by Trent Dalton
Ring, ring. Fuck it. Sometimes when Saturn calls, you just gotta answer.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Hello, Eli,’ says the voice down the phone line.
That same voice from last time. The voice of a man. A real man type man. Deep and raspy, weary maybe.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ I ask. ‘The one I spoke to when Lyle said I wasn’t speaking to no one but I was.’
‘That’s me, I guess,’ the man says.
‘How’d you know I was down here?’
‘I didn’t,’ he says.
‘Then it’s a hell of a fluke you got me as I was passing through,’ I say.
‘Not so flukey,’ he says. ‘I must call this number forty times a day.’
‘What number do you dial?’
‘I dial the number for Eli Bell,’ he says.
‘What number is that?’
‘773 8173.’
‘That’s insane,’ I say. ‘This phone doesn’t take calls.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Lyle.’
‘But isn’t this a call?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So I guess it takes calls,’ he says. ‘Now, tell me, where are you at?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘At what stage of your life are you at?’
‘Well, I’m thirteen years old . . .’
‘Yes, yes,’ he says, urgent. ‘But be more specific. Is it close to Christmas?’
‘Huh?’
‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘What are you doing right now and why? And please don’t lie because I will know if you are lying.’
‘Why should I tell you anything?’
‘Because I need to tell you something important about your mother, Eli,’ he says, frustrated. ‘But first I need you to tell me what has just happened to you and your family.’
‘Lyle got taken away by some men who work for Tytus Broz,’ I say. ‘Then Iwan Krol chopped off my lucky finger and I passed out and woke up in hospital and Slim told me Mum got taken to the Boggo Road women’s prison and Gus got taken to my father’s house in Bracken Ridge and I escaped from hospital and I’m on the run like Slim in 1940 and I came here to find . . . to find . . .’
‘The drugs,’ the man says. ‘You wanted to find Lyle’s stash of heroin because you thought you could take that to Tytus Broz and he might exchange the drugs for Lyle but . . .’
‘It’s gone,’ I say. ‘Tytus got to the drugs before me. He got the drugs and he got Lyle. He got it all.’
I yawn. I’m so tired. ‘I’m tired,’ I say down the phone line. ‘I’m so tired. I must be dreaming this. This is just a dream.’
My eyes are closing with exhaustion.
‘This is not a dream, Eli,’ the man says.
‘This is crazy,’ I say, dizzy now, confused. A fever chill. ‘How did you find me?’
‘You picked up the phone, Eli.’
‘I don’t understand. I’m so tired.’
‘You need to listen to me, Eli.’
‘Okay, I’m listening,’ I say.
‘Are you really listening?’ the man asks.
‘Yes, I’m really listening.’
A long pause.
‘Your mum will not survive Christmas Day,’ the man says.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘She’s on obs, Eli,’ he says.
‘What’s obs?’
‘Observation, Eli,’ he says. ‘Suicide watch.’
‘Who are you?’
I’m feeling sick. I need to sleep. I have a fever.
‘Christmas is coming, Eli,’ the man says.
‘You’re scaring me and I need to sleep,’ I say.
‘Christmas is coming, Eli,’ he says. ‘Sleigh bells.’
‘I’ve gotta lie down.’
‘Sleigh bells, Eli,’ the man says. ‘Sleigh bells!’
‘I gotta close my eyes.’
‘Sleigh bells,’ the man repeats.
What was that song she sang about sleigh bells? ‘Sleigh bells ring, are you listenin’? In the lane, snow is glistenin’. Gone away is the blue bird. Here to stay is the new bird.’
‘Yeah, sleigh bells,’ I say to the man. ‘Your end is a dead blue wren.’
And I hang up the phone and I curl up on the earth floor of Lyle’s secret room and I pretend that Slim’s girl Irene is sleeping down here in the hole with me. I slide into a bed with her and I spoon against her porcelain skin and I reach a comforting arm across her warm breast and she turns to kiss me goodnight with the face of Caitlyn Spies. The most beautiful face I’ve never seen.
Boy Meets Girl
The office of the South-West Star community newspaper is in Spine Street in Sumner Park, an industrial suburb neighbouring Darra, across the Centenary Highway that takes drivers north into Brisbane’s CBD or west towards the Darling Downs. The newspaper office is two doors up from the Gilbert’s tyre shop where Lyle goes to get second-hand tyres. It’s next door to a window tinting shop and a buy-in-bulk pet supply store called Pawsitively Pets. August and I used to ride our bikes to Spine Street to visit the army disposals store two doors up from here, where we’d look at old military bayonets and Vietnam War water bottles and try to convince the storeowner ‘Bomber’ Lerner – an excitable Australian patriot with a wonky left eye who loves his country and the defence of it as much as he loves Kenny Rogers – to show us the still-pinned and deadly grenade we knew he kept in a safe beneath his cash register.
The South-West Star office is a single-level shop space with a mirrored glass window front and a deep red banner strip of South-West Star adorned with four red shooting stars forming the Southern Cross. I see my reflection in the mirrored glass. I’m stronger than yesterday. More coherent. More confident in mind, body and spirit. I had a bowl of four Weet-Bix with hot water from the kitchen tap for breakfast. Showered. Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and blue jeans and the Dunlops. I put a new bandage on my finger and the rest of my hand. Found a fresh bandage in Mum’s first-aid kit and re-taped the gauze pad Dr Brennan had already dressed it with. My schoolbag was still hanging over the corner post of my bed. An acid-washed blue denim backpack covered in band names – INXS, Cold Chisel, Led Zeppelin. I’ve never heard a single song by the Sex Pistols but that didn’t stop me from scrawling their name across my backpack two years ago. Across the zipped back pocket there’s a sketch of an overweight three-armed alien monster I created named Thurston Carbunkle, who sucks children whole through his nostrils and enjoys the films of Alfred Hitchcock, which is why he’s always wearing a sleeveless Psycho T-shirt. Between these scribbles are several hard-to-read schoolyard permanent marker messages that, like my throbbing missing finger knuckle, don’t age well. ‘Sit on this and rotate’, says one message over a sketched fist with its middle finger raised. Other messages I really should have removed in the interests of good taste, like ‘Kenneth Chugg loves Amy Preston, true luv 4 eva’. Amy Preston died from leukaemia last winter. I stared at that backpack for a full minute, thinking back to simpler times. Pre-this. Pre-that. Pre–finger fucking chop. Fuck that fucking Tytus Broz. I stuffed the backpack full of clothes and food – a couple of cans of baked beans, a muesli bar from the pantry – and Slim’s copy of Papillon that he lent me and I slipped out the back door of that Darra shithole, vowing never to return. But then I returned thirty seconds after walking out of the front gate when I realised I’d forgotten to take a piss before my long walk to Sumner Park.
I lean into the window to see if I can see through it but I can’t see anything except myself up close. I pull on the handle of the mirrored glass entry door and it doesn’t budge. There’s an oval-shaped white speaker by the door, so I press the green button at the bottom of it.
‘Can I help you?’ asks a voice through the speaker.
I lean into the speaker.
‘Umm, I’m here to . . .’
‘Push the button as you speak please,’ the voice says.
I push the button.
; ‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘How can I help you?’ the voice asks. It’s a woman. A tough woman who sounds like she breaks macadamia shells in her eye sockets.
‘I’m here to see Caitlyn Spies.’
‘Push the button as you speak, please.’
I push the button.
‘Sorry again,’ I say, holding the button. ‘I’m here to see Caitlyn Spies.’
‘Is she expecting you?’
Well, that does it. The jig is up. Foiled at the first hurdle. Is she expecting me? Well, no. Does a rose expect to be bathed in a sun shower? Does an old-growth tree expect to be struck by lightning? Does the sea expect to ebb and flow?
‘Umm, yeah . . . no,’ I say. ‘No, she’s not expecting me.’
‘What are you here to see her about?’ the woman asks through the speaker.
‘I have a story for her.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘I’d rather not say.’
‘Push the button as you speak, please.’
‘Sorry, I’d rather not say.’
‘Well,’ the woman says, exhaling, ‘then maybe you can tell me what sort of story it is so I can tell Caitlyn what the hell sort of story it is, since you’re being all cagey.’
‘What sort of story? I don’t know what you mean?’
‘News story? Feature story? Community story? Sports story? Council story? Council grievance story? What sort of story?’
I consider this for a moment. Crime story. Missing persons story. Family story. Brothers’ story. Tragic story. I press the green button.
‘Love story,’ I say. I cough. ‘It’s a love story.’
‘Oooooohhhhh,’ says the woman in the speaker. ‘I love a good love story.’ She howls with laughter.
‘What’s your name, Romeo?’ she asks.
‘Eli Bell.’
‘Hold on a sec, Eli.’
I look at my reflection in the mirrored glass of the entry door. My hair’s all over the place, scruffy. I should have run Lyle’s curry comb through it, put a few globs of Lyle’s hair gel in it. I turn and scan the street. Still on the lam. Still the wanted unwanted. Unwanted by everybody except the cops. A hulking cement truck barrels down Spine Street, followed by a courier van, a red four-wheel-drive Nissan, a yellow square-shaped Ford Falcon, its driver throwing a cigarette butt out the window.
A crackling sound comes back through the door speaker.
‘Hey Romeo . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘Look, she’s real busy right now,’ she says. ‘Do you want to leave a contact number and a bit of an idea about why you’re here and maybe she can get back to you? These journos are always run off their feet.’
The sea will not ebb. The sea will not flow.
I press the green button.
‘Tell her I know where Slim Halliday is.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Tell her I’m best friends with Slim Halliday. Tell her I have a story to tell her.’
A long pause.
‘Hold on a second.’
*
I stand for three minutes staring down at a line of black ants group-carrying plunder from a trail of pastry flakes that runs to a half-eaten sausage roll resting on the ground in the Pawsitively Pets car park. I will associate trails of ants with Caitlyn Spies and I will associate half-eaten sausage rolls with the day I tried to see Caitlyn Spies for the first time. The ants bump their heads together every now and then and I wonder if they’re questioning, plotting, directing, or just apologising in those brief encounters. Slim and I watched a whole trail of ants marching back and forth along our front steps once. He was having a smoke on the steps and I asked him what he thought those ants were saying to each other as they passed, why on earth it was that they were always touching each other. He said the ants had antennae on their heads and they were talking through those antennae without really talking. Those ants were like August, they’d found their own way of communicating. They talked by feel. Little hairs on the end of the antennae, Slim said, and these hairs passed on smells and those smells told other ants where things were, where they needed to forage, where they were going, where they’d been.
‘Food trail pheromones,’ Slim said.
‘What’s a pheromone?’ I asked Slim.
‘It’s like a smell with meaning,’ Slim said. ‘A chemical reaction that triggers a social response among the ants and they all get that shared meaning.’
‘Smells can’t have meaning,’ I said.
‘Sure they can,’ Slim said. Slim reached his arm out from the front steps of the house and he ripped a cluster of purple flowers from a lavender bush Mum had planted in the garden. He rubbed the flowers in his closed palm and presented the roughly ground flowers to my nose and I breathed them in.
‘What does that smell like?’ Slim asked.
‘The mother’s day stalls at school,’ I said.
‘So maybe that means your mum,’ he said. ‘Or maybe now it means these ants crawling down the steps beside your mum’s lavender bush. Fruitcake means Christmas. Meat pies mean Redcliffe Dolphins versus Wynnum-Manly and Sunday afternoon football. Salted beer nuts mean your uncle’s tying one on. Sunlight soap means a Carlingford winter and the orphan master throwing me in a freezing cold bath to wash the dirt off my kneecaps but the dirt don’t come off because he had me kneeling down in mud too long to clean off the front steps of the orphanage. Front steps just like these ones.’
I nodded.
‘Trails, kid,’ Slim said. ‘Where we’re goin’. Where we been. Just another way for the world to talk back to ya.’
*
The speaker crackles on the South-West Star entry door.
‘Come on in and tell your story, Romeo.’
The door unlocks and I pull it open before it locks shut again. I step into the front foyer of the South-West Star. It’s airconditioned in here. Blue grey carpet. A water cooler with plastic white cups. A white sign-in desk, a short and stocky woman behind the desk in a crisp white security shirt with navy blue epaulettes on her shoulders. She smiles.
‘Just take a seat and she’ll be out soon,’ the woman says, nodding me towards a two-seat couch and an armchair by the water cooler. Concern on her face.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘You don’t look okay,’ she says. ‘Your face is all red and sweaty.’
She looks at my strapped hand.
‘Who did that dressing?’
I look down at the dressing. The bandage is coming loose, creased in parts, too tight in others, like I received first aid from a blind drunk.
‘My mum did it,’ I say.
The woman on the desk nods, doubt across her face.
‘Grab yourself a water,’ she says.
I fill a plastic cup, glug it down with the cup collapsing in my left hand. Fill another and glug it down just as fast.
‘How old are you?’ the woman asks.
‘I turn fourteen in five months,’ I say.
I am changing, desk woman, inside and out. My legs are getting longer like my past. I have twenty-plus hairs growing from my right underarm.
‘So you’re thirteen,’ she says.
I nod.
‘Your parents know you’re here?’
I nod.
‘You been walkin’ a bit, ay?’ she asks.
I nod.
She casts her eyes over my backpack resting at my feet.
‘You goin’ some place?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Where you goin’?’ she asks.
‘Well, I was goin’ here. Then I got here. And after here I’ll probably go some place else. But that depends.’
‘On what?’ asks the woman behind the desk.
‘On Caitlyn Spies.’
The woman smiles and turns her head and what she’s looking at makes me stand up.
‘Well, speak of the devil.’
I stand up the way a thirteen-year-old Aztec boy might have stood up on a beach
when he saw a Spanish fleet cutting across the horizon.
She walks towards me. Not towards the security woman behind the desk. Not to the water cooler. Not to the entry door. But towards me. Eli Bell. The most beautiful face I’ve never seen. I saw that face standing on the edge of the universe. That face spoke to me. That face has always spoken to me. Her deep brown hair is tied back and she wears thick black-rimmed spectacles and a white long-sleeve shirt that hangs loosely over light blue acid-wash jeans and the bottom of her jeans hang over brown leather boots. She carries a pen in her right hand and in that same hand she carries a small yellow Spirax notepad the size of her palm.
She stops before me.
‘You know Slim Halliday?’ she asks flatly.
And I freeze for two seconds and then my brain tells my mouth to open and then my brain tells my voice box to respond but nothing comes out. I try again but nothing comes out. Eli Bell. Speechless, nothing to say as he stands on the edge of the universe. My voice has temporarily left me, abandoned me like my confidence and my cool. I turn to the water cooler and pour myself another cup of water. As I drink it down my bandaged right hand begins unconsciously scribbling words in thin air. He’s my best friend, I write on the air with my club of a bandaged hand. He’s my best friend.
‘What are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘What is that?’
‘Sorry,’ I say, relieved to hear the word come out of my mouth. ‘My brother, Gus, talks like that.’
‘Like what?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘You looked like you wanted to paint a house but you didn’t have a paintbrush.’