by Trent Dalton
With August tied to his chair, unable to move his arms, Iwan Krol stands directly behind me, the Bowie knife in his right hand by his waist. I can feel him behind me, smell him behind me.
Tytus breathes deep himself. He shakes his head, frustrated.
‘Now, boys, please allow me to fully illuminate the unfortunate situation you two find yourselves in,’ he says. ‘If, through the course of this discussion, it appears I am going too fast for your youthful ears it is only because, in roughly fifteen minutes, and as soon as I exit this miserable house, two senior police detectives will enter this house through the front door to arrest your mother, supposing, of course, she remains in the land of the living, for her significant role as a courier for the head of a growing outer-western Brisbane heroin supply ring run by Lyle Orlik, who, as of approximately two minutes ago, has mysteriously vanished off the face of the planet.’
‘Where are you taking him?’ I shout. ‘I’m gonna tell the police everything. It’s you.’ I’m standing up now and I don’t even realise it. I’m spitting now. I’m pointing now. ‘It’s you. You’re behind everything. You’re fucking evil.’
A hard slap from Iwan Krol across my cheek drops me back into my chair.
Tytus turns and paces across the living room. He comes to a cabinet and picks up an old figurine of Lena’s, a Polish salt miner made out of salt from a cavernous salt mine Lena’s ancestors helped build in southern Poland.
‘You are right and you are wrong, young man,’ Tytus says. ‘No, you will not tell the police everything because they will not speak to you. But, yes, I am indeed as you describe. I came to terms with that fact long ago. But I am not so evil as to drag children into the works of evil men. I’ll leave that to men like Lyle.’
He places the salt mine figurine back on the cabinet.
‘Do you boys know what loyalty is?’ Tytus asks.
We don’t answer. He smiles.
‘That’s a kind of loyalty in itself, your not answering,’ he says. ‘You remain loyal to a man you do not know, a man whose disloyalty to me has placed you in the position you now find yourselves in.’
He turns on the spot, clears his throat, thinks some more.
‘Now, I have a question to ask you boys and before you answer it, or choose not to answer it, I simply ask that you briefly consider not putting the loyalty you have for Lyle before the loyalty you have to yourselves because, as cruel fate has so tragically determined, yourselves are precisely all you two appear to have now.’
I look across at August. He doesn’t look across at me.
Tytus nods at Iwan Krol and, in an instant, Iwan Krol has a firm and immovable grip on my right hand. His forceful arms plant my palm on the green top of Lena’s dining table, right next to the bowl of spaghetti I was eating before the world collapsed in on itself, before the mountains crumbled into the sea, before the stars fell from the sky and formed this terrifying evening.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
I can smell his underarms. I can smell his Old Spice cologne and his clothes smell like cigarettes. He’s leaning over me with his weight on my right forearm and his big hands have bones of iron and they are trying to spread my right forefinger out, my lucky forefinger with my lucky freckle on my lucky middle knuckle. My hand instinctively makes a fist but he’s so strong and he’s wild on the inside and I can feel that through his hands, his black electricity, his lack of reason, no emotion other than rage. He squeezes my fist hard and my forefinger pops out, rests flat on the table.
I’m going to be sick.
August looks across at my finger flat on the table.
‘What did he say, August?’ Tytus says.
August looks back at Tytus.
‘What did he just write, August?’ Tytus asks.
August feigns a puzzled look, confused.
Tytus nods at Iwan Krol behind me and then the blade of the Bowie knife is touching my forefinger, just above the bottom knuckle.
Vomit. In my stomach. In my throat. Time slowing.
‘He scribbled a message in the air,’ Tytus spits. ‘What did he say, August?’
The blade comes down harder into the finger, draws blood and I draw breath.
‘He doesn’t talk, Tytus,’ I scream. ‘He doesn’t talk. He couldn’t tell you even if he wanted to.’
August keeps staring at Tytus and Tytus keeps staring at August.
‘What did he say, August?’ Tytus asks.
August looks at my finger. Iwan Krol presses the blade down harder, so hard now it’s cut through all my skin and flesh and is lodging into my finger bone.
‘We don’t know, Tytus, please,’ I scream. ‘We don’t know.’
Dizzy now. Frantic. Cold sweat. Tytus stares deep into August’s eyes. He nods again at Iwan Krol and he pushes the Bowie knife down harder. Old Spice and his breath and that blade, that endless blade digging into my bone marrow. My marrow. My weak marrow. My weak fingers.
I howl in pain, a wail so unbridled and raw it rounds out with a high-pitched squeal, from white pain and shock and disbelief.
‘Please don’t,’ I howl through tears. ‘Please don’t do this.’
The blade goes deeper still and I roar with agony.
Then a voice joins the sounds in the room from a place I can’t register.
A voice to my left that I couldn’t hear properly over my screams but this voice makes Iwan Krol ease the pressure on the knife. A voice I’ve never heard before in my conscious life. Tytus leans closer to the table, closer to August.
‘Come again?’ Tytus says.
Silence. August licks his lips and clears his throat.
‘I have something to say,’ August says.
And the only thing to tell me I’m not dreaming this is the blood running from my lucky forefinger.
Tytus brightens. Nods his head.
August looks across at me. And I know that look. That slightly upturned half-smile, the way his left eye squints. That’s the way he says sorry without saying sorry. That’s the way he says sorry for something bad that is about to happen that he is no longer in control of.
He turns to Tytus Broz.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren,’ August says.
Tytus smiles. He looks at Iwan Krol, puzzled. He chuckles. A face-saving chuckle designed to mask something I never expected to see on his face in this moment. There is fear across his face in this moment.
‘I’m sorry, August, could you please repeat that?’ Tytus asks.
August speaks and he sounds like me. I never knew he would sound like me.
‘Your end is a dead blue wren,’ he says.
Tytus scratches his chin, takes a deep breath, thin eyes studying August. Then he nods at Iwan Krol and the blade of the Bowie knife smacks against Lena’s table and my lucky forefinger is no longer attached to my hand.
My eyelids close and open. Life and the blackness. Home and the blackness. My lucky finger with the lucky freckle resting on the table in a pool of blood. Eyelids close. The blackness. And they open. Tytus picks up my finger with a white silk handkerchief, folds it up carefully. Eyelids close. The blackness. And they open.
My brother, August. Eyelids close. And open. My brother, August. Eyelids close.
The blackness.
Boy Busts Out
The magic car. The magic flying Holden Kingswood. The magic sky, light blues and pinks, outside the window. A cloud so fluffy and big and misshapen it’s a prime candidate for August’s game of ‘What’s that one look like to you?’
‘That’s an elephant,’ I say. ‘There’s the big ears, left and right, and the trunk going down the middle.’
‘Nah,’ he says, because he talks in the magic car dream. ‘That’s an axe. There’s the blades, left and right, and the axe handle going down the middle.’
The car turns in the sky and we roll along the tan vinyl back seat.
‘Why are we flying?’ I ask.
‘We always fly,’ August says. ‘But don’t worry, it
won’t last long.’
The car dips sharply in the air and takes a leftward arcing drop through the clouds.
I look into the car’s rearview mirror. The deep blue eyes of Robert Bell. The deep blue eyes of my father.
‘I don’t want to be here any more, Gus,’ I say, the force of the plummeting car pushing us back hard against our seats.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘But we always end up here. No matter what I do. It makes no difference.’
There’s water below us. But this is like no water I’ve seen. This water is silver and it glows, throbbing with silver light.
‘What is that?’ I ask.
‘It’s the moon,’ says August.
The car slams into the glowing silver surface and the surface breaks into liquid as the car plunges into the suffocating green of a world beneath the sea. The magic Holden Kingswood fills with water and bubbles flow from our mouths as we stare at each other. August isn’t bothered about being underwater like this, not phased in the slightest. He lifts his right hand and points his right forefinger out and slowly writes three words in the water.
Boy swallows universe.
And I raise my right hand up because I want to write something back and I go to extend my right forefinger but it’s not there any more, just a blood-filled knuckle hole leaking red blood into the sea. I scream. Then the redness. Then the blackness.
*
I wake. Blurred vision focusing into a white hospital room. The throbbing pain in my right hand sharpens everything. Everything inside me, all my cells and all my blood molecules, rushing and then smashing against the dam wall of the heavily bandaged and taped forefinger knuckle that once connected to my lucky forefinger with the lucky freckle. But wait, the pain isn’t so bad now. There’s a warm feeling in my belly. A floaty feeling, something fuzzy and giddy and cosy.
A liquid drip pulses from the centre of the top of my left hand. So thirsty. So sick. So surreal here. A hard hospital bed and a blanket over me and the smell of antiseptic. A curtain that looks like Lena’s old olive green bedsheets is connected to a U-shaped rod surrounding the hospital bed. The ceiling is made up of square tiles with hundreds of tiny holes in them. A man sitting on my right in a chair. A tall man. A slender man. A slim man.
‘Slim.’
‘How you doin’, kid?’
‘Water,’ I say.
‘Yeah, matey,’ he says.
He takes a white plastic cup from a trolley beside my bed, puts the cup to my lips.
I drink the whole cup. He pours me another and I drink that one too and lean back, weak and exhausted by the small effort. I look again at my missing finger. A right thumb, a bandaged knuckle and three other fingers sticking from my hand like an uneven cactus.
‘I’m sorry, kid,’ Slim says. ‘It’s gone.’
‘It’s not gone,’ I say. ‘Tytus Broz . . .’
Movement makes my hand throb in agony. Slim nods.
‘I know, Eli,’ he says. ‘Just lie back.’
‘Where am I?’
‘Royal Brisbane.’
‘Where’s Mum?’ I ask.
‘She’s with the cops,’ Slim says. He drops his head. ‘You won’t be seeing her for a while, Eli.’
‘Why?’ I ask. And the tears inside me rush to my eyes the way the blood inside me is rushing to the nub of my forefinger, but there’s no dam stopping the tears and they pour out of me. ‘What happened?’
Slim moves his chair closer to the bed. He stares at me silently.
‘You know what happened,’ he says. ‘And any minute now a woman named Dr Brennan will come in here and she’ll want to know what happened too. And you need to decide what you want to tell her because she will believe you. She does not believe what the ambulance officers told her, which is what your mother told them moments before the police arrived.’
‘What did she tell them?’
‘She told them you and August were horsing around with an axe. She told them you were holding one of your Star Wars figurines against a log and you asked August to chop it in half and he chopped Darth Vader in two, along with your finger.’
‘An axe?’ I say. ‘I was just dreaming about an axe. A cloud that looked like an axe. It felt so clear it could have been a memory.’
‘They’re the only dreams worth having, the ones you remember,’ Slim says.
‘What did August tell the cops?’
‘The same he says about anything,’ Slim says. ‘Sweet fuck all.’
‘Why’d they take Lyle away, Slim?’ I ask.
Slim sighs. ‘Forget about that, mate.’
‘Why, Slim?’
Slim takes a deep breath.
‘He was making his own side deals with Bich Dang,’ he says.
‘Side deals?’
‘He was operatin’ behind the boss’s back, kid,’ Slim says. ‘He was building towards something. He had a whole plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘He was going to get out. He called it the “nest egg”. Slowly build your stash, sit on it for a year or two. Let time and the market double its value. Somehow Tytus got wind of it and reacted as expected. He’s now severed ties with Bich Dang. He’ll use Dustin Vang now as his supplier. And when Bich Dang finds out about Lyle it’s gonna be World War III in the streets of Darra.’
Nest egg. World War III. Find out about Lyle. Fuck.
‘Fuck,’ I say.
‘Don’t fuckin’ swear.’
I weep, drag the right sleeve of my hospital gown across my eyes.
‘What is it, Eli?’
‘It’s my fault,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘It was my idea, Slim. I told him about the market. I told him about supply and demand, what we talked about, you know, Taskforce Janus ’n’ that.’
Slim pulls his White Ox from a top shirt pocket, rolls a cigarette that he’ll keep in his packet and light as soon as he exits the hospital. This is how I know Slim is anxious, by his rolling a cigarette he cannot light.
‘When did you tell him that?’ Slim asks.
‘Few months ago,’ I say.
‘Well, he’s been doin’ it for six months, kid, so it sure as shit ain’t your fault.’
‘But . . . that’s . . . impossible . . . He lied to me.’
Lyle lied to me. The man who said he couldn’t lie. He lied to me.
‘There’s a big difference between lying to a kid and not telling him something for his own good,’ Slim says.
‘What did they do with him, Slim?’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, mate,’ he says, tender. ‘I don’t want to know and maybe you shouldn’t either.’
‘There’s no difference between lying and not telling, Slim,’ I say. ‘They’re both weak as piss.’
‘Careful,’ warns Slim.
Maybe it’s the pain in the knuckle where my finger once was that’s putting this rage in me, or maybe it’s the memory of Mum knocked out in Lena and Aureli Orlik’s hallway.
‘They’re monsters, Slim. They’re fucking psychopaths running the suburbs. I’m gonna tell ’em everything. I’m gonna tell ’em every bit of it. Iwan Krol and all the bodies he’s cut up. How saintly Tytus Broz and “Back Off” Bich Dang and fucking Dustin Vang supply half the heroin across Brisbane’s west. They came into our house while we were eatin’ spaghetti and they took Lyle away. They just took him away from us, Slim.’
I sit up on my right elbow to get closer to Slim and a sharp pain localises around my knuckles.
‘You gotta tell me, Slim,’ I say. ‘Where were they taking him?’
Slim shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, kid, but you can’t be thinking about that now. You need to be thinking very carefully about what reasons your mother had for making up that story. She’s protecting you boys, mate. She’ll swallow that shit for you two and you’ll swallow that shit for her.’
My left hand on my forehead. I rub my eyes, wipe tears from my eyes. I’m dizzy. Confused. I want to get out. I want to play Missile C
ommand on Atari. I want to stare for ten minutes at Jane Seymour in Mum’s Women’s Weekly. I want to pick my fucking nose with my lucky fucking forefinger.
‘Where’s August?’ I ask.
‘The cops took him to your father’s house.’
‘What?’
‘He’s your guardian now, mate,’ Slim says. ‘He’ll look after you boys now.’
‘I’m not going to his house.’
‘It’s the only place you can go, kid.’
‘I could stay with you.’
‘You can’t stay with me, kid.’
‘Why not?’
This is Slim losing patience. It’s not loud what he says but it’s pointed.
‘Because you’re not my fucking kid, mate.’
Unplanned. Unwished. Unwilled. Untested. Underdeveloped. Undernourished. Undone. Unwanted. Unloved. Undead. Shoulda coulda woulda never been here in the first place if that creep hadn’t dragged Mum into his car way back in the way back when. If she hadn’t run away from home. If her old man hadn’t run away from her.
I see my mum’s dad in my head and he looks like Tytus Broz. I see the creep who tried to drag Mum into his car and he looks like Tytus Broz with thirty years shaved off that zombie face, a switchblade knife for a tongue. I see my father and I can’t remember what his face looks like, so he looks like Tytus Broz too.
Slim drops his head. Breathes. I lay my head back in tears on the pillow, staring up at the square tiles. I’m counting the holes in the ceiling tiles starting from the left. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . .
‘Look, Eli, you’re in the hole,’ he says. ‘You know what I mean. This is a low. But it only goes up, mate. This is your Black Peter. It only goes up, mate.’
I keep staring at the ceiling. I have a question.
‘Are you a good man, Slim?’
Slim is puzzled by this.
‘Why you askin’ that for?’
Tears spill from my eyes, run down across my temples.
‘Are you a good man?’
‘Yeah,’ Slim says.
I turn my head towards him. He’s looking out my room window. Blue sky and cloud.
‘I’m a good man,’ Slim says. ‘But I’m a bad man too. And that’s like all men, kid. We all got a bit o’ good and a bit o’ bad in us. The tricky part is learnin’ how to be good all the time and bad none of the time. Some of us get that right. Most of us don’t.’