by Trent Dalton
Mum’s stern warnings are always open-ended, always leaving the possible consequences of waking up tired for tomorrow as intimidatingly infinite.
If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . I’ll beat your backsides so red you’ll put Rudolph out of work. If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . the stars will disappear from the night skies over Bracken Ridge. If you’re tired for tomorrow . . . the moon will crack like a gobstopper between your teeth and the colours inside the moon will blind humanity. Sleep, Eli. Tomorrow is coming. Everything is coming. All of your life is leading up to tomorrow.
*
Dad reads The Courier-Mail at the kitchen table at breakfast. He’s smoking a roll-your-own and reading the World Affairs pages. I can read the paper’s front page over my Weet-Bix bowl. It’s an enlarged picture of Glenn Penn’s prison photograph. He’s got a menacing and hard face. Blond hair in a crew cut, bent and misshapen teeth like a row of old garage doors opening halfway. Acne scars. Pale blue eyes. He gives a half-dumb half-smile in the photograph as though that prison photo was a rite of passage to be ticked off his list of dreams, like making it all the way with a pretty girl and making it all the way to Turkey with ten condoms full of heroin in his stomach and up his arse.
The picture’s accompanying story is a co-byline piece by Dave Cullen and Caitlyn Spies about Glenn Penn’s neglected and misspent youth. The usual story: Dad whips Mum with the cord from an electric fry pan; Mum spreads rat poison through Dad’s toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich; eight-year-old Glenn Penn burns his local post office down. Dave Cullen holds the top byline but I know Caitlyn wrote this. I know this because there’s a compassion in the piece and it doesn’t feature Dave Cullen’s regular go-to impact phrases ‘shocking revelation’, ‘murderous intent’ and ‘digitally penetrated’. Caitlyn’s interviewed several teachers and parents at Bevan Penn’s primary school. They all say he’s a good kid. A good boy. Quiet. Never hurt a fly. Reads a lot. A library geek. She’s telling the full story about the boy in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt with the face made of pixels.
‘What are you wearing tonight, Eli?’ Mum asks from the living room.
Mum’s ironing clothes with Dad’s old, faulty Sunbeam iron that sends electric shocks through the user on the ‘linen’ setting and leaves black tar marks on my work shirts if I turn it up any higher than the ‘synthetic’ setting.
It’s 8 a.m. – almost ten hours before August is due to accept his award in the Brisbane City Hall Queensland Champions ceremony – and Mum’s already buzzing around the living room the way Mr Bojangles buzzed around a drunk tank.
‘I’m just wearing this,’ I say, nodding down to my untucked plaid deep purple and white work shirt and blue jeans.
Mum is mortified.
‘Your big brother is going to be named a Queensland Champion and you’re gonna front up looking like a child molesterer.’
‘Molester, Mum.’
‘Huh?’ she says.
‘Child molester. Not child molesterer. And what exactly is it about what I’m wearing that makes me look like a child molester?’
She studies me for a moment.
‘It’s the shirt,’ she says. ‘The jeans, the shoes. The whole thing just screams, “Run, Joey.”’
I shake my head, dumbfounded, swallow my last spoonful of Weet-Bix.
‘Do you have time to come home and change before we go in?’ she asks.
‘Mum, I’ve got an important interview at 3 p.m. in Bellbowrie and a story I’ve gotta file by 6 p.m. back in Bowen Hills,’ I say. ‘I don’t have time to come home and change into a tuxedo for Gus’s big glory night.’
‘Don’t you dare be cynical about this moment,’ Mum says. ‘Don’t you dare, Eli.’
Mum’s pointing at me with a pair of her slacks under her arms ready for ironing. ‘This is the best day . . . of . . .’ Her eyes fill with tears. She drops her head. ‘This is a . . . great . . . fucking . . . day,’ she sobs.
Something deep in that face. Something primal. Dad puts the paper down on the table. He looks confused, lost for comfort solutions to the unexpected display of that unsettling womanly eye wetness known in more human circles as tears. I move to her. I hug her. ‘I’m gonna wear a nice jacket, Mum, all right,’ I say.
‘You don’t own a nice jacket,’ Mum says.
‘I’ll grab one of the work ones they have on the emergency rack.’
The shared emergency rack of hanging black coats for parliament and the magistrates court that all smell like whisky and cigarettes.
‘You’re gonna be there, right, Eli?’ Mum says. ‘You’re gonna be there tonight?’
‘I’m gonna be there, Mum,’ I say. ‘And I won’t be cynical, Mum.’
‘You promise?’
‘Yeah, I promise.’
I hug her tight.
‘This is a great day, Mum. I know it is.’
This is a great fucking day.
*
Judith Campese is the public relations woman from Queensland Champions. She’s been helping me all week with the feature spread I’m writing for tomorrow’s newspaper about ten winners from tonight’s glittery gathering in Brisbane City Hall.
She phones me at my work desk at 2.15 p.m.
‘Why are you still at your desk?’ she asks.
‘I’m just filing Bree Dower,’ I say. Bree Dower is the mother of six who ran around Ayers Rock 1788 times in 1988 to celebrate Australia’s bicentenary and raise money for the Queensland Girl Guides. Not the greatest twenty centimetres I’ll ever write. My story begins with the hamfisted introductory line, ‘Bree Dower’s life was going around in circles’ and I stretch the long bow of this entry point about how she quit her dead-end job as a real estate agency secretary all the way to how she found her purpose in life going around in circles at Uluru.
‘You better get a hurry on,’ Judith Campese says. She has a royal British undercurrent to her voice, sort of Princess Diana if Princess Diana managed a Fosseys fashion store.
‘Thanks for the advice,’ I say.
‘Just a quickie,’ she says. ‘Can you give me an idea of the questions you plan on asking Mr Broz?’
‘It’s not really policy for us to flag questions before interviews.’
‘Just ballpark?’ she sighs.
Well, I figure I’ll open with the gentle ice-breaker, ‘What did you do with Lyle, you twisted old cunt?’, then move seamlessly to, ‘Where’s my fucking finger, you animal?’
‘Ballpark?’ I say. ‘Who are you? What do you do? Where? When?’
‘Why?’ she says.
‘How’d you guess?’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ she says. ‘He really has a lot to say about why he does the things he does. It’s kinda inspirational.’
‘Well, Judith, I look forward to hearing about why he does the things he does.’
Across the newsroom, I can see Brian Robertson marching my way, staring at me as he approaches, so filled with steam his head needs a blast pipe.
‘I gotta go, Judith,’ I say, hanging up the phone and returning to the Bree Dower piece.
‘Bell,’ Brian barks from thirty metres away. ‘Where’s the Tytus Broz copy?’
‘I’m just going out there now.’
‘Don’t fuck it up, all right,’ he says. ‘The ad reps say he might come on board with some serious ad money. Why are you still at your desk?’
‘I’m filing the Bree Dower story.’
‘She the Uluru nutter?’
I nod. He reads the piece over my shoulder and my heart stops momentarily.
‘Ha!’ he smiles. I realise I’ve never seen his teeth before this moment. ‘“Bree Dower’s life was going around in circles.”’ He pats me on the back with his thick, heavy left hand. ‘Rolled gold, Bell. Rolled gold.’
‘Brian?’ I say.
‘Yeah?’ he says.
‘There’s a real big story on Tytus Broz I think I can write for you.’
‘Great, kid!’ he says, enthusiastic.
>
‘But it’s not an easy story for me to—’
I’m cut off by Dave Cullen calling across the room from the crime desk.
‘Boss, just got a quote from the Commissioner . . .’ Cullen hollers.
Brian rushes off. ‘We’ll talk when you’re back, Bell,’ he says, distracted. ‘File Broz a-sap.’
*
Waiting for a taxi to Bellbowrie. It’s forty minutes away in the outer western suburbs. I’ve got to be there in thirty minutes. I stare at my reflection in the glass entrance to our building. Me standing here in the floppy oversized black coat I yanked from the newsroom’s spare coat rack. Hands in deep coat pockets. Do I look that different as an eighteen-year-old from how I looked at thirteen? Longer hair. That’s about it. Same skinny arms and legs. Same nervous smile. He’s going to recognise me instantly. He’s going to spot my missing finger and he’s going to whistle a secret whistle that only dogs and Iwan Krol are attuned to and Iwan Krol will drag me out to a work shed behind Tytus Broz’s Bellbowrie mansion and there he will slice off my head with his knife and my head will still function severed from my body and I will be able to answer him when he scratches his chin and asks me, ‘Why, Eli Bell, why?’ And I will answer like I’m Kurt Vonnegut. ‘Tiger got to hunt, Iwan Krol. Bird got to fly. Eli Bell got to sit and wonder why, why, why?’
A small red Ford Meteor sedan screeches to a loud stop in front of me.
Caitlyn Spies pushes open the passenger-side door.
‘Get in,’ she barks.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Just get in the car, Eli Bell!’ she says.
I slip into the passenger seat. Close the door. She slams on the accelerator and I fall back in the seat as we speed into traffic.
‘Iwan Krol,’ she says, her right hand on the steering wheel, her left hand passing me a manila folder holding a slab of photocopied papers sitting beneath a police mugshot of Iwan Krol.
She turns to me and the sun lights up her hair and her face through the driver’s-side window and her perfect green eyes dig deep into my own.
‘Tell me everything.’
*
The Ford Meteor speeds down a Bellbowrie back road that snakes through cluttered bushland growth of old widowmaker eucalypts and suffocating lantana bushes that have knitted together across kilometres of scrub.
A street sign ahead.
‘Cork Lane,’ I say. ‘This is it.’
Cork Lane is a dirt road with large wheel divots and rocks the size of tennis balls that cause Caitlyn’s ill-suited car to bounce us up and down in our seats.
I had twenty-seven minutes to tell Caitlyn everything. She has saved her questions to the end.
‘So Lyle gets dragged away and just vanishes off the face of the earth?’ she says, her hands working hard on the steering wheel, struggling to keep the car moving straight.
I nod.
‘That fits the file,’ Caitlyn says, nodding at the folder in my hands. ‘I heard you talkin’ to Dave. I wrote down that name you said. Iwan Krol. There are only four registered llama farmers or llama pet owners currently living in the greater south-east Queensland region, your man Iwan Krol being one of them. So I called the other three and asked ’em straight up to tell me where they were on 16 May, right, the day the cops suspect the Penn family went missing. They all had perfectly believable and boring accounts of where they were. So then I go down to Fortitude Valley police station and I ask an old school friend of mine, Tim Cotton, who’s now a constable in the Valley, to dig me up anything they have on file on Iwan Krol and he passes me a brick of papers and I go to photocopy them and as I’m photocopying all these papers I’m reading all these statements from police where they’ve gone to Iwan Krol’s property in Dayboro on five separate occasions – five bloody times – across the past twenty years on cases of missing persons known or connected to Iwan Krol. And five times nothing sticks. Then, last night, I drop the file back to Tim Cotton and I’m buying him a meatball pizza down at Lucky’s in the Valley to thank him for his help and he pauses for a moment between trying to get in my pants and you know what he says?’
‘What?’
She shakes her head.
‘He says, “You might want to let this one go to the keeper, Caitlyn.”’
She slaps the steering wheel hard.
‘I mean, he actually fucking voices that shit, a fucking police officer, Eli? An eight-year-old kid’s gone missing and he says, “Let this one go to the keeper.” This is exactly why I fucking hate cricket!’
The car stops at an imposing white iron security gate built into a tall clay-coloured concrete security wall. Caitlyn winds her window down then reaches her arm out to a red intercom buzzer.
‘Hello,’ says a gentle voice.
‘Hi, Courier-Mail here for the interview with Mr Broz,’ Caitlyn says.
‘Welcome,’ says the gentle voice.
The gate slides open with a clunk.
Tytus Broz’s house is white like his suits and his hair and his hands. It’s a sprawling white concrete mansion with towering columns and Juliet balconies and a white wood double-door entry big enough to fit a white yacht through at full white mast. It’s more New Orleans bayou plantation mansion than Bellbowrie millionaire’s hideaway.
Dappled sunlight twinkles through the leaves of eight flourishing elm trees that line the long and twisting driveway that splits a vast manicured lawn and eventually ends at a wide set of white polished marble steps.
Caitlyn parks the car at a yellow gravel visitor’s bay left of the marble steps, slips out of the car and pops the car boot.
The sound of birds in the elm trees, a light wind. Nothing else.
‘How am I gonna explain who you are?’ I whisper.
Caitlyn reaches into the boot and presents an old black Canon camera, a long hard grey lens, like one of the cameras our sports photographers use in Lang Park on game days.
‘I’m the snapper,’ she smiles, closing one eye to gaze through the lens.
‘You’re not a photographer.’
‘Puh!’ she sniggers. ‘Point and click.’
‘Where’d you get that camera?’
‘Snuck it out of the repairs cabinet.’
She walks to the towering entry door.
‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘You’re late for your interview.’
*
Ring the doorbell. The doorbell rings in three places within the sprawling house, one ring echoing into another like a small music piece. Heart full of hope. Heart in my throat. Caitlyn grips her camera like it’s a war hammer and she’s leading a group of drunk Scots into battle. No more sound but the birds in the elm trees.
So far from anything here. So far from life and the world. I realise now how much the house doesn’t fit the setting. The white towering columns don’t fit with the native landscape surrounding us. There’s something wrong, something off about this place.
One half of the wide double-door entry swings open. As it swings open I remember to slip my right hand with its missing forefinger inside my deep right coat pocket, slip it out of view.
A short woman in a formal grey work dress, a maid’s uniform I guess. Filipino maybe. Big smile. She opens the door wider to reveal a frail and thin woman in a white dress. Flesh so thin on her face it looks like her cheeks have been painted in oils across her pronounced cheekbones. A warm smile. A face I know.
‘Good afternoon,’ she says, elegantly bowing her head briefly. ‘You folks from the paper?’
Her hair is grey now. It used to be blonde-white. It still hangs straight and long over her shoulders.
‘I’m Hanna Broz,’ she says, placing her right hand to her chest. But the hand is not a hand at all. It’s a plastic fake but like none I’ve ever seen. It looks like one of Mum’s hands, like it’s been tanned and weathered by the sun. It sticks out of the white sleeve of a cardigan she wears over her dress. I look at her left hand by her side and it’s the same. There are freckles on this one. It’s stiff but it lo
oks real, made of some kind of moulded silicone. All for show and not for function.
‘I’m Eli,’ I say. Don’t say your last name. ‘This is my photographer, Caitlyn.’
‘I might just grab a quick headshot if you don’t mind?’ Caitlyn says.
Hanna nods. ‘That should be fine,’ she says, turning away from the door. ‘Come. Dad is in the reading room out back.’
Maybe Hanna Broz is fifty now. Or forty and tired. Or sixty and grateful. What did she do with the past six or so years since I last saw her? She doesn’t recognise me but I recognise her. That was her father’s eightieth birthday party. Mama Pham’s restaurant in Darra. A different time. A different Eli Bell.
*
The house is a museum of collected antiques and gaudy oil paintings the size of the floor space in my bedroom. A medieval suit of armour holding a jousting stick. An African tribal mask fixed to a wall. Sweeping polished wood floors. A set of Papua New Guinean tribal warrior spears in a corner here. A painting of a lion tearing apart a gazelle over there. A long living room with a fireplace and a television wider than my bed is long.
Caitlyn cranes her neck to a bronze chandelier that looks like a steel huntsman spider weaving a web of lightbulbs.
‘Nice place,’ she says.
‘Thank you,’ Hanna says. ‘We didn’t always live like this. My father came to Australia with nothing. His first home in Queensland was a room shared with six other men in the Wacol immigration camp.’
Hanna stops on the spot. She stares at my face.
‘Do you know it?’ she asks.
‘Know what?’
‘The Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons?’
I shake my head.
‘Did you grow up in the outer west?’ she asks. ‘I feel like I know you.’
Smile. Shake my head.
‘Nah, I’m north side,’ I say. ‘Grew up in Bracken Ridge.’
She nods. Staring into my eyes. Hanna Broz digs deep. She turns, scurries on down the hall.
A Napoleon bust. A bust of Captain Cook near a replica Endeavour. A painting of a lion tearing apart a grown man this time. The lion is tearing the man’s limbs off, has two legs and an arm piled beneath his feet, sinking its teeth into the man’s remaining arm.