what just happened and one bloke bolts out the door to find the sick fuck’s car screeching up the highway and this bloke comes back into the tea room and says, “You’re safe now, you’re safe,” and that road gang bloke is Robert Bell, my old man.’

  Lyle stops on the spot.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says.

  ‘She never told you about the drop in the lake?’

  ‘No, Eli, she never told me.’

  We walk on.

  ‘You really think Tytus would send Iwan Krol after us?’ I ask.

  ‘Business is business, kid,’ Lyle says.

  ‘That true, all that stuff about him?’ I ask.

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Darren told me about what he does with the bodies. Is it true?’

  ‘I’ve never cared to find out, Eli, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop asking questions about what Iwan Krol likes to do with the bodies of dead criminals.’

  We walk on.

  ‘So where we going tomorrow?’ I ask.

  Lyle takes a deep breath, sighs.

  ‘You’re going to school,’ he says.

  ‘So what are we doing Saturday?’ I say, unwavering, unsinkable.

  ‘Teddy and I have some runs through Logan City.’

  ‘Can we come?’

  ‘No,’ Lyle says.

  ‘We’ll just sit in the car.’

  ‘What the hell you want to do that for?’

  ‘I told you, I can watch things.’ />
  ‘And what do you expect to see, Eli?’

  ‘The same things I saw tonight. The things that you can’t see.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Things like Teddy falling in love with Mum.’

  Boy Loses Luck

  A drop in the lake. Mum is asked to be on the organising committee for the school fete that must meet every Saturday for the next month. She wants to do it because she never does that stuff. She hates all those Parents and Friends cows but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to feel like one of them every so often. Then Slim’s chest starts playing up and his piss turns the colour of rust and his doctor tells him he has pneumonia. He’s holed up resting in a small rental unit in Redcliffe on the other side of Brisbane to us. Mum and Lyle don’t have a babysitter to watch over August and me on Saturdays.

  Spring, 1986. I’m a high school kid. As opposed to looking out the windows of Darra State School, I take the bus each day with August now to look out the windows of Richlands State High School in Inala. I’m thirteen years old and like any self-respecting Queensland teenager with a deeper voice and bigger balls I want to experience new things, like spending this next month of Saturdays with Lyle on his heroin runs. I subtly remind Mum about August’s and my burning fascination with burning things whenever we don’t have adult supervision. Why, just the other day, I mention, I’d watched August set fire to a petrol-covered globe we found dumped beside a Lifeline charity bin in Oxley. ‘Gonna set the world on fire!’ I hollered as August held his magnifying glass over Australia and a hot apocalyptic dot of magnified sunlight descended over the city of Brisbane.

  ‘I’ll take ’em to Jindalee pool,’ Lyle says. ‘They can have a swim for a few hours, Teddy and I will make the run, then we’ll grab them on the way home.’

  Mum looks at August and me. ‘What do you have left on your homework?’

  ‘Just the Maths,’ I say.

  August nods. Same as Eli.

  ‘You should have done the Maths first, got the hard stuff out of the way first,’ Mum says.

  ‘Sometimes life doesn’t work like that, Mum,’ I say. ‘Sometimes you just can’t get the hard stuff out of the way first.’