Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton

  Mum takes a breath. She gives stern instructions.

  ‘We’re all gonna go, all right,’ she says.

  I nod. Dad squirms.

  ‘We’re all gonna get dressed up,’ Mum says. ‘I’m gonna buy a nice dress for it. I’m gonna get my hair done.’ She’s nodding. ‘We’re gonna look great for you, Gus.’

  August nods, beaming. Dad squirms.

  ‘Fran, I . . . ahhh . . . I probably don’t need to go,’ he mutters.

  ‘Bullshit, Robert, you’re going.’

  *

  Can you see my desk, Slim? Can you see my fingers tapping words on the typewriter at my desk, Slim? I’m writing a piece on race 8 at Doomben. You’re looking at The Courier-Mail’s back-up of the back-up of the back-up turf writer. The chief back-up turf writer, Jim Cheswick, complimented me on a piece I wrote last week on the McCarthys, three generations – grandfather, father, son – of trotting drivers – they’re called drivers in the trots, not jockeys, Jim says – racing in the same event at the Albion trots. Grandfather won by two lengths.

  Brian Robertson is kinder than people give him credit for. He gave me a job and he even let me finish school before I took it up. My job on the newspaper is essentially a free-wheeling shit-kicker grunt role that I am grasping tight with both hands and nine fingers. If something big happens in State or Federal parliament I get sent out to shopping centres to ask random people questions set for me by our grizzly chief-of-staff, Lloyd Stokes.

  ‘Is the State of Queensland going down the toilet?’

  ‘Does Bob Hawke care about Queensland going down the toilet?’

  ‘How will Queensland pull itself out of the toilet?’

  I write about weekend sporting results in local community competitions. I write about tide times and every Friday morning I phone an old fisherman named Simon King for a weekly column called ‘Simon Says’, where we give readers Simon King’s predicted fishing hot spots along the Queensland coastline. You’d like Simon, Slim, he knows that fishing’s not about the catchin’ at all and it’s all about the sittin’. All about the dreaming.

  I write about homes in the property pages. I write three-hundred-word stories – the property editor, Regan Stark, calls them ‘advertorials’ – about expensive homes being pushed by the real estate companies who pay the most advertising dollars to fill our pages. Regan says my writing is too enthusiastic. She says there is no room for simile in three-hundred-word property advertorials and she’s always showing me how to shave my sentences down from something like, ‘The sweeping outdoor entertainment deck cradles the north and east sides of the home like a mother wallaby curling around a newborn joey’, to something more like, ‘House has L-shaped verandah’. But Regan says I shouldn’t stop being enthusiastic because – more than even pen and paper – enthusiasm is a journalist’s greatest tool outside of Gilbey’s Gin. But I’m just doing like you, Slim. I’m just keeping busy. I’m just doin’ my time. Every day is one day closer to Caitlyn Spies. We share the same room at work, Slim. It’s just that the room – the main newsroom in the building – is about a hundred and fifty metres long and she sits at the front of the room on the crime desk by the office of the editor-in-chief, Brian Robertson, and I sit at the far back of the room by a loud photocopier and Amos Webster, the seventy-eight-year-old man who edits the crosswords, whom I prod on the shoulder several times a day to ensure he’s not dead. I love it here, Slim. The smell of the place. The sound of the presses in the brick buildings beneath us when we write. The smell of cigarette smoke and the way the old men swear about older politicians they knew in the 1960s and younger women they screwed in the 1970s.

  It was you who got me the job, Slim. It was you who changed my life. I want to say thanks, Slim. If you can see me. Thanks. It was you who told me to write to Alex. It was Alex who gave me his story. It was that story that got my story onto the front page of The Courier-Mail. ‘REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE’ the headline read on my 2500-word exclusive on the life and times of the recently released Rebels leader, Alex Bermudez. I didn’t get a byline for the yarn but that’s all right. The piece was changed dramatically by the editor, Brian Robertson, on account of me filling it with what Brian called ‘flowery bullshit’.

  ‘How did you possibly jag a sit-down interview with Alex Bermudez?’ Brian asked at his desk, reading my printed draft that I had mailed him with a cover letter describing, again, my desire to write for The Courier-Mail’s esteemed crime-writing team.

  ‘I wrote him letters in prison that cheered him up on the days he was down,’ I said.

  ‘How long were you writing him letters?’

  ‘From about the age of ten until I was thirteen.’

  ‘Why did you start writing letters to Alex Bermudez?’

  ‘My babysitter told me it might mean a lot to someone like him because he didn’t have any family or friends writing to him.’

  ‘He didn’t have any family or friends writing to him because he’s a highly dangerous, possibly sociopathic convicted criminal,’ Brian said. ‘I take it your babysitter wasn’t the Mary Poppins type?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he wasn’t.’

  ‘How do I know this isn’t a load of bullshit fantasy from a bullshit kid who wants to come work for me?’

  Alex knew he would say that. I passed Brian a phone number for Alex.

  I watched him across the desk as he spoke to Alex Bermudez on the phone, confirming the details and quotes in the story.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see . . . Yeah, I think we can run it.’

  He nodded, staring at me blankly. ‘Well, no, Mr Bermudez, I’m afraid it won’t be “word for word” because the kid writes like he wants to be fuckin’ Leo Tolstoy and he buried the lead down in the nineteenth paragraph. And, furthermore, no newspaper of mine will ever open a page-one story with a quote from a fuckin’ poem!’

  Alex had suggested opening with this quote from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the poem I sent him in the prison mail:

  Oh, come with old Khayyám, and leave the Wise

  To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;

  One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;

  The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

  He said he had learned that poem by heart. He said he had leaned on that poem through his lag. He said it brought him wisdom and comfort. He said it brought him out of the hole, like it brought Slim out of the hole, four decades before him. That quote was a thematic emotional thread through my piece because it spoke of Alex’s regrets for the things he’d done to others which were threaded to the things he’d had done to him as a boy.

  ‘Do you like it?’ I asked Brian.

  ‘No,’ Brian said flatly. ‘It’s a fawning fuckin’ sob story about a fuckin’ crim cryin’ into his bucket over his life of A-grade professional scumbaggery.’

  He cast his eyes back over my story draft.

  ‘But it has its moments,’ he said. ‘How much you lookin’ for?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Payment?’ he said. ‘How much per word?’

  ‘I don’t want any money for it,’ I said.

  He placed the draft on his desk. Sighed.

  ‘I want to write for your crime team,’ I said.

  He dropped his head, rubbed his eyes.

  ‘You’re not a crime writer, kid,’ Brian said.

  ‘But I just wrote you 2500 exclusive words on one of Queensland’s most notorious criminals?’

  ‘Yeah, and five hundred of those words were about the colour of Alex’s eyes and the intensity of his gaze and the way he fuckin’ dressed and the fuckin’ boat dreams he had in the slammer.’

  ‘That was a metaphor for him drowning inside and longing for freedom.’

  ‘Well, it made me long for a fuckin’ bucket, mate. I’ll give it to ya straight so ya don’t waste any more time on it: the truth is, kid, crime reporters are born, not made, and you weren’t born a crime reporter. You’ll never be a crime reporter and you’l
l probably never be a news reporter for that matter, because you have too many thoughts swimming around in too small a head. A good news reporter has only one thing on their mind.’

  ‘The unvarnished truth?’ I said.

  ‘Well, yeah . . . but he’s thinking about something else even before that.’

  ‘Justice and accountability?’

  ‘Yeah . . . but . . .’

  ‘Being an objective servant of the people in the industry of information?’

  ‘No, mate, all he has on his mind is the fuckin’ scoop.’

  Of course, I thought. The scoop. The all-powerful scoop. Brian Robertson shook his head, loosened the tie around his neck.

  ‘You, son, I’m afraid, were not born a crime reporter,’ he said. ‘You were, however, born a colour writer.’

  ‘A colour writer?’

  ‘Yeah, a fuckin’ colour writer,’ he said. ‘The sky was blue. The blood was burgundy. Alex Bermudez’s bike that he rode away from home on was fuckin’ yellow. You like all the little details. You don’t write news. You paint pretty pictures.’

  I dropped my head. Maybe he was right. I’ve always written like that. Remember, Slim? Vantage points. Stretching a moment in time to the infinite. Details, Slim.

  I stood up out of the chair opposite Brian’s desk. I knew I’d never be a crime reporter.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said, glum and defeated.

  I walked forlornly to his office door. Then the editor’s voice stopped me on the spot. ‘So when can you start?’ he asked.

  ‘Huh?’ I said, puzzled by his question.

  ‘I could use a back-up of the back-up of the back-up turf writer,’ Brian said. He almost smiled. ‘Plenty of pretty pictures to be painted down at the track.’

  *

  Details, Slim. She has two creases running from the right corner of her mouth when she smiles. She eats chopped-up carrots for lunch on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays she eats celery sticks.

  She wore a Replacements T-shirt to work two days ago and at lunchtime I took the train into the city and bought a Replacements cassette tape. It was called Pleased To Meet Me. I listened to that tape sixteen times in one night and then I went to her desk the next morning to tell her that the last song on side two of the tape, ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’, was the perfect marriage of lead singer Paul Westerberg’s raw garage punk rock early days with his burgeoning love of celebratory love pop more reminiscent of B.J. Thomas’s ‘Hooked on a Feeling’. I didn’t tell her that the song is, in fact, the perfect marriage of my heart and my mind which can’t stop beating and thinking for her; that it’s the sonic embodiment of the urgency in my adoration for her, the embodiment of the impatience she has put in me, how she makes me will time to quicken, hurry up, hurry up, so she can walk through the door, so she can blink like she does, so she can laugh with the other crime writers in her pod, so she can look over here – over here, Caitlyn Spies – some one hundred and fifty metres all the way over to nobody me and the dead guy in the crossword pod.

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I hate that song.’

  Then she opened a drawer beneath her desk. She handed me a cassette tape.

  The Replacements’ Let it Be. The band’s third album. ‘Track nine,’ she said, ‘“Gary’s Got a Boner”.’ She said the word ‘boner’ like she might have said the word ‘lavender’. She does that, Slim. She is magic, Slim. Every word she says comes out as the words ‘lavender’ and ‘luminescence’ and ‘longing’ and . . . and . . . and what’s that other L word, Slim? You know the one they’re always talking about. You know that word, Slim?

  *

  Brian Robertson’s self-combustive hollering echoes across the newsroom.

  ‘So where have the fuckin’ pens gone?’ he screams.

  I stand up from my chair to assess the cyclone of movement happening far away at the serious end of the newsroom, human shrapnel and debris spreading outwards from the nuclear bomb of my editor standing with his fist furiously gripping a copy of our Sunday sister newspaper, the Sunday Mail.

  My elderly pod friend and crossword king Amos Webster rushes back to his desk and sits down, all but burying himself beneath a tower of dictionaries and thesauruses.

  ‘I’d sit down if I were you,’ he says. ‘The boss is on the warpath.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, still standing, watching Caitlyn Spies nod her head at her word processor, absorbing Brian Robertson’s blitzkrieg of directions and unvarnished journalistic truths about how newspapers live and die on being first.

  Brian Robertson explodes again, flame and shrapnel bursting from his lips. Seasoned journalists run for their lives.

  ‘Who wants to tell me where the fuckin’ pens have gone?’ he screams.

  I whisper to Amos.

  ‘Why doesn’t someone just give him a bloody pen?’ I say.

  ‘He’s not looking for a pen, you primate,’ Amos says. ‘The Penns. He wants to know what happened to the Penns, that family that disappeared in Oxley.’

  ‘Oxley?’

  Neighbouring suburb to Darra. Home of the Oxley pub. Home of the Oxley laundromat. Home of the Oxley overpass.

  ‘No fuckin’ prizes on my fuckin’ newspaper for comin’ fuckin’ second!’ Brian screams across the newsroom, before marching to his office and slamming his office door so hard it wobbles like the brown boards Rolf Harris flexes on telly through ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport’.

  ‘Veronica Holt scooped us again,’ Amos whispers.

  Veronica Holt. The Sunday Mail’s chief crime reporter. She’s thirty years old and she only drinks Scotch whisky on ice and she freezes the ice cubes for her drinks by staring at them. She wears skirt suits in charcoal black and onyx black and jet black and soot black. Her news sense is as sharp as the points on her ink-black heels. The Commissioner of Police once demanded Veronica Holt issue a ‘public withdrawal’ of a story she wrote about Queensland Police frequenting brothels across suburban Brisbane. On talkback radio the following morning Veronica Holt responded directly to the commissioner: ‘I’ll withdraw my story, Mr Commissioner, when your men withdraw their weapons from Brisbane’s illegal brothel houses.’

  I scurry to a row of newspapers from across Australia, a reference shelf for staff, found near the water cooler and the newsroom stationery cabinet. A stack of yesterday’s Sunday Mail newspapers rests on the shelf, tied with white twine. I cut the twine with a pair of scissors from the stationery cabinet and read the front page of yesterday’s Sunday Mail.

  ‘Brisbane Family Vanishes as . . .’ These words on the Sunday Mail’s front page are the set-up words to the cover’s banner headline: ‘DRUG WAR EXPLODES’.

  A Veronica Holt power-slam page one about the mysterious and inexplicable vanishing of three members of a three-member Oxley family, the Penns, set indelicately against the backdrop of what Queensland Police are calling ‘escalating frictions between rival factions of clandestine illegal narcotic networks stretching across Queensland and Australia’s east coast’.

  Through anonymous sources – largely her uncle, Dave Holt, a retired senior sergeant for Queensland Police – Veronica Holt has stitched together a thrilling crime yarn that doesn’t explicitly say the Penn family, prior to their puzzling disappearance, were long entrenched in Brisbane’s criminal underworld but gives just enough suggestive backstory to show Veronica’s loyal and often salivating readers how the Penns were as crooked as Dad’s toilet piss aim on single-parent pension night.

  The father, Glenn Penn, was recently released from Woodford Prison, north of Brisbane, after serving two years for small-time heroin dealing. Mother Regina Penn was a Sunshine Coast surfer girl who waited tables for a time in a notorious Maroochydore bloodhouse hotel, Smokin’ Joe’s, known to be frequented by big-time criminals like Alex Bermudez – he’s mentioned in the story – and small-time criminals like Glenn Penn who want to be like Alex Bermudez. Glenn and Regina’s eight-year-old son, Bevan Penn, is the boy in the family pic
ture on page one with his face obscured. He’s wearing a black Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt. The clean skin. The poor and innocent eight-year-old boy swept up in the undertow of his mum and dad’s poor thinking. The Penn family’s Oxley neighbour, a widowed grandmother named Gladys Riordan, is quoted in Veronica’s splash piece: ‘I heard screams coming from the house around midnight about a fortnight ago. But that lot was always screaming late at night. Then, not a peep. Nothing at all for two straight weeks. I thought they might have gone away. Then the police came around and told me they had been reported as missing persons.’

  Gone. Vanished. Disappeared off the face of the earth.

  I wonder for a moment if Bevan Penn has a mute brother who’s not in the photograph. Maybe the Penns have a gardener who is known as one of Queensland’s greatest prison escapologists. Maybe the Penns didn’t disappear at all, they’re just holed up in the secret room Glenn Penn built beneath the family’s single-level home in suburban Oxley where the boy is taking tips from nameless grown men on the other end of a red telephone.

  Cycles, Slim. Things coming back around again, Slim. The more things change, the more they stay fucked.

  I know Brian Robertson told me not to sniff around the crime desk but I can’t help it. It calls me. It draws me. Whenever I’m walking over to Caitlyn Spies I lose track of time. That is, I arrive at her desk and I never know exactly how I arrived there. That is, I know instinctively that I passed the Sports desk and the Classifieds room to my left and the beer fridge beside the Motoring writer, Carl Corby, and the framed Queensland State of Origin rugby league jersey signed by the courageous Wally Lewis, but I don’t recall passing these things because I am only ever locked inside the vision tunnel of Caitlyn Spies. I always die on the way through this tunnel and she is the life-preserving light at the end of it.

  She’s talking on the old black rotary-dial phone at her desk.

  ‘Buzz off, Bell.’

  That’s Dave Cullen, the paper’s hotshot police roundsman. Solid reporter. Solid ego. He’s a decade older than me and has the facial hair to prove it. Dave Cullen runs triathlons in his spare time. Lifts weights. Rescues children from burning buildings. Glows.