by Trent Dalton
‘Who was he?’ I asked Slim.
‘He was the boy with all the answers,’ Slim said.
*
I speak into the darkness of our bedroom.
‘The boy had a whole world inside of him,’ I say.
‘The boy who swallowed the universe,’ August says.
Silence in the dark.
‘Gus,’ I say.
‘Yeah?’ August replies.
‘Who is the man on the red phone?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think you’re ready to know,’ he says.
‘I’m ready to know.’
A long pause in the universe.
‘You just wrote it in the air, didn’t you?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Please tell me, Gus. Who’s the man on the red phone?’
A long pause in the universe.
‘It’s me, Eli.’
Boy Loses Balance
I will remember Mrs Birkbeck through the plastic Santa Claus dancing on a coil spring next to the phone on Mrs Birkbeck’s office desk. Second week of December. Last week of school. Christmas is coming. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?
Poppy Birkbeck is the Nashville State High School guidance counsellor with the sunshine smile and the remarkably impervious optimism that refuses to shatter in a daily world of aborted teenage pregnancies and drug-addicted sixteen-year-olds and suburban Bracken Ridge child molesters touching up boys with wildly aggressive behavioural disorders who go home to wildly ignorant parents who go to dinner with suburban Bracken Ridge child molesters.
‘Frankly, Eli,’ says Mrs Birkbeck, ‘I don’t know why we don’t just remove you from school altogether.’
Nashville High has nothing to do with Tennessee. Nashville was a suburb between Bracken Ridge and Brighton, further north towards Redcliffe, before it got squeezed out – obliterated – by time and progress. Nashville High is a thirty-minute walk from our house, through a tunnel passing under the main road that takes locals to the Sunshine Coast. I’ve been at the school six weeks now. On the second day a Year 10 boy named Bobby Linyette welcomed me to school by inexplicably spitting on my left shoulder as I passed by the Social Science building’s water cooler. It was a golly, a real deep snort of a golly, filled with yellowy phlegm and snot and all that is wrong with Bobby Linyette, who sat laughing on the Social Science port racks amid a group of giggling zit-faced hyena buddies with mullet cuts. Bobby Linyette raised his right hand and hid his right forefinger as he waved his hand around. ‘Where is pointer? Where is pointer?’ he sang, a kindergarten teacher singing in the tune of ‘Frère Jacques’.
I looked down at my missing forefinger. My skin was winning the war on the open wound, gradually closing around the bone, but I still had to wear a small dressing over it, all the more eye-catching to wild schoolyard lions like Bobby Linyette.
Then his pointer forefinger appeared. ‘Here I am. Here I am.’ He guffawed. ‘Fuckin’ freak,’ he said.
Bobby Linyette is fifteen years old and has two chins and chest hair. In the third week of my enrolment, Bobby Linyette’s friends held me down as Bobby squirted the entire contents of a tomato sauce bottle from the tuckshop into my hair and down the back of my shirt. I did not report these deeply frustrating acts to the teachers because I didn’t want something as mind-numbingly predictable as school bullying upsetting my plan. August offered to stab Bobby Linyette in the ribs with Dad’s fishing knife, but I asked him not to because I knew that, apart from the fact it was well past the time when August had to stop fighting my battles, this too would upset my plan. In the beginning of this sixth week of my enrolment, in the tunnel underpass as I was walking home from school last Monday, Bobby Linyette tore my canvas backpack from my shoulders and set it alight. I watched that backpack burning and the fire in my eyes told me, deep down inside, that Bobby Linyette had just upset my plan, largely because inside that backpack were my plans. A whole blue-lined school exercise book filled with all my ideas and carefully crafted strategies written in ink. I had schedules in that pad and diagrams and sketches of grappling hooks and ropes and measurements of walls. The masterpiece of these plans was sketched in pencil across the pad’s central two-page opening, the product of valuable prison intel passed directly to me by the Houdini of Boggo Road. A perfect bird’s-eye-view 2B-pencil blueprint of the grounds and building layout of the Boggo Road Women’s Prison.
‘How could you do something so . . . so . . . violent?’ Poppy Birkbeck asks across her desk.
She dresses like one of the 1960s singers Mum loves. She dresses like Melanie Safka. Her arms are folded across her desk and from her elbows hang the fire-coloured sleeves of a loose dress, part American Indian smoking ceremony leader, part Sunshine Coast hinterland seller of sculptures carved from tree trunks.
‘I mean, this is not the kind of behaviour one displays in the schoolyard,’ she says.
‘I know, Mrs Birkbeck,’ I say sincerely, putting the plan back on track. ‘It’s not schoolyard behaviour. It’s more like something you’d find in a prison yard.’
‘It really is, Eli,’ she says.
And it really was. Straight out of Boggo Road’s Number 1 yard. A simple slice of porridge thuggery. All one needs is a pillowcase, something unbreakable and a breakable kneecap.
I had stolen a pillowcase from the Year 8 Home Economics class at 10 a.m. that morning. We were learning to sew. Most of us boys sewed handkerchiefs. But the real Home Economics stars like Wendy Docker sewed pillowcases adorned with stitched images of Australian fauna. I filled Wendy Docker’s kookaburra pillowcase with two five-kilo weight plates I stole from the sports equipment room during our 11 a.m. Health and Physical Education class.
Shortly after the 12.15 p.m. lunch bell I found Bobby Linyette standing in line at the central quad handball courts scoffing a Chiko roll among his hyena buddies.
I approached Bobby the way my pen pal Alex Bermudez, former Rebels motorcycle gang Queensland sergeant-at-arms, said one should approach the unaware victim in a shiv attack. I knew the words of Alex’s letters like I knew the words to ‘Candles in the Rain’ by Melanie Safka.
You want to be coming at the victim from behind, shove the shiv in as close as you can to the kidneys. They’ll drop like a bag of spuds. The key is to shove the shiv in hard enough to get your point across, but soft enough to avoid a murder charge. A fine balance indeed.
I shuffled quick and hard at Bobby, the pillowcase twisted taut so the five-kilo weights became the head of a cotton kookaburra-embroidered mace, and I swung with force at his right kidney, just above his grey school shorts. His Chiko roll dropped to the ground as he keeled over to his right, collapsing like a crushed can of Pasito with the pain and shock of impact. He had time enough to register my face and time enough for rage blood to fill his own but not time enough to anticipate my follow-up full arm swing blow to his right kneecap. Hard enough to get my point across. Soft enough to avoid expulsion. Bobby hopped on his left foot for two steps, clutching desperately at his busted right kneecap, then he crashed down on his back on the rough skin-grazing bitumen of the handball court’s King square. I stood above him with the pillowcase weights raised above his head and I knew the fury inside me was the only gift my father had given me in a decade.
‘Cuuuuuunnnt!’ I screamed down into his face. Spit was coming from my mouth. The holler was so loud and primal and frightening and mad that Bobby’s friends stood back from us like they were stepping back from a bonfire with a burning can of petrol at its core.
‘Stop it,’ I said.
Bobby was crying now. Bobby was pale and his face was red and reeling so hard away from the pillow weights I thought his head might sink through the handball court.
‘Please stop it,’ I said.
*
Mrs Birkbeck’s office is decorated with painted aluminium animals, a green frog clinging above a filing cabinet on the wall to my right. An eagle soari
ng along the wall behind her back. A koala clinging to a gum tree she’s painted on the wall to my left. These decorations all serve to complement the office’s real talking piece, a large framed wall print of a penguin scurrying across a vast ice desert above the words, LIMITATIONS: Until You Spread Your Wings You’ll Have No Idea How Far You Can Walk.
On her desk beside her phone is a fundraising coin box for Shelly Huffman.
I hope Poppy Birkbeck takes that Limitations penguin poster down for Shelly.
There’s a picture of Shelly smiling on the coin box in her Nashville uniform, all gappy teeth in one of those forced over-the-top smiles Artful Dodger kids like Shelly smile when some gruff photographer asks them to put a little more effort into it. Shelly is in my Year 8 class. She lives around the corner from our house in a Housing Commission place on Tor Street, which August and I walk down to get to school. Four months ago, Shelly’s parents found out that the second eldest of their four kids will live the rest of her life with muscular dystrophy. August and I like Shelly, even if she is an A-grade smartarse most days we walk past her house. She’s the only friend we’ve made so far in Bracken Ridge. She keeps asking me to challenge her to arm wrestles on her front porch. She usually beats me because her arms are stronger boned and longer boned and she has me beat on leverage. ‘Nah, hasn’t come yet,’ she says when she beats me. She says she’ll know when the muscular dystrophy has properly arrived when I can beat her in an arm wrestle. The school is on a fundraising drive to help fit out Shelly’s home with outside and inside wheelchair ramps and rails in the bathroom and Shelly’s bedroom and kitchen, generally making the house what Shelly calls ‘fuck-up friendly’. Then the school hopes to purchase a wheelchair-friendly family van for the Huffmans, so they can still drive Shelly to Manly on the east side of Brisbane where she likes to watch skiffs and yachts and tin rowboats sail into the Moreton Bay horizon. The school hopes to raise $70,000 to future-proof the home. The school’s so far raised $6217 or what Shelly calls ‘half a ramp’.
Mrs Birkbeck clears her throat and leans in close across the desk.
‘I phoned your father four times and he did not answer.’
‘He never answers the phone,’ I say.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he doesn’t like talking to people.’
‘Can you please ask him to call me?’
‘He can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Our phone only takes incoming calls. The only number it can call is triple zero.’
‘Can you ask him to please come in and see me? It’s extremely important.’
‘I can ask, but he won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he doesn’t like to leave the house. He only ever really leaves the house between the hours of 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. when nobody else is around. Or when he’s pissed and he’s run out of piss.’
‘Watch your mouth.’
‘Sorry.’
Mrs Birkbeck sighs, leans back in her chair.
‘Has he taken you and August to see your mother yet?’
*
I slept in after that first night in Lancelot Street. I woke to find August’s bed was empty and my neck was stiff from sleeping on a rolled bath towel. I walked out of August’s room across the hall and past my father’s open bedroom door on the way to the toilet. I saw him on his bed. He was reading. I opened the door of the toilet and I saw that the toilet floor was now spotlessly clean and smelling of disinfectant. I took a long piss and walked into the bathroom off the toilet. The bathroom was four white walls, a yellow bathtub, a mould-covered shower curtain, a mirror, a sink, a lonely and spent lick of yellow soap and a lime green plastic circular comb. I stared at myself in the mirror and I didn’t know if I was sick from hunger or sick from the question I had to ask the man reading in the room beyond the bathroom door. I knocked on his door and he turned to me and I tried to not look like I was looking so hard at the darkness of his face and I was thankful for all the translucent blue-grey cigarette smoke filling the room that put a veil between us.
‘Can we go see Mum?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said.
And he returned to his book.
*
Mrs Birkbeck sighs.
‘I’ve asked him a hundred times in the past six weeks and he says the same thing,’ I say.
‘Why do you think he doesn’t want to take you up to see her?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘Because he still loves Mum,’ I say.
‘Wouldn’t that mean he’d want to see her?’
‘Nah, because he hates her too.’
‘Did you ever consider the possibility that your father might be shielding you from that world? Perhaps he feels you shouldn’t have to see your mum in that situation.’
No, I didn’t ever consider that.
‘Have you spoken to your mum?’
‘No.’
‘Has she called the house?’
‘No. I don’t expect her to either. She’s not well.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just know.’
Mrs Birkbeck looks at my right hand.
‘Tell me again how you lost your finger?’
‘August chopped it off with an axe but he didn’t mean to.’
‘He must have been devastated when he realised what he’d done.’
I shrug. ‘He was pretty philosophical about it,’ I say. ‘August doesn’t really do devastation.’
‘How’s your finger coming along?’
‘It’s good. Healing.’
‘Are you writing okay?’
‘Yeah, bit messy, but I get by.’
‘You like to write, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What sort of things do you like to write?’
I shrug. ‘I write true crime stories sometimes,’ I say.
‘What about?’
‘Anything. I read the crime features in The Courier-Mail and then I write my own versions of those stories.’
‘That’s your goal, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘To write about crime.’
‘One day I’m going to write for The Courier-Mail’s crime pages.’
‘You interested in crime?’
‘I’m not interested in crime as much as the people who commit crimes.’
‘What interests you about the people?’
‘I’m interested in how they got to the point they got to. I’m interested in that moment when they decided to be bad instead of good.’
Mrs Birkbeck sits back in her chair. Studies my face.
‘Eli, do you know what trauma is?’ she asks.
Her lips are thick and she uses a lot of deep red lipstick. I will remember trauma through Poppy Birkbeck’s ruby bead necklace.
‘Yes,’ I say.
I will remember the plan.
‘And do you know that trauma can reach us in many forms, wearing many masks, Eli?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Trauma can be brief. Trauma can last a lifetime. There are no fixed ends on trauma, correct?’
‘Correct.’
Stick to the plan.
‘You and August have endured great trauma, haven’t you?’
I shrug, nod at the fundraising coin box on her desk.
‘Well, nothing like Shelly,’ I say.
‘Yes, but that’s a different kind of trauma,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Nobody was responsible for her misfortune.’
‘Shelly did call God an arsehole the other day,’ I say.
‘Watch your mouth.’
‘Sorry.’
Mrs Birkbeck leans in closer across her desk, places her right hand over her left hand. There’s something pious in the way she sits.
‘What I’m trying to say, Eli, is that trauma and the effects of trauma can change the way people think. Sometimes it can make us believe things that are not true. Sometimes it can alter the way we look at the world. Sometimes it can make us do things
we normally would not do.’
Sly Mrs Birkbeck. Woman wants to suck me dry. She wants me to throw her a bone about my missing bone.
‘Yeah, trauma is pretty weird, I guess,’ I say.
Mrs Birkbeck nods.
‘I need you to help me, Eli,’ she says. ‘You see, I need to be able to explain to the heads of school exactly why we should give you another chance. It is my belief that you and your brother, August, could be genuine assets to the Nashville High community. It is my belief that you and August are very special indeed. But I need you to help me, Eli. Will you help me?’