The office of the South-West Star community newspaper is in Spine Street in Sumner Park, an industrial suburb neighbouring Darra, across the Centenary Highway that takes drivers north into Brisbane’s CBD or west towards the Darling Downs. The newspaper office is two doors up from the Gilbert’s tyre shop where Lyle goes to get second-hand tyres. It’s next door to a window tinting shop and a buy-in-bulk pet supply store called Pawsitively Pets. August and I used to ride our bikes to Spine Street to visit the army disposals store two doors up from here, where we’d look at old military bayonets and Vietnam War water bottles and try to convince the storeowner ‘Bomber’ Lerner – an excitable Australian patriot with a wonky left eye who loves his country and the defence of it as much as he loves Kenny Rogers – to show us the still-pinned and deadly grenade we knew he kept in a safe beneath his cash register.
The South-West Star office is a single-level shop space with a mirrored glass window front and a deep red banner strip of South-West Star adorned with four red shooting stars forming the Southern Cross. I see my reflection in the mirrored glass. I’m stronger than yesterday. More coherent. More confident in mind, body and spirit. I had a bowl of four Weet-Bix with hot water from the kitchen tap for breakfast. Showered. Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and blue jeans and the Dunlops. I put a new bandage on my finger and the rest of my hand. Found a fresh bandage in Mum’s first-aid kit and re-taped the gauze pad Dr Brennan had already dressed it with. My schoolbag was still hanging over the corner post of my bed. An acid-washed blue denim backpack covered in band names – INXS, Cold Chisel, Led Zeppelin. I’ve never heard a single song by the Sex Pistols but that didn’t stop me from scrawling their name across my backpack two years ago. Across the zipped back pocket there’s a sketch of an overweight three-armed alien monster I created named Thurston Carbunkle, who sucks children whole through his nostrils and enjoys the films of Alfred Hitchcock, which is why he’s always wearing a sleeveless Psycho T-shirt. Between these scribbles are several hard-to-read schoolyard permanent marker messages that, like my throbbing missing finger knuckle, don’t age well. ‘Sit on this and rotate’, says one message over a sketched fist with its middle finger raised. Other messages I really should have removed in the interests of good taste, like ‘Kenneth Chugg loves Amy Preston, true luv 4 eva’. Amy Preston died from leukaemia last winter. I stared at that backpack for a full minute, thinking back to simpler times. Pre-this. Pre-that. Pre–finger fucking chop. Fuck that fucking Tytus Broz. I stuffed the backpack full of clothes and food – a couple of cans of baked beans, a muesli bar from the pantry – and Slim’s copy of Papillon that he lent me and I slipped out the back door of that Darra shithole, vowing never to return. But then I returned thirty seconds after walking out of the front gate when I realised I’d forgotten to take a piss before my long walk to Sumner Park.
I lean into the window to see if I can see through it but I can’t see anything except myself up close. I pull on the handle of the mirrored glass entry door and it doesn’t budge. There’s an oval-shaped white speaker by the door, so I press the green button at the bottom of it.
‘Can I help you?’ asks a voice through the speaker.
I lean into the speaker.
‘Umm, I’m here to . . .’
‘Push the button as you speak please,’ the voice says.
I push the button.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘How can I help you?’ the voice asks. It’s a woman. A tough woman who sounds like she breaks macadamia shells in her eye sockets.
‘I’m here to see Caitlyn Spies.’
‘Push the button as you speak, please.’
I push the button.
‘Sorry again,’ I say, holding the button. ‘I’m here to see Caitlyn Spies.’
‘Is she expecting you?’
Well, that does it. The jig is up. Foiled at the first hurdle. Is she expecting me? Well, no. Does a rose expect to be bathed in a sun shower? Does an old-growth tree expect to be struck by lightning? Does the sea expect to ebb and flow?
‘Umm, yeah . . . no,’ I say. ‘No, she’s not expecting me.’
‘What are you here to see her about?’ the woman asks through the speaker.
‘I have a story for her.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘I’d rather not say.’
‘Push the button as you speak, please.’
‘Sorry, I’d rather not say.’
‘Well,’ the woman says, exhaling, ‘then maybe you can tell me what sort of story it is so I can tell Caitlyn what the hell sort of story it is, since you’re being all cagey.’
‘What sort of story? I don’t know what you mean?’
‘News story? Feature story? Community story? Sports story? Council story? Council grievance story? What sort of story?’
I consider this for a moment. Crime story. Missing persons story. Family story. Brothers’ story. Tragic story. I press the green button.
‘Love story,’ I say. I cough. ‘It’s a love story.’
‘Oooooohhhhh,’ says the woman in the speaker. ‘I love a good love story.’ She howls with laughter.
‘What’s your name, Romeo?’ she asks.
‘Eli Bell.’
‘Hold on a sec, Eli.’
I look at my reflection in the mirrored glass of the entry door. My hair’s all over the place, scruffy. I should have run Lyle’s curry comb through it, put a few globs of Lyle’s hair gel in it. I turn and scan the street. Still on the lam. Still the wanted unwanted. Unwanted by everybody except the cops. A hulking cement truck barrels down Spine Street, followed by a courier van, a red four-wheel-drive Nissan, a yellow square-shaped Ford Falcon, its driver throwing a cigarette butt out the window.
A crackling sound comes back through the door speaker.
‘Hey Romeo . . .’
‘Yeah.’
‘Look, she’s real busy right now,’ she says. ‘Do you want to leave a contact number and a bit of an idea about why you’re here and maybe she can get back to you? These journos are always run off their feet.’
The sea will not ebb. The sea will not flow.
I press the green button.
‘Tell her I know where Slim Halliday is.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Tell her I’m best friends with Slim Halliday. Tell her I have a story to tell her.’
A long pause.
‘Hold on a second.’
*
I stand for three minutes staring down at a line of black ants group-carrying plunder from a trail of pastry flakes that runs to a half-eaten sausage roll resting on the ground in the Pawsitively Pets car park. I will associate trails of ants with Caitlyn Spies and I will associate half-eaten sausage rolls with the day I tried to see Caitlyn Spies for the first time. The ants bump their heads together every now and then and I wonder if they’re questioning, plotting, directing, or just apologising in those brief encounters. Slim and I watched a whole trail of ants marching back and forth along our front steps once. He was having a smoke on the steps and I asked him what he thought those ants were saying to each other as they passed, why on earth it was that they were always touching each other. He said the ants had antennae on their heads and they were talking through those antennae without really talking. Those ants were like August, they’d found their own way of communicating. They talked by feel. Little hairs on the end of the antennae, Slim said, and these hairs passed on smells and those smells told other ants where things were, where they needed to forage, where they were going, where they’d been.
‘Food trail pheromones,’ Slim said.
‘What’s a pheromone?’ I asked Slim.
‘It’s like a smell with meaning,’ Slim said. ‘A chemical reaction that triggers a social response among the ants and they all get that shared meaning.’
‘Smells can’t have meaning,’ I said.
‘Sure they can,’ Slim said. Slim reached his arm out from the front steps of the house and he ripped a cluster of purple flowers from a lavender bush Mum had planted in the garden. He rubbed the flowers in his closed palm and presented the roughly ground flowers to my nose and I breathed them in.
‘What does that smell like?’ Slim asked.
‘The mother’s day stalls at school,’ I said.
‘So maybe that means your mum,’ he said. ‘Or maybe now it means these ants crawling down the steps beside your mum’s lavender bush. Fruitcake means Christmas. Meat pies mean Redcliffe Dolphins versus Wynnum-Manly and Sunday afternoon football. Salted beer nuts mean your uncle’s tying one on. Sunlight soap means a Carlingford winter and the orphan master throwing me in a freezing cold bath to wash the dirt off my kneecaps but the dirt don’t come off because he had me kneeling down in mud too long to clean off the front steps of the orphanage. Front steps just like these ones.’
I nodded.
‘Trails, kid,’ Slim said. ‘Where we’re goin’. Where we been. Just another way for the world to talk back to ya.’
*
The speaker crackles on the South-West Star entry door.
‘Come on in and tell your story, Romeo.’
The door unlocks and I pull it open before it locks shut again. I step into the front foyer of the South-West Star. It’s airconditioned in here. Blue grey carpet. A water cooler with plastic white cups. A white sign-in desk, a short and stocky woman behind the desk in a crisp white security shirt with navy blue epaulettes on her shoulders. She smiles.
‘Just take a seat and she’ll be out soon,’ the woman says, nodding me towards a two-seat couch and an armchair by the water cooler. Concern on her face.
‘You okay?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘You don’t look okay,’ she says. ‘Your face is all red and sweaty.’
She looks at my strapped hand.
‘Who did that dressing?’
I look down at the dressing. The bandage is coming loose, creased in parts, too tight in others, like I received first aid from a blind drunk.
‘My mum did it,’ I say.
The woman on the desk nods, doubt across her face.
‘Grab yourself a water,’ she says.
I fill a plastic cup, glug it down with the cup collapsing in my left hand. Fill another and glug it down just as fast.
‘How old are you?’ the woman asks.
‘I turn fourteen in five months,’ I say.
I am changing, desk woman, inside and out. My legs are getting longer like my past. I have twenty-plus hairs growing from my right underarm.
‘So you’re thirteen,’ she says.
I nod.
‘Your parents know you’re here?’
I nod.
‘You been walkin’ a bit, ay?’ she asks.
I nod.
She casts her eyes over my backpack resting at my feet.
‘You goin’ some place?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘Where you goin’?’ she asks.
‘Well, I was goin’ here. Then I got here. And after here I’ll probably go some place else. But that depends.’
‘On what?’ asks the woman behind the desk.
‘On Caitlyn Spies.’
The woman smiles and turns her head and what she’s looking at makes me stand up.
‘Well, speak of the devil.’
I stand up the way a thirteen-year-old Aztec boy might have stood up on a beach when he saw a Spanish fleet cutting across the horizon.
She walks towards me. Not towards the security woman behind the desk. Not to the water cooler. Not to the entry door. But towards me. Eli Bell. The most beautiful face I’ve never seen. I saw that face standing on the edge of the universe. That face spoke to me. That face has always spoken to me. Her deep brown hair is tied back and she wears thick black-rimmed spectacles and a white long-sleeve shirt that hangs loosely over light blue acid-wash jeans and the bottom of her jeans hang over brown leather boots. She carries a pen in her right hand and in that same hand she carries a small yellow Spirax notepad the size of her palm.
She stops before me.
‘You know Slim Halliday?’ she asks flatly.
And I freeze for two seconds and then my brain tells my mouth to open and then my brain tells my voice box to respond but nothing comes out. I try again but nothing comes out. Eli Bell. Speechless, nothing to say as he stands on the edge of the universe. My voice has temporarily left me, abandoned me like my confidence and my cool. I turn to the water cooler and pour myself another cup of water. As I drink it down my bandaged right hand begins unconsciously scribbling words in thin air. He’s my best friend, I write on the air with my club of a bandaged hand. He’s my best friend.
‘What are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘What is that?’
‘Sorry,’ I say, relieved to hear the word come out of my mouth. ‘My brother, Gus, talks like that.’
‘Like what?’ Caitlyn Spies asks. ‘You looked like you wanted to paint a house but you didn’t have a paintbrush.’
I really did look like that, didn’t I? She’s so funny. So insightful.
‘My brother, Gus, doesn’t talk. He writes his words in the air.’
‘Cute,’ she says sharply. ‘But I’m on deadline, so you want to hurry up and tell me how you know Slim Halliday?’
‘He’s my best friend,’ I say.
She laughs.
‘You’re Slim Halliday’s best friend? Slim Halliday hasn’t been seen in the flesh in three years. Most presume he’s dead already. And you’re telling me he’s alive and well and best friends with a . . . what are you, twelve?’
‘I’m thirteen,’ I say. ‘Slim was good friends first with . . . well . . . Slim was my babysitter.’
She shakes her head.
‘Your parents had you babysat by a convicted killer?’ she says. ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road? The greatest escapee ever locked away in an Australian clink? A man who’d happily sell the kidneys of a thirteen-year-old boy if it meant a clean getaway? That’s some classy parenting from your folks there.’
There’s warmth in the way she says that. Humour and toughness too, but warmth mostly. Maybe I’m biased because she really looks like the girl of my dreams in a Clark Kent–style thick-rimmed specs disguise, but there’s warmth in everything she says. The warmth comes through in the way her top lip kinks up gently in the corner of her mouth and there’s warmth in the skin of her cheeks and the colour of her red bottom lip and the deep pools of her green eyes that look like the lilypad-fringed waters of the Enoggera Reservoir where Lyle took August and me for a swim that day we bought the Atari from that family in The Gap in Brisbane’s leafy inner west. I want to dive into those green eyes and scream ‘Geronimo!’ and splash into the world of Caitlyn Spies and never come back up for air.
‘Hey,’ she says, waving a hand in my face. ‘Hey, you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here,’ I say.
‘Yeah, now you are, but just then you drifted off,’ she says. ‘You started staring right at me, then you went away somewhere, with this goofy look across your face like a giraffe doing a quiet fart.’
That is how I look, isn’t it? She’s so funny!
I turn to the two-seat couch, whispering.
‘Can we sit down for a second?’
She looks at her watch.
‘I’ve got a story for you,’ I say. ‘But I need to be careful how I tell it.’
She takes a deep breath, sighs on the exhale. She nods, sits down on the couch.
I sit beside her. She flips open her Spirax notepad, takes the lid off her pen.
‘You gonna take notes?’ I ask.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ she says. ‘What’s the spelling of your name?’
‘Why do you need to know that?’
‘Because I’m knitting a cardigan with your name on it.’
I’m confused.
‘It’s so I can spell your name right in my story.’
‘You’re gonna write a story about me?’
‘If this story you’re about to tell me is worth writing about, yes,’ she says.
‘Can I give you a fake name?’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Give me a fake name.’
‘Theodore . . . Zuckerman.’
‘That’s a shit fake name,’ she says. ‘How many Aussies you know called Zuckerman? Let’s go with . . . oh, I don’t know . . . Eli Bell.’
‘How do you know my name?’
She nods to the woman behind the front desk.
‘You already told it to Lorraine.’
Lorraine behind the desk gives a knowing grin.
I take a breath. ‘No names,’ I say.
‘All right, no names,’ she says. ‘Boy, this must be one hell of a yarn, Deep Throat.’
She crosses her legs and turns towards me then looks me in the eye. ‘So,’ she says.
‘So what?’ I wonder.
‘So tell me something,’ she says.
‘I really enjoyed the “Queensland Remembers” story you wrote about Slim.’
‘Thanks,’ she says.
‘I liked how you said that in the end the way he finally escaped Boggo Road was by walking out the front door as a free man,’ I say.
She nods.
‘That’s very true,’ I say. ‘In the end, the greatest trick he ever pulled was surviving. That’s the truth of it. People always go on about how cunning he was inside but they never talk about his patience or his will or his determination or how many times he thought about swallowing a rubber band ball filled with razor blades.’
‘Nice imagery,’ Caitlyn says.
‘But you did leave out the most poignant part about Slim’s story.’
‘Do tell.’
‘The fact he wanted to be good but the bad in him kept getting in the way of his plans,’ I say. ‘He was like any other man, he had good and bad in him, but Slim never got a chance to give the good side a long enough walk down the street. He spent most of his life inside and, when you’re inside, bein’ good is as good as bein’ dead.’
‘Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about the stories of Queensland cons?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Shouldn’t you be playing with He-Man figures or something?’
‘My brother, Gus, and I burned all our He-Man figures with a magnifying glass.’
‘How old is your brother?’ she asks.
‘He’s fourteen,’ I say. ‘How old are you?’
‘I’m twenty-one,’ she says.
That hurts. That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t feel right for some reason.
‘You’re eight years older than me,’ I say. ‘By the time I’m eighteen, you’re gonna be . . . twenty-six?’
She raises an eyebrow.
‘By the time I’m twenty you’re gonna be . . .’
She cuts me off: ‘What do you care how old I’m gonna be when you’re twenty?’
I look again into those green eyes.
‘Because I think we’re meant to be . . .’
What, Eli? What are we meant to be exactly? What exactly are you talking about?
The answers to the questions. Your end is a dead blue wren. Caitlyn Spies.
Boy. Swallows. Universe.
I bet August knows what we’re meant to be.
‘Never mind,’ I say. I rub my eyes.
‘Are you all right?’ Caitlyn asks. ‘Can I call your parents for you?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ I say. ‘I’m just tired.’
‘What happened to your hand?’ she asks.
I stare at my bandaged hand. Tytus Broz. That’s what you came here for. Tytus Broz. Not Caitlyn Spies.
‘Listen, I’m going to tell you a story but you must be very careful about what you do with it,’ I say. ‘The men I’m about to tell you about are very dangerous. These men do terrible things to people.’
She looks serious now. ‘Tell me what happened to your hand, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Do you know a man named Tytus Broz?’ I whisper.
‘Tytus Broz?’ she ponders.
She starts to scribble the name in her notebook.
‘Don’t write it down,’ I say. ‘Just remember the name if you can. Tytus Broz.’
‘Tytus Broz,’ she says again. ‘Who is Tytus Broz?’
‘He’s the man who took my—’
But I don’t finish that sentence because a fist bashes against the office’s glass shopfront, just above where we’re sitting. I duck down instinctively and so does Caitlyn Spies. Bang. Bang. Two fists now.
‘Oh shit,’ says Lorraine on the front desk. ‘It’s Raymond Leary.’
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says.
*
Raymond Leary wears a camel-coloured suit and tie with a white business shirt. Mid-fifties. His face is round and his hair is straw-coloured and scarecrow-straggly. His belly is large and his fists are fat and they bash the shopfront glass with such fury the whole glass panel rattles in place and the water cooler inside shakes a little too. Lorraine presses a button at her desk, speaks into an intercom.
‘Mr Leary, please step back from the glass,’ she says.
Raymond Leary screams. ‘Let me in,’ he barks. He puts his face against the glass. ‘Let me in!’
Caitlyn moves to the front desk and I follow her. Raymond Leary bashes again on the glass. ‘Stay back from the glass,’ Caitlyn warns me.
‘Who is he?’ I ask, moving to Caitlyn’s side.
‘State government knocked his house down to build an exit road off Ipswich Motorway,’ she says. ‘Raymond got screwed in the process and then his wife got depression and she threw herself in front of a cement truck on the Ipswich Motorway, just before the new exit road was built over her house.’
‘So why’s he bashing on your window?’ I ask.
‘Because we won’t tell his story,’ Caitlyn says.
Raymond’s clenched fists bang against the window.
‘Call the police, Lorraine,’ Caitlyn says again.
Lorraine nods. Picks up her desk phone.
‘Why won’t you tell his story?’ I ask.
‘Because our paper campaigned for the government to put that exit road in,’ she says. ‘Eighty-nine per cent of our readers wanted improvements made to that section of the motorway.’
Raymond Leary takes five methodical steps back from the glass.
‘Oh fuck,’ Caitlyn Spies says.
Raymond Leary runs at the glass wall. It takes a moment to actually comprehend that he does this, that this moment is real, because it’s so wrong, so truly out of the norm, that it seems impossible. But it is happening. He is really running headfirst at the glass wall and his wide and fatty forehead flesh really does hit the glass wall first with all the weight of, what, a hundred and fifty kilos pushing behind it and the impact is so dramatic and hard that Caitlyn Spies and Lorraine behind the desk and me, Eli Bell – solo adventurer, hospital escapee, lam boy – draw breath sharply and brace for the inevitable shattering of all that dangerous glass but it doesn’t give, it just rattles in place, and Raymond Leary’s head snaps back like he’s broken his neck and I see his eyes register what he’s done and his eyes say he’s mad, his eyes say he is now animal, his eyes say he is Taurus the Bull.
‘Yes, the office of the South-West Star, 64 Spine Street, Sumner Park. Please hurry,’ Lorraine says down the phone.
He staggers and regathers his footing and then he steps back seven paces this time and he breathes and he charges again at the glass. Smack. His head whips back further this time and his legs give way beneath him. Stop it, Raymond Leary. Stop it. A lump emerges in the centre of his forehead. It turns the colour and shape of the old black tennis balls August and I own that have been rubbed and handball-bashed raw from countless games in the middle of Sandakan Street. He steps back again, the rage building and exploding and building again inside him with every step back, shoulders circling in their sockets, his fists clenching. Taurus the Bull wants to die today.
Lorraine speaks urgently into her intercom. ‘That’s reinforced glass, Mr Leary,’ she says. ‘You cannot break through it.’
Challenge accepted. Raymond Leary in his frayed camel-coloured suit and his sad attack on a wall of reinforced glass. He charges again. Whack. And the impact knocks him down. He lands hard on his left shoulder. Spit coming from his mouth. Groggy and drunk on his own madness. He lurches to his feet, a tear in the left shoulder of his suit jacket. He’s dizzy and confused. Moving from side to side. For a moment he turns his back to the glass and this is the moment I choose to rush to the front door of the office.
‘Eli, what are you doing?’ Caitlyn Spies barks.
I open the door.
‘Eli, stop, don’t go out there,’ Caitlyn Spies warns. ‘Eli!’
I go out there. I slip out the entry door and close it quickly behind me.
Raymond Leary wobbles on his feet, punch-drunk. He steps three times to his side and stops on the spot and turns to set his eyes on me. There’s a split across his forehead and his forehead is black and swollen and the split throbs with blood and this red blood spills down his face, down the mountain of a busted nose, across the ridges of his trembling lips, along the plain of his wide and dimpled chin and onto his crisp white business shirt and tie.
‘Stop it,’ I say.
He stares into my eyes and he tries to understand me and I think he does because he breathes and that’s what humans do. We breathe. And we think. But we get mad too. We get so sad and we get so mad.
‘Please stop it, Raymond,’ I say.
And he breathes again and he steps back. Confused by this moment. Confused by this boy before him. Across the road, at a hole-in-the-wall snack shop selling meat pies and chips with gravy, several men in workwear are looking over at this scene.
The street is quiet. No cars passing. This moment is frozen in time. The bull and the boy.
I can hear him breathing. He’s exhausted. He’s spent. Something registers in his eyes. Something human.
‘They don’t want to hear my story,’ he says.
He turns to the glass wall and finds himself in the mirrored reflection.
‘I’ll hear your story,’ I say.
His right hand rubs the swelling in his forehead. Blood covers his fingers and his fingers trace the blood running down his face. His right palm finds the blood now and the palm rubs the blood in circles around his forehead. He rubs it across his whole face. The colour red. He turns to me like he’s just woken up from a dream. How did I get here? Who are you? He shakes his head in disbelief. And he drops his head and the workmen from the meat pie shop are crossing the road now and Raymond Leary seems to have stopped.
‘You all right, kid?’ calls one of the workmen.
And, with that, Raymond Leary raises his head and finds himself again in the glass and he runs at himself in the glass and his bloody face meets his bloody face and both versions of Raymond Leary fall unconscious to the ground.
Three workmen rush across the road, form a half-circle around Raymond Leary.
‘What the fuck’s his malfunction?’ one of the workmen asks.
I say nothing. I just stare at Raymond Leary. He lies flat on his back with his arms outstretched and his legs outstretched like he was drawn up for scientific study by da Vinci.
Caitlyn Spies emerges cautiously from the front door, looking at Raymond Leary flat on his back.
Caitlyn’s fringe hangs over her face and a light gust of wind blows it about like there’s a puppet in a dress dancing across her forehead and the sun makes Caitlyn Spies beautiful because it lights up her face and makes her move outside of time, outside of life, like she’s walking in slow motion along the edge of the universe.
She walks over to me. Over to me, Eli Bell. Boy on the lam. Boy in trouble.
She rests a gentle hand on my left shoulder. Her hand on me. Boy on the lam. Boy in love.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘Is he . . .?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks closer at Raymond Leary, then steps back, shaking her head.
‘You’re a brave boy, Eli Bell,’ she says. ‘Stupid, but stupid brave.’
The sun is in me now. The sun is my heart, and all the world – the fishermen in China and the corn farmers in Mexico and the fleas on the backs of the dogs in Kathmandu – relies on the rising and falling of my full heart.
A police car pulls up on the side of the road, its front right wheel biting into the concrete guttering. Two male police officers exit the vehicle and rush to Raymond Leary on the ground. ‘Step back, please,’ says one officer, slipping on a pair of gloves as he kneels down to Raymond Leary. A pool of blood builds on the concrete beside Raymond’s left ear.
Police.
‘Goodbye, Caitlyn Spies,’ I say.
I step back from the small group gathered around Raymond.
‘Huh?’ she says. ‘Where you going?’
‘I’m going to see my mum,’ I say.
‘But what about your story?’ she asks. ‘You haven’t told me your story.’
‘The timing’s not right,’ I say.
‘The timing?’
‘The time’s not right,’ I say, walking backwards.
‘You’re a curious boy, Eli Bell,’ she says.
‘Will you wait?’ I ask.
‘Wait for what?’ she asks.
Lorraine from the front desk calls out to Caitlyn from the group surrounding Raymond Leary. ‘Caitlyn,’ she says, ‘the officers have some questions.’
Caitlyn turns her head to Lorraine and the police and the scene before the wall of glass. And I run. I sprint up Spine Street and my bony legs are quick but maybe not quicker than Christmas.
Wait for the universe, Caitlyn Spies. Wait for me.