by Trent Dalton
She’s rambling dot points, fast and loud. Sometimes she takes her eyes off the road to see my face. ‘I mean, what’s with his daughter and him? What about all that crazy stuff in his house? Okay, where do you want to start?’
I’m looking out the window. I’m thinking of Lyle in the front yard of the Darra house. I’m seeing him standing in his work clothes showered in a rainbow spray from my hose.
‘Let’s start at the end, huh, and work our way forward to the beginning,’ she says.
Forward to the beginning. I like that. That’s all I’ve ever been doing. Moving forward to the start.
‘I don’t know about you but my crazy-meter was tingling all over,’ she says. ‘There’s something wrong with all this, Eli. Something very, very wrong with all this.’
She’s rambling nervously. Filling the silence. She looks across at me. I turn my head to the road in front, repeated broken white bitumen lines lost under the car.
I know what I have to do.
‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say. I say it louder than I intended. I say it with feeling.
‘Back?’ Caitlyn says. ‘Why do you want to go back?’
‘I can’t say,’ I say. ‘I have to be mute on this. There are things people can’t say. I know that now. There are things too impossible to say out loud so they’re best left unsaid.’
Caitlyn hits the brakes hard and turns the car sharply to a dirt bank on the side of the road. The front wheels lose traction momentarily and she reefs on the steering wheel to keep the vehicle from crashing into a rocky slope on my passenger side. She skids to a stop. Switches off the car.
‘Tell me why we should go back, Eli.’
‘I can’t, you’ll think I’m nuts.’
‘Don’t worry about me thinking you’re nuts because I’ve felt exactly that since the moment I met you,’ she says.
‘You have?’ I reply.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘You’re a loon, but I mean that in the best possible way. Like a Bowie-type loon, Iggy Pop–type loon, Van Gogh–type loon.’
‘Astrid-type loon,’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘She was a friend of my mum’s when I was a kid,’ I say. ‘I thought she was nuts. But good nuts. Lovable nuts. She told us she heard voices and we all thought she was crazy. She said she heard a voice telling her my brother, August, was special.’
‘He sounds special, from what you’ve told me about him,’ Caitlyn says.
I breathe.
‘I’ve gotta go back,’ I say.
‘Why?’ she asks.
I breathe. Forward to the start. Backwards to the end.
‘The bird,’ I say.
‘What about the bird?’
‘A dead blue wren.’
‘Yeah, the wren?’
‘One day when I was a kid . . .’ And so ends my vow of silence. It lasted a staggering forty-three seconds. ‘. . . I was sitting in Slim’s car and he was teaching me how to drive a manual and I was distracted like I always am and I was staring out the window and I was watching Gus who was sitting on the front fence writing the same sentence in the air with his finger because that was his way of talking. And I could tell what he was writing because I knew how to read his invisible words in the air.’
I pause for a long moment. There’s a semicircle of dust on Caitlyn’s windscreen.
Her windscreen wipers have smeared a rainbow of old dirt over to my passenger side. That rainbow of dirt reminds me of the milky moons in my thumbnails. Those milky moons remind me of that day in the car with Slim. The small details that remind me of him.
‘What was he writing?’ she asks.
The sun is falling. I have to file my story for tomorrow. Brian Robertson will be steaming already. Mum and Dad and Gus are probably travelling into Brisbane City Hall now. Gus’s big night. A confluence of events. A convergence. Detail upon detail.
‘He wrote, “Your end is a dead blue wren.”’
‘What was that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t even think Gus knew what it meant or why he was saying it, but he said it. And one year later, they were the first words I ever heard come out of his mouth. The night they took Lyle away. He looked into Tytus Broz’s eyes and he said, “Your end is a dead blue wren.” It means that dead blue wren represents some kind of end for Tytus Broz.’
‘But that bird in your hand wasn’t dead, it flew away, and I’m not even sure if it was a wren,’ she says.
‘It felt like it was dead to me,’ I say. ‘But it came back. And that’s what Gus is always saying. We come back. I don’t know. Old souls, like Astrid used to say. Everybody’s got an old soul but only the special ones like Gus get to know that. Everything that happens has happened. Everything that is going to happen has happened. Or somethin’ like that. I got up and went out to that bird and I picked it up because I felt like I had to. And then it went and landed on that concrete bunker thing at the side of the lawn.’
‘That bunker did give me the creeps,’ Caitlyn says.
She looks ahead down the winding road back home. The setting orange sun lighting her deep brown hair. Her fingers tap the steering wheel.
‘I never believed Gus was special,’ I say. ‘I didn’t believe Astrid could hear voices from spirits. I didn’t believe a word of it. But . . .’
I stop. She looks across at me.
‘But what?’
‘But then I met you and I started believing in all kinds of things.’
She gives a half-smile. ‘Eli,’ she says, dropping her head, ‘I think it’s real sweet how you feel for me.’
I shake my head, shift in my seat.
‘I see you when you look at me,’ she says.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. I think it’s beautiful. I don’t think anyone’s ever looked at me like you look at me.’
‘You don’t have to say it,’ I say.
‘Say what?’
‘What you’re gonna say about the timing,’ I say. ‘How I’m still a boy. Or maybe only just a man. You’re gonna say the universe fucked it up. It put me near you but the timing was off. Nice try but about a decade out. You don’t have to say it.’
She nods. Curls up her lips.
‘Wow,’ she gasps. ‘Is that what I was gonna say? Damn, how about that? Here I was thinking I was gonna tell you all about a strange feeling I had when I first met you.’
Caitlyn starts the car, slams the accelerator and spins the tyres as she pulls a sharp U-turn back in the direction of Tytus Broz’s mansion.
‘What did you feel?’ I ask.
‘Sorry, Eli Bell,’ she says. ‘Not enough time. I think I just worked out what’s in that bunker.’
‘What’s in there?’
‘Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘The end is in there, Eli,’ she says, leaning hard on the steering wheel as the tyres howl on the bitumen road. ‘The end.’
*
In a soft twilight we’re parked in dark shadow under a sprawling purple jacaranda tree that rises up to the top of Tytus Broz’s fence, some fifty metres from the security gate. A small white Daihatsu Charade pulls out of the gate, turns left onto the road into the city.
‘That them?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Caitlyn says. ‘Car’s too small, too cheap. That was the help.’
She nods to the glove box.
‘Look inside the glove box will you, there should be a little flashlight,’ she says.
I pop the glove box open, sift through six or seven scrunched tissues, two small notepads, eight or so chewed pens, a pair of yellow-rimmed sunglasses, a cassette tape of Disintegration by The Cure and, about the size of a lipstick, a small green flashlight with a black push-button on one end and a small bulb the size of a human iris.
I switch it on and the light flashes a pitiful beam of artificial light big enough to illuminate a night-time barbecue held by a family of green ants.
‘What sort of torch is this?’ I ask.
‘I use it when I can’t get my key in the door at home late at night.’
Caitlyn snatches the flashlight from my hand and sharpens her gaze ahead.
‘Here they come,’ she says.
A silver Mercedes Benz pulls out of the driveway. Chauffeur-driven. Tytus and his daughter Hanna Broz in the back seat. The Mercedes turns left out of the driveway, motors on towards the city. Caitlyn reaches into the footwell on my side, grabs her camera from the faulty camera cabinet and slings the black strap over her left shoulder.
‘Let’s go,’ Caitlyn says.
She slips out of the car, lifts her left Dr Martens boot up to the joint of the jacaranda tree where three main branches of the trunk split off in separate directions. A rip in the left knee of her black jeans stretches further as she hauls herself up. She then monkey crawls up one thick branch that rises up to the top of the clay-coloured fence. She doesn’t think. She only acts. Caitlyn Spies. A doer. I get lost for a moment just watching her move. The natural courage in her. Not even blinking before she crawls up a branch high enough to break her neck if her trusty British boots slipped off it.
‘What are you waiting for?’ she asks.
I lift my left leg up to the tree’s central trunk joint, my rear thigh muscle threatening to tear. She stands on the branch and walks it like a gymnast on a balance beam before lying down, hugging the branch momentarily and reaching her legs down ambitiously towards the clay-coloured wall the branch has grown above. Next, she stands on the wall, crouches down, then drops her legs over the side while pressing her belly hard against the top. She pays her potential landing only half-a-second of attention then releases her grip and vanishes.
I crawl up the branch, less graceful. Darkness now. I jump to the wall, dangle my legs over the side. I pray the landing is soft. Drop. My feet find earth and the impact knocks me off them. I stagger backwards and land hard on my arse bones.
A yard in darkness. I can see the lights on in Tytus’s mansion ahead but I can’t see Caitlyn in the dark of the lawn. ‘Caitlyn?’ I whisper. ‘Caitlyn.’
Her hand on my shoulder.
‘Minus ten for the dismount,’ she says. ‘C’mon.’
She scurries low and quick across the lawn, skirting the left side of the grand house we walked through with Hanna only hours ago. We’re like special ops soldiers. Chuck Norris in The Octagon. Low and hard. Round the corner of the house, onto the rear lawn. Stone fountains. Hedge mazes. Floral garden beds. We split through these, sprinting on towards the white door of the bunker being swallowed whole by vines and shrubbery and weed. Caitlyn stops at the door. We both keel forward, sucking in air, hands on thighs. Journalism and sprinting are chalk and cheese, oil and water, Hawke and Keating.
Caitlyn turns the silver knob on the door.
‘Locked,’ she says.
I suck in more air.
‘Maybe you should go back to the car,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Sentencing ladder,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The sentencing ladder,’ I say. ‘Right now we’re probably on the bottom rung of the sentencing ladder. Trespassing onto property. I’m about to go up a rung.’
‘To what?’
I walk to the small tool shed neighbouring the bunker.
‘Breaking and entering,’ I say.
The smell of oil and petrol in the tool shed. I pad down the side of the parked John Deere tractor. A row of gardening and lawn tools leaning against the back of the tool shed. A hoe. A pick. A shovel. A rusty-bladed axe. An axe big enough to chop off Darth Vader’s melon.
I pad back to the bunker door, holding the axe in both hands.
The answer, Slim. Boy finds question. Boy finds answer.
I raise the axe high above my shoulder, its heavy rusted blade aligned on a rough trajectory towards the five centimetres of door space between the doorknob and the door edge.
‘I feel like I’ve gotta do this,’ I say. ‘But you don’t have to, Caitlyn. You should go back to the car.’
She stares into my eyes. The moon above us. She shakes her head.
I loosen my shoulder to swing. I go to swing.
‘Eli, wait,’ Caitlyn says.
I stop.
‘What is it?’
‘I just had a thought,’ she says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Your end is a dead blue wren?’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘What if it’s not even about Tytus Broz’s end? What if “your end” means your end? The end for you, not for him.’
This notion makes me shiver. It’s suddenly cold here by this dark bunker. We look at each other for a long moment and I’m grateful for this moment with her, even if I’m terrified and even if I know somewhere deep inside me that she is right about the possibility that ‘your end’ means my end and my end means our end. The end of Caitlyn and Eli.
And I bring the blade down on the door and the axe bites hard and violently into a door that is already weather-beaten. Wood fragments pop and split and I bring the blade back up and I plunge it into the door again, much like, if I’m honest with myself, the blade I see in my mind’s eye plunging into Tytus Broz’s geriatric skull. The bunker door flies open, revealing a concrete staircase descending sharply, deep into the earth. Only moonlight illuminates the staircase to the sixth step and the rest is darkness.
Caitlyn stands at my shoulder, looking down into the staircase.
‘What the hell is this, Eli?’ she says gravely.
I shake my head, walk down the staircase.
‘I don’t know.’
I count the steps going down. Six, seven, eight . . . twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Then the ground. Concrete ground beneath my feet.
‘You smell that?’ Caitlyn asks.
The smell of disinfectant. Bleach. Cleaning products.
‘It smells like a hospital,’ Caitlyn says.
I rub my hands along the walls in the darkness. Concrete besser block walls on both sides of a hall – a walkway, a tunnel – maybe two metres wide.
‘Your flashlight,’ I say.
‘Right,’ Caitlyn says.
She reaches into her pocket. Her thumb clicks the torch and a small orb of white light illuminates about a foot of space in front of us. Enough to see the white door built into the left side of the concrete hall. Enough to see the white door on the right side directly facing the door on the left.
‘Oohhhhhh shit,’ Caitlyn murmurs. ‘Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.’
‘You wanna get outta here?’ I ask.
‘Not yet,’ she says.
I walk further into the darkness. Caitlyn turns the knobs on both doors.
‘Locked,’ she says.
The polished concrete floor. The claustrophobic hall. Rough concrete walls. Dead air and disinfectant. Caitlyn’s shaky light bounces along the walls. Five metres into darkness. Ten metres into the darkness. Then the pitiful flashlight lands on two more white doors built into the hall. Caitlyn turns the door handles.
‘Locked,’ she says.
We walk on. Another six metres, seven metres into darkness. And the hallway ends. The underground tunnel ends on one more white door.
Caitlyn reaches for the knob.
‘Locked,’ she says. ‘What now?’
Forward to the beginning. Backwards to the end.
I rush back down the hall to the first door we passed.
I drive the axe into the door latch. Once, twice, three times. The door flies open in a splintery mess of door chips and cracks and splinters.
Caitlyn shines the flashlight into the room. The room is the size of a standard home garage. She enters the room, waves the light around furiously, nothing steady in her movements, so all that we see comes in brief flashes. Workbenches line the walls and on these workbenches are cutting tools and power saws and moulding instruments interspersed with artificial limbs in various stages of creation. A plastic arm fall
ing over at the elbow, unfinished. A metal shin and foot, like something from science fiction. A foot made of carbon. Hands made of silicone and metal. It’s a mini artificial limb lab. But there’s nothing professional about it. It’s the laboratory of a madman. Too busy to be the work of someone qualified. Too rabid.
I cross the hallway to the second room. Dig the axe five times into the space between the doorknob and the door edge. Something primal driving me, something vicious and animal. Fear. The answers, maybe. The end. Your end is a dead blue wren. The door cracks and I kick the rest in with my shoe, stomping and stomping and stomping. The door opens and Caitlyn’s light falls upon another work room, this one with three benches surrounding a medical operating table and what rests upon this operating table makes us reel back in horror because it looks like a headless human body but it is not. It is an artificial body, a fake plastic body comprised of artificial limbs; a silicone-based torso roughly connected to a monstrous mix of limbs with uneven skin tones. A morbid hybrid horror of hack-test-dummy artificial-limb experimentation.
I run to the next door on the left, further up this horror movie hall, this spook hall like something from a fairground sideshow alley; a man missing his two front teeth is going to appear soon in a ticket booth, selling popcorn and another ticket to Tytus Broz’s Bunker of Doom. I drive the axe into the door, this time with more force because I’ve got a run-up. Hack. Hack. Crack. Shrieks of splintered wood as the door pops open. I kick it further ajar and pad breathlessly into this next room, my heart bracing for the impact of what we’ll find. Caitlyn’s light bounces erratically across the room. Concrete walls. Flash. Shelving. Flash. Glass specimen jars. Rectangular glass boxes, perfectly blown from one piece of perfect glass. Something inside the glass boxes. Something hard to see in the darkness, in such poor light from Caitlyn’s flashlight. Scientific specimens, my brain tells me, replacing grim fact with something I can understand. The stonefish my old high-school teacher, Bill Cadbury, kept above his desk in a jar of preservation fluid. Those specimen jars I saw in the old Queensland Museum on school excursions, jars holding organic matter. Preserved starfish. Preserved eels. Preserved platypus. That makes sense. That’s something I understand. Caitlyn’s orb of light finds another medical table in the centre of this room and upon this table is another artificial body of connected limbs. Another body built from artificial feet, legs, arms; four limbs and a woman’s silicone-sleeved torso. I understand this. This is within my knowing. Science. Experimentation. Engineering. Research.