by Trent Dalton
I really did look like that, didn’t I? She’s so funny. So insightful.
‘My brother, Gus, doesn’t talk. He writes his words in the air.’
‘Cute,’ she says sharply. ‘But I’m on deadline, so you want to hurry up and tell me how you know Slim Halliday?’
‘He’s my best friend,’ I say.
She laughs.
‘You’re Slim Halliday’s best friend? Slim Halliday hasn’t been seen in the flesh in three years. Most presume he’s dead already. And you’re telling me he’s alive and well and best friends with a . . . what are you, twelve?’
‘I’m thirteen,’ I say. ‘Slim was good friends first with . . . well . . . Slim was my babysitter.’
She shakes her head.
‘Your parents had you babysat by a convicted killer?’ she says. ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road? The greatest escapee ever locked away in an Australian clink? A man who’d happily sell the kidneys of a thirteen-year-old boy if it meant a clean getaway? That’s some classy parenting from your folks there.’
There’s warmth in the way she says that. Humour and toughness too, but warmth mostly. Maybe I’m biased because she really looks like the girl of my dreams in a Clark Kent–style thick-rimmed specs disguise, but there’s warmth in everything she says. The warmth comes through in the way her top lip kinks up gently in the corner of her mouth and there’s warmth in the skin of her cheeks and the colour of her red bottom lip and the deep pools of her green eyes that look like the lilypad-fringed waters of the Enoggera Reservoir where Lyle took August and me for a swim that day we bought the Atari from that family in The Gap in Brisbane’s leafy inner west. I want to dive into those green eyes and scream ‘Geronimo!’ and splash into the world of Caitlyn Spies and never come back up for air.
‘Hey,’ she says, waving a hand in my face. ‘Hey, you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here,’ I say.
‘Yeah, now you are, but just then you drifted off,’ she says. ‘You started staring right at me, then you went away somewhere, with this goofy look across your face like a giraffe doing a quiet fart.’
That is how I look, isn’t it? She’s so funny!
I turn to the two-seat couch, whispering.
‘Can we sit down for a second?’
She looks at her watch.
‘I’ve got a story for you,’ I say. ‘But I need to be careful how I tell it.’
She takes a deep breath, sighs on the exhale. She nods, sits down on the couch.
I sit beside her. She flips open her Spirax notepad, takes the lid off her pen.
‘You gonna take notes?’ I ask.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ she says. ‘What’s the spelling of your name?’
‘Why do you need to know that?’
‘Because I’m knitting a cardigan with your name on it.’
I’m confused.
‘It’s so I can spell your name right in my story.’
‘You’re gonna write a story about me?’
‘If this story you’re about to tell me is worth writing about, yes,’ she says.
‘Can I give you a fake name?’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Give me a fake name.’
‘Theodore . . . Zuckerman.’
‘That’s a shit fake name,’ she says. ‘How many Aussies you know called Zuckerman? Let’s go with . . . oh, I don’t know . . . Eli Bell.’
‘How do you know my name?’
She nods to the woman behind the front desk.
‘You already told it to Lorraine.’
Lorraine behind the desk gives a knowing grin.
I take a breath. ‘No names,’ I say.
‘All right, no names,’ she says. ‘Boy, this must be one hell of a yarn, Deep Throat.’
She crosses her legs and turns towards me then looks me in the eye. ‘So,’ she says.
‘So what?’ I wonder.
‘So tell me something,’ she says.
‘I really enjoyed the “Queensland Remembers” story you wrote about Slim.’
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘I liked how you said that in the end the way he finally escaped Boggo Road was by walking out the front door as a free man,’ I say.
She nods.
‘That’s very true,’ I say. ‘In the end, the greatest trick he ever pulled was surviving. That’s the truth of it. People always go on about how cunning he was inside but they never talk about his patience or his will or his determination or how many times he thought about swallowing a rubber band ball filled with razor blades.’
‘Nice imagery,’ Caitlyn says.
‘But you did leave out the most poignant part about Slim’s story.’
‘Do tell.’
‘The fact he wanted to be good but the bad in him kept getting in the way of his plans,’ I say. ‘He was like any other man, he had good and bad in him, but Slim never got a chance to give the good side a long enough walk down the street. He spent most of his life inside and, when you’re inside, bein’ good is as good as bein’ dead.’
‘Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about the stories of Queensland cons?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Shouldn’t you be playing with He-Man figures or something?’
‘My brother, Gus, and I burned all our He-Man figures with a magnifying glass.’
‘How old is your brother?’ she asks.
‘He’s fourteen,’ I say. ‘How old are you?’
‘I’m twenty-one,’ she says.
That hurts. That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t feel right for some reason.
‘You’re eight years older than me,’ I say. ‘By the time I’m eighteen, you’re gonna be . . . twenty-six?’
She raises an eyebrow.
‘By the time I’m twenty you’re gonna be . . .’
She cuts me off: ‘What do you care how old I’m gonna be when you’re twenty?’
I look again into those green eyes.
‘Because I think we’re meant to be . . .’
What, Eli? What are we meant to be exactly? What exactly are you talking about?
The answers to the questions. Your end is a dead blue wren. Caitlyn Spies.
Boy. Swallows. Universe.
I bet August knows what we’re meant to be.
‘Never mind,’ I say. I rub my eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Can I call your parents for you?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ I say. ‘I’m just tired.’
‘What happened to your hand?’ she asks.
I stare at my bandaged hand. Tytus Broz. That’s what you came here for. Tytus Broz. Not Caitlyn Spies.
‘Listen, I’m going to tell you a story but you must be very careful about what you do with it,’ I say. ‘The men I’m about to tell you about are very dangerous. These men do terrible things to people.’
She looks serious now. ‘Tell me what happened to your hand, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Do you know a man named Tytus Broz?’ I whisper.
‘Tytus Broz?’ she ponders.
She starts to scribble the name in her notebook.
‘Don’t write it down,’ I say. ‘Just remember the name if you can. Tytus Broz.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ she says again. ‘Who is Tytus Broz?’
‘He’s the man who took my—’
But I don’t finish that sentence because a fist bashes against the office’s glass shopfront, just above where we’re sitting. I duck down instinctively and so does Caitlyn Spies. Bang. Bang. Two fists now.
‘Oh shit,’ says Lorraine on the front desk. ‘It’s Raymond Leary.’
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says.
*
Raymond Leary wears a camel-coloured suit and tie with a white business shirt. Mid-fifties. His face is round and his hair is straw-coloured and scarecrow-straggly. His belly is large and his fists are fat and they bash the shopfront glass with such fury the whole glass panel rattles in place and the water cooler inside shakes a little too. Lorraine pres
ses a button at her desk, speaks into an intercom.
‘Mr Leary, please step back from the glass,’ she says.
Raymond Leary screams. ‘Let me in,’ he barks. He puts his face against the glass. ‘Let me in!’
Caitlyn moves to the front desk and I follow her. Raymond Leary bashes again on the glass. ‘Stay back from the glass,’ Caitlyn warns me.
‘Who is he?’ I ask, moving to Caitlyn’s side.
‘State government knocked his house down to build an exit road off Ipswich Motorway,’ she says. ‘Raymond got screwed in the process and then his wife got depression and she threw herself in front of a cement truck on the Ipswich Motorway, just before the new exit road was built over her house.’
‘So why’s he bashing on your window?’ I ask.
‘Because we won’t tell his story,’ Caitlyn says.
Raymond’s clenched fists bang against the window.
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says again.
Lorraine nods. Picks up her desk phone.
‘Why won’t you tell his story?’ I ask.
‘Because our paper campaigned for the government to put that exit road in,’ she says. ‘Eighty-nine per cent of our readers wanted improvements made to that section of the motorway.’
Raymond Leary takes five methodical steps back from the glass.
‘Oh fuck,’ Caitlyn Spies says.
Raymond Leary runs at the glass wall. It takes a moment to actually comprehend that he does this, that this moment is real, because it’s so wrong, so truly out of the norm, that it seems impossible. But it is happening. He is really running headfirst at the glass wall and his wide and fatty forehead flesh really does hit the glass wall first with all the weight of, what, a hundred and fifty kilos pushing behind it and the impact is so dramatic and hard that Caitlyn Spies and Lorraine behind the desk and me, Eli Bell – solo adventurer, hospital escapee, lam boy – draw breath sharply and brace for the inevitable shattering of all that dangerous glass but it doesn’t give, it just rattles in place, and Raymond Leary’s head snaps back like he’s broken his neck and I see his eyes register what he’s done and his eyes say he’s mad, his eyes say he is now animal, his eyes say he is Taurus the Bull.
‘Yes, the office of the South-West Star, 64 Spine Street, Sumner Park. Please hurry,’ Lorraine says down the phone.
He staggers and regathers his footing and then he steps back seven paces this time and he breathes and he charges again at the glass. Smack. His head whips back further this time and his legs give way beneath him. Stop it, Raymond Leary. Stop it. A lump emerges in the centre of his forehead. It turns the colour and shape of the old black tennis balls August and I own that have been rubbed and handball-bashed raw from countless games in the middle of Sandakan Street. He steps back again, the rage building and exploding and building again inside him with every step back, shoulders circling in their sockets, his fists clenching. Taurus the Bull wants to die today.
Lorraine speaks urgently into her intercom. ‘That’s reinforced glass, Mr Leary,’ she says. ‘You cannot break through it.’
Challenge accepted. Raymond Leary in his frayed camel-coloured suit and his sad attack on a wall of reinforced glass. He charges again. Whack. And the impact knocks him down. He lands hard on his left shoulder. Spit coming from his mouth. Groggy and drunk on his own madness. He lurches to his feet, a tear in the left shoulder of his suit jacket. He’s dizzy and confused. Moving from side to side. For a moment he turns his back to the glass and this is the moment I choose to rush to the front door of the office.
‘Eli, what are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies barks.
I open the door.
‘Eli, stop, don’t go out there,’ Caitlyn Spies warns. ‘Eli!’
I go out there. I slip out the entry door and close it quickly behind me.
Raymond Leary wobbles on his feet, punch-drunk. He steps three times to his side and stops on the spot and turns to set his eyes on me. There’s a split across his forehead and his forehead is black and swollen and the split throbs with blood and this red blood spills down his face, down the mountain of a busted nose, across the ridges of his trembling lips, along the plain of his wide and dimpled chin and onto his crisp white business shirt and tie.
‘Stop it,’ I say.
He stares into my eyes and he tries to understand me and I think he does because he breathes and that’s what humans do. We breathe. And we think. But we get mad too. We get so sad and we get so mad.
‘Please stop it, Raymond,’ I say.
And he breathes again and he steps back. Confused by this moment. Confused by this boy before him. Across the road, at a hole-in-the-wall snack shop selling meat pies and chips with gravy, several men in workwear are looking over at this scene.
The street is quiet. No cars passing. This moment is frozen in time. The bull and the boy.
I can hear him breathing. He’s exhausted. He’s spent. Something registers in his eyes. Something human.
‘They don’t want to hear my story,’ he says.
He turns to the glass wall and finds himself in the mirrored reflection.
‘I’ll hear your story,’ I say.
His right hand rubs the swelling in his forehead. Blood covers his fingers and his fingers trace the blood running down his face. His right palm finds the blood now and the palm rubs the blood in circles around his forehead. He rubs it across his whole face. The colour red. He turns to me like he’s just woken up from a dream. How did I get here? Who are you? He shakes his head in disbelief. And he drops his head and the workmen from the meat pie shop are crossing the road now and Raymond Leary seems to have stopped.
‘You all right, kid?’ calls one of the workmen.
And, with that, Raymond Leary raises his head and finds himself again in the glass and he runs at himself in the glass and his bloody face meets his bloody face and both versions of Raymond Leary fall unconscious to the ground.
Three workmen rush across the road, form a half-circle around Raymond Leary.
‘What the fuck’s his malfunction?’ one of the workmen asks.
I say nothing. I just stare at Raymond Leary. He lies flat on his back with his arms outstretched and his legs outstretched like he was drawn up for scientific study by da Vinci.
Caitlyn Spies emerges cautiously from the front door, looking at Raymond Leary flat on his back.
Caitlyn’s fringe hangs over her face and a light gust of wind blows it about like there’s a puppet in a dress dancing across her forehead and the sun makes Caitlyn Spies beautiful because it lights up her face and makes her move outside of time, outside of life, like she’s walking in slow motion along the edge of the universe.
She walks over to me. Over to me, Eli Bell. Boy on the lam. Boy in trouble.
She rests a gentle hand on my left shoulder. Her hand on me. Boy on the lam. Boy in love.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Is he . . .?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks closer at Raymond Leary, then steps back, shaking her head.
‘You’re a brave boy, Eli Bell,’ she says. ‘Stupid, but stupid brave.’
The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world – the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu – relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.
A police car pulls up on the side of the road, its front right wheel biting into the concrete guttering. Two male police officers exit the vehicle and rush to Raymond Leary on the ground. ‘Step back, please,’ says one officer, slipping on a pair of gloves as he kneels down to Raymond Leary. A pool of blood builds on the concrete beside Raymond’s left ear.
Police.
‘Goodbye, Caitlyn Spies,’ I say.
I step back from the small group gathered around Raymond.
‘Huh?’ she says. ‘Where you going?’
‘I’m going to see my mum,’ I say.
‘But wh
at about your story?’ she asks. ‘You haven’t told me your story.’
‘The timing’s not right,’ I say.
‘The timing?’
‘The time’s not right,’ I say, walking backwards.
‘You’re a curious boy, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Will you wait?’ I ask.
‘Wait for what?’ she asks.
Lorraine from the front desk calls out to Caitlyn from the group surrounding Raymond Leary. ‘Caitlyn,’ she says, ‘the officers have some questions.’
Caitlyn turns her head to Lorraine and the police and the scene before the wall of glass. And I run. I sprint up Spine Street and my bony legs are quick but maybe not quicker than Christmas.
Wait for the universe, Caitlyn Spies. Wait for me.
Boy Stirs Monster
The moon pool. All the way out here on the northern fringe of the city. The full midnight moon shines for August Bell anywhere, so why wouldn’t it shine for him in Bracken Ridge, home of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Number 5 Lancelot Street. Robert Bell’s small orange brick house in the Queensland Housing Commission cluster of small orange brick homes just down the hill from Arthur Street and Gawain Road and Percivale Street and Geraint Street. Here sits Sir August the Mute, in the gutter by a black letterbox fixed to a weather-beaten stick. He has a garden hose resting on his right thigh as he fills a flat pan of Lancelot Street bitumen in precise angles to reflect a full moon so vivid that the man inside it can be seen with his lips wet whistling ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’.
I watch him from behind a blue Nissan family van parked five houses further up the street. He looks up at the moon then he kinks the garden hose in his hands so the water stops and the moon pool stills, reflecting a perfect silver moon. Then he reaches for an old rusted 7-iron golf club that sits beside him and he stands and he leans over the moon pool and stares into his reflection. He flips the club upside down and, with the handle end, he taps the very centre of his pool. And he sees things only he can see.
Then he looks up and sees me.
‘So I guess you can talk when you want to?’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders, scribbles in the air. Sorry Eli.
‘Say it.’