This room of true love. This room of blood. Sky-blue fibro walls. Off-colour paint patches where Lyle has puttied up holes. A made-up queen bed, tightly tucked white sheet, an old thin grey blanket that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those death camps Lyle’s mum and dad were escaping from. Everybody running from something, especially ideas.
A framed Jesus portrait over the bed. The son and his jagged crown, reasonably calm for all the blood dripping down his forehead – so cool under pressure that guy – but frowning like always because August and I aren’t supposed to be in here. This still blue room, the quietest place on earth. This room of true companionship.
Slim says the mistake of all those old English writers and all those matinee movies is to suggest true love comes easy, that it waits on stars and planets and revolutions around the sun. Waits on fate. Dormant true love, there for everybody, just waiting to be found, erupting when the thread of existence collides with chance and the eyes of two lovers meet. Boom. From what I’ve seen of it, true love is hard. Real romance has death in it. It has midnight shakes and flecks of shit across a bedsheet. True love like this dies if it has to wait for fate. True love like this asks lovers to cast aside what is meant to be and work with what is.
August leads, boy wants to show me something.
‘He’ll kill us if he finds us in here.’
Lena’s room is out of bounds. Lena’s room is sacred. Only Lyle enters Lena’s room. August shrugs. He grips a flashlight in his right hand, passes Lena’s bed.
‘This bed makes me sad.’
August nods knowingly. It makes me sadder, Eli. Everything makes me sadder. My emotions run deeper than yours, Eli, don’t forget it.
The bed sags on one side, weighed down on one half for the eight years that Lena Orlik slept alone on it without the balancing weight of her husband, Aureli Orlik, who died of prostate cancer on this bed in 1968.
Aureli died quiet. Died as quiet as this room.
‘Reckon Lena’s watching us right now?’
August smiles, shrugs his shoulders. Lena believed in God but she didn’t believe in love, or at least the kind written in stars. Lena didn’t believe in fate because if her love of Aureli was meant to be then the birth and the whole unholy and deranged headfuck adulthood of Adolf Hitler was also meant to be because that monster, ‘that filthy potwor’, was the only reason they met in 1945 in an American-run displaced persons holding camp in Germany where they stayed for four years, long enough for Aureli to collect the silver that formed Lena’s wedding ring. Lyle was born in the camp in 1949, spent his first night on earth sleeping in a large iron wash bucket, wrapped in a grey blanket like the one right here on this bed. America wouldn’t take Lyle and Great Britain wouldn’t take Lyle, but Australia would and Lyle never forgot this fact, which is why, during a wildly misspent youth, he never burned or vandalised property marked Made in Australia.
In 1951 the Orliks arrived at the Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons, a sixty-second bike ride from our house. For four years they lived among two thousand people sharing timber huts with a total of three hundred and forty rooms, with communal toilets and baths. Aureli landed a job pegging sleepers for the new rail line between Darra and neighbouring suburbs, Oxley and Corinda. Lena worked in a timber factory in Yeerongpilly, in the south-west, cutting sheets of plywood alongside men twice her size and with half her pluck.
Aureli built this room himself, built the whole house on weekends with Polish friends from the railway line. No electricity for the first two years. Lena and Aureli taught themselves English by kerosene lamp light. The house spread, room by nailed room, short stump by short stump, until the smell of Lena’s Polish wild mushroom soup and potato and cheese pierogi and cabbage golabki and roasted lamb baranina filled three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a lounge room, a laundry off the kitchen, a bathroom and a stand-alone flushable toilet beneath a wall hanging of Warsaw’s white three-nave Church of the Holiest Saviour.
August stops, turns to the room’s built-in wardrobe. Lyle built this wardrobe himself using all those woodcraft skills he learned watching his dad and his dad’s Polish friends piece this house together.
‘What is it, Gus?’
August nods his head right. You should open the wardrobe door.
Aureli Orlik lived a quiet life and was determined to die quietly too, with dignity, not to the sound of heart monitors and rushing medical staff. He wouldn’t make a scene. Every time Lena returned to this death room with an empty pisspot or a fresh towel to wipe her husband’s vomit from his chest, Aureli would apologise for causing such trouble. His last word to Lena was ‘Sorry’, and he didn’t stick around long enough to clarify what exactly he was sorry for, and Lena could only be sure he did not mean their love because she knew there was hardship in this true love and endurance and reward and failure and renewal and, finally, death, but never regret.
I open the wardrobe. An old ironing board standing up. A bag of Lena’s old clothes on the wardrobe floor. A hanging row of Lena’s dresses, in single colours: olive, tan, black, blue.
Lena died loud, a violent cacophony of crashing steel and a Frankie Valli high note, returning from Toowoomba’s Carnival of Flowers along the Warrego Highway at twilight, eighty minutes out of Brisbane, her Ford Cortina meeting the front steel grille of a semitrailer hauling pineapples. Lyle was down south in a Kings Cross drug rehab with his old girlfriend, Astrid, on the second of three attempts to kick a decade-long heroin habit. He was jonesing all the way through a subsequent meeting with police officers from the highway town of Gatton who attended the scene. ‘She wouldn’t have suffered,’ said a senior officer, which Lyle took as the officer’s tender way of saying, ‘The truck was fuckin’ huuuuge.’ The officer handed over the only possessions of Lena’s they were able to prise from the Cortina’s wreckage: Lena’s handbag, a set of rosary beads, a small round pillow that she sat on to see better above the steering wheel and, miraculously, a cassette tape recording ejected from the car’s modest stereo system, Lookin’ Back by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons.
‘Fuck,’ Lyle said, holding the tape, shaking his head.
‘What?’ said the officer.
‘Nothing,’ Lyle said, realising an explanation would delay the smack fix that was dominating his thoughts, the physical need for drugs and their beautiful daydream – for what I heard Mum once call ‘the siesta’ – creating an emotional levee that would break a week later, flooding him with the notion that there was no longer a single person left on earth who loved him. That night, on a small sofa bed in the Darra basement of his childhood best friend Tadeusz ‘Teddy’ Kallas, he shot his left arm up to the thought of how romantic his mum was, how deeply she loved her husband, and how the soaring high notes of Frankie Valli made every human on earth smile except his mother. Frankie Valli made Lena Orlik weep. In a heroin haze, Lyle placed The Four Seasons cassette into Teddy’s basement tape deck. He pressed play because he wanted to hear the song that was playing when she smashed into the semitrailer full of pineapples. It was ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’, and in that moment Lyle remembered, as sure as Frankie Valli’s first high note, that accidents never happened to Lena Orlik.
True love comes hard.
*
‘What is it, Gus?’
He puts a forefinger to his lips. He silently shifts aside the bag of Lena’s clothes, slides Lena’s dresses across the wardrobe’s hanging pole. He pushes against the rear wall of the wardrobe space and a sheet of white painted timber, a metre by a metre, clicks against a compression mechanism behind the wall and falls forward into August’s hands.
‘What are you doing, Gus?’
He slides the timber sheet along the back of Lena’s hanging dresses.
A black void opens behind the wardrobe, a chasm, a space of unknown distance beyond the wall. August’s eyes are wide, elated by the hope and possibility in the void.
‘What is that?’
*
We met Lyle through Astrid, and Mum met Astrid in the Sisters of Mercy Women’s Refuge in Nundah, on Brisbane’s north side. We were all dipping bread rolls into beef stew – Mum, August and me – in the refuge dining room. Mum says Astrid was at the end of our table. I was five years old. August was six and kept pointing at a purple crystal tattooed beneath Astrid’s left eye, shaped so it looked like she was crying crystals. Astrid was Moroccan and beautiful and permanently young and always so bejewelled and mystical that I’d come to think of her and her exposed coffee-coloured belly as a character from Arabian Nights, a keeper of magical lamps and daggers and flying carpets and hidden meanings. At the refuge dining table Astrid turned and stared into August’s eyes and August stared back, smiling for long enough that it inspired Astrid to turn to Mum.
‘You must feel special,’ she said.
‘For what?’ Mum asked.
‘Spirit chose you to watch over him,’ she said, nodding at August.
Spirit, we would later discover, was an all-encompassing term for the creator of all living things who visited Astrid on occasion in three manifestations: a mystical white-robed goddess spirit, Sharna; an Egyptian Pharaoh named Om Ra; and Errol, a farting, foul-mouthed representation of all the universe’s ills, who spoke like a small drunk Irishman. Lucky for us, Spirit liked August and Spirit soon made some miraculous communication with Astrid about how her path to enlightenment included arrangements to have us stay for three months in the sunroom of her grandmother Zohra’s house in Manly, in Brisbane’s eastern suburbs. I was only five years old but I still called bullshit, but Manly’s a place where a boy can run barefoot across the low-tide mudflats of Moreton Bay for so long he can convince himself he’s running all the way to the edge of Atlantis, where he might live forever, or until the smell of crumbed cod and chips calls him home, so I made like August and shut my trap.
Lyle came to Zohra’s house to see Astrid. He soon came to Zohra’s house to play Scrabble with Mum. Lyle’s not book smart but he’s street smart and he reads paperback novels endlessly so he knows plenty of words, like Mum. Lyle says he fell in love with Mum the moment she landed the word ‘quixotic’ on a triple word score.
Mum’s love came hard. There was pain in it, there was blood and screams and fists against fibro walls, because the worst thing Lyle ever did was get my mum on drugs. I guess the best thing Lyle ever did was get her off drugs, but he knows I know that the latter could never make up for the former. He got her off drugs in this room. This room of true love. This room of blood.
*
August turns on the flashlight, shines it into the black void beyond the wardrobe wall. The dead white light illuminates a small room almost as big as our bathroom. The torchlight shines on three brown brick walls, a cavity deep enough for a grown man to stand in, like some kind of fallout shelter but unstocked and empty. The floor is made of the earth that the room was dug out from. August’s torch shines on the empty space until it finds the only objects in the room. A wood stool with a cushioned circular seat. And upon this stool is a push-button box telephone. The telephone is red.
*
The worst kind of junkie is the one who thinks they’re not the worst kind of junkie. Mum and Lyle were woeful for a while there, about four years ago. Not in the way they looked, just the way they behaved. Not forgetting my eighth birthday, as such, just sleeping through it, that kind of thing. Booby-trap syringes and shit. You’d creep into their bedroom to wake them up and tell them it was Easter, hop onto their bed like the joyful seasonal bunny and cop a junk needle in your kneecap.
August made me pancakes on my eighth birthday, served them up with maple syrup and a birthday candle that was actually just a thick white house candle. When we finished the pancakes, August made a gesture that said because it was my birthday we could do whatever I wanted. I asked if we could burn several things with my birthday candle, starting with the fungus-green loaf of bread that had been sitting in the fridge for what August and I had tracked at forty-three days.
August was everything back then. Mum, dad, uncle, grandma, priest, pastor, cook. He made us breakfast, he ironed our school uniforms, he brushed my hair, helped me with my homework. He started cleaning up after Lyle and Mum as they slept, hiding their drug bags and spoons, responsibly disposing of their syringes, with me always behind him saying, ‘Fuck all that, let’s go kick the footy.’
But August cared for Mum like she was a lost forest fawn learning to walk because August seemed to know some secret about it all, that it was all just a phase, a part of Mum’s story that we simply had to wait through. I think August believed she needed this phase, she deserved this drug rest, this big sleep, this time out of her brain, this time out from thinking about the past – her thirty-year slideshow of violence and abandonment and dormitory homes for wayward Sydney girls with bad dads. August combed her hair while she slept, pulled blankets over her chest, wiped drool from her mouth with tissues. August was her guardian and he’d clean me up in a flurry of pushes and punches if ever I stood in judgement and disgust. Because I didn’t know. Because nobody knew Mum but August.
These were Mum’s Debbie Harry ‘Heart of Glass’ years. People say junk makes you look horrific, that too much heroin tears your hair out, leaves scabs all over your face and your wrists from your anxious fingers and your anxious fingernails that keep filling with blood and rolled skin. People say the gear sucks the calcium out of your teeth and your bones, leaves you couch-bound like a rotting corpse. And I’d seen all that. But I also thought junk made Mum look beautiful. She was thin and pale white and blonde, not as blonde as Debbie Harry but just as pretty. I thought junk made Mum look like an angel. She had this fixed dazed look on her face, there but not there, like Harry in that ‘Heart of Glass’ clip, like something from a dream, moving in the space between sleeping and waking, between life and death, but sparkling somehow, like she had a mirror ball permanently spinning in the pupils of her sapphire eyes. And I remember thinking that’s how an angel really would look if they found themselves in suburban Darra, south-east Queensland, down all this way from heaven. Such an angel really would be dazed like that, puzzled, glassy, flapping her wings as she studied all those dishes piling up in the sink, all those cars passing by the house beyond the cracks in the curtains.
There’s a golden orb-weaver spider that builds a web outside my bedroom window so intricate and perfect that it looks like a single snowflake magnified a thousand times. The orb-weaver spider sits in the middle of the web like it’s parachuting sideways, suspended in the quest it keeps wanting to finish without needing to know the reason why, blown but not beaten by wind and rain and afternoon summer storms so strong they fell power poles. Mum was the orb-weaver spider in those years. And she was the web, and she was the butterfly too, the blue tiger butterfly with sapphire wings being eaten alive by the spider.
*
‘We need to get outta here, Gus.’
August hands me the flashlight to hold. He turns around and kneels down, sliding his legs backwards through the space in the wardrobe and into the void of the room. He drops into the room and his feet find footing. He turns back around to me and, standing on his toes for extra height, he nods at the sliding wardrobe door. I close it behind us and we’re in total darkness but for the light from the torch. August nods me into the void, reaches up to take the flashlight from my hands. I shake my head.
‘This is insane.’
He nods me in again.
‘You’re an arsehole.’
He smiles. August knows I’m just like him. August knows that if someone told me there was a hungry Bengal tiger on the loose behind a door I’d open it to be sure they weren’t lying. I slip down into the room and my bare feet land on the cold damp earth of the room’s floor. I run a hand along the walls, rough brick and dirt.
‘What is this place?’
August stands staring at the red telephone.
‘What are you looking at?’
He keeps staring at the telephone, excited and distant.
‘Gus, Gus . . .’
He raises his left forefinger. Wait a second.
And the telephone rings. A rapid ring that fills the room. Ring, ring. Ring, ring.
August turns to me, his eyes wide and electric blue.
‘Don’t answer it, Gus.’
He lets it ring three more times and then his hand reaches for the receiver.
‘Gus, don’t pick up that fucking phone!’
He picks it up. Phone to his ear. He’s already smiling, seemingly amused by someone on the other end of the line.
‘Can you hear something?’
August smiles.
‘What is it? Gimme a listen.’
I grab for the phone but August pushes my arm away, his left ear squeezing the phone to his left shoulder. He’s laughing now.
‘Is someone talking to you?’
He nods.
‘You need to put the phone down, Gus.’
He turns away from me, listening intently, the phone’s twisting red cord wrapping over his shoulder. He stands with his back turned to me for a full minute, then he turns back around with a vacant look across his face. He points to me. They want to speak to you, Eli.
‘No.’
He nods his head and passes the phone to me.
‘I don’t want it now,’ I say, pushing the phone away.
August snarls, eyebrows raised. Don’t be such a child, Eli. Then he throws the phone at me and, instinctively, I catch it. Deep breath.
‘Hello?’
The voice of a man.
‘Hello.’
A real man type man, deep voice. A man in his fifties maybe, sixties even.
‘Who is this?’ I ask.
‘Who do you think this is?’ the man replies.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course you do.’
‘No, I really don’t.’
‘Yes, you do. You have always known.’
August smiles, nodding his head. I think I know who it is.
‘You’re Tytus Broz?’
‘No, I am not Tytus Broz.’
‘You’re a friend of Lyle’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re the man who gave Lyle the Golden Triangle heroin I found in the mower catcher?’
‘How do you know it was Golden Triangle heroin?’
‘My friend Slim reads The Courier-Mail every day. When he’s finished with the paper he passes it to me. The crime desk has been writing stories about heroin spreading through Brisbane from Darra. They say it comes from the main opium-producing area of South-East Asia that overlaps Burma, Laos and Thailand. That’s the Golden Triangle.’
‘You know your stuff, kid. You read a lot?’
‘I read everything. Slim says reading is the greatest escape there is and he’s made some great escapes.’
‘Slim’s a very wise man.’
‘You know Slim?’
‘Everybody knows the Houdini of Boggo Road.’
‘He’s my best friend.’
‘You’re best friends with a convicted killer?’
‘Lyle says Slim didn’t kill that cab driver.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes, that’s right. He says Slim was verballed. They stitched him up for it because he had history. They do that, you know, the cops.’
‘Has Slim told you himself that he didn’t do it?’
‘Not really, but Lyle says there’s no way in hell he did it.’
‘And you believe Lyle?’
‘Lyle doesn’t lie.’
‘Everybody lies, kid.’
‘Not Lyle. He’s physically incapable of it. That’s what he told Mum, anyway.’
‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘He called it a full-blown medical condition, “Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder”. It means he can’t mask the truth. He can’t lie.’
‘I don’t think that means he can’t lie. I think it means he can’t be discreet.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Maybe, kid.’
‘I’m sick of adults being discreet. Nobody ever gives you the full story.’
‘Eli?’
‘How do you know my name? Who are you?’
‘Eli?’
‘Yes.’
‘You sure you want the full story?’
There’s the sound of the wardrobe door sliding open. Then August sucks in a deep mouthful of air and I feel Lyle looking through the wardrobe space well before I hear him.
‘What the fuck are you two doing in there?’ he barks.
August drops to the ground and in the dark I can only see flashes of his torchlight frantically making lightning bolt shapes on the walls of this small dank underground earth room as his hands feel desperately for something and he finds it.
‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ Lyle hollers through clenched teeth.
But August does fucking dare. He finds a square brown metal door flap at the base of the right wall, the size of the cardboard base in a large banana box. A bronze latch keeps the flap fixed to a strip of wood in the floor. August loosens the latch, flips the door up and, slipping quickly onto his belly, uses his elbows to crawl through a tunnel running off the room.
I turn to Lyle, stunned.
‘What is this place?’
But I don’t wait for an answer. I drop the phone.
‘Eli!’ screams Lyle.
I dive to my belly and follow August through the tunnel. Soil on my stomach. Damp earth and hard dirt walls against my shoulders, and darkness, save for the shaky torch bouncing white light from August’s hand. I have a friend at school, Duc Quang, who visited his grandparents in Vietnam and when he was there his family visited a tunnel network built by the Viet Cong. He told me how scary it was crawling through those tunnels, the suffocating claustrophobia, the dirt that falls on your face and into your eyes. That’s what this is, goddamn it, full North Vietnamese army madness. Duc Quang said he had to stop halfway through a tunnel, frozen stiff with fear, and two tourists who were crawling behind him had to drag him out of the tunnel backwards. There’s no going back for me. Back in that room is Lyle and, more significantly, Lyle’s open right palm which I have no doubt whatsoever he is priming with a series of finger flexes and muscle clenches in readiness to smack the bounce out of my poor white arse. Fear stopped Duc in his tunnelling tracks, but fear of Lyle keeps me elbow-crawling like a seasoned VC explosives expert – six, seven, eight metres into darkness. The tunnel takes a slight left turn. Nine metres, ten metres, eleven metres. It’s hot in here, effort and sweat and dirt mix into mud on my forehead. The air is thick.
‘Fuck, August, I can’t breathe in here.’
And August stops. His torchlight shines on another brown metal flap. He flips it open and a foul sulphur stench fills the tunnel and makes me gag.
‘What is that smell? Is that shit? I think that’s shit, August.’
August crawls through the tunnel’s exit and I follow him hard and fast, taking a deep breath when I spill into another square space, smaller than the last but just big enough for the two of us to stand up in. The space is dark. The flooring is earth again, but there’s something layering the earth and cushioning my feet. Sawdust. That smell is stronger now.
‘That’s definitely shit, August. Where the fuck are we?’
August looks up and my eyes follow his to a perfect circle of light directly above us, the radius of a dinner plate. Then the circle of light is filled with the face of Lyle looking down at us. Red hair, freckles. Lyle is Ginger Meggs grown up, always in a Jackie Howe cotton singlet and rubber flip-flops, his wiry but muscular arms covered in cheap and ill-conceived tattoos: an eagle with a baby in its talons on his right shoulder; an ageing staff-wielding wizard on his left shoulder who looks like my Year 7 teacher at school, Mr Humphreys; pre-Hawaii Elvis Presley shaking his knees on his left forearm. Mum has a colour picture book about The Beatles and I’ve always thought that Lyle looks a bit like John Lennon in the wide-eyed ‘Please Please Me’ years. I will remember Lyle through ‘Twist and Shout’. Lyle is ‘Love Me Do’. Lyle is ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’.
‘You two are in so much shit,’ Lyle says through the circular hole above us.
‘Why?’ I say defiantly, my confusion turning to anger.
‘No, I mean you’re actually standing in shit,’ he says. ‘You just crawled inside the thunderbox.’
Fuck. The thunderbox. The abandoned rusty tin outhouse at the end of Lena’s backyard, cobwebbed home to redback spiders and brown snakes so hungry they even bite your arse in your dreams. Perspective’s a funny thing. The world seems so different looking up at it from six feet under. Life from the bottom of a shithole. The only way is up from here for August and Eli Bell.
Lyle removes the thick sheet of wood with the hole in it that stretches across the thunderbox and acts as the toilet seat that once cushioned the plump backsides of Lena and Aureli and every one of Aureli’s workmates who helped build the house we just miraculously crawled away from through a secret underground tunnel.
Lyle reaches his right arm down into the void, hand extended for grabbing.
‘C’mon,’ he says.
I move back from his hand.
‘No, you’re gonna give us a floggin’,’ I say.
‘Well, I can’t lie,’ he says.
‘Fuck this.’
‘Don’t fuckin’ swear, Eli,’ Lyle says.
‘I’m not going anywhere until you give us some answers,’ I bark.
‘Don’t test me, Eli.’
‘You and Mum are using again.’
Got him. He drops his head, shakes it. He’s tender now, compassionate and regretful.
‘We’re not using, mate,’ he says. ‘I promised you both. I don’t break my promises.’
‘Who was the guy on the red phone?’ I shout.
‘What guy?’ Lyle asks. ‘What the hell are you talking about, Eli?’
‘The phone rang and August picked it up.’
‘Eli . . .’
‘The man,’ I say. ‘Deep voice. He’s your drug boss isn’t he? He’s the man who gave you the bag of heroin I found in the mower catcher.’
‘Eli . . .’
‘He’s the big bad mastermind, the puppet master behind it all, the kingpin who sounds all sweet and nice and boring like a high school Science teacher but is actually a murderous megalomaniac.’
‘Eli, damn it!’ he screams.
I stop. Lyle shakes his head. He takes a breath.
‘That phone doesn’t get calls,’ he says. ‘Your imagination’s getting the better of you again, Eli.’
I turn to August. I turn back up to Lyle.
‘It rang, Lyle. August picked it up. A man was on the other end. He knew my name. He knew us all. He knew Slim. I thought for a minute it was you but then . . .’
‘That’s enough, Eli,’ Lyle barks. ‘Whose idea was it to go into Lena’s room?’
August puts a thumb to his chest. Lyle nods his head.
‘All right, here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Come up now and get what’s coming to you, and after everyone’s settled down a bit I’ll update you on a few things we got goin’ on.’
‘Fuck that,’ I say. ‘I want answers now.’
Lyle replaces the wood toilet seat back on the thunderbox.
‘Let me know when you find your manners again, Eli,’ he says.
Lyle walks away.
*
Four years ago I thought he was going to walk away forever. He stood at the front door with a duffle bag over his right shoulder. I clutched his left hand and leaned back on it with all my weight and he dragged me with him out the door.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, Lyle.’
Tears in my eyes and tears in my nose and mouth.
‘I gotta get myself better, mate,’ he said. ‘August is gonna look after your mum for me. And you gotta look after August, all right.’
‘No,’ I howled and he turned his head and I thought I had him because he never cries but his eyes were wet. ‘No.’
Then he shouted at me: ‘Let me go, Eli.’ And he pushed me back through the door and I fell to the linoleum floor of the front sunroom, friction taking skin from my elbows.
‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’
‘You’re lying,’ I shouted.
‘I can’t lie, Eli.’
Then he walked out the front door and out along the path to the front gate and out further past the wrought-iron letterbox and the brown brick fence with the single missing brick. I followed him all the way out to the gate and I was screaming so loud it hurt my throat. ‘You’re a liar,’ I screamed. ‘You’re a liar. You’re a liar. You’re a liar.’ But he didn’t even turn around. He just kept walking away.
But then he came back. Six months later. It was January and it was hot and I was in the front yard, shirtless and tanned, with my thumb on the garden hose directing arcing sheets of vapour spray to the sun to make my own rainbows and I saw him walking through the wall of water. He opened the front gate and closed it behind him and I dropped the hose and ran to him. He had navy blue work pants on and a navy blue denim work shirt covered in grease. He was fit and strong and when he kneeled on the pathway to meet my height I thought he kneeled like King Arthur and I had never loved another man more in my short life. So rainbows are Lyle and grease is Lyle and King Arthur is Lyle. I ran at him so hard he nearly fell backwards with my impact, because I hit him like Ray Price, steel-hard lock forward for the triumphant Parramatta Eels. He laughed and when my fingers clutched at his shoulders to draw him closer, he dropped his head on my hair and kissed the top of my head and I don’t know why I said what I said next but I said it all the same. ‘Dad,’ I said.
He gave a half-smile and he straightened me up with his hands on both my shoulders, stared into my eyes. ‘You’ve already got a dad, mate,’ he said. ‘But you got me, too.’
Five days later Mum was locked in Lena’s room, punching the thin fibro walls with her fists. Lyle had nailed wooden boards across the room’s two sets of windows. He’d dragged out Lena’s old bed and taken the Jesus picture off the wall, removed Lena’s old vases and framed photographs of distant relatives and close friends from the Darra Lawn Bowls Club. The room was bare but for a thin mattress with no sheets or blankets or pillows. For seven days Lyle kept Mum locked in that sky-blue room. Lyle, August and I would stand outside her locked door, listening to her screams, long and random banshee howls, as if beyond that locked door was a Grand Inquisitor overseeing some wicked variety of torture involving pulley systems and Mum’s outstretched limbs. But I knew for certain there was no one else in that room but her. She howled at lunch, she wailed at midnight. Gene Crimmins, our next-door neighbour on the right side, a retired and likeable postman with a thousand tales of misdirected mail and suburban kerbside happenstance, came over to check on things.
‘She’s almost there, mate,’ was all Lyle said at the front door. And Gene simply nodded like he knew exactly what Lyle was talking about. Like he knew how to be discreet.
On the fifth day, Mum singled me out because she knew I was the weakest.
‘Eli,’ she cried through the door. ‘He is trying to kill me. You need to call the police. Call them, Eli. He wants to kill me.’
I ran to our phone and I dialled three zeroes on the long rotary dial until August gently put his finger down on the receiver. He shook his head. No, Eli.
I wept and August put a gentle arm around my neck and we walked back down the hallway and stood staring at the door. I wept some more. Then I walked to the lounge room and I slid open the sliding bottom doors of the wood veneer wall unit that held Mum’s vinyl records. Between the Buttons by the Rolling Stones. The one she played so much, the one with the cover where they’re standing in their winter coats and Keith Richards is all blurred like he’s stepped halfway into a time portal that will take him to his future.
‘Hey, Eli, go to “Ruby Tuesday”,’ Mum always said.
‘Which one’s that?’
‘Side one, third thick line from the edge,’ Mum always said.
I unplugged the record player and I dragged it down the hall, plugged it in close to Lena’s door. Dropped the needle down, third thick line from the edge.
That song about a girl who never said where she came from.
The song echoed through the house and Mum’s sobbing echoed through the door. The song finished.
‘Play it again, Eli,’ Mum said.
*
On the seventh day, at sunset, Lyle unlocked the door. After two or three minutes, Lena’s bedroom door creaked open. Mum was thin and gaunt and waddling slowly like her bones were tied together with string. She tried to say something but her lips and her mouth and throat were so dry and her body was so spent that she couldn’t get the words out.
‘Gr . . .’ she said.
She licked her lips and tried again.
‘Gr . . .’ she said.
She closed her eyes, like she was faint. August and I watched and waited for some sign she was back, some sign that she was awake from the big sleep, and I guess that sign was the way she fell into Lyle’s arm and then collapsed onto the floor, clinging to the man who might have saved her life, and waving in the boys who believed he could do it. We huddled around her and she was like a fallen bird.
And in the cave of our bodies she chirped two words.
‘Group hug,’ she whispered. And we hugged her so tight we might have all formed into rock if we’d stuck around long enough. Formed into diamond.
Then she staggered, clinging to Lyle, to their bedroom. Lyle closed the bedroom door behind them. Silence. August and I immediately stepped softly into Lena’s room like we were treading lightly into a minefield in one of those North Vietnamese jungles of Duc Quang’s grandparents’ homeland.
There were scattered paper plates and food scraps across the floor amid clumps of hair. There was a bedpan in the corner of the room. The room’s sky-blue walls were covered in small holes the size of Mum’s fists and emanating from these holes were streaks of blood that looked like tattered red flags blowing in battlefield winds. A long brown streak of dried-up shit wound like a dirt road to nowhere along two walls. And whatever the battle was that Mum had been waging in that small bedroom, we knew she had just won it.
My mum’s name is Frances Bell.
*
August and I stand in silence in the hole. A full minute passes. August pushes me hard in the chest in frustration.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
Another two minutes pass in silence.
‘Thanks for taking the hit on whose idea it was.’
August shrugs. Another two minutes pass and the smell and the heat in this shithole grip my neck and my nose and my knowing.
We stare up to the circle of light, up through Lena and Aureli Orlik’s backyard wooden arse void.
‘Do you think he’s coming back?’