by Trent Dalton
‘Gotta be careful where we put him,’ Dad says. ‘Moving Henry to a new place kinda gives ’im a shock.’
‘You serious?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Different kind of light shines on him, new temperature in a new place, bit of a draught maybe, change in humidity, and he thinks it must be a different season. He starts shedding his leaves.’
‘So he can feel things?’
‘Sure, he can feel things,’ Dad says. ‘Henry Bath is a sensitive son of a bitch. That’s why he turns on the waterworks all the time. Like you.’
‘Whaddya mean, like me?’
‘You like a good cry,’ he says.
‘No, I don’t,’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders.
‘You loved to cry as a bub,’ he says.
I forgot this. I forgot he knew me before I knew him.
‘I’m surprised you remember,’ I say.
‘Of course I remember,’ he says. ‘Happiest days of my life.’
He stands back and assesses the new location of Henry Bath. ‘Whaddya reckon?’ Dad asks.
I nod. August holds two pieces of Christmas tinsel in his hands, one twinkling red and one twinkling green, both of them losing their tinsel fibres over time, like Henry Bath slowly loses leaves and Dad might be slowly losing fibres of his mind.
August lays the tinsel carefully over Henry Bath and we stand around the weeping fig, marvelling at the saddest Christmas tree in Lancelot Street and possibly the Southern Hemisphere.
Dad turns to us both.
‘I got a Christmas box coming from St Vinnies later this afternoon,’ he says. ‘Got some good gear in ’em. Can of ham, pineapple juice, some liquorice squares. I thought we could have a bit of a day of it tomorrow. Give each other gifts ’n’ shit.’
‘What, you got us gifts?’ I ask, dubious.
August smiles, encouraging. Dad scratches his chin.
‘Well, no,’ he says. ‘But I had an idea.’
August nods. Great, Dad, he writes in the air, urging Dad on.
‘I had this thought that we could each choose a book from the book room and we could wrap it up and put it under the tree,’ Dad says.
Dad knows how much August and I have been enjoying his bedroom book mountain.
‘But not just any ol’ book,’ he says. ‘Maybe something we’ve been reading or something that’s really important to us or something we think someone else might enjoy.’
August claps his hands, smiling. Gives a thumbs-up to Dad. I’m rolling my eyes as if my eye sockets were filled with two loose Kool Mint lollies from a St Vincent de Paul Christmas charity box.
‘Then, you know, we can eat some liquorice squares and read our books for Christmas,’ Dad says.
‘And how is this any different from any other day for you?’ I ask.
He nods. ‘Yeah, well, we can all read in the living room,’ he says. ‘You know, we can read together.’
August punches me in the shoulder. Stop being a dick. He’s trying. Let him try, Eli.
I nod. ‘Sounds great,’ I say.
Dad goes to the kitchen table and tears a TAB betting ticket into three pieces, scribbles a name on each piece with the pencil he uses to circle horses in the form guide. He screws the pieces up and holds them in his hand.
‘You get first pick, August,’ Dad says.
August picks a piece of ticket, opens it with a glint of Christmas spirit in his eye.
He shows us the name: Dad.
‘All right,’ Dad says. ‘August picks a book for me. I pick a book for Eli and Eli picks a book for August.’
Dad nods. August nods. Dad looks at me.
‘You will stick around for it, won’t ya, Eli?’ Dad asks.
August looks at me. You’re an arsehole. Really.
‘Yeah, I’ll stick around,’ I say.
*
I don’t stick around. At 4 a.m., Christmas morning, I place a copy of Papillon for August beneath the Christmas tree, wrapped in the sports pages of The Courier-Mail. Dad’s wrapped his book for me in The Courier’s Classifieds pages. August has wrapped his book for Dad in the up-front news pages.
I walk to the train station in the nearby seaside suburb of Sandgate – famed for its fish and chips and nursing homes – taking the shortcut crossing over the motorway to the Sunshine Coast, normally a frantic exercise of Evel Knievel–level insanity requiring Bracken Ridge kids to leap a steel guardrail, dodge four lanes of speeding traffic, leap another steel guardrail and slip through a hole the size of a dinner plate in a council wire fence, while going undetected by police or, worse, concerned parents who have been pressuring the local council to build a footbridge across the highway for years. But this morning the motorway is empty. I take my time slipping over the guardrails, whistling ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ as I go.
Beyond the motorway is Racecourse Road, edging the Deagon Racecourse where, this early Christmas morning, in the half-light of a slow-waking sun, a young female rider does trackwork on a plucky mahogany thoroughbred. An old man in a beanie watches her ride, leaning against the racecourse fence. He looks a bit like Slim, but it can’t be Slim because Slim’s in hospital. Houdini Halliday is trying to escape from fate. Houdini Halliday is hiding in the bushes, ducking down as the skeleton in the cloak with the sharpened sickle snoops around him.
‘Merry Christmas,’ says the old man.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I nod, quickening my pace.
Only four trains running today and the 5.45 a.m. train to Central stops at Bindha Station, beside the iron pipes and the exposed factory conveyor belts of the foul-smelling Golden Circle Cannery, not so foul-smelling today because the cannery is closed. There was a Golden Circle one-litre can of orange and mango fruit juice in our St Vincent de Paul Christmas charity box that was dropped off yesterday afternoon by a warm-faced woman with ginger hair and red polished fingernails. There was a can of Golden Circle pineapple slices also, canned and shipped by the good folks of the Golden Circle Cannery beside Bindha train station.
The old red truck is waiting where Slim’s note said it would be waiting. It splutters in neutral on the corner of Chapel Street and St Vincents Road. The front of the truck is all fat curves and rust, like something Tom Joad would’ve driven on the road to California. The back of the truck is four iron walls forming a rectangular box with a blue canvas top, the size of Dad’s kitchen. I grip the shoulder straps on the backpack I’m carrying and approach the driver’s side door.
A man sits at the wheel smoking a cigarette, right elbow resting out his window.
‘George?’ I ask.
He’s Greek, maybe. Italian. I don’t know. About Slim’s age, bald head and chubby arms. He opens his door and slips out of the truck, stubs his cigarette out beneath a pair of worn running shoes that he wears with thick grey socks that bunch at his ankles. He’s short and stocky but quick in his movements. A man on the move.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ I say.
He doesn’t say anything. He opens the back of the truck, swings the metal back door wide and latches it to the side of the truck. He nods me up. I climb into the truck and he climbs up behind me.
‘I won’t say a word, I promise,’ I say.
George says nothing.
The truck is filled with crates of fruit and vegetables. A box of pumpkins. A box of rockmelons. A box of potatoes. A pallet jack by the left wall. By the rear door is a large empty square crate sitting on a forklift pallet. George leans over into the crate and pulls out a false wood bottom two-thirds of the way down into the box. He nods his head right two times. I’ve read enough silent nods from August to know that what he means is, ‘Get in the box.’ I drop the backpack in the box and lift my legs over the side and lie down in the box.
‘Will I be able to breathe in here?’
He points to drilled air holes on each wall of the crate. It’s an impossibly tight fit, only achieved by lying on my left side with my legs pulled up hard to my belly. I cushion
my head under my backpack.
George assesses my fit and, satisfied, lifts the sheet of wood that forms the crate’s false bottom and places it over my crowbarred body.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘Do you have any instructions for what I should do at the other end?’
He shakes his head.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing. You’re helping me help my mum.’
George nods. ‘I’m not talking, boy, because you don’t exist, you understand?’ he says.
‘I understand,’ I say.
‘You stay quiet and you wait,’ he says.
I nod three times. The false wood bottom comes down over my body.
‘Merry Christmas,’ George says.
Then the darkness.
*
The engine rattles into life and my head bangs against the crate floor. Breathe. Short, calm breaths. No time for one of those nasty panic attacks of Dad’s. This is living. This is what Slim used to call living life at the coalface. All those other saps standing back from the coalface worried about the rock wall caving in, but here I am, Eli Bell, scraping the walls of life, finding my seam, finding my source.
There’s Irene in the darkness. A silk slip. Her exposed calf muscle, perfect skin and a freckle on her ankle. The truck speeds along the road. I can feel George’s gear changes, I can feel every bump in the road. There’s Caitlyn Spies on the beach now. And she’s wearing Irene’s silk slip and she’s calling me. She beams and she turns her head to see the eternal universe.
The truck slows, comes to a stop and I hear an indicator and the truck turns left into the bump of a driveway. The truck moves forward then reverses and I hear the sound of the reversing beep. The truck stops. The rear door opens and I hear George sliding an iron ramp from inside the truck and slamming it down on concrete. Then the sound of a machine, forklift probably, moving up the ramp. The smell of engine oil and petrol. The machine close to the crate. The crate shakes and rocks as two metal forks stab through the pallet beneath me and suddenly I’m elevated inside the box. I’m moving, my head banging against the crate as the forklift moves down the iron ramp and is dropped heavily onto concrete. The forklift teeth slide out of the pallet and the machine moves back and forth, so close I can smell the rubber in its moving wheels. Beep, beep. Zip, zip. Left, right. Then the sound of the forklift teeth raising another box in the air, then something heavy raining on the false bottom above me. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Buddddddderrdudddderrrr. The weight of the crate’s new cargo flexes the false floor and my heart races. There’s fruit above me. I can smell it. Watermelons. Then I’m floating again, elevated by the forklift, dropped back into the truck. And we’re moving again.
*
I close my eyes and I look for the beach but all I see is Slim and he’s lying on his side like he was on the bridge, old blood on his lips. And I see footprints in the sand and I follow these footsteps and I see that the footsteps belong to a man and that man is Iwan Krol and he’s dragging a man behind him along the beach and the man he is dragging is Lyle, wearing the same shirt and shorts he was wearing on the night we saw him last, the night he was dragged out of the house in Darra. I can’t see Lyle’s head because it’s hanging down as he’s being dragged but I know the truth. I’ve known the truth ever since he disappeared. Of course I can’t see his head. Of course I can’t see his head.
*
The truck brakes hard, takes a long turn right. Then a hard left, up a sloping driveway with what feels like speed bumps. The truck stops.
‘Season’s greetings, Georgie Porgie,’ calls a man outside the truck.
George and the man talk but I can’t hear what they’re saying. They laugh. I catch words. Wife. Kids. Swimming pool. On the piss.
‘Bring her in,’ the man says.
The sound of a large mechanical door or a gate opening. The truck moves forward, motors up a gentle slope and stops again. Two men talking to George now.
‘Merry Christmas, Georgie,’ one says.
‘We’ll make it quick, mate,’ says another man. ‘Tina making the cassata this year?’
George says something back to the men to make them laugh.
The door opens on the back of the truck. I hear the footsteps of two men climbing into the truck. They’re inspecting the crates beside mine.
‘Look at this shit,’ says one of the men. ‘These bitches eat better than us. Fresh cherries. Grapes. Plums. Rockmelon. What? No chocolate-coated strawberries? No toffee apples?’
They don’t even touch the box I’m in.
They step back out of the truck. Close the rear door.
The sound of a rattling roller door rising.
‘In ya go, Georgie,’ calls one of the men.
The truck moves forward slowly, takes several turns left and right, then stops. And again the rear door opens and the iron ramp slams down on the concrete.
And again I’m elevated and I’m moving, on the forks of George’s pallet jack this time, no engine, just rusting metal levers rattling. Down the ramp and onto a concrete floor. George brings down six more crates and drops them beside me. I hear him slide the iron ramp back up into the truck. I hear him close the rear door and then I hear his sneakers squeak as he walks towards my crate of watermelons with the false floor from some suburban Queensland spy book that nobody bothered to write. He whispers into an air hole.
‘Good luck, Eli Bell,’ he says. He taps the box twice and shuffles away.
The truck’s engine roars to life, echoing loud in this room I’m in, and fumes from the exhaust fill my cramped and increasingly claustrophobic spy space.
Then silence.
*
I make this time go fast with my fear. My fear makes me think. My thinking manipulates time. Where is she? Is she okay? Will she want to see me? What am I doing here? The man on the red phone. The man on the red phone.
What was that thing Mrs Birkbeck, guidance counsellor to the lost and restless, said about kids and trauma? What was that thing about believing things that never happened? Is this really happening right now? Could I really be here, trapped at the bottom of a box of watermelons on Christmas Day? Sublime to the ridiculous and the ridiculous to the bottom of a box of fruit.
How long have I been here now? One hour, two hours? If I’m this hungry it must be lunchtime. Must be three hours. I’m so fuckin’ hungry. August and Dad are probably having that canned ham as I speak. Reading their Christmas books and sucking on Golden Circle pineapple slices. August’s probably telling Dad how rugged and legendary prison escapee Henri Charrière was nicknamed ‘Papillon’ on account of the butterfly tattoo inked into his tanned and hairy chest. That’s what I’m gonna do if I get out of here. I’m gonna go down to Travis Mancini’s house on Percivale Street in Bracken Ridge and ask him to do one of his homemade Indian ink tattoos: a bright blue butterfly spreading its wings from the centre of my chest. And when other kids see me swimming down at the Sandgate swimming pool they will come up and ask me why I have a blue butterfly tattooed across my chest and I can say it’s my tribute to the will of Papillon, to the enduring power of the human spirit. I can say that I got that tattoo after I smuggled myself into the Boggo Road women’s prison to save my mother’s life and I got the butterfly tattoo because I was a cocoon that day, I was a boy larva trapped in a pupal casing of watermelons, but I survived, I busted out of those watermelons renewed, metamorphosed.
Boy swallows past. Boy swallows himself. Boy swallows universe.
A door opening and closing. Footsteps. Rubber soles squeaking on polished concrete. Someone standing by the crate. Hands on the watermelons. The watermelons being removed from the crate. I feel the weight shifting on the false bottom. Relaxing. Light floods my eyes as the false bottom is removed. My pupils fight the light and focus on the face of a woman leaning over the crate, looking down on me. An Aboriginal woman. Big-boned and imposing, maybe sixty years old. Grey roots in her black hair.
‘Oh, look at you,’ she says warmly.
She smiles and her smile is earth and sunshine and a blue butterfly flapping its wings. ‘Merry Christmas, Eli,’ she says.
‘Merry Christmas,’ I say, still crushed like a stomped Pasito can inside the box.
‘You wanna get outta there?’ the woman asks.
‘Yeah.’
She offers me her right hand and helps me up. There’s a tattoo of a Dreamtime rainbow serpent twisting colourfully up the inside of her right arm. We learned about the rainbow serpent in Year 5 Social Studies at school: giver of life, wondrous and majestic but not to be fucked with, not least because he might have regurgitated half of Australia into being.
‘I’m Bernie,’ she says. ‘Slim told me you’d be dropping by for Christmas.’
‘You know Slim?’
‘Who doesn’t know the Houdini of Boggo Road?’ she replies. A grave look on her face. ‘How is he?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘He’s still in hospital.’
She nods, stares warmly into my eyes. ‘I should warn you you’ve become the talk of the whole joint,’ she says. She brushes a soft hand across my right cheek. ‘Oh, Eli,’ she says. ‘Every woman here who ever had a cup o’ milk in her tit is gonna wanna hold you.’
I scan the room we’re standing in, stretching, clicking my aching neck back into a functioning place. We’re in a kitchen, part practical cooking space with sweeping metal benches and sinks and drying racks, industrial ovens and stovetops. The entry door to the kitchen is closed and steel roller doors have been pulled down over a service bain-marie with twelve compartments. We’re standing in a kind of storage room space flowing off the kitchen; there’s a roller door on the rear wall of the kitchen which I must have come through.
‘This is your kitchen?’ I ask.
‘No, it’s not my kitchen,’ Bernie says, feigning offence. ‘This is my restaurant, Eli. I call it “Jailbirds”. Well, sometimes I call it “Cell Block Ate”, that’s A-T-E, and sometimes I call it “Bernie’s Bars and Grill”, but mostly I call it “Jailbirds”. Best beef burgundy you’ll find south of the Brisbane River. Shit location for a restaurant, of course, but the staff are friendly and we get a steady stream of about a hundred and fifteen loyal guests every breakfast, lunch and dinner.’