Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  ‘I miss him,’ he says.

  And his thoughts are interrupted by two large German shepherds barking at the driver’s door of the truck.

  ‘Hey boys!’ he beams out the truck window. ‘Come meet my boys,’ he urges us.

  He slips out of the truck and play wrestles with his dogs in his backyard.

  ‘This bloke is Beau,’ he says, vigorously rubbing the head of one dog, his left hand reaching out to tickle the belly of the other dog. ‘And this feller is Arrow.’

  He looks lovingly into their eyes.

  ‘These boys are the only family I got now,’ Teddy says.

  August and I say something to each other we do not say. What a fuckin’ loser.

  ‘Come see their house,’ he says, giddy.

  Beau and Arrow’s kennel beneath the house. Less a dog house than a two-level dog retreat set on a concrete slab. Hardwood palings with flourishes of shaped plywood for windows and doors resembling the kind found on a cottage Hansel and Gretel might stumble across wandering lost in the woods. The whole thing is built on stumps and Beau and Arrow have a ramp with foot notches to access their blanketed and cushioned dream home.

  ‘Built it meself,’ Teddy says.

  August and I say something to each other we do not say. What a prize fuckin’ loser.

  *

  It’s all peachy perfect here at Teddy’s house for the first three days of our stay. Loquat perfect. Teddy smiles at Mum to show us he cares and he buys us Paddle Pops to win us over and tells us trucker jokes, almost all of which are deeply racist and end with an Aboriginal/Irishman/Chinaman/woman being found in the front bullbar of an eighteen-wheeler. Then Dustin Hoffman makes everything go south on the fourth night of our stay.

  We’re driving home from the Eldorado cinema in Indooroopilly when something about Dustin Hoffman’s performance in the movie we just saw, Rain Man, reminds Teddy of August.

  ‘Can you do that sorta stuff, Gus?’ Teddy asks, looking through the rearview mirror at August in the back seat.

  August says nothing.

  ‘You know,’ Teddy pushes, ‘can you count up a pile of toothpicks in a single look? You got any special powers like that?’

  August rolls his eyes.

  ‘He’s not autistic, Teddy,’ I say. ‘He’s just fuckin’ quiet.’

  ‘Eli!’ Mum snaps back at me.

  The car is silent for a full five minutes. Nobody talks. I watch the yellow glowing of roadside lights. The glowing is the fire inside me, forging a question out of flame. I ask it flat, not a hint of emotion.

  ‘Teddy, why did you rat on your best friend?’

  And he says nothing. He just stares at me in the rearview mirror and he doesn’t look like Elvis from any kind of era or time or place or context any more because Elvis never went to hell. Elvis never had a devil phase.

  *

  He says nothing for two more days. He wakes late in the morning and trudges heavily past Mum and August and me at the breakfast table eating Corn Flakes and Mum says, ‘Good morning’, and he doesn’t even look up as he silently walks out of the house.

  Dad does this sometimes to August and me after we’ve had a big blow-up in the lounge room during one of his benders. He’s the one who picks a fight with us, he’s the one who keeps slapping us across the backs of our heads when we’re trying to watch 21 Jump Street, he’s the one who always pushes August too far and he’s the one August punches in the eye just to get a moment’s respite. And yet it’s us who get the cold shoulder. Most of the time Dad wakes up the next morning, assesses the bruising on his face and apologises. But sometimes he gives us the silent treatment. Like we’re the arseholes. Like we’re the dicks in all this. Fuckin’ adults.

  Teddy’s acting like we’re not in his house, like we’re ghosts, spectres in his living room playing games of Pictionary and The Game of Life while he plays the wrongfully persecuted mute inside his bedroom.

  Then I feel shit for making Mum feel shit and when she asks August and me to help her cook some lamb shanks for dinner August gives me one of those looks that says, You’ll help her cook these lamb shanks because it means something to her and you’ll enjoy it and if you don’t I’m gonna cave your skull in.

  We make the lamb shanks, slow-cook them for a day just like little iddy widdy Teddy likes them.

  Teddy leaves the house at midday, marches through the kitchen.

  ‘Where you going?’ Mum asks.

  He says nothing.

  ‘Can you be back for dinner at six?’ she says.

  Nothing.

  ‘We’re making you lamb shanks,’ she says.

  Say something, you fuck.

  ‘With the red wine sauce, just how you like ’em,’ Mum says. Mum’s smile. Look at that smile, Teddy. Look at that sun inside her. Teddy? Teddy?

  Nothing. He walks out of the kitchen, down the back stairs. Down, down, down, the devil going down and the devil’s sunshine girl doing her best to laugh it off.

  We slow-cook the lamb shanks in a steel pot that once belonged to Teddy’s grandmother, big enough to take a bubble bath in. We cook them for half a day and then some, turn them every hour in a sauce made of red wine, garlic, thyme, four bay leaves, chopped onions, carrots and celery sticks. By the time it comes to taste testing, pieces of lamb are falling off those shanks like chocolate in the hands of that ethereal lady in white from the Flake ad who August has a crush on.

  *

  Teddy doesn’t make it back by 6 p.m. We’ve already started eating at the dining room table when he pads in two hours later.

  ‘Yours is in the oven,’ Mum says.

  He stares at us. Assesses us. August and I can smell the piss on him the minute he sits down at the table. And something else inside him. Speed, maybe. The trucker’s little helper on a long-haul drive up to Cairns. His eyes can’t fix on us and he’s breathing loud and he keeps opening and closing his mouth like he’s thirsty, thick white balls of saliva pooling in the corners of his lips. Mum goes to the kitchen to serve his meal and he stares at August across the table.

  ‘How was your day, Teddy?’ I ask.

  But he does not answer, he just keeps staring at August, who has his head down in his plate, dragging flakes of lamb through red wine sauce and mashed potato.

  ‘What’s that?’ Teddy says, staring at August. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything, Teddy,’ I say.

  He leans in closer to August, heaving his fat stomach onto the table so far that his Winfield Reds fall out of the pocket of his blue denim work shirt.

  ‘Can you repeat that for me? Maybe a little louder this time.’

  He turns his left ear theatrically to August.

  ‘No, no, I understand, mate,’ Teddy shrugs. ‘I’d be lost for words too, if my old man did that to me.’

  My brother looks up at the betrayer and smiles. Teddy rests back in his dining chair and Mum places his meal in front of him.

  ‘We’re glad you made it,’ Mum says.

  He forks some mash like a child. Bites into a shank like a shark. He looks across at August again.

  ‘You know what his problem is, don’t you?’ he says.

  ‘Let’s just eat our dinner, hey, Teddy,’ Mum says.

  ‘You indulged this vow-of-silence bullshit,’ Teddy says. ‘You made these boys as crazy as their fuck-up father.’

  ‘All right, Teddy, that’s enough,’ Mum says.

  August looks up again at Teddy. August is not smiling this time. He’s just studying Teddy.

  ‘I gotta hand it to you, boys,’ Teddy says. ‘It sure is brave of ya to sleep under the same roof as the bloke who tried to drive you into a fuckin’ dam.’

  ‘That’s enough, Teddy, damn it!’ Mum screams.

  Teddy howls. ‘Yep, exactly.’ He laughs. ‘Dam it, hey boys? Dammmmmmmm it.’

  Then he screams, too. Louder than Mum. ‘Nup, nup,’ he barks. ‘This was my dad’s dinner table. My dad built this fuckin’ table and now it
’s my fuckin’ table and my dad was a good fuckin’ man and he raised me right and I’ll say what the fuck I want at my fuckin’ table.’ He bites another lamb shank like he’s biting the flesh from my left forearm.

  ‘Nup, nup,’ he shouts. ‘You can all fuck off.’

  He stands. ‘You don’t deserve to sit at this table. Get away from my table. You’re not worthy of this table, you fuckin’ crazies.’

  Mum stands now. ‘Boys, we can finish our meals in the kitchen,’ she says, her hands lifting up her dinner plate. Then Teddy’s hand smacks the plate loudly back down on the table, cracking the plate into three pieces, splitting it like a peace sign. ‘Leave your fuckin’ plates here,’ Teddy snarls.

  August and I are already standing, moving away from our chairs, moving towards Mum.

  ‘Nup, nup,’ Teddy says. ‘Only family eat at this table.’

  He makes a loud farmyard whistle and his beloved German shepherd dogs run up the back stairs, in through the kitchen and into the dining room. Teddy pats his hands in front of my table place, pats August’s too. ‘Up ’ere boys.’ Beau dutifully bounds up onto my chair and Arrow loyally leaps onto August’s. Teddy nods his head. ‘Eat up, boys,’ he says. ‘These lamb shanks are restaurant quality.’

  The dogs sink their heads into our plates, their tails wagging with euphoria.

  I look across at Mum.

  ‘Let’s go, Mum,’ I say.

  She stands staring at the growling dogs eating up the day she spent cooking. She turns and paces silently, robotically, into the kitchen. There’s an old canary yellow kitchen cabinet lining the wall near the oven where our lamb shanks pot sits, filled with four more lamb shanks we’re saving for lunch tomorrow.

  Mum stands silently in the kitchen, just thinking, for maybe a full minute. Thinking.

  ‘Mum, let’s go,’ I say. ‘Let’s just leave.’

  Then she turns to face the kitchen cabinet and she drives her right fist into a row of eight old country-style dinner plates that once belonged to Teddy’s grandmother, standing upright along the cabinet behind a flexible white band. She punches them like she’s programmed to punch them, like something mechanical inside her is operating her arms. She’s not even realising how much the broken ceramics are cutting up her knuckles, spreading dark red blood across the pieces still standing behind the band. And August and I are so stunned we can’t move. I can’t get a word out of my mouth, so frozen and perplexed am I by her actions. Blood and fists. Punch after punch. Her fists then smash the sliding glass door that fronts the cup section of the cabinet. She reaches in and clutches an FM 104 radio station mug and she grabs a World Expo ’88 mug and she grabs a pink Mr Perfect Mr Men cup and she walks back into the dining room and whip-throws all these mugs hard at Teddy’s head, the third mug, Mr Perfect, colliding with his right temple.

  And he rushes at her with a blind amphetamine rage. August and I throw ourselves instinctively between him and Mum, ducking our heads for protection, but he knees us in our thin-skulled heads with his fat kneecaps that are the size of cricket helmets and he barges his way, brute fury and power, to Mum whose hair he clutches from behind and he drags her out of the kitchen. He drags her along the linoleum kitchen floor, so hard that clumps of her hair are falling out in the pulling. He drags her down – the devil drags her down, down, down – the back wooden stairs. He drags her behind him, holding her by her head like he’s dragging a heavy rug or a cut tree branch, her backside and heels bouncing hard against the steps. And I wonder something in this moment, a clear thought reaches me in this perfectly terrifying moment, as the monster drags my mum to hell. Why is Mum not screaming? Why is Mum not crying? She is silent in this moment and I realise now, as the time in this moment stretches out flat and looped and infinite, that she’s not screaming because of her boys. She doesn’t want us to know how scared she is. A rage-filled, speed-buzzing psychopath is dragging her by the hair down a wooden staircase and she is only thinking of us. I look at her face and her face looks at me. The details. The unspoken. Don’t be scared, Eli, her face tries to say as the monster reefs her head. Don’t be scared, Eli, because I’ve got this under control. I’ve lived through worse, matey, and I’ve got this. So don’t cry, Eli. Look at me, am I crying?

  At the bottom of the staircase, he drags Mum to the entry ramp of Beau and Arrow’s downstairs dog kennel. He grips the back of Mum’s neck forcefully and he presses her face into Beau and Arrow’s dog bowl. She gags as her face sinks into a mushy brown mess of old meat chunks and jelly.

  ‘You fuckin’ animal,’ I scream, driving my right shoulder as hard as I can into Teddy’s ribs but I can’t move his fat and vast frame.

  ‘I made you dinner, Frankie,’ Teddy screams, eyes wide and electric. ‘Dog food. Food for a dog. Food for a dog. Food for a dog.’

  I push and punch at his face from below but the punches have no impact. He can’t feel in this moment so he can’t be moved. But then a large silver object flashes past my eyes and I see this silver object connect with Teddy’s head. Something warm that feels like blood and flesh splatters across my back. But it doesn’t smell like blood. It smells like lamb. It’s the pot we slow-cooked the lamb shanks in. Teddy falls to his knees, stunned, and August swings the pot again, straight at his face this time and this swing knocks him out, lays him flat on the miserable concrete beneath this miserable house of inheritance.

  ‘Go out to the street,’ Mum instructs us calmly. She wipes her face with her shirt and she suddenly looks like a warrior in this moment, not a victim, an ancient survivor wiping the blood of the fallen off her cheeks and nose and chin. She runs back up the stairs and into the house and meets us out on the street five minutes later with our bags and a backpack for herself.

  *

  We catch the train from Wacol to Nundah one hour later. It’s 10 p.m. when we knock on the door of Sister Patricia’s house on Bage Street. She takes us in immediately and she doesn’t ask why we’re here.

  We sleep on spare mattresses in Sister Patricia’s sunroom.

  We wake at 6 a.m. and join Sister Patricia and four transitioning ex-prison women for breakfast in the dining room. We eat Vegemite on toast and sip apple juice from the Golden Circle Cannery. We sit at the end of a long brown table big enough to fit eighteen or twenty people. Mum is quiet. August says nothing.

  ‘Soooooooo,’ I whisper.

  Mum sips a black coffee.

  ‘So what, matey?’ Mum says gently.

  ‘So what now?’ I ask. ‘Now that you’ve left Teddy, what are you gonna do now?’

  Mum bites into her toast, wipes crumbs from the corners of her mouth with a napkin. My head is bursting with plans. The future. Our future. Our family.

  ‘I reckon tonight you come spend the night with us,’ I say. I say things as fast as I think them. ‘I reckon you should just turn up on Dad’s doorstep with us. Dad will be shocked to see you but I know he’ll be good to you. He’s got a good heart, Mum, he won’t be able to turn you away. He won’t have it in him.’

  ‘Eli, I don’t think . . .’ Mum says.

  ‘Where would you like to move to?’ I ask.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you could choose anywhere to live, and money wasn’t an obstacle, where would you want to go?’ I ask.

  ‘Pluto,’ Mum says.

  ‘Okay, anywhere in south-east Queensland,’ I say. ‘Just name the place, Mum, and Gus and me, we’re gonna make it happen for you.’

  ‘And how do you boys suppose you’ll do that?’

  August looks up from his breakfast plate. No, Eli.

  I think for a moment. Measure my thoughts.

  ‘What if I told you I could get us a place in . . . I don’t know . . . The Gap?’ I say.

  ‘The Gap?’ Mum echoes, puzzled. ‘Why The Gap?’

  ‘It’s nice there. Lots of cul-de-sacs. Remember when Lyle took us to buy the Atari?’

  ‘Eli . . .’ Mum says.

  ‘You’ll love it in The Gap, Mum,’ I say, exci
ted. ‘It’s beautiful and green and right at the end of the suburb is this big reservoir surrounded by bushland and the water in it is so crystal clear . . .’

  Mum slaps the table.

  ‘Eli!’ she snaps.

  She drops her head. She cries.

  ‘Eli,’ she says, ‘I never said I was leaving Teddy.’

  Boy Tightens Noose

  The capital of Romania is Bucharest. The collective noun for a group of toads is a knot. The collective noun for a group of Eli Bells is a prism. A cage. A hole. A prison.

  Saturday night, 7.15 p.m., and Dad is sleeping by the side of the toilet. He passed out directly after vomiting into the porcelain bowl and he sleeps soundly now beneath the toilet roll holder, and when he breathes out, air from his nostrils blows three hanging sheets of one-ply like a white flag of surrender blowing in the wind.

  I give up. I want to be just like him.

  But Sir August the Unmoved does not share my enthusiasm tonight for using Lyle’s hard-earned drug money to drink and eat ourselves to death.

  My initial plan is to spend five hundred bucks on a takeaway food frenzy at the Barrett Street shops. We can start with Big Rooster – a whole chicken, two large chips, two Cokes, two corn cobs – then move along the shops to the fish and chip shop, the Chinese shop, then the deli for large dim sims and choc-chip ice cream. After that we can slip down to the Bracken Ridge Tavern and we can go into the public bar and ask one of Dad’s old barfly acquaintances, Gunther, if he’ll buy us a bottle of Bundaberg Rum for a pineapple.

  You’re being a fuckwit, August does not say. So I drink alone tonight. I ride to the Shorncliffe Pier with a bottle of rum and the pockets of my jeans filled with four hundred bucks in cash. My legs dangle over the pier beneath a flickering pier light. Beside me is the severed head of a mullet. I sip the rum straight and think of Slim and realise how warm the rum makes me feel and how it won’t feel so bad spending the next year of my life spending the remaining $49,500 of Lyle’s drug money on rum and chicken Twisties. I drink until I pass out on the edge of the pier.