The moon pool. All the way out here on the northern fringe of the city. The full midnight moon shines for August Bell anywhere, so why wouldn’t it shine for him in Bracken Ridge, home of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Number 5 Lancelot Street. Robert Bell’s small orange brick house in the Queensland Housing Commission cluster of small orange brick homes just down the hill from Arthur Street and Gawain Road and Percivale Street and Geraint Street. Here sits Sir August the Mute, in the gutter by a black letterbox fixed to a weather-beaten stick. He has a garden hose resting on his right thigh as he fills a flat pan of Lancelot Street bitumen in precise angles to reflect a full moon so vivid that the man inside it can be seen with his lips wet whistling ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’.
I watch him from behind a blue Nissan family van parked five houses further up the street. He looks up at the moon then he kinks the garden hose in his hands so the water stops and the moon pool stills, reflecting a perfect silver moon. Then he reaches for an old rusted 7-iron golf club that sits beside him and he stands and he leans over the moon pool and stares into his reflection. He flips the club upside down and, with the handle end, he taps the very centre of his pool. And he sees things only he can see.
Then he looks up and sees me.
‘So I guess you can talk when you want to?’ I say.
He shrugs his shoulders, scribbles in the air. Sorry Eli.
‘Say it.’
He drops his head. Considers something for a moment. Looks back up.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
Boy sounds soft and fragile and nervous and unsure. Boy sounds like me.
‘Why, Gus?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why the fuck weren’t you talking?’
He breathes.
‘Safer that way,’ he says. ‘Can’t hurt anyone that way.’
‘What are you talking about, Gus?’
August looks down at the moon pool. He smiles.
‘Can’t hurt you, Eli,’ he says. ‘Can’t hurt us. There are things I want to say, but if I said them, Eli, people would be frightened by those things.’
‘What things?’
‘Big things. The kinds of things that people would not understand, things that would make people misunderstand me if I said them. Then they’d misunderstand us, Eli. And then they’d take me away and who’d be left to look after you.’
‘I can get by just fine on my own.’
August smiles. He nods.
A streetlight shines above us. All the lights in all the houses in the street are off, except for the living room light of our house.
He nods me over. I stand beside him and we stare into the moon pool. Watch this, he does not say. He taps the pool with the handle end of the 7-iron and circular ripples spread out into the pool from the central point of impact and our reflection – the two of us brothers – is fractured thirteen or fourteen times over.
August scribbles in the air. You and me and you and me and you and me and you and me and . . .
‘I don’t understand,’ I say.
He taps the pool again and points to the ripples.
‘I think I’m losing my mind, Gus,’ I say. ‘I think I’m going crazy. I need to sleep. I feel like I’m walking in a dream and this is the end bit that feels really real, the bit just before I wake up.’
He nods.
‘Am I going crazy, Gus?’
‘You’re not crazy, Eli,’ August says. ‘But you are special. Didn’t you ever have that feeling you were special?’
‘I’m not special,’ I say. ‘I think I’m just tired.’
We both stare into the moon pool.
‘So you’re going to talk to people now?’
August shrugs.
‘I’m still thinking about that,’ he says. ‘Maybe I could just talk to you?’
‘Everybody’s gotta start somewhere.’
‘You know what I realised in all that time with my mouth shut?’
‘What?’
‘Most things people say don’t need to be said,’ he says.
He taps the moon pool.
‘I’ve been thinking about all the things Lyle said to me,’ August says. ‘He said so many things, and I reckon all those things put together wouldn’t say as much as he said when he’d wrap his arm around my shoulder.’
‘What did Lyle tell you across the table?’
‘He told me where the drugs were,’ he says.
‘Where are the drugs?’ I ask.
‘I’m not telling you,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he also told me to protect you,’ he says.
‘Why?’
‘Lyle knew you were special too, Eli.’
I tell him about my adventure. I tell him about my quest. I tell him how I met Caitlyn Spies. I tell him how beautiful she is. How everything about her feels right. ‘I feel like I know her,’ I say. ‘But that’s impossible, right?’
August nods.
‘How did you know her name that day?’ I ask. ‘That day you were sitting on the fence at home and you were writing her name over and over and over? Was that one of the big things? One of those things you know but can’t say because it’s safer that way.’
August shrugs.
‘I just saw her name in the paper,’ he says.
I tell him everything about her face. About her walk. About the way she speaks.
I tell him everything. About my escape from the hospital, my encounter with Batman, going back to Darra, returning to the secret room and the message from the man on the phone about Mum.
My story is interrupted by a deep howling sound coming from the living room of number 5 Lancelot Street.
‘What the fuck is that?’
‘That’s Dad,’ August says.
‘Is he dying in there or something?’
‘He’s singing,’ August says.
‘Sounds like he’s talking to a whale.’
‘He’s singing to Mum,’ August says.
‘Mum?’
‘He does it every second night,’ August says. ‘He spends the first four cups of goon cursing her, calling her every name under the sun. Then he spends the next four cups singing to her.’
This strange howling wobbles and wails out through the large front sliding window built into the orange brick house. There are no words in the howling, just sorrow, a deranged vocal warbling, slobbering and woozy and guttural, like an opera singer hitting a crescendo with a mouth full of marbles.
Blue and grey flashes of television light bounce off the living room walls visible through the front window.
I scan the house for a moment.
All the houses in the street are Housing Commission houses and all these Housing Commission houses in the street are built the same: low-set three-bedroom shoeboxes with a two-step access to a porch off the left side and a concrete ramp running to the back door. My father hasn’t mowed the lawn at the front of number 5 Lancelot Street. My father hasn’t mowed the lawn at the back of the house either. But he must mow the front lawn more than the back because the front lawn grass reaches my kneecaps but the back lawn grass would reach my nose.
‘This place is a shithole,’ I say.
August nods.
‘We gotta go see her, Gus,’ I say. ‘We gotta go see Mum. She just needs to see us and she’ll be all right.’
I nod to the living room window.
‘He’ll take us to see her,’ I say.
August tips his head to the side, a look of doubt. He says nothing.
*
The howl singing gets stronger as we step onto the front porch. OOOOoooowwwwwwwwwooooooooooo. The pain in it. The melodrama.
Some strange incoherent warbling along to a song about the night and fate and death.
August leads us through a thick wooden front door roughly painted a deep brown.
The floors in the living room are dark brown wood, unpolished. By the entry there’s a cream-coloured cabinet from the 1960s that’s mostly empty but for six or seven old mugs, a brown bowl holding a wooden banana, apple and orange, and a novelty metal faux bumper sticker: DISLEXICS ARE TEOPLE POO. The fibro walls of the living room are painted a peach colour and there are small and large holes and dents on every wall and these random holes and dents are interspersed with blotches of white paint where other holes have been puttied up. There’s a framed print on the wall of a beautiful woman in a white dress sitting in a boat on a pond with her arms out, a look of despair on her face.
My father doesn’t see us enter the house. He’s somewhere in the corner haze of tobacco smoke and 1960s peyote rock music. He’s kneeling on the floor half a metre from a television that has its volume down with white noise static fuzz filling the screen. My father rests an elbow unsteadily on a square white coffee table scratched in parts to reveal historical layers of multicoloured paint coatings, like the inside of a jawbreaker lolly. Beside his bare right foot is a yellow plastic cup like the ones I used to glug cordial from in primary school. Next to the cup is a silver wine cask bladder wrung to death like an old chamois.
Robert Bell’s howl singing is an attempt to sing along with The Doors, coming through a stereo at full volume beside the television.
My father howls again, his voice cracking on the high notes and drowning in spit and drink on the lows. And my father can’t follow the words of Jim Morrison so he puts his head back and howls and his pack of post-midnight wolves should be arriving soon. He’s thin and bony with a beer belly and a salt and pepper crew cut. If Lyle is John Lennon then this man is George Harrison, gaunt and dark and haunting. A white singlet and blue Stubbies shorts. I guess he must be forty by now. Looks fifty. Tattoos look sixty, old homemade jobs like Lyle’s. A python wrapped around a crucifix on his right forearm. An image of a giant ship, Titanic maybe, sailing across his right calf beneath the letters S.O.S.
A monster singing in that ghost-smoke corner of the living room, curled up and kneeling like that, howling like that. The monster looks like he belongs in some basement with Igor and his friends, Lobster Boy and Camel Girl. And my father’s bloodshot right eyeball moves inside its socket beneath the tan chewing gum spread of his old and worn-in face and finds me.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say.
His face wobbles as he looks at me, then his right hand fumbles for something beneath the coffee table. He finds an axe handle, a shapely hard brown wooden club without the chopping blade at the top. He grips this weapon and staggers to his feet. ‘Whoooooooo . . .’ he snarls. ‘Whhaaaa . . .’ His shorts are soiled with his own piss. He grits his teeth, spit coming from his mouth. Trying to say something. Trying so hard to form words. He sways as he stares at me and he finds his balance. ‘UUUUUuuuuuuuu . . .’ he spits. He wets his lips and says it again. ‘UUUUuuuuuuuuuuuu.’ Then he goes again. ‘Cuuuuuuuuuunt,’ he spits, breathless, struggling to find the word. Then, quicker than I can comprehend it, he pads straight for me, raising the axe handle high, ready to swing it.
‘Cuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnt,’ he screams.
I stand in place, my brain not presenting me with a better defence than my forearms covering my skull.
But Sir August the Mute, Sir August the Brave, stands in front of me. In one perfect motion, August’s clenched right fist hooks into my father’s left temple, bringing the man with the axe handle down low enough for August to grip the back of his singlet with both hands and build on his forward momentum with a heaving throw that drives his drunk head into the peach-coloured wall behind us. My father’s skull puts a hole in the wall just before it drops, already unconscious, with the rest of his body to the unpolished wooden floor. We stand above him. He has his lips pressed to the floor, his eyelids closed. He still grips the axe handle.
August breathes.
‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘He’s actually quite lovely when he’s sober.’
*
August opens the old Kelvinator fridge in the kitchen. It’s covered in so much rust that it leaves bronze dust on my hands when I touch it.
‘Sorry, not much to eat,’ August says.
There’s a bottle of water in the fridge and a tub of Meadow Lea margarine and a jar of pickled onions, as well as something mouldy and black growing in the bottom crisper, an old piece of steak, maybe, or a small human.
‘What have you been having for dinner?’ I ask.
August opens the pantry door, points to six Home Brand packets of chicken noodles.
‘Bought these a few days ago,’ he says. ‘I bought a bag of frozen vegetables to mix in with them. You want me to do you up some?’
‘Nah, thanks. I just need to sleep.’
I follow August back past my father, splayed out unconscious in the living room, and down a hallway to the first bedroom on the left.
‘This is where I sleep,’ he says. The room has deep blue carpet and a single bed against the left wall, and an old wardrobe with peeling cream-coloured paint opposite the bed.
‘I guess you could crash on the carpet beside me,’ August says.
August points down the hallway to the bedroom at the end of it.
‘Dad’s room,’ he says.
I point to the bedroom next to August’s. Its door is closed.
‘What about this one?’
‘That’s the library,’ he says.
‘The library?’
August opens the door of the bedroom and flicks on the light switch. There are no beds in this room or wardrobes or paintings on the wall. There are only books. But the books aren’t stacked neatly on shelves for there are no shelves to speak of. There is only a mountain of books, paperbacks mostly, building from all four corners of the room to form a peak in the bedroom’s centre that reaches the height of my eye line. Nothing in the room but a volcano-shaped pile of books in the thousands. Thrillers and westerns and romance novels and classics and action-adventure novels and thick textbooks about mathematics and biology and human movement studies and books of poetry and Australian history and war and sport and books on religion.
‘Are these all his?’ I ask.
August nods.
‘Where does he get them all from?’ I ask.
‘He gets ’em from the op shops,’ August says. ‘I think he’s read them all.’
‘That’s impossible,’ I say.
‘I don’t know,’ August says. ‘All he does is read. And drink.’
He nods to the bedroom at the end of the hallway.
‘He wakes up early in the morning, around 5 a.m., and he rolls all the smokes he’s gonna smoke any given day, and that might be thirty or forty smokes, then he just reads books and smokes the smokes he’s rolled.’
‘Does he ever come out?’
‘Yeah, he comes out when he’s having a drink,’ August says. ‘And when he wants to watch Sale of the Century on the telly.’
‘That’s fucked up,’ I say.
August nods.
‘Yeah, but he blitzes Sale of the Century.’
‘I gotta piss,’ I say.
August nods, moves to the toilet and bathroom, next to my father’s bedroom. He opens the toilet door and we both recoil at the smell of old urine and beer.
Above the plastic toilet top rest several torn and rough-shaped squares from The Courier-Mail newspaper, which August uses to wipe his arse.
The toilet’s floor space is just long enough and wide enough to accommodate a porcelain toilet and an opening door and the floor is currently holding an inch-deep pool of my father’s piss. A yellow fluffy toilet mat the colour of a baby chick is soaked in piss in the corner beside a toilet brush leaning against the wall. ‘His aim turns to shit after the fifth cup,’ August says, standing at the edge of my father’s urine pool. ‘You can piss from outside if you want. If you have a full tank you’ll probably make it from here.’
I line up at the edge of the piss pool and unzip my fly.
*
August takes a sheet and a towel from the hallway cupboard. In his bedroom he rolls the towel up into a pillow for my head. I lie back on his deep blue carpet and pull the sheet over me. August stands by the bedroom door. He raises his right hand to the light switch.
‘You good?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, I’m good,’ I say, spreading my legs out for a better sleeping position.
‘It’s good to see you, Gus,’ I say.
‘It’s good to see you, Eli,’ he says.
‘It’s good to talk to you,’ I say.
He smiles.
‘It’s good to talk to you,’ he says. ‘Get some sleep. Everything’s gonna be all right.’
‘You really think so?’ I ask.
He nods.
‘Don’t worry, Eli,’ he says. ‘It gets good.’
‘What gets good?’
‘This life of ours,’ he says.
‘How do you know it gets good?’
‘The man on the phone told me.’
I nod. Nah, we’re not crazy. We’re just tired. We just need some sleep.
‘Night, Gus,’ I say.
‘Night, Eli.’
The light goes off and darkness fills the room. August steps over me to get to his bed. I hear the springs in his bed sink down as he lies back. Silence. Eli and August Bell together again in another black bedroom. Slim says he would sometimes open his eyes in darkness like this, the darkness upon darkness underground in Black Peter, and he’d pretend the darkness wasn’t darkness at all. It was just space, he says. Deep space. Deep universe.
‘Gus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Lyle is still alive?’
Silence. A long silence.
‘Gus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I was just checking you hadn’t stopped talking again.’
Silence.
‘Please don’t stop talking to me, Gus. I like talking to you.’
‘I won’t stop talking to you, Eli.’
Silence. Deep universe silence.
‘Do you think Lyle is still alive?’ I ask.
‘What do you think, Eli?’
I think about this. I think about this often.
‘You remember what Lyle used to say about the Parramatta Eels when he really knew the team was gonna get beat but he didn’t want to admit it?’
‘Yeah,’ August says.
Silence.
‘Do you remember what he said?’
‘Yeah, sorry,’ August says. ‘I just wrote it in the air.’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to say it.’
Just keep it in the air. That’s where Lyle Orlick can stay, maybe. In the air. In my head. In my heart. In my rage. In my vengeance. In my hatred. In my time that will come. In my universe.
‘You remember that day we ate all the mulberries?’ August asks.
I remember. The mulberry tree that hung over the back fence of the Darra house, flopped over the fence lazily from Dot Watson’s house behind us. Slim was looking after us that day but he didn’t know we had eaten so many fat burgundy mulberries that day until I vomited a purple river after lunch. I ran out the back door off the laundry but I didn’t make it to the grass. I chucked up the purple river all across the path that led to the clothesline. A purple stain splashed across the concrete like someone had dropped a bottle of fine red wine on it. Slim had no sympathy for my aching belly, just made me wash it up with Pine-O-Cleen and hot water. Once I’d cleaned it all up, Slim said he wanted to make a mulberry pie like the ones he had eaten in a boys’ home down south.
‘Remember the story he told us about the boy who had the universe in his mouth?’ August asks.
We were pulling mulberries off the tree when Slim started telling us about some story he read in Boggo Road once, a story about some god, or some special guy from a religion different from the wooden cross one we knew, not one where Jesus was the hero, but one that was spoken of in the kinds of places Slim said Indiana Jones liked to visit. He said there was this special boy who was actually a special man and this special boy was running around with a bunch of other kids, older kids, playing near a sprawling fruit tree. And the older kids didn’t let this special boy climb the fruit tree with them because he was too small but they let him pick up the fruits that fell from the tree as they climbed. The older kids warned the boy not to eat the fruits because they weren’t clean. ‘Just collect them,’ said an older boy. But the boy began stuffing his mouth with the fat and juicy purple fruits that lay on the ground. He ate these fruits like he was possessed, so ravenous for them that he started picking them up with clumps of earth and shoving them in his busy mouth, fruit and soil together, shoving them in so hard that purple fruit rivers started flowing from the sides of his mouth. ‘What are you doing?’ the older boys asked. ‘What are you doing? Explain yourself. Give us some answers. Give us all the answers.’ But the boy said nothing. He did not speak. He could not speak, with his mouth so full of tainted fruit. The older kids demanded he stop but the boy kept eating, so they ran to fetch the boy’s mother. ‘Your boy is eating mud!’ the older kids hollered. The boy’s mother, mad as hell, demanded her son open his mouth to show her the evidence of his recklessness, his greed, his insanity. ‘Open your mouth!’ she barked. And the boy opened his mouth and the mother looked inside and saw trees and snow-capped mountains and blue sky and all the stars and all the moons and planets and suns of the universe. And the mother hugged her boy close. ‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘Who are you? Who are you?’
‘Who was he?’ I asked Slim.
‘He was the boy with all the answers,’ Slim said.
*
I speak into the darkness of our bedroom.
‘The boy had a whole world inside of him,’ I say.
‘The boy who swallowed the universe,’ August says.
Silence in the dark.
‘Gus,’ I say.
‘Yeah?’ August replies.
‘Who is the man on the red phone?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think you’re ready to know,’ he says.
‘I’m ready to know.’
A long pause in the universe.
‘You just wrote it in the air, didn’t you?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Please tell me, Gus. Who’s the man on the red phone?’
A long pause in the universe.
‘It’s me, Eli.’