by Trent Dalton
My right hand grips my belly and I see it painted in blood. Stagger to the staircase to my left. A grand marble and wood staircase sweeping in an arc to the hall’s second floor. I pull myself up each step and Iwan Krol staggers behind me, dragging his severed left foot, evidently bandaged now and stuffed agonisingly into a black leather shoe. Two cripples playing cat and mouse, one more accustomed to physical pain than the other. The word is ‘help’, Eli. Say it loud. Just say it. ‘H . . .’ But I can’t get it out. ‘Hel . . .’ The wound won’t let me scream it. Three audience members descend the stairs from the second floor, a suited man and two women in cocktail dresses, one wearing a fluffy white scarf like she’s shouldering a white wolf. I burst through them, clutching my stomach. They see the blood now over my hands and across the shirt beneath the old black jacket I took from the newsroom’s emergency coat rack.
‘Help!’ I say, loud enough for them to hear.
The woman wearing the white scarf howls in fear, reels away from me like I’m on fire or diseased.
‘He’s . . . knife,’ I spit at the man in the descending trio and this man makes a dot-to-dot connection between my bloodstained belly and the man waddling after me with the look on his face like a thousand fires from a thousand hells.
‘Hey, stop,’ demands the suited man, bravely standing in front of Iwan Krol who promptly stabs the brave suited man in the top of his right shoulder with a lightning-swift and masked downward stabbing motion that leaves the man collapsed instantly on the marble staircase.
‘Harold!’ howls the woman in the white scarf. The other woman in the trio banshee-screams then runs down the stairs and across the foyer in the direction of the gathered police officers. I stagger on, reach the top of the stairs and turn a sharp right into a hall space and I burst through a nameless brown solid wood door and then another hall space that curves around through sky-blue walls for twenty metres and I look behind me to see the drops of blood I’m leaving in my wake, blood crumbs for the beast whose rabid old-man wheezing tells me he’s slower than me but hungrier. I burst through another nameless door – no people, nobody around to save the boy – and this door opens to a staircase zig-zagging up to another level still and I know this level. I know this white wall space and I know this elevator. I know this, Slim. This is the room from my youth. This is the room where we met the maintenance man who showed us how the city clocks work and how the clock faces look from the inside out.
I stagger to the old yellow steel clock tower elevator and I try to open the cage door but it’s locked and I can hear Iwan Krol bursting through the doors behind me, so I stagger to the door of the maintenance stairs. Your friend Clancy Mallett’s secret stairs, Slim, the ones he showed us years ago, around the corner and through the door running off the elevator room.
Total darkness in the secret stairwell. I’m fading now. I can’t breathe right. My belly doesn’t even hurt so acutely any more because my whole body aches. Numb now. But still moving. Up and up and up the secret stairs. These concrete stairs zigzag upward, eight or nine steps going up sharply, then I bang into a wall I can’t see, then I turn and step up eight or nine more steps, then I bang into another wall hard and turn and go up another eight or nine steps. I’ll do this until I drop, Slim. Just keep going up. But then I stop because I want to lie down on these steps and close my eyes but maybe that’s called dying and I don’t want to do that, Slim, not when there’s so many more questions to ask Caitlyn Spies, so many more questions to ask my mum and dad about how they fell in love, how I came to be; about August and the moon pool and all those things they were gonna tell me when I was older. I’ve got to get older. My eyes close briefly. Black. Black. The long black. Then my eyes open because I hear the door to the secret stairs open below me, a shaft of yellow light flooding the entry then vanishing as the door closes. Move, Eli Bell. Move. Get up. I can hear Iwan Krol below me, wheezing and sucking in the dank stairwell air. His crippled psycho legs and his crooked heart driving him up the stairs in search of my neck and my eyes and my heart, all of which he wants to stab. Frankenstein’s monster. Tytus’s monster. I drag myself up another cramped flight of stairs, then another, then another. The woman with the white fox around her neck. She screamed on the curved staircase. She bellowed so loud the police had to hear her. Keep walking, Eli. Keep going. Ten flights of stairs. I’m ready to sleep now, Slim. Eleven flights of stairs. Twelve. I’m ready to die now, Slim. Thirteen.
And then a wall with no more stairs zig-zagging up. Just a thin door with a handle for turning. The light. The room with the lights that shine at night through the four clock faces of the Brisbane City Hall clock tower. The north clock. The south clock. East and west. Illuminated from here for the city of Brisbane. The sound of the clockwork. The machinery of the clockwork. Rotating wheels and pulleys working into themselves, not beginning at any point but not ending at any point either. Perpetual. A polished concrete floor and a caged elevator shaft in the centre of the engine room. Four grand ticking clock faces on each side of the tower, engines at the base of each clock encased in protective metal.
Both hands clutching my stomach now, I stagger along the square concrete path around the elevator shaft, past the east clock face, blood dripping on my shoes and on the concrete, past the south clock face and the west clock face. Eyes closing. So thirsty. So tired. Eyes closing. I come to the north clock face and there’s nowhere else to go, the concrete path ends here, blocked by a tall wire protection gate giving access to the elevator. I fall to the ground, push myself up so I’m leaning against the metal casing of the engine that pushes the long black steel minute and hour hands of the north clock face. The minute hand moves up a notch and, cupping my stomach, holding my hands over the blade wound to stop the bleeding, I mark the time on the clock from the inside out. Time of death. Two minutes to nine o’clock.
I hear the door to the engine room open and close again. I hear Iwan Krol’s footsteps. One foot steps and the other foot drags. And I see him now through the wires and steel beams of the elevator cage. He’s on one side of the engine room and I’m on the other. The elevator shaft between us. I just want to sleep. I’m so lifeless now he doesn’t even scare me any more. I’m not afraid of him. I’m angry. I’m furious. I’m vengeful. But I can only channel that rage into my heart, nothing else. Not my hands to pull myself up or my legs to stand.
He limps past the east clock face and the south and the west and turns a corner into my path, my body spread out before the north clock face, my useless punctured flesh and my weak bones without any marrow.
He limps closer now. All I hear is his wheezing and his left shoe dragging along the concrete. Up close he seems so old. I see his wrinkles, the lines in his forehead like dry desert gullies. His face is covered in farming sunspots. Half his nose has been cut away surgically. How could he be so filled with hate at such an old age?
He steps closer. One step, drag. Two steps, drag. Three steps, drag. And he stops.
He stands over me now, studies me like I’m a dead dog. A dead bird. A dead blue wren. He kneels down, placing his weight on his right foot, relieving the pressure on his cut left foot. Then he prods me. He feels for a pulse in my neck. He spreads open the flaps of my black jacket to study the wound in my belly clearly. He lifts my shirt up to study the wound. He pushes my shoulder. He squeezes my upper left arm in his hands. He’s squeezing my left bicep. He’s feeling my bones.
I want to ask him what he is doing but I’m too spent to speak. I want to ask him if he thinks he’s a good man but my lips don’t move. I want to ask him what moment in his life preceded his heart turning so cold and mechanised and his mind so mad. Then his hands return to my neck and he’s feeling the bones in my neck and his forefinger and thumb squeeze my Adam’s apple. Then he cleans his knife on my pants, wipes each side of it. And he breathes deep and I can feel his breath on my face. And he brings his clean blade to my neck.
Then the door to the engine room opens. Three police officers in sky-blue un
iforms. They scream things.
My eyes closing. The police screaming.
‘Step back.’
‘Step back.’
‘Drop the knife.’
The cold blade on my neck.
An explosion. A gunshot. Two gunshots. Bullets bouncing on metal and concrete.
The knife momentarily released from my neck and I’m standing now, hauled to my feet by Iwan Krol. My vision blurs. I know he stands behind me and I know his blade is touching my Adam’s apple now and I know those shirts are blue in front of me. Men in blue with weapons raised.
‘You know I’ll do it,’ he says.
Then go ahead, I cannot say, I’m already dead. My end was a dead blue wren.
He pushes me forward and my legs move with him. And the movement of feet moves my jacket and something inside my jacket moves. I reach inside my jacket pocket with the four fingers of my right hand gripping something made of glass. Something cylindrical. A jar.
‘Back,’ Iwan Krol bellows. ‘Get back.’
The blade presses hard against my throat. We’re so close together I feel his breath and his spit in my earhole. And we stop because the police can’t go back any further.
‘Put the knife down,’ one officer says, trying to calm things. ‘Don’t do this.’
Time stops, Slim. Time does not exist. It is frozen in this moment.
Then it starts again because it is given something human to understand it, something we built to remind us of ageing, a deafening bell that chimes above us. A bell I did not see above me when I entered this engine room. A bell tolling nine times. Clang. Clang. Clang. The sound clogs our eardrums. Stifles our minds. And temporarily clouds Iwan Krol’s sense of awareness because he does not defend himself from the glass specimen jar holding my severed forefinger which I smash against his right side temple. He reels back and the knife is momentarily lifted from my neck, long enough for me to drop to the ground hard, a dead weight drop, landing on my arse and rolling over like a party-trick dog playing dead.
I don’t see where the bullets go from the guns of the officers. Just my perspective through a dead man’s eyes. That’s my perspective on this moment, Slim. Face flat on concrete. The world turned on its side. The black polished shoes of police officers moving to something behind me. A figure running through the door to the engine room. A face leaning down into my view.
My brother, August. My eyes are closing. Blink. My brother, August. Blink.
He whispers in my right ear.
‘You’re gonna be okay, Eli,’ he says. ‘You’re gonna be okay. You come back. You always come back.’
I can’t speak. My mouth won’t let me speak. I’m mute. My left forefinger scribbles a line in the air only my older brother will read before the line disappears.
Boy swallows universe.
Boy Swallows Universe
This is not heaven. This is not hell. This is Boggo Road prison yard Number 2 Division.
It’s empty. Not a soul alive in the place, except . . . except for the man kneeling down, tending the prison garden in his prison clothes with his prison-issue spade. A garden of red and yellow roses; lavender bushes and purple irises under full sun and cloudless blue sky.
‘Hey, kid,’ the man says without seeing me.
‘Hey, Slim,’ I say.
He stands, dusts soil from his kneecaps and his palms.
‘The garden’s lookin’ real great, Slim.’
‘Thanks,’ he says. ‘If I can keep them bastard caterpillars off it, she’ll go all right.’
He drops his spade and nods his head to the side.
‘C’mon,’ he says, ‘we gotta get you outta here.’
He walks across the yard. The grass is thick and green and swallows my feet. He walks me to a thick brown brick wall skirting behind Number 2 Division cell block. A knotted rope hangs from a wedged grappling hook high above us.
Slim nods. He tugs on the rope hard, twice, to ensure it holds taut.
‘Up you go, kid,’ he says, handing me the rope.
‘What is this, Slim?’
‘It’s your great escape, Eli,’ he says.
I look up at the high wall. I know this wall.
‘This is Halliday’s Leap!’ I say.
Slim nods.
‘Get goin’,’ he says. ‘You’re runnin’ outta time.’
‘Do your time, hey Slim?’
He nods. ‘Before it does you,’ he says.
I climb up the wall, my feet pressing up from the thick knots in Slim’s rope.
The rope feels real, burning my hands as I climb. I reach the top of the wall, lean my head back down to Slim, standing way down there on the thick green grass.
‘What’s over the wall, Slim?’ I ask.
‘The answers,’ he says.
‘To what, Slim?’
‘To the questions,’ he says.
I stand on the thick edge of that brown brick prison wall and I see a yellow sand beach below me, but that beach does not run to ocean water, it runs to the universe, an expanding black void filled with galaxies and planets and supernovas and a thousand astronomical events occurring in unison. Explosions of pink and purple. Combustive moments in bright orange and green and yellow and all those glittery stars against the eternal black canvas of space.
There’s a girl on the beach, dipping her toes in the ocean of the universe. She turns her head and she finds me up here on the wall. She smiles.
‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘Jump.’ She waves me to her. ‘C’mon, Eli.’
And I leap.
Girl Saves Boy
The Ford Meteor speeds down Ipswich Road. Caitlyn Spies’ left hand drops the gear stick down as she yanks the steering wheel too hard and fast into the Darra turn-off.
‘And you think that was me standing on the beach?’ she asks.
‘Well . . . yeah,’ I say. ‘Then I opened my eyes and my family were there.’
It was August I saw first. He was looking over me just as he was looking over me in the clock tower engine room. I thought I was back there until I saw the drip sticking into my hand. Felt the hospital bed. Mum rushed to the bedside when she saw me awake. She told me to say something so she would know I really was alive.
‘Gr . . .’ I said, wetting my dry lips to talk.
‘Gr . . .’ I said.
‘What is it, Eli?’ Mum asked, anguished.
‘Group hug,’ I said.
Mum suffocated me in a hug and August threw his arm around us. Mum slobbered tears and spit on me and turned to Dad who was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room.
‘He means you too, Robert,’ Mum said. And that was a kind invitation to many things for Dad, starting with a hug he tried to pretend he didn’t want.
‘And that’s when you walked into the hospital room,’ I say to Caitlyn.
‘And that’s why you think I brought you back?’ Caitlyn asks.
‘Well, it’s kinda obvious, isn’t it?’ I reply.
‘Sorry to spoil the magic, mate, but it was RBH Emergency who brought you back.’
The car hits a bump on Darra Station Road. The knife wound in my belly howls for attention. It’s only been a month since City Hall. I should be in bed watching Days of Our Lives. I shouldn’t be in this old car. I shouldn’t be working.
‘Sorry about that,’ Caitlyn says.
The RBH doctors say I’m a walking miracle. A freak of medical science. The blade hit the top of my pelvic bone as it went in. And that bone stopped the knife going deeper.
‘You must have strong bones!’ the doctor said.
August smiled at that. August said he’d told me I’d come back. August knows things because August is exactly one year older than me and the universe.
Caitlyn turns into Ebrington Street and we pass Ducie Street Park, with the cricket pitch and the playground I once followed Lyle across on his midnight walk to pick up drugs from ‘Back Off’ Bich Dang. A lifetime ago. Another dimension. Another me.
The car pulls up i
n front of my old house in Sandakan Street. Lyle’s house. Lyle’s mum and dad’s house.
We’re retracing the story. Brian Robertson wants it all. The rise and fall of Tytus Broz, the man every newspaper across Australia has had splashed across their front pages for the past month. Brian’s going to turn our story into a five-part crime series, with special first-person accounts from the boy who saw some of the story up close, through his own eyes, from his own perspective. Joint byline. Caitlyn Spies and Eli Bell. Caitlyn will handle nuts and bolts. I will handle colour and detail.