Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  I can smell the muddy mangroves skirting Bramble Bay on the wind that pushes the Malvern Star along the bridge, up over the first hump. Lyle called it ‘Humpity Bump’ bridge because of the bumps his mum and dad’s car made when he was a boy crossing over the buckled and rough aggregate bitumen surface that crackles beneath my bicycle wheels today.

  The bridge was closed to traffic in 1979 when they built a strong, wider, uglier bridge beside it. Now the Hornibrook is used only by a few bream and whiting and flathead fishermen and those three local kids pulling backflips off the tallowwood decking, spinning into a full and choppy green-brown tide so high the water lashes the iron safety rails that are peeling with yellow paint.

  Rain on my head and I know I should have worn a raincoat but I love the rain on my head and the smell of the rain on the bitumen.

  The sky gets darker the closer I get to the middle of the bridge. This is where we always meet, so this is where I find him, seated on the concrete edge of the bridge, his long legs dangling over the side. He wears a thick green raincoat with a hood over his head. His red fibreglass fishing rod with an old wooden Alvey reel rests between his right elbow and his waist as he hunches over, rolling a smoke. With his head under the hood, he can’t even see me pull up in the rain, but somehow he knows it’s me.

  ‘Why didn’t you wear a fuckin’ raincoat,’ Slim says.

  ‘I saw a rainbow over Lancelot Street and I thought the rain was done,’ I say.

  ‘The rain’s never done with us, kid,’ Slim says.

  I lean the bike against the yellow rails and inspect a white plastic bucket resting beside Slim. Two fat bream swim without moving forward or backwards inside the bucket. I sit beside him, my legs over the side of the bridge. The high tide water heaves and swells in peaks and valleys.

  ‘Will the fish still bite in the rain?’ I ask.

  ‘It ain’t raining down there under the water,’ he says. ‘The flathead come out in this. Mind you, different story fishing in a river. I’ve seen yellowbelly out west go bonkers in the rain.’

  ‘How do you know when a fish is going bonkers?’

  ‘They start preaching about the end of the world,’ Slim chuckles.

  The rain gets heavier. He pulls a rolled Courier-Mail from his fishing bag and spreads it out for me to use as a shelter.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  We stare at his taut line, dragged up and down by the Bramble Bay waves.

  ‘You still want to go through with this?’

  ‘I have to, Slim,’ I say. ‘She’ll be all right once she sees me. I know it.’

  ‘What if that’s not enough, kid?’ he asks. ‘Two and a half years is a long time.’

  ‘You said it yourself, a lag gets a little bit easier every time you wake up.’

  ‘I didn’t have two kids on the outside,’ he says. ‘Her two and a half years will feel like twenty of mine. That men’s prison is filled with a hundred blokes who think they’re bad to the bone because they’ve done fifteen years. But those blokes don’t love nothin’ and nothin’ loves them back and that makes things easy for ’em. It’s all those mums across the road who are true hard nuts. They wake each day knowing there’s some lost little shit like you out there waiting to love them back.’

  I take the newspaper off my head so the rain can hit my face and hide my wet eyes.

  ‘But the man on the phone, Slim,’ I say. ‘Dad just says I’m crazy. Dad just says I made him up. But I know what I heard, Slim. I know he said what he said. And Christmas is coming and Mum loves Christmas like nobody I’ve ever seen love Christmas. Do you believe, Slim? Do you believe me?’

  I’m crying hard now. Hard as the black sky rain is falling.

  ‘I believe you, kid,’ he says. ‘But I also believe your dad is right not to take you up there. You don’t need to see that world. And she don’t need to see you in it. Sometimes it makes it hurt worse.’

  ‘Did you talk to your man?’ I ask.

  He nods, taking a deep breath.

  ‘What did he say?’ I ask.

  ‘He’ll do it.’

  ‘He will?’

  ‘Yeah, he will.’

  ‘What does he want from me in return?’ I ask. ‘Because I’m good for it, Slim. I’ll square it, I promise.’

  ‘Slow down, Road Runner,’ he says.

  He winds in his line, turning the old Alvey reel three rotations, gentle and instinctive.

  ‘You got a bite?’

  ‘Nibble.’

  He winds in one more rotation. Silent.

  ‘He’s not doing it for you,’ he says. ‘I kept his brother safe through a very long porridge a very long time ago. His name’s George and that’s all you need to know about his name. He has a fruit wholesale business and he’s been making fruit deliveries into the Boggo men’s and women’s for the past twelve years. The guards know George and the guards also know the things George carries inside in the false floors beneath his watermelon and rockmelon crates. But of course they’re paid handsomely not to know about these things. Now, like any retail business on the outside, the Christmas season is a nice earning period for traders who care to make a few extra bucks from retail on the inside. George can usually bring in all kinds of gifts at Christmas time. He can smuggle in sex toys and Christmas cakes and jewellery and drugs and lingerie and little Rudolph lights that turn red with a tickle of his nose. He has never, however, through twelve years of successful clink trade, smuggled in a thirteen-year-old boy with a childish lust for adventure and an unshakeable hankering to see his mum on Christmas Day.’

  I nod. ‘I guess not,’ I say.

  ‘When you get caught, Eli – and you will get caught – you do not know George and you do not know anything about George’s fruit truck. You are mute, you understand. You will take a leaf from your brother’s book and shut the fuck up. There will be a total of five trucks making deliveries on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, all with their individual illegal bonus cargo. You can guarantee the screws will try to smuggle you out as quickly and as quietly as you came in. They’re the last ones who want the world knowing a thirteen-year-old boy was found running around the grounds of the Boggo Road women’s prison. If they take it further up the food chain then they’re more fucked than you. Press comes in, then the prison standards crowd comes in, the clink trade collapses and the wife of one of those screws don’t get that special Mixmaster she’s been dreaming about and that screw don’t get his Sunday-morning pancakes and everything else that comes with ’em, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Do you mean sexual intercourse?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes, Eli, I mean sexual intercourse.’

  He jiggles the rod twice, studies the top of the line like he doesn’t trust it.

  ‘Another nibble?’ I ask.

  He nods, reeling his fishing line in a little more.

  He lights a smoke with his head tucked into his chest, cups the smoke from the rain.

  ‘So, where do I meet him?’ I ask. ‘How will George know who I am?’

  Slim blows a drag into the rain. He slips his left hand into the top pocket of a flannelette shirt inside his raincoat. He holds a slip of paper, folded in two.

  ‘He’ll know you,’ he says.

  He holds the slip of paper in his hands, dwells on it.

  ‘You asked me that day in the hospital about the good and the bad, Eli,’ he says. ‘I been thinkin’ about that. I been thinkin’ about that a good deal. I should have told you then that it’s nothing but a choice. There’s no past in it, there’s no mums and dads and no where you came froms. It’s just a choice. Good. Bad. That’s all there is.’

  ‘But you didn’t always have a choice,’ I say. ‘When you were a kid. You had no choice then. You had to do what you had to do and then you got on a road that gave you no choice.’

  ‘I always had a choice,’ he says. ‘And you got a choice today, kid. You can take this slip of paper. Or you can breathe. You can step back and breathe, ride on home and tell your old
man you’re looking forward to spending time with him on Christmas Day and you ain’t gonna worry any more because you know you can’t do your mum’s time for her, and that’s what you’re doin’, boy, you’re living inside that prison with her and you’re gonna be there for the next two and a half years if you don’t step back for a second and breathe.’

  ‘I can’t, Slim.’

  He nods, reaches his hand out with the slip of paper.

  ‘Your choice, Eli,’ he says.

  The slip of paper peppered by rain. Just a slip of paper. Take the slip of paper. Take it.

  ‘Are you gonna be angry at me if I take it?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says flatly.

  I take the slip of paper. I tuck it in my shorts pocket without even reading what’s written on it. I stare out to sea. Slim stares at me.

  ‘You can’t see me no more, Eli,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can’t keep spending time with an ol’ crook like me, kid,’ he says.

  ‘You said you weren’t gonna get angry?’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ he says. ‘If you need to see your mum, all well and good, but you leave this crook bullshit behind, you hear me. No more.’

  My head throbs with confusion. My eyes swell. The rain on my cheeks and on my head and in my crying eyes.

  ‘But you’re the only real friend I got.’

  ‘Then you need to get some new ones,’ he says.

  I drop my head. I put my fists in my eyes, press down hard like you press down on a cut to stop it bleeding.

  ‘What’s gonna happen to me, Slim?’ I ask.

  ‘You’ll live your life,’ he says. ‘You’ll do things I only ever dreamed about. You’ll see the world.’

  I’m cold inside. So cold inside.

  ‘You’re cold, Slim,’ I say, between the tears.

  I’m so angry inside. So angry inside.

  ‘I reckon you did kill that cabbie,’ I say. ‘You’re a cold-blooded killer. Cold like a snake. I reckon you beat Black Peter because you don’t have a heart like the rest of us.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he says.

  ‘You’re a fuckin’ murderer,’ I scream.

  He closes his eyes at the sudden noise.

  ‘Settle down,’ he says, looking up and down the bridge, seeing no one in earshot. Everybody’s gone. Everybody’s gotta go some time. Everybody’s runnin’ from the rain. Nobody runnin’ to it. So cold inside.

  ‘You deserved everything you got,’ I spit.

  ‘That’s enough, Eli,’ he says.

  ‘You’re full of fuckin’ shit,’ I scream.

  Slim shouts and I’ve never heard him shout.

  ‘That’s enough, damn it!’ he hollers. And the shouting makes him wheeze and he falls into a coughing fit. He brings his left arm to his mouth and coughs into his elbow, retching and rattling lung coughs like there’s nothing inside him but old bone and the earth dust from Black Peter. He breathes deep, wheezing and spluttering, gargles and hacks up a phlegm spit that lands two metres to his right beside a couple of discarded pilchards. He calms himself.

  ‘I done enough,’ Slim says. ‘And I did it to too many people. I never said I didn’t deserve the time I got, Eli. I just said I didn’t do that killin’. But I done enough and God knew I done enough and He wanted me to think on some other things I’d done and I did that, kid. I did my time thinkin’ on those things and I thought them inside and out. And I don’t need you thinkin’ on them for me. You should be thinkin’ ’bout girls, Eli. You should be thinkin’ ’bout how you’re gonna climb the mountain. How you’re gonna climb outta that shithole you’re livin’ in there in Bracken Ridge. Stop tellin’ everybody else’s story and start tellin’ your own for once.’

  He shakes his head. Stares out to the brown-green sea.

  The tip of his rod bends sharply. Once. Twice. Three times.

  Slim studies the rod silently. Then he reefs on the rod with a whipping pull and it bows like the rainbow I saw over Lancelot Street.

  ‘Gotcha,’ he says.

  The rain batters down and the sudden action makes Slim cough uncontrollably again. He hands me his fishing rod as he attends to a coughing fit. ‘Flathead,’ he says, between choking coughs. ‘Monster. ’Bout ten pounds.’ Three more coughs. ‘Pull her in, will ya?’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘I can’t . . .’

  ‘Just bloody wind it in,’ he barks, standing now with his hands on his kneecaps, coughing up some vile witch’s brew of tar and phlegm. And blood. There’s blood in his spit and it hits the bridge’s aggregate bitumen and the rain washes it away but it keeps coming. No colour as strong as the colour of Slim Halliday’s red blood. I reel the line in frantically, darting my head back and forth between the sea and the blood at Slim’s feet. The sea and the blood. The sea and the blood.

  The flathead pulls away with the line, swimming for life. I pull harder on the Alvey, winding in long, slow rotations like I used to turn the handle on the rusty Hills Hoist in the backyard of the Darra house.

  ‘I think it’s a monster, Slim!’ I scream, as suddenly awed as I am elated.

  ‘Just stay calm,’ he says between coughs. ‘Give him some line when you think he’s gonna snap away.’

  Only when Slim’s standing do I notice how thin he’s become. I mean he’s always been thin. He’s always been Slim. Arthur Halliday needs a new nickname, but Emaciated Halliday just doesn’t have the same romance.

  ‘What are you lookin’ at?’ Slim wheezes, hunched over. ‘Pull that monster in!’

  I can feel the flathead zipping left and right through the water. Panicked. Lost. For a time he comes with me, follows the pull from the hook in his lip, like he’s had some divine message that that’s where he’s supposed to go, that the pilchard and the hook and the Bramble Bay tide this rainy day were the ultimate goal behind all that searching for survival along the ocean bed. But then he fights. He swims away hard and the Alvey reel finger-grips punch into the heel of my hand.

  ‘Fuck,’ I shriek.

  ‘Fight him,’ Slim wheezes.

  I yank on the rod and rotate the reel at once. Long, deliberate reels. Rhythmic. Purposeful. Relentless. The monster is tiring but I’m tiring too. Slim’s voice from behind me.

  ‘Keep fighting,’ he says softly, coughing again.

  I reel and I reel and I reel and the rain slams my face and the world seems close to me now, every piece of it, every molecule. The wind. The fish. The sea. And Slim.

  The monster eases. I reel him hard and I see him approaching the top of the sea, surfacing like a Russian submarine.

  ‘Slim, here he comes! Here he comes!’ I howl, euphoric. He might be eighty centimetres long. He’s closer to fifteen pounds than ten. An alien monster fish, all muscle and spine and olive green flatheaded stealth. ‘Look at him, Slim!’ I scream, ecstatic. I reel the Alvey so fast that I could start a fire to barbecue the monster, then wrap him in tinfoil and bake him for Slim and me by the muddy mangrove banks on the Redcliffe side of the bridge, and follow him up with some toasted marshmallows dipped in Milo. The flathead rises into the air and my rod and line are a crane hauling some priceless cargo up to a skyscraper, my monster flying through the black sky, the ocean-bed dweller feeling rain on its back for the first time, glimpsing the universe above the sea, glimpsing my gasping face, wide-eyed and joyous.

  ‘Slim! Slim! I got him, Slim!’

  But I don’t hear Slim at all. The sea and the blood. The sea and the blood.

  I turn from the fish back to Slim. He’s lying flat on his back, his head turned to the side. Blood still on his lips. Eyes closed.

  ‘Slim.’

  The flathead whips its spiny, powerful frame in the air, snaps the fishing line cleanly.

  I will remember this through the weeping. I will remember this through the way my cheek rubs against the rough bristles of his unshaved face. The way I sit so awkwardly because I don’t think about sitting, I just think about him. The way
I can’t tell if he breathes in the rain. The blood on his lips, spilling to his chin. The smell of White Ox tobacco. The small rocks from the bridge gravel biting into my kneecaps.

  ‘Slim,’ I sob. ‘Slim,’ I shout. The way I bob back and forth in pitiful confusion. ‘No, Slim. No, Slim. No, Slim.’

  The sound of my stupid teary breathless mumbling. ‘I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said. I’m sorry I said what I said.’

  And the way the monster fish plunges into the brown-green sea, down deep into the high tide, having seen the universe up here.

  He wanted to see it only for a second. He didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t like the rain.

  Boy Parts Sea

  Our Christmas tree is an indoor plant named Henry Bath. Henry Bath is an Australian weeping fig. Henry Bath is five feet tall when he sits in the terracotta pot Dad keeps him in. Dad likes trees and he likes Henry Bath, with all his cluttered green leaves shaped like canoes and a grey fig trunk like a frozen carpet snake. He likes to personalise his plants because if he doesn’t personalise them – picture them possessing human needs and wants in some tiny and whimsical part of a mind I am only beginning to realise operates with as much order and predictability as the insides of our lounge room vinyl beanbag – then he is less inclined to water them and the plant is more likely to succumb to the endless assault of Dad’s stubbed-out rollies. He named Henry after Henry Miller and the bath he was lying back in reading Tropic of Cancer when he thought of naming the weeping fig.

  ‘Why does Henry weep?’ I ask Dad as we slide the tree over to the centre of the living room where the ironing board stands, 24/7, our old iron rusting away in its square metal hand.

  ‘Because he’ll never be able to read Henry Miller,’ he says.

  We push the pot plant in place.