The memorial plaque reads: Audrey Bogut, 1912–1983, loving wife of Tom, mother of Therese and David. A life like theirs has left a record sweet for memory to dwell upon.
Seventy-one years for Audrey Bogut to pass.
The memorial plaque next to that one reads: Shona Todd, 1906–1981, beloved daughter of Martin and Mary Todd, sister to Bernice and Phillip. The cup of life with her lips she prest, a taste so sweet she gulped the rest.
Seventy-five years for Shona Todd to pass.
‘C’mon, it’s about to start,’ I say to August.
We walk into a small brick chapel in the centre of the Albany Creek Crematorium. Winter, 1987. Nine months into my great time lapse experiment.
Slim’s right. It’s all just time. Thirty-nine minutes to drive from our house in Bracken Ridge to the Albany Creek Crematorium. Twenty seconds to tighten my shoelace. Three seconds for August to tuck his shirt in. Almost twenty-one months until Mum comes out. I am fast becoming a master manipulator of time. I will make twenty-one months feel like twenty-one weeks. The man in the wood coffin taught me that.
Seventy-seven years it took for Slim to die. He spent the past six months in and out of hospital, cancer creeping in to too many corners of that tall frame of his. I tried to visit him when I could. Between school. Between homework and afternoon TV. Between my growing up and his getting out. His last great escape.
‘CRIME ERA CLOSES’ read the headline in The Telegraph Dad handed me yesterday. ‘A gripping chapter in the Queensland crime annals closed this week with the death in Redcliffe Hospital of Arthur Ernest “Slim” Halliday, 77.’
Time stops in this chapel. No noise from the few mourners around the coffin, a couple of men in suits, nobody in here that knows anybody else.
My hand reaches into my pants pocket and I feel for the last words Slim ever wrote to me. It was a message he wrote at the end of the instructions he gave me for meeting mysterious George and his prison smuggler fruit truck.
Do your time, he wrote, before it does you. Your friend always, Slim.
Do your time, Eli Bell, before it does you.
A crematorium official says something about life and time but I miss it all because I’m thinking about life and time. And then Slim’s coffin is taken away.
It’s over quick. Quick time. Good time.
An old man in a black suit and tie approaches August and me as we walk back out the chapel doors. He says he’s an old bookmaker friend of Slim’s. He says Slim did some work for him after prison.
‘How did you boys know, Slim?’ he asks. His face is warm and friendly, a smile like Mickey Rooney’s.
‘He was our babysitter,’ I say.
The man nods, puzzled.
‘How did you know Slim?’ I ask the man in the black suit.
‘He lived with me and my family for a time,’ the old man says.
And I realise in this moment that there were other lives Slim led. There were other vantage points. Other friends. Other family.
‘It’s nice of you to come and pay your respects,’ the old man says.
‘He was my best friend,’ I say.
He chuckles.
‘Mine, too,’ the old man says.
‘Really?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, really,’ the old man says. ‘Don’t worry,’ he whispers. ‘A man can have many best friends and none any more or less best than the other.’
We walk along the crematorium lawn, rows of grey gravestones forming grim and uniform lanes in a cemetery beyond the chapel.
‘Do you think he killed that cabbie?’ I ask.
The old man shrugs.
‘I never asked him,’ the old man says.
‘But you would know, wouldn’t you?’ I ask. ‘I reckon you’d get a feeling on that. Your instinct or somethin’ would tell you if he did it.’
‘Whaddya mean, “instinct”?’ the old man asks.
‘I was around a guy once who killed many people and my instinct told me he killed many people,’ I say. ‘There was a chill down my spine that told me he killed many people.’
The old man stops on the spot.
‘I never asked him about it, purely out of respect,’ the old man says. ‘I respected the man. If he didn’t do that killin’, then I respect him more still and God rest his soul. I never got no chill down my spine around Slim Halliday. And if he did do that killin’, then he was one hell of a tribute to rehabilitation.’
That’s a nice way of putting it. Thanks, mysterious old man. I nod.
The old man puts his hands in his pockets and walks off down a row of the cemetery. I watch him walk down that row of gravestones like he possesses the most carefree soul to ever inhabit a body.
August is hunched over inspecting another wall of gold plaques dedicated to the departed.
‘I need to get a job,’ I say.
August gives a sharp look over his shoulder. Why?
‘We gotta get a place for Mum when she gets out.’
August looks deeper into a plaque.
‘C’mon, Gus!’ I urge, walking away. ‘No time to waste.’
*
I landed flush into the arms of the screws that day I fell from the wall of the Boggo Road women’s prison. To their great credit the screws seemed more concerned for my mental health than furious with my misadventures.
‘Ya think he’s mental?’ pondered the youngest screw, who had a ginger beard and freckles across his forearms. ‘What’ll we do with him?’ ginger asked his fellow screw.
‘Let Muzza make the call,’ the second screw said.
The two screws walked me in a pressure hold, each man gripping an arm, back up the lawn to the other two screws, the older and more experienced ones with not enough in the tank to chase a teenage boy through a prison yard.
What took place inside the office of the prison administration building was a strategy meeting between prison screws, which, for me, was akin to being witness to four early Neanderthals working out the rules of Twister.
‘He could fuck up a lot for us, Muz,’ said the largest screw.
‘We gotta call the warden?’ asked ginger.
‘We’re not calling the warden,’ said the man they called Muzza, Muz and, the least preferred, Murray. ‘He’ll hear about it in good time. He loses just as much from this shit getting out as we do. He doesn’t need to hear about it when he’s home eating Christmas ham with Louise.’
Muzza thought about things for a moment. He bent down to my eye level.
‘You love your mum very much, don’t you, Eli?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘And you’re a bright boy aren’t you, Eli?’ he asked.
‘Not bright enough, it seems,’ I said.
Muz chuckled. ‘Yes, true shit,’ he said. ‘But you’re bright enough to know what can happen in a place like this when people make our lives difficult. You know that, right?’
I nodded.
‘All sorts of things can happen in the night in here, Eli,’ he said. ‘Real horrible things. Things you wouldn’t believe.’
I nodded.
‘So tell me how you spent your Christmas?’
‘I spent it eating canned pineapple from St Vinnies with me brother and me dad,’ I said.
Muz nodded.
‘Merry fuckin’ Christmas, Eli Bell,’ he said.
The ginger screw, whose name turned out to be Brandon, drove me home in his car, a purple 1982 Commodore. He played a cassette tape of Van Halen’s 1984 all the way home. I tried to pump my fists to the sonic thump of ‘Panama’ but my freedom of expression was hampered somewhat by my left hand being handcuffed to Brandon’s rear left armrest.
‘Rock on, Eli,’ Brandon said, uncuffing me and letting me out, as per my request, three doors down from our house on Lancelot Street.
I scurried light-footed into the house to find August asleep on the living room couch, Papillon resting open on his chest. I saw cigarette smoke down the hallway in Dad’s room. Beneath the saddest Christmas tree ever decorated was a present wrapped in newspaper, a large rectangular book, a felt pen Eli scrawled across it. I tore the paper away to find the gift inside. It was no book. It was a block of paper, maybe 500 blank pages of A4. On the first page was a brief message.
To burn this house down or set the world on fire. Up to you, Eli. Merry Christmas. Dad.
*
He gave me another block of paper for my fourteenth birthday, along with a copy of The Sound and the Fury because he noticed that my shoulders were broadening and he said any young man needs broad shoulders to read Faulkner.
It’s on one of those pieces of A4 paper that I write my list of possible occupations within bike-riding distance that would provide enough money for August and me to save for a deposit on a house in The Gap, in Brisbane’s lush western suburbs, which Mum can move into upon her release:
• Chip fryer at the Big Rooster takeaway restaurant on Barrett Street.
• Shelf stacker at the Foodstore grocery shop on Barrett Street, with the frozen food section August and I hang out in on the hottest summer days, debating which ice block is more bite for your buck out of a Hava Heart, a Bubble O’ Bill and, the unchallengeable masterpiece, the banana Paddle Pop.
• Paperboy for the mad Russians who own the Barrett Street newsagency.
• Bakery assistant for the bakery next door to the newsagency.
• Cleaning out Ol’ Bill Ogden’s pigeon loft on Playford Street (last resort).
I give this some more thought, tapping my blue Kilometrico pen on the paper. And I scribble one more potential occupation, drawing on my limited skill set:
• Drug dealer.
*
A knock on the front door. This never happens. The last time someone knocked on the front door was three months ago when a young police officer came to chase up Dad about a drink-driving incident three years ago in which several local mothers said he knocked over a stop sign outside the childcare centre on Denham Street.
‘Mr Bell?’ the young officer said.
‘Who?’ Dad said.
‘I’m looking for Robert Bell?’ the officer said.
‘Robert Bell?’ Dad pondered. ‘Nahhhh, never heard of ’im.’
‘What’s your name, sir?’ the policeman asked.
‘Me?’ Dad said. ‘I’m Tom.’
The officer took out a notepad.
‘Do you mind if I ask your surname, Tom?’ the policeman asked.
‘Joad,’ Dad said.
‘How do I spell that?’ the policeman asked.
‘Joad like toad,’ Dad said.
‘So . . . J-O-D-E?’ the officer said.
Dad shuddered.
A knock on the door always means something dramatic in this house.
August drops his Papillon – he’s read it twice already – on the living room couch and rushes to the front door. I follow close behind.
It’s Mrs Birkbeck. School guidance counsellor. Red lipstick. Red bead necklace. She holds a manila folder filled with papers.
‘Hi, August,’ she says tenderly. ‘Is your father there?’
I shake my head. She’s come to save the world. She’s come to cause trouble because she’s too fucking earnest and self-inflated to know the difference between caring and carelessness is exactly the size of a five-centimetre thorn lodged in your arsehole.
‘He’s sleeping,’ I say.
‘Can you wake him for me, Eli?’ she asks.
I shake my head again, turn from the door and pace slowly down the hall to Dad’s bedroom.
He’s reading Patrick White in a blue singlet and shorts, rolled cigarette in his mouth.
‘Mrs Birkbeck’s at the door,’ I say.
‘Who the fuck is Mrs Birkbeck?’ he spits.
‘She’s the school guidance counsellor,’ I say.
He rolls his eyes. He hops up from his bed, stubs his cigarette out. He hacks up a chesty tobacco spit to clear his throat, spits it into the ashtray on his bed.
‘You like her?’ he asks.
‘She means well,’ I say.
He walks up the hall to the front door.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Robert Bell.’
He smiles and there’s sweetness in his smile, a softness I’ve not really seen. He offers his hand for shaking and I don’t think I’ve seen him do that either, shake another person’s hand like that. I thought it was just August and me he knew how to interact with on a human level, and we usually just communicate in nods and grunts.
‘Poppy Birkbeck, Mr Bell,’ she says. ‘I’m the boys’ guidance counsellor at school.’
‘Yeah, Eli’s been telling me about all the wonderful guidance you’ve been giving to my boys,’ he says.
The lying bastard.
Mrs Birkbeck looks quietly and briefly moved. ‘They have?’ she replies, looking at me, her cheeks glowing red. ‘Well, Mr Bell, I believe your boys are very special. I believe they have great potential and I guess I consider it my job to inspire them enough to turn potential into reality.’
Dad nods his head, smiling. Reality. You know, midnight anxiety fits. Suicidal depressive episodes. Three-day benders. Fist-split eyebrows. Bile vomit. Runny shit. Brown piss. Reality.
‘Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all,’ Dad offers.
‘Yes!’ Mrs Birkbeck says, taken aback.
‘Aristotle,’ Dad says earnestly.
‘Yes!’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘I live my life by that quote.’
‘Then you keep on livin’, Poppy Birkbeck, and you keep on inspirin’ those kids,’ Dad says sincerely.
Who the fuck is this guy?
‘I will,’ she smiles. ‘I promise.’ Then she refocuses. ‘Look, Robert, can I call you Robert?’
Dad nods.
‘Ummm . . . the boys weren’t at school again today and . . . umm . . .’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ Dad interjects. ‘I took the boys to a funeral of an old friend of theirs. It’s been a tough couple of days for ’em.’
She looks at August and me.
‘A tough couple of years, I understand,’ she says.
We all nod, Dad, August and me, like we’re starring in some sick midday movie.
‘Can I talk to you for a minute, Robert?’ she asks. ‘Maybe just the two of us?’
Dad takes a deep breath. Nods.
‘You two make yourselves scarce, will ya?’ he says.
August and I pad down the ramp at the side of the house, down past the hot water system and a couple of Dad’s old rusting engines. Then we duck under the house, weave through Dad’s store of unwanted and unworking washing machines and refrigerators. The space beneath the house narrows as the earth floor climbs up towards the living room and kitchen areas of the house. We crawl up to the top left corner of the under-house area, damp brown dirt caking our kneecaps, and sit right beneath the wooden floor of the kitchen where Dad and Mrs Birkbeck talk about August and me at the octagonal table Dad usually passes out on at midnight on sole-parent pension day. We can hear every word through the cracks between the floorboards.
‘In all honesty, the work August produces is brilliant,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘His artistic control and originality and innate skill represent a genuine artistic talent, but he . . . he . . .’
She stops.
‘Go on,’ Dad says.
‘He troubles me,’ she says. ‘Both the boys trouble me.’
I never should have told her a word. She had rat written all over her.
‘Can I show you something?’ echoes Mrs Birkbeck’s voice through the cracks.
August is lying down with his back on the dirt. He’s listening but he’s not caring about what he’s hearing. With his hands tucked behind his head like that, he might as well be daydreaming by the Mississippi River with a straw of grass in his mouth.
But I care.
‘This is a painting August did in art class last year,’ she says.
There’s a long pause.
‘And these . . .’ We hear the sound of paper in her hands. ‘. . . these were done early this year and these were done just last week.’
Another long pause.
‘As you can see, Mr Bell . . . ummm . . . Robert . . . August appears obsessed with this particular scene. Now, somewhat of an issue has formed between August and his art teacher, Miss Prodger, because while Miss Prodger believes August is one of her most outstanding and committed students, he simply refuses to paint any other image but this one. Last month the students were asked to paint a still life, and August painted this scene. The month before that they were asked to paint a Surrealist image, and August painted this. Last week August was asked to paint an Australian landscape; August painted that same scene again.’
August stares straight up at the floorboards, unmoved.
Dad remains silent.
‘I would never normally betray the confidence of a student,’ she says. ‘I consider my office a sacred space for sharing and healing and educating. I sometimes call it the Vault and only myself and my students know the password to the Vault and the password is “Respect”.’
August rolls his eyes.
‘But when I feel the safety of individuals within our school community might be at risk, then I feel I must say something,’ she says.
‘If you think August is gonna hurt someone then you’re sniffin’ the wrong rabbit hole, I’m afraid,’ Dad says. ‘That boy don’t hurt no one who don’t deserve it. He doesn’t do anything on a whim. He doesn’t carry out a single action that he hasn’t first thought through a hundred times over.’
‘That’s interesting you say that,’ she says.
‘Say what?’ Dad replies.
‘A hundred times over,’ she says.
‘Well, he’s a deep thinker,’ Dad says.
Another long pause.
‘It’s not the other students I’m concerned about, Robert,’ she says. ‘I truly believe August – and those thoughts he keeps running over in that extraordinary mind of his – is of risk to no one but himself.’
A chair slides briefly across the wooden floor of the kitchen.
‘Do you recognise that scene?’ she asks.
‘Yeah, I know what he’s paintin’,’ Dad says.
‘Eli called it “the moon pool”,’ she says. ‘Have you ever heard him call it that, “the moon pool”?’
‘No,’ Dad says.
August looks at me. What did you tell her, Eli, you fuckin’ rat?
I whisper: ‘I had to give her somethin’. She was gonna kick me outta school.’
August looks at me. You told that crazy witch about the moon pool?
‘When Principal Gardner told me of the recent traumas in their lives I thought it was natural that the effects of these events would manifest themselves in the boys’ behaviours in some way,’ Mrs Birkbeck says above the floorboards. ‘I believe they are both suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘What, like shellshock or something?’ Dad asks. ‘You reckon they been in a war, Mrs Birkbeck? You reckon those boys just got back from the Somme, Mrs Birkbeck?’
Dad’s starting to lose his patience.
‘Well, of a kind,’ she says. ‘Not a war of bullets and bombs. But a war of words and memories and moments, just as damaging to a growing boy’s brain, one could say, as anything on the Western Front.’
‘You sayin’ they’re loopy?’ Dad asks.
‘I’m not saying that,’ she says.
‘Sounds like you’re sayin’ they’re nuts,’ he says.
‘What I’m saying is some of the things running through their heads are . . . unusual,’ she says.
‘What things?’
August looks at me. Why do you think I never told anyone but you, Eli?
‘Things that could potentially be harmful to both boys,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Things that I feel I am obligated to tell the Department of Child Safety.’
‘Child Safety?’ Dad echoes. The words are acid on his tongue.
August looks at me. You fucked it all up, Eli. See what you’ve done. You couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? You couldn’t be discreet.
‘I feel those two boys are planning something,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘It feels like they’re heading towards some destination that maybe none of us will know about until it’s too late.’
‘Destination?’ Dad asks. ‘Please tell me where they’re going, Mrs Birkbeck? London, Paris, the Birdsville Races?’
‘I don’t mean a physical place, necessarily,’ she says. ‘I mean they’re heading to certain destinations in their minds that are not safe for teenaged boys to go to.’
Dad laughs.
‘You get all that from August’s little watercolours?’ Dad asks. ‘Have your boys ever engaged in any suicidal behaviours, Robert?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
August shakes his head, rolls his eyes. I place an imaginary pistol below my chin, giggling, blow my imaginary brains out. August chuckles, hangs himself, tongue out, on an imaginary noose.
‘Eli said August was painting his dreams,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘The moon pool was from Eli’s dreams, he said. But he said he associated deep feelings of fear, feelings of darkness, with the moon pool. He said he could recall this dream in vivid detail, Robert. Has Eli ever spoken to you about his recurring dreams?’
August has a twig in his hand that he breaks into small bits. He throws a bit of stick at my head.
‘No,’ Dad says.
‘He can recall his dreams with remarkable clarity,’ she says. ‘There is great violence in these dreams, Robert. When he tells me about some of these dreams he can describe the sound of his mother’s voice, the way drops of blood look on the wooden floors of a house, he can tell me the smells of things. But I told him that dreams do not come accompanied with smells. Dreams do not come with sound. And I asked Eli to start calling these dreams what they are.’
A long pause.
‘What are they?’ Dad asks.
‘Memories,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
August writes in the air. Child Safety takes August Bell to hell.
August writes in the air. Child Safety teaches Eli Bell to never tell.
‘Eli said the car went into the moon pool two days before Frances left you,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘Why do you want to dredge all this shit up?’ Dad asks. ‘Those boys are doin’ all right. They’re movin’ on. They can’t move on when bleeding hearts like you keep dredgin’ up shit and twistin’ things around in their heads and replacin’ things that happened in their heads with things that happened in your head.’
‘Eli said you drove them into the moon pool, Robert.’
And the dream feels so different when she says it like that. You drove them into the moon pool. He did drive us into the moon pool. Nobody else did. It had to be him. We were in the back seat and we were playing corners, rolling against each other in the back seat with the weight of a turn squashing one of us into the side door.
‘I like your sons, Robert,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘I’ve come here today in the hope, for their sake, that you can convince me I should not inform the department that August and Eli Bell live in fear of their only guardian.’
I remember the dream. I remember the memory. It was night and the car turned sharply off the road and the car bounced along gravel and between tall gum trees that passed by my window like God was shuffling through images on a life slideshow.
‘It was a panic attack,’ Dad says. ‘I have panic attacks. I get ’em all the time. Had ’em even when I was a kid.’
‘I think Eli believes you did it on purpose,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘I think he believes you intentionally swerved off the road that night.’
‘So did his mother,’ Dad says. ‘Why do you think she fucked off?’
A long pause.
‘It was a panic attack,’ Dad says. ‘Go ask the cops in Samford if you don’t believe me.’
Samford. Yes. Samford. It was rural. Had to be Samford. All the trees and hills. The wheels bounced hard on dips and ditches in the rolling land beneath us. I had enough time to look across at Dad in the front seat. ‘Close your eyes,’ he said.
‘I was takin’ ’em out to Cedar Creek Falls,’ Dad says.
‘Why would you go to Cedar Creek Falls at night-time?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘You doin’ the cop work now?’ Dad asks. ‘You love this, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Having me over a barrel’, he says.
‘How exactly do I have you over a barrel?’
‘’Cause you can take those boys away from me with the tick of a box,’ Dad says.
‘It’s my job to ask difficult questions if those difficult questions ensure the safety of my students,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘You think you’re serving your profession so nobly, so compassionately,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll take those boys from me and you’ll split ’em up and you’ll strip ’em bare of the only thing that keeps ’em going, each other, and you’ll tell your friends over a bottle of chardonnay from Margaret River how you saved two boys from their monster dad who nearly killed them once and they’ll bounce from foster home to foster home until they find each other again at the gate of your house with a can of petrol and they’ll thank you for sticking your nose into our business as they’re burning your house down.’
Close your eyes. I close my eyes. And I see the dream. I see the memory. The car hits the lip of a dam edge – the backyard dam of someone’s farm in rural Samford, in the fertile hills of Brisbane’s western fringe – and we’re flying.
‘The boys were left unconscious,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
I can’t hear Dad respond.
‘It was a miracle anyone survived,’ she says. ‘The boys were unconscious but you pulled them out somehow?’
The magic car. The flying sky-blue Holden Kingswood.
Dad sighs. We can hear the sigh through the cracks.
‘We were going camping,’ Dad says. He leaves big gaps between his sentences. To think and drag on his smoke. ‘August loved camping under the stars. He loved looking up at the moon when he slept. Me and their mum had been going through some . . . issues.’
‘She ran away from you?’
Silence.
‘Yeah, I guess you could say that.’
Silence.
‘I guess I was thinking too much about it all,’ Dad says. ‘I should never have been drivin’. Got the big shakes just before a blind lip in Cedar Creek Road and that blind lip led to a blind corner. Wasn’t easy to see on the road. My brain turned to mush.’
Long silence.
‘I got lucky,’ Dad says. ‘Them boys had their windows down. August always had his window down to look out at the moon.’
August is still.
And the moonlight shines on the black dam water in my mind. The full moon reflected in the dam. The dam pool. That damn moon pool.
‘Bloke who owned the little cottage near the dam came racing out,’ Dad says above us through the floorboards. ‘He helped me drag the boys out.’
‘They were unconscious?’
‘I thought I’d lost ’em.’ Dad’s voice wavers. ‘They were gone.’
‘They weren’t breathing?’
‘Well, that’s the tricky thing of it, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says.
August gives a half-smile. He’s enjoying this story. Nodding his head knowingly, as if he’s heard it before but I know he hasn’t. I know he can’t have heard it.
‘I woulda sworn they weren’t breathing,’ Dad says. ‘I tried resuscitating them, shook ’em like crazy to wake ’em up. And I couldn’t wake ’em. Then I start screaming to the sky like a lunatic and I look back down again at their faces and they’re awake.’
Dad clicks his fingers.
‘Just like that,’ he says, ‘they come back.’
He drags on his smoke. Exhales.
‘I asked the ambos about it when they lobbed up and they said the boys mighta been in shock. Said it mighta been hard for me to find a pulse or check their breathing because their bodies were so cold and numb.’
‘What do you think about that?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘I don’t think anything about that, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says, frustrated. ‘It was a panic attack. I fucked up. And not an hour has passed in my life since that night that I haven’t wished I could turn that car back onto Cedar Creek Road.’
A long pause.
‘I don’t think August has stopped thinking about that night,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘How do you mean?’ Dad asks.
‘I think that night left a deep psychological imprint on August,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘August has seen every psychologist in south-east Queensland, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says. ‘He’s been analysed and tested and probed and prodded by people like you for years and none of ’em have ever said he was anything more than a normal kid who don’t like talkin’.’
‘He’s a bright boy, Robert. He’s bright enough not to tell those psychologists any of the things he tells his brother.’
‘Such as?’
I look at August. He shakes his head. Eli. Eli. Eli. I look up at the floorboards, covered in messages and sketches August and I have scribbled under here in permanent marker. Bigfoot riding a skateboard. Mr T driving the DeLorean DMC-12 from Back to the Future. A poor sketch of Jane Seymour nude with breasts that look more like metal garbage can lids. A scribbled collection of dumb one-liners: I was wondering why the ball was getting bigger and bigger, and then it hit me. The banker wanted to check my balance so she pushed me over. I didn’t want to believe Dad was stealing from the road works, but all the signs were there.
‘Why did he stop talking?’ Mrs Birkbeck asks.
‘Not sure,’ Dad says. ‘He hasn’t told me yet.’
‘He told Eli he doesn’t talk because he’s afraid he’ll let his secret slip out,’ she says.
‘Secret?’ Dad spits.
‘Have the boys ever mentioned a red telephone to you?’ she asks.
August boots my right shin. Fuckwit.
A long pause.
‘No,’ Dad says.
‘Robert, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but August has been telling Eli a number of troubling things,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Traumatic things that are, I believe, themselves borne of trauma. Potentially harmful thoughts from a bright boy with an imagination too wild for his own good.’
‘All older brothers tell their younger brothers all kinds of bullshit,’ Dad says.
‘But Eli believes it all, Robert. Eli believes it because August believes it.’
‘Believes what?’ Dad asks, frustrated.
Her voice turns to a whisper we can hear only faintly through the floorboard cracks.
‘It would appear August has become convinced that he . . . ummm . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . ummm . . . he believes he died that night in the moon pool,’ she says. ‘He believes he died and came back. And I think he believes he’s died before and come back before. And maybe he believes he’s died like that and come back like that several times.’
A long pause in the kitchen. The sound of Dad lighting a smoke.
‘And it seems he told Eli that . . . well . . . he believes there are now other Augusts in other . . . places.’
‘Places?’ Dad echoes.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘What sort of places?’
‘Well, places beyond our understanding. Places that are found at the other end of the red telephone the boys talk about.’
‘What fuckin’ . . . Sorry . . . what red telephone?’ Dad barks, losing patience.
‘The boys say they hear voices. A man at the end of a red telephone.’
‘I have no fuckin’ idea what you’re on about.’
Mrs Birkbeck speaks now like she’s disciplining a six-year-old. ‘The red telephone that sits in the secret room beneath the house their mother shared with her partner, Lyle, who has inexplicably disappeared off the face of the earth.’
Dad takes a long drag. A long silence.
‘August hasn’t spoken since that night of the moon pool because he doesn’t want to risk letting slip the truth behind his great secret,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘And Eli is adamant the magic red phone is true because he’s spoken to a man on the other end of the phone who knows things about him he couldn’t possibly know.’
Another long pause. And Dad laughs. He howls, in fact.
‘Oh, that’s fuckin’ priceless,’ he says. ‘That’s fuckin’ spectacular.’
I hear him slapping his knees.
‘I’m glad you can see the funny side,’ Mrs Birkbeck says.
‘And you believe that my boys truly believe all of this?’ Dad asks.
‘I believe both of their minds, quite some time ago perhaps, developed a complex and mixed belief system of real and imagined explanations for compounding moments of great trauma,’ she says. ‘I believe they are either deeply psychologically damaged or . . . or . . .’
She pauses.
‘Or what?’ Dad asks.
‘Or . . . it couldn’t hurt to consider the other explanation for it all,’ she says.
‘What’s that?’ Dad asks.
‘That they are more special than you and I could possibly understand,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Maybe they do hear things that are beyond their own understanding as well and this red phone they’re talking about is the only way they know how to make sense of the impossible.’
‘That’s fuckin’ ridiculous,’ Dad says.
‘Maybe so,’ Mrs Birkbeck says. ‘Whatever the case – however fantastical these theories are – my point is that I truly fear these beliefs, even if they were formed in the imagination, might one day cause great harm to August and Eli. What if August’s belief in what he calls “coming back” transfers itself to some mistaken sense of . . . invincibility.’
Dad chuckles.
‘I worry these thoughts have placed your boys on a path of recklessness, Robert.’
Dad dwells on this for a moment. The flint of his lighter striking. An exhalation of smoke.
‘Well, you don’t need to worry yourself about my boys, Mrs Birkbeck,’ Dad says.
‘I don’t?’
‘Nah,’ Dad says. ‘Because that’s all a pile of horseshit.’
‘How so?’ asks Mrs Birkbeck.
‘I mean August is nuts and bolts,’ Dad says.
‘Sorry, nuts and bolts?’
‘He’s straight up and down,’ Dad says. ‘I mean it sounds like Eli’s taking the piss. He’s spinnin’ you a fantastical bullshit yarn to pull himself outta some shit he got himself in. It’s a win-win. You believe it and you think he’s special. You don’t believe it and you think he’s fucked in the head but you still think he’s special. Look, he’s a storyteller. And I hate to tell you, Mrs Birkbeck, but Eli was born with the two qualities of any good storyteller – the ability to string a sentence together and the ability to bullshit.’
I look at August. He nods his head in agreement. The legs of one of the kitchen chairs slides across the kitchen floorboards. Mrs Birkbeck sighs.
August sits up and moves into a crawl position, crab-walking back out from beneath the house. At the back of the under-house area, where there’s enough room between the dirt ground and the house’s floorboards for August to stand, he stops at one of Dad’s abandoned washing machines. It’s a top loader. He opens the lid of the washing machine and looks inside, closes the lid again. He waves me over. Open the lid, Eli. Open the lid.
I open the lid and inside the washing machine is a black garbage bag. Look inside the bag, Eli. Look inside the bag.
I look inside the bag and inside it there are ten rectangular blocks of heroin wrapped in brown greaseproof paper and wrapped again in clear plastic. The blocks are the size of the bricks they make at the Darra brickworks.
August says nothing. He closes the lid to the washing machine and marches up the side of the house, back up the ramp, and into the kitchen. Mrs Birkbeck turns in her chair and immediately sees the intensity on August’s face.
‘What is it, August?’ she asks.
He licks his lips.
‘I’m not gonna kill myself,’ he says. He points at Dad. ‘And we love him very much, which is only half as much as he loves us.’