Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘Which way to the train station?’ I ask.

  ‘Wazzat?’ he says.

  ‘The train station?’ I say, louder.

  He points the way, an unsteady right arm and a limp forefinger pointing to an intersection left of here.

  ‘Just keep walking, Robin,’ he says.

  Just keep walking.

  ‘Thanks, Batman,’ I say.

  He holds out his hand.

  ‘Shake me ’and,’ he demands.

  I instinctively go to shake his hand with my right but remember the dressing over my missing finger and tentatively offer my left hand instead.

  ‘Good, good,’ he says, giving a firm handshake.

  ‘Thanks again,’ I say.

  Then he pulls my hand to his mouth and bites it like a rabid dog.

  ‘Nnnngrrrrr,’ he spits, his mouth slobbering over my hand. He’s biting my hand but it’s all skin in his mouth, jelly gums. I reef my hand away and he falls back laughing, his mouth open wide and deranged. Not a single tooth in his smile.

  Run.

  Sprinting now. Sprinting now like I’m Eric Grothe, powerhouse winger for the mighty Parramatta Eels, and there’s a sideline beside me and a try line eighty metres in front of me. Sprint like my life depended on it. Sprint like there’s jet boots on my feet and fire in my heart that never goes out. Across the intersection. My Dunlop KT-26s will guide my way. Just trust in the sleek cushioned design of the KT-26, cheapest, most effective runner in all of Kmart. Sprint like I’m the last warm-blooded boy on earth and the world is overrun by vampires. Vampire bats.

  Run. Past a car dealership to my right and a hedgerow to my left. Run. Past an orange brick building to my left that takes up a whole block of land. A name fixed in fancy letters to the building. The Courier-Mail.

  Stop.

  This is where they make it. This is where they build the newspaper. Slim told me about this place. All the writers come here and they type their stories out and typesetters put their stories on metal down in the printing presses at the back of the building. Slim said he spoke to a journalist once who told him he could smell his stories being pressed in ink in the evening. There was no greater smell, the journo told Slim, than tomorrow’s front page scoop being pressed in ink. I breathe deep and smell it and I swear I can smell that ink because maybe they’re all on deadline and the presses are already running and I’m gonna be part of that place somehow, some day, I just know it, because why else did Batman with no teeth send me down here, down this very street where The Courier-Mail crime writers return to file their pieces and change the State and change the world? Batman was just a bit player, maybe, but he acted well in the grand production of The Extraordinary and Unexpected Yet Totally Expected Life of Eli Bell. Of course he sent me down here. Of course he did.

  A police car passes through the intersection, moving across the road I’m standing on. Two officers. The officer in the passenger seat looks my way. Don’t engage. Don’t engage. But it’s two cops in a police car and I can’t resist engaging. The police officer is eyeballing me now. The police car slows, then continues across the intersection. Run.

  *

  Slim had been on the run for almost two weeks before he was first reported by a civilian on 9 February 1940. A State-wide manhunt stretched to the New South Wales border and police cars lined roads leading south, where most expected Slim to go. But Slim was heading north when he pulled into a service station in Nundah, in Brisbane’s suburban north, at 3 a.m., to fill up a car he’d stolen from nearby Clayfield. The service station owner, a man named Walter Wildman, was woken by the sound of petrol being pumped from a garage bowser. He promptly and justifiably sprang upon Slim with a loaded double-barrel shotgun.

  ‘Stand still!’ barked Wildman.

  ‘You wouldn’t shoot a man, would you?’ Slim reasoned.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Wildman. ‘I’d blow your brains out.’

  This admission naturally prompted Slim to run for the driver’s seat of his stolen car, which in turn prompted Walter Wildman to fire twice at Slim, attempting to blow his brains out but succeeding only in shattering the car’s rear window. Slim sped off towards the Bruce Highway, heading north, as Walter Wildman phoned police to report the car’s numberplate. He got as far as Caboolture, about thirty minutes out of Brisbane, before a police vehicle jumped on his tail, sparking a thrilling car chase through bush side roads and around blind corners and into and out of gullies, which ended with Slim crashing the car through a wire fence. Running into scrub on foot, Slim was quickly surrounded by some thirty detectives from Queensland Police who eventually found him hiding behind a wide tree stump. The police drove Slim back to Boggo Road and threw him back in his cell in Number 2 Division and they slammed the cell door shut and Slim sat back down on his hard prison bed. And he smiled.

  ‘Why were you smiling?’ I once asked Slim.

  ‘I established a goal and I achieved it,’ he said. ‘Finally, young Eli, this good-for-nothin’ orphan scumbag you’re lookin’ at had found something he was good at. I realised why the man upstairs made me so fuckin’ tall and lanky. Good for jumpin’ over prison walls.’

  *

  Train tracks. A train. Bowen Hills train station. The Ipswich line, platform 3. A train pulling in and a set of concrete stairs I sprint down. Maybe fifty concrete steps I’m bounding down, two at a time, one eye on the steps, one eye on the train’s open doors. Then a mistimed step and my right ankle in my right Dunlop KT-26 rolls on the edge of the very last step and I dive face-first onto the rough bitumen of platform 3. My right shoulder cushions most of the impact but my right cheek and ear scrape along the surface like the back tyre of my BMX when I slam the brakes on for a long skid. But those train doors are still open so I lift myself up from the ground and stagger, winded and groggy, towards them as they start closing and I leap for my life and land inside, where three elderly women sharing a four-seat space turn to face me, gasping.

  ‘Are you all right there?’ asks an old woman holding her handbag with both hands on her lap.

  I nod, sucking breath, turning to walk down the train corridor. Small bitumen gravel pebbles are lodged in my face. Air stings the open graze on my cheek. The knuckle that once controlled my missing finger screams for attention. I sit and I breathe and I pray this train stops at Darra.

  *

  Deserted suburbs at dusk. Maybe the world did end. Maybe it is just me and the vampires are sleeping because it’s still daylight. Maybe I’m losing my mind and I shouldn’t be walking like this in the sun, with the hospital painkillers wearing off, but this dream is growing real because I can smell my underarms and I can taste the sweat above my top lip. I walk past the Darra Station Road shops. Past Mama Pham’s restaurant. Past an empty Burger Rings packet blowing in circles in the wind. Past the fruit and vegetable market. Past the hairdressers and the op shop and the TAB. Across Ducie Street Park with the seeds of the paspalum grass catching on the bottom of my jeans and in the white laces of my Dunlops. Almost there. Almost home.

  Careful now. Sandakan Street. I scan the street from afar, hiding behind a sprawling widowmaker swaying in the afternoon breeze. No cars in front of our house. No people in the street. I move cautiously and quickly between trees, zig-zagging my way across the park towards our house. The sky is orange and deep pink above the house and night is falling. Returning to the scene of the crime. I’m tired but I’m nervous, too. Not sure this quest was such a good idea. But I’m supposed to be going places. The only way is up out of a hole. Or further down, I guess. Straight down to hell.

  I scurry across the road, through the gate like I’m meant to be here because it’s my house after all, or Lyle’s house, I should say. Lyle’s house. Lyle.

  Can’t go through the front. Go through the back. If the back door’s locked, try Lena’s window. If Lena’s window is locked, try the sliding kitchen window on the old neighbour Gene Crimmins’s side and maybe Mum, or was it me, forgot to put that length of metal curtain rod in the window
track to lock out intruders. Intruders like me. Intruders like me with big plans.

  Going places.

  Back door’s locked. Lena’s window doesn’t budge. I bring the black wheelie bin around to the kitchen window, pull myself atop the bin and reef at the window. It slides five centimetres along the window track and I’m hopeful, then it slams against the curtain rod and I’m not hopeful at all. Fuck it. Desperate times. Break a window.

  I jump off the bin. It’s getting dark but I can still see under the house, the dirt floor strewn with rocks, but none big enough for my needs. But this will do. A brick. Probably one of those glorious bricks from the factory up the road. A hometown brick. A Darra brick. I slip back out from under the house and I sit the brick on top of the wheelie bin and I’m pulling myself back up on top of the bin when a voice echoes over my shoulder.

  ‘Everything all right, Eli?’ asks Gene Crimmins, leaning out of his living room through an open casement window. The space between Gene’s house and ours is only about three metres so he can talk softly. He’s a soft talker anyway, which I’ve always found calming. I like Gene. Gene knows how to be discreet.

  ‘G’day Gene,’ I say, turning to him, letting go of the bin.

  Gene’s wearing a white singlet and blue cotton pyjama bottoms.

  He registers my face.

  ‘Bloody hell, mate, what happened to you?’

  ‘Tripped over running down the train station stairs.’

  Gene nods. ‘You locked out?’

  I nod.

  ‘Your mum around?’ he asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Lyle?’

  I shake my head.

  He nods.

  ‘I saw those boys dragging him out to a car the other night,’ Gene says. ‘Figured they weren’t all going for ice cream.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He all right?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I’m hoping to find out. Just need to get inside.’

  ‘That what the brick’s for?’

  I nod.

  ‘I never saw you, all right?’ he says.

  ‘Thanks for being discreet, Gene,’ I say.

  ‘You still got those wicket keeper’s hands you used to have in the backyard?’ Gene asks.

  ‘Yeah, guess so.’

  ‘Catch,’ he says.

  He throws a key and I catch it with two cupped hands. The key’s attached to a kangaroo bottle-opener key ring.

  ‘That’s the spare Lyle asked me to hold on to for a rainy day,’ Gene says.

  I nod in thanks.

  ‘It’s rainin’ a bit, Gene,’ I say.

  ‘Pissin’ down,’ Gene says.

  *

  The house is dark and silent. I keep the lights off. Our dishes from the night we had spaghetti bolognese are stacked in a dish rack beside the sink. Someone’s cleaned up. Slim, I guess. I cup a hand beneath the kitchen tap and take a long drink of water. I open the fridge and find a knob of wrapped devon and a block of Coon cheese. I wonder how Slim ate on the lam. Water from creeks, robbing eggs from chook pens, maybe; stealing buns when bakers weren’t looking; plucking oranges from trees. Staying fed and watered is a public activity, raising one’s head is often required to make it work. There’s a loaf of Tip-Top bread on the kitchen bench and I smell it in the darkness and know immediately it’s green with mould. I take bites from the devon and the cheese, mixing them together in my mouth. Not the same without bread, but filling the yawning hole in my stomach. I take the red torch from the third drawer down below the kitchen sink. Pad straight to Lena’s room.

  This room of true love. This room of blood. Jesus on the wall. The light from my torch lands on his sorrowful face and he looks so distant and aloof to me in the darkness.

  My right hand is throbbing. My forefinger knuckle is hot and full with blood going nowhere. I need rest. I need to stop moving. I need to lie down. I slide Lena’s wardrobe door across, slide Lena’s old dresses along the rod they hang on. I push with my left hand against the wardrobe’s rear wall and it compresses and pops back open. Lyle’s secret door.

  It has to be here. Why would it be anywhere else?

  The light from my torch makes a small moon the size of a tennis ball bounce across the dirt ground of Lyle’s secret room. I slip down and my Dunlops dig into dirt. My torchlight finds every corner of the brick-walled room. Then it circles around the middle of the room, along the walls, across the red telephone. It has to be here. It has to be here. Why would he hide it anywhere else but his secret room built for hiding things in?

  But the room is empty.

  I hunch down and scramble for the secret door built into the wall of the secret room. I get a grip on the door flap and stick the torch into the tunnel Lyle has dug stretching to the thunderbox beyond. The tunnel is clear of snakes and spiders. Nothing but soil and thick air.

  Fuck. Heart pounding. Got to do a piss. Don’t want to do this. Got to do this.

  I collapse onto my belly and push myself into the hole with my kneecaps. I cradle my wounded right hand and pull myself along with my elbows scraping the dirt floor. Dirt falls into my eyes when my head bumps the tunnel ceiling. Breathe. Stay calm. Almost out. My torch shines down the tunnel and I can make something out, something resting on the floor of the thunderbox cavity. A box.

  The sight of it makes me scramble quicker along the floor. I’m a crab. I’m a soldier crab. One of those little purple ones with a body like a marble. August and I would let them crawl over us in their hundreds on the shores of Bribie Island, Lyle’s favourite day-trip destination, an hour north of Brisbane. Lyle would pick two or three crabs up in his hand and they’d claw at his fingers and then he’d place them casually on top of our heads. The sun would set and there’d be nobody on the beach but us boys fishing and a couple of seagulls with their hungry eyes on our pilchards.

  My head emerges from the tunnel into the thunderbox and the torchlight shines over a box. A white box. One of Bich Dang’s rectangular Styrofoam boxes. Of course he put it here. Of course he put it in the thunderbox.

  I pull my legs up and hunch down with the torch over the box, flip the lid off with my left hand. And there is nothing in the box. The torchlight races across the box but no matter how many times I trace it back and forth, nothing appears inside. Empty. Tytus Broz got here first. Tytus Broz knows everything. Tytus Broz is one day older than the universe.

  Kick the box. Kick this fucking Styrofoam box. Kick this fucking life of mine and kick fucking Lyle and fucking Tytus Broz and psychotic Iwan Krol and Mum and August and pissant Teddy and bullshit Slim who mustn’t have ever really given that much of a shit about me if he didn’t want to take me home with him in my darkest hour. Slim, of all people, who I woulda thought knew what it felt like to be rag-dolled by life and unwanted and unwished.

  My right Dunlop is stomping now. Bits of Styrofoam scatter across the thunderbox floor, falling into shapes on the sawdust ground like disconnected countries on a world map. And what’s this shit in my eyes, this bullshit liquid that betrays me every single time? It floods my eyes and my face and I struggle to breathe there’s that much of it coming out of me. Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I’ll go. I’ll cry myself to death. I’ll cry so hard I’ll die of water loss right here in this shithole. A shithole end to a shithole existence. Caitlyn Spies can write my story up in the South-West Star.

  The body of thirteen-year-old hospital escapee Eli Bell, who had been missing for eight weeks, was found yesterday at the bottom of a backyard shithole. He had apparently destroyed the box he’d hoped would save the life of the only man he ever really loved. His only relative available for comment, older brother August Bell, said nothing.

  Caitlyn Spies. I fall to the ground in exhaustion. I drop my bony arse into the sawdust and exhale as I rest my back on the rough wood wall of the thunderbox hole. Close your eyes. Breathe. And sleep. Sleep. I turn the torch off and rest it in my waist. It’s warm in this shithole. It’s cosy. Sleep now. Sleep.
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  I can see Caitlyn Spies. I can see her. She’s walking in the sunset on Bribie Island beach. There are thousands of purple soldier crabs before her but they part for her, they map out a footpath of perfect Queensland beach sand and she paces down it slowly, acknowledging the hardworking soldier crabs with her open palms. She has dark brown hair and it blows in the sea breeze and I can see her face even though I’ve never seen her face. Her eyes are deep and green and knowing and she smiles because she knows me the same way she knows everything about everything. The soldier crabs at her feet and the sun falling in the sky and her top lip that curls a little when she smiles like that. Caitlyn Spies. The most beautiful girl I’ve never seen. She wants to tell me something. ‘Come closer. Come closer,’ she says, ‘and I’ll whisper it.’ Her lips move and her words are familiar. ‘Boy swallows universe,’ she says.

  And she turns her head and she casts her eyes across what was once the Pacific Ocean but is now a vast galaxy of stars and planets and supernovas and a thousand astronomical events occurring in unison. Explosions of pink and purple. Combustive moments in bright orange and green and yellow and all those glittery stars against the eternal black canvas of space. We are standing at the edge of the universe and the universe stops and starts here with us. And Saturn is within arm’s reach. And its rings begin to vibrate. Buzz. Buzz. And its vibrating rings sound like a telephone. Ring, ring.

  ‘Are you going to get that?’ asks Caitlyn Spies.

  A telephone. I open my eyes. The sound of a telephone. Ring, ring. Back through the secret tunnel, back in the secret room. Lyle’s secret red telephone is ringing.

  I crawl back through the tunnel. Damp dirt under my bruised kneecaps and my grazed elbows. This call is so important. This call is so perfectly timed. I mean, how about them odds? Me being down here and the phone ringing while I’m down here? I reach the other end of the tunnel and clamber into the secret room and the phone is still ringing. You just wouldn’t credit it. Good ol’ Eli Bell, the lucky Johnny on the Spot once again, right secret place, right unknown time. I reach out to take the secret red phone handset off the secret red push button base. Wait. Think about this remarkable coincidence. Me down here just as the phone rings. Extraordinarily well timed if you don’t know I’m down here. Not so extraordinary, however, if you saw me trying to climb in through the kitchen window. Not so extraordinary if Gene Crimmins has boarded the Tytus Broz gravy train and he was actually foxin’ me with all that windowsill kindness. Not so extraordinary if Iwan Krol is waiting outside in a car listening to The Carpenters softly on the radio as he sharpens his Bowie knife.